He moved toward the piano table and started to pull at the wooden keys, prising them out of their positions. I walked toward him, formed my hand into a fist, and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. My father was still a strong man, so I think it must have been the surprise that made him double over, winded. He crumpled onto the floor, hugged his knees, and cried. In between my father’s wails I thought I heard the fire eating through the undergrowth, crackling, and for a second I thought maybe my father was right: it would be easier if we let it all go. I stood there wondering what was next, and a trickle of liquid ran down my thigh, the blood I had forgotten about flowing down my leg and around my ankle. At the same time, I looked out through the door and saw a curtain of rain move across the valley and up toward us and the fire. I went outside to greet it.
In my mind, the blood, the rain, and the fire became associated with the change in my father. He was subdued for days afterward, as though he knew he had been bad, and I often wondered if he had started the fire himself. But I became aware that his plans for what would become of us hadn’t gone away; they had been clarified. He still often got up in the middle of the night to draw diagrams and unintelligible scribbles over the walls of the cabin. In the mornings he would try to engage me with them, jabbering and jumping on the table to point out a particular argument about survivalism.
“Oliver Hannington wouldn’t be able to answer that one,” he would say.
“Oliver Hannington is dead; everyone is dead except us,” I would answer wearily.
The day after the fire, I walked through the burned rock forest. I found the metal part of the spade, but the handle was sooty and disintegrated in my hands. One of our plates was in a tree, the other below it, in a skeletal bush—the enamel scorched. With a stick, I poked through the ash caking the ground, but not even a corner of the sheet music remained. The forest smelled heavy and dirty and sorry for itself. The leaves in the canopy dripped and most of the vegetation had gone; the ground was grey sludge. The fire had reached the beginning of the clearing and had gone all the way down to the river, but the rain had started before it had spread across the mountain to the forest on the other side.
I found only one tree that had caught fire. It stood alone, blackened and twisted. I sat on a rock and watched a crow return to it again and again. The bird couldn’t settle; it was all wings and flap and rusty cawing. It must have had a nest high up where the limbs became distorted. But I had no sympathy for the crow; the feeling I had was jealousy. I would have given up everything—the music, my memories of London, the forest—to become that bird and to be able to fly away to make a new nest in a new tree. But I also acknowledged that if it were possible for me to wish hard enough to become that crow, it would be equally possible that long ago, something else—a fly, a rabbit, a bee—may have looked at me, Peggy Hillcoat, and been jealous of everything I had then and might have in the future. And if that creature had wished hard enough, it might have given up everything to become me.
19
After the fire, when I had finished growing and was as tall as I was ever going to be, I insisted on a bed of my own. I pleaded for it, stamped my feet, turned my back on my father, refused everything he asked for until he relented. My bed had squat log legs and a warped frame cut from a pine. We placed it against the back wall toward the stove, so each morning when I woke with my head warmed by the fire and my feet chilly, the first thing I saw was my piano. I had spent every spare five minutes rolling plant stalks along my thighs to make rope thick and strong enough to criss-cross the bed frame. On top, I laid a straw mattress—bundles of dried grass stitched together with more rope—and a layer of furs, and over that I put the scraps of my sleeping bag. I tried to hide my joy from my father, who sulked and predicted that the rope would sag and that by the end of the first night my bottom would be inches from the floor. I didn’t care.
“Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he called out bitterly when we were both in bed.
He complained about being cold, about there being too much space in his bed, but I lay in the dark, smiling up at the joists. And when I was sure, from the sound of his breathing, that he was asleep, I put my fingers between my legs.
The first morning, it took a few seconds to orient myself—I woke to sunlight inching under the door instead of an out-of-focus view of wood grain and splinters, my head having been squeezed in the gap between the wall and my father’s back. I jumped out of bed, opened the chimney damper, shoved a log onto the fire embers, and climbed back under my furs, luxuriating in my own space. From my low position in the bed I saw the name again—gouged into the wood under the shelf next to the stove. I hadn’t thought about Reuben for so long, I couldn’t remember when I had last touched the letters or even seen them. And how many autumns had passed since I had watched the boots walk in front of the nest? Eight? Nine? The memory of them was connected to a different girl, naïve and new to the forest. I lay on my stomach on my bed and stretched my arm above my head to touch with the very tips of my fingers where Reuben had once carved his name, and I mine. Had he been in die Hütte before us and abandoned it? And where was he now? I was sure that if he lived on our side of the river I would have bumped into him, or seen more evidence of his existence, other than a pair of damp boots.
That day, while I played the piano, hoed between the rows of new carrot leaves, and walked my usual route to check and set the traps, I wondered how the head and face at the other end of the boots might look. I gave him a clean-shaven chin, a flop of sandy hair, and blue eyes. I gave him an American accent, but he reminded me too much of Oliver Hannington, so I started again with dark curly hair and a drooping moustache. I thought about him crossing the river without being frightened, striding through the rapids in his sturdy boots and thick socks and climbing up to the ridge on the other side. He teetered on the lip of the Great Divide; he gazed into the empty blackness and he wasn’t afraid.
The spring afternoons were my own to do as I wanted. I sheltered from the rain in the nest while newborn ferns unfurled around me, and thought about whether Reuben might play the piano or the guitar. I dreamed of duets and recitals. Perhaps he lived in a brick house across the river, with a mirror and a bath. Or he was a famous Russian writer who didn’t speak any English and was searching for his wife and children. Maybe he had been mistakenly arrested for spying, escaped to the forest, and got stuck here after the Great Divide happened. When I found a patch of sunshine to lie in, I put my hands behind my head and remembered how his ankles had seemed particularly well fed. He must catch and eat deer, I thought, something my father and I had still never managed to do, or maybe there were boar across the river.
I watched for him when I walked amongst the celandines, their yellow heads paling into summer. I whirled around when I caught a movement from the corner of my eye, but the man was always faster. I studied the ground for footprints which weren’t ours, but saw only the tracks of deer, birds, and wolves. One day, I had the idea of climbing again up to the ledge where we had flown the kite, to see the very edge of our land through the spyglass. My father came into the cabin just as I was taking it down from the shelf.
“What are you going to do with that?” He seemed immediately suspicious.