The Skeleton Tree (21 page)

I wanted very badly to go and help him, and I looked for things to add to his pile. I searched for bits of red along the beach.

What I found almost broke my heart.

It was a child's diary, its pages stuck together. I peeled them apart and found Japanese writing that had smudged and faded, and now looked like delicate paintings of water and mountains. I thought about the child who had written words now gone forever. I imagined she had begun her diary full of hope and dreams, and maybe she had ended it the same way, not knowing she was writing for the last time.

I carried the diary with me, not thinking until I reached the stream that I would have to go into the forest to bury it. Then I stood for a long time, not sure I could even do it. But I couldn't throw the diary away. I dashed into the forest and buried it as quickly as I could. I shoved it down into the green ground and black earth as songbirds twittered around me. I started crying as I covered it over—but not for the girl, and not for myself. I cried for Thursday. I missed his little noises, his strange words. I missed his company.

In a way it was hard to get up and leave that place. I didn't want to face Frank and talk about—or
not
talk about—the things I'd seen. But I got up from the moss and brushed off the little twigs that clung to my filthy clothes.

A flash of color caught my eye, a color too bright to belong in the forest. On the other side of a fallen log, the moss had been disturbed. Strips of dark earth and different shades of green showed where it had been torn and lifted. Under the moss lay a band of scarlet, and a scrap of the same bright orange I'd seen rolling in the stream. My first thought was that Frank had come to my cemetery and uncovered the things I'd buried. I stepped up on the log to look.

I saw scattered sticks and a pile of leaves. I saw a human hand, an arm and a leg. I saw the cabin guy, half-buried in the moss. Or part of him, anyway.

The orange cloth was the shell of a sleeping bag. The band of red was the end of a sleeve, and out of it poked the dead man's fingers, curled and gray like mushrooms. He had been hurriedly buried, and just as hurriedly uncovered again.

I remembered standing for the first time in the door of the little cabin, seeing the furniture toppled, the mattress pulled from the bed, the ashes gouged with finger marks. Then an awful image formed, of the man screaming as the grizzly bear dragged him into the darkness.

It had buried him here in the spring or the summer. And the other night it had come to dig him up again.

I backed away. I stepped down from the log and stumbled over the moss. I ran from the forest, and the birds scattered around me.

I found Frank at the skeleton tree, still working on his plastic beacon. I shouted as I walked closer. “Hey, Frank, I found the cabin guy!”

I wanted to shock him, and I did. His head lifted suddenly; he turned to look at me.

“He's in the forest,” I said. “The bear killed him.”

I was now right behind Frank. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Do you want to look?”

Frank didn't
want
to look. No one in his right mind would want to see a man half-chewed by a grizzly bear. But he really had no choice. I took him through the forest, past spiderwebs that billowed as we passed, and I showed him where the cabin guy was lying.

Frank took one quick look. Then he sat on the fallen log, squeezing his hands together. “That could have been wolves,” he said. “It might not have been the bear.”

I didn't believe him. It was too vivid in my mind: the cabin guy waking as the bear burst through the door, its jaws clamping around his ankle before he knew what was happening; the guy grabbing on to the table, the chair, the stones by the fire. He would have clutched on to anything that might have saved him from being dragged off into the night. That was why we'd found the door hanging by one hinge. It was the last thing the man had held on to.

Frank swore. “Let's get out of here.”

“What about the cabin guy?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“We can't just leave him here,” I said.

I thought we should build a coffin. We could use the planks of the
Reepicheep,
or even a barrel or a box washed up on the beach. But Frank wanted to get it over with right then. “We can cover him up,” he said. “But I'm not going to touch him.”

A twelve-year-old boy should not have to be a gravedigger. I tried not to look at the man, but I saw his face anyway—and I thought I would scream. Though Frank was older, it was no easier for him. He took huge, loud breaths as he tossed handfuls of leaves and twigs and moss on top of the body. He didn't even watch where they landed.

I used a stick to push the man's hand into the ground again. I poked the sleeping bag on top of it, trying not to think of the fingers twitching underneath. The cloth was so torn and ragged that I wondered if the bear had come for that—not to eat the man, but to fill its stomach with the fluffy lining of the sleeping bag, or maybe the moss that had grown mattress-thick above it. Frank, as a child, had been fed cotton wool to pad the glass he'd eaten. Could the bear have known to do the same thing?

I thought of that as I covered everything with sticks and leaves. Frank said it was good enough, and he went away. But I kept working until I'd made the man a part of the forest again. When I was done I washed my hands in the stream. I washed my wrists, my arms, my face, trying to scrub away the horror of what I'd seen. Terrified of ending up like the cabin guy, I ran from the forest.

I found Frank at the rocky point, where the wooden saint stood under gleaming clouds. A big flock of geese was heading south in a shifting line that must have stretched a quarter mile. By the time the last one passed above us, the leaders were little black dots in the distance. They honked like mad. And just as the last one faded away, snow began to fall.

Frank was still watching them, staring into a gray and silver sky. Beside him, I said, “I found the fish at the pool.”

He didn't even flinch. “What did you do with it?”

“What do you think?” I said. “I shook out the glass. I threw it away.”

He flicked back his flop of hair. “You shouldn't have done that.”

“Were there others?”

Frank waited a moment, then held up three fingers.

“Where?”

He only smiled at the sky.

“How could you do that?” I asked. “How could you be so cruel?”

“Oh, come on, Chrissy!” He turned to look at me. “You were terrified of that bear. You should be happy now. It's dead.”

“You don't know that,” I said.

“Well, it's
dying.
And I did that. I told you: I'm your guardian angel.”

Tiny, whirling flakes of snow gusted over the sea. They collected in the crevices among the rocks, in the eyes of the wooden saint. They lay speckled on Frank's shoulders and hair. I could see he would never understand why I was bothered by what he'd done. “I can't believe I'm your brother,” I said, and walked away.

Frank laughed. “You're too soft. That's probably why Dad never liked you.”

“Dad liked me lots,” I said, still walking.

“Did you know he was a hunter?” asked Frank. He was walking along behind me now. “That's what we did every fall. We went hunting for moose. Sometimes for bears.”

I didn't know whether to believe him. But it was possible. My father's “business trips” had always taken him away in the fall.

“He saved the antlers,” said Frank. “He had a whole room full of antlers.”

Cold and hungry, I sat by the fire in the cabin. Frank lay on the bed with the book while I watched the flames and thought of Thursday. Though I tried to imagine him huddling warm in a dry place, I could only picture him dead on the ground, with snow piling on his black feathers.

For an hour the snow kept falling. Then it suddenly stopped in a burst of sunshine. And out in the forest, a raven called.

I looked up from the fire. Frank put down the book, and for a moment our eyes met. Then I ran out, shouting for Thursday, and saw the raven landing in a fir tree. The branch bent, shedding snow in a glistening mist. The raven clucked and gurgled.

“So it's back, eh,” said Frank, coming to join me. “The bad penny.” He tried to sound uncaring but couldn't hide his pleasure.

“That's not Thursday,” I told him.

Frank frowned. “How can you tell?”

“Because I know him.”

To Frank, all ravens were the same. But this one was smaller than Thursday, its feathers more ragged, its beak curved in a different way. Disappointed, I went back in the cabin. Frank kept calling uselessly to the bird, even whistling. “Come on, boy.”

I shouted through the door, “It's not a dog, you know!”

I heard the rustle of the raven's wings, then the whistling sound of its flight. A shower of snow pattered on the cabin roof, and a moment later, Frank came inside. He stood behind me for a while as I peered wet-eyed into the forest.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

I shrugged.
A little late for sorries,
my mother would have said. There was nothing he could do to bring Thursday back. But Frank wasn't thinking of the raven.

“That was all lies,” he said. “Dad never took me hunting. He always talked about it, but we never went. There was no room full of antlers; I made that up. Dad was no good at hunting, like he was no good at anything else. It was Jack who taught me stuff.”

I let Frank keep talking. He confessed to other lies too. Of all the things he'd told me about our father, almost nothing was true. He'd invented it all. He had invented a dad to replace the one who hadn't paid him much attention.
His
dad was not really so different from mine after all.

I dreamed of him that night—our real father. I saw him as I had on the very last day, as he walked out of the house and down to the car. Again I saw him drive away without looking back. Then I jolted awake.

A noise had disturbed me. Something was right outside the cabin.

I waited to hear the sound again: a slither, a shuffle, whatever it was. Terrifying images whirled through my mind. Had the grizzly passed the cabin on its way for another meal? Had the cabin guy hauled himself from the ground to reclaim his little house? Maybe he was peering in through the window right then. I was too afraid to look. Or was he climbing into the skeleton tree, to join the rest of the dead in their coffins?

My fears chased each other around and around until daylight. I poked my head outside and saw that the snow had vanished. The ground was bare, and I could see no footprints. Then I finally slept, while Frank went down to the beach and back, while he cooked a pot of seaweed.

I lay on the bed and watched him. “Three more days,” I said.

He nodded.

“Say it,” I told him. “Come on, Frank, say it.”

But he wouldn't join in. He was using a short stick to stir the soup, holding his head tilted from the flames.

“You have to
believe
it,” I said. “We won't be saved if you don't believe it.”

I spent the day out on the point, by the wooden saint. I overturned an empty bucket and drummed as I chanted. “Three more days. Three days more. Three more days to go.”

Around noon, Frank put a hand on my arm to stop me. He'd been shouting, but I hadn't heard him. “Look,” he said.

I turned around. Frank was pointing east, toward the mountain. On the blue sky above it was a tiny white scratch. The contrail of an airplane.

“We're going to be saved,” he said. Then he dashed off across the grass, heading for the cabin.

I shielded my eyes with the sticks I'd used for drumming, and I watched as a sparkle of light appeared at the end of the contrail. I saw it sprout a pair of tiny wings. In a moment came the sound of engines, as faint as the purring of a cat.

Frank came racing back with the little cylinder that Thursday had brought, our last match inside it. He ran to the mountain of plastic at the trunk of the skeleton tree. He glanced up at the plane.

The sound of its engines shifted in pitch and grew louder.

It was many miles away. It wasn't even heading toward us, and would pass well to the north. Frank must have known that. But he snatched up the can of fuel and twisted the cap.

“Frank, don't,” I said. “They'll never see it.”

He kept pulling at the lid. I tried to wrestle the bottle out of his hands, but he wrenched it away. Off came the lid. Like a genie appearing, the air around the little spout shimmered. I smelled gas.

“Please,” I said. “Frank, don't.”

I couldn't let him burn the skeleton tree. Flames would roar up from the plastic, black smoke would boil through the branches. The fire would spread to the moss and the bark, to the shreds of cloth, and the coffins would burn like kindling. The skeletons that had lain there for years would blacken and scorch. They would tumble into the plastic fire.

“They won't see it!” I shouted again. “In three days we'll be saved!”

He tipped the can and started pouring fuel over his piled-up garbage.

“Stop!”

I grabbed at the gas can. But Frank shoved me away, driving his elbow into my chest.

At one time, that would have knocked me flat. But I wasn't so puny anymore. I grunted as the breath went out of me, then flung myself at Frank's bent back. I got my arm around his neck, my legs around his waist. He staggered across the clearing, stumbling down toward the rocks. I kicked the red can from his hand.

It landed with a
thunk
on the ground and tumbled toward the wooden saint. The fuel gushed out with a gurgling sound.

Frank grabbed my arm and flipped me onto the ground. We wrestled and grunted and shouted. The last time we'd fought, he had gotten the better of me quickly. But now I ended up on top, straddling his chest. It was Frank who lay breathing heavily, his face bright red.