Far Far Away (29 page)

Well, that is how it is. The night that I closed the lids of my nephew’s eyes, the course of my life altered. During my nephew’s earlier days, watching him in his sweet discovery and play, I had nursed thoughts of marriage and fatherhood and family, but these ideas fell away with his last breath. I turned. My vital principle flowed only to the studies, the papers, the essays, the dictionary. Projects without searching eyes and gasping mouths.

But enough of my morbid thoughts. The cocks were crowing, the town was stirring, and I fell again to my duties of watching over Jeremy during his sad, dark time.

Sad and dark, and soon to be sadder and darker still.

It seems strange to say that it began with good news.

“Guess what?” Ginger said. “The baker wants us to work for him again! Some kind of construction thing at his cabin up in the timber.”

Several more long, dull days had passed when Ginger brought this news.

“Mr. Blix has a cabin in the timber?”

“I
know
. News to me, too. But he said we’ll mix work with pleasure. We’ll build a wood crib—that’s the work part—but he’s going to pack a picnic, and there’s a swimming hole, so we should bring our swimming suits.”

I will confess the truth. Nothing about these details alarmed me. Every day, all over the world, people build things and swim in ponds without particular risk.

Ginger threw her arm loosely over Jeremy’s shoulder and left it there. “Know what’s good here? This will get you out of the house and you won’t even have to deal with any of Never Better’s idiot-citizens.”

They were quiet for a while, and it had to be admitted that these two youths at ease with themselves and each other made a pleasant picture, and I suddenly understood that, for Jeremy, the surprise of love would not arrive, as it does in the tales, with a strange enchantment or with a single smiting glance or with a lilting voice riding the wind through the woodland. No, for
Jeremy, the surprise of love would be carried on the lazy currents of friendship.

When the sun peered over the earth’s rim that Sunday morning, it found Jeremy bicycling along the highway leading from town. A mile or two out, close by a railroad siding, he turned into a small clearing, where he stopped, stood by his bicycle, and looked around.

“You’re early,” a voice said, and Jeremy turned to see Ginger smiling and stepping out from a stand of trees. She was wearing a faded pink shirt that said
AS IS
across the front in gold, glimmery letters.

“Early,” he said, “but not as early as you.”

“Yeah, well, I think I told you that my grandfather gets up at an ungodly hour, and I needed to be gone before he got up.” She watched him lean his bicycle against a tree next to hers. “Did anybody see you leave town?”

“You mean McRaven?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Nope. No sign.”

This was true. I had myself gazed through the window of his quarters above the garage. The deputy seemed to be sleeping soundly in his small bed.

“Okay, all we do now is wait for Mr. Blix,” Ginger said. She
poured coffee from an insulated container and offered a cup to Jeremy. “It’s lukewarm,” she said. “I made it last night after my granddad went to bed.”

Jeremy took a sip and smiled. “Just the way I like it.”

I could see in his face how relieved he was to be out of town at the beginning of this fresh new day, relieved to be away from his troubles and the villagers’ stares, relieved to be alone with this girl, and truly, relief can sometimes come within an inch of happiness itself.

On the siding, freight cars stood empty in the low, sloping sun. Birds began to sing, insects to buzz. And then, beyond all that, the faint thrum of an engine could be heard, and presently the gleaming Green Oven delivery van came into view. The baker’s smile beamed out from his full white beard as he turned off the highway.

“Hallå!”
he said, after lowering his window. “Is it not a great day to be alive?”

“A little too early to say, if you want to know the truth,” Ginger said, but it truly was a beautiful day, and they all seemed to feel it.

Stacked and bound in the rear of the van was a selection of wooden posts and planks to be used for construction of the wood crib, so as they rolled along the highway, Jeremy sat in the front seat with Ginger in his lap.

“An adventure!” the baker said, beaming. “That’s what this feels like. A most pleasant adventure!”

“Yeah,” Ginger said, smiling, too, “it does, kind of.”

The highway split fields of corn and wheat, and symphonic music played within the van, quite beautiful to my ancient ear,
though when the baker asked Jeremy and Ginger if they liked it, Jeremy said, “It’s okay, I guess,” and Ginger said, “It’s kind of an audio sleeping pill.”

A laugh rumbled up from the baker’s belly, and he guided the van onto a dirt road leading north. The van bounced over ruts, and pebbles tinked against its underside.

“Okay,” Jeremy said, “I think it’s time for me to give up my seat.”

“Really?” Ginger said. “ ’Cause I’m comfy as can be.”

The van jounced again and Jeremy said, “That’s because you’re the sitter and I’m the seat.”

He folded a red blanket into a cushion and took a position on the bundled lengths of wood.

Ginger turned to the baker. “So how far is this cabin, anyhow?”

“A ways yet. It’s a beautiful spot, close to a small lake, deep in the woods.”

The baker’s voice was as kindly as ever, but at the mention of deep woods, a dim note of alarm sounded within me.
Wald, Forst
, and most especially,
im tiefen Wald
—in deep forests—were the words that wrapped black tendrils around a story and foretold ghastly creatures lying in wait or children losing their way. But those were the forests of fairy tales, I told myself, not the ordinary pines of everyday life.

The music played, the baker guided his delivery van along the dirt roads, and Ginger and Jeremy stared complacently out. The farms here were large, unirrigated, and widely spaced, and soon the land was given to the grazing of animals rather than the growing of grains. When the van approached a crossroads, the baker turned toward a range of dense, up-reaching conifers, and
soon we were among them, the pines so thick that they eclipsed the sun. The road grew darker, narrower, rockier, more intricate in its twistings. There were no other mortals here, no fences, no gates, no visible boundaries.

“Wow,” Jeremy said staring out from his seat in the back. “I didn’t know there was anything like this around here. Where are we?”

“A world all its own,” the baker said, his round face beaming. He turned onto a lane so narrow and overgrown it seemed the forest’s own secret.

Ginger laughed with delight. “What was that? Did the directions just say, ‘Take a hard left straight into the forest’?”

The passage was almost a tunnel, and when the baker approached the end of it, he slowed the van. “And now the ceremonial clearing away of the bears!” he said, and honked the car horn three long times.

“You have bears?” Ginger asked, looking slightly alarmed, and the baker, laughing, said, “Not anymore.”

In another moment, he was gesturing toward a clearing before us. “There,” he said, his round cheeks radiant with pride. “There is the cabin.”

A
Hütte
, Wilhelm and I would have called it in a tale—a simple, single-story structure made of logs, its roof composed of earth from which grass grew.

“Zounds,” Ginger said as she and Jeremy walked around the encampment, “it must be twenty degrees cooler up here.” The wind through the tree limbs made a low, hollow whistle. She grinned at Jeremy. “Pretty fabulous, no?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, “it really is,” and, behind them, the baker smiled with pleasure.

I will be truthful. I, too, partook of the preternatural beauty. But it went beyond even that. I felt myself pleasantly transported back to the woods of Germany, and of my childhood. And so I was carried away … when I should have stood fast and remained vigilant.

Jeremy and Ginger hauled the wooden posts and planks from the car while the baker busied himself at the hut, folding back window shutters and setting out chairs.

“I haven’t been here for a few weeks,” he said. “Not since Frank Bailey left.”

Ginger seemed surprised. “Frank Bailey came up here?”

“Oh, yes. He’s a good boy. He helped me put down the new wood floor.”

Ginger and Jeremy carried the last loads of lumber, then looked around. “Everything here in Blixville looks so just-raked and tidy,” Ginger said to the baker. “How do you do it?”

“A caretaker,” the baker said. “Once a week, a gentleman hikes over from his cabin a mile or so from here and takes care of this and that.” The baker’s blue eyes twinkled. “Then when he comes into town, I pay him in pastries.”

After all the wood planks had been laid out, the baker directed Ginger and Jeremy to a large stack of pine logs, handed each of them a sharpened ax, and showed them how to split the
round lengths into smaller sections. It was a funny sight, this plump, cherubic man swinging an ax and issuing a little
Oof!
each time he brought the force of it to the wood, but he was surprisingly adept at his work.

As Ginger stepped up to try her hand, she asked, “Is the grunting absolutely required?”

“Absolutely,” the baker said with a Santa-like wink.

The baker left them alone with their sharpened axes. Jeremy and Ginger enjoyed the work and began racing to see whose pile of split wood grew largest.

The wood chips spewed here and there, and the minutes flew past. Jeremy and Ginger swung the axes with gusto, drawing closer to each other as the pile of logs diminished and the piles of split wood grew. They hurried and cajoled and huffed and puffed until the arcs of each ax fell perilously close to that of the other and I began to shout into Jeremy’s ear … but he was too caught up in his race to hear.

“Careful!” a voice rang out. “Careful now!”

It was, to my relief, the baker, hurrying toward them, wiping his hands in a towel.
“Hallå! Hallå!”
he sang out. “Oh, my dear young friends, you scare me with your wild axes!” He took several deep drafts of air to regain his breath, then looked with satisfaction at their work. “But what woodpiles you have made!”

Jeremy and Ginger—shirts damp, faces slippery with perspiration—stood catching their breath. I did, too, in my own manner, for I felt the danger had passed. The baker’s twinkling eyes moved from the split wood to Ginger and Jeremy. “You two put me to shame. It would take me a day to do what you’ve done here.”

It was a pleasant moment, a compliment hanging in the air
along with the scent of split wood, the soft murmur of the breeze through the trees, and, somewhere farther off, the dim, watery sounds of an unseen creek.

“Yes, yes,” the baker said, smiling and eyeing the woodpiles. “
Very
impressive.”

“Actually,” Ginger said, “if you look closely, you’ll see that my pile’s slightly more impressive than his.”

“You had the sharper ax,” Jeremy said, laughing, and Ginger said, “You had the softer wood.”