At the reeds, another red flash. A small fox splashed into the water. And Pax recognized him.
He shrieked a warning.
Bristle turned to look then. Runt struggled out of the water beside the scrub oak. Instantly Bristle sprang up, seeming to double in size. In a single leap she cleared the ledge and then flew down the slope.
No, back! Home! Back! She flashed through the grasses. The panic in her voice only seemed to spur Runt on—he rose again to get her position and then loped in joyful bounds toward her.
Pax pounced on the wire, but he was too late.
Just as he stripped off its sheathing, a dark odor of lightning blew through the earth. A jolt of current shattered one of his back teeth. It seared his bottom lip, scorched his throat, and sizzled down his spine.
And then a swath of lower field exploded into the sky. Pax was knocked off the ledge, and when he hit solid ground again, tangled in uprooted shrubbery, the broken world went silent. His skull rang in the silence, and he watched shock-still as the storm of hot dirt and rocks and branches and weeds rained down upon him and then wasted itself to a veil of grit.
He staggered to his feet and sucked the burned air into his flattened lungs until his head cleared. Then he rose on his haunches to sniff for Runt and Bristle. He tried for them in all directions, but his nose was useless, the fine scenting nerves numbed by ash and soot. He barked for them, but the ringing in his ears was still the only sound he heard.
Pax worked his way out of the pile of brush and shook off the debris. Soldiers streamed down the hill across the smoking patch of field and then plunged into the river. When they had passed, he followed. Each movement sent aftershocks through his bones.
Where he had last seen them, he called again for Runt and Bristle. There was no answer, but—faintly at first, as if they were reaching his ears from a great distance away—he heard his own barks. And then the sound of the wind, and the snapping of seared weed stalks as he crashed through them, and the rough shouts of the war-sick men as they returned to the trenches. And from the trees, a murder of crows, cawing their displeasure at the ruined world. Pax could hear again.
For an hour he paced the field, calling for the missing foxes. Dusk fell before he finally heard it: Bristle’s weak answering yelp. He followed the call to the river’s edge. There, the scrub oak was lying splintered and smoking over the bank, its blackened branches in the water.
Pax found Bristle tucked into the earthy ball of its roots. Her head was up and her eyes were alert, although her muzzle was matted with blood. The fur of her beautiful brush was burned to a black crust. Pax nosed her face. The blood on her cheeks was not hers.
She dropped her head. Curled beneath her was the still body of Runt.
Pax dipped his head to the little fox’s chest. It rose and fell in ragged hitches, and Pax was relieved.
But then Bristle shifted and he saw: where Runt’s hind leg should have been, where the neat black-furred leg and the quick white paw should have been, there was only a shredded red mess on the blood-soaked leaves.
Peter rubbed the chisel handle with oiled steel wool, trying to resist the urge to throw it across the barn.
The morning had been good. He’d crutched over field and woods, through mud and gravel, up hills and down rock faces, over stone walls and under fences. Strong, tireless, and nearly as fast as if he’d had both boots on the ground. At noon, he’d told Vola he felt ready to go now, and he was. But she had ignored him as usual. She’d ordered him into the barn to rest and taken his crutches hostage. “Foot up. Polish some tools. Get the hand feel of them.”
His gaze fell on the near-finished carving in front of him on the workbench. The fox was rough, but it looked alive, and it seemed to him a sign that he would find Pax unharmed. Although it felt dangerous to hope, he allowed himself to imagine the scene. He would call for Pax at the spot where he’d left him, and Pax would come bursting out of the woods and probably knock him down in his happiness. They would go home together.
“You’re going to polish that handle right off, boy.”
Peter jumped. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You can’t go drifting off when you’re working with tools.” Vola settled herself on a barrel beside him and picked up a rasp and an oily cloth.
“I was thinking about Pax.” He put down the gleaming chisel and picked up his carving. He handed it over when Vola held out a palm.
“Looks like he wants to jump out of my hand. You’re worried about him?”
Peter nodded. “But half the time I think he could be all right. Foxes are smart—really smart. We had to lock the door to the kitchen because Pax could open every cupboard. Once, he chewed through the wire to a fan we’d just put in my room. My father was really mad. But then, when he was trying to fix it, he found out the fan had a short in the housing. It would have caught fire. I think Pax knew that somehow, that he was protecting me. So why wouldn’t he be smart enough to learn to hunt? Don’t you think he could survive?”
“I do,” Vola agreed.
Peter took the carving back and looked into the fox’s face. “There’s something else,” he said. “It’s that . . . I would know if he’d died.” And then he told Vola what he’d never told anyone else—about the merging he felt sometimes with Pax, how sometimes he didn’t just know what his fox was feeling but actually felt it himself. He held his breath, hearing how crazy it sounded.
Instead of laughing, Vola told him he was lucky. “You’ve experienced ‘two but not two.’”
“That’s on your board—‘Two but not two.’ I didn’t know what it meant.”
“It’s a Buddhist concept. Nonduality. It’s about one-ness, about how things that seem to be separate are really connected to one another. There are no separations.” Vola picked up his fox again. “This is not just a piece of wood. This is also the clouds that brought the rain that watered the tree, and the birds that nested in it and the squirrels that fed on its nuts. It is also the food my grandparents fed me that made me strong enough to cut the tree, and it’s the steel in the axe I used. And it’s how you know your fox, which allowed you to carve him yesterday. And it’s the story you will tell your children when you give this to them. All these things are separate but also one, inseparable. Do you see?”
“Two but not two. Inseparable. So . . . a couple of nights ago, I was sure that Pax had eaten. I felt it. Last night, I saw the moon, and I knew Pax was seeing it right then, too. Do you think that if I feel Pax living, then he’s alive?”
“Yes.”
Peter’s hopes swelled at her words. Vola never said anything she didn’t mean. “We tell the truth here; that’s the rule.” She’d told him that about a hundred times.
It was a valuable thing, he suddenly realized, to have someone you could count on for honesty. How many times in his life had he wanted only that? How many questions had he needed an honest answer for and gotten instead, from his father, dark silence?
And then, before he could chicken out, he asked the one that haunted him.
“Do you think . . . Do you think if someone had a wild part, it could ever be tamed out? If it’s in his nature? Inherited?”
Vola looked at him hard. Peter knew she thought he was asking about Pax, and he didn’t correct her. He picked up the chisel again and looked down at it on his lap, his fingers squeezed white around the shank as he waited for the answer.
“You always been like this? Asking other people to figure out your stuff for you? Eh? That doesn’t work.”
Peter let out his breath. As soon as he’d asked the question, he’d realized he didn’t want to hear the answer. Maybe he would never be ready to hear the answer to that question.
Vola patted her overall pocket and frowned. “Almost forgot.” She pulled out a napkin-wrapped muffin and handed it to Peter. He’d eaten four of them at breakfast, but she was always convinced that he wasn’t eating enough.
He unwrapped it. It was a little squashed, but as with the rest
of them, the pecan was centered perfectly on the brown-sugar topping. She’d stayed up late last night baking them, and he had heard her singing something in a language he didn’t recognize. Something happy. “Vola, why are you still living out here alone?”
“I told you.”
“But twenty years to figure out who you are? I mean, how hard can it be?”
“Plenty hard. The plain truth can be the hardest thing to see when it’s about yourself. If you don’t want to know the truth, you’ll do anything to disguise it.”
Peter put the muffin down. She was avoiding his question. “But you do. You know yourself. So how come you don’t go live somewhere with people? Tell me the truth. That’s the rule around here, right?”
She looked out the barn window for a minute. Her shoulders slumped, and when she turned to him, she looked tired. “Fair enough, No-bat Peter. Maybe it’s because I do know myself. Maybe what I know is that I don’t belong with people. Maybe I am a grenade.”
“What do you mean, a grenade?”
“What would you call someone who can go from a girl eating peaches and watching fireflies to a woman who kills a man? Eh? That girl would have cut off her arm before she’d have hurt a single one of those fireflies, but a few years later she killed a perfect stranger. I’d call that person a weapon. I’m an unpredictable, deadly weapon. It’s best I stay hidden here, where no one will ever be hurt by me, even by accident.” She raised her fingers and popped them at him—boom!—but this time the gesture looked sad, not menacing.
“You don’t hurt me,” Peter answered.
“How do you know I won’t?”
“Because I know.” He thumped his chest. “In my core.”
Vola slapped her palms on the workbench and pushed herself off. “Put those tools back in the right order,” she muttered over her shoulder as she left.
From the window, Peter watched her stamp down the path. It seemed she was moving differently. As if that heart-pine leg of hers had grown even heavier.
One by one, Peter slid the cleaned tools into their pockets and then rolled the canvas. He felt his old anxiety coiling at the base of his skull. Over a week he’d been stuck here. He would’ve left already if it hadn’t been for the third condition. He’d promised, and he owed it to Vola, but when he’d asked her at breakfast about building the stage, she’d only shrugged. “I’ll get to it.”
And then the solution hit him, so ridiculously simple that he laughed out loud.
Without his crutches he was awkward and slow again, but he managed to hop outside to where Vola kept a brush pile. There, he chose twelve long straight saplings, each the thickness of his arm. One by one, he flung them to the barn doorway, then followed and slid them inside. On the sawhorses, he stripped them of their branches, then set to work.
And two hours later, he had a stage. It wasn’t much to look at—the corners raggedly notched and lashed with twine, mismatched scrap boards nailed onto the frame for the walls and floor—but when he strung a length of burlap over the top, he smiled. “Piece of cake,” he said to François, who wandered in and stopped to sniff the frame in obvious admiration. “Piece of cake.”
“I made the stage. It’s in the barn.”
Vola looked up from the chicken she was plucking. She eyed the branch Peter was leaning on and then motioned to his crutches, propped against the kitchen counter.
Peter reached for them, slid them under his arms, and felt the immediate comfort they brought. “I can do that puppet show for you now. Come to the barn.”
“I have work to do now. But all right. Tonight.”
“And then I can leave, Vola. I’m ready.”
Vola laid the chicken on the table and sighed. “You are not ready. You sleep indoors, dry and warm. You have clean water, and someone cooks your food for you. But all right, tomorrow I will test you. Ten miles. You hike five miles, show me you can make a camp on one leg, and hike five miles back . . . then we’ll talk.”
Peter watched her gather up the chicken feathers and tuck them into a pouch. And it struck him: nothing would change after he left. Vola would save her feathers, would make her puppets all alone in the woods, more and more and more of them, and tell that soldier’s story to no one.
Pax watched Runt all night and into the next day from a bush not far away. He left only to soothe his burned lip in the cool river mud and make a meal of the small fish he found lying on the bank. His sense of smell returned, and whenever he woke from a fitful doze, he sniffed for Bristle and Runt to reassure himself that they were still alive.
Bristle had dragged brush to the fallen tree to shelter her brother and curled her body over his to keep him warm. She left him briefly a few times, and when she did, Pax quietly took her place beside Runt’s motionless form. He was there when Runt finally woke with a whimper.
Pax nuzzled Runt’s shoulder to comfort him. Runt lifted his head. His eyes were clouded with pain and fear. He cried out again, and Bristle, who had been hunting nearby, trotted back to him.
Pax pulled back, respectful, but Bristle merely settled herself alongside her brother, her cheek beside his. Pax bent to Runt’s wound and licked it cautiously, wary of Bristle’s reaction. She watched him carefully but did not object.
Pax set to a thorough cleaning of the wound. Runt watched him with a trusting gaze and did not flinch. When Pax finished, he cleaned Runt’s face and ears. And Bristle allowed it.
When Runt had fallen asleep again, Pax stayed beside the two. Together, he and Bristle watched the activity of the camp.
Although the humans did not return to the ruined part of the field, the scents were dangerous. When the wind was from the west, carrying the smell of burned land, the men seemed tense. More arrived at the camp, with more machines. At the sudden growl of an engine, Bristle jumped. She laid her head back over her brother’s. I must move him soon.
Humans cannot scent. If we are hidden from view, we are safe.
Bristle looked from him to the men. We are not safe if a single human is nearby.
Bristle seemed lessened to Pax, as if a vital piece of her had disappeared. He knew that somehow the humans had taken it. My boy does not bring harm. He is not like them. He is not war-sick.
The war-sick are full-grown. He is still young.
No. It is another difference. Pax was sure of this, but he was also confused. Over the past year, Peter had grown taller and stronger, and his voice had deepened. But more than that, his scent had changed—it was no longer the scent of a child. He is not young. But he is not war-sick. The last day I saw him, he cared for me, although he himself was in pain. His eyes shed water.
His eyes were wounded?
Pax thought for a moment about the mystery of crying. No. When he is hurt in other places, his eyes shed water. It streams down his face. I think the pain is relieved by the flowing water. But his breath—he gulps for air, as though this pain-water may be drowning him.
The vixen bent to lick more dried blood from her sleeping brother’s haunch. After a while, she raised her gaze to Pax, and in it, Pax saw the terrible things that had been done to her family by humans.
And then Pax understood something. Peter had thrown the toy into the woods that last day. The pain-water had been flowing from his eyes, but he had thrown the toy. And he had not followed.
My boy is not war-sick. But he has changed. He is now false-acting.
Peter lit the four big lanterns hanging from the barn rafters. The tools, the sharpening wheel, the wall full of puppets—all glowed warm and cheerful in the cones of amber light. Even the hay shone like Rumpelstiltskin’s gold. The barn looked reborn but familiar. He knew it like a home now.
Home. As soon as he’d put on Vola’s puppet show, just another hour from now, he would finally be free to start out again.
He lit the two small lanterns near the stage and lifted Sinbad from the wall. “Showtime.” The marionette’s black eyes looked back at him blankly. Peter checked the joints, still amazed that Vola had taken
the puppet apart just so he could learn its secrets. And suddenly Vola’s secret philosophy card flashed in his mind: “I would have been a good teacher.”
She was right about that. He thought about how easily she suggested techniques in his drills without making a big deal of anything. How she had him watch while she carved, then let him figure out things for himself. How she asked him questions about everything and didn’t answer for him.
But she was all wrong about being too dangerous to be near people. Anyone who knew her would tell her that.
The problem was that no one knew her.
Except maybe him.
He hung the marionette back on the wall. “I think, Sinbad, I’m going to give you the night off.”
He went outside and fished a wrist-thick limb out of the brush pile. Back inside, he sawed off the ends and nailed on a base. He lashed the Roc’s tin bowl nest to the top, then fixed it on the stage. Next, he lifted the sorceress puppet from its perch and unscrewed its left leg.
“Ready?” Vola called out.
Peter climbed the stack of hay bales he’d set up behind the stage and picked up the sorceress’s controls, surprised his hands weren’t shaking. Because suddenly, everything he’d been so sure of an hour ago now seemed like a terrible idea.
When she’d come into the barn, Vola had been wearing a long purple skirt instead of her overalls, and she had combed her hair, something Peter had never seen before. She had been astounded at the stage he’d built, and it hadn’t been an act. “You have the makings of a woodworker,” she’d said. “If I were in the market for an apprentice, I’d offer you the spot.”
In another few minutes, what would she think of him? It was too late for second-guessing, though. “Ready,” he lied.
Vola turned down the four overhead lanterns; then Peter heard her drag a stool to the middle of the barn.
Pax Page 11
