The Skeleton Tree

by Iain Lawrence

  I laughed. “Yeah, it is.” Then I opened my mouth a little wider, and Thursday tilted his black head to reach right in.

  Frank covered his eyes and turned away. But now he was laughing too, and in our tiny cabin that shook in the storm, I was happy. I couldn’t remember the last time I had sat with someone and talked about simple things. Mrs. Lowe’s nagging comment—Christopher has trouble making friends—was still true. But at least I had made a friend. I had nearly made two.

  “It drives me crazy sitting in here,” said Frank. He sat up and scratched his head. “Let’s go out.”

  It was raining bullets. We hauled out the plastic sheets the cabin guy had saved and turned them into capes and leggings. They were so ragged that we had to wear three at the same time. When we opened the door the wind tore it away, slamming it back against the wall. That was too much for Thursday. He peered out at the rain and wouldn’t go past the door. Like a pair of giant birds ourselves, with enormous, flapping wings, Frank and I went down to the sandy beach.

  Masses of things had come ashore. There were dozens of bottles and chunks of foam, scraps of wood and plastic. There were things that were sad and poignant too: a stroller with three wheels; a plastic doll in a white dress that rolled in the surf like a drowned child. I found a torn blanket I could wear as a poncho, and that pleased me. But we didn’t stay very long on the beach.

  “This is crazy,” said Frank. The wind shredded his plastic clothes. The rain made him squint and frown. “Let’s go back.”

  We trekked back to the cabin, past trees that swayed like grass. And we found the raven stealing our food.

  Standing on the table, pecking at a fish, he looked like a boxer with a punching bag. As he jabbed with his beak, the slab of fish whirled away on the rope. He hopped back and forth. He ducked his head; he lunged and pecked again. Bits of flesh fell from the fish, covering the table in specks of pink and red.

  Pucka-pucka-pucka. Thursday’s black beak punched at the fish. The rickety table squeaked and squealed underneath him, and the fish swung in and out.

  For a moment Frank just stood in the doorway, watching. Then he ran into the cabin and snatched up the gaff.

  A sound like a gunshot startles me out of my memories. It’s loud and flat, and I look up with the thought that someone has fired a signal.

  But the sea is empty. I realize that all I heard was the slap of a seal’s tail, or the burst of a whale’s breath.

  In the north, the fogbank looks bigger. The sun glares off the top of it, but underneath it’s thick with shadows. I wonder if the ship that will save us is traveling along inside it, ready to burst at any moment into the sunshine.

  Today is the day we’ll be saved. I believe that. Maybe when I reach the end of the novel, when Kaetil finds the man who killed his father, that’s when they’ll arrive. I convince myself it’s true—until I remember that there is no ending. Not anymore.

  I take the book from the bucket and bend it open. A page falls out, fluttering away like an autumn leaf. It will leave another small hole in the story, something for Frank to argue about.

  I find my place near the beginning. The Skraelings have murdered Valgaard on his farm, and now the man with yellow eyes is running across the fields, chasing Valgaard’s wife and child.

  Over the meadow she ran, over the stony slope. On her back bounced Kaetil, laughing at the game. But this was no game. The man with yellow eyes chased them to the river, where the woman dropped to her knees, down to her knees she fell, and with her arms shielded little Kaetil.

  “Please,” she begged. “Please spare the boy. Oh please.”

  But her pleas fell on deaf ears. With one blow the Skraeling split her skull. Kaetil lay beside her, giggling at the sight of his toes sticking up in the air. He tried to touch them and giggled again. The man with yellow eyes washed his sword in the river and left them lying together in the grass.

  At dusk, the ravens came.

  I don’t understand why Frank loves this book so much. To me, the best parts are the notes that the cabin guy made. They’re scrawled with a red felt pen. True! Ravens flocked to battlefields. All through the book are similar comments. In his lonely cabin, the man must have become obsessed with the story. He knew a lot about ravens.

  I keep thinking of Thursday.

  •••

  When Frank barged into the cabin, Thursday lifted his head. In the raven’s eyes was a look of fear and betrayal, and he shrieked as he spread his wings. Frank swung the gaff.

  “Don’t!” I shouted.

  There was an awful thud. Frank had missed Thursday and hit the swinging slab of fish instead. It exploded into chunks of flesh and bone.

  “Stop it!” I cried.

  But Frank was in a fury, and the raven in a panic. They blundered around the cabin, through the dangling fish. Thursday smashed against the window, screaming in fright. He tried to squirm out through the hole, then fled across the cabin and up toward the smoke hole. Frank stumbled over the wooden chair and hurled it out of his way.

  “Frank, stop!” I shouted. “Leave him alone.”

  Thursday was flapping so hard against the roof that I thought he would break his wings. Frank smashed another salmon, splattering the wall with bits of bone. Thursday took his chance to fly out through the open door.

  “I’ll kill him!” cried Frank. “I swear to God I’ll kill him.”

  We stood at the table, both breathing heavily as we looked at the destruction around us. A dozen salmon—a week’s worth of food—lay smashed into ragged chunks all over the cabin. Nearly bare skeletons hung from the ceiling, still swinging and turning on their hangers.

  It was such an awful waste. And to make it even worse, Thursday had eaten only a tiny bit of fish, if anything at all. The table was covered with little bits of flesh, as though he had pecked the fish apart just for the pleasure of destroying it.

  I felt sad and hopeless. And then I saw the maggots.

  They crawled in and out of the pieces of salmon. They writhed on the floor and squirmed on the tabletop. It wasn’t the salmon the raven had been after. It was the maggots.

  I grabbed one of the hanging fish and twisted it like a rope. A clump of maggots tumbled out. I saw others twitching among the ribs and the backbone.

  It was the same for the next fish and the one after that. It was the same for nearly every salmon that we’d caught. The sight made me sick. I had eaten that fish—we had both eaten it—just the night before.

  We threw away every salmon that we’d caught, hauling them down the trail. From the top of the skeleton tree, Thursday watched us drag the salmon to the rocks. Black and ragged-looking, he stood in silence.

  “He doesn’t understand why we’re throwing out the fish just when it’s getting ripe,” I said, trying to make Frank smile. I held up a piece of maggoty fish and called Thursday down to get it. But the raven wouldn’t move from the tree.

  “He looks sad,” I told Frank. “You should tell him you’re sorry.”

  “I’m not telling him I’m sorry,” said Frank. “He was stealing the fish.”

  “He was stealing the maggots.”

  “Well, I’m still not saying I’m sorry,” said Frank with a flick of his hair. “He should say sorry to me.” Then he started laughing—and so did I—because it seemed so stupid. And Thursday, up in the tree, made one of his lovely raven sounds, as though it pleased him to see us happy.

  Piece by piece, we threw every fish we’d caught into the sea. Frank stared down at the little stains of salmon oil that bubbled up to the surface. He brushed crumbs of salmon from his hands. “We have to start all over,” he said. “But we’ve got to have a fire. We have to have a fire.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He crossed his arms. “Oh, I wish my dad was here.”

  He had never sounded so small. He was, for a moment, a little boy convinced that everything would be all right if only his dad could appear. I remembered thinking like that when I
was little, believing my father was a superman, stronger and smarter than anyone in the world. I couldn’t remember when that had changed.

  We tried everything we could think of to start a fire. We chipped stones against other stones, and stones against metal, trying to make a spark. We gathered bits of glass from old bottles and shattered fishing floats and tried to focus sunlight onto little piles of moss and twigs.

  But nothing worked, and that night we went to bed hungry for the first time in many days. Frank jammed bits of wood in the window frame, and when Thursday came to the cabin in the morning, he ordered me not to let him in. I didn’t want to get into a big fight, so I just covered my ears as the raven tapped and muttered. It was hours before he gave up and went away.

  We had no breakfast. Dead flies and flakes of salmon lay all over the floor. I brushed the mess away as Frank settled down to try to make fire again. With a bunch of sticks, and an awful sigh of resignation, he went to work. “I saw this on Survivorman,” he said. “It can’t be that hard.”

  I didn’t want to sit there and watch him get angry, so I went walking along the beach to look for cigarette lighters. Wrapped up in my poncho blanket, I thought I looked like Zorro.

  Thursday appeared as soon as I reached the sand, but he stayed in the treetops, dashing from one to another in funny little bursts of fancy flying. He flipped on his back or rolled right over, as he zoomed from tree to tree. I searched through the driftwood, peering under every log. When I found a lighter I snatched it up with a shout. But it was rusted and useless.

  Thursday came down to see what I was doing. He followed me along the logs, peering into the places I searched. Then he strutted along ahead of me, bouncing from log to log. It surprised me when he plucked a lighter from a tangle of wood. It amazed me when he did it again. He laid them out on the sand and called to me with a little cry. “You’re a clever bird,” I said, and he answered with a funny chirping sound.

  When I climbed the trail back to the cabin, Thursday was again riding on my shoulder. I had three lighters in my pocket, and a plan to light the gas inside them, and I felt like a Stone Age hunter bringing fire to his cave. I could hardly wait to show Frank.

  But he wasn’t there.

  Our bits of glass were scattered across the floor. So were two of Frank’s sticks, snapped angrily in half and tossed away. A third was stuck like a knife into the foam mattress. I felt a bit sorry for Frank.

  I sat and watched Thursday playing with the glass. He had arranged six pieces near the stones of the fire circle, and now he stood perfectly still beside them. When a beam of sunlight burst through the window and sparkled on the glass, he rushed forward and shuffled the pieces around. He moved them here; he moved them there; he turned them with his beak and talons. Then he stepped back and bobbed his black head, as though to see how they shone.

  The beam of light vanished, and the cabin darkened, and Thursday didn’t move until another shaft of light set his pieces glowing. Again, he moved them around in a great hurry.

  I watched him do this four times before I realized it was more than a game. He was using the glass for prisms, shining sunlight into the dark space below the bed. At last, with a sharp cry, he darted under there and came back holding something in his beak. He set it down in front of me. The knob from the radio.

  I put it on the narrow windowsill and reached out to pet Thursday. He nuzzled against me. Clever bird, he said.

  “Yes,” I told him. “You’re a very clever bird.” He hopped up onto my lap. I stroked the little feathers on the top of his head, feeling the hardness of his skull underneath.

  “Where’s Frank?” I asked. Thursday peered at me as though he knew but just couldn’t say.

  It was late in the afternoon when I walked to the stream in the forest, and on to the very high cliffs. I looked north toward the river, but saw no sign of Frank.

  Of course I imagined all sorts of things: that he had gone at last to climb his mountain; that he had fallen from the rocks into the sea; that the bear or a wolf had caught him. And then a thought even worse came into my mind: that someone had come to save him. Maybe a boat had gone by, or a helicopter had landed, and Frank was on his way home. I could imagine him sitting with his rescuers, not saying a thing about me, just watching with that smug look as the land faded in the distance. If anyone could do that, it was Frank.

  The sun began to set and there was still no sign of him. I picked a few handfuls of berries and sedge, and went back to the cabin. It felt lonely and deserted. The empty bed seemed sad, with the shape of Frank pressed vaguely into the foam.

  On my shoulder, Thursday looked around. Filthy birds, he muttered.

  Even then I didn’t sit on the bed. I folded up in my own little place on the floor, and it was quite a long time before I suddenly noticed that the gaff was missing. “He went fishing!” I shouted, slapping my hand against my forehead. That startled Thursday and I laughed, relieved.

  “I’m so stupid,” I said. I should have thought of looking for the gaff. If I’d noticed sooner I could have gone up to the river. But now it was too late, too dark. I could only sit and wait for Frank to come back.

  When the sun set, Thursday flew away. I tried hard to keep him inside, but he went out through the window, into the darkness. I peered after him until he vanished, wondering where it was that he went every night. As the sound of his wings faded, my worst nightmare came true. I was alone in the wilderness.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of the hugeness of Alaska, of the mountains and snow, of the forests full of bears and wolves. I thought of the cabin guy. The skeletons. I wanted to cry, to scream for help, just as I had imagined on the airplane.

  I closed myself up in the cabin and took the cigarette lighters from my pocket. In the last bit of daylight I tried desperately to make a fire.

  On the beach it had seemed easy. I had imagined every step: how I’d twist the metal tops; how I’d pry the little flints. The gas wasn’t important; we had the can of fuel from the cabin guy’s stove. All I needed was a spark.

  But the metal wouldn’t bend as I wanted. The flints were ground away, or frozen by rust, and I threw everything away in frustration. I heard one lighter ricochet off the wall, another rattle on the floor, and I shouted, “Stupid useless lighters!” I heard my voice—shrill as the one on the mountain—and felt ashamed. I was acting just like Frank. Maybe we were not so different after all.

  Lonely and frightened, I hugged myself in the darkness.

  I rocked like a baby. And finally I broke the promise I’d made on the mountain and cried for my father to help me.

  When the window began to brighten, I thought morning had arrived. But it was only the moon rising over the distant mountains, filling the cabin with a cold and silvery light. All the things blinded by the dark began to move outside. Something scurried past the door. Something chattered; something screamed. Then something big came tramping along the trail, pushing through the bushes. And through the wall came the faint sound of someone whistling.

  An old, forgotten memory slowly woke inside my head. The whistled notes faltered and started again. I didn’t know the words, and I couldn’t name the song, but I remembered where I’d heard it. I was suddenly a tiny boy again, squatting on the kitchen floor. I saw my father all scrunched up under the kitchen sink, trying to work on plumbing pipes that were, to him, as mysterious as ancient writing. He frowned and squinted, jiggled the pipes, and hummed that song.

  He had come to save me! With the memory so strong in my mind, my first thought was to rush out to meet him, my big, towering father, who would sweep me up in his arms. But he was dead. For a year he’d been lying in his grave, and he couldn’t possibly be out there in the forest.

  The little snatch of song came whistled again. A cold prickle tingled down my neck at the thought of my dead father out there. Had I wished him alive, back from the grave?

  I had seen his ghost before.

  On the night before his funeral, as I had lain in b
ed remembering things good and bad, he had appeared in my doorway and waved to me sadly. Just for a moment he’d been there. But a year before that, on a drizzly Sunday in Vancouver, I had seen something even more puzzling.

  Dad was in Chicago on a business trip, two thousand miles away. He had been gone three days and wouldn’t be home for three days more. I wasn’t even thinking about him as I rode the SkyTrain with Mom. I looked down as the train squealed around the bend to the Dunsmuir Tunnel, and there he was at a traffic light, stepping out into the street. I saw him for less than a second, in a clack-click-clack of the train wheels, striding over the white lines on the crosswalk. His legs, and the shadows of his legs, worked like scissors, everything shiny in the rain. “There’s Dad!” I shouted. “Don’t be silly,” said Mom, turning in her seat. Then the tunnel closed around us.

  I wanted to get off at the next station, to go back and find him. But Mom said no. “Your father’s in Chicago; you know that. It was just someone who looked like your dad.” But I knew what I’d seen, and I made her call him on the cell phone. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. But she fished it out of her purse and called, and I heard his voice telling her the exact same thing. “I’m in Chicago; you know that.” But she looked so worried and pale that I thought she believed I had seen his doppelgänger, or a changeling or something.

  The feeling that had come over me then returned as I crouched in the corner of the moonlit cabin. I heard the door rattle. Then it opened. A figure stood in the moonlight, and a creaky voice spoke to me.

  “Greetings, earthlings.”

  I gasped. But it was only Frank who stood there, only Frank who laughed at my fear. For once he was happy. “I got a fish,” he said, holding it out.

  It was a small one, and he had eaten more than half of it. He tossed me the rest, then put the gaff on the table. “I got caught by the tide on the way back,” he said. “I had to wait at that old wreck. But look what I found.”