The Skeleton Tree (23 page)

“What time is it now?” says Frank.

He has asked the same thing every ten minutes. But when I look at the watch, I'm surprised. “Twenty past six.” Sunset is less than an hour away.

The wind has made me very cold, and there's not much warmth from the sun. But we can't go back to the cabin now; that would be giving up. So I put my poncho around my shoulders, and we make a fire at the feet of the wooden saint. We pull our chairs as close as we can to the flames.

Frank keeps looking north, then south, then up at the sky. He reaches up to push aside the hair that he's forgotten he cut off. His face is a picture of disappointment. I'm afraid he's given up.

I want to yell at him to do something, to make noise, to dance around the saint and shout that we'll soon be saved. But he might tell me it's useless. He might get
me
doubting too.

In my hands, the book crackles as I squeeze it without thinking. More flakes of paper drift away, falling like tiny leaves. Autumn has arrived for the book, as well as for me and Frank. Everything is coming to a close.

It is strange how stories work. I turn a page of
Kaetil the Raven Hunter
and find no others behind it. The last one is gone, torn away and burned by Frank. He's smarter than I thought; it
is
more real this way. Now the story just stops—suddenly—in a way that makes no sense. And that's the exactly the way our father's life ended.

I close the book and hold it in front of me, the way old men and women hold Bibles in church. Beside me, Frank is leaning back in his chair, not even looking out at the sea anymore. His eyes are closed. But there is still time for a boat to appear.

“Hey, Frank,” I say.

He answers with a little grunt.

“This is the day we'll be saved!”

He tips his head to look at me, just as Thursday used to do. But he doesn't take up the chant. He only smiles a little smile, then turns again toward the sun.

“Hey, Frank?”

This time he doesn't even respond.

“Where were you when you learned that Dad had died?” I ask.

He takes a breath and sighs it out. “At home.”

It seems that's all he's going to say. I ask him, “Did the police come and tell you?” That's how
I
found out. The doorbell rang in the evening, and two Mounties were standing on the porch—a man and a woman—both holding their hats in their hands, as though they had come begging for money.

But Frank shakes his head. “I didn't even know for three days. Then I heard his name on the TV news. ‘No charges laid,' or something. I had to wake up my mom to tell her. She was so drunk she didn't understand.”

He kicks at a stick that's poking out from the fire. Embers explode, showering sparks. “Then Jack shows up—just one day before the funeral—and he's all, ‘Don't worry, I'll make sure you get there.' So he sends a taxi. But we get there late and everyone's gone, except the guys who fill the graves. ‘Oh, I guess I mixed up the times,' he says. Yeah, right. He just didn't want people meeting each other, a big scene at the cemetery. Good old Jack.”

I don't say anything about our cars passing. I should have guessed Uncle Jack was behind it all, arranging people's lives in a way that was meant to be helpful. As always, he tried his best to please everybody, but only made a mess of things.

Across the sky in front of us, a redness glows and deepens. Frank sighs. “You still think we're going to be saved?”

“I
know
it,” I tell him.

“But—”

“Today's the day!” I shout it at Frank, not wanting to hear his doubts. “This is the day we'll be saved.”

We sit quietly, staring at the sky and the sea, as though watching an enormous television. The sun touches the horizon and begins to spread across the water. There are only a few minutes left for a helicopter to arrive. They don't fly after dark. When the colors of the sunset fade to purple and black, and there is still no throbbing of rotors in the sky, I decide it must be a ship that is coming to save us. There are still three hours to go until midnight, still lots of time for a ship to appear.

I put more wood on the fire.

At ten o'clock I know that Frank has stopped believing. I can see it in his posture; I can feel it in the air. I get up and dance around the wooden saint.

I start chanting, louder and louder. “This is the day. Today is the day. This is the day we'll be saved.”

“Come on!” I tell Frank. I try to pull him from the chair, but he won't move. I whirl away from him and reel across the rocks, twirling past the fire. The flames bend toward me, reaching out as though to stroke my legs.

“This is the day. Today is the day. This is the day we'll be saved.”

The minutes go by. The hands of my watch swing toward eleven. In a little more than an hour the day will be finished. It's our last chance.

“Frank, please,” I tell him.

With fifty-five minutes to go, he gets up. He joins in the chant; he circles the saint, keeping pace to stay on the opposite side of my circle.

Like a pair of moons going around a planet, we sing and dance, my brother and I.

“This is the day we'll be saved.”

Wave after wave bursts on the rocks below us. The hands on my watch keep moving. The second hand ticks from number to number, and the minute hand crawls toward twelve.

To everything around us, midnight means nothing. The waves will keep rolling toward shore; the stars will keep shining. There will be nothing to mark the hour except one more tick of the watch. For all I know, it's five minutes fast or five minutes slow.

But according to the watch it's midnight…
now!

I look out over the sea, certain I'll see a ship appear, or a searchlight turning, or an airplane's dazzling beam suddenly switching on.

But nobody comes to save us. Today is not, after all, the day we'll be rescued. Our dreams were only dreams.

We let another hour pass, sitting together beside the fire. Nearly a full day has gone by since I woke Frank by shaking his shoulder and shouting his name. In some ways, it's been the worst day of all, and I see now that we're in terrible trouble. Winter has nearly arrived. Frank wanted enough fish to last until spring, but we don't even have one for
breakfast.
We have no matches. If our banked fire dies one night, so will we.

I feel like crying as I get up to go back to the cabin. Frank seems angry, but that's his way. He slams his shoulder against the saint as he passes by. It topples slowly, then crashes onto the rocks and goes tumbling down into the sea. Then Frank turns back and kicks the fire into huge flurries of sparks, scattering the last pieces of wood. Some fly like meteors through the darkness and plunge hissing into the black water. For a moment I think that
this
will be our saving, that a passing ship will see the sudden flash of fire. I watch for the sizzling trail of a signal flare. But the sparks just fade away, and everything is black and empty.

We don't have a torch to light our way. But as we pass under the skeleton tree our eyes adjust to the dark, and we see the northern lights. They're blue and shimmery, spreading like a thin veil over nearly half the sky. They soar above us as we make our way to the cabin. At the door, I ask Frank, “You want the bed?”

“No, go ahead.” He sort of laughs. “I doubt I'll sleep much anyway.”

He banks up the fire in the circle of stones to keep it safe through the night. Then I settle down on the foam mattress with my poncho for a blanket. We hear the eerie sound of wolves in the forest. They're closer than ever.

Frightened and sad and lonely, I fall asleep thinking of my father.

But it's Uncle Jack I dream about. I see him again at
Puff
's big steering wheel, and he
still
can't hear me. For once I wake early, to a terrible crash as the boat plows into that thing in the water. Frank screams.

Something clamps around my ankle and drags me from the bed. I grab on to the table, but it falls over with a clatter, as everything on its top tumbles to the floor.

“The bear!” shrieks Frank.

Its teeth are digging into my ankle. It grunts in the darkness as it drags me across the cabin. I pull the table with me, through the circle of stones, through the pile of ashes. Embers come alive, glowing red in the darkness. Then flames appear, leaping pale and yellow like little spirits.

Their light glows on the face of the grizzly bear, gleaming in its eyes. Its great hump quivers as it pulls me through the door.

I grab the chair; I grab the bed. But I can't hold on; I can't save myself. “Help!” I shout.

There's Frank. I see him now. He's pressed into the corner, drawn up so tightly that he looks like a child. I cry to him, “Help me, Frank!” But he seems paralyzed.

Then I'm out of the cabin, sliding down the dark tunnel of salal. The bear is hauling me into the forest.

It moves faster. The bright flickering of the northern lights falls through the trees, as though blue fire burns in the forest. Wolves begin howling, and their voices rise to a barking clamor.

The bear drags me around the turn in the trail. I snatch at branches, at bushes, and they all tear away in my hands. I roll over, and back again, every move sending pain shooting up my leg. I'm afraid the bear will snap my foot off.

A black shadow flashes across the shifting shapes. Others appear behind it.

The wolves are running. They're bounding along the beach, splashing through the surf. Amid their frantic howling is another sound, the raucous cries of a raven.

The bear pulls me down the canyon of salal, into the ancient forest. There is no glint of starlight, no gleam of blue aurora below the towering trees. There in the darkness, the bear lets go of my ankle. I try to squirm away, but it plants its massive paws on my chest, pinning me to the ground. I feel myself sinking into the moss as its nose comes snuffling up along my legs.

There's a smell of fur, of awful breath, of fetid wounds and blood.

In the darkness I can't see Thursday swooping down. But I hear the whistle of his wings, the piercing cackle of his voice. He flashes past the grizzly's head and weaves away among the trees. The bear raises its head and bellows, and suddenly the wolves come crashing out of the salal. With snarls and grunts, they leap at the bear.

I squirm away on my back, slithering helter-skelter over the moss. I roll onto my knees and scurry away like an animal, dragging myself through the forest as the animals roar and scream behind me. They snarl, they growl. They gnash their teeth.

Thursday dives again and again, screaming as he plunges through the darkness. His cries drive the wolves to a frenzy.

Among the trees around me, a flame appears. And here is Frank, running down the trail with two bright torches. He is shouting my name.

“Chris!”

I call back to him, and a moment later he's bending over me. The light of the torches flares through the salal, and I see the bear in the darkness, turning to run. I see a wolf clinging to its back, another biting its heels. And I see my raven, poor Thursday, lying on the ground.

I crawl toward him and pick him up. His neck seems to have no bones, and his head flops over, onto my fingers. His eyes are open, but they're gray and glassy. His heart makes such a tiny flutter that I can hardly feel it.

“Oh, Thursday,” I say.

Frank plants a torch into the earth and makes me lie down. He eases me back onto the green moss and moves the other torch above me, looking for wounds and bites.

I want to hold on to Thursday. He has given his life for me, and I wish I knew the magic of the forest so that I could give it back to him. His eyes slowly close, and the warmth begins to leave his body.

Frank runs his fingers down my ankle. “It's not too bad,” he says. But there's a throbbing pain in my foot, and I can't tell from his voice what Frank really thinks. He helps me up, then leans forward so I can use his shoulder as a crutch. He pulls the torch up from the moss and leads me away with the light.