XIII
They spent the remaining months of winter many miles from Keelut, in their father’s sod igloo hidden in the taiga, an earthen grot he’d built when they were children for three-week hunting trips. They’d known about these crude outposts all their lives—many hunters in the village had built them for the winter hunt when the caribou migrated east. In the valley beyond the village their mother had left them backpacks of provisions, including a map with the location of their father’s sod igloo circled in blue pen.
It had taken them an entire day to find it, in four-wheel drive on pathways until the truck was choked by snow, until they were forced to walk, carrying what they could. They dug for forty minutes through drifts to reach the entrance, the pine door that looked clawed at by grizzly. Once inside they found it dry, with a working stove, cut wood and kindling stacked beside it, steel drums packed with nonperishables made before their birth. That clean scent of frigid earth until Slone cleared the vent of snow and started the stove.
They saw at once that their father had stocked this lee with food for two seasons: Bisquick and beans, oatmeal and rice, noodles and raisins, powdered milk and coffee, dried peaches and apricots. In a different drum: medical kits, candles and matches, radio and batteries, tissue paper and snowshoe bindings, Coleman fuel and lantern wicks. The chocolate she’d devoured as a child and hadn’t seen in years. Cartons of cigarettes. Sweaters, socks, long johns, overalls. Blankets, ammunition, books. A mattress hung by wire from the low ceiling to keep rodents away. With sugar and vanilla they could make ice cream of snow.
Perhaps, she thought, their father had prepared for this very day, the day when his twins would need this shelter—the day their otherness became known and they were forced to flee, to enact their exile from the world for sins they could not control. She hadn’t seen their father’s face in six years, since the evening before he slipped a shotgun barrel into his mouth and pressed the trigger with his toe, but she remembered it, could recall his cigarette scent, his voice always as rough, as stubbled as his appearance. This sod igloo meant that he’d loved her, she knew—meant that he’d loved them both, no matter their otherness.
They slept and ate and read, feasted on one another in the afternoon. She rebandaged the bullet wound in his upper back, applied ointment, pulled the stitching once it fully healed. For weeks they did little but lie naked beneath blankets as snow piled around them, exhausted in a way she’d never felt before, the stove too much heat for this small lee. He chopped more wood and hunted lynx, fox, rabbit, whatever he could find, but a famine was still on this land and he couldn’t find much. He kept the rifles ready by the entrance, shotgun by the stove, handgun always in his belt. He told her what to do if ever he was out and she heard men coming through the thick. In six places around the perimeter he strung tripwire between trees, in front of the wire sharpened sticks in the snow to impale a man.
One afternoon, hunting before dusk, they came upon a single-engine propeller plane suspended, mangled in the treetops, camouflaged in snow—one of the countless lost planes in this country. Lighter than her brother, always the better climber, she let him hoist her into the branches and she made her careful way to the plane above. Through the shattered glass she saw the bush pilot seat-belted in a bank of snow, just a wool-clad skeleton now, the headset still fastened to its skull. The propeller was smashed back into the engine from the impact, on the door black streaks from fire. The tail cracked and dangling, one wing snapped off, bent beneath the fuselage. She brushed snow from the other wing, tested her weight on it, and entered through the missing glass. Behind the seats several wood-slat crates of mail. The year stamped on the letters was 1968. She dropped a bag down to Slone—there was nothing in the plane they needed—and for two weeks that winter she read these letters, forgotten messages from worlds she tried to imagine, amazed by the varied handwriting of people who had long since moved on to other lives.
She read these lines aloud to Slone, dulled blue ink on peach-colored paper that still held a ghostly whiff of perfume, lines from Mary to Joseph that began, “Please don’t you dare go to that jungle over there. There’s no love in war and I have all this love for you waiting. You can dodge it, Joe. Just run, come here to me, stay with me, they’ll never find you here.”
* * *
Winter diminished and breakup came, spring a savior she thought hadn’t remembered them. It was always that way, she knew. By the end of each March they always believed themselves forgotten by spring.
Slone dug a larger sod igloo into a wooded ridge near the rim of taiga, hidden from the ancient caribou trail and from the sky beneath the hemlock. Just ten feet from them in the forest no one could know they were there. She watched him work shirtless in moving shafts of sunlight, watched him dig high enough into the earth, above the water table, careful of proper drainage to keep them dry. She watched him frame the structure from spruce, make the notched posts and ridge beams, pound poles into the soil.
He built with tools others from the village had left for them in the valley—whipsaw and axe, hammer and mallet, shovel and pick, bag of nails and spikes, roll of plastic sheeting. She helped with saplings for the sod-block walls, with the pilings, helped cut and carry sod. She scraped clean the conifers for the roof. She learned how to fasten the beam joints with spikes. He taught her this with a patience that surprised her.
No windows. A rounded entrance of five feet. Together they carted the mattress and woodstove from their father’s igloo, carted the goods their father had stored for them. They trekked to both of their vehicles, hidden in the hills two miles apart, and trekked back with the duffel bags of supplies they’d been unable to carry in winter.
They moved by starlight sometimes, whenever they’d noticed the same plane in their patch of sky two days in a row, unsure if that plane was searching for them. In the purple just before dusk they’d check their quarry, traps and snares in the forest, nets in the water—they’d check when they couldn’t be spotted from the air. She wondered if the world really cared anymore about what they’d done in winter. She couldn’t be sure.
Naked in the nearby lake or river under moonlight was a startling way to be, the water still chill in midspring. They gathered food, walked a black wood they felt their way through, paths they’d made and memorized, owls and bats sounding their way. They ate grayling, jackfish, bluebell shoots. Marten and fox and deer. Each night their eyes adjusted more to the dark. He could skin a deer by moon or fire. He knew which footfall was bear, which was moose. If ever they needed to be on paths in daylight he knew to stomp through the bush, hooting as he went, so as not to come suddenly upon a grizzly or brown bear. The scourge on this land, whatever curse had been here, fled when winter relented. The animals were back now after breakup.
She’d listen to him breathe, snore beside her. When his snores stopped she’d hold her own breath and try to hear the new morning outside through the sod walls. They’d sleep through the day and he’d wake her at the gloaming. After three days of hearing no planes they’d return once again to the daylight.
They relocated Bailey’s grave once the ground was soft enough to pierce. They rescued him from the melting ice of the cemetery of Keelut and carried him in his plywood box deep into the taiga. Slone picked the spot beside the heather where they slept. He made her watch as he dug the hole, made her open the lid with a pry bar and look—not a glance but a look with two accepting eyes, and she did it because she knew that once she did, he’d never again mention what she’d done.
She possessed certain memories. She was a girl of five or six, summertime in the forest by the village, a forest of immense hemlock and oak. She could see rays of sun dispersed through the treetops, pollen suspended in the light like a galaxy of stars. Or those first years in the village schoolhouse, so long ago, their teacher a missionary from the States, a young man of beauty, she remembered. Dark hair and blue eyes—she was startled by the combination, had never seen it before. He had enough Bibles for all twelve
children. He read verses as they sat rapt, not looking at their own text but at him, his lips, how they moved in such delight as if the words themselves were pleasure.
When she told Slone of her memories now, he said that memory is a trickster, the great deceiver. He couldn’t recall half of what she could. They’d gone hand in hand everywhere together, surely he’d remember too if her memories had really happened, if the pollen in the shafts of sunlight had resembled stars that summer day, if the schoolteacher had given them Bibles. He wants my memories too, she thought. He has my face and body, my every cell, and still he wants more, wants to steal my shadow too.
As kids they’d come to this country for several days each summer with nothing but their bodies. She remembered they napped naked in the sun on beds of moss, on rocks of lichen, and later in the night they wrapped around each other for warmth. It was like that again now. Daily she grew round with another, with the new one he insisted on. Inside her she could hear already the sucking, sobbing, the pulse that led to a wailing for food, want of growth. And it was then she remembered she had other hopes.
At their spot in the valley they met their mother after breakup. She smacked him on the beard, held his chin firm in her hand, squeezed his lips. She told him, ordered him to make Medora pleased, and to make her pleased too. She said his teeth were filthy. He only nodded and looked away to the hills as Medora stifled a laugh.
In sunlight and moonlight both they walked far, and along the way she gathered salmonberries, bunchberries, mossberries, birch sap, and cottongrass stems. The fireweed she picked for its color. She could see it shine, really shine, in the first hour of daylight, and often she walked without him to collect the fireweed before they slept. The warm calm of the morning, these moments alone—she could not let them pass.
A late spring breeze came in through the entrance of their igloo and she woke with a knife in her hand, hovering above him as he slept. Their mother had given her a magazine a month earlier at their meeting place, and in it she’d read that dreams are useless. They mean nothing, hint at neither future nor past. They are the discard of the brain as the body slumbers. Why then, how did she see herself with the knife before she felt it in her hand, before she woke to find herself above him about to plunge a blade into his neck? Because, she knew, we call our wishes dreams, and she put down the knife to sleep again.
Acknowledgments
Feeling thanks to:
Bob Weil, torch in the night.
Steve Almond, rabbi, brother, friend.
John Stazinski, invaluable from inception.
Will Menaker, reader extraordinaire.
David Patterson, sapient 007.
The committed staff of W. W. Norton and Liveright, paragon in publishing.
Katie, Ethan, and Aiden, forgiving in this dark.
ALSO BY WILLIAM GIRALDI
Busy Monsters
About the Author
William Giraldi is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.
Copyright © 2014 by William Giraldi
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Giraldi, William.
Hold the dark : a novel / William Giraldi. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-667-5 (hardcover)
1. Wilderness areas—Alaska—Fiction. 2. Wolves—Fiction. 3. Families—
Alaska—Fiction. 4. Revenge—Fiction. 5. Missing persons—Fiction.
6. Alaska—Fiction. 7. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.I469H65 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014023730
ISBN 978-0-87140-494-7 (e-book)
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Hold the Dark: A Novel Page 17