These Silent Woods: A Novel
Kimi Cunningham Grant
For Dad
Like a bird that wanders from its nest
Is a man who wanders from his place.
—PROVERBS 27:8
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
—WALT WHITMAN
ONE
Something wrong, I can feel it: a sting pricking the skin and stitching inward.
A dream, maybe. Memory. Both have brought me their share of grief. I force open my eyes, the slightest tinge of gray seeping through the curtains. Not yet day. But light enough that I can make out the silhouette of her curled on the little bed beside mine, blanket tucked to her chin and wrapped tight around her small legs. Finch, sleeping. Safe.
Sleep pulls, a mighty and sinewy force.
But— Outside the cabin, movement. Something scuffling past the window. A struggle. Thump, death cry, distress.
Up now, Cooper. Get up.
I kick the covers off, sit up. Grab the headlamp, strap it to my forehead. I slide the Ruger, already loaded, from under the pillow next to mine.
Finch rolls over and sits up. She rubs her eyes. “What is it?”
“Stay here.”
I slip out of the bedroom. In the main room, I grab the shovel that’s always resting against the door, its metal handle propped beneath the doorknob. Slide the top lock, unhook the bottom one, the wooden door tight and moaning as I yank it.
Outside, still dark, the sun not up but coming, the woods gray and the trees, looming in shapes: dark sentinels, soldiers. All these years and still everything always comes back to that. War.
I flash the light around the yard, looking. Most likely just an animal, I know that, but last week we woke up and one was gone, a fat Neptune hen that strutted around like she owned the place. Poof, gone. No scat, no prints, nothing. Just a small hole dug under the fence. Well. Fox, coyote, raccoon, fisher: despite my good efforts to safeguard the place, the girls are an easy meal for any of them, and depending on how much time has passed, how long it took me to wake, the whole flock could be wiped out, all four of them, and then we’re in real trouble because we’ve lost our one and only guaranteed source of protein. Which is not a spot we can afford to be in, once January comes and the snow hits.
Something in the coop, I can hear him thrashing. A low growl. I pound on the metal roof the way I do to get the hens out when they’re on the eggs and don’t want to move. The sound thunders down and the whole structure shudders like the roof’s about to cave in. The thing scuttles out just like the hens always do, wobbles quick down the little ramp and into the grass. I shine the headlamp and see the eyes glowing, a menacing yellow-green in the dark. Raccoon. A bird in his mouth, limp. Smart little devils, that’s what Aunt Lincoln always said. And mean. He snarls and shows his teeth and lunges toward me as if to say, Go ahead.
Which I do. I open the gate and take the shovel and knock him good over the head and then again, smack smack smack, until he lies still and even though I’m sure every ounce of fight in him is gone, I keep on hitting him. I know there’s a meanness in that, striking him all those times, but sometimes a thing inside of me flashes, dark and despicable: it’s there, it’s part of me, and on occasion it lurches forth and can’t be held back. The hen twitches, the raccoon’s jaws still tight around her neck. I use the shovel to pull her free and somehow she is still alive so I hit her too, once, on her tiny head, hard enough to knock that little brain of hers right loose and crush the skull. I kneel down and shine the light on her. Finch won’t be happy about losing one of our girls. Neither am I, but Finch—she’ll take it personally.
“Cooper?”
I startle: her voice in the darkness.
“Told you to stay in the house, sugar.”
She has always had a way of moving undetected. Which is what I’ve taught her. How we live. Most kids, they lumber through the woods, kick up the leaves, chatter and scare everything off but the thrushes. Not Finch. Mostly this is a good thing, with us needing to hunt for food and live in quiet, but sometimes she does it and catches me off guard, like now, out in the yard and the dark, and me thinking I was alone, no audience to observe the dirty work of doling out death.
She stands beside me, her palm on my back. She puts her hand on my jaw and moves my head to shine the light on the chicken. “It’s Susanna,” she says.
I pull her onto my lap.
“You hit her.” She shivers, nothing but her pajamas on and it’s December and cold, the yard glistening with frost. She tucks her bare feet onto my knees.
“She was suffering.” We have gone over the ethics of the woods. We live it every day and have since she was a baby. You do not kill something just to kill. But also: you relieve suffering when you can. “She would’ve just lay there and died slowly, so what I did, hitting her, that sped it up is all. Helped her along.”
Finch pulls away, kneels down and strokes Susanna’s black and white feathers. She’s a Barred Rock, a pretty thing as far as chickens go. Me, I’m doing calculations and hoping she was one of the hens that was three years old and didn’t lay every day. We like our eggs. Need them. Come winter, with less sunlight and the hens’ productivity tapering off, we already won’t get enough.
Behind Finch, the woods burn purple red and then the sun pushes up out of the horizon. All the saplings and pines, the sun stretching its arms and everything bright and bathed in light and throwing new shadows, the world coming alive. I squeeze Finch’s hand.