It started raining yesterday. Jake and I are holed up inside and I am telling him “The Nettle Spinner.” I glance outside and all I see is a wall of rain. I’ve finished up the weaving and almost run out of thread. In fact, the last panel I fudged. It is fore-shortened for lack of nettle, the figures distorted. Still they are strangely compelling. Renelde is horrid, no proper torso and badly rendered, tiny, ridiculous legs. I’m quickly sewing the panels together when we hear a banging at the door. Well, it starts out as a banging and then degenerates into a scratching, as if someone or something is writing along the rude wooden surface. This cannot be, and were we brave people we would get up and investigate. As it is, Jake pulls the blanket up over himself and Adam and begins to moan.
I knew it. I knew it, he cries.
I drop down and crawl over to him, whispering instructions.
I will stay with the baby. He is skeptical at first but I keep telling him over and over until he begins to nod automatically. I am grinning at his compliance. I see he is grinning too. All will be well.
The bear has arrived, I say.
Ah!
The bear. The bear.
It may be a wolf?
Imagine it is a bear and this will give you strength.
It is a man, he says. He whimpers and holds the baby as if he’s a talisman.
No, no, no. An oversized black bear hunting the baby. It is in the habit of stealing our food. It has found our dump. Jake. Listen to me. You have to act. You have to act right now. You have to kill it. You have to. Jake, please. For the sake of . . .
There is silence for a time and the rain washes our fears away only slowly. After some minutes it seems as if nothing happened, and we begin to let down our guard. Only I haven’t. I know it is false comfort. The bear will return for Adam, I whisper. High drama; work on his sentiment. And I am right. The scratching starts again. I rub my hand up and down Jake’s arm. He is terrified!
I can’t see, he whines. He tries this. But he knows that I know he can find his way, blind or not. He certainly sees my point.
I say, The little spoon, Jake! The little spoon has gone missing.
I see he is crying, that I’ve hit a soft spot. Jake is mine now. I know it.
And from then on, it is over quickly. Come, I whisper. He rolls the baby in the blanket and follows me to my bedroom, watches as I pull the screen out of the window. A faint, sliding noise of wood on wood, nothing more. I give Jake a leg up to the window, and he is so quiet even I am impressed. Death comes to all things, does it not? I hear him moving around the shack, and I move slowly inside the shack tracing his small sounds; if I did not know he was there, I would have heard nothing. There is a barely audible thumping, the slick sharp blade of Jake’s knife, well placed. Beyond the regular shushing of rain against the roof, the ground, the tink against the window, I hear the sound of dragging, the sound of dead resistance, of form against earth, as if it already seeks to claim its due. Jake returns, banging at the door to get in, and when I open it he goes back to his heap of skins, his bed, and huddles under the blanket with Adam, shivering and keening.
Where did you put it?
It is beneath the bedroom window here. It was a man.
No, Jake. You’re wrong about that. I can smell bear. It’s a bear.
Or a wolf? he says.
Timber wolves are very big.
Do they come around here?
Yes. Haven’t we seen them?
By morning the flies have gathered; I have put the screen back in and they are creeping up it inside my bedroom, clustering inside the shack. Born of nothing, old wood, they have arrived here with ominous spontaneity. They press and press and crawl upon one another in a vain attempt to escape this house. Their liveliness is astounding, reminding me of my own.
I rouse Jake after I’ve nursed the boy back to sleep. The flies have multiplied and it has become difficult to see out the window. Jake’s eyes flutter and close again.
No.
Yes. The flies . . .
No.
I can’t do it alone, I say. The nettle sheet is tucked under my shirt; my plan is unfolding perfectly.
Let it rot there, he says.
It will stink. You have to help me finish this. The crows will come, the creatures will come. We can’t have that, you know. They’ll eat the garden next. I keep prodding him until he gets out of the bed. He is moaning and keening under his breath. His eyes are tearing, and I think how strange it is to see this stream of feeling dripping from opaque eyes. I pull him outside and around to the body. We each grab an ankle and tug the thing as far into the bush as seems necessary. I send him back for the shovel, and as he digs I take the cloth, the nettle cloth, and slide the outer edges under the body. It is simple to flip him over and over until he is entirely wrapped. By the end of it, the material is filthy with his dirt and the muddied earth upon which he lies. He has not begun to rot at all. Jake is sobbing. The shovel tings against the rock shield of my country, which protects itself from this sort of sullying by its very impenetrability. He hasn’t got more than two feet down but that will have to do. It is a lazy, careless burial.
What did you say?
Nothing.
By the end of the day, we hear the screaming of ravens. I think I see one flying up, up, a fragment of cloth flapping from its beak. Soon there will be nothing. I don’t hear Jake after a while and I look around. He’s gone from here, disappeared into the woods maybe. His deep resonant moaning has stopped. Beside me, the baby reaches up toward the dust hanging in the air and gurgles, oblivious. He begins to cry, quickly gathering his anxiety into something beyond my small capacity to soothe. I try bouncing him in my arms but it doesn’t help. I coo. I nurse. He is disconsolate, inconsolable. Colic? I find I am crying in the face of my uselessness. I will pack him up; I will head out toward civilization. The great anticlimax. My crying is cold and tearless.
Waa, waa. The boy won’t stop.
Waa, waa. It hits every nerve ending.
I say. I say. I say, I yell, I’m faultless. I never did anything. Adam stops and stares and resumes. And then I recall the book. It is tucked under a board in the kitchen. I build a little fire outside. It sputters and threatens to go out, but while it smokes and coughs for life, I go in and fetch the little journal, for that is what it is. I toss it in the fire, which rises in a brief expression of flame and then dies again.
I look in the boy’s mouth while he wails and see a sharp white stone. He has cut his first tooth.