These Silent Woods: A Novel(23)

Well. None of those things can happen now, of course, which can get depressing if I let myself think about it too hard. In the past, I’ve let myself do it, talk to her. Spin into regretting and wishing and remembering, and it’s a vortex, that type of thinking. It’ll suck you right down and you have to kick and claw your way back. Better to stay in the present. I turn down the kerosene lamp, watch the light fade to blue.

“You would’ve liked it here,” I whisper, and that is all I will say to her tonight.





ELEVEN




After breakfast the next morning, Finch gets back to work on her cross for the grave of Susanna the chicken. She finds two pieces of white pine and cuts them to size with her hatchet. I start splitting firewood, axe up high, down hard. I’ll feel it this evening in my right shoulder, a tightness, a soreness, an injury from my second tour where part of a building collapsed and a beam fell and knocked loose a chunk of bone, which the doctor said was probably best left untouched. It mostly doesn’t bother me—well, maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, a dull ache that never goes away—but certain activities aggravate it. Splitting wood. Drawing the bow.

Finch carefully opens the pocketknife and uses it to skin pieces of bark from the twigs, her hands steady and sure. She gets the twine I laid on the porch and begins wrapping it round and round in an X to tie the two pieces of wood together. I pick up an armload of wood and carry it to the porch. Since the woodstove is not only our source of heat but also our means of preparing food, we use it every day. Which means we go through a lot of wood.

Finch finishes the cross and takes it out back to where we buried Susanna. I hear her pounding it into the ground and sneak a look around the corner to see her kneeling and using a rock. Walt Whitman brushes against her back, wandering back and forth. The cross leans and she adjusts and pounds some more. I could offer to help her, but I’ve always been of the mind that my daughter should grow up to be independent and resourceful, because you never know what life might decide to throw at you. Finch is both. Besides, she would resent my offering, anyway, and she wouldn’t like it if I were spying on her, either.

At last she is satisfied. I duck behind the corner and get back to splitting wood and Finch soon comes around the front. She marches into the house, and comes out with her journal, a gift from Jake, a space where she draws and takes note of all her findings in the woods. There’s a pocket in the back where she keeps things. Pressed flowers, uncommon feathers. Her slingshot is tucked under her arm.

“Walt and me are gonna scout a little,” she says.

I nod. “Where you headed?”

She points to her left. “East.”

About a year ago I began letting her roam a bit. I still get a little nervous when she does, but she was getting antsy, pent up here all the time, watching and helping, and I felt guilty for limiting her so much. I figure a little bit of freedom—I can give that to her. She scouts the ground, looking for tracks; tucks herself down and sits real still until the critters come in. And they do. Her preternatural ability to be quiet, hide. Not sure I could find her myself if she ever decided to put me to the test. She knows the tracks of every animal that comes through here. Knows their trails, which way they move, where they bed. Knows the calls of the birds. She knows the woods just as well as I do, and she never goes far. I’ve made sure she understands: she cannot wander off.

I split the wood into quarters and leave them in a heap for Finch to cut into smaller pieces for kindling, which work well to get the fire hot quick on cold mornings. Then I move on to the bigger stuff. Overnighters, I call them: thick slabs of hardwood that I bank the fire with at bedtime.

After a while, I hear the call of a whip-poor-will: a means of communicating in the woods without hollering. I look for Finch, echo the sound. She glides into the yard with her journal in one hand and her slingshot in the other, and I take a good look at her, gangly and tall, all arms and legs. Her pants, which she has worn since last year, fall inches above her ankles.

“Well?”

“Three gray squirrels. A tufted titmouse and a pileated woodpecker.”

“Worthwhile trip, then.”

“The woodpecker’s working on a red oak, about a hundred yards up the hill.” She points. “The tree’s dead. We could use it for firewood.”

“Good find,” I tell her.

She fiddles with her pencil. “That was something, wasn’t it, Cooper? Driving on that big road to Walmart. Trucking along, the trees and cars racing past. It was like flying.”

I murmur an agreement.

“The gas station, all those houses, the things in people’s yards.” She climbs on top of a log, rocking back and forth, balancing. “And there’s more, I’m sure of it. There’s a whole world out there, Cooper.”



* * *



Dollhouses. Libraries. School lunches on those melamine trays. Funnel cakes and Ferris wheels. Swimming pools: the smell of chlorine in your hair, those white chairs that hue with mildew. Saturday-morning cartoons. Riding a school bus. Telephones: the comfort of hearing someone’s voice who is far away. Airplanes, the miracle of flight. The ocean. Crushes. Sleepovers with friends. Back-to-school shopping. Playing dress-up. Getting a driver’s license. Bowling alleys. Ice cream, hand-dipped. Sharing secrets with a best friend. Proms. Field trips. Movie theaters. Walmart.