by Rick Bass
As if these little boats would bring her father back, where nothing else had before.
She whittled the boats out of willow and pine—catamarans, canoes, battleships, destroyers, yachts, and pleasure boats—and scrolled up notes inside dollhouse milk bottles, dated and signed, “Your neighbor on the other side of the mountain,” and sealed them with candle wax before launching them; and as she had so long ago, she hurried alongside them through the snow and ice, as best as she could, though she had to stop quickly now, due to the breathlessness.
On the notes inside the bottles, she penned impressionistic entries, commenting on the beauty of the season, the wonder of the landscape, and the goodness of life in general. She crafted increasingly intricate vessels, and took pleasure in doing so—though as the weeks passed and the children did not come to visit her, she had pretty much given up hope that her tiny ships and their messages would ever be found, and she figured that even if they were, it would be by someone so much farther downstream that the identification “Your neighbor on the other side of the mountain” would have no meaning.
And that was all right, she supposed. It was enough for her to be speaking out to the rest of the world, to the wider world—enough to be striving for some other contact, to be reaching out from within the darkness that threatened to envelop her, and to be testifying, even if to a perhaps unseeing future, about the beauties she was still witnessing, even in her fear. Perhaps someone—perhaps the Workman children themselves—would find the ships far into the future, as adults. It didn’t matter. It was enough for Jyl to be making beautiful little carvings—no matter that only the rivers and forests themselves might be all who ever saw them, like prayers not so much to a god who did not exist, as to one who simply chose not to respond.
So she was surprised when the fourteen-year-old boy and his seven-year-old sister knocked at her door one afternoon, waking her from a deep sleep.
There were still a couple of hours of daylight left, and it was snowing lightly. Snow was mantled on the backs and shoulders of the children. “Come in,” she said. “I would have thought you’d be out hunting, in this good snow.”
The boy, Stephan, looked surprised. “We’ve already got our animals,” he said, though the season had only been open a couple of weeks. He paused. “Have you?”
Jyl shook her head. “I haven’t been out yet.”
A look of concern crossed the boy’s face and, to a lesser degree, the girl’s. “You’re going, aren’t you?”
Jyl smiled. “Maybe,” she said.
Stephan just stared at her, as if unable to conceive of a life in which meat, free meat, could be turned down, or not even pursued.
The girl, Shayna, took off her pack. Jyl had assumed both of their packs were loaded with extra coats and scarves and mittens—a flashlight, perhaps, and a loaf of bread—but instead there were her ships, every one of them.
“We were thinking if we brought them back you can maybe send them to us again,” Shayna said.
Stephan rattled the glass bottles in his pocket, fished them out and held them before her, a double handful. “We liked the notes,” he said. “We’re pasting them into a scrapbook. They look real nice. I’m not sure we got the ships and messages in the right order, but they kind of tell a story anyway.” He handed her back the bottles. “Some of the smaller boats might get caught under the ice, but the middle of the creek will probably stay open all winter, and the larger ships will probably be able to still make it.”
He paused, having thought it all out. “You could put the important messages in the big boats, the ones that you really wanted to get out, and the other, little, prettier messages, in the little boats, so if they got through in winter, well, all right, but if we didn’t find them till spring, then that’d be all right, too—they’d fit in anywhere, being so pretty and all.”
Jyl laughed. “All right,” she said. “It sounds like a good plan.” She invited them in, watched them stomp the snow from their boots and dust it from their arms and shoulders, helped them hang their coats and hats on the door hooks as if they were proper adults rather than children bearing adults’ ways.
The pantry was almost empty—she’d been able to drink some fruit juice, and sometimes to gnaw on an orange for strength, or, strangely, raisins—she had developed an affinity, if not a craving, for them—and the children wanted none of these, but she was able to find a couple of old envelopes of instant oatmeal, as well as some equally ancient packages of hot chocolate mix.
They sat at the table, where Jyl had not had company in several months. She tried to remember the last company she’d had, and could not. The memory of it, the fact of it, seemed to get tangled in the snow falling outside the window, which they sat watching.
“Mama said to ask you how you’re doing,” Stephan said. “If you need anything. If there’s anything we can do.” He peered sidelong at Jyl, evaluating, she could tell, her girth, or gauntness, to take back home to tell his mother—glancing at her and making a reading or judgment as he would in a similar glance the health of a cow or horse, or even some wild creature in the woods, one he was perhaps considering taking. “She said to ask if you’re eating yet.” He gave another glance, as if he’d been warned that the interviewee might not be trusted to give direct or even truthful answers. “She said to ask if you needed any propane. If you needed any firewood. If you needed any firewood split. If you needed any water hauled.”
He said this last task so flatly, so casually and indifferently, that his practiced childish nonchalance illuminated rather than hid his distaste for the job, and again Jyl smiled, almost laughed, and said, “No, I don’t need any water hauled, thank you, I’ve got a well and a pump”—and a look of pure desire crossed both children’s faces.
“But you need some wood,” Stephan said, glancing at the nearly empty wood box by the stove. “Everybody always needs wood, and especially split wood.” He studied her physique further—the wasted arms, the pallor. The steady fright.
“Yes,” Jyl admitted, “I could use some wood. And I’ve been wondering, too, what I’ll do if I go out hunting, and do get an animal down. Before my illness—my cancer—I could just gut it and drag it home from wherever I’d shot it. But now it would take me so many trips that the ravens and eagles and coyotes would finish it off long before I ever got it all packed out.”
Stephan nodded, as if the concern were music to his ears. “We can help with that,” he said, and she saw that already his indoctrination was complete, that work had become his religion, that it transcended escape and was instead merely its own pure thing; that from early on, he and his brothers and sisters had been poured into the vessel of it, and it would be forever after how they were comfortable in the world. “We can take care of that,” he said. “If you get an animal, you just let us know.”
“Send us a note,” Shayna said, again quiet and shy. Magic sparking in both of them like the tapping of flint against steel.
Stephan finished the rest of his hot chocolate in two gulps, then was up and headed for the door, with Shayna behind him like a shadow; and Jyl was surprised by the wrenching she felt in their sudden leave-taking.
She followed them out to the porch—they had already put on their coats and hats and were pulling on their gloves—and, slipping on her own snow gear, hurrying to keep them from waiting, she went out into the falling snow with them and down to her toolshed, where she showed them the saw, the cans of gas, the jug of bar oil. The battered wheelbarrow, unused since last summer.
“That rifle, back there on your porch,” Stephan said. “It looked like an old one. Did it belong to your father, or your grandfather?”
“Yes,” said Jyl. “My father’s. I don’t know where it came from before that—if it was his father’s, or not.”
Stephan was already sniffing the gas-and-oil mixture to see how old it was, and he looked up at Jyl as if this were the first thing she had said that had surprised him—as if he found such an admission unimaginable—and h
e said, “Are you a Christian?”
His expression was so earnest, his face so framed with concern, that again Jyl’s first impulse was to laugh; but then her legs felt weak and the blood rushed from her head, so that she looked around quickly for a stump, and she took a seat and braced herself against the waves of dizziness, and the nausea. The snow was coming down harder: curtains and curtains of it.
“No, I don’t guess I am,” Jyl said. “I mean, I don’t know. There’s parts I believe, and parts that touch my heart”—she raised a gloved fist to her chest—“but the whole package…I don’t know.” She looked up in the direction of the craggy mountain, invisible now in the falling snow. “I guess I find God more in the out-of-doors, and in the way we treat one another, than in any church. I’ve never cared to sit inside for anything unless I absolutely had to.”
Stephan glanced over at Shayna with a look that Jyl could not identify, then hefted the chain saw and started up the hill toward a lichen-shrouded lodgepole. “You mind if we cut that one?” he asked, and Jyl smiled, shook her head, and said, “That was the one I was going to pick myself.”
The saw had been idle for almost a year, and it took Stephan nearly ten minutes of cranking before it would even cough. During that time, Shayna and Jyl sat hunkered on their heels in the hard-falling snow, watching Stephan wrestle with the starter cord, panting and pausing to catch his wind—and from time to time he would look over at Jyl with the realization that not in a thousand years would she ever have been able to start the saw, in her weakened condition—and what would she have done then, with no wood? Driven into town and lived like a homeless person until the spring? Spent eight hours a day scrounging the snowy hills for damp twigs and branches? Attempted, in her weakness, to gather her firewood with an ax?
The saw finally caught—went miraculously, suddenly, from a weak and faint sputter to full-throated burbling roar, complete with belch of blue smoke—and Stephan stood up straight, relief and pleasure on his face.
He moved to the tree and eased the spinning blade into the dead flesh—white chips flew like rice at a wedding—and he cut a notch, which he slid out of the tree expertly, and then went around to the other side and made the back cut. And as if following the bidding of some master anti-architect, in which there was as much grace in the laying down as in the building up, the tree eased itself gracefully down the hill, falling slowly through the swirling snow in such a manner as to disorient all three of them.
The tree bounced when it hit, and the dry branches snapped and popped and went flying in all directions; and even before the sifting clouds of snow stirred up by its impact had drifted away, Shayna had risen and was moving alongside the fallen tree, gathering small branches in her arms, gathering a double armful, as many as she could carry, and taking them to the porch, some fifty yards distant, trudging through snow that was over her knees.
Jyl watched and tried to recall bits of her own childhood, and wondered if childhood felt to Shayna as it once had to her, when she had been so small—as if sometimes the world was filling with snow and trying to bury her.
Stephan was moving quickly along the fallen tree, bucking it up, severing more limbs, and Jyl went out to help him, began gathering her own armfuls of limbs and branches, and started carrying them back to her porch, following the initial trail Shayna had plowed in the snow.
They smiled at each other in passing, Shayna returning with arms empty for another load, and Jyl struggling with hers full; and now Stephan had the log delimbed and was cutting it into firewood, spacing his quick and neat cuts in metronomic sixteen-inch spacings that seemed as precise as the bobbings of a water ouzel perched on a streamside boulder, crouching and dipping ceaselessly: always the same distance, always the same motion, like a wind-up toy.
It was not a very big tree, and they had it dismembered, split and hauled and stacked within a half hour: a porch full of bright, gleaming new-cut firewood, and a fresh-lumber scent dense upon them, like the odor of new beginnings, and possibility.
They went inside to dust off for a moment, to wash the scent of oil smoke from their faces and to pour a glass of water. The darkness was coming quickly.
“We’ll be back tomorrow to get some more,” Stephan said. “Or as soon as we can. And to do other things.”
“Listen,” said Jyl, “I know how busy you all are. I know how much you have to do at home. This is more than enough. I’ll be fine, really. It’s so kind of you to do even this. I’ll be fine. Thank you. Tell your mother thank you.”
“We can’t keep a regular schedule,” Stephan said. “There’s too much to do at home. We can just come when we get our chores done.”
“I’m here in the evenings,” Jyl said. “Mornings, I’m almost always sleeping. After lunch, I go get my treatment. But I’m here at night.”
“When do you sail the boats?” Shayna asked, her voice little more than a whisper, like the stirring of a bird back in the brush. More of a fluttering than a voice.
“Afternoons,” Jyl said, “when I get back from the hospital, and just before I go in to nap.”
“We usually get them right before suppertime,” she said.
“I’ll send one tomorrow,” Jyl said. “I’ll send two, a big boat and a little boat, each with the same message, so that if one gets hung up the other one might still make it through.”
“Oh, no,” Shayna said quickly, surprising Jyl with her assertiveness. “If you send two you can write different messages, because we’ll find them both. We’ll go upstream looking for them. We’ll find them.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Jyl asked. “If one doesn’t come by your house, you go upstream, searching for it?”
Shayna nodded. “He takes one side and I take the other. It’s fun. We go after chores, and after supper. Sometimes we go at night, and use lanterns.”
“Do you ever worry that one gets past you—that you never see it?”
The children looked at each other. “We all keep a pretty good eye out for them, most of the day,” Stephan said. He paused. “Some of the kids wanted to put a fishnet across the creek, and check it regular, but Shayna and I didn’t want to do it that way.”
“It’s okay if there’s days you can’t send one,” Shayna said. “We know you’re busy, and that there’s days you have to rest.”
Jyl smiled. “I’m getting better,” she said. “I can’t make any promises, but it’s good to know the ships are getting through.”
The snow was still falling hard, and although such a heavy snowfall so early in the year assured them of a long winter, it also meant a reduced fire season, next summer; and knowing this, they accepted both the hardship and the blessing of it with neither praise nor complaint, and instead only watched it, as animals might.
“Do you need another flashlight?” Jyl asked. “Or do you want to stay here for the night?”
The children looked horrified at the latter suggestion. “We’ve got to be up early,” Stephan explained.
“How early?”
“Four,” he said.
It was almost dusk. Jyl could smell the chain saw odor on them and wondered if they would bathe when they got home or simply crawl into their sleeping bags in the warm loft, surrounded by the breathing sounds of their sleeping siblings and the occasional stove creak of one of their parents adding wood to the fire downstairs, and the compressed hush of the snow falling on the roof, just inches away from their faces as they slept warm in that loft.
“Thank you,” she told them as they set off into the gloom, with Stephan breaking trail for his sister.
After their light had disappeared, she put on her heavy coat and gloves and got her father’s rifle and went into the woods a short distance and sat down beneath the embrace of a big spruce tree. She waited a few moments to settle in—to adjust her heart, pounding from even that small exertion, to the space and silence around her. She took off her gloves and blew through cupped hands.
She put her gloves back on, lifted her rifle,
and waited, listening to the falling snow. It was right at the edge of being too dark to shoot. She could hear the creek riffling behind her, and she listened to that for a while, lulled. Her cabin, not a hundred yards distant, beckoned, as did her bed—for a moment her mind strayed ahead to the relief, the dull harbor, she found in sleep each night—and she began to feel ridiculous, tucked in so invisible against the world, as if in a burrow, as if she were hiding in the one place where no one could ever find her, the one place where she was least likely to find her quarry.
She was settling into a reverie, had already given up the notion of hunting and was instead merely dreaming, when there came into her consciousness a sound that was unlike the other sounds and silences that had been surrounding her: a jarring, clumsy sound of eagerness, hoofs slipping on wet rocks, a clattering and splashing, and silence again.
She sat up and peered through her lattice of branches. She heard the sound of quiet steps approaching, but then the steps ceased. She waited for five minutes, ears and eyes straining—she tried to catch the scent of the animal but could smell nothing, only wet falling snow—and then she heard the animal crossing back over the creek, going away; and when she rose stiffly from her crouch, her warren beneath the tree, and went to examine the tracks, they were already filled in with new snow, and it was as if the thing had never existed.
When she got back to her cabin and its warmth and yellow light, she was surprised by how late it was—she had been confused by the luminous blue light cast by the snow in the fading dusk. It was nearly seven o’clock, and she was cold, wet, and shivering.
She was still stimulated by the hunt, and by the children’s visit, and would have liked to have stayed up late, or even until a normal hour, taking a hot bath and curling in bed afterward, reading until midnight, as she had once done in the freedom of her health.