Vola went quiet then, her eyes closed.
“What happened?” Peter nudged after a moment.
“What happened?”
“In the store. What happened in the store?”
“Oh.” She turned back to the stove and flipped the johnnycakes. “Peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter happened?”
Vola tossed her hands into the air. “Peanut butter happened. And I was lucky it did. There I was on the floor of the grocery store—dirty, red-and-white-checked linoleum, I will never forget—weeping. And I knew I wouldn’t get up until I remembered what kind of food I liked.”
Vola stacked the johnnycakes on a blue plate, then paused. Peter thought she might be drifting back to the memory of that grocery-store floor. He was glad he hadn’t seen something like that—a grown woman, sobbing on a dirty grocery-store floor. A crazy lady, with one lost leg. He felt suddenly protective and hoped no one had laughed at her, and that she had gotten herself out okay. “And . . .”
“Oh. And finally I did. I remembered my grandmother telling me that when I first discovered peanut butter sandwiches, I wanted one every day. So I got up from the floor and I bought myself some peanut butter and bread. I filled my cart with peanut butter and bread, because I decided I wasn’t coming back until I knew for sure something else I liked to eat. And I was afraid that might be a long time.”
She added the ham to the plate, slapped on a scoop of applesauce, and brought it over to him along with a white pitcher of maple syrup. “Eat.”
Peter flooded the plate with syrup and loaded a fork. The cornmeal had a gritty crunch; the ham was smooth and salty against the sweet syrup. It was the best food he could remember eating.
“And was it?” he asked when he’d cleaned half the plate. “A long time before you remembered something else?”
Vola pressed a finger to the drying cast. “Almost set. Keep still a while longer.” She went back to the stove and carved more ham and ladled more batter into the skillet. “It was. People around me, they called it PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, from being in the war. And they were right that I was sick. But I knew it wasn’t being in the war, exactly. It was that in the war, I had forgotten everything that was true about myself. Post-traumatic forgetting-who-you-are disorder, that’s what I had.
“My grandfather was in a nursing home by then, and he was dying. I went out to his place—it had been my old home, too, my grandparents raised me for a couple of years—to clean it out.
“It was the end of summer. The orchard was an untended mess, but there were still some peaches hanging on. And that was the second lucky thing that happened to me, after the peanut butter. Because I suddenly remembered: Lord, I had loved those peaches. I used to sneak out in the middle of the night to pick them. I’d sprawl on the grass underneath those trees with fireflies flashing all around and katydids singing, a heap of peaches on my belly, and I’d eat them till the juice ran into my ears.
“I remembered that so clearly. I could smell that memory, I could hear it, and I could taste it. But I couldn’t figure out how that girl could be the same person who had put on a uniform, picked up a gun, and done the things I did in the war. So I reached up and picked one of those peaches, and I laid myself down on the grass and bit into it, and . . . and there I was. I found another little true piece of my old self.”
She brought the skillet over and stacked more johnnycakes and ham onto his empty plate, then went back to the stove.
“Stop,” Peter said.
“Stop? Well, that’s the end of the story anyway.”
“No, I mean this’ll be enough food. Thank you.” Peter wished again that his fox were under the table, wondered again if Pax was hungry. And then had the curious sense that he wasn’t—that tonight, at least, Pax had food in his belly. “So then what?” he asked after loading his fork. “You were okay?”
Vola set the skillet in the sink and came back to sit across from him at the table. “What a person likes to eat? That’s a detail. I was so lost, I needed to find out all the true things about myself. The little things to the biggest of all: what did I believe in at my core?”
Peter figured he knew what was coming. “Like war. Now you’re antiwar, right?”
Vola steepled her fingers under her chin. “That’s a complicated thing. What I am is for telling the truth about it. About what it costs. People should tell the truth about what war costs. That’s taken me a long time to figure out.” She leaned back. “And that was just one thing. I had to relearn everything that was right and wrong for me. But I couldn’t—the world was too loud for me to hear myself think. So I moved into my grandfather’s place. I decided to stay there until I knew who I was again.”
Peter looked up at the jarred peaches on the shelf above him, then recalled the blooming trees in the orchard. “And you’re still here,” he said. “This is that place, isn’t it?”
The sun burned through a dawn fog. The two foxes had been traveling for hours, but Gray was slow and rested often, so they had only just reached the valley basin. For the most part, Pax respectfully flanked the older fox, but sometimes he broke away to race at full speed for long glorious minutes before circling back.
He had never run before, not really. He’d sprinted around the borders of his pen or across the yard, but this running was a different thing: neat oval paws, healed now, skimming the ground only for traction as he galloped faster and faster over great sweeps of grass.
Yesterday’s meal had cleared his senses and fueled his muscles, but now the eggs were gone from his belly and the smells of the warming valley brought on a powerful hunger. Where the humans were, there would be food. How far?
Two days’ travel. Gray described a place of old stone walls where the earth smelled faintly of tar and hemp, bordered by a river. We will reach it by dusk. The human settlements are another day’s travel beyond that.
Pax did not remember human settlements. He did not remember a river. Of his home, he remembered the looming door. He remembered oaks ringing the house, the overgrown remains of a flower garden he was never allowed into, the sounds of a road. He sensed that other humans lived along this road, but he had never encountered them. These memories were fading, as was the memory of being caged. He could no longer recall what the sky looked like through hexagons of cage wire.
He remembered his boy, though. The hazel eyes with their odd round pupils; the way Peter would close them and throw his head back and yelp something near a bark when he was delighted. His salty neck that smelled sometimes of sweat and sometimes of soap. His hands, always moving, with their scent of chocolate, which Pax loved, and of mitt leather, which he loathed.
As the two foxes traveled on, Pax reflected on the puzzle of the other scent of his boy—his underlying scent. It hung between grief and yearning, and it welled from a deep ache for something that Pax could never divine.
Sometimes, in the boy’s nest room, this grief-yearning scent was so strong that it overpowered everything else, and yet his boy made no move to acquire whatever it was he wanted so badly. Whenever Pax caught that scent, he would hurry from wherever he was to find Peter flung across his bed, clutching the objects he kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his bureau, his face set in hard ridges. Pax would nose Peter’s shirtsleeve, or claw up the curtains, then pretend to lose his footing and fall to the floor—anything to get his boy to play. But when the grief-yearning scent was strongest, none of his tricks would work. On those days, Peter would shoo Pax outside and shut the door.
Remembering this, Pax felt the urge to run again, but not for the joy of it. This war that is coming—are you sure it will harm all in its path? Even the youth?
Everything. It will destroy everything.
Pax nosed Gray, respectful but urgent. They must hurry. The older fox studied the younger one for a moment, then began to trot. They crossed the marshy seam of the valley and climbed the rocky cliffs, shoulder to shoulder this time.
At the top of the rise, the tw
o foxes stopped. Gray was panting hard. Ahead, the pines towered up, promising long, cool pools of shade. But the markings here were strong: the challenger hunted this territory, and the threat in his scent was unmistakable. And almost immediately the ground beat with the light staccato of paws tearing toward them. Pax and Gray had barely braced themselves when the tawny fox burst from the underbrush, lips curled in a snarl, tail lashing.
Pax shrank back, but Gray advanced calmly, his body lowered enough to declare nonaggression. We are only passing through.
The challenger ignored the peaceful greeting and sprang, hitting the old fox hard in the flank and pinning him down, then sank his teeth into Gray’s thin neck.
At Gray’s pain scream, Pax’s guard hairs lifted and his heartbeat quickened. His muscles thrummed with a fury he’d known only once: in the early days with his humans, the father had raised a hand to the boy, and Pax had shot across the room without thought, small kit-teeth tearing fiercely through the man’s pant leg. Now, as it had then, his back arched and a low growl rumbled deep in his throat.
The challenger spun around in surprise, and Pax charged him headlong. They rolled, teeth clipping at tender ears, hind claws digging for purchase in soft belly fur. The yellow fox was more skilled, but Pax’s fighting was fueled by an instinct to protect. When his teeth found the other’s throat, the challenger scrambled to his feet and backed off, whimpering.
Pax leaped in front of Gray, shielding him as he’d shielded his boy that long-ago time, lifted his chest, and growled a warning. The challenger slunk away.
Pax shook off the blood from a dozen superficial scratches and then cleaned Gray’s wound. The puncture was deep. He urged Gray to go back.
No. I will travel.
The two padded steadily for an hour through light woods, Pax restraining himself to keep pace with the ailing Gray, relieved at least that they kept moving. But when a murder of crows landed in the bare arms of a pecan tree, Gray doubled back and sat down at its base, ears pricked up intently at the commotion.
Pax waited, not patiently. After a moment the old fox barked for him. The war is moving closer.
How do you know this?
The crows. Listen.
Pax cocked his head. More shrieking birds swept in, descending into the lower branches, then flapping up again to higher perches in a cyclone of distress. They’re upset.
The crows hulked their shoulders, spiked their feathers, jerked and dipped their shrieking beaks. Their discord set Pax’s nerves on edge. There is disorder.
He attended more carefully. What he sensed alarmed him. He tried to describe it: Air choked with death. Fire and smoke. Blood in a river, the river running red with it, the earth drowning in blood. Chaos. Everything is broken. The fibers of the trees, the clouds, even the air is broken.
Yes. War. Where?
Pax attuned himself once more. West. Still distant, but nearing. And now a small group of war-sick has come from the south to meet it.
From the south.
Pax paced while Gray struggled to his feet. He offered again to travel alone, and again Gray refused to turn back home. Again they set out, and again their pace was slower than Pax wanted. They stopped only for meals of grubs and berries, and whenever they did, Pax searched the air for any trace of his boy’s scent, for the faintest sound of his voice. None. None.
He lifted his muzzle and bayed a single aching note.
It had been so long since he’d seen his boy. Before this, they’d never been apart for more than half a day. Often, Peter would leave in the morning, and Pax would pace his pen in increasing distress until the afternoon, when Peter would come home, smelling of other young humans and of the strange breath of the large yellow bus that delivered him. With the afternoon, Pax could reassure himself his boy was all right, examining him for any sign of injury before he could relax into play.
It was afternoon now. He bayed again, and this time Gray lifted his voice in an echo of loss. But when Pax trotted back to the path to resume the journey, Gray faltered.
Pax could see that he needed rest. He led the wounded fox to a mossy circle of shade beneath a pine. Gray laid his cheek on his paws, and before Pax had even finished cleaning his wound again, he was asleep.
As Pax kept watch, he thought of doing favorite things with his boy when he found him: tumbling together outside, playing hunting games, exploring the grassed yard and the bit of woods behind it. He remembered the ways his boy would reward him: the full smiles of greeting; the thorough neck scratchings, Peter’s fingers digging in just hard enough. He recalled the peace of lying at his boy’s feet in front of the fire.
These thoughts calmed Pax and he dozed with the memory of Peter’s knuckles kneading the loose skin between his shoulder blades so real that his fur ruffled under it. Until a shifting breeze brought a scent that called him to instant alert.
Meat. Roasted meat, the kind his humans sometimes cooked over a fire in the yard. His boy would feed him bites of this meat, dripping with fat. For days afterward, Pax would scour the ashy fire bed for overlooked scraps. Even the charred bones were treasures.
Pax got to his paws to sniff more deeply. Yes, roasted meat. He nosed the sleeping Gray. Humans are near.
Gray moved more easily after his rest, and the two foxes kept up a loping pace. As they got closer, though, Pax charged ahead. His body was light, the fat burned off from days of scarce food. He ran as foxes are meant to run—compact body arrowing through the air at a swiftness that rippled his fur. The new joy of speed, the urgency of coming night, the hope of reunion with his boy—these things transformed him into something that shot like liquid fire between the trees. Something gravity couldn’t touch. Pax could have run forever.
Until he galloped out from the woods and saw ahead of him a wide river. Beyond that stretched a clear field, flat and then rising up to massive crumbling stone walls. It was dusk now, and at the far corner of the stone ruins a dozen men were gathered around a fire, eating. Beyond them were a cluster of tents and several large vehicles.
The wind had shifted to the east. The grilled meat smoke still hung heavy in the air, but Pax could only get a general scent of the humans. He bounded up and down the river’s edge, frustrated, but from no direction could he differentiate one human scent from another.
At least Pax knew his boy was not here. None of the humans had his reedy form, none moved with the same quick energy, none held himself as Peter had—upright, but with a downward cant of his head. He was relieved; the other scents of the encampment—smoke, diesel, scorched metal, and a strange, dark electrical odor—were things he would have herded Peter away from.
Gray limped from the woods and flopped to the riverbank beside Pax. Together, the two foxes watched the men. They had finished eating, but they remained around the fire, talking and laughing.
They are war-sick? Pax wanted to know.
Not now. They are peaceful now. I remember this peace. The old fox curled his forelegs under his chest. At the end of the day, the humans I lived with gathered like those across the river.
Suddenly Pax remembered: he had seen something similar as well. It hadn’t happened for several years, but sometimes at the end of the day, his humans would sit together on his boy’s nest. The father would lay a hard box, flat and thin and made of many layers of paper, across his lap. Paper, like Pax’s own bedding, but not shredded, and with many marks. His humans would peel these layers, one by one, and study them. Pax remembered that his humans were most linked together on those evenings, and with their harmony he could let down his guard.
Pax felt a strange sensation—as if his chest were no longer large enough for his heart.
The foxes turned back to the men. Some were still crouched around the fire, while others moved with lanterns between the equipment and the tents. With full darkness, the remaining men rose from the fireside. They dumped out mugs of coffee, scuffed dirt over flames, and ducked into tents.
Gray rose also and limped uphill to the prote
ction of a sweeping hemlock bough. He circled and curled himself up on the pine-needled ground underneath, his nose tucked under his brush.
The smell of the meat had made Pax too hungry to rest. He trotted to the edge of the river. Its current was soft. He dipped his head and drank and then jumped to a rock, slippery with moss but stable. Then, gaze fixed on the glow of the dying embers, he chose. A leap, a splash, and again his body did what it had never done before but was meant to do all along: he swam. A moment later, he climbed the bank and shook himself off.
Neither movement nor sound came from the tents. Pax crept silently across the field and climbed the rise. He circled the bounds of the camp, edging closer and closer to the fire bed.
The sense of danger was strong. It was hard not to flee. He was, after all, accustomed only to his two humans—the one he loved, the one he tolerated. Several times he crept to the very rim of the fire bed, found the smell of meat laced with the warning scent of the war-sick men, then leaped back.
A discarded pork bone, still redolent with fat, proved too much to resist. Pax darted in. As he gulped the meat, ash-gritted but still warm, the rustle of canvas startled him. He froze.
A man emerged from a tent. Silhouetted by lantern light, he stretched, and a long shadow snaked out to cloak the watching fox. The man turned away and relieved himself on a bush. The scent of his urine traveled to Pax, and he bristled to sharp alert:
His boy’s father.
“That’s enough.”
The words, along with Vola’s hand on Peter’s shoulder, were a welcome relief. His foot throbbed, his shoulders ached, and his armpits were so chafed that they were bleeding. Two days of Boot Camp Vola—the secret name he’d christened the torture sessions in which he crutched uphill, dragged himself over stony ground on his elbows, and pitched mountains of hay balanced on one foot—had worn him out. He swung around to face the cabin, suddenly not even sure he could make it that far.
But above the roof of the cabin, the hills were veiled with rain clouds. Night was coming. He thought of Pax, wet and cold. “I could keep going.”
Pax Page 8
