So my idea became Frank’s idea, and then it was a good one. We both dug our feet into the sand to topple the saint. But now he came down easily, practically falling into our arms. He weighed a ton, and the oil made him slippery. Frank had only one good hand. We had to drag the wooden man down the beach, his feet leaving long gouges in the sand. We hauled him along the trail, working together to keep him from snagging on sticks and bushes.
I remember how we’d wrestled with Uncle Jack’s dinghy in Kodiak, and I was glad that I was now working with Frank instead of against him. We placed the saint at the edge of the rocks, under a sky filling with ugly clouds. Another storm was on its way. We piled up rocks that the saint could rest against, and in his hand we tied long streamers of red plastic. In the first puffs of wind they lifted from the ground like writhing serpents.
In an hour the wind was blowing hard and steady. Rain swept through the trees and over the cabin with a sound like radio static. Inside, we sat in our usual places, not talking, as though nothing had changed. Without a word, Frank got up and put on his jacket and a cape.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Fishing,” he said.
I stood to go with him. But as soon as I took a cape from its peg, Frank tore it from my hands and tossed it to the floor. “I’m going alone,” he told me.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I want to,” he said. “Don’t ask questions all the time.”
I watched him walk away. He kept his head down as he plowed through the wet salal bushes, and I found it strange to think that he was my brother. My big brother. The idea made me laugh. I’d looked after him while he was sick; I’d offered to help him, but he hadn’t even thanked me. I could hardly wait to be saved so that I would never have to see him again.
I kicked my capes into the corner and took Kaetil the Raven Hunter from the shelf. I started settling into my old place on the floor, until I realized what I was doing. There was a bed and a mattress right there, but I was lying like a dog on the hard wooden floor. I’d had enough of that. I stepped boldly right up onto the bed and sat, leaning back against the wall. I sank into the foam, wriggling until I was comfortable. Then I opened the book and started reading.
It was the height of the northern summer, and Kaetil was six weeks old. Storm told him, in the raven language, “Now you learn to fly.”
Through seven days and seven nights, Kaetil stood at the edge of the nest. His arms spread wide, he teetered there, sixty feet above the ground. His raven parents shouted encouragement, but it was up to Kaetil to know when he was ready. When he believed he could fly, he could fly.
As the sun went down, so did Kaetil.
Falling, falling. Flapping and falling. His arms a blur. His foot hitting a branch. His shoulder striking another. Kaetil tumbling now. Kaetil screaming.
I laughed. I was supposed to feel sorry for Kaetil. But I saw Frank in his place, poor Frank trying out one of his great schemes. The cabin guy had not been impressed. He wrote on the page Oh, please!
Little Kaetil lay bleeding on the forest floor, and his parents plunged from the nest to help him.
They dragged him into the bushes, into the ferns they pulled him, hiding him there from owls and vultures. All night they worked to heal his wounds.
There’s magic in the forest, for those who know its secrets. Using knowledge born inside them, knowledge shared by every wild-born creature, the ravens gathered mushroom caps. Beetle hearts. The bark of pine. The dung of yearling deer. In their beaks they chewed these things, and in their stomachs ground them up, and bending over Kaetil coughed the medicine into his wounds.
The cabin guy had made no comment. He might have found it too stupid to think about. Or he might have known it was possible; he might have believed it.
I did.
I remembered how Thursday had hunched over Frank’s wounds, and it was exactly the same in the story. My raven had cured Frank. And I’d chased him away.
I felt sick thinking about what I’d done. I pictured Thursday in the forest, bewildered and sad. I didn’t wait a minute to go out and find him. I put the book on the shelf, pulled on my capes and went out in the storm. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find Thursday. I searched until dark.
When I got back to the cabin, Frank was already there. He had three skinny salmon hanging from the ceiling, and he was roasting another on the fire. Its dripping grease made sizzling flames and dark smoke. I hung up my capes.
“Where were you?” Frank asked.
“Looking for Thursday.”
“Why bother?”
I pointed to the shelf. “I was reading the book.”
“So what?”
“ ‘There’s magic in the forest,’ ” I said, quoting from the story.
He frowned for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “Come on, Chris, it’s a story.”
“But it’s true,” I said. “You know it’s true.”
Frank kept working with the fish. “So there’s vultures in Greenland? Ravens talk like people?”
“Well, it’s not all true,” I said. “But—”
“I think it’s done,” said Frank, poking at the salmon.
It sure looked done. It was black and blistered, like a chunk of old charcoal. I decided there was no point arguing with Frank about magic. He just could not believe in things like that. At least he hadn’t gotten angry.
I ate my dinner in the corner, remembering all the times that Thursday had stood there with me, and how he’d loved his scraps of fish. I would have done anything to bring him back, or to travel through time and undo what I’d done.
On the bed, Frank flexed his fingers as he stared at his hand. He turned it back and forth, and for once I could look at his face and tell exactly what he was thinking. He said, “All right. If that raven comes back, you can let him stay.”
“I was going to anyway,” I told him.
He shrugged, as though it didn’t matter.
“I’m going to take him home too,” I said. “When we’re rescued.”
“What if he’d rather stay here?”
“By himself?”
“Why not?” Frank picked a little fish bone from his lips and flicked it away. “He’s not a person, you know. He’s a bird.”
“Ravens like company,” I said. “You always see them in huge flocks all over the place.”
“Those are crows, moron,” said Frank. “Anyway, he’s never lived in a city. Why would he want to? He’d rather stay here, and you know it.”
Well, I didn’t know it, but I suspected Frank was right. Why would a wild bird want to live in a house in the city? But the thought of leaving Thursday behind made me so sad I couldn’t stand it. I thought of him watching from a tree as I climbed into a helicopter. He wouldn’t understand why I was leaving. What if he tried to follow the helicopter, flying frantically over the sea until he couldn’t fly any farther?
Even worse, what if he didn’t come back before we were saved? He would return to an empty cabin, bursting through the window, excited to see me. He would look all around, and then wait. And wait, and wait, and wait…For the rest of his life he would think he’d been abandoned.
From outside came the shivering howl of a wolf. I looked up at Frank; he looked down at me. The wolf howled again, and the hairs on my neck tingled.
“Wolves don’t kill ravens,” said Frank. “They hunt with them. They run together, wolf and ebon raven.”
“Is that from the story?” I asked.
Frank turned a little red. He suddenly busied himself with his dinner, his hair hanging over his face. I took a torch and went looking for Thursday.
I walked through the forest and right to the end of the sandy beach. When I turned back and saw Frank’s torch flickering through the trees, I felt hopeful that everything would work out. We ended up at the stream in the forest. Frank was holding his torch as high as he could, moving it slowly back and forth to throw light among the ancient trees.
“I tho
ught I saw something,” he said.
“Like what?”
“A pair of eyes.”
“It might have been a wolf,” I said.
Frank shook his head. The wolves were closer now than they’d ever been, but their calls and their songs still came from the mountain.
“Do you think it was Thursday?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” The torch flared as Frank waved it again. Shadows moved, but nothing glinted back at us. I had a feeling that something was there. But Frank didn’t go farther into the forest to get a better look. Neither did I.
We went back to the cabin before our torches could burn out. All night the wind blew, and old cones, shaken loose from the trees, pattered down on the roof. It grew colder and colder, and the rain turned to sleet. Even close to the fire, I found it hard to keep warm.
In the morning I thought we would both go looking for Thursday. But Frank announced that he was going fishing. The weather was still awful, with gusts of wind and rain sweeping through the forest.
“We don’t have to go fishing,” I said.
“If we want to live, we do,” said Frank. “We need enough fish to last seven months.”
“No, Frank.” I talked patiently, hoping he wouldn’t get angry. “We only need enough for six more days.”
“We don’t know that, Chris.”
“Yes we do,” I told him.
Frank sighed and pushed his hair out of his eyes. It was a tangled mat, like a frayed piece of carpet. “You can’t go by a dream,” he said. “And we can’t wait to see what happens. In six days, there won’t be any fish left to catch.”
That was probably true, but I didn’t care. “We’ve got enough,” I said.
Frank looked down at me from the bed. “You’re just scared of the bear.”
Well, I was scared of the bear. But that wasn’t why I wouldn’t go fishing. My dad—our dad—had said we’d be saved. The wooden saint showing up on the beach had proved it. If I went fishing now, it would be like saying I wasn’t really sure. If I didn’t believe we’d be rescued, it might not happen.
But Frank was so stubborn. He got dressed. He gathered the gaff and the knife and a bit of rope. “If you’re too scared, stay here,” he said.
“I’m not too scared,” I told him. “We just don’t need any more fish.”
He smiled his little smile to let me know he didn’t believe me. Then he opened the door, and a blast of sleet swirled through the cabin. The fire swayed and flickered as Frank went out into the wind.
I thought that Thursday might be watching from a nearby tree, just waiting for Frank to leave. I waited for him to appear in the window; I listened for the sound of his wings. But hours passed with no sign of the raven. To pass the time, I tried to read. I turned the pages without even seeing the words, then hurled the book onto the bed and went out.
It was even colder than before. Trees bent alarmingly, shedding branches that wheeled away through the sky. White pellets of sleet covered the ground, and I could see Frank’s blotchy footprints leading toward the trail. There were other tracks underneath his, huge paw prints so faint in the sleet that they were nearly invisible, as though they’d been made by ghostly animals. I could press my hand inside one of them and not even touch the edges.
Only the bear could have made those tracks. Sometime in the night, it had walked past the cabin, just two or three feet from where we’d been sleeping. I erased the tracks with my feet, sweeping them from the ground as though I could sweep the bear along with them. Then I followed Frank’s footprints toward the river.
At the high cliffs the wind howled straight up from a white sea, stretching my capes high in the air. Along the beach, it tore the waves into a blinding blizzard. Head down, I shouldered into the wind.
Many things had washed ashore, and many others tumbled in the surf among the breakers. But I didn’t stop to search for treasure. I was interested in nothing but finding Frank.
When he appeared ahead of me in that whirling fog of spray and sleet, it was almost magical. Just a shadow at first, and then a gray shape, he took form from the sea and the wind. One moment I saw nothing, and the next he was there, plodding toward me.
He was bent over like a little old man. Leaning into the storm, he used the gaff for a cane. He went staggering up the beach as the wind gusted, then fought his way back down again. The fog thickened around me as a gust ripped spindrift from the sea. And when the fog cleared, the beach was empty.
Frank was gone. He had vanished, just like that. I started running—or tried to. I reeled and stumbled over the stony beach as the wind snatched at my capes. I could hardly see a thing; I could hear nothing. But something made me stop in the right place, and peer in the right direction, and I saw Frank huddled behind a stranded stump.
White and waxy-looking, he gazed up as though he didn’t recognize me.
Two salmon lay beside him. They were big and shiny, the best fish I had seen in a long time, and I knew that Frank must have searched for hours to find them. But now they were wasted. Seagulls had pecked out the bellies, the eyes, the layers of flesh from the ribs. It made me sad to think that Frank had carried them so far, but couldn’t keep the birds from eating them.
As I held out my hand to help him up, I remembered our first morning in Alaska, when he would hardly let me near him. The day I need your help, that’s the day I kill myself. But now he took my hand gladly, and I pulled him to his feet. I held him as he got his balance.
I didn’t bother with the fish.
“Dad was a loser,” says Frank suddenly.
This is not what I want to hear on the day we’ll be saved. I clamp my hands over my ears.
“It’s true. His whole life was crap.”
“Don’t say that, Frank.” I can spend forever trying to make sense of my father’s life. But right now, with the sun shining and men on their way, I don’t want to talk about rotten things.
But something in the story of Kaetil has made Frank angry again. He slaps the book into his lap. “Dad wrecked everything,” he says. “He was useless.”
“That’s not true,” I tell him. “He had all sorts of trophies for football and baseball and—”
“Yeah. From high school,” says Frank. “That’s the last time he was any good to anyone. From then on he was just a loser.”
When I look at Frank now, I see Dad. His gestures, his habits, the sound of his voice are things I can sort of remember. He’s a model of the father that I had when I was very young, the father he had known himself. Maybe that’s why I grew to like him.
I wish I was Frank. I want to be the one who was raised to play sports. The one who went camping and canoeing. The one who sat on a couch with his dad on Saturday mornings to watch World Wide Wrestling. I never got to roll around on the carpet with my dad, practicing the Texan death grip and the pile driver. I would have been the boy of my father’s dreams. But if I was Frank I would feel bitter now too, because all of that ended.
Couples break apart, and people move away. It wasn’t Frank’s fault, what happened; it sure wasn’t mine. But his father became my father, and Dad did everything differently with me.
I’d always thought he was disappointed with me. Now I see that isn’t true. Maybe I was never his favorite, but that’s all right. Dad loved me just as much as he loved Frank, and he made me stronger by making me stand alone. I think he did it on purpose, knowing he couldn’t always be around to help. But Frank would say he just didn’t care, that Dad moved from one thing to another without caring what he left behind, drifting through life like a broken-down boat. Like a castaway.
I don’t know if I should be angry or sad at the way things worked out. I guess I could wonder forever how things were meant to be. But in the end I turned out stronger than Frank.
•••
I carried the gaff and kept an arm around Frank, and when he stumbled I held him up. The wind pushed us along, and rain streamed from our capes. I heard a constant tick-tick-tick, like
stones being tapped together, that I couldn’t figure out at first. It was the chattering of Frank’s teeth.
He staggered through the cabin door and stood shivering in the middle of the room. In my hurry to leave I had forgotten to bank the ashes. The fire had gone out long ago. I uncovered the embers and breathed fire into them while Frank fumbled with his capes. His fingers were claws, so cold he couldn’t bend them. He tore frantically at the plastic, trying to rip it to shreds, but he couldn’t do it. I had to peel off his capes and work his jacket over those hooked fingers, as though untangling something from barbed wire. Frank didn’t say a word. He just stared at nothing, as though he teetered on the edge of his old wide-awake sleep. Like a robot, he lay down on the bed. His hands grabbed the mattress as I folded it around him.
Something had happened out there. But what it was, Frank couldn’t say.
I read aloud from Kaetil the Raven Hunter. All evening and into the night I kept reading, using different voices to make the story exciting. Though Frank fell asleep I didn’t stop, thinking the sound of my voice made him calm.
The storm ended overnight. So did Frank’s strange mood, and the morning was sunny and pleasant, with five more days to go.
That seemed amazing. “In five days we’ll be rescued,” I said. “In five more days we’ll be saved.” Frank still looked doubtful, but I felt happy and excited, as though bathed in warm sunlight. Then I thought of Thursday. I had five more days to find him.
I went out to the skeleton tree, where he so often perched in the evening. The wooden saint still stood at the edge of the shore, glistening with his oily sheen. He had not moved, though the streamers had been torn from his hands. Thursday wasn’t there.
I called and whistled as I searched to the south, along the sandy beach. Many things lay cast ashore or bobbing in the water, but the most shocking was a piece of wood painted red. I recognized it as a shattered plank from Uncle Jack’s dinghy, and I waded out to get it. Every time I bent down, it skittered away, pulled in or out by the waves. I chased it along the beach until I finally caught it.
The Skeleton Tree Page 16