Knife Fight and Other Struggles (12 page)

“What if he does?”

“Bobby, will you please go to bed? Allan can’t do anything to me. Believe me—he’s finished.”

Finished. That was the second time she’d used that word to describe her ex-husband today.

“I’m just—”

But she cut him off again. “I love you, Bobby. But it’s late. Go to bed. You’ve got a long day ahead of you. And I’ve got things to do around here in the morning. So get some sleep. Love you,” she repeated.

“You too,” he said, and hung up.

The phone didn’t ring again, but Robert sat up waiting for it all the same. At around midnight, he thought again about calling her, driving out there anyway. But her tone hadn’t been welcoming. And she was a big girl, he reminded himself.

Finally, Robert decided to give in to sleep, and stood up to go to the bedroom. It was unnaturally quiet—he couldn’t even hear the leaves rustling over the house.

When he opened the window beside his bed, a cool summer breeze teased through his beard. He peered through the screen, out into the dark. A lone caterpillar was curled in an imperfect “S” shape on the outside of the screen. Robert flicked the wire mesh with his forefinger. The worm went tumbling into the night.

“Summer worms,” he muttered and pulled off his shirt and blue jeans. He crawled into bed, pulled up the deep green comforter that Sharon had brought over the week before, and settled onto his side. The night was quiet as winter, and through it all Robert slept a fine, dreamless sleep.

The alarm clock jangled Robert awake in darkness, and he fought an inclination to roll over and sleep another hour—if he did, he knew he wouldn’t be out of bed until six. It was so quiet in the early morning dark.

With a deliberate groan Robert threw aside the comforter and made his way to the kitchen. The temperature couldn’t have dropped too much overnight, but the cabin air was freezing against his bare shoulders and thighs. He measured some instant coffee into a mug and filled the kettle, then went back to the bedroom to get into something warm.

The bedroom was, if anything, worse than the rest of the house. The window, still open from last night, admitted a north breeze that rustled across the two small curtains like flags. They made a faint flapping noise, and that was the only sound Robert heard.

The only sound.

He wrapped the housecoat tight around him and shut the window, but he couldn’t stop shivering. Some things, he thought, you only notice by their absence. And with a breeze like that, the rustling of the leaves and branches in the maple tree over his cabin should have been steady, all night long.

“Ah, hell.” Doing up the belt of the robe as he went, Robert hurried to the front door and slid his bare feet into an old pair of rubber boots. As an afterthought, he grabbed the flashlight from the hook beside the coat rack—it was still dark outside—and flipping it on, unlatched the front door and went out onto the stoop. He swung the flashlight beam up, to the branches that dangled over his roof.

“Hell,” he said again, slack-jawed at the sight.

The branches were white, wrapped in silk thick as cotton candy. Strands of it hung taut between the limbs of the old maple tree, and as Robert played the flashlight beam across the expanse, he saw that it made nearly a perfect wrap; as though an enormous bag had been dropped over the tree, tied snug at the trunk. The leaves, the branches were all caught tight in the fabric, sheltered by it, and the wind left them still in the night. Robert stepped away from his porch and moved around the nest’s perimeter, playing the flashlight up and down it. The morning dew glimmered off the nest like spun sugar.

The nest. That’s what it is. Robert was awestruck by the immensity of it.

The tent caterpillars had come in the night, and before dawn they had woven a nest around a single tree that must have measured more than forty feet across, maybe half again as high. How many caterpillars would that have taken? Millions? A billion?

As he stood wondering, it occurred to Robert that he had been wrong about the silence. The nest wasn’t quiet at all. In the darkness there was a drone of tiny jaws, working steadily at the greenery they had locked inside.

Robert started as another sound came up. It was the whistle from his kettle, high and insistent as the water boiled away. When he went inside to quiet it, his hand was trembling.

The morning went badly.

The Torsdales were the first of the campers to rise, at just before seven, and when Jim, their youngest boy, saw the work the worms had done in the night, he screamed like a girl. The scream got Don and Jackie Torsdale out of bed—although their daughter Beth slept until they shook her a moment later—and before seven fifteen, Robert figured, the other two families that made up his camp clientele this morning were also wide awake.

When he came out of the shed twenty minutes later with the canister of insecticide over his shoulder and his coveralls, goggles and filter mask on, he noted wryly that those two trailers were in the process of packing up.

“Hey! That stuff’s harmful!” shouted Mrs. Poole, setting her fists on her wide hips and glaring across the nearly empty campground while her husband disassembled the canopy on their trailer behind her. “Don’t you go sprayin’ it while there’s people here!”

No danger of that, he thought, not for much longer. Then he pulled aside his filter mask to answer: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Poole. I’m following the instructions.”

“They don’t mean nothin’!” she snapped before turning to her husband. “Hurry up! I don’t wanna stay here no longer than I got to!”

Robert slipped the mask back over his face and walked over to the spot where the branches hung lowest. The weave was thick here, hanging deep over the wood pile and casting a uniform grey shadow over the sandy soil. If Robert reached up, he could touch the silk with his hand, and even through the blur of the goggles he saw the dark mass of the caterpillars. They crawled outside the nest too, and as he stood there, they dropped in twos and threes, landing to die in the sand or insinuate themselves into the crannies of the wood pile. Absently, Robert brushed at his shoulder.

Robert unhooked the hose on the end of the canister. It had a long metal nozzle, and he lifted it to the fabric of the nest. The silk felt rough on the end of the nozzle, and Robert hesitated a moment before pushing it through—he was struck by an image of the entire nest bursting, the nozzle a sharp pin to the tree’s balloon, and him trapped, exposed under the weight of a million summer worms.

But the other option was fire. More than a few landowners in this part of Muskoka used that option readily, and Robert had in the past: just hold a lighter to the silk, watch it catch in gossamer embers and black curls of ash. Nature takes care of itself.

But he wasn’t about to burn a nest this big. Any fire that could destroy this nest would take the maple tree, his cabin, maybe even the rest of the campground as well.

The nozzle slid into the nest like a syringe, and Robert squeezed the valve lever. He did it in seven more spots around the tree, until the canister was empty, leaving ragged holes of a size that bullets might make. Finally, he stood back, squinted at his work.

There was nothing he could see, of course—the silk wrapped it, and even in the harsh morning sunlight, the blackness underneath still clung.

Robert pulled the goggles off, wiped the condensation from the inside. He skirted around the tree’s perimeter and hurried up the steps into his cabin.

Robert stripped his coveralls off in the living room, leaving them draped over the sofa, and he ran the water in the shower until it steamed before getting in.

Robert drove into Gravenhurst white-knuckled. As he turned onto Bethune Drive from the highway, he had to resist the urge to yank down his collar, pull out the worms. His stop at the Beer Store was quick, and the girl who worked at the counter looked at him funny—just for a second, as his twelve-pack of Ex rumbled down the rollers from the storeroom—and once again, he was tempted to brush his shoulders: what had she seen to make her look at him so? He hurried back to his truck, bottles jangling in their case.

He parked on Muskoka Street and walked to the A&P, where he gathered his groceries like an automaton, filling up the little arm basket by rote: extra-large eggs, butter, bread, a two-litre carton of two percent, a package of bacon, a three-dollar pepper steak from the meat department. Some days, walking the aisles of the A&P, Robert would actually meet three or four people whom he knew by name. Back in ’69, when he came up from Kentucky and started Twin Oaks, he could count on doing so nearly every time he came to town. But Gravenhurst had grown over the past two decades, filled up with too many well-heeled strangers. Retired doctors and lawyers moving up to the brand-new subdivisions by the lakes. Younger families trying to beat the high cost of houses in Toronto. They were transitory, though, just like the summer people.

Just like the women who passed through Robert’s home from time to time: summer women. Robert had to wait until the light changed behind him before he could pull onto the street, and he thought about it.

Was Sharon another summer woman? She had escaped her marriage without the obvious damage that some of the others had brought with them; hell, Mary’s husband used to beat her up, and the asshole Lynn had married was cheating with her cousin before she left. They had been on the run, and in retrospect Robert knew he probably should have expected that anyplace they stopped was just a way station.

But Sharon . . . Where was the damage, what was it in Allan Tefield that she really had to flee? She had said it herself: He’s finished.

Then he remembered Pat, and her warning phone call.

The light at Bay Street turned from yellow to red, and Robert put the truck into gear. He gassed it too hard, though, and it lurched as he swung onto the road.

There was no evidence of the caterpillars in downtown Gravenhurst. But it didn’t seem to matter. At the Canadian Tire, Robert went straight to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall and stripped off his shirt. The raw pungency of his sweat hit his nostrils like belly-gas from road kill. With shaking hands, Robert pulled the sleeves of his shirt inside out, and when he found nothing in its lining, he threw it to the floor. He ran his fingers around his belt-line, reached inside—he was sure he felt something down there, nestling in the warmth—and snapped the elastic of his briefs hard enough to leave a sting. Then he sat down on the edge of the toilet, pants still up, and exhaled a long, jagged sigh.