4.

Abi meets Gee after school on the first day back. They stand in the dirt playground next to the swings. This is storm darkness at the end of summer.

“He is a bug,” says Gee.

“James?”

“He is an insect.”

“Why?”

“He’s talking crazy. Like, he wants us to run away, and has no money and no idea of where to go or what to do. He wants me to go with him.”

“Why? Has something happened?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Like, is something wrong?”

“He’s just a bug.”

Tom’s grapes took the prize every year, no beats missed, as his family grew, and his house was open each fall to a wide circle of cousins, friends, fellow growers, their envious faces flushed and astonished with that year’s dark majestic wine.

I remember the windows and doors thrown wide to cloying fermenting fruit, children playing in and out of the deep yellow light, shouts as transient as quick bodies, and it all felt glorious and eternal. A full house, turbulent and joyful, never feels desolate. Our house, by contrast, has been dark with passing storms, gut-wrench thunder, increasing loneliness, when Annie died, when George went away, when we stood, cowed. Or is that how my memory shades it?

Low sun throws rippling shadows from the river across our rooms. Emma’s touch everywhere.

I don’t know what the young campers are thinking, but they have infiltrated and contaminated us. Let me embroider the epoch. We are at the end of the familiar path. Long past the last frozen age and nearly at global cooking. Both poles, north and south, fill with life. Summer and winter bracket the story of stories. Ice sheets melting at an astounding rate. Thousand-mile tracts of silent taiga. Equatorial tribal wars. The Beagle was decommissioned and broken up and now the last pod of killer whales flows through a marine valley between islands. Danny lingers on the lane behind Abi’s house; he sits his fuming horse and those islands fuss with clouds and lurid colour. Let them glow, our pillages, the forest raids, the shy ponies, our light-long thrusts clear of winter’s invasive cells! Let them glow! We are whole and pristine the autumn we are nineteen and go to sea and discover our origin!

Four seasons. Four kids. Four suits to the deck. Four routes to the crossroad. Let’s see how artfully we can carry the story between us, despite our own plights. My wife’s knitting bones, my plans, your unknown participation. I must talk to Kata and Apocat, but tell them what? Ask them what?

“It’s not that I begrudge you your work on that wall,” says Emma, “but there are a thousand more important tasks.”

“It goes on as before.”

“What does?”

“This.”

“What?”

“Taste the air.”

“What?”

“Smoke!”

“Ah. Fall.”

“There’s something else, Apo . . . ”

Apocat shifts her buttocks into the dust between tree roots. “I’m listening.”

Kata hisses. “Appetite. After nearly forty years.”

Apocat sniffs the air. “Certainly. You are right. There’s hunger.”

“Something is on the way,” says Kata. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re right, love, but . . . I don’t know. Sea? Pancakes? Sea?”

“Yes, yes. Something deep and rotten,” says Kata. “Sulphurous.”

“Is it winter coming?”

“I don’t think so.”

All summer Apocat and Kata wove baskets by the river, day in day out. Every summer they weave baskets. Their baskets find their way into the houses. Every child in the village has slept in a river basket, opened its eyes to light through green curving reeds.

Sunday, just into October, Danny was riding home. Tom walked out of the forest, strode stiffly toward him, lips moving.

Danny reined in.

“Trouble,” Tom said. “Come.”

Danny dismounted, let the reins dangle.

“A boy who works for me,” said Tom. “Hanged himself.”

With what language can we approach this forest? It only exists now, as we enter the trees. Tom and Danny are not storytellers. They do not make meaning out of chaos. They tread together, grim, excited, into the story as if it doesn’t exist, down the muddy path to the clearing where Danny climbs onto the stump and slits the rope with his knife. Tom catches the body and carries it to the lane. They lay James across the saddle and lead the horse to his parents’ house. The house shambling, unsuspecting. Tether the horse. Tom carries the boy over the plank bridge, through the front door, and sets him on a couch. Danny follows, steps back when he sees the father, and watches. The father is still, and clearly in terror of the mother, whose voice from another room is asking, Who is it? James is pale and rain-wet. His black jeans and plaid shirt drip onto the couch, onto the floor.

Soon the father produces a bottle of red wine and the men drink and the mother crouches beside the boy, speaking under her breath. My only one, my sweet boy, just raise your head and look at me, just raise your head and take a breath.

What can I do? says the father. Tell me what to do.

His head swings back and forth, loose.

The parents were blind with shock. All I can do is tell the story. I have my own as well as the village’s to fit together, but to what purpose? How does obligation work? I know something of how they feel because Annie died, and even though no one listens and there’s no true telling, I know that I’m obliged to try. Elders come to sit with the family around the fire, cards in hand, suits in order, red black red black, their eyes aglitter, while James reposes in the next room.