He watched her shake off water in the doorway and it reminded him of Pax, the doglike way he did that. Was it raining where he was? Would he still shake himself off if there was no warm, dry inside to come into? Peter shivered and rubbed his arms.
“What’s the matter? You look like you’re in pain. Your arms hurt?”
“No.” Of course they did. But it was a good hurt, a soreness that meant he was getting closer to being strong enough to go. He dropped and did three push-ups, his cast resting on his left ankle. “See? Fine. Can I do the obstacle course now? It’s not raining as hard.”
“No. You can’t get the cast wet. I’ll figure out some way to waterproof it before you leave, but for today, stay in here. You do all your drills already?”
“Beam work, sack dragging, cinder blocks. All that core work you taught me.”
Vola nodded to the wall of marionettes. “Why don’t you practice, then?”
Because those puppets don’t get me a minute closer to my fox, Peter wanted to say. He sighed deeply and rolled his eyes instead.
Vola was unmoved. “How are you coming with them?”
“Okay. Good, I mean.” He’d practiced a few times. And gotten a little better. The strings didn’t tangle up, anyway. Sometimes, though, the controls still worked exactly the opposite of the way he expected them to, and the puppets always looked twitchy, as if they were being electrocuted. But he had run out of patience.
“Let’s do the show. I’m going to be leaving soon, Vola.” Peter lifted the crutches, which moved as if they were extensions of his arms now. “I made it to the ridge and back twice yesterday—I was on these things almost six hours. I would have done eight except you took them away, remember? I’m ready to go.”
Vola dropped a handful of nails into an overall pocket and slid a hammer into her belt loop. Then she leveled him a gaze. “Show me how you work Sinbad.”
Peter gave another sigh, which Vola ignored again, and picked Sinbad off the wall. He swept the puppet over a bale of hay and dropped it onto the wooden egg in the big tin bowl that Vola had painted to look like a nest. He knew how clumsy it looked, but he sent her a hopeful glance.
“Really? That’s the desperate hero, risking his life for a chance to escape the mighty Roc?”
Vola took the controls from him, and instantly the marionette seemed to become flesh and blood. “Think about what he wants: to escape,” she said, as if Peter had asked for a lesson. “Drop his arms and lead with them, like this, see, kind of low and sneaky. Have him sink down into the nest till he’s hidden behind the egg. Once he’s there, you can let him go and fly the Roc over the nest from the other side—from the right, remember, so it doesn’t tangle Sinbad’s strings. Bring it down directly onto the egg, nice and slow, so the magnets in its talons catch hold of the ones in Sinbad’s hands.”
“They don’t move like that for me. Why don’t you just set up a mirror and watch yourself act it out?”
Vola glared at him. “It’s the third condition, and it’s not optional. Come over here.” She carried the puppet to her workbench.
“He wants to move. All the puppets want to move because I made them that way. You just have to show them how. Your muscles to theirs, your muscles to theirs.”
She took off Sinbad’s cloak. Then, to Peter’s shock, she unstrung his wires. She reached for a screwdriver and disassembled the puppet until he was nothing more than a pile of scattered parts. Then she held the screwdriver out.
Peter clamped the crutches under his armpits and raised his palms.
“You watched, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“I just stopped in for some tools. I’ll be back in an hour. You’ll have this puppet put together again, and you won’t have any more problems after that.” She slapped the screwdriver into his hand and left without another word.
It wasn’t actually that hard. The marionette’s knees and elbows were simple one-way hinges, the shoulders and hips carved wooden ball joints, which Peter could see allowed for greater movement. The hands and feet were fastened with leather straps.
The stringing was trickier. But once he figured out that the hands had to work off the control that moved like a dragonfly, he was able to figure out the others.
And Vola was right: after he’d refastened Sinbad, he could move the puppet more smoothly. “Your muscles to theirs,” Vola had said, and sure enough, Peter was able to translate the movements she’d suggested through his own body to Sinbad’s.
“Your muscles to theirs” didn’t work for the Roc. Peter flexed his shoulders, swooped his arms, but the bird only lurched a few strokes and then fell as if it had been shot. The bird’s glittering gaze seemed a reproach.
“I’m sorry, bird. I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, though. Are you trying to eat the guy? Are you protecting your egg?”
Suddenly Peter wanted to know the Roc’s story, wanted to get it right. He found the slot where Vola kept the Sinbad book. As he drew it out, he heard a quiet thunk. There was something at the back of the niche.
He pulled it out. A square tin, faded yellow and decorated with the peeling words SUNSHINE BISCUITS. He steadied it on his palm and thought back to the battered cookie tin he’d found at his grandfather’s, the one with its heap of soldiers guarding the surprising photo.
He pried off the lid. Inside was a stack of index cards, scrawled with handwriting he’d already come to recognize. He knew instantly that he held in his hand Vola’s personal truths, the ones she kept hidden. He snapped down the lid, not wanting to invade her privacy. But it was too late—he’d read the top one:
I would have been a good teacher.
It wasn’t a terrible truth, and it didn’t even seem all that personal. Still, he wished he hadn’t seen it. He pushed the tin back into the niche and slid the book in after it just as Vola came back in.
He pointed to the marionettes. “I’ve got it now. Let’s do the scene.”
But Vola only walked to her workbench and poured oil onto a whetstone. “Not yet. We need a stage first. I’ll put something together when I’ve got some free time.”
“A stage? You didn’t say anything about a stage!”
“The marionettes don’t just swing around in thin air over a couple of hay bales.” She turned around and raised a palm to cut off Peter’s protest. “Listen, boy, I will see that soldier’s story the way it should be seen. You’ll have to respect how much that means to me even if you don’t understand it. Which you should, by the way. You carrying that charm around—it’s the same thing. You’re telling that story of your mother’s for her.”
“But it will take so long. . . .”
“And there’s no hurry—you’re going to be here another week anyway.” She clumped back to the workbench, sat down hard, and began selecting tools. Discussion over.
Peter flung himself onto a stack of hay bales. Another week of this and he’d go crazy.
The word struck him. He didn’t think of Vola as crazy anymore. He propped himself on his elbows and studied her as she polished her tools, noticing how carefully she lifted and cleaned each one. How, when she finished, she laid it precisely in its place. There was a calm purposefulness to her movements that he liked. A predictability.
François waddled in and yawned. He climbed to a crotch in the rafters above the workbench and started washing himself before a nap. It occurred to Peter that, like François, he’d grown comfortable with Vola.
Peter craned his head to see what she was making. A handle. She’d brought in a broken hoe, and she was giving it a new handle. A simple thing, and yet it struck him as almost magic. Like his crutches. Before he’d had them, he’d been helpless. Vola had nailed a couple of boards together, and now he could swing over miles of rough country, quick and sure. Magic.
He pulled the crutches over and braced them under his arms, feeling the familiar comfort their sturdy strength brought. He swung over to the workbench. “I want to make something. Will you show me
?”
Vola leaned back to study him hard. After what seemed a full minute, she nodded. “No sense letting your brain go to rot. You know anything at all about working with wood?”
“‘Carve away from yourself’—I know that much.”
“That’s a start. But that’s not what I meant.” Vola chose a fresh block from her wood bin and centered it on the workbench. “Who is the master here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who is the boss: me or the wood?”
Peter understood that this was a test. He looked at the wood, blank and still, waiting. Then he looked at the neat arcs of gleaming tools, so eager to cut, they seemed to tremble. “You. You’re the master.”
Vola nodded. She selected a spoon-tipped chisel and a mallet, then gave the block the same searching look she’d given him a few minutes ago—as if she were trying to read some secret message below its surface. She tapped the chisel into the fresh wood. It cut with a clean snap, and a curled chip flipped onto the bench.
She turned to Peter. “And now? Who is the master now?”
Vola’s face told him nothing. But the wood, its missing wedge now a question demanding a response, spoke. “The wood is,” he said, certain.
“That’s right,” Vola agreed. “From this moment on, the wood is the master. The carver is servant to the wood. All craftsmen are servants to the craft. Once you decide what you want to make, the project is the boss. You know what you want to make?”
The answer came right away. “How do you carve a fox?”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Peter braced for the answer he figured was coming—about how he should figure it out for himself. But Vola surprised him.
“Michelangelo was once asked how he’d created one of his statues. He said, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ Might be a good way to think about it. Of course, if you’re going to try to find the fox in the wood, you’ll have to start with some wood.”
She motioned Peter to follow her to the wood bin. “Different woods, different merits. Basswood’s easy to carve, holds fine detail, and it’s light. I use it for the marionettes’ heads. Now, this pine—”
“White ash is good for baseball bats,” Peter offered. “It’s really hard.”
Vola passed the pine block from one hand to the other in silence for a moment. “Speaking of which . . .” She turned to Peter. “You really don’t own a bat? You love baseball, but don’t own a bat?”
“I’m a fielder.”
“So . . . what? You wait for someone to hit the ball, then you go get it? That’s just reacting. Don’t you want to hit, too?”
“That’s not how it is. Once I’ve got the ball, I’m in control. I’m not reacting; I’m making choices. And I hit. The team has bats. You don’t know baseball.”
“Maybe I don’t know baseball.” She tossed the wood back into the bin with a shrug. “But I’m starting to know you. And I think you need yourself a bat.”
Peter turned to the bin. He ran his hand through the blocks of wood while the image of blue glass shattering over white roses swept him. The image he could avoid when he stood at the plate, a team bat in hand, only by aiming his fiercest concentration on the pitcher’s moves.
If he owned his own bat again, every time he picked it up, he would see that shattered blue glass over those white roses. And it would wreck him.
He lifted a honey-colored piece of wood, just the size Pax had been when he’d found him. “How about this?” he asked, his breathing tight. “It’s rippled, like fur.”
Vola looked as if she was biting her lip against more of the bat debate. “Butternut,” she said finally. “Beautiful grain. Soft enough. You study it for a while. We’ll carve tomorrow.”
Late that night, as he was about to climb into his hammock bone weary, Peter saw the block of wood he’d propped on the windowsill earlier. He’d barely thought about Pax all day. Guilt swept him. He was becoming foxless, something he hadn’t been since he was seven years old.
It had taken a lot longer—a year and sixteen days to be exact, he’d figured it out—for a day to go by when he didn’t think about his mother. On that day, he’d gone with a friend’s family on a camping trip. They’d gotten into canoes in the morning, and fished and swum and pitched tents and grilled hot dogs. Only when he climbed into his sleeping bag under the stars had his disloyalty struck him. He’d worried that night that he deserved to be motherless.
He pulled her picture out from his pack. Her birthday, the kite. One of the very good memories. The kite hadn’t flown—he’d been six years old, and really it wasn’t anything more than a picture of a dragon taped to some Popsicle sticks. Even at that age, he’d known that if his father had been there, somehow the kite’s failure would have ruined the afternoon. But he wasn’t there, and his mother had just laughed about it, and they’d spread a blanket on the hill and made a picnic of peanut brittle and grape juice and made up story after story about that paper dragon who was too wise to go flying off into the air when so many other adventures were waiting for him on the ground.
Peter set the photo on the sill beside the block of wood. He closed his eyes. He needed to visit some memories of Pax, too.
Pax, waiting at the door of his pen whenever Peter got home because he’d learned the whine of the school-bus brakes. Nosing through his backpack for apple cores. Peeking out of his sweatshirt pocket. Peter had snuck him into school once—in second grade, he hadn’t thought of the consequences to the kit, but had only wanted the secret comfort of his company. There’d been a fire drill, and the alarm had terrified Pax. Peter had been sent home and his father had been angry, but the way the kit had shivered and mewed had been the true punishment.
The best memory was a quiet one. The winter before last had been cold, with long stretches when Peter hadn’t wanted to leave the fireplace to do his homework. It had been so cold that his father had relented and allowed Pax inside early to stretch out close to the fire. Pax would doze with his muzzle and front paws getting so hot that Peter kept checking them. Peter remembered his knuckles drifting down as he read his history text to knead the fur between his pet’s shoulder blades. Peace.
He opened his eyes and lifted the butternut block. And in the pale light of the moon, he saw the fox in the wood.
Bristle had started out after Pax, but his long bounds had outpaced hers and he had run hard all through the night, all through the morning. He had not sensed her presence for hours when he reached the river in front of the mill in the afternoon. He slipped silently into a stand of green reeds, downstream from where Gray’s body rested. He dipped his head to drink. When his thirst was slaked, he pushed the reeds aside.
The field was empty. The vehicles were gone. There was no sign of the humans, but their scents were fresh and even sharper than before. They were nearby, and they were anxious. Pax climbed upstream and crossed the river at the narrows, then hurried along the treed ridge to observe the site from above.
New gouges raked across the hillside behind the mill ruins. Like a skulk of foxes taking to its dens, the soldiers had retreated to their trenches: a few still digging, others working on equipment, still others talking together over charts. The vehicles rested behind the walls also.
Pax retraced his steps back along the ridge, back across the river, back downstream. Again he slipped into the reeds, and looking up from there, he saw no humans this time either. The dark electric scent hung heavy in the air.
The wind eddied, bearing smoke from the west. He’d smelled it twice on his way, but now it was thicker, more dangerous. Closer.
Pax could not wait until the safety of night.
He dived into the water and swam with only his sleek head above its surface, climbed the bank, and shook the water from his fur. Keeping low, he headed for the closest cover—a scrub oak skirted with new suckers at its base, just a few full-bounds away.
From there, he sighted the advantage he needed: midway down from the mill walls, where t
he field began to flatten out, a purple granite slab shouldered out of the ground. A bundle of wires trailed over this outcrop before dropping back into the grass.
Pax crept out. His paws sensed a threat from the ground: more boxes were buried near the bank, the field crossed with more wires. Leaping clear of the wires, he skimmed the grasses so swiftly that they barely parted.
At the base of the slab he flattened himself and perked his ears uphill. By the steady rhythms of their voices and tools, he knew that the soldiers had not moved from the trenches. The breeze was still downhill—it would alert him if they approached.
He pulled a wire out and began to gnaw at it. Before he’d chewed through the sheathing, a fury of teeth attacked him from behind. He hit the rock hard, the wind knocked out of him. He rolled to his feet and saw Bristle leap over him to the crest of the slab.
From that height, she held the advantage. The crows say war-sick humans are nearing. This exploding earth, these death wires, leave this for them to find.
Pax was larger than Bristle, but he was no match for her determination. Every time he attempted to reclaim his position at the wire, her snapping jaws held him away. He circled the outcrop, climbing closer to the mill than he liked, to come at her from above. But before he could pounce, a movement down at the river caught his eye.
Bristle noted his alarm but kept her gaze locked on Pax. The humans have arrived?
Pax sensed an eager thrill below the question. No. Another fox, I think.
Bristle refused to be distracted. No fox from our valley would venture past the territory boundary.
Pax rose on his haunches for a clearer view. He saw it again—a narrow copper wedge, tipped with white, that rose and disappeared, rose and disappeared, running beside the riverbank along exactly the path he had taken earlier, the same path Bristle must have tracked to find him.
Pax Page 10
