Tomorrow, Fanny’s husband will hit her for the first time in their short marriage. Fanny will relive the cold November day he hits her twenty-seven times. Her husband will only remember it once.
This is the day Fanny will repeat twenty-seven times:
A great crack will wake her alone in their cabin on the side of the mountain above North Vancouver. Warm beneath her deerskin and wool blankets, she will elect to remain in bed and will not notice that the flume, whose constant watery babble fills every waking moment, is silent.
Her husband will return to the cabin with one of his wool shirts that she rinsed in the flume the day before. He will tell her: “How many times have I told you not to do the laundry in the flume?”
Then he will hit her.
After he has gone, she will look at the daguerreotype on the wall of the two of them taken May 7th, 1895, their wedding day in San Francisco, and she will realize that the mountain did something to her husband. She will see that the mountain stripped away the boyish fat on his face to expose dark crevices and gullies. She will see that the mountain seeded thick stubble on his chin no razor will remove. She will see that the mountain poured its innumerable icy streams over his heart that scoured away everything but hard stone. She will see that in the two short years since their wedding the mountain remade her husband.
When her husband leaves, she will cook breakfast—always oatmeal with molasses and raisins—and she will carry it up the slick skid road to her husband’s men. The braying of the camp mule, Boris, will lead her to the men, though after the third day, she will have the route memorized.
The foreman Marty is a half-Japanese logger who lost his left eye to a faulty sawmill blade and a bottle of rum before he joined her husband’s crew. His one eye will see her coming and he will call the men down from their work, which is a tree they felled that morning. Fanny will never have seen a larger tree; even the redwoods she saw as a child will be dwarfed by this grey monster, and redwoods are called the biggest trees in the world. The men who scamper along the huge tree trimming branches are also Japanese, though on the first day Fanny will not know this; she calls them Chinamen.
Marty will have been drinking rum and will say: “What happened to your face?” when he gets his ladle of oatmeal.
“Slipped on an icy stair,” Fanny will say.
She will feed the Chinamen, who she thinks are part of the mountain’s conspiracy to remake her husband. His crew used to be mixed white and Celestial, but the whites thought they should be paid at least three times what her husband paid the Chinamen, and when he refused, they walked off the job. Only Marty received a raise as he was the only one who could talk to the Chinamen, and he stayed on the mountain.
After Marty and the Chinamen have eaten and Fanny has fed the mule Boris an apple she brought for him, her husband will walk out of the woods and demand that she bring breakfast up to the men at the sawmill and then return to her chores.
After she’s fed the silent Chinamen at the sawmill, she will descend the mountain with the empty pot. She will draw water for the laundry from the flume.
The flume looks like a V from head-on. She thinks the flume looks like a snake from the side. It crawls up the mountain on cedar stilts to its source, a mountain stream. At the source, the men who built the flume, her husband and his crew, divert the stream down the v-shaped notch. The flume becomes an artificial stream they use to send bolts of lumber down the mountain to make shingles and siding for the growing cities below. The water is very cold. Her husband’s bosses built a cabin beside the flume, away from the main camp, so that someone will always watch the flume and make sure the bolts flow, because sometimes bolts jam in the flume, sometimes tree branches fall across the flume, and sometimes, in particular the day before this day repeated itself twenty-seven times, Fanny loses a piece of laundry that she rinses in the flume and the shirt catches on a cedar seam, freezes, accumulates debris, and causes the flume to jam.
Fanny will hate the flume.
Her other chores will include mending a leaky cedar shingle on the roof, fixing a broken cedar step leading up to their home, sitting on a cedar rocking chair and darning her husband’s socks, and sweeping cedar sawdust out of the cabin. Everything is made of cedar because cedar doesn’t rot.
Fanny will hate cedar.
A rain storm will start every afternoon. When it is time to cook dinner, Fanny will climb back up the mountain to the main camp where the men sleep and will go to the kitchen cabin, also made of cedar. By then the rain storm will have turned to a thunder storm. She will make dinner, a stew of salted pork, potatoes and onions, and she will feed each of them. Marty, much drunker than that morning, will crack jokes about the poor quality of her cooking: “Tasted better food that had already been eaten and puked up by someone else.” The jokes will not be the same every day.
When she comes around with tea at the end of the meal, her husband will reach into his jacket and will pull out a cone more beautiful than anything she has ever seen. Copper-coloured and semi-transparent, the cone won’t look like pine, or fir, or cedar; maybe a combination of all three. She will accept the cone, and she will think that maybe the mountain hasn’t finished remaking her husband.
After she cleans all the dishes, she will walk home alone through the storm with only lightning to guide her way. She will find her husband entering numbers into his ledger. She will be unable to speak to him about what happened that morning because her father never let any of his five daughters talk back to him, and because she will be afraid of the man the mountain remade. She will watch him writing and she will try to use the force of her mind to get her husband to look up and speak to her, but he won’t. She will try to get the fire going bright enough to chase the chill from the cedar cabin by burning small pieces of cedar, but the chill won’t leave.
Thunder will rattle the walls of their cabin. He will climb into bed first. She will wait and hope that his body warms the cold sheets, but it never does. The mountain has drained all heat from his limbs. She will crawl in beside him and together they will both flinch every time another crack of thunder shakes the cabin and fills the air with cedar dust.
Then lightning will flash so bright that it shines through the solid wood walls of their home.
When the lightning recedes, it will take everything with it, and the day will begin again.
Not every day will be the same.
On the second day, Fanny will wake up to the great crack and find that her cheek isn’t bruised. She will assume she had a terrible, vivid dream. When her husband enters the cabin with the same frozen laundry that jammed the flume and hits her again, she will wonder if maybe she can see the future, like her eldest sister claimed about their dead mother. She will attend to her chores, the same chores she attended to the day before. As thunder peals that night while she and her husband lie flinching beside each other on a mattress made of cedar sawdust, she will pray that tomorrow is a new day.
On the third day, Fanny will rise without a bruise and her husband will re-make it for her. On the third day, Fanny will realize that she is being forced to relive this day, this one day when her husband hits her.
When she brings breakfast to the men, one-eyed Marty will look at her bruised face and say: “Wait, let me guess. You slipped on an icy stair.”
“Do you remember it too?” she will ask. “Does this day keep happening?”
“Same day,” he will say. “Same shit.” And then he will drink rum from a flask.
Fanny will think that if she can stop her husband from hitting her, she might be able to make the day stop repeating.
On the fourth day, she will rise out of bed the moment the great crack wakes her. She will rush through the woods beside the flume on its cedar stilts. She will trip and smash her shin so that it bleeds. She will find her husband at the spot where his frozen shirt and the debris it accumulated jams the flume. She will apologize, she will beg him not to hit her, but the mountain remade the man she loves, and he will knock her down. For the rest of that day, she will remain in bed, and her shin will bleed through the sheets.
Her shin will be unmarked the next day.
On the fifth, sixth, and seventh days, she will remain in bed. These days are the same. Her husband will arrive with the frigid laundry, he will hit her even when she burrows beneath the covers. Then she will lie in bed and wait. Ravens outside will clack their beaks at the same time each day. Rain will arrive on schedule, and it will come pouring through the shingle she doesn’t mend. Her husband will arrive before dinner and she will claim she doesn’t feel well. He will tell her: “You can stay in bed today, but this can’t happen tomorrow.”
It will happen tomorrow.
After these three days in bed, she will rise to the sound of the great crack. She will wonder: is it the sound of my husband’s fist on my face? Is it the sound to the great grey tree falling? Is it the sound of the world splitting in two? Is it the drums of Hell? Am I dead?
Her husband will hit her and she will make breakfast. She will carry it up the mountain. When she finds the men beside the massive tree, Boris the mule will be the first at her side, and the beast will nose her pocket for the apple she’s forgotten.
Marty will push the mule out of the way.
“Damn-me but you were right,” he will say. “This day’s repeating. What in the hell?”
She will take his full mug of rum and drink it in one gulp. She will feel warm for the first time since they moved to the mountain. Her husband will walk out of the woods and send her to feed the men at the sawmill. Once breakfast is done, she will return to the cedar cabin, crack open her husband’s shipping chest and find the bottle of port his uncle gave them on their wedding night. The sweet wine will keep her warm through the afternoon as she stares at the daguerreotype on the wall.
She will see that the mountain has changed her too. Her skin, always pale, will seem thin as the frost that coats the cedar flume in the morning. Her hair, once long and chestnut, will hang like the lichen from the trees, streaked with grey. And her eyes that stare back at her from the shaving mirror her husband never uses, her eyes will be the colour of the mountain’s damp earth.
Dinner will be burned that night. Her husband will give her the translucent, copper-coloured cone when she comes by with the tea. As she cleans up in the kitchen, while the Chinamen drink sake and her husband returns to their cabin, Marty the one-eyed foreman will bring a bottle into the kitchen and say: “Finest rum I ever tasted.”
“I’d hate to waste it,” she will say.
And he will laugh, and his breath will stink like a distillery.
“It’s full every morning,” he will say. “A drunkard’s dream.”
They will drink all of the bottle.
“They aren’t really Chinamen,” Marty will say as they drink and rain pounds the roof. “They’re Japs. Good thing they don’t speak English, cause if they heard us calling them Chinamen they’d get bitter. And I ain’t half Chinese neither. My Pa was British, my Ma Japanese.”
“How did they meet?” she will say.
“My father had enough money and a hankering for Orientals,” he will say.
She will laugh. He will not.
“Why don’t the rest of them realize the day keeps repeating?” she will say.
He will offer her another mug full.
“Who cares,” he will say. “More rum for us.”
While thunder gathers around them, she will talk. Growing up in San Francisco will seem even more wonderful through the murky lens of the rum. She will tell him about her five sisters, and the father who raised them after his wife died giving birth to the last of them. She will even cry a bit when she tells him about her mother, the one memory of the foggy day watching the boats sail in.
As the storm reaches its crest, he will say: “Just about done, I think.”
“I hate the lightning,” she will say, and she will reach out and take hold of his hand which will be knobby and root-like and totally unlike her husband’s. “Especially the last one.”
The lightning will flash through the walls of the cabin and when it recedes it will draw everything else with it and the day will begin again.
She will rise to the great crack. No bruise will mar her face. No hangover will cloud her mind. Her husband will hit her. She will bring breakfast up the mountain. Ravens will clack their beaks. Instead of returning down the mountain after breakfast, she will find Marty and they will sneak to the kitchen cabin at the main camp, and they will open the bottle of rum they finished the day before. He will tell her more about life in the slums of Tokyo, and she will tell him about the fish market in San Francisco.
They will do this for several days.
On the twelfth day, after the crack, after the blow from her husband, and after breakfast, she and Marty will lie beneath one of the great trees the loggers haven’t yet felled. The rum bottle will lie half-full at their feet. They will be talking about why this day keeps repeating:
“Do you think it’s that big tree?” she will say. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
“Me neither,” he will say.
“What if you don’t cut it down?” she will say.
He will shrug.
“Each day starts for you in bed,” he will say. “But for me it’s there, beside the tree, as the damn thing falls over. There’s the lightning, then there I am, standing and watching as my boys topple the big tree.”
“So it is the tree,” she will say.
He will pull out a pouch from his pocket and a long strange pipe of the kind she’s only heard about.
“Who cares?” he will say. “This ain’t such a bad day to be stuck in.”
He will pack a slick bit of tar into the bowl, he will light a match, and he will inhale. He will pass the pipe to Fanny.
“I shouldn’t,” she will say, but then she will take the pipe and she will smoke it and she will lie down on the damp ground beside Marty until the rain starts and they walk down the hill for dinner.
From the thirteenth to the twenty-third day, Fanny will smoke opium with Marty and will remember very little. Her husband will talk to her in this time when he finds her. He will scold her. He will hit her. He will bring her the present of the copper, translucent cone that comes from no tree she’s ever seen. She will know that she should talk to her husband, that she should tell him that the days keep repeating, and that she wants the man in the daguerreotype, the man she married, to become unmade by the mountain, but she will also hold the cone he gives her, the beautiful cone that shows the mountain hasn’t finished with her husband, and she will wonder if it is enough. The opium will make it easier to not answer that question; it won’t hurt so long as she keeps smoking.
Like every day, the twenty-fourth will start with the great crack, her husband’s fist, and a flume that doesn’t flow. After breakfast, she will find Marty and they will smoke opium beneath the same old tree under which they first smoked. They will also drink the rum and smoke some of the hemp that never runs out. She will pass out.
When she wakes up, Marty will be on top of her. His trousers will be around his ankles. She will feel him thrusting into her and the opium will make her not want to scream but she will scream. He will put his root-like fingers over her mouth and clamp her mouth shut until he finishes hot and sticky down the sides of her legs. He will roll over onto his back and sigh.
“I’m married,” she will say once his fingers release her mouth and the opium lets her speak.
“Tomorrow,” he will say. “It won’t have happened.”
He will light one of his hemp cigarettes. When he passes it to her, she will take the lit end and she will press it into his palm. Now he will scream. She will pull up her undergarments and she will run down the mountain. She will run away from the slashed areas and into the forest where huge trees still stand. As she runs, she will weep. She will mourn the sanctity of her marriage. She will curse the day she first took a sip from Marty’s mug.
She will hate the flume, the lightning, the cedar, and herself.
As she runs, she will come to a cliff. For a moment, she will hesitate at the cliff’s edge. She will hear no one following her. She will jump, and as she falls, she will think of sailboats in the fog.
When she hits the rocks, she will die.
The great crack will sound for a twenty-fifth time. She will rise. No bruise. No hangover. No death. None of Marty’s stickiness between her legs.
She will hear her husband on the steps. She will endure his punch. Ravens will clack beaks. Eventually, her husband will start the water flowing back down the flume. The roar will fill the cabin, and the roar will seep into her, fill her with resolve.
At her husband’s sawmill, Japanese Chinamen turn cedar trees into bolts, wedge-shaped logs that fit into the v-notched flume. One day her husband caught the men riding down the flume on a narrow skiff they carved from a cedar bolt. He confiscated the skiff and hid it beneath their cabin. Though he warned her never to touch the dangerous thing, she will push aside spider webs and mouldy lumber until she finds the shallow boat, which will be no wider than her hips, no deeper than her forearm and no longer than her husband is tall. She will drag the skiff up the steps by a rope handle looped through its nose and she will lift it onto the edge of the flume. She will climb up beside the skiff and for a moment she will be mesmerized by the white water that rushes past her feet. Then she will slide the skiff beneath her and let the roaring stream her husband has redirected pull her down the mountain.
Her screams will startle ravens and woodpeckers from their roosts. The skiff will knock beneath her as the flume makes corners. Water will soak through her wool shirts until she shivers but she won’t let go of the rope. Though she will be terrified as she slides down the cedar flume, a part of her will sing with the joy of escape.
Ahead through the trees she will see an expanse of dark blue. The flume will spit her out into Rice Lake, a holding pen where the bolts are then ferried down another flume to the city. She will swim to the surface though her sodden clothes will drag her down. That first breath after she is dunked will feel like her baptism.
A bolt will fly off the flume and will strike her in the thigh, and her leg will break in two places. She will swallow water as she tries to scream. One of the loggers rowing a boat around the lake to herd bolts will notice her struggles. He will be a pale blonde man too young for a beard. He will row over to her, drag her out of the water, and bring her to the cabin, also cedar, where these loggers live.
Most of them will be white. They will scold her for riding the flume, though they have all ridden the flume before. They will send for a doctor.
Talking to these men who aren’t Marty and aren’t her husband will be the brightest moment in the last twenty-five days. The pain in her leg will be unbearable. She will refuse the whiskey and opium they offer her.
As she lies in a cot that stinks of sweat, mud, and cedar, she will think that she has escaped it. The repetition is over. A doctor will come and everything will be all right.
The young logger will come in and tell her they’ve sent someone to fetch her husband. Later, the same logger will return to tell her that the doctor will arrive tomorrow.
“He has to come today,” she will say. She won’t believe in that word, tomorrow.
“He’ll come as fast as he’s able,” the young logger will say.
Rain will start slightly later than it does further up the mountain. A headache will set in behind her eyes, and her leg will throb with each beat of her heart, and as her blood fills the cavities the broken bones have slashed inside her flesh, her leg will swell like wet cedar.
After the first peal of thunder, the young logger will come in and say: “There’s someone here to see you.”
Despite the pain, she will sit, expecting the doctor or her husband, but the person who will walk through the door is neither. He is a young boy of seven or eight; maybe Indian or Chinamen or Japanese. She won’t be able to tell for the filth that cakes him. He will walk over to her.
“You haven’t happened before,” he will say. “Are you like us?”
“You know about this?” she will say. Her heart will pound louder than the thunder. “Does this day keep happening for you?”
He will nod his filthy head.
“Have you seen it?” he will say. “We think they cut it down.”
“The tree?” she will say. “My husband’s men felled a huge tree this morning.”
“Where?” he will say.
She will point up the mountain. “The flume runs eight miles back to the cabin, and the tree is another mile or two beyond that.”
He will sigh, a sound she will think should come from an old man many times this boy’s age.
“That’s too far,” he will say. “Most of us start by the water. It took me all day to get here.”
“You know how to make this stop? You know what to do?”
He will pick something from his ear that he will wipe on his muddy shirt.
“The old people told us the tree needs to grow again,” he will say. “They sent us out to find it.”
“My husband brings me a cone,” she will say. “A cone like none I’ve ever seen. Do you think that’s it?”
He will shrug.
The fever that has been building in her will take hold then. Her words will stop making sense. The filthy boy will sit beside her and hold her hand until she dies.
The crack. Her leg will be healed, the bruise on her cheek will be gone. Her husband will be on the stairs with his cold shirt and colder fist. The twenty-sixth day.
She will pull herself up from the floor. She will bring breakfast to the men where they climb over the dead massive tree. Boris the mule will nuzzle her pocket for the apple she will forget.
“Where’d you go yesterday?” Marty will say when he comes up to her for breakfast. She will not say anything in return. “You can’t stay silent forever. It’s just you and me, pumpkin. May as well make the best of it.”
And he will pinch her bottom as he walks away to eat his oatmeal.
Her husband will come down the hill and tell her to bring breakfast to the men at the sawmill, but she’ll ignore him. She’ll climb up the length of the downed tree. The stump will be forty paces across. At its centre, she will find a hole a few inches deep that ends in fine sawdust. The wood around the hole will be blackened from an old fire. This, she will think, is where the cone must go.
“What are you doing up there?” Marty will say. He will hold a big two-person saw over one shoulder and will squint out of his good eye.
“Nothing,” she will say. “I’ve got work to do.”
She will climb down the planks the Japanese loggers drove into the tree to serve as platforms for cutting. Marty will try to grab her arm but she will shake him off.
“You come back and see Marty as soon as you’re ready for some more,” he will say.
She will look for a cone, but she won’t find one. She will have to wait until dinner when her husband gives her the cone after the tea is served, and she will know there is still something decent within her husband. With the dishes unwashed and the storm raging, she will climb up the mountain alone through the downpour with only lightning to illuminate her path.
When she arrives at the tree, she will find Boris the mule waiting for her. He will be very quiet and will follow her up the length of the downed tree. She will climb the stump again. When she takes the cone out of her shirt, the cone will glow with a soft light the same colour as the lightning. She will place the cone in the hole she found earlier that day. Though the cone will fit, something will seem to push the cone out of the hole if she doesn’t hold it there. She will climb back down to find some stones or sticks to make a brace to hold the cone in place, and that’s when she will see Marty standing beneath an ancient hemlock.
“Now I’m real curious,” he will say. “You disappear for a day and you come back with all sorts of new ideas.”
“Leave me alone,” she will say. He will laugh, and even through the rain she will be able to smell the distillery.
Boris the mule will bray louder than she’s ever heard him. Marty will jump out of the darkness but her shirt will be too soaked for him to get a hold. She will climb back up the stump. Lightning will flash and thunder roll. She will know the last flash is close.
She will place the glowing cone in the hole at the centre of the stump. In one of the flashes, she will see Marty’s face at the edge of the stump. In the next, she will see him pull up onto the lip of the stump.
The last bolt of lightning will cut through the air. It will seem like light jumps out of the cone in her hand to meet the lightning. She will try to hold onto the cone even as the lightning pours through her. Marty will be blasted back, away from the cone. She won’t be able to hold on. The cone will roll out of the hole. The light will recede, sucked back into the cone, and when it disappears the day will start again.
Day twenty-seven will start like every other. The crack. Her unblemished face. Her husband on the steps. This time, after he hits her, she will say: “That Marty made inappropriate advances to me a few days ago. I don’t want to see him again.”
“He’s the only one who can speak with the Chinamen,” her husband will say.
“I don’t care,” she will say. “I won’t feed him.”
She won’t bring breakfast up the mountain that day. She will barricade the door and lie in bed, gathering her strength. When she hears Marty yelling at her from outside, she will remain where she is, even when he slams his fists against the door.
“Don’t you dare try to end this,” he will say. “Don’t you even dare.”
After the rain comes, she will hear her husband return. He will try the door and he will say: “What’s going on here?”
“That Marty tried to come in,” she said. “I told you, there’s something wrong with him.”
She will move the shipping chest and the wood chair out of the way and she will let her husband in. He will not smile.
“I’ll talk to him,” he will say.
“Don’t let him come to dinner,” she will say.
His eyes, as hard as the stones she wrecked herself on when she jumped off the cliff, will soften for a moment.
“All right,” he will say. “But you get down there and get cooking. This can’t happen tomorrow.”
She will go down to the kitchen with her husband. She will make the same stew she made before; the ingredients will all be there. Marty will not join them for dinner. She will hear him cursing outside. She will be very afraid of what he will do.
After the dinner, her husband will reach into his coat and will present her with the copper-coloured cone. Instead of accepting it, she will take his hand, and she will say: “Come with me up the mountain. I need to show you something.”
“I’ve got to enter my numbers,” he will say. “And you need to clean up this mess.”
She will hesitate then. She will not know if she can face this man the mountain has turned into somebody different. Thunder will shake the cabin. Cedar dust will fall into her hair. She will hope that the small part that remains of the man she married is enough.
“Please,” she will say. “Do this for me.”
All the Japanese Chinamen will be watching. He will nod and she will lead him out into the storm.
They will climb the skid road together.
“Is this about what happened this morning?” he will say.
“No,” she will say. “Yes. I don’t know. Just follow.”
They will come to the clearing where the massive trees lies on its side. Boris the mule will greet them with a loud honk.
As the mule presses his flank into her, she will rub him between the ears and will say: “You can remember it too, can’t you?”
The mule will follow them up to the tree.
“It’s too dark to be up here,” her husband will say.
“Just a bit longer,” she will say.
“Lightning’s a logger’s worst enemy,” he will say.
“Just a bit longer,” she will say. She will not release his hand.
When they come to the massive stump, she will turn to him and take the cone from his pocket.
“What in God’s name?” he will say as the cone glows with faint blue light.
“We have to plant it,” she will say. “So that the tree can grow again. I can’t do it alone.”
This is when Marty will rush out of the forest with his axe. He will run straight at her husband.
“Marty, what’re you doing?” her husband will say.
Marty will only snarl as he charges and raises the axe. Her husband will reach for the knife at his belt as he steps between her and the foreman, and that is when Boris the mule will lash out with his two hind legs. The animal will cave in Marty’s chest. The axe will tumble to the ground beside the foreman’s limp body.
Fanny will exhale a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She will place a hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“We need to get him help,” he will say.
“He’s dead,” she will say. She will pat the mule on the head and say, “Good boy.”
Lightning will flash and thunder will roll and Fanny will know the time is near.
“Come on,” she will say. She will take her husband’s hand and she will climb up the planks driven into the stump.
“Fanny, this is madness,” her husband will say.
“We won’t have another chance,” she will say. “He’ll come back.”
He will follow her.
She will guide him to the centre of the stump. She will place the glowing cone in the hole and she will ask him to kneel beside her. Together, they will hold it in place.
“Now what?” her husband will say.
“Just hold on,” she will say.
The lightning that starts it all again will arrive. Light will leap up from the cone to meet the electricity arcing down. Energy will course through her, she will see it run through her husband. She will see his hand loosen on the glowing cone.
“Hold on,” she will scream. The lightning will last longer than any lightning can last. It will last as long as the universe exists.
And it will end. They will both fall aside, breathing, stunned. The heart of the stump will be blackened and burnt and so will their clothing.
The Japanese Chinamen will find them when they hear Boris the mule braying into the night. They will take Fanny down in a stretcher they make out of cedar-smelling bedsheets and will take her husband down on the mule’s back.
In the morning, they will wake in their small bed in their little cabin beside the roaring flume. Their clothes will be ashes, but their skin will be untouched. Her husband will be in the bed beside her. He will be warm. They will wake up together.
“We need to talk,” she will say.
They will talk as they walk up the mountain. The trees will drip from the previous night’s rain. The ravens will complain. Boris will meet them halfway and Fanny will remember to bring him an apple. They will climb the stump of the massive tree.
A green shoot will grow up from the blackened cone and will reach a pair of tiny green leaves toward the sky.
All this will happen tomorrow. Today, Fanny rinses her husband’s shirts in the flume. One of the shirts gets away from her.
She doesn’t think he will miss it.