In Wilderness (26 page)

At these times she leaves bruises, scratches, without realizing it. Once, the day after, she came upon him gazing at a long welt she’d made on his belly. He ran his finger down it as if it were some precious treasure he wanted to keep always. She backed away in silence, so as not to let him know she’d seen.

Today he has many things to do and will be gone longer than usual. She will not let herself imagine how he might look, from behind and from a distance, walking out the dirt road toward the morning sun; or in town at the little grocery, stooping to heft one of the twenty-pound cloth bags of beans laid on a bottom shelf. As always, his being gone makes everything inside the cabin different. Flatter, perhaps. Pieces of bright-colored paper against a dark background. Often, like today, she walks through the house, stands in every shaft of sunlight so she can feel its heat without him, touches things he’s touched—his razor, a soft cotton shirt—and tries to fathom how his absence changes them. Because it does. It changes everything.

The house settles and ticks in the cooling afternoon. When she goes to the hearth, throws on a log, the fire explodes in a shower of red sparks. She tosses on another just to see the show. Danny has been building all the hearth fires lately and she’s missed this. Hard to accept her world as narrower in even one respect because of him.

By late afternoon she’s weaving frantically to finish what she
started in the morning, doesn’t want to lose the flow. Sees this as her duty, so his return won’t be an interruption—a secret bargain with herself that she has made. By the time the sun has set the lower sky on fire she’s not accomplished everything she wanted, but she has reached a stopping place where she can know what’s left to do. When he bursts through the door she’s glad to see him, feel his wiry arms around her, glad they’re together once again.

He carries beans and salt into the kitchen. And coffee, which he brought once before. She herself doesn’t drink it, but likes when the house smells of it, because it is his. The rest of what he’s brought is yarn. Skein after skein mashed in the bottom of the cart so he could carry more, yarn so soft and lovely she herself would not have thought to choose it. She squeezes a cream-colored ball that springs back lively as a young lamb in a meadow. He has brought a little white, more greens, browns, black—and the rest bright-colored as spring meadow flowers. She touches the skein she’s holding to her cheek.

“You like that?”

She nods, smiles.

“Well, if you’re thinking that’s hot shit, you better step outside and get a look at my surprise.”

He grabs her hand and drags her out the door. There before her lies a doe, her still head resting on the porch step. Her expression is calm, her eyes almost human. Katherine stares at the animal that breathed with her so long in all her fantasies, expects her to get up and run away, then realizes with a pang of sadness that this doe will never run again.

“Isn’t she a beauty!” Pride’s got him bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“She’s—how did you—?” Can’t think what to say.

“I bought a bow.”

He squats beside the animal, runs his hand along her neck, as if she is alive and he is petting her.

“Wound’s on her other side. They got such pretty eyes, does. I love looking at them. Love watching how they leap and run. They run so fast.”

He says the words as if he’s talking to himself. His legs tremble
slightly from the strain of carrying the animal. When he pulls Katherine to him he transfers a wild, damp deer smell to her clothing; she inhales deeply, fascinated. Then he is hauling her by the hand to the shed, filling her arms with wood. Soon a bonfire blazes in the clearing, flinging its orange glow out through the humid night. Danny drags the deer into its circle, a ground fog of golden smoke curling around them. His movements have the economy of things done many times.

“Bring a pan.”

When she returns with the kitchen dishpan, he slits the doe’s throat. His work is quick and clean, for which Katherine is grateful. In the firelight nothing seems what it is. The blood’s a thin syrup collecting in the bowl. Katherine holds her chilled fingers in its stream to warm them. Danny bends and fills his cupped hands with it, raises them to his mouth and drinks, then grins at her.

“Makes you run fast like the deer. I bet you won’t drink it.”

It’s a dare; he’s smiling. She dips her right hand in the bowl, fills her palm. Drunk fast, it’s not repulsive.
Don’t think about it. Any of it
. When she looks up he is no longer smiling. He dips his own hand in the bowl, touches a sticky finger to her forehead, paints a bloody cross that drips into her eyebrows. He undoes the buttons of her shirt, pushes her jeans down off her hips. His breath sounds like the hissing flames.

He bloodies his fingers in the bowl again, touches between her eyes. Traces a line straight down, over her nose, the cleft at the center of her lips, the hollow in her throat. Dips his finger yet again to trace between her breasts, past her small, round navel to end in the triangle of coarse black hair between her legs.

He steps back, looks at her. In the fire’s flickering shadows she can’t read his face.

“You are more beautiful than the deer. More beautiful than all the world.”

His words come gravelly and slurred, and his eyes burn with small, reflected flames. A sudden terror flashes through her, bleaches everything around them white as bones, then disappears.

He bends down, grabs her flannel shirt up off the ground and thrusts it at her in a wad.

“Put your shirt back on, pull up your jeans. It’s cold and I’ve got work to do.”

Why does he sound so angry? Why did he start the thing if he did not intend to finish it? She buttons her shirt along the trail of the doe’s drying blood, pulls her jeans over the last of it. He has turned back to the deer as if she, Katherine, had never been there.

The fire leaps higher. He strings the animal up on a low limb at the clearing’s edge, where it sways like a hanged man in the eerie light. Danny’s shirtless body shimmers, godlike, in a golden steam, as he works with his skinning knife.

When the deer’s roasting heart sizzles in the flames, he slides it off its green spit, cuts a slice, turns back to Katherine and offers it to her on the flat of his knife blade. “It’s a ritual, what a boy gets fed on his first hunt.”

“I wasn’t with you when you killed her.”

“Yes, you were.”

They share the heart between them, him gazing at her all the while. When they are done, he goes back to the swaying carcass, a scene surreal in the firelight.

Suddenly, what she has eaten rises in her throat. She whirls around and retches in the brush behind her. It feels almost comforting, this familiar thing that has not happened since she lived alone here and felt safe. She wipes her mouth and turns back to the fire, and to Danny.

T
HEY SPEND LONG HOURS UNDER THE HEARTH QUILTS NOW; IT
’
S
gray outside.

“What day is it?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you made marks on the wall.”

“I quit.”

They have lost track of dates, recall days only by their small events, and not in sequence. Was it three days ago or four he caught the trout? Was it yesterday they walked out to see the frozen cattails by the pond? How many days ago was the full moon? Their order doesn’t matter. They all run together, watercolors on absorbent paper, to produce the dreamlike whole that is their life now.

Winter isn’t so much blowing in as falling on them in a stillness, like the last brown leaves. Some mornings she wakes late to woods that have been lightly brushed with snow. There’s less reason to go
outside. Some days Danny even forsakes his time up on the mountain. They are two against the cold. He’s brought a book. They read aloud from it to each other in the gray afternoons.
The Last Days of Pompeii
. An odd choice, poorly written, boring, but he will not skip it—“It comes next on the shelf.” After it there’s
Catcher in the Rye
.

They know each other’s ways by now.

“I never loved anyone,” he tells her late one evening, the room luminous with snow-light.

He’s turned away and she can’t see his face, holds her breath for him to finish. He does not, there is no need.

Yet one morning when she goes out to the garden early, while he’s still asleep, to dig the last of the Jerusalem artichokes before a bank of dark northerly clouds rolls in, she returns to find him pacing on the tiny porch, his hands jammed in his pockets.

He wheels around, blocking her way.

“Goddammit, you weren’t anywhere in this whole fucking house.” He grabs her shoulders, shakes her hard. “You can’t just leave like that.”

She steps back, stares in unbelief. “You were sleeping. I went to dig the artichokes.”

He stands silent, doesn’t move.

“It’s cold. Let me in.”

His mouth clamped tight, he opens the door.

When she goes in the kitchen to put the artichokes away, a window rattles. Suddenly their sturdy house seems frail.

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
,
AS
if to make amends, he brings home a cut tree. To shake off the snow, he knocks its trunk hard on the porch step. Once, twice, three times, until she flings open the door.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas.” He’s grinning like he’s known it all along and kept it back for a surprise. Or for some unknown other reason.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. Aren’t you? It’s cold enough.”

He drags the tree inside, a gorgeous cedar that’s a good three feet
too tall, lops off its excess height, chops up the fragrant waste and throws it on the hearth fire. She rolls and ties small balls of brightest-colored yarns as decorations, shapes a larger one into an angel, gives it a pair of delicate green cedar wings. Believes she doesn’t miss her mother’s ornaments, or the trees she had with Tim: She and Danny are making traditions of their own to last them all their lives.

Their Christmas morning threatens rain. He presents her with a set of kitchen implements he’s carved. Spoons, forks, spatulas, all of warm, red cherry wood. They are plain and perfect.

“They’re beautiful,” she tells him. “Like what the Old Man might have done.” He smiles shyly, looks down at his hands.

When she brings out the poncho she has woven, hands it to him, he stares at it as if he’s not sure what it is.

“It’s the colors you like. I asked you once to get them.”

His face crumples like a wad of paper. “Nobody ever—” He composes himself with visible effort, frowns. “What in hell did you go to all that trouble for? You never should have done it.”

He turns away, but not so fast she doesn’t see him pinching at the corners of his eyes. She stands quiet until he turns back to face her.

“What do I do now?”

“Put it on. The slit goes over your head. Depending on how you wear it, it’s quite warm.”

He drops it down over his head, wraps it around himself.

“Shouldn’t have fucking done it. All that secret shit when I was gone.”

“I wanted to.”

He flings open the door, goes out, slams it behind him.

Katherine sits on the cold floor beside the tree, removes one of its yarn ornaments hung low and holds it in her hand, squeezes it rhythmically, in time with her beating heart. She knows this small house as she knows the lines in her own palm and as she knows this boy-man’s body, inch by inch, completely. Yet lately she sometimes feels as though she’s stepped into a mirror, where everything’s its opposite, glittering and strange.

Something is bumping on the porch, scraping against its stones. The door bursts open and he stands there with what looks like a half-made
table. Large, maybe five feet square, and with no slats across its frame.

“It’s a loom.” His voice is proud and quiet. “I made it for you.”

He has changed so quickly it’s put her off balance, as if the cabin has been tipped an inch or two. She glances toward her weaving wall. The nails are gone. They were there yesterday afternoon. He must have pried them out this morning while she slept. Without them, the room feels over-large and empty.

“I got ’em all, don’t worry.” He’s fidgeting, the way he does when he’s nervous, bouncing his weight from one foot to the other. “I’ll hammer ’em in this afternoon. I made a chair for you to sit in, too. When you make your weavings. That way I can always see your face.”

Tears well up from deep inside her and she shakes with soundless sobs.

Because she is surprised and touched.

Because he has taken away her wall that was essential, that enabled her to shut out everything except the patterns, colors, she was working with. He might just as well have knocked down every one of her imaginary room’s imaginary walls, dispersed the peace it had enclosed. A silly, self-centered thing to cry over—he meant only to give a gift. But she can’t stop.

Danny sits beside her on the floor, takes her in his arms and strokes her hair.

“Looks like nobody gave you presents neither.”

She shakes her head, conscious of her silent lie, burrows against his chest. He wraps the poncho tight around the both of them. Together they stare out the window at the winter rain.

T
HEY RECOGNIZE HIM AT THE HARDWARE STORE
,
BUT THEY DON
’
T
know him. Not even his name. They rush to serve him anyway, the deep-voiced man with the wad of bills shoved in his pocket. Even so, he’s a man careful to get exactly what he wants for his money.

“I just need half that fifty-pound bag of plaster.”

“It’ll keep. Cool, dry place.” Adenoidal little shit. Adam’s apple swooping like a sash weight.

“I only aim to carry twenty-five pounds out of here. Twenty-five pounds or nothing. I’ll come back next week for the rest. I need an empty bucket with a lid. That there one.”

“It’s full of Sheetrock mud.”

“Well, dig it out. Only way that bucket’ll get empty. I’ll pay you for it. Cash money in your hand. For everything. How much?”