Chapter Eighteen

Jake comes back in the night. I do not hear him latch the door nor wrap a rope around this latch to lock us in. Safely. I do hear his lusty snores, which wake me; rectilinear shafts of light enter, prettily framing his filthy, age-shrunk head. Dust motes burst from his mouth with each exhalation; if I look closely can I read them? I wonder where he has been. He wakes up when I prod him with the handle of an old broom he’s made with an alder branch. Half in his sleep, he announces that we’ve got to work in the garden.

Everything sorts itself out if you take care of nature, he says.

He compliments my soup too. He’s talkative. I’m sure he’s covering something up. Talking — the great firewall. I’ll let him talk and talk. The bugs have eased off, and we are pulling back aisles of carpeting in order to clean them and then replant the corridors with late crops of spinach, radish, more lettuce. The carpeting harbours colonies of woodlice, which fall off and scatter, at once camouflaged by the dirt. The ground is packed down where we have trodden, but poking through are worms and worm-like roots. While we work, we are disturbing households.

For weeks and months, I walked around as if I was dead, he says. My sea legs stayed with me. My balance was shifting. The solid earth was all liquid and I could not get the picture of her sprawled body out of my head. I didn’t feel responsible. I tried to but I couldn’t. I’ll admit to being changed. Before I was determined. After I was nothing. I wandered around for years,working here and there and everywhere, doing whatever people wanted me to do. Hand to mouth, hand to mouth. This was the way I saw the world. I found one day I was up here. I did some jobs in the mines but never anything too ambitious. I liked it in the earth, this was not the problem. The problem was I was unreliable. The problem was I did not like to live up to expectations. I did not like to be expected and so, often, I did not come to work. And sometimes too the walls of the mines worried me. I was not afraid but I felt dead. Buried. And so I wandered away for a time until I felt better. You brought your sadness here, he says. He’s agitated.

I say, No, Jake. No, not at all. Now I wish he would shut up.

I walked deep in the forest yesterday, he says. I walked deeper than ever until I did not know the trees around me. I could feel the animals moving away from me because they were cautious. I was thinking if there might be a smell of man, something of our work, a stink of business that warns them away. I could hear them everywhere. In the parks in the city, the chipmunks, the squirrels and the little birds will become bold. I have seen them come to eat cookies out of the hands of people. You sit down, very still, and you hold your hand out and they come eventually to eat. But this is a trick, isn’t it? This is bringing the animal into the world of men, not the other way around. It is no better than keeping a bird in a cage and teaching it to speak English. We conquer, men do. They smell it, the stink of it sweating out of our bodies. And they run away for the little pockets of wilderness they can at least pretend are still theirs.

I . . .

No.

But . . .

No. Shh. I walked deeper still into the forest, and while I walked I was deep in thought and not really paying attention to where I was. The woods were very thick and I was having some trouble moving through the pines, the dead branches whipped me as I passed. The light was less and less and then it was wet darkness. I shivered and looked around me. I am old, I thought all of a sudden, though I don’t usually think about that ever. I am, that’s all. Stands of three and four trees grew together. It was good. There was only a spongy floor of red and brown needles and the good smell of decay and the trees, here and there; they are in conversation, I think, and this thought makes me smile. Then I got a bit scared. I was really deep in.

Jake . . .

Listen, he says, staring me down. I was in the true wilderness where no man has yet corrupted. I stood and smiled and I was so cold with my good humour, and then by chance I glanced down again and something shone up at me. It was a rock full of mica, maybe. And I crouched. But it wasn’t a rock. It was the end of a little silver spoon, marked with the maker’s seal. It’s sterling and decorated with a leaf pattern. I was not afraid anymore, and I laughed a bit until the smile froze on my face. I thought about her again then. You wanted me to think about her, and I need you to know that you have your heart’s desire; now I began to think back in time to her. The fat lady from the Titanic is there before me like a sick ghost. There in the deepest woods, demanding answers. She was swaying, leaning against the swaying of her berth, the stand of trees. I thought suddenly, was her name perhaps Bertha? A joke to divert my attention from her anger. I saw right then, in the forest, that you were right. I saw with the flash of this silver spoon in the heart of the woods that I had abandoned her, that I’d miscalculated my inconsequence. I had not acted, only reacted.

Yes?

I failed at living.

That’s a bit much.

No. Come, he says, and picks up Adam. Come. He takes us to the mine pit and points at the gravel beach. There is a note scratched out there. I cannot make out any of the words, only single letters, f, z, qu, and when I ask Jake about it, he shrugs and says he can’t see them at all.

How do you know, then?

He told me.

Who told you?

I take to circumnavigating the pit every day, widdershins. There have been no ramifications. The time for me to leave this place will soon end and I will have forced a decision to stay another year. I have grown fond of Jake, though that is not what binds me. I am uncertain what I should do if I return home. I will no sooner arrive than all sorts of requirements will be made of me. I will be asked to engage in conversation for the sake of same. This thought in itself is wearying. My mother will wish to know all the details of my motherhood. I will have to lie or half-lie, which is, in its intimacy, worse. I wish the letters spelled out some runic answer to these questions which eat at me. I glance out into the impenetrable forest and shout obscenities that diminish infinitely into the treed space. Fuck off, I yell. And, What? Why? And especially, over and over, I yell, What did I do to deserve this?

The weaving is almost done. My work is near finished. If not for Jake and my mother I would leave as soon as this task is completed.

Burchard’s wound, sewn together, had healed into a thin white scar. When Renelde saw him, which was seldom, he reminded her of Guilbert. And that he was gone. She would have neither a dishonest man nor an honest man, and so she settled into a life alone, the same life she supposed her mother to have led, small comfort. Occasionally she went gleaning into the forest, her grandmother now too old and tired to do much but sup and sit and sleep, like a cat, in and out of dream throughout the day and night. The great-grandmother was a benign cipher in the corner, eating next to nothing, seldom speaking except to transmit some old wives’ tale or ancient irrelevant fairy story.

Renelde gathered young shoots and nuts to be cooked up or preserved for healing salves, teas and pottage. For the purpose of gathering, she had a basket that she had made from bent willow shoots. As she wandered through the forest, Renelde felt, on occasion, watched. She put this down to phantom memories and wild creatures hiding. If she saw Burchard, she would swiftly shift herself into whatever foliage provided itself and she would hide — but the hiding was other, having something to do with watching as well as something to do with not being seen. She was not a fawn escaping capture. She was interested in Burchard, curious about him — his anger, his wealth, his presence, his helplessness to resist her weaving. It was important that he not see her there, mortally important. She held the basket low, out of the way.

Renelde saw how old he had become through his long illness. His nastiness was betrayed by his sallow skin, the barely flickering life in his eyes. He acted at times as if he knew he was not alone, checking over his shoulder and chortling. He wore shining breeches, black. What cloth were they?

You wench! he cried, looking about him. He might have lost his mind. The fever had been long and arduous, and he had certainly come to be an old man. I see you, he yelled, his chin thrust out in defiance, petulance. Why do you torment me so? Coquette!

The spoon that Jake brought back from the forest was caked in earth but, when washed in sand, came out more beautiful than anyone could have hoped. We strung it from the overhang, a sort of lonely chime outside the door. It has disappeared. This is a pity because the shiny cutlery gave Adam untold pleasure. He pointed at it. Day after day he reached out to grab at it and, finding that it moved, laughed and laughed. It is gone. I have told Jake that the boy found it too distracting and that I’ve put it away. Jake says I am pleasureless in the face of my own child’s pleasure. He accuses me of jealousy. I am jealous. Jealous of the way his fat arms, fat on my milk, by the way, reach out in joy toward that object. But I am jealous even more when the spoon goes missing. For someone has taken it. No bear pulls up on hind legs for crow’s booty. The string was untied as carefully as can be; the slender twine is sullied. It hangs empty, a fairy noose. I am undone.

Adam, when I carry him across the threshold, wails for the missing spoon, as if he is in mortal pain, and now, instead of up, he reaches out, toward the black forest, toward the culprit. I think to leave him bundled at the forest edge and be done. I am undone. When Jake runs away again, I vow I will do it. I will wander over close to that place. I can feel myself melt into the vision of another as I draw near. I disappear into those eyes. But Jake is stubborn. He stays and stays.

You never go, I say.

Garden.

Supplies? I try.

That’s okay. We’ll manage.

One day, I hear the thrum of a faraway bird, and it comes nearer. I realize it is a machine, not a bird. The Doppler effect runs through me as if the quad itself knocked me down and killed me. I stand stock-still as it hurtles past the clearing. It is a man and a woman, the wind pulls their long hair out behind them. I see she is clutching him more tightly than she needs to. She is wearing a yellow T-shirt and they are in love. If I run and holler and wave, they will hear me and return to rescue me and Adam. We do not need rescuing. There is no hidden spot, no bad, no good, no need to rescue nothing from nothing. I feel the forest suck in its breath and pretend it is not there. They pass by again minutes later, and I am inexplicably remorseful.

Let’s stop, I hear her say.

But the young man doesn’t hear, or does not want to hear.

I turn to the shack and see Jake’s frightened face peering out the window. I wonder if he looked so curiously worried when it was Willem and me, not passing but stopping, invading his concealment.

What was that? he says.

That was history repeating itself, I say. But he doesn’t laugh.

July 25. They stole my book so I’m forced to scribble in the sand. At night. I almost had a heart attack today when a vehicle tore through the place. I was just eating, you see, I’d stolen a bit of mash from the shack when they were in the garden, the window was open. I was settled back in the bush huddled over my bowl with the beautiful spoon. I love the silver spoon. It’s lovely to eat in a civilized fashion after all this time. The spoon lends a dignity to all this mucking about in the woods. An obnoxious couple flew by on a quad and I choked and almost, well, I felt my heart constrict in a horrific way, as if it might go out. Imagine if the heart truly broke. I suddenly imagined it. The little boy has touched this spoon, you know. I can’t wait to touch him. Soon. Courage. Courage.