The sky brightened. It must have been close to 6.00 a.m. Jonah shook his head. Time! Night? Day? What was the difference, living the way he did now? Soon his body would fall into the rhythms of the nature that surrounded him, and his life, his work, would be determined by nothing more than the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and the changes brought on by the advancing autumn.
Still, he wondered how long he’d been here. He rolled over again on his damp mat, counting back, remembering. There was the first day, travelling from Minneapolis, taking the bus down from Duluth, sleeping curled up in the toilet of a wayside rest. There was the second day, stopping in Welmer, getting building supplies at Hardware Hank and food at the supermarket. There was the third day, trying to build the wigwam, failing, going into the cabin to sleep.
He yawned, sleepy again. Third day, fourth day – what did it matter? He needed to think about what he had to do tomorrow – build a cooking fire, make a trap for rabbits, find some shells and feathers to decorate the weapon he was carving from his firewood club.
On the fifth day, on the sixth day. He turned over on his stomach, agitated. He was thinking like a white man again. Words from the Bible – the wrong creation story – were running through his head. What was he doing, worrying about what God created and when?
He closed his eyes, but the thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone. On the sixth day. Wasn’t that today? Was that why the words were gnawing at him? No, he’d been in the forest for over a week.
On the sixth day. What happened on the sixth day? Had God created something really special?
Jonah curled up so his body faced the door. It was getting brighter now. . .
Adam and Eve. That was it! On the sixth day God created people! He got so lonely he made them out of a hunk of clay.
For a second, Jonah felt proud of himself for remembering – and then he realised how stupid that was. God created people. What was so great about that? Maybe God would have been better off on his own.
Jonah was.
Maybe God couldn’t handle being alone, but he could.
People. Who needed them, anyway?
Chapter Eight
ETTA
It was Peter who kept me going. He pulled me along, propped me against his shoulders. He must have known that if I sat down or took a rest I’d never be able to pick myself up and start moving again.
I was turning out to be a real liability – like one of those stupid girls in horror movies who wear high heels and prom dresses on a hike through the woods, then twist their ankles while running away from axe-wielding zombies.
How far had we walked? Miles, it felt like, blindly, in the dark.
Then slowly, the sky brightened. We could make things out – the trunks of the trees, the ferns and saplings on the ground, all those holes and hollows we’d been stumbling across. Above us, we could see the outlines of branches. And through the trees, in the distance, something shimmered, silvery-blue.
‘That’s it!’ Peter shouted. ‘That’s Yellow Lake.’
It seemed huge at first, another Lake Superior. As we got closer it shrank, and when we stumbled onto a tiny beach of scrubby sand – our arms covered in scratches, our faces swollen by bashes and bites – it looked like the most perfect thing I’d ever seen. It was oval, not round, too far to swim across, but shallow and safe, like a grey-blue pool. On the far side, a strip of water was reflecting the sunrise, sparkling like a narrow band of diamonds and gold.
I wanted to stop, to pitch a tent, build a fire, live on this beach for the rest of my life – alone, a forgotten castaway.
But I wasn’t alone.
Peter slumped down onto the damp sand. He sat cross-legged, like he wanted to stay, too – just soaking up the beauty. At first he looked straight out onto the water, but then I noticed how his head dropped, how his posture slumped, how his body was turned away from me.
He was crying. He tried to hide it, the way boys always do. He buried his face in his arms and made strange sounds, so I’d think he was coughing or had something in his eyes. But there was no mistaking the movement in his shoulders. Funny. Those shoulders had seemed so broad and strong when we were in the woods. Now, hunched over and shaking, they looked so fragile underneath his thin T-shirt, so breakable.
I sat next to him. Should I touch him? He’d touched me when I lost it back there in the woods, and that had been just the right thing to do. But now, in the morning, it might be weird. Now that we could actually see each other, maybe it wouldn’t be the same.
I closed my eyes to make the world dark again. It was easier to think that way. The water smelled weedy and green, fresh. The wind shook the clump of tall reeds, making them brush against my face. I listened to the soft lapping of the waves as Peter’s sobs got louder and louder. He’d stopped trying to choke what he was feeling. He was really crying, like somebody whose heart was breaking. I had to do something. I couldn’t just ignore him. I could feel my own eyes well up again, and I didn’t want that.
‘Thanks for saving me,’ I said.
It came out stupid and girly, like something Mom taught me to say so I could snag myself a boyfriend. ‘I mean it, Peter. I don’t know what would have happened to me if you hadn’t been there last night.’ That part was true, anyway, not that it did any good. The sobs came harder, sharper.
I just kept talking.
‘You probably think I’m stupid, probably think I’m some kind of, well, I don’t know what’ – I did know what, but I didn’t want to say the word – ‘for getting in a car with strangers. But they weren’t exactly strangers. One of the guys was my mom’s boyfriend. Allegedly.’
I told him the whole story – about Kyle sniffing around, even when Mom wasn’t home, about him coming around with a bunch of men, about the powder in the bags and the money on the counter. I told him things that happened before Kyle came into the picture, too – having to move to Welmer, having to be on my guard all the time in case Mom got herself in too deep with some guy and I ended up being sent to a foster home.
Peter seemed to be listening. His body was still, but he nodded his head like he understood.
‘I just wanted you to know. So you wouldn’t think I was some kind of—’
‘I didn’t think that, not for a minute.’ He shifted his body in the sand so that he was staring straight out into the lake, same as me. ‘I knew it wasn’t your fault.’
I don’t know how long we sat there, not talking, just listening and looking out. The sun rose over the tops of the trees behind us, so I took off the heavy shirt he’d given me. He slipped out of his shoes and pulled his socks off, carefully putting the right sock into each shoe, then setting them neatly on top of his duffle bag. He stood up, rolled his jeans to his knees and walked into the water, peering along the shoreline. I leaned back into the sand and let the sun sink into my skin.
I knew he was with me, but I didn’t feel like I had to say anything or do anything, or even look at him – not if I didn’t want to. And if he didn’t want to, he didn’t have to say anything, either. If he didn’t want to tell me why he got so upset, that was OK too.
‘Right then.’
This made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. The way he sounded like somebody out of an old black-and-white movie on TV, a man wearing a safari outfit with one of those funny helmets. I’d never met a real English person. Did they all talk like that?
‘What?’
‘ “Right then.” The way you said it. It sounded funny to me.’
‘Oh,’ he said quietly. I looked up at him, worried for a second that I’d hurt his feelings. ‘Right then.’
This time we both laughed.
He came back to the shore and dried his feet off with a towel he had in his bag. I sat up and bent over the lake. Luckily it was too wavy to act like a mirror, so I didn’t have to see what I looked like. I cupped my hands to splash water on my face and run some through my hair. I kept on and on, splashing and splashing. When my hair was completely soaked, Peter han
ded me the towel. I dried myself, wiped my face clean.
‘Is that OK?’ I asked
He smiled at me. I noticed his eyes then – pale blue, like opals. ‘You look lovely,’ he said.
Lovely. That was good, wasn’t it? That meant he thought I looked nice?
I handed him back the towel and the shirt and he folded them up and put them away. I realised then that I didn’t want to be alone. It was good to have a helper. Not just for folding clothes more neatly than I’d ever seen it done, not just for guiding me through the forest on a black night. Not for protecting me. Just for being there. It was good to have a friend like Peter – lovely, in fact.
JONAH
It was the next morning, and everything was as it should be. He’d almost forgotten about those stupid white kids from the other night. And the cabin? It was as if it didn’t even exist any more.
Jonah went into the woods – naked, except for his underpants and a muslin sling he’d made to gather up his bounty – and collected twigs to use as kindling for his night-time fire. He brought them back into the wigwam and checked on the logs that he was storing – completely dry! And as he walked down the path towards the lake, something peeked out at him from under a clump of leaves – a flash of brightness. It wasn’t shiny, like gold or silver, but it caught his eyes and he stooped down to uncover it.
An eagle feather. Well, it looked like one at least – dark brown, smooth, perfectly tapered. His hands shook as he picked it up and ran his fingers along its edges.
His heart pounded, too. He knew what this meant.
From the time he was a little boy he’d heard the stories. To earn a feather, he needed to do something brave or heroic – save a person’s life, or kill an impressive animal. His grandfather had told him that – at least he thought it was his grandfather. So many of his memories were vague. Maybe he’d dreamed this scene of a small boy, dark brown eyes wide in wonder, sitting on the lap of a kindly twinkle-eyed elder who wore faded denim and a torn red work shirt. In his memory, his grandfather’s thick, grey hair was braided. Jonah had no way of knowing if it actually was, though, because his mother never showed him any pictures, never answered any of his questions. His grandfather was just another missing piece from the fractured story of who he was.
When he got to the water’s edge, he added the new feather to his decorated club, tying it on with an old shoelace he’d found on his journey from the city. Then he laid the weapon carefully on the dry sand, and waded into the cool, shallow water. He squatted down to dig in the wet, sandy lake bottom. Hundreds of tiny silver minnows swirled around his arms and legs like whirlwinds of shimmering metal. Jonah tried to sift out some shells, but it wasn’t much of a harvest – stones, mostly, bits of broken glass, smooth-edged, eroded by the sand.
The sun got hotter, the rays caressing the skin on his curved back like a pair of huge, warm hands. He closed his eyes, combing his fingers through the lake-bed, feeling the cool water beneath him, the warm sun above him, hearing the birds, the rhythmic music of the waves. Then something jarred his senses, jerked his thoughts back to the task at hand. Something hard and rough was underneath the sand, something small, pointed, like the serrated tooth of a northern pike or a sturgeon. He lifted it out. He cleared away the grit that had settled in the tiny ridges of its rough surfaces. Then he saw. It wasn’t a tooth. It was made of stone and was the colour of dull, cloudy amber. It was a small, carved triangle that could only have been one thing – an arrowhead.
Another sign!
His first instinct was to tell someone, show somebody this amazing treasure. But what could he do? Call his mother? Hike through woods until he’d found another cabin, stand in his underpants and tell the white owner what he’d done?
He looked towards the shore, across the empty lake, and sighed. Maybe someone in the spirit world was sharing in his joy, but there was nobody here he could talk to. Still, wasn’t that how he wanted it to be? Solitude – wasn’t that why he was here?
He stood up, and the dripping water made his underpants cling to his body like a second skin. He loped onto the beach, and picked up his club. He opened his sling, put his precious new treasure inside it. He stood on the warm sand and stretched, arching his body, nearly touching the sky.
That was when he saw them – two white people, trudging through the trees that grew along the shoreline, pushing back the undergrowth, wading out into the water when the bushes got too thick. They were a hundred or so metres away from him and getting closer to the beach – his beach – every second.
He slumped down, hunkering behind a row of scrubby pine trees. He stayed totally still, breathing as quietly as he could. He had to calm down, to think. If he’d seen them, then they’d probably seen him too. But did that matter? No – if he crept away silently, if he climbed up the hill to the wigwam, they wouldn’t follow him. Why would they? He hadn’t done anything wrong. And if they did follow, he could put his twigs onto the path, hide it by roughing up the smooth bits of grass he’d trodden down. They probably wouldn’t even notice that there was a path, not if wasn’t black-topped or didn’t have railings.
He looked down at his club. He’d carved it to protect himself and his land from white intruders. Hadn’t he vowed that the next white people he saw, he would see off, by force, if necessary? He could charge through – not to hurt them, just to scare them, to make them run away.
But these white people weren’t the same as the others. Even from a distance, Jonah could tell. They weren’t drunk. They weren’t swaggering and boasting. They looked as though they’d been awake all night, on some gruelling march. They looked hungry – like him – and frightened. The girl seemed as tiny and fragile as a doll. Her flimsy T-shirt was dirty and torn, her jeans were caked in mud. The boy, taller than Jonah, with pale skin and a shock of spiky, dyed-blonde hair, held her hand protectively.
Maybe they were lost. That made sense. Maybe they’d taken a wrong direction somewhere and would turn around as soon as they realised that this wasn’t the place they were looking for.
He put down the club – that seemed silly now, a bit of ceremonial overkill – and slipped his sling around his front in order to cover up. He hunkered down. What else could he do? He’d have to wait here, hiding like a trespasser, cowering behind trees.
He fingered the arrowhead in his sling. Some symbol, he thought bitterly. He was back to square one – waiting on the white kids, seeing what they’d do before he could make his next move.
PETER
Peter pushed aside the last line of skinny silver birch tree saplings. He scrambled across the beach, breathless with excitement – it was all he could do to stop himself from turning a cartwheel. Finally – finally – they’d made it.
‘There.’ He pulled Etta along, his fear and exhaustion completely forgotten. ‘Up the hill. That’s it. That’s the cabin.’
He stopped in the sand, nearly toppling over.
He looked up the hill, squinted, shook his head.
What the hell?
The steep, sandy hill had crumbled through erosion, and whatever was standing at the top didn’t look anything like he remembered. It didn’t even look like a cabin. It was an oversized shack with a scrubby, weedy lawn. The paint was peeling, showing grey wood underneath. Dull brown shutters hung from rusty hinges. The window frames were warped by the harsh weather of hot summers and freezing winters. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years and years.
‘No,’ he sputtered. This couldn’t be the cabin. ‘It’s not. It’s not right.’
Maybe he had the wrong place. He was tired. Maybe he was all muddled up.
‘There used to be swings here on the sand. They were a bit rusty and the slide was broken but. . .’ Peter dropped his holdall, let go of Etta and waved his arms in the air, pointing to a grassy patch of sand. ‘There was a firepit – just a circle of rocks, but you could make a fire and find a twig and roast marshmallows.’ He paced along the beach. The lake was getting choppier as the sky
clouded over. It bashed against a narrow strip of spongy-looking boards that jutted out of the water before listing to the right, on the verge of collapse.
‘And that can’t be the dock, can it? Our dock was painted white and so solid that we could. . .’
Then he saw. The boathouse that had once stood back from the lake, close to the deep woods, was still there. Its roof had sunk in, though, and it was little more than a pile of shattered timber. Beside this shell was a twisted, rusty tangle of metal that had once upon a time been a swing set.
Peter slumped down on the sand, with Etta watching him. He wished suddenly that she weren’t there, that she’d just go away so he could be alone for a minute.
All this way, he thought, all this bloody way, just to see this. Uncle Ken said he hadn’t been keeping the place up, but this was more than just neglect, this was total abandonment.
He felt the tears rise up again. No, he wouldn’t allow that. Crying wasn’t going to help anything now. It was far too late for tears. He had to go up the hill, go inside the cabin, face the worst.
‘Right then.’ There, he’d said it again. What a bloody pillock. But at least he had a choice now – to cry or to laugh.
There was a moment – the choppy waves stopped crunching against the sand, the wind stopped rustling the tree leaves, the birds stopped chirping. Peter could feel Etta behind him. He imagined her pretty face, not daring to smile, probably by now not even daring to breathe.
He stayed still, facing away from her. ‘When I turn around, which I am going to do at the count of five, you’d better not have even a trace of a smile on your face or I will pick you up and throw you into the lake, fully clothed.’
He turned around, smiling, delighted that Etta was there and that he wasn’t alone. It was good to have someone to have a laugh with. Somebody who thought he was, well, amusing at least.
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