Heather exits a tiny clearing and finds the arrow she’d scraped into the moss and the three birches she was using to orient herself. She climbs the strongest of the three, which nevertheless bends under her weight, but all she can see ahead of her are branches, branches, and more branches. She calls Jackson’s name anyway, and a faint howling reaches her from what, judging from the position of the sun, she thinks is the south. She climbs back down the tree feeling as though her thigh wound is opening up even further, but she runs and runs and runs. Toward the sun.
Toward Jackson.
I’ve opened a bottle of the Ardèche wine I’ve been saving in the basement for a special occasion, and clink my glass against P.’s. “To us,” I say, smiling at P. in a manner that elicits his own tenderness and the myopic sweetness of his light brown eyes, and then I swallow the Ardèche wine remembering the thousands of moments of tenderness that have accumulated between us, and I smile again, if a little sadly this time, because this meal we are beginning might be our last if the rain turns, as I have predicted, into an endless snow thrashing in the raging wind.
“To us,” P. replies, and a sharp gust rattles the house from foundations to attic.
I wait for P. to fall asleep, then I borrow an old backpack of his into which I stuff a change of clothes — wool socks, scarves, mittens, sweaters — slipping among them a flashlight, new batteries, a hunting knife, and wooden matches. Then I clip an axe to the rings on the straps and head to my study to wait for the storm as Vince and Réal Morissette, sitting at Vince’s table, listen to the stove clock ding — one ding per minute, every time the second hand reaches the twelve — stringing out endless time made more oppressive by the atmosphere in the room. In front of them are two bottles of beer, two glasses, two plates, and two rare steaks, but neither brother is eating. Occasionally they bring the glasses to their lips, but they don’t touch their knives or forks. The wind outside is screaming, and the tension in the dimly lit room is palpable. A kilometre away, standing in front of a window outside which the branches of a Virginia pine are waving, Howard W. Thorne is in the throes of an anguish that doesn’t allow him any kind of coherent thought, and he hears the sound of barking approach.
The wind is whistling furiously at the tops of the trees, but here on the spongy ground where the roots snake, its fury barely touches Heather at all. She stops for a moment to catch her breath and sees Jackson appear, a ghostly shadow slipping into the undergrowth. So she shouts again, but the more she shouts the further away the shadow gets. Then a path appears in front of her, which leads to a gravel road. She heads along it, panting like a lame dog, and sees Jackson in the middle of the road, a fuzzy shadow pierced by the flight of a solitary thrush. “Jackson,” she murmurs, but a rumbling can be heard beyond the mound on which the animal is standing, the sound of a truck being driven at top speed by two drunk young men, who run it through the vanishing body of Jackson, my love.
The throbbing of the engine as it continues on its way is followed by a wail resonating from the mountain to the village and the 2nd Line.
Holy Crappy Owl stiffens at the end of his string, rigid with horror, “Jackson, boom, boom, dog, blood,” he squawks, as a few sheets of paper blow around the room: “Heather on the 4th Line,” “Heather and the caterpillars,” “Heather drinking at a stream.” I gather them up and try to arrange them in some sort of order despite the trembling of my hands. Howard W. Thorne is still standing in the dark and drops his glass. A trickle of amber alcohol runs over the worn rug and soaks into the final pages of The World According to Garp while Vince Morissette, his stomach gripped by fear, quickly gets up from the table to run to a black window lashed by the wind.