Читать книгу Secondhand Summer - Dan L. Walker - Страница 9

Chapter 2

Mom broke the news one Sunday in March when we were sitting at the kitchen table eating apple Betty for dessert. Joe was there, Mary, Mom, and me. Only Dad was missing, and we hadn’t gotten used to that yet.

“We have to move to Anchorage,” said Mom. Her voice was soft but strong, and I can’t think of a much harder thing she ever had to say. “You kids can stay with the Browns until school is over. But I’m going to have to go get a job. You know there is nothing here, no work for a woman, nothing that pays anything.” The strength was gone suddenly from her voice. She looked around the cabin with tears filling her eyes and leaking down her cheeks. “You’ll never know how hard this is for me. To lose him like this, and then this too. Your father loved it here, you know.”

I could only think of how it felt to hug her, how she was soft on the outside and hard underneath. Dad’s hugs were just hard, no softness, their strength right out front. I thought she could use a hug just then, but one from me wouldn’t help much.

Joe leaned back on his chair and looked at the ceiling. “It makes sense to me,” he said. Of course, it was fine with him. He had stayed too long already. “It’ll be better, you’ll see.”

I saw Mom’s pain as she swept the hair back from her face and held the coffee cup to her lips so that the steam from it rose into her nose and eyes. She did that when she was choosing careful words. “We don’t all feel that way, Joe. We don’t all want to leave.”

“He’ll be here forever,” I heard myself say, “and we’ll be back.”

I don’t know why I said it that way, like a kid could make decisions about such things, about anything, but Dad was buried on the bluff above the inlet. The log house he built and the land he cleared, the smokehouse and all of it would be here. It wasn’t going away.

Mary erupted instead of speaking, as she always seemed to do. “Joe doesn’t care about anyone but himself, Mom. You know that. No one cares what I want. No one asks me!”

“Now Mary.”

“Daddy wouldn’t want us to leave,” said Mary. She turned a hard stare at the three of us at the table. “He built this place for us, and this is where we should stay.”

I thought Mom was going to cry again. “I want to stay too, Mary, but your father would expect us to do what we had to do to get by. He didn’t like going doodle-bugging for an oil company, off in the middle of nowhere all winter either. But he did it to support this family. And we are going to do what we have to.”

Joe was suddenly restless and he rose to tend the fire. He opened the stove, exposing the red coals and jabbed them with a poker, creating a shower of sparks. Then he slammed the stove door with a bang, pulled on Dad’s wool coat, and passed through the snow porch to the cold and silence of the winter night.

It was done. The talk at the kitchen table was just talk. As sure as the sunrise, we were moving to Anchorage. The wind in the trees was stronger now, and I could hear the snow brushing against the windows, and I wondered if it would be winter forever.

It was the darkest of winters, this winter after Dad died. The nights were endless and the sun of the day had no warmth. Only the wind seemed to move, moaning as it swept across the muskegs searching for spring.

During the long evenings I hid from the cold of death and winter by reading tales of the mountain men, and I studied their lives in our battered Compton’s Encyclopedia. I walked in the tracks of Lewis and Clark, and slept in the camp of John Colter. I laid trap for beaver with Joe Meek, greatest of the frontiersmen.

I decided I could be a mountain man, so I ventured beyond the shoveled paths and into the sleeping timber. The chickadees were the only sign of life as I crossed over places where I had played in the summer, and I walked taller as I passed deeper into the forest. I used to be scared of the shadowed maze of trees but now the birches and alders were stripped naked, and I could see deep into the woods, much farther than during the summer.

Small trails ran around the trees and under the brush. And I knew the broad tracks and black scat pellets of rabbit. A shadow moved and then froze. A rabbit saw me. I froze too and our eyes locked for a moment. I made a plan.

In the shed I found snares hanging in a corner, tinted with rust and long forgotten. I remembered pictures from books showing how they should be hung, and I tried to recall each detail as I separated the long pieces of wire with their tiny lassoes at the end. There were six in all, and I stretched each full length on the rough workbench beside the coffee cans full of nails and bolts and strange magical parts that only a father could put to use and therefore have reason to save. The shed had been Dad’s quiet place, and I felt a touch of guilt for the times I interrupted that silence, “What’s that do? Why is metal heavy? Will I ever be big as you?” He would nod and answer or nod and not answer without looking up from his work.

I had questions now, but they went unasked as I oiled the snares like Dad would have. I could smell his Prince Albert cigarettes and hear the curses he used on the rusty bolts and broken engine parts. I could feel his presence among his tools.

I set my snares by hanging them from bushes along the narrow little paths that ran under the moose brush and devil’s club where larger animals wouldn’t go. Some I tied on bushes bent over springlike and anchored with a notched stick. Others hung loose from the branches above. Sometimes, I used sticks to build a tiny fence along the trail through the snow. When a rabbit ran along the trail he was supposed to run his head into the noose until it tightened around his neck and choked him.

Each day, I went directly from the school bus to check my traplines. The dusk came early in the clearing and darkness had settled among the trees, making the giant spruces seem taller. I imagined sinister creatures hiding beneath them. On especially dark evenings I ran the whole trail in ten minutes, not stopping, just slowing down for a quick glance as I passed each snare. I was ashamed of the fear that sometimes grabbed me. I liked the snares and the trail and the time alone; I just didn’t like the woods in the dark.

The great adventure stories and my daydreams about them never showed that fear. I had to wonder, were the mountain men ever afraid of what could be out in the night beyond the light of their tiny campfire? Did they ever cower under blankets, wishing they were home in bed with people around them? The woods did that to me. Every shadowed tree, each gust of wind, every frightened thrush made me jump and tremble.

On one early spring evening, the winds off the inlet had filled most of the trails with snow, and I had to pick my way carefully, following the flags of plastic ribbon that marked the path through the forest. By now the days were longer, but there was little warmth from the sun, and the air bit at my cheeks.

I’d been trapping for weeks and had caught nothing, so I was complacent, expecting nothing, only half paying attention to the snares as I passed them. Then there it was!

The rabbit was dead. He lay stiff, frozen in an unfinished lunge with my snare cinched around his neck, strangling the last of his breath. It was just a meal now, rabbit stew lying cold on the snow. I stepped back, a lump of nausea rising in my throat. My first prey was dead before me, and I couldn’t touch it. I had found the run and set the snare, but I couldn’t touch the catch. I didn’t want to handle the rabbit I had killed, but I had to. I had to be a hunter, to take possession. I leaned forward and cautiously lifted one leg. The fur was soft like a cat’s, but beneath was solid like someone had stuffed a wooden cutout of a rabbit in a real rabbit’s fur. The eyes were real though, and the tiny crystal of blood frozen to the lips was real.

I forgot how cold it was. The nausea was passing, and I forgot that I had lost my father. I forgot everything but the dead rabbit, and I wanted to make a fire and eat it right there.

Gingerly I took the wire in two fingers and lifted the head. The snare wire was buried in the white fur and traces of blood tinted it pink. I gagged a little as I loosened the noose and pulled the carcass free. The animal was heavy and long, so I had to hold my arm up as I shuffled toward the house, changing hands every few steps.

I climbed over the berm pile and stopped to rest my arm. Dead things were heavy. I squatted in a small depression in the pile of stumps and brush that formed a low wall around our clearing. In the summer a large elderberry shaded this place and the fireweed and raspberries made it private. Wild grass formed a soft bed for daydreaming. It was there that I had dreamed of crossing the Rockies to trap for beaver, making detailed lists of gunpowder, salt pork, and trade beads. Gazing at the sky I could enumerate each detail of my outfit and weapons. I fought Indians and Hudson’s Bay Company trappers. But that was the summer; this day was real, and I passed over that dreaming place.

It was a short walk across the clearing to the house. I could see the tiny hump of it squatting in the snow, a rectangular log box with a pitched roof. Out behind was the outhouse and beyond that a dory turned over and hidden in the snow beside the smokehouse.

The light in the kitchen window made a pale square of gold in the snow, and my mother’s shadow passed through it. She waved when she saw me. I held up the rabbit and saw her smile.

“Don’t you bring that thing in here,” she said, catching me at the door. She smelled of homemade food and warmth, and the heat of the kitchen washed around her like surf. “My that’s a big one,” she added. “I guess I know what I’m cooking tomorrow night.”

The darkness around her eyes reminded me of our loss, and I was filled with a sense of panic. There was no father at this house to help me clean the rabbit. Dad would have known how to butcher the animal and probably would have told me a story while he did it.

“You remember how to clean them, right?”

“Yeah, no problem,” I lied.

I turned back to the forest, and beneath a giant spruce I used my knife to open the rabbit and expose the innards. They were cold, nearly frozen, and I had to tug and tear to pull the strange slimy shapes out of the cavity formed by the creature’s ribs. I was making a mess of it, ripping meat and hide, splattering myself with blood. I knew the skin should come off in one smooth slip like taking off one-piece long johns, but I didn’t know how, and there was no Dad there in that cold winter evening to show me.

I looked across the snow to the back edge of the clearing where the berm pile made a shadow in the pale light of evening. I didn’t feel anything like a mountain man. My feet were cold and it was dark under the trees where the night started early. There were cold tears on my cheeks. I knew that Dad would insist that the guts be left back in the trees away from the cabin where scavengers could get them. He would have turned grouchy if I complained.

Several yards into the shadowed forest I threw the rabbit guts across the snow where they spread a shameful stain. I walked slowly back to the house with my rabbit in my hand and wondered how many days I had left. I knew we couldn’t stay. Soon I would have to put away my snares and say good-bye to the cabin in the woods that I was just beginning to come to know.

As if reading my mind, Mom confirmed my fears when I returned to the house. She took the rabbit and laid it in a pan of cold water. As she washed her hands she leaned against the sink and smiled the first real smile I’d seen in several weeks. “Are you proud of yourself, bringing home dinner like a man?”

“I hope I gutted it okay,” I said.

“It’s just fine.” She moved across the room shortening the distance between us. “Sam, you’ll have to pull your snares in a few days.”

I nodded my answer, feeling the comfort of her presence and the warmth of the fire in the woodstove. I knew she was heading to Anchorage to start a job, and we kids were to be farmed out with friends until we finished the school year.

Perhaps it was the purity of a sleeping forest in winter, or maybe it was just the safe, warm feeling of the cabin itself with its memory of Dad’s laugh and the taste of his cream and sugar coffee. For whatever reason, the homestead was a good place to be, especially for a guy like me. Then I knew that in this, my first time in the woods alone, long before the end of winter’s shadow, I had started a new part of my life.