Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (26 page)

I was sitting in the living room cutting dolls from a brown paper sack when the front door swung open, banging heavily into the wall. My father stumbled toward me. He did not shut the door behind him, and a dry maple leaf came blowing in across the floor, skittering on its legs like a spider. “I need you to do something for me, Holly,” he said. He spoke calmly but tears were rolling down his face. His breathing was ragged. “Do you know the way to the cave? Can you get there by yourself?”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Daddy hurt himself.” I looked at his arm: beneath the elbow it was twisted and swollen, and the hair there, painted with blood, was flattened to his skin. He said, “I need you to get me some ice. Can you do that? Can you hurry?”

I could. I ran to the cave, watching the trunks of great trees slide past me like creatures in a dream, the gaps in the branches showing flashes of white sky. I was surprised by how little my body grew tired. I did not think to bring a hammer, so I slammed at the ice with a hoof-shaped stone, and I did not think to bring a rag, so I wrapped the chunks in my shirt to carry them home.

My father had treated his wound with alcohol and a sterile cotton pad, securing his arm in a temporary sling. When I arrived home with the ice, he loosened the bandages.

“All right,” he said. “Now I need you to do something else for me. I need you to take my arm”—he touched the thick barrow of muscle just beneath his shoulder—“and hold it tight. Don’t let go, okay?”

I did as he said, clenching his arm to my chest.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Before I could say yes, he grabbed hold of his arm and, pulling hard, hitched it into place. The bone made a grating sound and then it gave a sudden pop. My father screamed, lurching in his chair, and I fell backward and lost my grip.

“God-
damn
it!” he shouted.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. I thought that by letting go I had torn something loose inside him: it was the scream he had made, and the tightening of his face. “I tried to hold on.”

His eyes were squeezed shut and he sighed—a weary, lingering breath. “Okay,” he said to himself, breathing deeply. “Okay. I’ll be all right. Everything’s going to be all right.” He placed the ice I had brought him around the break, and a few minutes later he removed it and strapped his arm into a splint.

That afternoon he took to his bed.

It was more than a week before he left the house, and more than a month before he was able to venture back into the forest. During that time I took on the work of our family, caring for him as best I could.

I woke when the sky was still violet. The air was always cold at that hour, and the first whistles of the birds could almost be mistaken for a part of the silence. I checked the traps on the far side of the stream, rebaiting the ones that had been touched off during the night. I caught small iridescent fish that turned gray when they reached the air. I gathered wood and picked mushrooms and carried water to the house in a green plastic bucket. I learned how to sift through coals for glowing orange embers and how to blow sparks from them to start a fire. I learned how to gut and cook the fish that I caught. I learned how to open cans with a can opener, biting securely into the lid and then twisting the handle in a circle. I learned how to sweep floors and change bandages and oil the hinges of our weathered front door. So many things are mysteries until you have experienced them. I felt as though I was learning to be my father.

Every day, when I had finished my early morning chores, I would prepare a breakfast of boiled oats for him and knock on his bedroom door. He would be waiting for me there, just as I had waited for him in the mossy hollow of the oak tree. I was filled—constantly filled— with a sense of surprise at my own skill, my own capability, and each morning I took more of my father’s heart into my care. “How’s your arm?” I would ask.

“Stiff,” he would say. “Stiff, but getting better.” His hair was always crisp from sleep, his room always musty. I would watch as he added honey and milk to his oatmeal. “Did we catch anything in the traps?” he would ask.

“No,” I would answer. “The animals just eat the bait and wander off into the woods.”

He would say, “Those traps aren’t worth mud.”

I would agree with him: “They’re pretty useless, all right.”

There we were, the two of us talking together like grown men, and this meant all the world to me.

Afterward I would help him get dressed—maneuvering his broken arm through his shirt sleeve, lacing and knotting his boots for him. Then we would play cards together or wash clothes together or sit together and listen to the flow of the stream, which was running shallow that season. He might read me a story as I chopped and mixed the ingredients for dinner. He might steady the ladder as I climbed into the storeroom to get some lamp oil. Sometimes he would worry that his arm wasn’t setting properly. “Should it still be hurting?” he would ask. “I’m not in any pain right now, but the break stabs at me whenever I try to move it. I just wish I could get rid of this stupid splint. You shouldn’t have to work so hard, Holly,” he would say. “I want to be able to take care of you. We need each other.”

One day as I was standing in the woods, peeling a strip of birch bark into threads of tinder, a bear came lumbering through the brush and stopped not ten yards away from me. It was a small black bear, the fur around its face specked with some kind of snowlike grain, and it gave off a wet, slightly stale smell. Bears are perhaps the most human of all the forest creatures, and they can seem strangely impassive at times. This one simply looked me in the eye for a moment, turned on its legs, and swung away.

When I got home, I told my father what had happened. His eyes creased with alarm. “Are you sure you don’t want me to teach you to use the gun?”

“I’m sure,” I said. I had fired a gun once—or rather, I had held the carriage of a gun against my shoulder as my father pulled the trigger. I found the noise it made frightening, and liked neither the smell that rose from the barrel nor the way it kicked back against me when it fired, which made it seem alive. As I answered my father, my life seemed completely within my control, a good feeling. I was strong and smart and proud. I was capable of making my own decisions. I was only five years old—almost five years old—but I was growing into my adulthood.

Still, at night, as the birds slowly stopped their singing and the insects slowly began their own, I would become a child again. My father and I would watch the stars come up one by one through the crowns of the trees, and after a while we would head inside. I was always sleepy from all the work I had done, and he would usually have to squeeze my hand to keep me from drifting away. After I had helped him out of his T-shirt, he would tuck me into bed and sing me a lullaby, and then, gradually, I would fall asleep:

All the world is gone away,
All the light and all the gray
Of buildings, houses, streets, and schools,
All the wishes, all the rules,
Of everybody, everywhere,
Oh, all their dreams and all their cares.
Our loved ones and our dearest friends
Are waiting at the journey’s end.
The moon is high, the night is deep.
Hush now, baby, go to sleep.

Though his arm never did heal perfectly—he experienced a dull pain in damp weather, and there was a glossy line just below the elbow where the hair would not grow—my father was soon able to untie his bandages and remove the splint. He seemed to fill with his old remembered energy. He could walk long miles into the forest, he could hunt and he could fish, and he could carry me without difficulty. We resumed the pattern of our lives.

The stream in our front yard was running thinner than it ever had before. It was our only reliable source of water, and now it was fogged with silt—that is, where there was any current at all. There were places where it ran so shallow that the water seemed to be simply filtering up from the earth. Winter was nearing its end, and the last few months had seen pale white skies and little rain, but this in itself was not unusual and the stream had never flowed so weakly before. It was as if the land which had for so long given us shelter was finally reconsidering its bounty. I half expected to see the blackberry bushes reabsorbing their fruit, the grass shrinking back into the mud, the trees and saplings taking in their branches like umbrellas.

After my father roused me from my place in the oak tree one day, he decided to head into the forest to investigate. He thought that there might be a plug of wood damming the stream somewhere, or that the bank might have collapsed, diverting the water into an adjacent streambed. He told me that he was going to walk a few miles upstream and that he would be back by late afternoon.

I passed the time whittling a small chunk of hickory into a spinning top: the flesh of the wood was tough, the fibers sinewy, and try as I might I was unable to perfect the balance. My father returned home as the sun was sinking into the trees and casting a quiet red light on the grass and the clover. He sat down beside me at the saddle of the front door and took off his shoes, flexing the muscles of his feet.

“Well?” I asked.

“Not a thing,” he said. He had hiked along the ledge of the stream for more than five hours, crossing to the other side when he hit a thicket or a patch of thorns, sometimes walking in the streambed itself. In all that time, he said, he had never seen the current grow wider than his wrist. “The water’s not disappearing along the way, it’s simply not there.”

“You didn’t see anything at all?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Well, nothing that might explain where the water’s going. I did see Holly the Turtle. She’s living beneath a stand of roots about an hour away from here.” He smiled and tousled my hair. “She sends her regards.”

Now and then, when I saw a turtle scuffing through the leaves, I had wondered about Holly in the idle way you wonder about those small things in your life that have disappeared. I wholly expected to see the little red signet of my name vanishing behind a log one day, or lolloping around the corner of the house. How likely is it that such a creature will circle back through the world to find you once again? I don’t know, but I have heard the same story in other shapes, and I never doubted my father.

Later that evening, he confessed his worries to me. While he could filter the dirt from the water and boil it free of any impurities, he wasn’t sure what we would do if the stream ran completely dry. What if we awoke one morning to find the streambed jigsawed with cracks? It sent a nervous flutter through his stomach. “I have an idea, though,” he said. “What I want to do is travel up-forest a few days and see if I can learn anything. If I go, though, Holly, I might be gone for as long as a week. Will you be okay if I’m gone that long? Do you think you can take care of yourself?”

“Couldn’t I go with you?”

My father hoisted me onto his lap. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. First of all, I don’t know what I’ll find. And then what would we do if you got hurt? How would we take care of you?” He jogged his leg, steadying me with his hand. “No, I don’t want to leave you here, but it’s the only way.”

I was unconvinced, though, and that night, as he filled his backpack with food and blankets and his first aid kit, I decided that I would follow him into the forest the next morning. After all, I had taken care of him when he broke his arm. What would happen if
he
got hurt, far from home, with no one who loved him?

My father woke me early in the morning, while the night was still dark. His eyes reflected two tiny threads of light from the lantern in his hands, which was burning dimly. “I’m leaving now, Holly. Don’t forget to check the traps when you wake up. Treat any scrapes you get with iodine. Don’t walk too far from home. The wood is stacked in the pantry. The tool chest is in the living room. I’ve left a lamp out for you. You can open a few extra cans if you want.” His eyes were wet with tears. “I guess that’s it. You’ll be just fine.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Bye, sweetness.”

I waited until I heard the front door click shut, and then I hurried outside. I was already dressed and had packed a small satchel for myself full of food and a change of clothing. As I stepped out into the predawn coolness, I was just able to spot the misty outline of my father vanishing into the trees. I knew that he would follow the course of the stream, and that I could pursue him without difficulty, but I did not want to lose sight of him. I walked as quickly as I could into the forest.

All morning I hid behind trees and boulders and nests of briar as I trailed behind him. A purple light spread across the forest floor, brightening as the sun climbed into the sky, and when I looked up, I noticed the tight yellow buds of leaves twitching on the tips of the tree branches. I tried to stay far enough behind my father so that he wouldn’t hear me, walking so that when I held my thumb at arm’s length it covered his body. Once, he stopped to pick the burrs from his socks: he carefully disengaged each one, flicking them out over the stream, and when he finished, he happened to glance up in my direction. My heart began to hammer in my chest, and I felt a needlelike frost dissolve though my fingers and toes. It was only by luck that he didn’t discover me.

It was not until noon that I gave myself away. The stream took an ell, and my father was concealed from me by a screen of poplars. When I rounded the corner, he was standing there wiping the sweat from his brow. He started when he saw me and then his mouth lengthened into a slow smile, which he tried to stifle. He shook his head and placed his hands on his hips.