The Inverted Forest

Praise for
The Inverted Forest

“Mr. Dalton’s prose is polished and crisp but unhurried. As ruthlessly blunt as his descriptions of the characters’ deformities are, he clearly feels warmly toward all but one.”

—
The Wall Street Journal

“A masterly, deeply humane second novel [that] offers old-fashioned Updikean pleasures: emotionally complex characters, gorgeously tuned sentences, and a briskly paced plot.”

—
The Daily Beast

“Gorgeously written.”

—Associated Press

“A layered consideration of what happens when intentions good and bad collide.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“The Inverted Forest
deserves a place on every must-read summer list, and it should be slowly savored until the very end.”

—
Shelf Awareness

“This is, as Dalton’s title indicates, summer camp turned on its head. Working with this group of misfits, Dalton suggests a quieter, less comic John Irving.”

—
Booklist

“Dalton’s novel gives readers something they haven’t seen before.”

—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“
The Inverted Forest
is a magnificent novel, a true literary achievement that left me awestruck and breathless. It moves with a strange, eerie
sense of dread, and it’s full of suspense, but what impressed me most of all was the depth of John Dalton’s insight into his characters. The chorus of narrators that make up this novel are drawn with such wisdom, compassion, and kindness, the pages nearly seem to glow. I loved this book.”

—Dan Chaon, author of
Await Your Reply

“
The Inverted Forest
is a novel of immense insight and humanity by a writer whose prose can be exciting, tender, and unnervingly candid all at once. John Dalton’s narrative proceeds with a grand inevitability, its resolution deeply satisfying and powerful. It has to be my Novel of the Year.”

—Jim Crace, author of
Being Dead
and
All That Follows

Part One: Shannon County, Missouri Summer 1996

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Two: St. Louis 2011

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Acknowledgments

About John Dalton

This novel is for my brother and sisters:

Jim Dalton

Judy Dalton Sellmeyer

Peggy Zundel

Jean Dalton Young

Joan Dalton

Carla Meyer

Part One

A
night breeze lifted the dark skirts of the forest. The usual riot of insects fell quiet. Into the well of this new silence came a sudden peal of laughter—a bark of laughter, exuberant, righteous, feminine.

Hahhhhhyeeeee!

The sound of it at 2:16
A.M.
: half raucous cheer, half squeal of delight, borne like a tumbling feather across the wide, night-screened meadow of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp.

On the opposite side of the meadow, in a one-room cedar cottage joined to the camp office, Schuller Kindermann looked up from his drafting table.

He considered his wristwatch. His kindly shopkeeper’s face, known for its paternal softness and for the mildness of its expressions, assumed a disappointment that was sharp and private. In his unsteady right hand he held a surgeon’s scalpel, the tip of the scalpel
pressed into a sheet of heavy Italian-made paper, the paper to be cut millimeter by millimeter, fiber by fiber, then prodded, molded, expertly creased, until, like a pop-up book or the ribs of a paper lantern, it would rise up and assume the shape Schuller intended.

He called his creations Foldout Paper Cards, a hobby of his own invention, though recently an art supplies wholesaler had visited camp and surveyed Schuller’s cards, which had been set out in a display case, and declared them examples of kirigami, a Japanese art form. Schuller wanted to scoff at this pronouncement.
Kirigami
. Imagine that. To be told he is a kirigamiist! He’d begun making Foldout Paper Cards some eight years earlier, near the time of his unofficial retirement and the gradual handing over of daily camp operations to the program director. Tonight, Schuller had hoped to cut and bend and coax from the paper a three-dimensional outline of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Milan, Italy. Too bad then that, at this late hour, the basilica would not rise, would not reveal itself, thanks to the bark of laughter and his lack of concentration and the palsied tremor—mild, to be sure—quivering the wrist of his right hand. What a shame. If he’d had his window fan on, he might not even have heard it.

He rose and slipped his bare feet into a pair of loafers. Before stepping out the door, he switched on the porch floodlight—a marbled brightness, a low, buzzing hum. In an instant there was a mad spiraling of gypsy moths and enough gauzy light for him to shuffle ahead a few timid steps and descend the porch’s sagging pine board stairs.

It was much better once he felt the rich meadow grass beneath his loafers. He had his bearings. His night vision was reasonably good. If he concentrated, he could recall, or rather
rehear,
the laugh, its upward feminine lilt, its open claim of privilege, too.

At once he had a sure-voiced intuition as to which direction the laughter had come from, and he set out along a path that would take him across the meadow toward the sleeping cabins and sandlots and
recreation courts and swimming pool. A lengthy enough hike, especially at night, but so be it. He was used to crossing the meadow—three acres long, two wide, the largest clearing in all of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp. Over the course of the summer the meadow would serve as assembly and parade ground, capture-the-flag field, parking lot. It never failed to draw the eye of each visitor. To parents the meadow looked
safe,
a happy accident of geography amid an otherwise rugged Ozark landscape. (No accident. The meadow had been cleared of cedar trees in 1957, and every spring since then Schuller and the maintenance staff had collected and carried off thousands of stones that pushed through the skin of the grass.)

There was a soft freckling of light along the scrubby southern edge of the meadow, the clustered winking of fireflies. In time he made a measured and mostly confident descent along a mild, dew-slick slope to a volleyball court and a row of tire swings. At the swings a brick walkway began and in the span of a few careful steps became something else: a burrowed path into the woods, a long sweep of tunneling darkness.

From this point on, it would be a more painstaking journey. With the soles of his loafers, he felt his way forward, one brick to the next, a meticulous and sure-footed tap, tap, tapping, until, after much time and blind probing, he arrived at a large, partially lit swimming pool built into the thick of the woods.

So they’d been bold enough to turn on the shower-house lights and let the soft gleam spill out across the deck and the pool’s lapping surface. A few dim shapes moved in the water. He could see the red glow of cigarettes, could hear a kicked bottle rolling across the concrete deck. All of this an unwelcome surprise, a disappointment, truly. But a satisfaction, at least, to know that his first hunch had been correct. And a relief, a consolation, to remember this: the campers had not yet arrived; the start of the first session was still, thankfully, two days away.