Juggling Fire (16 page)
It’s a long carefree life ahead without a bear lying in wait. Mountains beyond mountains are waiting to be explored.
Suddenly I can hardly wait.
Back at the cabin I shake the cardboard quote from its book, meaning to tack it back on the wall.
A small black notebook, lodged behind the bookshelf all these years, thuds to the floor.
I recognize it at once. It’s the diary I gave Dad before he left.
For a long minute I don’t move. Can I live with what he has to say? Can I be happy? Live a good life?
And when I do pick it up, I turn at once to the last entry.
Rained all day again. I heard my name on the radio tonight and
tried to answer, but something’s wrong. It won’t transmit. I’m
starting home tomorrow so they won’t worry. I think it’s time
anyway. I feel so much better. And I miss them. I never knew
how much I loved them until I left.
So now I know. He never meant to stay away at all. He tried to keep his word.
I climb into bed, whistle for Brooks, who can jump up himself now, and blow out the lamp. I’ll read the rest later with Mom and Becky—it’s their story too.
“Good night, Dad,” I whisper. “Sweet dreams.”
That night—my last alone, it turns out—I juggle fire on the gravel bar under the northern lights. Vast curtains of red and green aurora sweep across the starry sky.
This time I know how to keep the sticks alight. I cut sections of one of Dad’s old leather belts and wrap each piece around the end of one of the three spruce torches I’ve whittled. I douse the ends with kerosene from a five-gallon bucket left in the shed. Then I light a bonfire and hold my homemade torches in the blaze. The shooting flames make me jump but I don’t let go. A skiff of snow dusts the stones around my fire-pit when I begin but soon melts.
This is what it must be like to be in charge of the universe: juggling all those people who are blazing their courses through the air, juggling planets, galaxies and suns. So what if one burns out? So what if a child’s father doesn’t make it; if, in the course of blazing across his own sky, he just fizzles out and lands somewhere nobody ever finds him?
Does anyone even notice?
My torches are true to the center and falling down the sides, like water, like the northern lights, like sand dunes and rock slides, over and over. The same forces act on all flesh, on all pieces of the Earth.
And now I’ve had enough of fire breathing in my face.
I let the torches drop, one at a time, and there under the dancing aurora I rest my fire sticks in the bonfire coals and reach for my juggling balls instead.
It’s bright as day with the lights and the stars and a full moon floating above the river’s ice. The northern lights come from particles streaming through the atmosphere from the sun. Dad told me that.
I slip the balls under my legs, under each other, slipping and sliding in patterns so fast that even if someone were watching they couldn’t follow. My brain can’t even track the patterns. If I stopped to think, the balls would crash onto stone.
And now I remember the story I made up before I left Mom and Becky at home. I remember a princess who couldn’t leave her castle, how she circled and turned, again and again. How she found her own magic place outside the castle grounds, but it wasn’t far enough away. Nightingales sang in it. A stream trickled through green, green moss.
“Go, princess,” I shout, and the balls dance by the flames of my fire. Oh, it’s not so easy leaving the castle. It’s not so easy being free. If I were in charge of this universe, what would I do differently?
And then one ball falls and then another. I don’t even pick them up. Up the bank and back in the forest along the trail, the cabin is glowing with lamplight:
The princess
picked her way through the wall of trees and it grew even darker,
but still she traveled on, and in the end a hut appeared, glowing
softly in the darkness.
It was her home.
I’ve changed my own ending.
I could say it’s the last fairy-tale ending I’ll ever change, but I know it isn’t. My life won’t be long enough to rewrite them all, whichever way I choose. And that’s the magic key that unlocks the gate into the forest. Whichever way I choose.
Yes, my father is dead. He no longer lives in the forest by a river somewhere. But he tried to come home. He loved me fiercely. That’s the secret I needed to know.
I miss him. And every morning and every evening I’ll stop whatever I am doing so I can really focus on missing him. I won’t pretend that I don’t, even if it’s embarrassing to still care.
I’ll stare at the stars at night and I’ll chant while the balls cascade up the middle and down the outside. Until one day maybe I’ll get tired of it. Enough, I’ll say, and I’ll ride away to find my destiny, snatching his baseball cap to wear as I ride. Even then, when I hear a whisper of missing him, I’ll pull on the reins and stay very still and listen to it.
That’s the only way to mourn someone, to mourn them until the grief flies away. Then hold your hands to catch it when it returns. Don’t flinch even when the flames hover above your face.
My father never meant to stay away. He wanted to return. Northern lights cascade across the dark dome of sky like a moving river of light.
Brooks, on the far side of the bonfire, wakes, shakes and wanders over, poking his nose against my leg so I’ll pat him. He makes a sound in his throat like a siren warming up, and I remember leaving the highway with him so long ago. We did it, Brooks and I.
We came home.
And that’s as far as the fairy tale ever gets.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to my large and rather noisy family, whose presence in this world is my home, especially to Mikin, Elizabeth and Mary, whom I delight in every day. And finally my gratitude to the Dempster Mountains for the stories they tell me when the wind blows.
Born in Great Britain, Joanne Bell grew up in New Brunswick, Alberta and British Columbia. She visited Dawson City, Yukon, many years ago and fell in love with the nearby Ogilvie Mountains, where she spent years running dogs, hiking, canoeing and living in log cabins. Now married with two daughters, she works as a naturalist in the summers and is a substitute teacher in Dawson City whenever she is not in the mountains. She spends as much time as possible in her log cabin about twenty miles from the Dempster Highway.