by Beth Kephart
There are many kinds of courage, and some kinds are smarter than others.
I should never have hiked into the woods after that puff of smoke. I should never have sneaked off in the dawn. I should never have thought that I had any business out in the woods alone without a phone and without a plan, when Little Siberia had been breached by two desperate men on the desperate run, when all six million acres of the Adirondacks were on lockdown, other parts of the country too, maybe even Canada.
I was alone in a cave, and now there rose up the worst song I ever heard. A screech, a reach, a rush, a scream.
77
KEPPY SAYS, ABOUT THE CAVES, that no one should try to explore one until she has learned how caves are formed. That to go ignorantly into such places is to court disaster.
Keppy, I wanted to say right then, I could teach you a thing or two about disaster.
But where in his book does it say what to do if you’re me? If the night is coming on, if you’ve lost your way, if the mud has swallowed your own trail back to a rhododendron jungle you’d never actually survive again, if maybe the notches that you left in trees were not smart enough, not clear enough, not noticeable clues, and if someone, something, you can’t see is screaming a terrible song.
Where, Keppy, does it say what to do?
I aimed my flashlight deep into the narrow passage, then tilted it toward the cave’s rock sky, and that’s when I saw them—the herd of little brown bats, their eyes like glass beads, their ears like triangles, their fuzzy bodies clinging to the leather of their wings, their wings folded up, their faces upside down. A thousand bats.
It was their song.
I stood up. I grabbed my pack. I felt dizzy, caught my balance. I lifted Tiburcio’s machete and took a few swipes: If you come even this close, I’ll use this deathly tip, just a touch of the metal to the heart, don’t try it. Some of those bats flicked their noise at me and some of them tightened their wings and some of them showed me their ugly teeth, and I closed my eyes because I couldn’t, right then, move, I couldn’t do anything, and whatever was going to happen next would have to happen next. I could not choose. Then I remembered Matias and Tiburcio, how Tiburcio had been his protector, and so now I pretended that Tiburcio was right there with me, with his crushed hat on, and that he would get me through this.
I had come this far. I had no choice. I had to find Matias and my uncle. Both of them. At once. They had been here. And now they weren’t. I opened my eyes and threw the cone of light in every possible direction and, deeper and deeper into the dark, I started walking, my machete raised.
78
SUDDENLY, FROM DEEP INSIDE THE cave, I heard a quick fluttering, then the sound of slosh, then the fluttering again. Over the hard beating of my heart, past the pulse in my ears, it was there.
Maybe someone running or maybe a bear, or a wolf, or maybe, just maybe, I thought, them. I beamed my light in the direction of the sound. I saw rocks toppled upon rocks, like shelves. Passages that got started and then stopped. Stone arches. The needles of stalactites. Guano. The farther in the cone of light reached, the narrower the cave became, but there it was again, a sound from the other side, and I was sure of it—somebody running.
The cave could have been a mansion of many rooms, and basements, and attics. It could have been shelves of stone where other campers had been, leaving things behind, little signs, a can of beer, peanut butter. In places it seemed like the cave itself was growing horns—hard nubs of mineral salts, not stalactites, precisely, more round, and every time I tilted up my cone of light, I saw the bats, their beady eyes, their leather wings getting ready to flap.
There were veins in the rocks, like Keppy had said. There was a small pile of bones, like pick-up sticks, and now I collected a handful of those hard white bones and began to put them down again, one by one, marking my path.
This way, the bones said.
Here.
Look for me.
Don’t give up.
I stopped where the cave split into three low hallways of rock. I heard it again—the sound from far away. I stood there waiting, and now a huge white moth floated by, like two sails without a boat, a humongous creature, and I took it as a sign. I followed it into the cave’s center hall. Choose. I did.
Narrowing myself through the narrowing stone, I felt the tug on my back of the pack and took it off, then I strapped it tight to my chest. I turned to fit my shoulders through the stone walk, and all this time I was praying out loud that I wouldn’t get stuck, that the rocks wouldn’t fall, that my light would not conk out.
The moth circled back. Changed its mind and its direction and floated just above my head, into the cone of yellow light, then circled again, back, as if to say, This is the way. I followed. The narrow passage in the cave turned and suddenly the underground world opened wide, took a breath, and right there, on the dark ground ahead, I saw two small silk trumpets—my uncle’s spotty tie.
It was there on the ground, in a neat crisscross, like the trumpets were getting ready to be tied. Falling to my knees, I pushed the pack to one side, lifted those trumpets from the ground to my nose, and it was there—my uncle’s smell—violets and M-B-As and brown sugar.
“Uncle Davy?” I said his name out loud.
“Matias?”
Their names doubling up on themselves and coming back to me in the echo chamber of that big room inside the cave, and now as I threw the light around in the dark, I saw the sticks of an unlit fire, two cans of beer, a jar of strawberry jam, and then: Matias’s squirrel-hair brush, Matias’s paints, proof that Matias was here.
My heart stopped right there.
Then it started again.
There was nothing else. No more evidence trapped inside that cone of light. My uncle and my best friend had left parts of them behind, on purpose, I was sure, for me. On purpose because they trusted me, because they knew that I would come, and maybe it really had been them, running. Maybe the escapees had forced them to run, but how could they run—my tall uncle with his slippery shoes and Matias with those hips?
“Matias!” I called.
“Uncle Davy!”
Their names came back to me in droves.
79
AND THEN THE BATS WENT wild.
80
BATS, TRILLIONS OF THEM, GOING off like a bomb, knocking their talk all around, squirming inside their brown fur and leather wings. The fur on the roof of the cave rippled like a rug being slowly shaken out. The sound was a crescendo that would not stop.
I went straight to my knees like the old-fashioned fire drills Uncle Davy told me about once, when he and my mom were kids in the Cape May school—hands over head, this is a test. I squeezed my eyes shut. Collapsed onto my pack. Crouched. Couldn’t block the sound of it, couldn’t stop that feeling of the air churning above, all those bats—one of me and trillions of them. I could have drowned inside the noise of it.
Will somebody please stop the bats?
Will somebody do something?
Please?
Courage.
My uncle and my best friend were together. Or they had been and now they were gone, and I couldn’t die there, on the floor of a cave, under the churning talk of the bats. I opened my eyes, and just as I did, I saw the bats leave their cave-roof roost and fly—out of the big room, toward the deeper dark. Flapping their leather wings and pointing their triangle ears toward where their dinner was, they flew and flew and flew and flew until I was alone and there again was that great white moth.
The back end of the cave, I realized. The bats had found their way out, and now I followed them, slipping the machete back inside its sleeve and putting the bow tie beside the watercolor brush inside the pack, then putting a white bone down upon the ground. I straightened the two caps on my head, so that both of the bills were pointing back.
This, at last, was my way out.
81
LIKE A LABYRINTH. FALSE ROOMS and dead ends and passages too thin to fit through. So many going thi
s way, going that way, getting stuck, until finally the dark inside the cave changed and the rocks eased up and I could see it: the dusk. I could hear the world again—the frogs and the bugs and the birds and, far away, the mosquito-snacking bats. I could see it and I could hear it and I was walking toward it, I was close.
The last of the day was out there, the actual sky, and I cried for the relief I felt. Put the pack back on my back. Walked forward, straight as I could, though the rocks were on an incline now, the floor of the cave rising up, making it all so hard, impossible, I thought, for my uncle and his knee, for Matias and his hips.
Where were they?
Closer. The frogs and the bugs and the birds and the bats, the sounds of dusk, were closer. I had to stomp through puddles and pools with swollen sneaks. My jeans were sandpaper; they itched. From out in the world now I heard a howling, like a wolf—aw-wooooo, aw-wooooo—then silence, then the wail again. Aw-wooooo. The voice was an echo of itself. The one aw-woooo, the next one, then silence, and I kept walking, maybe slightly slower now, up and almost out of the cave. I walked quiet as I could.
Aw-wooooo.
I knuckled my way into dusk.
I breathed.
The storm had blown off. There was a single fading thundercloud. The sky was an orange-and-purple drip of light.
The sky was.
82
AW-WOOOOO.
83
A WOLF, I THOUGHT, BUT it wasn’t that. It was the loon of the lake, my uncle’s loon.
Where are you?
Where were they?
Where was I?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. I still couldn’t tell you now. The loons. The lake. The bats in the cave. And no sign of Matias or my uncle or the prison breakers on the pebbled beach or the driftwood seats, and maybe a wolf out there, and probably a bear, and all those bats with their beady eyes, and every sound I heard, every crack, every rustle, put my heart into a panic, my guts into a swirl.
A million ways that I could go, a million miles, and the dusk giving up and the darkness rushing in, and God Almighty, it was dark out there.
My last day on Earth, I thought. My last dusk. My last moon, just rising.
Aw-wooooo.
I had to think.
I sat on guard, with that machete.
I sat through the stars.
I sat through the break of the sun.
84
LOOK. LOOK AT THE SUN. Look at the shadows.
There isn’t much time for us now.
There’s only the end, crashing down, coming soon, and I have to stop it. I have to tell you another story that’s true. I have to tell you, again, who we were before this. The all of all of us.
Because it matters.
I was twelve. We were celebrating Matias, who was turning thirteen. We’d gone to Herbalish—my uncle, Matias, and I.
We’d had one cup each of cranberry tea. We’d finished off the bowl of salsa my uncle had brought—homegrown and homemade—and we were half into a slice of cake when Clarice, the former schoolteacher with a wobbly double chin who owned the place, came around with another pot of tea, pulled out a chair, and sat, smoothing the embroidery threads on the housedress she wore.
Matias was telling stories he’d already told my uncle and me, and he didn’t stop; why should he stop? He had us laughing. About the candy shack his grandfather had built in the clearing at the coffee farm—the bright wrappers blinding everyone in the sun. About the sharks that swam right up to the piers where they sold the salted fish, and lounged. About La Siguanaba, the witch who teased the worst of men. About the antbirds and wagtails and nightjars and puffbirds that only Tiburcio and Matias ever saw; nobody else could see the best birds, he said. When he got around to the birds, Uncle Davy raised his hand, slid his sunglasses down his nose, and said, “Matias. That reminds me.”
Uncle Davy dug into the pocket of his coat and felt around. “Ah,” he said, “yes,” pulling out what maybe you would have thought was trash—a wad of tissue paper, Day-Glo pink, so crinkled you could tell it had been scrunched up and flapped open a dozen times before.
“Happy birthday to the best nephew I have,” Uncle Davy said, reaching across the table and putting the gift in the palm of Matias’s hand.
Matias flipped his upturned hand around, like he’d been handed some sort of magic trick. He began to peel away the pink. Like an onion, Uncle Davy said, his hand already up to his mouth to cover the smile. Clarice had stopped fingering the threads on her dress, was rubbing at her second chin, was getting impatient for the big reveal and so was I, but when the tissue finally peeled away, she was the first to speak.
“Well, will you look at that,” she said.
“A real M-B-A,” Uncle Davy said.
“A painted bird?” Matias guessed.
“Nineteenth-century bird whistle,” Uncle Davy said. “Moravian style.” He pointed out the sgraffito, talked technique. He told the history of the earthenware, the Moravians of Bethlehem. The feathers of the bird gleamed dark black green. The belly was the color of cooked clay.
“You fill it with water,” Uncle Davy said. “You blow right here.” He pointed.
Matias nodded. Kept the bird balanced in the palm of his hand.
“Come on,” Clarice said. “Let’s see if it works.”
She took the bird, stood up, went back around the counter where the cookies and the kinds of teas were kept. She turned on the sink tap and filled the clay bird with water, through the hole Uncle Davy had pointed out. She got a towel and dried the bird, then dried her hands, placed the bird back in Matias’s hand.
“Do the honors,” she said.
He found the blowing hole and blew. The bird sang. My uncle laughed.
“It’s a real rare bird,” my uncle said. “It’s a real rare person who can get the bird to sing, first try like that.”
I saw the color come up in Matias’s cheeks. The skin around his eyes go brighter. His feet swing above the diamond-tiled floor.
“I have something too,” I said. I dug down into my backpack. Found my gift in its newspaper wrap. The newspaper was thick and dense. It looked like a brick wrapped up like that, but when I handed the package to Matias, he laughed.
“Light as a feather,” he said.
“Not a feather,” I told him.
“What is it, then?”
“Guess.”
He unwrapped some of the newsprint and guessed a spoon. Unwrapped more and guessed a ruler. Unwrapped again and guessed a vanilla bean. Unwrapped again and said, “It must be air. You’ve wrapped up air. A good-enough gift, I guess.”
“It isn’t that,” I laughed.
Layer by layer, he unwrapped. Clarice had poured us more tea by then. She’d touched the bird whistle with a curious hand.
Finally Matias got to the newsprint’s end. My gift rolled out. Clattered on the table. Somersaulted onto Matias’s lap.
“Da Vinci Russian blue,” I said.
“Serious?”
“Yeah.”
He held the squirrel-hair paintbrush in his hand.
“It’s kind of perfect” is what he said.
85
KIND OF PERFECT.
It was.
86
THE SHADOWS BETWEEN THE TREES beyond the lake are not always bears or wolves or rats or snakes.
The end of the world isn’t always the end.
There is light before the dawn. The silver flash of fish in the lake and the crackle in the woods and the breeze blowing in, and when the fish jump, they are the color of the moon.
It was morning, almost morning. After a night of endless black. The clouds were pressing down on the lake. The sun was leaking amber and pink, and now, by the little light of the hardly-any sun, I saw footsteps leading away from the lake, into the trees, into the deeper woods.
Footsteps.
They’d been hidden by the dark.
I struggled to my feet. Cut across the pebbly beach. Hurried toward the trees to p
ee, then followed the footsteps up. Fast as I could, backpack on my back, chatter in my teeth.
Nothing, now, would stop me.
I was full of my whole self.
87
MY FATHER’S BLOOD IS IN my blood, and your father’s blood is in your blood, and what you believed were the letters your father wrote you, the paintings he sent, the idea he had about you and him and Nova Scotia, being free.
What you believed is that he was not the man he was fourteen years ago, when you were four. Your father took a trooper down in total cold blood, no reason for it, just an afternoon of something to do. Your father swiped a girl on a bike with his getaway car and didn’t stop. Your father had an idea about deleting your mother (that’s what he said, “deleting,” said the news on CNN), but she got wind of it, and who knows what he thought he’d do with you.
Your father was a bad man and he earned life, and he got lucky on the honor block, where they contrabanded him paints and a brush and some canvas. Your father painted his paintings and he got them out to you, first time you’d heard from him in practically forever, and suddenly he’s there with his pretty pictures of those empty rooms and a bunch of stories about remembering you and he’s asking you: “Come see me.” He’s in your life again, after so much time, and what you believed is that he could be someone else, that all he needed was a second chance, that if you loved him, he would love you.