“Get the spade.” I watched his face as he spoke, and in the moonlight I thought I saw the flicker of a smile cross it before he said, “I’ll bring the water.”
The dark line of trees was two-dimensional, a silhouette, but we knew our way in. I walked behind my father into the forest, carrying the spade. It might have been like old times, but the man’s back I followed was thinner, less jaunty. I imagined the bird’s nest on the shelves in die Hütte crackle from a lick of flame which curled around the feathers, turning them brown, crumbling them to ash. The toothbrushes buckled and melted, dripping off the shelf, and Phyllis’s hair fizzled and lit up around her head like a halo. I thought about going back to die Hütte and scooping all I could carry into my arms and running with it down to the river—horse-head stones in my pockets and pine cones tucked into my hair. But in my imagination I saw myself stop at the water’s edge and look down into the dark, unable to go any farther.
I carried on walking behind my father. “What are we going to do, Papa?” I said.
The bitter smell in the air was stronger now—I could taste it, too, harsh in the back of my throat. The only noises from the forest were the sticks snapping under our feet. Whatever we were walking toward was silent. He didn’t answer.
Where the trees thinned, scrubby bushes and grasses had claimed the ground but were dry from the weeks without rain. My father stopped and I came up beside him. The moonlight filtered through the trees, which cast long shadows, but in front of us I could see puffs of smoke rising from the ground, the earth smouldering. While we watched, a flame flared up, illuminating the forest litter, consuming a fern, and dying away. I looked farther into the trees—the ground as far as I could see was smoking.
“Where’s the fire?” I said.
“Under the leaves,” said my father in a whisper, and my feet inside my moccasins seemed hotter.
I stepped backward. My father put one bucket down and threw the water from the other in an arc toward where the flame had erupted from the ground. The soil hissed and steam billowed. He threw the water from the other bucket in the opposite direction, with the same effect.
“Will that work, Papa? Will we be all right?” I wanted him to say that it would be fine, that we could go back to bed and in the morning we would wake up to have another normal day weeding the vegetable patch and going down to the river to fish. If he told me we could return to die Hütte, I promised myself, I would never complain about not having enough water, but again he ignored me. “Should we go back now, Papa?” I tugged on his sleeve. “Please let’s go back. We could get more water.” As I said it, I realized how hopeless that would be, how far away the river was, and even if we could carry more, we had only two buckets—three if you counted the one tied up to the tree on the bank. For a long time my father stood watching and thinking, with me hopping around him, trying to get his attention or an answer, a plan. The smoke puffed closer. When I glanced over my shoulder, the trees were fading, blurred with grey.
“Pass me the spade, Punzel,” he said. I handed it to him. He thrust it into the ground and lifted out a pile of smouldering leaves. Fire leaped from the small pit at his feet and he moved back, to stand beside me. I could feel the heat and, while I watched, a stick lying across our path lit up, a tongue of fire passing along its length and jumping sideways onto other plants, the flames licking outward. My father let the spade fall from his hand and in an automatic reaction I caught the handle before it fell into the fire. At the same time, my father grabbed my wrist and squeezed it tight, holding it toward the flames. I cried out and dropped the tool.
“Leave it,” he said. “We don’t need it any more.”
The spade lay on the earth, and the orange flames crept around it. For two seconds my father held my arm out over the fire—offering me up, while I struggled to get away from the heat. Then he let go of me and I backed away, rubbing my wrist.
“Yes,” he said, “more water.” His voice was monotone, his words drawn out. He picked up the buckets and turned back the way we had come.
I stared after him, trying to make sense of what had just happened. I looked back at the spade in the fire but its handle had already blackened while, ahead, my father swung the buckets as though he were on a stroll down to the river. I had no option but to follow him.
When we reached the clearing, my father went into die Hütte, but I hung back, staring into the dark trees, unsure about whether I could see a low flicker of fire. A lesson from school came back to me: a cartoon where a cat called Charlie had told us in a squeaky voice not to play with matches, and a talk afterward by a real fireman about fire needing three things to burn—fuel, air, and something else. I wished I had listened more rather than messing about with Becky.
I remembered a phrase—firebreak—a circle around die Hütte that the fire couldn’t cross. I fetched the trowel from the vegetable garden and tried to dig a shallow channel around the back of the cabin, but the ground was solid from where our feet had tramped across it and it was difficult to get anything more than the point of the trowel into the earth. I stopped and realized that the furrow I was cutting was too close to the wooden walls; if the fire reached it, the sparks would simply leap across. I went closer to the trees and started to work at the ground in a different place, digging the trowel in and tossing spoonfuls of soil behind me. The earth was softer but, just below the surface, a tangle of roots snagged and impeded me. Still I kept hacking and sobbing, glancing into the forest and back at die Hütte, hoping to see my father reappear. I dug with desperation, scraping at the earth, chopping at the roots with the side of the trowel. My palms grew blisters, which popped. I sat back, defeated. “Papa!” I cried, but he didn’t come. Throwing down the trowel, I kneeled on the ground and scraped with my hands at the earth between the roots. When I glanced around again, my father was standing a foot or two behind me, silent, clasping a bucket to his chest. In a crab-like motion, I scrabbled backward across the ground, frightened by how he had appeared without me noticing. “Did you get more water?” I said.
“Punzel, I’ve been thinking,” he replied, crouching down, so our eyes were level.
I saw that the bucket was crammed with things from die Hütte—a ball of twine, our tin plates, the hammer and other tools, with acorns rattling around loose—and I thought he must have had the same idea as I’d had: to save everything he could.
“Perhaps it’s time to let it go.” He spoke calmly. Tucked under his arm was a roll of animal skins.
“Let what go?” I stumbled across the loose earth, my nightie getting dirtier, but he shuffled closer on his haunches. His face was dark, the sky behind him the colour of tracing paper.
“All of it.”
“We just need to get some water.”
“We don’t need any of this stuff.” He pulled out the twine and tossed the ball away into the trees, where it unravelled, its tail still stuck in the bucket. “Our time in the woods is over, Punzel.” He put down the bucket and the skins and picked out the tin plates. He clashed them together and lifted his head back, shouting, “Say goodbye to the last human beings on the planet!” He stood up, beating a rhythm with the plates, and gave a kind of howl that ripened into a laugh. His eye sockets were hollowed out, and the tight skin across his skull shone where his hair was retreating.
I covered my ears, terrified by the animal my father had become in the few minutes I had been digging. He flicked the plates like Frisbees into the trees, picked up the bucket and the animal skins and set off toward the fire. I sat in stunned silence, then stood up and ran after him, following the trail of twine that he dragged behind him.
The fire was much closer to the clearing than before, but still it crept low across the ground, consuming all the leaves and twigs that lay before it, but only licking around the bottom of the large tree trunks, then moving forward. My father was dancing close to the edge of it—advancing and every now and again taking a leap backward, away from the heat. As well as the smoke there was a fetid smell
, and I saw he had thrown the animal skins into the flames at his feet. The fire sparked and fizzed through the fur. I made an attempt to pluck them out, but the heat was too intense.
“Please come back!” I shouted, my arm covering my mouth. My father turned to look at me, surprised to see me there.
“It’s OK, Punzel,” he said, the flames flickering across the smile on his face. “We’ll go together. I would never leave you.” He bent down to the bucket, removed something else, and flung it into the fire. I stood dumbly and watched the words La Campanella curl and fold over themselves, and notes and staves and Ute’s handwriting catch light and transform into ash. Leaving the bucket where it was, my father walked back toward die Hütte again. I picked up the bucket and once more followed him. Inside the cabin he was filling the second bucket with anything he could find, sweeping our belongings off the shelves with the side of his arm. I tugged on his sleeve, begging him to stop, but he shrugged me off. All the time he was talking to himself as if I weren’t there, saying things like, “This is it now, this is the answer. How could I have been so blind? Of course, we’ll go together.”
He moved toward the piano table and started to pull at the wooden keys, prising them out of their positions. I walked toward him, formed my hand into a fist, and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. My father was still a strong man, so I think it must have been the surprise that made him double over, winded. He crumpled onto the floor, hugged his knees, and cried. In between my father’s wails I thought I heard the fire eating through the undergrowth, crackling, and for a second I thought maybe my father was right: it would be easier if we let it all go. I stood there wondering what was next, and a trickle of liquid ran down my thigh, the blood I had forgotten about flowing down my leg and around my ankle. At the same time, I looked out through the door and saw a curtain of rain move across the valley and up toward us and the fire. I went outside to greet it.
In my mind, the blood, the rain, and the fire became associated with the change in my father. He was subdued for days afterward, as though he knew he had been bad, and I often wondered if he had started the fire himself. But I became aware that his plans for what would become of us hadn’t gone away; they had been clarified. He still often got up in the middle of the night to draw diagrams and unintelligible scribbles over the walls of the cabin. In the mornings he would try to engage me with them, jabbering and jumping on the table to point out a particular argument about survivalism.
“Oliver Hannington wouldn’t be able to answer that one,” he would say.
“Oliver Hannington is dead; everyone is dead except us,” I would answer wearily.
The day after the fire, I walked through the burned rock forest. I found the metal part of the spade, but the handle was sooty and disintegrated in my hands. One of our plates was in a tree, the other below it, in a skeletal bush—the enamel scorched. With a stick, I poked through the ash caking the ground, but not even a corner of the sheet music remained. The forest smelled heavy and dirty and sorry for itself. The leaves in the canopy dripped and most of the vegetation had gone; the ground was grey sludge. The fire had reached the beginning of the clearing and had gone all the way down to the river, but the rain had started before it had spread across the mountain to the forest on the other side.
I found only one tree that had caught fire. It stood alone, blackened and twisted. I sat on a rock and watched a crow return to it again and again. The bird couldn’t settle; it was all wings and flap and rusty cawing. It must have had a nest high up where the limbs became distorted. But I had no sympathy for the crow; the feeling I had was jealousy. I would have given up everything—the music, my memories of London, the forest—to become that bird and to be able to fly away to make a new nest in a new tree. But I also acknowledged that if it were possible for me to wish hard enough to become that crow, it would be equally possible that long ago, something else—a fly, a rabbit, a bee—may have looked at me, Peggy Hillcoat, and been jealous of everything I had then and might have in the future. And if that creature had wished hard enough, it might have given up everything to become me.
19
After the fire, when I had finished growing and was as tall as I was ever going to be, I insisted on a bed of my own. I pleaded for it, stamped my feet, turned my back on my father, refused everything he asked for until he relented. My bed had squat log legs and a warped frame cut from a pine. We placed it against the back wall toward the stove, so each morning when I woke with my head warmed by the fire and my feet chilly, the first thing I saw was my piano. I had spent every spare five minutes rolling plant stalks along my thighs to make rope thick and strong enough to criss-cross the bed frame. On top, I laid a straw mattress—bundles of dried grass stitched together with more rope—and a layer of furs, and over that I put the scraps of my sleeping bag. I tried to hide my joy from my father, who sulked and predicted that the rope would sag and that by the end of the first night my bottom would be inches from the floor. I didn’t care.
“Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he called out bitterly when we were both in bed.
He complained about being cold, about there being too much space in his bed, but I lay in the dark, smiling up at the joists. And when I was sure, from the sound of his breathing, that he was asleep, I put my fingers between my legs.
The first morning, it took a few seconds to orient myself—I woke to sunlight inching under the door instead of an out-of-focus view of wood grain and splinters, my head having been squeezed in the gap between the wall and my father’s back. I jumped out of bed, opened the chimney damper, shoved a log onto the fire embers, and climbed back under my furs, luxuriating in my own space. From my low position in the bed I saw the name again—gouged into the wood under the shelf next to the stove. I hadn’t thought about Reuben for so long, I couldn’t remember when I had last touched the letters or even seen them. And how many autumns had passed since I had watched the boots walk in front of the nest? Eight? Nine? The memory of them was connected to a different girl, naïve and new to the forest. I lay on my stomach on my bed and stretched my arm above my head to touch with the very tips of my fingers where Reuben had once carved his name, and I mine. Had he been in die Hütte before us and abandoned it? And where was he now? I was sure that if he lived on our side of the river I would have bumped into him, or seen more evidence of his existence, other than a pair of damp boots.
That day, while I played the piano, hoed between the rows of new carrot leaves, and walked my usual route to check and set the traps, I wondered how the head and face at the other end of the boots might look. I gave him a clean-shaven chin, a flop of sandy hair, and blue eyes. I gave him an American accent, but he reminded me too much of Oliver Hannington, so I started again with dark curly hair and a drooping moustache. I thought about him crossing the river without being frightened, striding through the rapids in his sturdy boots and thick socks and climbing up to the ridge on the other side. He teetered on the lip of the Great Divide; he gazed into the empty blackness and he wasn’t afraid.
The spring afternoons were my own to do as I wanted. I sheltered from the rain in the nest while newborn ferns unfurled around me, and thought about whether Reuben might play the piano or the guitar. I dreamed of duets and recitals. Perhaps he lived in a brick house across the river, with a mirror and a bath. Or he was a famous Russian writer who didn’t speak any English and was searching for his wife and children. Maybe he had been mistakenly arrested for spying, escaped to the forest, and got stuck here after the Great Divide happened. When I found a patch of sunshine to lie in, I put my hands behind my head and remembered how his ankles had seemed particularly well fed. He must catch and eat deer, I thought, something my father and I had still never managed to do, or maybe there were boar across the river.
I watched for him when I walked amongst the celandines, their yellow heads paling into summer. I whirled around when I caught a movement from the corner of my eye, but the man was always faster. I studied the
ground for footprints which weren’t ours, but saw only the tracks of deer, birds, and wolves. One day, I had the idea of climbing again up to the ledge where we had flown the kite, to see the very edge of our land through the spyglass. My father came into the cabin just as I was taking it down from the shelf.
“What are you going to do with that?” He seemed immediately suspicious.
“I’m going to see if it works. I’m going to climb the mountain.”
“There’s nothing to see, just trees and the ridge.” He dropped the logs he was carrying in a heap next to the stove.
“I’ll just look at the trees and the ridge then,” I said, gripping the spyglass behind my back, as if I could hide it from him.
“It’s not a toy. You’ll only drop it.” He held out his hand. I was a puppy, receiving obedience training.
“I won’t. I’ll be careful. I promise.” I moved to go.
“Punzel. No!” He reached behind me and pulled my wrist, squeezing. “You are not allowed.”
“Why not? You can’t stop me. The spyglass is mine.” I yanked my arm back, but he gripped harder, burning the skin.
“I don’t want you playing with it.”
“I’m not going to play with it, I’m going to use it to look across the Fluss.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. That’s enough!”
“It’s not up to you what I do!” I was shouting now.
“Give it to me,” he yelled back. I was the bad dog with a bone I had snatched from my master’s table. “The spyglass, Punzel.” The palm of his left hand was straight out, the fingers straining backward and the tendons in his wrist quivering. That’s when I knew Reuben really did live over the river and that my father knew it too.
“It’s mine. It was a present, from . . .” and I realized I couldn’t remember who had given it to me. There was a flash of a memory—tearing wrapping paper, seeing the frown lines on Ute’s face magnified and encircled by brass, but no memory or name of the giver.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 16