“It looks as if there was a landslide last night after all that rain,” he said, patting the new boulder which had nearly killed me. We carried on until we stood at the lip of the steep channel. The tumble of mossy rocks had been dislodged by the rainstorm and had rolled down the gill, taking chunks of earth with them. The trunk of a tree had wedged itself crossways between the banks, and forest debris had collected behind it, water seeping through the gaps formed by a tangle of branches and logs.
Reuben picked his way down the slope with obvious practise, each foot placed with confidence, and didn’t even glance at the temporary dam above us. It wasn’t until he was standing on the boulders at the bottom that he looked back at me, still hesitating at the top of the bank.
“Oh,” he said, surprised I wasn’t behind him, and, “wait there.”
But before he had a chance to come back for me, I slid downward on my bottom, the backside of my shorts gathering mud. I dug the heels of my moccasins into the bank, clung on to clumps of grass with my hands, and in one blind leap I was on the rocks and beside him.
“That’s one way to do it,” he said, smiling. Balancing on a green boulder, he bent down and gripped a neighbouring rock with both hands, hefting it to one side, revealing the secret, gurgling, rushing water beneath. He scraped moss from the bank and dipped it into the flow. We sat side by side so that Reuben could wipe my face with the water; I flinched at the cold shock of it.
“Sorry,” he said, still wiping. “I’ve never seen so much mud and blood on one face. Hot or cold?”
I looked at him.
“Go on, hot or cold?”
“Hot,” I said, beginning to understand.
“Interesting. Town or forest?” He threw the moss away and got a new bit.
I didn’t want to point out to him that his first choice wasn’t available any more, so I said, “Forest.” Up close, and while he was occupied with cleaning the blood and mud from my face, I noticed that every hair of his beard was a different shade—red and brown and blond, mixed on the palette of his chin until they merged to the colour of rust.
“Forest or river?”
“Forest,” I said, even though I was keyed up at the thought of the danger behind us, the sudden burst that might carry us away.
“Day or night?”
“Definitely day,” I replied, remembering the night before. I kept my eyes averted from his, but I was aware of his breathing and his concentration while he cleaned me. He was quiet for a while.
“Rabbit or squirrel?”
I laughed. “Neither.” And Reuben laughed too.
“All right, apple or pear?”
“Apple,” I said, because I didn’t want to tell him that I couldn’t remember the taste of pear.
“That’s a shame,” he said, “there aren’t any apples here.”
“There’s the gribble,” I said, looking him in the eyes for the first time.
His hand, holding the moss, paused. “Ah yes, the gribble. Sour little good-for-nothings.”
I wanted to stick up for the tree, to say something in its defence, but Reuben said, “There, all done,” and threw the moss away. “I think you might end up with a scar though. How did you do it?” His fingertips reached for my eyebrow again.
“It’s fine,” I said, pulling back. There was a loud crack behind us. I jumped and looked toward the bulging dam and a new trickle of water which flowed between the boulders, under our feet, and continued past us, down the gill. Reuben carried on talking as if he hadn’t even noticed.
“And what about that shoe you’re holding? Is that fine too?”
It was still in my lap, the mud drying into flakes. He took it and plunged it into the flow that washed between us—already rushing past faster, carrying leaves and twigs with it. Reuben put his hand inside the shoe to claw out the years of compacted river mud. He rubbed at the outside, making the leaping cat on the heel clearer. A wave of homesickness came over me, but I wasn’t sure if it was for London and shoe shops and pavements, or my father and die Hütte. I wanted both to stay and to run away. Reuben’s face was too new; I didn’t yet understand the meaning of each crease of his brow, each purse of his lips, every set of his jaw; being so close was overwhelming, like a birthday party I had been to once, where the laughing and the games and the lurid food had all been too much and I’d had to be collected by Ute and taken home. Before I could see or hear anything else, I wanted to go into a darkened room to process this new human being.
“Is it yours?” he asked about the shoe, and I could only nod. “Aren’t you going to put it on?”
I shrugged. He lifted up my right leg and rested my ankle across his knee. It was the first time his skin had touched mine. I pushed off my moccasin; there was no sock to remove—all our socks had been worn away to threadbare tubes winters before. The lace had rotted after its years in the mud and it disintegrated when Reuben opened up the shoe and tried to push it onto my foot. The inside was slimy and sodden, and I had to curl my toes up to get it on; it just fitted. My bones must have lengthened, but I hadn’t got any fatter since we’d been living in the forest. Any clothes that hadn’t fallen apart were still almost the right size for me. All my underwear had eroded into grey shreds and my trousers had ripped so badly at the knees that we had sliced them off with the knife and sewed the bottom halves as arms onto a tunic made from rabbit and squirrel skins. For many winters I wore Ute’s two dresses, but I had never grown into them and now they were ragged and worn. I cared only for my blue mittens and the balaclava—washing them regularly in a bucket of water and pinning them out over thorn bushes in the sunshine, so that the wool stretched back into shape.
But my hair had grown—bark brown in the winter, lighter in the summer; close around my face and long down my back. It stuck together in clumps so that even the few remaining teeth on the comb refused to be dragged through it. I plaited the strands that I could tease loose, and often still coiled them around my ears in the winter to keep warm.
Reuben sat back with pride, looking at my mismatched feet like the shoe fitters I remembered from Clarks on Queen’s Avenue. Before he could say anything else, I blurted out, “I have to go now,” and jumped up. As if my sudden movement had dislodged a rock or a branch, there was the creak of wood scraping against wood and a gush of water and the dam burst. I scrambled up the bank, aware that Reuben was right behind me. I could hear the water, but didn’t turn to look; I just hobbled back the way we had come. Reuben called out my name, but still I didn’t turn or even slow down.
“Wear both your shoes tomorrow,” he shouted after me, and I imagined his large hands cupped around his bristled mouth. I smiled as I ran, even though the tightness of my shoe made my foot hurt. I jumped over fallen trees and leaped from stump to stump where my father had felled them, full of an energy that could have kept me running for the rest of the day.
I burst into the clearing, prepared to tell my father everything, just for the excitement of having news—forgetting about our recent argument—but die Hütte’s door was open, and even before I had gone inside I could hear him singing mournfully and clunking the wooden piano keys:
And my father said to me, oh alaya bakia,
You will wed and you will see, oh alaya bakia.
All your dreams, they will come true, oh alaya bakia.
In a paradise for two, oh alaya bakia.
I leaned, catching my breath, against the side of the cabin as his voice floated out. The summer sun dipped down behind the mountain and a fresh chill arrived, which always made me think of new beginnings. I added a harmony to my father’s chorus, at first quiet and shy, then louder, with confidence: “Oh lay oh la, oh alaya bakia.”
My father stopped playing, rushed outside, and hugged me.
“Oh, Ute, I thought I had lost you. We must always be together. Promise me, we’ll always be together.” He didn’t stop to explain where he thought I could have gone or give me a chance to correct him. “I have a surprise for you,” he said, rele
asing me and taking my hand. Inside, the walls of die Hütte had been washed clean of all his charcoal notes and writing. One of the buckets stood in the middle of the floor, and in the bottom I recognized my nightie, now a grey wet rag.
“See,” he said, spreading his arms wide. I turned, taking in all four walls. “We have lots of space for new lists, new ideas. A fresh start.” He seemed too pleased with himself.
I let him hug me and call me Ute again because I had a secret of my own. He wrapped his arms around me, and over his shoulder I read the list he had started on the wall behind the door:
Belladonna
Wolfsbane
Yew
Bracken
Corncockle
Amanita virosa
22
I didn’t tell my father about Reuben that day, or the next morning when I got up, my insides jumping with excitement. I decided to keep him for myself. In the early morning light, I worked in the garden, weeding and hoeing. I brought in wood and stacked it by the stove and turned the chicken-of-the-woods which was laid out to dry on the shelves around the flue. I had completed all my jobs, except the checking and resetting of the traps, by the time we ate lunch. I wasn’t hungry. I tried to hide my fidgeting from my father, but he raised his eyebrows when I put on a dress I had made the summer before, stitched from the remnants of Ute’s camel dress, with scraps of rabbit fur for a collar. I had cut the ragged skirt, but kept it long to hide my knees, which I thought were too knobbly for a girl’s. Whenever I put on the dress it made me want to stand with my shoulders back and take little steps on the tips of my toes.
“What’s the special occasion?” my father asked.
“Just going out,” I said, plaiting the strands of hair hanging beside my face.
“Where to?” He leaned on the door frame, watching me, an irritating smile on his face.
“Just out,” I snapped back at him. I coiled the plaits and stuck them with feather quills. I jammed the quills in hard, and the thought popped into my head that if they stayed in place, Reuben would be waiting in the forest. I put my shoes on: the new one, nearly dry from where it had sat beside the stove all night, and the old one, which I had kept safe. I had sliced off the ends so I could wear them comfortably, even if my toes stuck out beyond the soles. I squeezed past my father and he gripped my upper arm, stopping me, the smile gone.
“I want you back before it gets dark.” His fingers pinched me and I pulled away, but he didn’t let go. “Punzel?” He said my name low, with an unspoken threat.
“OK!” I yanked my arm from him and walked off toward the forest. When I reached the trees, I glanced behind me. My father was still there, leaning in the doorway, watching.
I went straight to the gill and stared down into the runnel where we had sat the day before. The tree trunk still lay wedged from bank to bank, but all the forest litter which had been crammed behind it had been washed away as though it had never been there at all. The stone Reuben had lifted to reach the water to clean my face had even been put back—everything looked the same, and yet everything was different. I sat on the bank, patting my hair to check the braids were still in place. I tried out different positions and expressions: elbows on knees, looking moody; sitting up with the camel dress arranged in a circle around me; lying back in the afternoon sunshine with my eyes closed, humming. He didn’t come. Our scrap of land carried on moving while I waited, rotating away from the sun until I was sitting in the shade. And I suddenly thought Reuben wouldn’t be expecting to meet me here, by the gill; he would be watching the fawn again. I raced downhill, retracing our steps from the day before, slowing to a nonchalant walk when I got near to where I had first seen him. He wasn’t there either. I crept forward and parted the grass as Reuben had done. The fawn and its mother had gone. The only evidence that the birth had even happened was a few flattened ferns.
I did my rounds, plodding from one trap to the next. Two rabbits and a squirrel went into the rucksack slung over my shoulder. Perhaps Reuben crossed the river in the mornings; maybe he had meant to collect me from die Hütte, shake my father’s hand, and ask if he could walk out with me. He could be there now, or maybe he was ill, dying, washed away by the river. I was a few yards from the gribble when I remembered that we had talked about its sour apples the day before; then I was upon it, and Reuben was sitting under the tree, in a patch of sunshine, his back against the trunk, writing in a book. He squinted up at me.
“Glad to see you’ve got both shoes on today,” he said, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. He smiled back, and those little pouches appeared above his hairy cheeks, and I wondered how old he was and where he had been born and who his mother had been.
“What are you writing?” I could see the slope of blue words across the page, but couldn’t make out what they said. I wanted to read them and take the pen from his hand and write; to remember the feeling of letters and words appearing from the ends of my fingers. He snapped the book shut.
“Oh, nothing. Just some thoughts, ideas.” He stood up and tucked the book and the pen inside a satchel he wore slung across his chest. “Come on,” he said, then grabbed my hand and pulled me. “There’s something I want you to see. We might already be too late.”
As I allowed him to tug me along a track toward the gill and away from the gribble, I remembered Phyllis’s grave and her head buried in the earth. When I looked behind me, over my shoulder, I saw that the twig marker was no longer lying flat on the ground but had been bound with string into a cross, which now stood upright in the soil.
“Wait!” I cried out, but laughed too while he dragged me behind him. “Where are we going? Why are we running?”
“Come on,” he urged. “I promise you it’ll be worth it.”
At the gill, I took a couple of steps down the steep bank.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. He still had hold of my hand, and with it he pulled me back up. “Let’s cross on the tree trunk.” It remained jammed into the bank on either side, but most of its bark had been stripped away, revealing the smooth and pale sapwood underneath. “Hold your arms out and don’t look down,” he said, stepping onto the trunk. He walked confidently along it; one, two, three long strides and he was across.
Reuben faced me. “Easy,” he said.
I lingered on the bank, my fingertips sweating and my mouth dry. I looked up at him and down at the trunk. I stepped forward—it was barely wider than my feet. I took another step, and my centre of gravity shifted out over the gill; I compensated, moving in the opposite direction, too far. I tried another step, too fast. Reuben was bending toward me, his arms outstretched, but there was no grip on the slick surface of the trunk. And I fell. I heard myself cry out, and there was a smack of pain as my hip and chest hit the rocks a few feet below.
“Punzel!” he shouted; then he was sliding down the side of the gill and helping me to my feet. “Christ, have you broken anything?”
My hip burned and the hand which had been under me felt crushed, but I said, “No, no, I’m fine. Really, I’m OK.”
He held my hands in his and looked me up and down. “Your dress is ripped,” he said. There was a tear through the beige fabric.
“It’s just an old thing. It doesn’t matter.”
We were balancing on the damp boulders in the bottom of the gill. I pulled my hands away from his to brush the mud and bits of moss from my dress and so I could look down while I worked hard at not crying. I couldn’t cope with being the centre of his attention.
“What was it you wanted to show me?” I said.
“Are you sure you’d still like to go? We could see it another day.”
“Which way?” I said, starting off up the bank, trying not to limp or wince. At the top, I went left, weaving through the bushes toward the mountain, aware of Reuben following.
“Across the scree,” he said, overtaking me. “This was why you needed your shoes.”
Behind him, I lifted up my dress to examine my hip—the skin was ragg
ed, the area over my hip bone already reddening.
The ground underfoot shifted and moved, sliding us backward even as we climbed. Every year, winter frosts chipped away at the side of the mountain and the loose fragments of rock crept downhill like a grey lava flow. We scrambled up the slope for five or ten minutes until right against the escarpment the angle of the land flattened off, and we stopped to catch our breath and look back. The view carried us out over the frilly tops of the wintereyes and down to the spiked firs in the valley bottom. There was a flash of the silver river, and a green hillside rising up from the water, and, finally, the naked line of rock at the edge of the world.
“That’s where you live, isn’t it?”
“Come on, the sun’s moving,” Reuben said, and led the way along the side of the mountain, loose stones spinning out from under our feet and clattering off the mountainside. We came to an expanse of heather covered in a drift of purple flowers, similar to those I had found the grubs in many winters ago. In the shade of the mountain, Reuben crouched and pulled me down beside him. “Now we have to wait.” And he sat staring straight ahead at the bushes. I thought it was a joke, but he didn’t move; he didn’t look at me or say anything else. So I crouched there too, until the sun crossed our backs onto the heather, which trembled in the light, lifting its flowers toward the sunshine. As we watched, the heather flexed its petals, purple and pink with black-eyed spots. Like a ripple on a still pond, the flowers fluttered in the sun’s warmth and, in a chain reaction, they lifted, a flock rising and fluttering in the air around us.
“Butterflies are cold-blooded,” Reuben said. “They can’t move until the sun warms their flight muscles.” We sat until the sun had reached them all and just a few remained dancing about our heads. “They only live for two weeks. A short but beautiful life,” he said.
When the butterflies were all gone, Reuben asked, “Are you hungry?”
I was always hungry, but I shrugged. We continued walking along the side of the mountain, the narrow path disappearing after we left the scree, and the ground becoming grassy and uneven, lush tufts sprouting over hidden rocks and dips. I could hear water trickling beneath us, seeping out from the mountain, small rivulets which would gather themselves together in secret, amassing, joining forces until they found their way into the gill. When the incline became steeper, we headed downhill. I picked my way with care, holding my skirt and hopping from one grassy mound to the next, my hip complaining with each step. I tested the ground before I trod, wary of catching my foot in a hole and tumbling all the way down. Reuben, ahead of me, at first inched downward in the same fashion, but then stood up and with a whoop started to run. He leaped from one hillock to the next, his arms whirling, his body leaning out at an alarming angle as if he might spring off into the air. Well before me, he reached the grove of wintereyes and wasn’t even out of breath when I caught up with him. He stood under a tree, peering up through the leaves, and then shimmied into the branches monkey-style and came back with two eggs clutched in one hand.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 18
