Pax

by Sara Pennypacker

  “No. You’ll undo the good if you push too fast.”

  Peter nodded and took a step toward the cabin.

  But Vola shook her head. “Not yet.” She pointed to the barn. “The third condition.”

  The barn seemed impossibly far away. Peter looked back at the cabin. He wanted to fall into that hammock. He planted his crutch tips in a deliberate show. “What is it?”

  “Nothing much. You’re going to work some puppets for me. Marionettes. That sound too hard?”

  “Marionettes? I don’t get it.”

  “You know what they are?”

  “Sure.” He pictured the only ones he’d seen up close: Punch and Judy characters with long chins and sharp noses, at a street fair when he’d been a little kid. Dead eyed and skeletony as starving rats. The puppeteer had jerked them across the stage in twitchy rushes that had left him with nightmares for weeks. “What about them?”

  Vola eyed him for a moment before answering. “Another true piece of myself I recovered: I remembered that I’d made some marionettes for my little nieces when I was a teenager. I remembered how much I loved carving the wood.”

  She pulled two scarves from her overalls and handed them over with a sigh. “Wrap those handgrips. You’re still hanging off the crutches. Take the weight on your palms, child. Spread it to your arms, even when you’re just standing there.”

  Vola’s unexpected kindnesses undid Peter. One minute she’d be barking at him for a dozen pull-ups, or shooting her fingers at his face, warning him not to get too close. It was comfortable that way. Like home. But the next minute she’d rub her salve into his aching shoulders, or sand the splinters off his crutches, or drop her chores to fix him a mug of hot chocolate, and he’d realize how much care she was putting into making him strong and mobile, and he felt guilty.

  He felt guilty now, winding the soft cloth around the handgrips, so he told her what he figured she wanted to hear. “Your nieces must have been really happy to get such great presents.” But he doubted it. Those nieces of hers had probably stuffed those rat-skeletony, dead-eyed puppets right into the trash the first night they’d gotten them. No bad dreams.

  Vola shrugged, but Peter could tell she was secretly pleased by his words, and his guilt eased. He arranged his weight on his sore palms and followed her to the barn. In the doorway, he paused to draw in the cool air—it smelled of wood and hay and linseed oil and varnish. All good scents, Peter thought, separating them out. And really good together. He swung inside.

  Vola crossed to the opposite wall, the one draped in burlap. Peter hung back. That wall had unnerved him the first day. She pulled the material aside and he nearly lost his balance, as though what he saw had hit him with a physical force. The puppets—marionettes, he could see now that they were marionettes hanging off the wall—were spookily realistic, and yet like nothing he’d ever seen.

  He stepped closer and found his voice.

  “Their eyes.”

  “My grandmother’s jewelry. She had long jet necklaces. The pupils are filled with those beads. They flash in the light, make my friends seem alive.”

  Peter fell silent again, and Vola didn’t disturb him as he studied the creatures hanging in front of him.

  Five were human—a king and a queen, a child, a pirate or sailor, and a sorceress—the rest animals. All the heads were wooden, nearly human sized and huge eyed, but the bodies were of a wild variety of materials. A tortoise was shelled with a green and orange gourd. Pinecone bracts formed a serpent’s scales. And feathers: almost all the puppets wore an assortment of feathers as hair or headdresses, or cloaks or breeches. Looped neatly over pegs beside each marionette was an array of dowels and paddles, strung together with thin black cord.

  In the center of the wall hung what Peter guessed was the largest puppet, covered by a separate piece of cloth. Vola removed it and he gasped.

  The great bird’s wings were magnificent, probably a good five feet at full span. Hundreds of dark feathers gracefully overlapped each other in perfect rows, the tips painted red, as if licked with fire. Vola lifted it from its perch and carried it over to Peter. “Most of the others are head and shoulder puppets, but this one needs to fly. I jointed him at the elbow. When he soars, you can almost feel the wind. Go ahead: you can touch him.”

  Peter reached out. His fingertips stroked a sleek feathered shoulder, then the sharp wooden beak, painted a bright gold. The bird’s eyes glittered huge and black. He dropped his hand. “So what do I have to do with this?”

  Vola motioned to the hay bales. “May as well sit down. I’m going to begin at the beginning.”

  Peter sank onto a bale of hay, grateful for the rest. He watched as Vola hung the great bird back up. She pulled a small book from a niche in the wall, then came and sat beside Peter with it cradled in her hands. “I killed someone.”

  She looked up. Peter wasn’t quick enough to cover his shock.

  She heaved a sigh, thick with disgust. “No matter what dyableman lines they feed you about learning trades and reaching your potential, you’re there to kill people. Kill or be killed—that’s the contract in war.”

  That wasn’t true. His father, for example. “You won’t be fighting, right?” Peter had pressed. His father had laughed and said no, he’d just be doing pretty much what he did as a civilian: laying wires.

  Peter didn’t bother correcting Vola, though, because the look on her face was so wrecked. “You killed someone.”

  “I probably killed a lot of people, or at least contributed to their deaths. But this one . . . this one I saw. After. I had to search his body. We were trained to look for weapons, anything we could use.

  “I dropped to my knees. I had to touch him, looking for those weapons. I remember being shocked at the feel of him—I was a medic, but still I half expected him to be plastic, not real. The way they taught us to think of the enemy in our training. But of course he was . . . he was warm. It was cold out, and he was giving off warmth. As if his life was steaming out of him. And I was touching him without his permission. I’d murdered him, but what bothered me was that he had lost the right to say yes or no about what happened to him. You probably think that’s crazy, don’t you?”

  Peter’s mouth had gone dry. He didn’t know what to say. And then suddenly he thought of the kind-eyed therapist, and he did know. “That must have been hard for you.”

  Vola looked at him with a surprised relief on her face. She nodded. “Suddenly, I was desperate to know who he was. Where he’d come from, what he cared about, who loved him. His mouth was open, as if he might have wanted to speak to me. I realized something then: that even though he was a man, even though he was a different race, even though he had grown up in a different country—we might have had a lot in common. Important things, more important than which army had drafted us. Two but not two. But I’d killed him, so now we would never know. I searched his body, not for weapons but for clues to who he’d been.” Vola went silent, her face so devastated that Peter wanted to look away.

  “And . . .”

  “And this.” Vola lifted the book. “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. Part of the Arabian Nights series, in his pocket. He’d carried it into war, so it had to have meant something. An old copy, so probably it had been his favorite as a boy. Sinbad was brave, so maybe he thought it brought him courage. Or maybe he just wanted to remember that once he had been a little boy, and he had read books and felt safe. A page was bookmarked: the story of how Sinbad escapes from the Roc’s nest. I figured that story helped him believe that one day he’d escape, too, and get back home.”

  Vola got up. She lifted the great winged puppet off the wall again. “The Roc. This bird could snatch up elephants in its talons. Look at it.” She carried the bird back to Peter and turned its beak to face him.

  Its gaze was so fierce that Peter shrank back. “What do I have to do with this?” he asked again.

  “That book was so important to that soldier that he’d carried it to war. I figured since I�
�d taken his life, I owed him something. I owed it to him to tell the story that meant so much to him. I carved all these puppets, and I’ve been telling the story of Sinbad escaping from the Roc here in my barn for nearly twenty years.” Vola handed the control apparatus to Peter. “And now, finally, I’m going to get to see what it looks like.”

  Pax watched Gray lap at the river’s edge, then stumble back. For two days now, the foxes had rested across from the war-sick camp, but Gray had not gotten better. When the old fox reached the spicy shade of the hemlock bough, he collapsed. His eyes were hollow and glazed, and he barely flinched when Pax cleaned his neck once more.

  Pax found the wound even more inflamed. Stay hidden. Rest.

  He left Gray and climbed upstream to a place he’d discovered where the river narrowed beside a gorge wall and the underbrush beside it was dense enough that he could move about unseen by the humans. He’d had little luck hunting—the area was teeming with mice and rabbits, but they scampered from Pax’s clumsy attempts to catch them. Besides beetles and unripe berries, he’d been able to swipe only a few crayfish, which Gray had refused.

  For half an hour, Pax tried—he chased scurrying voles and hopping wrens, and once a sunning frog. But each time he sprang, his jaws snapped around only air. He grew hungrier with each failure. He wanted meat—for himself and for his weakened companion. The rich smells from the camp tormented him.

  He leaped into the water. The current was swift there, but midway across, three boulders rested against one another to form a secure perch. From there, Pax had a clear view downstream to the humans.

  More had come. A few were women; most were men. Pax checked for his boy constantly because the father was still here and because he sensed that his home was not far away, but only full-grown humans appeared.

  Many of them were in the field now. Some were down near the riverbank unrolling wires directly across from Gray, which made Pax uneasy. But the soldiers did not seem interested in anything except their labor.

  Pax had learned their routine. Each morning, two of them entered the tent that his senses told him was full of food. Then these two would cook at the fire, and the other war-sick would gather to eat. Afterward, they all toiled—in the field, in the vehicles, unloading more and more machinery—but no one went near the grub tent until dusk, when the same two would cook the evening food, then call the others to gather.

  It was midafternoon. Pax watched for a while longer to be certain the war-sick were occupied, then crossed over the remaining span of rushing water along a fallen tree. Belly to the ground, he made his way across the ridge to a spot above the old mill.

  There he paused to survey the scene. Three men were positioned at the encampment just below him. They huddled over new equipment on the south edge of the mill, where two thick walls met.

  The rest of the humans were in the field. Some rolled spools of wire to the holes they’d dug near the riverbank. Others lowered boxes into those holes, then shoveled dirt over them.

  Two pairs had crossed the river. They were digging holes on the far bank, some directly below the hemlock where Gray was resting. Pax knew that the humans would not scent Gray, and that Gray would not venture out while they were near. Still, he bristled in anxiety. He would move the wounded fox to a safer place tonight.

  Pax darted to the north edge of the mill ruins, near the tents and vehicles. There, a birch tree angled out from the stone wall.

  Pax stopped short.

  He had been here before. This place—the tree with its peeling white bark, the walls, the field below scented with wild onions and timothy grass and the faintest odor of tar—he recognized them all. He’d been here with his boy long ago, as a kit.

  The scene returned. Sticks. Peter and three other boys had rushed each other from these stone walls, whooping and brandishing sticks. They’d been laughing, but those swinging sticks had made Pax uneasy. He’d shadowed Peter, yipping at the other boys when they came too near, until Peter had tied him to this very tree. Pax had whined and chewed at the rope the rest of the afternoon.

  Peter had been here! Pax sniffed the tree and the base of the wall thoroughly, but he could find no trace of his boy now. The war-sick men, though—their scent was everywhere, strong and dangerous. Pax’s gut tightened.

  He checked the tents until he was certain there was no movement around them. Then he made a dash for the grub tent. At the corner he paused, checked again, and then slipped under a flap.

  Inside, meat hung above tables heaped with onions and potatoes—a bonanza for his taking. Pax sprang and seized a joint of ham, tearing it from its hook, and darted out of the tent with the heavy prize in his mouth.

  He ran hard uphill, behind the walls and back through the shrubby wood. At the river, he dropped the ham and gulped down a meal of the salty meat. He tore the joint apart and buried two large hunks in the sandy soil at the river’s edge, and then marked the caches.

  He picked up the remaining piece, lush with meat and fat that would nourish Gray for days, and carried it over the fallen trunk. He paused on the pile of boulders to survey the camp again.

  The humans had disappeared. A new odor, faint but menacing, hung in the air. Pax recognized it. When he was a yearling, the father had brought a fan to his boy’s room. Pax had hated the dark electrical scent coming off the wire between the fan and the wall. One night, when the odor was especially dangerous, Pax had chewed through the wire, as if killing a snake.

  Pax’s every instinct urged him to run from the menacing scent, but he would not leave without Gray. And just then he saw the old fox stagger out from beneath the hemlock bough, making his way back to the river.

  Gray tripped. Instantly, the scorched-air smell sizzled up from the spot like an earthborn bolt of lightning, and at the same second the riverbank exploded. Soil and rock and river and turf blew up in a furious roar, then fell back to the cratered earth like harsh black rain.

  Pax dropped the ham and barked for Gray. His ears rang in a shuddering silence.

  The war-sick poured out from behind the walls. From their cries, Pax knew they were excited. They ran down the field, splashed across the river, and spread out over the smoking bank. After several moments of searching, they made their way back to the camp.

  When the last of the war-sick had returned, Pax tore down the gorge.

  The great hemlock bough lay across Gray’s chest, cleaved from the tree. Pax nosed his friend’s muddy cheek, pawed his flank. He sniffed Gray’s muzzle. There was breath there, but just barely.

  Pax lay down shoulder to shoulder with the old fox, pressing tight in full company. He could offer only withness, but nothing else was asked.

  Linked with Gray’s final memories, he heard the song of an arctic bird instead of the humans’ shouts. Instead of the ashy haze that hung over them, he saw with Gray a vast blue bowl of sky. Instead of lying on gritted ground, he tumbled with Gray and his brother kits across a snowy tundra spiked with starry blue flowers. He purred with Gray under his silver mother’s rough tongue, tasted her warm milk, felt the weight of her chin resting over his newborn skull. And then peace.

  The old fox was still.

  Pax rose. He pressed his forehead into his friend’s cheek. He reared back and bayed, heedless of whether the war-sick heard. And then he ran.

  There was no joy in the running this time, but there was relief that his body served him. He ran and he ran, north through the dusk, north through the night.

  As dawn crested, he entered the challenger’s territory, and still he ran. The yellow fox charged out to face him, but fell back from the determination of Pax’s course and let him pass. Pax galloped down the cliff, tore across the valley bottom, and strained up the final long rise to the meadow. Midway, he stopped and lifted his head.

  Three foxes watched him approach. They were familiar to him now: Gray’s mate, still big-bellied with kits; Runt, half her size, nearby.

  Bristle did not stand with them. Her bright fur shone at the base of the
large pine that towered over the meadow, the pine under which her sister had died.

  The scent of Gray’s death was on Pax’s fur, but the foxes knew already.

  Pax padded up the rest of the way. When he reached Gray’s den, he lifted his head and wailed the notes of grief. Three foxes answered in kind.

  Gray’s mate approached. She sniffed Pax’s nose and then his flank. She learned of the fight, which did not kill her mate, and of the humans’ explosion, which did. She learned also that Pax had protected Gray, had fed him, had cleaned his wounds, for which she was grateful. And then she learned the news Gray had died trying to obtain. It is not safe for us in the south?

  It is not safe.

  Gray’s mate walked away, her belly swaying.

  His message delivered, Pax dropped to the grass, exhausted. Runt came to claim the space beside him, and Pax was glad to allow the little fox to groom him. Bristle watched from the base of the pine above them.

  Pax slept fitfully through the afternoon, plagued by dreams in which his boy was tangled in smoking wires. Finally, as the moon rose in an indigo sky, he got to his feet.

  He breathed the scents of the foxes, linked in grief over the loss of their silver center. He was linked to them by the same grief, and he knew he would be welcomed in this valley if he chose to stay. But his dreams urged him back to the war-sick camp.

  As he was about to leave, he sensed Bristle tearing down the hill. He waited.

  Where are you going?

  Pax shared his new understanding that the exploding earth was war, and that the wires caused death. He shared his fear that his boy might come upon them if he joined his father, and his determination to protect Peter.

  These explosions—they would kill humans?

  Yes.

  She sprang around to face him. Then leave them.

  Pax ignored her. He gathered himself and leaped. He hit the ground at a run.

  Peter dropped from the beam when he caught sight of Vola limping through the rain toward the barn, and tried not to look guilty. Vola was suspicious he’d been doing more than the exercises she’d ordered—he was, doubling them usually—and she wasn’t happy about it. “It takes a healthy adult four weeks to do what you’re trying to do in one. You’re bound to hurt yourself,” she’d warned him several times. In just these few days it had become an old argument.