My father was a natural mender of things. At night, for instance, he would tinker with little objects around the house, even the things that were irreparably broken. Every few days he would work for an hour or so on the small electric generator we owned. The generator had lost some basic internal mechanism, and though it looked easy to fix, in all the time I lived with him he was never successful. A few yards into the woods was a place where the stream banks narrowed and the water began to race, and he had placed a dam there and fitted it with a turbine. With this turbine and the generator, he had hoped to produce enough electricity to light the house, but instead he made a simple wheel for me to play with.
One summer afternoon, a few months after my fourth birthday, I found a turtle wedged beneath the turbine. I had taken a pair of pliers from my father’s tool chest, setting off into the woods to play fix-the-dam, and when I got there the turtle was submerged in the water. She was trying to push herself free. The long shaft of her neck was reaching from beneath the current of the stream, and her legs were shunting back and forth in the clay. I was afraid that she would suffocate—her head would drop from exhaustion, and she would be trapped without air beneath the water—so I pulled her loose and the turbine began to spin again, throwing off drops of water. I carried the turtle inside and showed her to my father. He held her in his hands.
“Did you know that turtles are like trees?” he said. “You can tell how old they are by counting the plates on their shell.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course. Here, I’ll show you.” We counted the fourteen plates on the turtle’s shell, one by one. “So she’s fourteen years old,” my father said. He tapped on the shell, then peered in through the opening in the front, trying to spot the turtle’s head. “Where’s my tool chest?” he asked. I pointed. “Get me a paint marker, will you?”
I ran to the other side of the room and brought him a thick red marker. It made a rattling sound when he shook it and gave off a sharp bleachlike smell. He wrote my name in capital letters on the turtle’s rearmost plate: HOLLY. “There,” he said, and he blew gently on the paint to dry it. “Now if we see her again, we’ll know she’s ours.” He capped the marker and held the turtle at arm’s length, examining his writing in a shaft of sunlight. “That’s what your name means,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that? ‘Turtle.’”
The lessons my father taught me rarely left me feeling any wiser. They only deepened my awareness of everything I would never know.
One day that fall I was walking alongside the stream, following a boat I had made from a strip of birch bark and some epoxy glue. It hit an eddy, and I tapped it loose with a stick, and then my father came up behind me and rested his hand on my shoulder. “The Marie Celeste,” he said solemnly. “The boat without captain or crew.”
“I made it in the kitchen,” I said. “I didn’t glue my fingers together.” This is what he always asked me when I told him that I’d been building something: Did you glue your fingers together? If I answered yes, he would wrap his hands around them and pretend that he couldn’t pull them apart.
He fished the boat from the water and set it on the shore. “Let me tell you about the Marie Celeste.”
I propped myself against the high dirt bank of the stream, listening.
“It was a ghost ship. The story goes that sailors would see it traveling toward them in the fog. Its masts were always raised, its walls always straight, and they would signal for it to change course so that it wouldn’t sail into them. When it drew near, though, they would find it deserted—no men on deck, no lights inside, nothing. Somebody boarded it once and found clothes hanging on the wash lines. Beds were rumpled in the shapes of bodies, dinner plates were black with grease. The captain’s log was still open on his desk. Whatever had happened there had happened fast. Nobody was ever able to bring the Marie Celeste into shore, and every now and then you would hear another report of it. It seemed to sail itself, people said. The ocean is a big place, so you never know. Maybe it’s still out there.”
I had never seen the ocean and I tried to imagine it. All I could envision was our field on the days when it flooded, the surface of the water dimpled by blades of grass.
My father lifted me onto the bank of the stream, standing me on my feet.
“Take a walk with me,” he said.
Not far from our house, less than half an hour’s travel, was a cave which the heat of the sun never seemed to penetrate. We had taken shelter there once during a violent summer rain, and even then the air was as cold and still as the frozen air of winter. I could see my breath in the cave, and I enjoyed watching the shapes it made: mushroom shapes, and apple shapes, and finger shapes. The water, which stood in pools at the entrance, always wore a thick shell of ice, and if we chipped at this ice and wrapped the larger pieces in rags, we could carry them home before they melted.
As we hiked through the forest, I tried to match my step to my father’s, but his pace was much quicker than mine, his stride much longer. He could step over patches of mud that I had to leap. He could climb onto logs without using his hands. “Slow down,” I kept calling, and he would turn and wait for me, fanning himself with his T-shirt.
After a while, I began to feel winded, and I asked him a question, knowing from experience that as he spoke he would slow down in thought. “Did you ever see the Marie Celeste?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No, I’ve never even been on a boat, actually.” He began to slow down. “But I did read about it. And I heard stories. People used to tell stories about all sorts of strange things.” A switch of thorns was bending into the path, and he held it out of the way for me as I walked past. “Ghosts and fairies. Lake monsters and UFOs. You have to wonder what’s become of all that now that we’re gone. The ghosts, for instance: let’s say they were real. Were they haunting us, then, or were they haunting the places where we found them? And if they were haunting us, did they disappear when we did, or are they still floating around out there inside all those empty houses? Are they anything without us? What did we mean to them?”
Nearby, a squirrel sat on a yellow log taking apart a pine cone. My father ducked beneath a vine, and I followed him.
“If I vanished today, Holly, what would you do?” he said. His voice was gentle. I took his sleeve. “You would miss me at first, but how long would it be before I came to seem like a dream to you? How long before you could live happily without even a thought of me? I hope I’ve been able to give you the things you need.”
I had never asked myself these questions before, but I knew that if my father were to leave me, or to give up his life somewhere in the forest, I would be utterly lost and alone. The animals were stronger than me, larger and faster and quieter on their feet, and the house grew cold and dark at night, and I would not know what to do. Even the lanterns, on their shelves in the storeroom, were too high for me to reach without my father. I began to cry.
“Oh, hey,” he said, bending over to console me. “Hey, hey, hey.” He kissed my cheek, and my forehead, and rubbed a tear away with his thumb. “I’m not going anywhere, baby. You don’t have to worry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
I felt the weight of his arm on my shoulder, and when I swallowed a breath, I could smell the faint palm scent of the soap that he used and the strong spice of his sweat, a smell that still today I associate with my father. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. I nodded. And then, looking up, I realized we were at the cave.
I sat inside on a ridge of stone as my father chipped at a frozen puddle. He took a hammer from his pocket, then knocked at the ice with the claw of the hammer until it came apart with a crack. When it was time to go, he bundled a few of the larger chunks in a scarf and we stepped outside. The sudden change in temperature made me feel dizzy. One of my legs buckled, and my head seemed to fill with pieces of shimmering light, like the reflection of the sun from broken water. I didn’t think I could walk back to the house.
“Carry me,” I said to m
y father.
“Make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll carry you, if you carry the ice.”
He hoisted me onto his back, and I tucked the ice against my side. I could feel the muscles of my stomach tightening against the cold.
The back of my father’s neck was a reddish brown color, and the skin there was folded into a slight X. I watched this X open and contract, and felt my body adjusting to the rhythm of his stride, as he walked us home across the forest.
It was not long after that that my father broke his arm, and I learned to bait the traps, and draw the water, and operate the machinery of our world.
I was sitting in the living room cutting dolls from a brown paper sack when the front door swung open, banging heavily into the wall. My father stumbled toward me. He did not shut the door behind him, and a dry maple leaf came blowing in across the floor, skittering on its legs like a spider. “I need you to do something for me, Holly,” he said. He spoke calmly but tears were rolling down his face. His breathing was ragged. “Do you know the way to the cave? Can you get there by yourself?”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Daddy hurt himself.” I looked at his arm: beneath the elbow it was twisted and swollen, and the hair there, painted with blood, was flattened to his skin. He said, “I need you to get me some ice. Can you do that? Can you hurry?”
I could. I ran to the cave, watching the trunks of great trees slide past me like creatures in a dream, the gaps in the branches showing flashes of white sky. I was surprised by how little my body grew tired. I did not think to bring a hammer, so I slammed at the ice with a hoof-shaped stone, and I did not think to bring a rag, so I wrapped the chunks in my shirt to carry them home.
My father had treated his wound with alcohol and a sterile cotton pad, securing his arm in a temporary sling. When I arrived home with the ice, he loosened the bandages.
“All right,” he said. “Now I need you to do something else for me. I need you to take my arm”—he touched the thick barrow of muscle just beneath his shoulder—“and hold it tight. Don’t let go, okay?”
I did as he said, clenching his arm to my chest.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Before I could say yes, he grabbed hold of his arm and, pulling hard, hitched it into place. The bone made a grating sound and then it gave a sudden pop. My father screamed, lurching in his chair, and I fell backward and lost my grip.
“God-damn it!” he shouted.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. I thought that by letting go I had torn something loose inside him: it was the scream he had made, and the tightening of his face. “I tried to hold on.”
His eyes were squeezed shut and he sighed—a weary, lingering breath. “Okay,” he said to himself, breathing deeply. “Okay. I’ll be all right. Everything’s going to be all right.” He placed the ice I had brought him around the break, and a few minutes later he removed it and strapped his arm into a splint.
That afternoon he took to his bed.
It was more than a week before he left the house, and more than a month before he was able to venture back into the forest. During that time I took on the work of our family, caring for him as best I could.
I woke when the sky was still violet. The air was always cold at that hour, and the first whistles of the birds could almost be mistaken for a part of the silence. I checked the traps on the far side of the stream, rebaiting the ones that had been touched off during the night. I caught small iridescent fish that turned gray when they reached the air. I gathered wood and picked mushrooms and carried water to the house in a green plastic bucket. I learned how to sift through coals for glowing orange embers and how to blow sparks from them to start a fire. I learned how to gut and cook the fish that I caught. I learned how to open cans with a can opener, biting securely into the lid and then twisting the handle in a circle. I learned how to sweep floors and change bandages and oil the hinges of our weathered front door. So many things are mysteries until you have experienced them. I felt as though I was learning to be my father.
Every day, when I had finished my early morning chores, I would prepare a breakfast of boiled oats for him and knock on his bedroom door. He would be waiting for me there, just as I had waited for him in the mossy hollow of the oak tree. I was filled—constantly filled— with a sense of surprise at my own skill, my own capability, and each morning I took more of my father’s heart into my care. “How’s your arm?” I would ask.
“Stiff,” he would say. “Stiff, but getting better.” His hair was always crisp from sleep, his room always musty. I would watch as he added honey and milk to his oatmeal. “Did we catch anything in the traps?” he would ask.
“No,” I would answer. “The animals just eat the bait and wander off into the woods.”
He would say, “Those traps aren’t worth mud.”
I would agree with him: “They’re pretty useless, all right.”
There we were, the two of us talking together like grown men, and this meant all the world to me.
Afterward I would help him get dressed—maneuvering his broken arm through his shirt sleeve, lacing and knotting his boots for him. Then we would play cards together or wash clothes together or sit together and listen to the flow of the stream, which was running shallow that season. He might read me a story as I chopped and mixed the ingredients for dinner. He might steady the ladder as I climbed into the storeroom to get some lamp oil. Sometimes he would worry that his arm wasn’t setting properly. “Should it still be hurting?” he would ask. “I’m not in any pain right now, but the break stabs at me whenever I try to move it. I just wish I could get rid of this stupid splint. You shouldn’t have to work so hard, Holly,” he would say. “I want to be able to take care of you. We need each other.”
One day as I was standing in the woods, peeling a strip of birch bark into threads of tinder, a bear came lumbering through the brush and stopped not ten yards away from me. It was a small black bear, the fur around its face specked with some kind of snowlike grain, and it gave off a wet, slightly stale smell. Bears are perhaps the most human of all the forest creatures, and they can seem strangely impassive at times. This one simply looked me in the eye for a moment, turned on its legs, and swung away.
When I got home, I told my father what had happened. His eyes creased with alarm. “Are you sure you don’t want me to teach you to use the gun?”
“I’m sure,” I said. I had fired a gun once—or rather, I had held the carriage of a gun against my shoulder as my father pulled the trigger. I found the noise it made frightening, and liked neither the smell that rose from the barrel nor the way it kicked back against me when it fired, which made it seem alive. As I answered my father, my life seemed completely within my control, a good feeling. I was strong and smart and proud. I was capable of making my own decisions. I was only five years old—almost five years old—but I was growing into my adulthood.
Still, at night, as the birds slowly stopped their singing and the insects slowly began their own, I would become a child again. My father and I would watch the stars come up one by one through the crowns of the trees, and after a while we would head inside. I was always sleepy from all the work I had done, and he would usually have to squeeze my hand to keep me from drifting away. After I had helped him out of his T-shirt, he would tuck me into bed and sing me a lullaby, and then, gradually, I would fall asleep:
All the world is gone away,
All the light and all the gray
Of buildings, houses, streets, and schools,
All the wishes, all the rules,
Of everybody, everywhere,
Oh, all their dreams and all their cares.
Our loved ones and our dearest friends
Are waiting at the journey’s end.
The moon is high, the night is deep.
Hush now, baby, go to sleep.
Though his arm never did heal perfectly—he experienced a dull pain in damp weather, and there was a glossy line just below the
elbow where the hair would not grow—my father was soon able to untie his bandages and remove the splint. He seemed to fill with his old remembered energy. He could walk long miles into the forest, he could hunt and he could fish, and he could carry me without difficulty. We resumed the pattern of our lives.
The stream in our front yard was running thinner than it ever had before. It was our only reliable source of water, and now it was fogged with silt—that is, where there was any current at all. There were places where it ran so shallow that the water seemed to be simply filtering up from the earth. Winter was nearing its end, and the last few months had seen pale white skies and little rain, but this in itself was not unusual and the stream had never flowed so weakly before. It was as if the land which had for so long given us shelter was finally reconsidering its bounty. I half expected to see the blackberry bushes reabsorbing their fruit, the grass shrinking back into the mud, the trees and saplings taking in their branches like umbrellas.
After my father roused me from my place in the oak tree one day, he decided to head into the forest to investigate. He thought that there might be a plug of wood damming the stream somewhere, or that the bank might have collapsed, diverting the water into an adjacent streambed. He told me that he was going to walk a few miles upstream and that he would be back by late afternoon.
I passed the time whittling a small chunk of hickory into a spinning top: the flesh of the wood was tough, the fibers sinewy, and try as I might I was unable to perfect the balance. My father returned home as the sun was sinking into the trees and casting a quiet red light on the grass and the clover. He sat down beside me at the saddle of the front door and took off his shoes, flexing the muscles of his feet.
“Well?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” he said. He had hiked along the ledge of the stream for more than five hours, crossing to the other side when he hit a thicket or a patch of thorns, sometimes walking in the streambed itself. In all that time, he said, he had never seen the current grow wider than his wrist. “The water’s not disappearing along the way, it’s simply not there.”