Summer burned on. Adam and Molly mostly lived off what they grew. They fished and hunted when they could, rotating both where they went and the routes they used to come back to the house. It was impossibly hot. Out harvesting beans and turnips and carrots, they stood dripping sweat. Adam noticed that his daughter never seemed to tire, never seemed to drink, never stopped to curse the sun or rest in the shade. He kept working, kept fretting over the dropping level of the pond as the heat rose into early July. Molly could see it too.
“The more water we take, the more fish are going to die,” he said. “Eventually there won’t be enough oxygen left in the water.”
“We’ll eat the ones that die,” she said.
“Who die,” her father corrected. “That’s not the point. We’re trying to do as little harm as possible.”
But they were surviving. They were okay. Adam had become convinced this was a test. Not a test of one’s spiritual faith laid out by a potentially sadistic creator, but of the self’s ability to endure. Fall would come, and then winter. The world would become static, frozen. Then it would become passable again, and they would have to leave this place. Molly needed to be in school. He needed to be working. No one should have to live in the collapsing ruin of a dead English sea captain’s house, taking game on the sly and battling a shade-flooded garden to survive. It seemed reasonable to head north, over the Canadian border and into Micmac territory, where the ways and land were not theirs but not so different, and where US laws couldn’t follow them. They would start small. A rented room. A garage apartment. A bottom-rung carpentry job. He didn’t want to leave Penobscot territory, and Molly of course would hate him for it, but he knew that the next white face that caught his daughter pulling fish from the river might kill her. What father could take such a risk?
Some mornings, wild turkeys wandered out of the woods. Once, as the drought deepened, a starved and confused black bear came down from the hills. The bear was standing in the clearing on a rise in the meadow. Ragged patches of hair covered its body, and when the bear walked, it stumbled and sat down in a heap and then slowly rose again. Mosquitoes swarmed the bear, and it did not seem to have the energy to flee or to drive them away. As the bear lifted its massive arm to swat at the mosquitoes, patches of cloud burst into view behind the creature. Molly thought it strange to see a bear, powerless and painted against the sky, cupped by clouds.
“What’s wrong with it?” she said.
“It’s dying,” Adam said.
“Why?”
“Mange. Stay with it. Don’t go anywhere.”
Adam went back inside the house. When he returned, he was carrying a rifle Moses had given them.
“Really, Dad?” she said.
Adam handed her the gun. “It’s what has to happen. It’s dying, suffering. We need meat.”
Molly held the gun out away from her body. It was polished and oiled and immaculately cared for. It was the most valuable thing they owned. The bear was lolling its head about, trying to escape the mosquitoes. It turned toward the woods and then tumbled down on its haunches and sat. When it tried to roar, nothing came out. Get up, Molly thought. Please. “It has its back to us,” she said.
“Bear meat is bear meat.”
“I’m not sure I can hit him.” She had shot plenty before, but never at something living.
“You can hit him. Take a deep breath and hold it. Blink once and bring the trigger back slowly. Think of it as pressing the trigger back, not pulling it back. Steady motion. No exhaling, no jerking.”
Following those directions, pressing back against the slender curl of steel, Molly fired, hit, and killed her first bear. The shot had taken the animal squarely through the heart. She felt both happy and sick at once. Her father did not try to touch her or speak to her afterward, and she was grateful.
They said a small prayer for the bear, thanking it. Then they spent several days with the animal, letting the innards and flaying the pelt back, running the knife between fur and fat and sinew. They would waste none of its gifts. The bear’s fur would warm them. The bear’s flesh would fill them. The bear’s fat, rendered into grease, would protect their skin and ease their bodies and lubricate their tools. Molly still found herself trying to figure out if theirs was a good life or not.
One rainy morning, as the leaves were beginning to change, a police cruiser appeared at the end of the driveway. It materialized from the trees as unexpectedly as the bear had weeks before. It nosed up the overgrown drive and then stopped after a few feet. Molly was in the woods, alone, foraging for mushrooms, and she watched in horror. Her father was inside the house. Squinting through the heavy rain, she was convinced she could see him up in the attic through the gable vent. She had the rifle with her in case she saw a partridge or pheasant or turkey, and now she lifted it to her shoulder. Sighted the driver’s-side door of the car, waited in complete terror for the car to keep coming down the drive. The clouds had darkened. Overhead the trees filled with a violent gust of wind. Starlings broke in waves between the yard trees. In the distance she thought she heard the thunder. Molly urged the world to stay quiet, the wind to hide, the birds to shut up—anything to keep from drawing the attention of the car. She knew she couldn’t shoot a person, but she knew she couldn’t let a person come take her father away either. So she crouched on one knee among the hemlocks with her arms aching from the weight of the rifle and silently whispered help over and over and over again for what felt like hours. She was crying as the cruiser backed down the drive and disappeared. Terror knocked through her body, and she was unable to move. The car was about to circle back. She was convinced this was some sort of trap. Then she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder from behind and heard him saying, “It’s okay, Molly. It’s going to be okay. Give me the gun.” Her hands were white from holding the gun so tightly, and her finger was resting on the trigger. She let her father lift the rifle from her hands and set it against a tree. Then he gathered her into his chest, and she hugged him as hard as she ever had, sobbing and repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
The leaves on the trees began to curl and lift from their nodes. More fell each day, shaken loose by the wind or by small sudden waves of rain. A blanket of crimson and gold and orange replaced the lush green meadow grass. They went days without speaking. Then one afternoon in early November, just as the air was turning thin and brittle with the promise of snow, Molly woke to the sound of a hacksaw biting through wood.
Outside, rain still fizzled in the pines. Turning in bed, Molly watched the drops slip down the spines of the needles. They seemed to hang for a moment, frozen, filling with light, and then, with a gentle shake of wind, leap into the air. She had planned to explore the woods today, to see what this forest felt like as fall took over. But as she got up, swinging her feet down from the bed, she heard her father calling her name—his voice low and urgent, rising like a net from the steady sawing.
Molly went down the stairs and followed the noise into the backhouse. Adam looked up from his sawing, and she took in the room. Her father had pulled up the wide plank flooring. Golden boards were stacked all about him. The backhouse was built on concrete blocks. A foot below the exposed floor joists, Molly could see the packed dirt earth now. Adam had drawn an eight-by-eight-foot square by marking each joist with a pencil. Now he was sawing through the marked joists, effectively cutting a square out of the bottom of the house.
“It’ll collapse,” Molly said groggily.
“Not if I do it right, it won’t.”
“If you say so. What is it?”
“It’s a cellar hole.”
“For what?”
“Think about it, Molly. Use your head.”
The ground was freezing against her bare feet. Her eyes were full of sleep still, and she had to pee.
“It’s for us.” Molly noted the shovel and the spade in the corner of the room. “We’re going to dig.”
“How deep?”
She thought about it. The big house provided shelter. But the big house was cavernous and drafty, and they couldn’t risk a fire during the day. The backhouse was small, almost a shed, really, shielded from the elements by the big house, and it was sealed and insulated. The windows were intact. The roof was solid. “Deep enough to get below the frost line,” she said.
Her father set the hacksaw down across two joists and stood. “Go on.”
“If we can get below the frost line, we can get free heat. The earth produces heat, and the soil sucks it up during the year. The snows seal it in.”
“Exactly.” Adam was proud of his daughter for making the connection, for following the science. “Soil temperatures change daily at the surface,” he explained. “But the deeper into the earth we dig, the more the temperature lags behind time.”
“How much behind time?”
“Every five feet we dig saves us three months. Today is November fifth. The temperature at the surface is forty-seven degrees. The temperature five feet underground, however, is the same as the surface temperature was on August fifth.”
“So if we dig deep enough, we can basically live in summer in the middle of winter.”
“We’ll have to combat heat loss somehow, but that’s the idea. It’s a place for sleeping, not living, not unless it gets real bad.”
They spent the remainder of the week digging the pit, for that’s really what it was, an eight-by-eight-foot hole extending ten feet into the earth. It was the hardest thing either of them had ever done with their bodies. They dumped the wheelbarrow loads of dirt in the woods. In spring, Molly said, they had to fill the earth back in, run new joists, and replank the floor. “Any harm we do to the house has to be righted,” she said. Adam agreed. They used extra lumber in the barn to build a frame down in the cellar hole, and locked the structure by nailing horizontal boards across the studs. The frame prevented the hole from collapsing, but it was impossible not to look down at their creation from above and think of a cage.
“We’re not animals,” Molly said.
“We’re no better than them either,” said Adam.
They hung a ladder on one wall, and laid the bearskin out on the floor for insulation. They found several padded furniture covers and sewed them to the back of a blue tarp. Then they rigged up the insulated tarp so it could be pulled overhead to make a roof. Home, Molly thought, gazing down into the sleeping hole. It never looked like what you imagined. She remembered the pink ranch house she now missed more than ever. She’d watched it bend into sight each day she walked home up the hill. She wished she’d thanked it for being there.
As the daylight hours shortened and the warmth waned, Molly watched the finches flit around against the cold. She loved the little birds who made the whole world grow. They had developed beaks to fit certain seeds, carried life impossible distances, filled the most barren mountains with trees. Miracles in plain sight, her father had called them all her life. She wondered which birds would stay, toughing it out with them, and which ones would go south in search of easier food.
Each day the plants seemed to droop a bit more. Molly methodically cut and collected as many stems and leaves and seeds as she could. Everywhere medicinal herb bundles hung about the old house. Finally a full heavy frost crystallized the earth. It was hard for Molly not to mourn the plants. Her father gathered up the dead stalks and stems. They would use them to further insulate the backhouse. They sawed the planks from the backhouse floor into three-foot sections. Then, to protect themselves from sight, they nailed the planks across the house’s windows. On sunny days they removed the planks from the southern windows, and hot vanes of light fell through the house. They stood in the light for as long as they safely could. Molly thought of the bear and how when her shot felled it, the sun behind it came into view, and she felt the light that had filled the creature fill her.
That night there were meteors in the sky, little pins of yellow breaking through the dark and zipping about in lines. Sometimes they came in barrages, and other times only one or two an hour. The largest were a blazing white. Molly watched them through the dark, counting each flash until she could no longer stay awake. She swore she fell asleep to the sound of airplane engines.