Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (25 page)

The House at the End of the World

When I was four years old, and living with my father, I would wait in the well of an oak tree each morning for him to come home, listening for the sound of his boots on the forest floor. The oak tree was an old black giant that stood by our front door. It grew acorns the size of my fist, and its trunk was mottled with a dry gray moss. Every morning when the sun climbed onto my window sill, I would run to the tree and crawl inside. The hollow I liked to sit in was spacious and deep, and I was such a small girl that I fit there easily. I would wait and listen, dreaming up little fantasies to pass the time, and then the leaves would crack, and the twigs would snap, and I’d know that my father was coming home. Our ceremony was this: he would place the food he had caught on a wooden platform by the front door—on some days a fish or a bird, on others a beaver or rabbit. He would knock the mud from his boots, then step over to the oak tree and slap it playfully with his palm—a hard, living sound. “Oak tree,” he would sigh. “You’re my only friend in all the world. I had a daughter once, a girl who loved me, but she’s gone now and I don’t know where to find her.” I would listen quietly, and when my father had finished delivering his lines, I would spring from beneath him shouting, “Here I am, here I am.” He would sweep me into the air and blanket me with kisses. “Ah, Holly,” he would say. Ah, father.

This was during the collapse of civilization, and I believed we were the only people in the world. My father had made certain preparations for these times: in a storeroom off our kitchen were cases of nails and soap and matches. On a shelf above the door stood a set of oil lamps, their globes polished to a liquid shine, and beside them was a box of spare wicks and several containers of lamp oil. A bolt of cotton cloth was leaning rigidly against the corner wall. A tool chest was tucked behind a stack of towels. We had a caulking gun and a sewing treadle and a crank flashlight with an electric socket in the butt. (We had a crank radio, as well, on a table in my father’s bedroom, but it was busted and would produce no sound, not even the fuzz of static.) And then there were the canned goods, large metal cylinders that lined the walls of our pantry, stacked three or four cans deep in columns that were staggered in height. These columns looked like steel pillars, or organ pipes, and when I walked into the pantry with a lamp or a candle I would see thousands of tiny flames flickering about me. There was powdered milk and coffee, rice and wheat and oats and flour, sugar and corn meal, beans and granola. There were carrots and eggs and hard little nuggets of dried potato. My favorite cans were the ones along the front wall, which held chocolate pudding, orange marmalade, and applesauce, and whenever we opened one, I would stand at my father’s side and breathe in that first wonderful smell which came through the puncture.

Our house itself was built beside a stream of swift, clear water in the eye of the forest. Trees pressed against the back wall and then cleared away in the front yard, rising up again on the other side of a meadow. I sometimes thought of the forest as a river and of our house as one of those shoulders of stone that interrupts the current—my father and I were like the fish you find living in the shadows. Two trails stretched from our yard into the trees, one to a blackberry thicket and one to a cluster of birches where we gathered kindling. We had a small garden where we grew potatoes and carrots and pale, misshapen zucchini. In the meadow were mushrooms and clover and, in the spring, small purple flowers that smelled of mustard when you crushed them between your fingers. The grass was not high—we must have walked across it a hundred times a day—and deer occasionally stopped there to wrap themselves in the sunlight; if I clapped my hands, they would bound back into the trees through the loose, cottony brush. I was content in our house. In my bed at night I felt safe and warm. The world had ended. The stream splashed before me, and the forest stirred behind me. My father worked quietly in the next room.

My father was a natural mender of things. At night, for instance, he would tinker with little objects around the house, even the things that were irreparably broken. Every few days he would work for an hour or so on the small electric generator we owned. The generator had lost some basic internal mechanism, and though it looked easy to fix, in all the time I lived with him he was never successful. A few yards into the woods was a place where the stream banks narrowed and the water began to race, and he had placed a dam there and fitted it with a turbine. With this turbine and the generator, he had hoped to produce enough electricity to light the house, but instead he made a simple wheel for me to play with.

One summer afternoon, a few months after my fourth birthday, I found a turtle wedged beneath the turbine. I had taken a pair of pliers from my father’s tool chest, setting off into the woods to play fix-the-dam, and when I got there the turtle was submerged in the water. She was trying to push herself free. The long shaft of her neck was reaching from beneath the current of the stream, and her legs were shunting back and forth in the clay. I was afraid that she would suffocate—her head would drop from exhaustion, and she would be trapped without air beneath the water—so I pulled her loose and the turbine began to spin again, throwing off drops of water. I carried the turtle inside and showed her to my father. He held her in his hands.

“Did you know that turtles are like trees?” he said. “You can tell how old they are by counting the plates on their shell.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Of course. Here, I’ll show you.” We counted the fourteen plates on the turtle’s shell, one by one. “So she’s fourteen years old,” my father said. He tapped on the shell, then peered in through the opening in the front, trying to spot the turtle’s head. “Where’s my tool chest?” he asked. I pointed. “Get me a paint marker, will you?”

I ran to the other side of the room and brought him a thick red marker. It made a rattling sound when he shook it and gave off a sharp bleachlike smell. He wrote my name in capital letters on the turtle’s rearmost plate: HOLLY. “There,” he said, and he blew gently on the paint to dry it. “Now if we see her again, we’ll know she’s ours.” He capped the marker and held the turtle at arm’s length, examining his writing in a shaft of sunlight. “That’s what your name means,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that? ‘Turtle.’”

The lessons my father taught me rarely left me feeling any wiser. They only deepened my awareness of everything I would never know.

One day that fall I was walking alongside the stream, following a boat I had made from a strip of birch bark and some epoxy glue. It hit an eddy, and I tapped it loose with a stick, and then my father came up behind me and rested his hand on my shoulder. “The
Marie Celeste,
” he said solemnly. “The boat without captain or crew.”

“I made it in the kitchen,” I said. “I didn’t glue my fingers together.” This is what he always asked me when I told him that I’d been building something: Did you glue your fingers together? If I answered yes, he would wrap his hands around them and pretend that he couldn’t pull them apart.

He fished the boat from the water and set it on the shore. “Let me tell you about the
Marie Celeste.
”

I propped myself against the high dirt bank of the stream, listening.

“It was a ghost ship. The story goes that sailors would see it traveling toward them in the fog. Its masts were always raised, its walls always straight, and they would signal for it to change course so that it wouldn’t sail into them. When it drew near, though, they would find it deserted—no men on deck, no lights inside, nothing. Somebody boarded it once and found clothes hanging on the wash lines. Beds were rumpled in the shapes of bodies, dinner plates were black with grease. The captain’s log was still open on his desk. Whatever had happened there had happened fast. Nobody was ever able to bring the
Marie Celeste
into shore, and every now and then you would hear another report of it. It seemed to sail itself, people said. The ocean is a big place, so you never know. Maybe it’s still out there.”

I had never seen the ocean and I tried to imagine it. All I could envision was our field on the days when it flooded, the surface of the water dimpled by blades of grass.

My father lifted me onto the bank of the stream, standing me on my feet.

“Take a walk with me,” he said.

Not far from our house, less than half an hour’s travel, was a cave which the heat of the sun never seemed to penetrate. We had taken shelter there once during a violent summer rain, and even then the air was as cold and still as the frozen air of winter. I could see my breath in the cave, and I enjoyed watching the shapes it made: mushroom shapes, and apple shapes, and finger shapes. The water, which stood in pools at the entrance, always wore a thick shell of ice, and if we chipped at this ice and wrapped the larger pieces in rags, we could carry them home before they melted.

As we hiked through the forest, I tried to match my step to my father’s, but his pace was much quicker than mine, his stride much longer. He could step over patches of mud that I had to leap. He could climb onto logs without using his hands. “Slow down,” I kept calling, and he would turn and wait for me, fanning himself with his T-shirt.

After a while, I began to feel winded, and I asked him a question, knowing from experience that as he spoke he would slow down in thought. “Did
you
ever see the
Marie Celeste
?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, I’ve never even been on a boat, actually.” He began to slow down. “But I did read about it. And I heard stories. People used to tell stories about all sorts of strange things.” A switch of thorns was bending into the path, and he held it out of the way for me as I walked past. “Ghosts and fairies. Lake monsters and UFOs. You have to wonder what’s become of all that now that we’re gone. The ghosts, for instance: let’s say they were real. Were they haunting
us,
then, or were they haunting the places where we found them? And if they were haunting
us,
did they disappear when we did, or are they still floating around out there inside all those empty houses? Are they anything without us? What did we mean to them?”

Nearby, a squirrel sat on a yellow log taking apart a pine cone. My father ducked beneath a vine, and I followed him.

“If I vanished today, Holly, what would you do?” he said. His voice was gentle. I took his sleeve. “You would miss me at first, but how long would it be before I came to seem like a dream to you? How long before you could live happily without even a thought of me? I hope I’ve been able to give you the things you need.”

I had never asked myself these questions before, but I knew that if my father were to leave me, or to give up his life somewhere in the forest, I would be utterly lost and alone. The animals were stronger than me, larger and faster and quieter on their feet, and the house grew cold and dark at night, and I would not know what to do. Even the lanterns, on their shelves in the storeroom, were too high for me to reach without my father. I began to cry.

“Oh, hey,” he said, bending over to console me. “Hey, hey, hey.” He kissed my cheek, and my forehead, and rubbed a tear away with his thumb. “I’m not going anywhere, baby. You don’t have to worry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

I felt the weight of his arm on my shoulder, and when I swallowed a breath, I could smell the faint palm scent of the soap that he used and the strong spice of his sweat, a smell that still today I associate with my father. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. I nodded. And then, looking up, I realized we were at the cave.

I sat inside on a ridge of stone as my father chipped at a frozen puddle. He took a hammer from his pocket, then knocked at the ice with the claw of the hammer until it came apart with a crack. When it was time to go, he bundled a few of the larger chunks in a scarf and we stepped outside. The sudden change in temperature made me feel dizzy. One of my legs buckled, and my head seemed to fill with pieces of shimmering light, like the reflection of the sun from broken water. I didn’t think I could walk back to the house.

“Carry me,” I said to my father.

“Make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll carry you, if you carry the ice.”

He hoisted me onto his back, and I tucked the ice against my side. I could feel the muscles of my stomach tightening against the cold.

The back of my father’s neck was a reddish brown color, and the skin there was folded into a slight X. I watched this X open and contract, and felt my body adjusting to the rhythm of his stride, as he walked us home across the forest.

It was not long after that that my father broke his arm, and I learned to bait the traps, and draw the water, and operate the machinery of our world.