The Scent Keeper(8)

After a time, I heard water slapping against rocks in the distance. The waves sounded sharper, not like the gentle lapping of the tide against the sand of our lagoon. Cleo and I pushed through a last gasp of green to find ourselves on a bare, gray landing of wind-smoothed rock, about ten feet wide, the sky huge beyond it. We inched close to its edge and stared out at an endless horizon of islands, and then down to the water far below us.

My eyes had never had such distance to travel. I didn’t know what to do with all that space. It felt as if it could reach out and grab me, take me with it. I backed up, one step at a time, until my heels banged into raw, wet wood. I looked behind me and saw a bench tucked into the very edge of the woods, half-crumpled to the ground by rain and time.

The runaway’s, I thought.

I leaned down and touched its crumbling surface, wondering what had brought that man to this open place, to sit here and look back to what he’d left. What was out there?

Cleo and I stayed on that bluff for a long time before we took the path back to the cabin. I didn’t tell my father what I’d found, worried that he might not let me go back. I didn’t know what I thought about that place; I only knew that my father had never showed it to me, and somehow it seemed impossible that he didn’t know of its existence. My father knew everything.

After that, Cleo and I started going to the bluff almost every day, and over time, my initial fear gave way to curiosity. I would bring lunch with me, and Cleo and I would share it as we sat closer and closer to the edge, watching the big water. Sometimes we saw a whale or a shining fleet of dolphins, or brown logs in the distance that looked like they were swimming. Sometimes a motorboat passed by, growling like a giant, angry insect. I had known these things only as pictures in my father’s science books, or the collection of fairy tales. Out on the bluff, the lines between the kinds of books blurred. I hid from the boats, certain they held pirates.

Once, however, I saw a boy with red hair standing at the back of a fishing boat. He looked young, perhaps my age. Cleo and I came back every day for the next week, but I never saw him again. It made me wonder, though—where was his home?

That evening over dinner, I asked my father, “Why are we here, Papa? Why are there no other people on our island?”

My father put down his fork. “People lie, Emmeline,” he said, “but smells never do.” He seemed to think that explained everything.

“All people?” I persisted. “What about Jack?”

“Even Jack,” my father said, and his face grew so dark I didn’t ask any more.

But it was then I knew I wouldn’t ever tell my father about the trail to the bluff. He had his secrets, but this one was mine.



* * *



Time passed. Another spring approached. I turned twelve, my legs and arms growing like saplings, strong and lean. When we went to the lagoon, I could now catch the clam water as it squirted into the sky, dig deep into the sand and find the waiting shells myself. I could make a fire with a bow drill and a piece of dried moss, use a sharp knife to pry a barnacle from its rocky shelf in the time it took to count to two. My foraging basket was always as full as my father’s now, and more and more often I filled it on my own, on my way back from my adventures in the woods with Cleo.

Cleo and I had taken to running along the tops of downed trees, my arms outstretched, her cloven feet sure and steady. But I wanted to be higher still. I started climbing up the standing trees, branch by branch, pretending I was Jack the Scent Hunter. Sometimes, clinging high up in the evergreen branches, surrounded by the gentle clacking of their needles, I would catch a tantalizing whiff of something else—a warm tendril of baking bread, far in the distance. A faint wake of the grumbling black odor left behind by boats. Pieces of a story my father would never tell me. A world I would never see. I would crane myself out into the air, feeling the branches bend beneath my weight. It all left me feeling more restless, and lonelier than before, but when I finally climbed down, there was Cleo waiting for me.

My father had taught me how to trim Cleo’s hooves and brush her. I loved the rhythm of my hand moving across her strong back, her teeth nibbling at me as I worked. It was a way to end each day. At night, I would hear her bleating in her shed; my father told me that goats liked to bundle up together, no matter the weather. I would wait until he was asleep and then I’d sneak down my ladder and out to her shed, snuggling next to Cleo until she quieted down. Sometimes I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until it was almost light.

Sometimes on those nights, I worried that there were too many secrets piling up between my father and me. But there was something about laying my head against Cleo’s flank, the solidity of her warm and compact body, that made me feel full inside. That made me feel as if there were more than two people in the world. So I said nothing.





THE SCENTS


That summer when I was twelve, my father started getting quieter, his stories disappearing even though winter was still a far-off thought. He no longer asked what Cleo and I had found on our explorations, and never said what he had done while I was gone, although I realized one day it had been a long time since I had come home to find a full foraging basket on the table.

But I was happy with Cleo, and I rationalized that my father wouldn’t tell me what was going on even if I asked. Then one day I walked in the cabin door and saw him standing in front of the woodstove, its door open, one of the scent-papers in his hand. An empty bottle was on the table, a ring of red wax still clinging to its stopper.