There was never a moment when I crossed the line between
knowing Dad would come home and doubting it. As time went
on, it seemed less and less likely to Mom and Becky, that was all.
In the beginning, we all pictured him clearly. I still have his baseball
cap in a drawer, our family picture by my bed. In the picture,
our dogs are harnessed with the sled still hooked to a tree, and
Dad is cross-legged in front of the packed sled. Becky and I are
tucked into the shelter of his arms. Mom has slid into the corner
of the frame, laughing, after propping up the camera.
Even after we got electricity in town, we still lit kerosene
lights when we went to bed. The light is soft and yellow enough
to leave corners shadowed. Mine hung on a nail hammered into
the log wall above my bed. When I was asleep, Mom came in
and blew into the top of the globe to snuff out the wick. I woke
for a moment to the smell of the kerosene and Mom bending
quietly to kiss me good night.
That’s how I thought of Dad, quietly and peacefully blown
out. Then Mom kissing him good night.
“He would have come back if he could,” she repeated,
month after month, then year after year. “He loved us. And he’d
want you to grow up happy.”
But she never met my eyes when she said this. And her voice
was quiet and slow as if she spoke from far away.
“What was he like?” I’d bug her when my memories began
to fade. “Did he like being alone? Did he juggle? Or tell jokes?
What did he like to eat?”
At first, Mom would weave stories of Dad into our nightly
fairy tales. “The princess’s father,” she might say, sitting on
the edge of my bed, “was a famous woodsman. He could talk
with birds and all the creatures of the forest. Every morning he
would take up his ax and go into the forest to cut trees. Then
one morning when the dew was still on the grass, everything
changed in a single moment.”
But after she left my room, I lay alone and reworked the
ending in my head. “And the woodcutter never returned,” I might
say, “and the princess grew up alone in the hut at the edge
of the forest, waiting for a glimpse of him through the trees.
Day after day, she waited. The seasons passed. Snow came and
went, but her father did not return. ‘Daddy,’ she used to shout
when nobody could hear her. All the longing of the waiting
years was in her voice. ‘Daddy!’”
“Look,” said Becky one day when she’d had enough of my
questions. “Pick something that might have happened to him
and tell yourself that’s how he died. Most likely he drowned. He
was probably crossing a river and stepped into a deep spot and
the current took him away.”
“Could he swim?” I asked.
“Actually,” said Becky, “he could, but not too well. That
isn’t the point.” She stood, stretched and yawned, dainty and
tough in her red wool pants, lumberjack shirt and cloud of long
black hair. Her massive wheel dog, Chili, uncurled himself from
behind the stove and went to her, happy for a run.
“Want to come with me and the dogs tomorrow? I need
some weight.”
“What is your point?” I asked, my juggling balls cradled
against my chest.
She bent down to scratch Chili’s ears. “That you realize he’s
dead. That you get a life.”
This was interesting. Why did she think I
hadn’t
realized it?
Unless, of course, it wasn’t really true.
I threw the balls up so the outside balls met at the top of
the arc and crossed over. I wasn’t talking with her anymore
about Dad dying. “Juggling’s simple,” I told her. “One day I could
teach you too.”
Becky hugged me. She put her arms around my shoulders.
“Come with us. I’ll teach you what Dad showed me about
running dogs.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I’m juggling.”
Around suppertime I walk past the perfect spot for a fire, but I don’t even hesitate. I’m not hungry yet.
After another hour, I realize that if I don’t stop to eat soon, I’ll have to boil supper where I camp. I don’t want cooking smells around my tent tonight.
I heap twigs in a teepee, stretch out on my stomach and light a fire. White flames lick along the wood and crackle cheerfully into the still, clear sky. The weather sure changes fast in these mountains. Brooks lies down. I unbuckle his pack, and he rolls happily on the moss and wades into the creek up to his chest. The current breaks around him and flows on past a gravel bar. Brooks growls and snaps up mouthfuls of water, then splashes back to shore. I fill my pot and boil a stew with dry meat and vegetables and rice. It’s not bad, although all the broth boils away. I add a dollop of butter and eat it with a stick— I’ve lost my spoon somewhere. So far I haven’t eaten much on this trip. Not enough. Dad was like that, I think. Mom said that he’d walk for a day and take only a package of soup to boil at night.
I force myself to eat until my stomach feels tight for once and give the leftovers to Brooks. I wash out the pot with hot water to get rid of food smells, tie it to the outside of my pack and wander on. My pants are hanging on me. I have to keep hitching them up. The trail is heading downhill now. Tomorrow I should be in the river valley. Tomorrow we’ll walk through the shadows of trees.
Before I go to sleep, I try to decide what I’ll dream. Mom told me that she could do it. She just figures it out before she’s asleep, and, mostly, whatever she picks will show up in her dreams. No bears, I chant to myself. No bears in my camp. No bears in my dreams. I’m half asleep when I realize what I
do
want is to dream about Dad.
That night, I dream I’m at the cabin and he’s sitting in the kitchen by the woodstove, whittling a spoon. “Here,” he says, laughing as he holds it out to me. “Take it. It will help you eat.”
I wake up in the dark, sweating, the wind moaning over the tundra again. It was his voice that I remember now. I haven’t heard it since I was a little kid. Even more clearly, I can hear his laugh. It makes me want to bury my face in his sweater. I can smell the wood smoke from the stove and I can still smell him, after all these years.
Mom never told us there was a letter. Not for years. When she went to search for him after he disappeared, she’d found no clues at all. The letter was stuck in the back of a drawer in our house in town.
She finally showed it to us. And that’s why I’m here.
“At least,” said Becky, “we know he died happy. He was out
where he wanted to be.”
We were standing by the woodstove with our hands out to
the heat, Mom carving at her worktable beside us. Becky was
stirring a five-gallon tin bucket of meat scraps and oil and grain
for her team. Our cabin always smelled like wood smoke and
Becky’s dog food.
“But we don’t really know if he’s dead,” I said, puzzled.
I backed away from the heat and picked up my juggling clubs.
They’re shaped like gaudy bowling pins and they spin when
you throw them. If you get really good, you can spin two or
three clubs.
It was winter and the northern lights danced like charmed
snakes across the sky. The clubs were awkward.
You shouldn’t impose your own order on the objects being juggled
, I’d read.
Clubs and balls have their own patterns, different each time
you throw them. A cup of water can be absorbed back into
a stream. Not so in juggling. A lost catch is gone forever.
Let it go.
“Of course we do,” said Mom, as always.
I had four clubs in the air so I couldn’t break concentration.
When I don’t focus, the balls or clubs begin to drift away from
me and I have to chase them. Good jugglers should be able to
stand completely still with their feet rooted. Only their lower
arms and wrists should move. If a juggler moves forward even
an inch, the balls or clubs will continue to creep forward. Soon
they will be out of reach. Novices juggle with a wall in front of
them to combat drift.
“Prove it,” I said. I’d never have spoken if I hadn’t been
so focused. All those years, I’d never asked her to prove
anything.
Mom came into my room with the letter when I was
almost asleep. She handed it to me and stood by the window,
looking out at the bowl of stars and distant mountains.
“I’m sorry,”
I read.
“I’m no good to you anymore. But I loved each of you. I hope you remember that.”
I let the letter drop onto my blankets and clutched
my stomach.
“Why didn’t you show it to me before?”
“Because it was for me,” she said. “And I didn’t want you
to know that he’d killed himself. But you need to understand
he’s dead.”
I shocked us both by laughing. “But it doesn’t say that at all,”
I sputtered. “It only says he’s sorry. He would never kill himself.
He told me he’d come home.”
Mom sat at the bottom of my bed. “The sad part for me,” she
said, looking directly at me, “is that it’s possible for you to choose
not to live your life properly. You really can choose to wait for
him all your life if that’s what you want to do. But it would be
a bloody waste.”
The next day I started cutting up food to dry: peel and
cut, peel and cut. I took the screen windows off the shed
and hammered spikes above the woodstove to rest the racks
on. It was all a misunderstanding, I realized. All these years
and no one had bothered to search again. I put my hand tightly
over my mouth.
He’d shoved his baseball cap on my head. “I’ll be back,”
he told me, turning at the door to wave. And yet in the letter he
said he wasn’t any good to us.
There’s a moment in the cascade when I feel the balls will
drop past my outstretched hands and bounce on the floor, out
of my control.
“Doesn’t it get boring,” asked Becky, “doing the same thing
again and again?”
But it doesn’t. When the balls leave my hands there’s no
guarantee they’ll return. Sometimes I let them bounce: one,
two, three, and catch them with a flourish as if that had been
my plan all along.
“You’re not going,” repeated Mom every day, suddenly
looking old amidst a heap of wood shavings. She looked absent,
like she’d looked in the first years after Dad disappeared.
I hugged her then. I didn’t quite know how to tell her that I
didn’t care what she wanted anymore. And I wanted to care.
The only way that would happen was for me to go back to
the cabin and see for myself.
Alone.
The next day, islands of dark green forest float on the sea of tundra. Tundra comes from a Finnish word meaning treeless plain. The isolated patches of alpine trees that grow at the border of forest and tundra are called
krumholz
. Becky taught me that. I glimpse trees first from the top of a little bump of a hill studded with boulders. When the trail wanders down again, I lose sight of them until, after a few miles of flat steady walking, the trail begins to slope gradually downhill. The river line gleams to the left. Creeks flow out to join it from each fold in the mountains.
When I reach the first spruce clump, I see that there is a parent tree inside a circle of smaller trees: clones sprouted from the original tree’s branches, which must have sunk into the moss and leaf litter under heavy snows some longago winter. Black spruce reproduces this way in the Far North; so do trembling aspen. Aspen seeds die so fast when they leave the parent tree and need such specific conditions to germinate that they rarely travel up here. You can tell clones because they’re all somehow still connected. In the fall, whole hillsides will change color, patch by patch, clone by clone. In the spring, the clones leaf up together too. It’s pretty weird how plants and animals adapt simply to survive on the cold dark tundra. You’d think they’d just not bother.
The trunks are wind-blasted and twisted. I snap off a fistful of twigs drooping with old-man’s beard and stuff the lacy, green-black lichen in a pocket of my pack to light my supper fire. I walk on, crushing spruce cones between my fingers and breathing in the smell before I toss them away. Black spruce cones often stay on the tree for many years unless a forest fire comes along to force them open. I’ll just help these along.
As I walk, the distant glints become silvery river bends. Huge cottonwoods with bare upflung arms grow on the banks beside tangled clumps of head-high willow and alder. Spruce are spaced in open woods farther back. Ptarmigan will be flocking now, socializing after a busy summer of raising chicks. Hares should be hopping through the thickets, ears tuned for danger. I stroll along, thinking about the forest and all its communities. It’s always seemed strange to me that humans are so curious about life on other planets and know so little about the other worlds that share the Earth.
That evening I eat cheese and nuts while I walk. More and more spruce islands appear. The trail is muddy and rutted with moose and caribou tracks. No tracks that look like a barefoot human’s; no bears.
And then the clumps of brush become a forest. The trail is boggy and a gray thrush is trilling from a treetop. “You should fly away,” I call in his direction. “Can’t you feel the frost?”
I find a flat area where the river bends and make camp on a bed of moss. All night a chinook blasts heat like a furnace over the mountain peaks.