These Silent Woods: A Novel(4)

We have four chickens. Three, now. Twenty-five percent chance it was Susanna’s. “We can say it was hers if you’d like.”

Finch nods and scoops a bite of egg onto her fork. “Her last gift to us.”

“Thank you, Susanna,” I say.

“Thank you, Susanna.”

After breakfast we head out back with the same shovel that ended poor Susanna’s life, blood still on the bottom of it. I try to wipe it off in the grass but it’s already dry. We go about digging a small grave. I place Susanna in gently, with reverence for Finch’s sake, then scoop the dirt over her body and pat it down. Finch recites a poem that she has recently committed to memory. This is on account of the bookshelf in the main room of the cabin being chock-full of books. Some are almost two inches thick and thus provide quite a bit of reading. Hans Christian Andersen, Walt Whitman, Ovid. She has read them all. Jake’s father was a literature professor, so I guess you could say what we read here at the cabin is rather highbrow. Which for some reason strikes me as funny since that’s the last word anyone would ever use to describe the life we live out here, let alone me. Finch reads and rereads and learns and memorizes, and the truth is, she is now quite a wealth of information regarding American Literature Before 1900, which is the book she waded into last spring. Two thousand five hundred sixty-four pages and the print is so small it gives me a headache if I read for too long. Anyhow, I suspect it’s not normal for most eight-year-olds to be reciting Emily Dickinson or Anne Bradstreet or Walt Whitman, but that’s what Finch has been doing for half a year now.

“‘Nothing can happen more beautiful than death,’” Finch says. Whitman. Believe me, I love Whitman, but this is unbearably morbid from the mouth of a little kid. “Susanna, you were brave and beautiful and you gave us eggs.”

“Amen.”

“Say something, Cooper. Something besides amen.”

Finch doesn’t remember, but this is not the first time the two of us have stood graveside together, and even though it’s a chicken this time, I can’t help thinking about it. About her. Cindy, who, if things had turned out different, should’ve been my wife, who nearly was. I tilt my head to the sky, sun up now, no clouds at all, nothing but blue and the white streak of one jet, inching across the expanse. “Susanna, you were a good chicken, and I’m sorry you had to go like this, and I’m sorry for hitting you with the shovel, but it was better than a long and painful death.” I glance at Finch, who has her eyes pressed tight, and who wrinkles her nose at the last part, still doubting my decision. “Amen.”

“You could’ve done a poem,” Finch says, squinting in the bright light. She puts her hand up to shield her eyes and look at me. “A poem would be a better way to say goodbye.”

I reach out and tousle her hair. “I’m gonna split wood now.”

She holds her hand out. “Knife, please,” she says, and I slide it out of my back pocket. “I’m gonna start on a cross.”





TWO




Eight years out here and aside from a few snoopers, the only real trouble we’ve had is Scotland. Our neighbor downriver, so he says, though truth be told, my only confirmation is a line of smoke lifting from the treetops on cold days. Shortly after we got here, he came drifting into the yard, quiet as a ghost. Just appeared. It was August, and the leaves were thick on the trees so if I set Finch on her blanket in just the right spot she could be in the shade, and then I’d move her when the sun shifted west across the sky. She was a baby, then, just learning to sit on her own.

“You’re not Jake,” he said, and he was there, ten feet behind me. I’m telling you: I never saw him coming, never heard a rustle of leaves, a stick breaking, nothing.

Well. I decided right then and there I couldn’t be Kenny Morrison anymore. Not sure how I had the presence of mind to realize this, me not having seen another human being besides Finch for over a month and him showing up and startling me so bad I could barely think, but I did. We were living in the tent because at that point Jake still didn’t know we were here, and I felt funny about just moving into the cabin without asking. The only books I had were Aunt Lincoln’s Bible and her The Book of North American Birds and I guess that’s what made me think of birds. Birds on the mind. I went with Cooper after the Cooper’s hawk. If you know anything at all about birds, you will recall that the Cooper’s hawk is a stealthy creature: sometimes it will fly low to the ground and then soar up and over an obstruction to surprise its prey. Anyhow, that’s who I’ve been ever since, to Finch, too. She’s never called me anything else.

“This is private property,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s not your private property, is it?”

The way he said it, cool and sharp. Just looked at me. And when he looked, it was like he could see beyond the outside and into the inside, like he knew about the things that were there that I wished were gone.

“Who the hell are you?”

He spat to the side and tobacco clung to his chin. He wiped his face with his dirty sleeve and said, “Don’t appreciate the foul language or the tone. Uncalled for. I’m Scotland, your neighbor. I live that way.” He nodded his head in the direction of a cliff south of here, where the river began to bend. When he turned I could see he had an AK-47 strapped across his back. An AK-47!