The Skeleton Tree

by Iain Lawrence

  The little fitting that had held an oarlock was still screwed to the wood. I touched it, remembering everything in reverse: the tumbling landing in the surf; the awful hours of rowing; the shock of Puff sinking; and every moment I’d ever spent with Uncle Jack.

  I buried the plank deep in the sand among the driftwood. I didn’t think Uncle Jack would want it lying in my little cemetery, so far from the sea that it couldn’t hear the waves. As I scraped out a hole I felt him standing behind me. It was not a frightening feeling. Not even sad. I thought that Uncle Jack was proud of me.

  I left no marker. I even swept away my fingerprints. “Goodbye, Uncle Jack,” I said.

  I found more floats, more bottles, more chunks of foam. I found an artificial rose and a bobblehead dog. But I didn’t find my raven. I collected two plastic bottles and tapped them together as I walked back toward the cabin. The sound they made was like one of Thursday’s loveliest calls: of pebbles dropped into barrels.

  Bawk-block. Bawk-block. I was sure the sound carried far into the forest.

  I climbed the trail and on through the ancient forest. Bawk-block. Bawk-block. It was quiet and beautiful there, and the last thing on my mind was any sort of danger. As I reached the stream I saw something white rolling in the water near the bottom of the little pool. It tumbled over and over, a blob of white and orange, like a puffy bit of mushroom. I bent down to catch it. But all of a sudden, in that wonderful place, a feeling of doom came over me.

  It was an animal instinct that made me freeze in place, as though turned to stone. A prehistoric part of me sensed that I was prey.

  Something was waiting for me in the forest.

  This was the same place where Frank had seen eyes in the dark. Like him, I stared among the trees, between the trunks and through the branches, watching for any movement, listening for every sound.

  The feeling passed. But I still went slinking away, quiet as a cat. Then I turned and fled. I raced to the cabin, but it was empty. I ran to the meadow and out to the rocky point. And there was Frank, lounging in a plastic chair. I raced up behind him.

  “There’s something in the forest,” I said.

  He moved slowly, turning to look up at me. In that moment I wished I hadn’t come to find him. I must have sounded like the frightened boy I’d been before, the one afraid of everything. But then I saw him smiling in the strangest way.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It’s not the bear.”

  His tone and words turned me cold. “What do you mean?” I said.

  Frank tilted the chair on its wobbly legs. “Let’s just say I took care of that old bear.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He looked so smug and knowing. “He just won’t be around anymore. Okay?”

  “But what did you do?” I said.

  It scared me, the way he smiled. I felt like grabbing the plastic chair and tilting it backward. I wanted to give him a fright, to make him squirm and kick to catch his balance. But I knew his plans never worked out, and I actually felt sorry for him.

  “Five more days,” I said.

  “Sure, Chris.” He nodded. “Five days more.”

  I went to sleep hungry that night. Frank rationed the salmon, but cooked a big pot of seaweed and sedge. The smell made me sick. I was so thin that I could see each one of my ribs, and the bones in my arms right up to the elbows, but I couldn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls of that awful gruel.

  The moon came up, big and yellow, and we heard the wolves again, much closer. There must have twenty or more, all calling back and forth. “What do you think they’re singing about?” I asked Frank.

  “They’re gathering,” he said.

  “For what?”

  The howling rose to a high warble, then fell away. Farther in the distance, other wolves took up the song.

  “Frank, why do you think they’re gathering?” I asked again.

  “I guess we’ll see,” he said.

  In the morning, with four more days to go, I wanted to search for Thursday at the river. But it scared me to think of walking through the old forest to get there. I asked Frank, “Do you want to go fishing?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s no more fish.”

  “We could try anyway. We—”

  “No,” he said. “There’s no more.”

  “Well, I’m going anyway.” I took the gaff and the knife, and I crept along the trail. But in the moss-covered forest I found nothing but birds. A woodpecker cried its giggling laugh, and sparrows sang from branch to branch. In a moment I was past the stream, heading down toward the beach.

  I found the skeletal salmon that Frank had carried so far from the river. They lay in a pile of kelp, with sand fleas swarming their bones. I wondered again if he had tried to fight off the seagulls, if he had tried to guard the fish. Or had the birds followed him, just waiting—like buzzards—for their chance?

  It seemed an unsolvable mystery. But it suddenly made sense when I reached the boulders near the river.

  Another big salmon lay there. Hidden from the gulls, it was nearly intact. Though the silvery scales had faded to gray, it still glistened and shone. It sparkled, like no fish I’d ever seen. I nudged it with my foot. It rocked on its side with a clinking, grinding sound, and I knelt down to look.

  Frank had stuffed that fish with broken glass.

  He must have gathered a bucketful at the wreck of the Reepicheep. From the boat’s shattered windows he had chosen the sharpest slivers, the perfect pieces to fit the salmon’s tail and fins.

  “Let’s just say I took care of that old bear.” It made me sick to think of Frank searching for the finest fish to be his bait, then arranging it so carefully. I could picture the intent look on his face as he worked with that salmon. The scales must have stuck to his fingers in shimmering specks. He would have remembered that frightening time from his childhood, his mother calling 911 in a panic when she found his mouth full of glass. Did he smile when he finished, imagining the bear’s dim delight as it discovered the gruesome fish? I thought of the glass shattering between its teeth, slicing its gums and its throat, tearing it open from the inside out.

  As much as I feared the bear, as much as I hated it, I couldn’t let that happen. It was too cold-blooded and cruel. I picked up the fish by its tail and knocked out the pieces of glass. I thumped it down against a rock, and the glass shot in all directions. It lay glittering around the pool as I threw that salmon out to sea.

  I guessed there were others. Frank would have set enough traps to be sure the bear had found at least one of them. But I went a long way up the river without finding a single salmon, living or dead. Even the gulls had deserted the river.

  As I started back, I was furious with Frank. When I saw the mound of red plastic stacked at the skeleton tree, and Frank adding one more thing to the pile, I wanted to get away from him forever. But even then I couldn’t stay angry. He looked small and helpless, dwarfed by that ridiculous pile of plastic that was, in his mind, the one great hope for our rescue. He was trying his best, but it was useless. I watched him fling something red to the top of the pile and saw it tumble down again. My brother, I thought. The idea struck right down inside me.

  I wanted very badly to go and help him, and I looked for things to add to his pile. I searched for bits of red along the beach.

  What I found almost broke my heart.

  It was a child’s diary, its pages stuck together. I peeled them apart and found Japanese writing that had smudged and faded, and now looked like delicate paintings of water and mountains. I thought about the child who had written words now gone forever. I imagined she had begun her diary full of hope and dreams, and maybe she had ended it the same way, not knowing she was writing for the last time.

  I carried the diary with me, not thinking until I reached the stream that I would have to go into the forest to bury it. Then I stood for a long time, not sure I could even do it. But I couldn’t throw the diary away. I dashe
d into the forest and buried it as quickly as I could. I shoved it down into the green ground and black earth as songbirds twittered around me. I started crying as I covered it over—but not for the girl, and not for myself. I cried for Thursday. I missed his little noises, his strange words. I missed his company.

  In a way it was hard to get up and leave that place. I didn’t want to face Frank and talk about—or not talk about—the things I’d seen. But I got up from the moss and brushed off the little twigs that clung to my filthy clothes.

  A flash of color caught my eye, a color too bright to belong in the forest. On the other side of a fallen log, the moss had been disturbed. Strips of dark earth and different shades of green showed where it had been torn and lifted. Under the moss lay a band of scarlet, and a scrap of the same bright orange I’d seen rolling in the stream. My first thought was that Frank had come to my cemetery and uncovered the things I’d buried. I stepped up on the log to look.

  I saw scattered sticks and a pile of leaves. I saw a human hand, an arm and a leg. I saw the cabin guy, half-buried in the moss. Or part of him, anyway.

  The orange cloth was the shell of a sleeping bag. The band of red was the end of a sleeve, and out of it poked the dead man’s fingers, curled and gray like mushrooms. He had been hurriedly buried, and just as hurriedly uncovered again.

  I remembered standing for the first time in the door of the little cabin, seeing the furniture toppled, the mattress pulled from the bed, the ashes gouged with finger marks. Then an awful image formed, of the man screaming as the grizzly bear dragged him into the darkness.

  It had buried him here in the spring or the summer. And the other night it had come to dig him up again.

  I backed away. I stepped down from the log and stumbled over the moss. I ran from the forest, and the birds scattered around me.

  I found Frank at the skeleton tree, still working on his plastic beacon. I shouted as I walked closer. “Hey, Frank, I found the cabin guy!”

  I wanted to shock him, and I did. His head lifted suddenly; he turned to look at me.

  “He’s in the forest,” I said. “The bear killed him.”

  I was now right behind Frank. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Do you want to look?”

  Frank didn’t want to look. No one in his right mind would want to see a man half-chewed by a grizzly bear. But he really had no choice. I took him through the forest, past spiderwebs that billowed as we passed, and I showed him where the cabin guy was lying.

  Frank took one quick look. Then he sat on the fallen log, squeezing his hands together. “That could have been wolves,” he said. “It might not have been the bear.”

  I didn’t believe him. It was too vivid in my mind: the cabin guy waking as the bear burst through the door, its jaws clamping around his ankle before he knew what was happening; the guy grabbing on to the table, the chair, the stones by the fire. He would have clutched on to anything that might have saved him from being dragged off into the night. That was why we’d found the door hanging by one hinge. It was the last thing the man had held on to.

  Frank swore. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What about the cabin guy?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “We can’t just leave him here,” I said.

  I thought we should build a coffin. We could use the planks of the Reepicheep, or even a barrel or a box washed up on the beach. But Frank wanted to get it over with right then. “We can cover him up,” he said. “But I’m not going to touch him.”

  A twelve-year-old boy should not have to be a gravedigger. I tried not to look at the man, but I saw his face anyway—and I thought I would scream. Though Frank was older, it was no easier for him. He took huge, loud breaths as he tossed handfuls of leaves and twigs and moss on top of the body. He didn’t even watch where they landed.

  I used a stick to push the man’s hand into the ground again. I poked the sleeping bag on top of it, trying not to think of the fingers twitching underneath. The cloth was so torn and ragged that I wondered if the bear had come for that—not to eat the man, but to fill its stomach with the fluffy lining of the sleeping bag, or maybe the moss that had grown mattress-thick above it. Frank, as a child, had been fed cotton wool to pad the glass he’d eaten. Could the bear have known to do the same thing?

  I thought of that as I covered everything with sticks and leaves. Frank said it was good enough, and he went away. But I kept working until I’d made the man a part of the forest again. When I was done I washed my hands in the stream. I washed my wrists, my arms, my face, trying to scrub away the horror of what I’d seen. Terrified of ending up like the cabin guy, I ran from the forest.

  I found Frank at the rocky point, where the wooden saint stood under gleaming clouds. A big flock of geese was heading south in a shifting line that must have stretched a quarter mile. By the time the last one passed above us, the leaders were little black dots in the distance. They honked like mad. And just as the last one faded away, snow began to fall.

  Frank was still watching them, staring into a gray and silver sky. Beside him, I said, “I found the fish at the pool.”

  He didn’t even flinch. “What did you do with it?”

  “What do you think?” I said. “I shook out the glass. I threw it away.”

  He flicked back his flop of hair. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Were there others?”

  Frank waited a moment, then held up three fingers.

  “Where?”

  He only smiled at the sky.

  “How could you do that?” I asked. “How could you be so cruel?”

  “Oh, come on, Chrissy!” He turned to look at me. “You were terrified of that bear. You should be happy now. It’s dead.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “Well, it’s dying. And I did that. I told you: I’m your guardian angel.”

  Tiny, whirling flakes of snow gusted over the sea. They collected in the crevices among the rocks, in the eyes of the wooden saint. They lay speckled on Frank’s shoulders and hair. I could see he would never understand why I was bothered by what he’d done. “I can’t believe I’m your brother,” I said, and walked away.

  Frank laughed. “You’re too soft. That’s probably why Dad never liked you.”

  “Dad liked me lots,” I said, still walking.

  “Did you know he was a hunter?” asked Frank. He was walking along behind me now. “That’s what we did every fall. We went hunting for moose. Sometimes for bears.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him. But it was possible. My father’s “business trips” had always taken him away in the fall.

  “He saved the antlers,” said Frank. “He had a whole room full of antlers.”

  Cold and hungry, I sat by the fire in the cabin. Frank lay on the bed with the book while I watched the flames and thought of Thursday. Though I tried to imagine him huddling warm in a dry place, I could only picture him dead on the ground, with snow piling on his black feathers.

  For an hour the snow kept falling. Then it suddenly stopped in a burst of sunshine. And out in the forest, a raven called.

  I looked up from the fire. Frank put down the book, and for a moment our eyes met. Then I ran out, shouting for Thursday, and saw the raven landing in a fir tree. The branch bent, shedding snow in a glistening mist. The raven clucked and gurgled.

  “So it’s back, eh,” said Frank, coming to join me. “The bad penny.” He tried to sound uncaring but couldn’t hide his pleasure.

  “That’s not Thursday,” I told him.

  Frank frowned. “How can you tell?”

  “Because I know him.”

  To Frank, all ravens were the same. But this one was smaller than Thursday, its feathers more ragged, its beak curved in a different way. Disappointed, I went back in the cabin. Frank kept calling uselessly to the bird, even whistling. “Come on, boy.”

  I shouted through the door, “It’s not a dog, you know!”
r />   I heard the rustle of the raven’s wings, then the whistling sound of its flight. A shower of snow pattered on the cabin roof, and a moment later, Frank came inside. He stood behind me for a while as I peered wet-eyed into the forest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I shrugged. A little late for sorries, my mother would have said. There was nothing he could do to bring Thursday back. But Frank wasn’t thinking of the raven.

  “That was all lies,” he said. “Dad never took me hunting. He always talked about it, but we never went. There was no room full of antlers; I made that up. Dad was no good at hunting, like he was no good at anything else. It was Jack who taught me stuff.”

  I let Frank keep talking. He confessed to other lies too. Of all the things he’d told me about our father, almost nothing was true. He’d invented it all. He had invented a dad to replace the one who hadn’t paid him much attention. His dad was not really so different from mine after all.

  I dreamed of him that night—our real father. I saw him as I had on the very last day, as he walked out of the house and down to the car. Again I saw him drive away without looking back. Then I jolted awake.

  A noise had disturbed me. Something was right outside the cabin.

  I waited to hear the sound again: a slither, a shuffle, whatever it was. Terrifying images whirled through my mind. Had the grizzly passed the cabin on its way for another meal? Had the cabin guy hauled himself from the ground to reclaim his little house? Maybe he was peering in through the window right then. I was too afraid to look. Or was he climbing into the skeleton tree, to join the rest of the dead in their coffins?

  My fears chased each other around and around until daylight. I poked my head outside and saw that the snow had vanished. The ground was bare, and I could see no footprints. Then I finally slept, while Frank went down to the beach and back, while he cooked a pot of seaweed.

  I lay on the bed and watched him. “Three more days,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Say it,” I told him. “Come on, Frank, say it.”

  But he wouldn’t join in. He was using a short stick to stir the soup, holding his head tilted from the flames.