The Skeleton Tree (12 page)

He was the witness to a funeral for a girl I'd never met. Grim and black, he sat there until I finished. Then he came with me to the cabin, swooping ahead around the bends in the trail. When I opened the door he hopped right in.

I was surprised to see Frank reading
Kaetil the Raven Hunter,
and especially surprised that he seemed to be halfway through it already. I would never have imagined him with a book in his hands, and I told myself that he must have begun in the middle, or was just reading little pieces here and there. Lying flat on the bed, he glared at Thursday, who shouted a warning as he crossed the cabin and settled in the corner. They eyed each other across the small room like a pair of crazy old gold miners.

“I warned you,” said Frank. “Keep that bird away from me.”

“Don't worry,” I said.

From my place on the floor, I watched Frank turning the pages of the book. His right hand was cut and bleeding, with a little trickle of red running toward his wrist. In our anger and our silence, I was almost happy that Thursday had hurt him. But I felt guilty when Frank tried to be pleasant.

“Listen to this,” he said. He lifted the book and read aloud.

Kaetil swung his silver sword. Forged from fire, a wizard's gift, it shone like the flames of hell. Through the air his sword flashed, and it sang a song of death and vengeance. Like a Valkyrie it sang.

Frank looked up at me again. “I love this story.”

“What's a Valkyrie?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “A lady of the warlord, you moron.”

The sound comes again, that flat bark like a shot. This time, when I look up, I see a tiny cloud of mist hovering over the sea. A whale is passing.

In my hands,
Kaetil the Raven Hunter
is open to the same page that Frank read aloud in the cabin. I remember being surprised—even annoyed—that he knew about Valkyries and warlords. I didn't like to think that he was smarter than me.

But now the mystery is solved.

In his hunt for the man with yellow eyes, Kaetil has come across a group of Skraelings camped by a fjord. In a fury, he slaughters them all.

Through the air his sword flashed and whistled, and it sang a song of death and vengeance. It sang like a Valkyrie, one of those beautiful ladies of the warlord.

It makes me laugh to read this. That's so like Frank to pretend to know something he'd only just learned. It seemed in those early days that he was always competing with me, as though he had to prove to himself—over and over—that he was stronger, smarter, better in every way.

But when he read, his lips moved and I could hear him, just a little. I saw it as he lay on the bed with the tattered old novel. Expressions appeared on his face for the first time. He smiled; he frowned; he looked proud and disappointed. I decided he was reading aloud so that he could
hear
the story, the way the words connected.

“Hey, Frank,” I said. “When you were little, did your dad read you bedtime stories?”

He didn't look away from the book. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just wondering,” I said.

“I don't remember.” He looked at his hand, at the long scratches the raven had made on his knuckles. Then he turned a page and started reading again.

I grew annoyed as I watched him. “Why can't you just tell me?” I said at last. “Yes or no?”

He sighed loudly. “Look, moron, I don't remember.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “How can you forget?”

He turned to me, dark with anger. “Because I can hardly remember that time at all. I can barely remember my dad back then. But my mom says he did. She says he read to me every night, sometimes for hours. Okay?”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Sorry I asked.”

But that wasn't the end of it. Frank stared at the ceiling for a minute or two, tried to read for another and then started talking again. “She would hear him downstairs. He would use different voices for the people in the story, and if they were shouting he'd be shouting too. She says it was like listening to a play.”

That was the most Frank had ever told me about himself. He closed his eyes and let the book fall forward on his chest, his hands folded on top of it. That pose, that peaceful expression, reminded me of my father in his coffin.

“Sometimes I think I can
almost
remember,” he said. “I was maybe two years old. But I can sort of hear his voice. I wish I knew what stories he read.”

“What about when you were older?” I asked. “Did he—”

“No.” Abruptly, Frank opened the book again. “He found other things to do.”

He sounded bitter about that. He could have asked about
my
dad, and what sort of things
I
had done when I was small. But he just held up the book and blocked me out. I sat, patting the raven. The sound of Frank reading to himself was faint and whispery.

That night ended our first month in Alaska. When Thursday flew out through the window I made the thirtieth mark on the wall. I dreamed again of zombies.

They chased me through the same drowned city, through black water and neon lights. But now Uncle Jack was in the dream too, staggering among the zombies in sodden clothes covered with seaweed. He chased me with his arms reaching out, up stairways and over rooftops. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn't leave him behind. When I woke early in the morning I was out of breath.

It was a cold and rainy day. Frank was already awake, but sitting glumly by the door. Water had worked through the sheets of plastic on the roof and was dripping onto the bed. Frank just sat there, shivering, watching the drops grow on the ceiling like tiny, shivery wasp nests.

“I'm not going fishing today,” he said.

“Okay,” I told him. “We can fix—”

“But you can go alone.” He glowered up at me. “Unless you're scared.”

Well, how could I
not
go then? I put on capes and leggings and a hood, took the gaff from the table. For the first time, I got to carry the knife. I was a bit nervous about the bear, but proud to be going alone.

Down on the beach the waves were huge, rolling up beside me in big green curls. They roared and leapt along the stones, and fingers of surf reached right to the stranded logs.

There was no sign of Thursday. On windy days he sometimes played his raven games, flinging himself through the air, or clinging for as long as he could to the tips of wildly tossing trees, until the wind sent him spinning away. But on this day he had something else to do, his own wild ways to follow.

I saw an old refrigerator wallowing in the breakers, and a propane tank slamming on the stones with a sound like a gong. Spray pattered on my capes, but inside them I was dry right down to my feet. I saw myself as Robinson Crusoe in an age of plastic, in shoes that didn't match, with a belt made of rubber hose, a cone-shaped hood tied with a bit of old rope.

As soon as I reached the river, my heart began to fall. There were no seagulls squabbling over scraps, and there were very few salmon left in the pool. They swam lazily out in the middle, barely moving their fins and tails, just drifting with the current. They reminded me of the sad old people I'd seen shuffling along on the sidewalks in Vancouver. I crouched at the edge and fished a long time, but the only one that I gaffed was barely alive.

I saw a salmon tumble backward over the falls and sink into the pool. Then up it rose like a white ghost, its fins and tail nearly rotted away, and started swimming again toward the falls.

I had to follow it. If I was going to find any fish worth eating, I would have to go up the river, into the territory of the grizzly bear.

It was not an easy thing to do, and I stood for a long time at the foot of the falls, until I knew that if I waited another minute I would never go. Then I went quickly, as fast as I could, hauling myself up rocks at the very edge of the river.

At the top I found an old, forgotten road.

Only four or five feet wide, it pushed straight through the bushes. Hollowed into the ground were enormous potholes, one after the other, stretching away into the dark of the forest. They had filled with old leaves and fir needles. I wondered where the road would take me if I followed it all the way.

The roar of the falls faded behind me as I walked toward the mountain. The river became a quiet, burbling stream split into three channels that flowed over gravel and sand. It teemed with birds. Gulls crowded so closely together that I could hardly see the water in places.

I waded right into the stream. The water was painfully cold, and clear as glass, and I could see my feet in their stupid sandals, swollen by refraction until they looked like big white sausages.

All around, salmon were struggling upstream where the water was so shallow they couldn't even swim. They crawled across the gravel with their backs above the surface, their fins so worn away that they looked like Japanese fans, as thin as paper. They thrashed forward in bursts, then stopped to rest as the current pushed them back again. Along the banks lay dead ones by the hundreds.

All I had to do was bend down and hook the fish. I looked for those with the fewest wounds and scars and, afraid the bear would come along, I chose two very quickly. I cleaned them on the riverbank, ripping out skeins of scarlet eggs that I tossed among the gulls. My hands trembled as I worked. I wanted to get off the river as soon as I could, but the salmon would be lighter and easy to carry once they were gutted. When something swooped above me I got an awful fright. But it was only Thursday, arriving in a whirl of feathers and wings, with his cry of greeting. He landed beside me, and the gulls gave him room. I tossed him the guts of my second fish, and I carried him back down the river on my shoulder. I liked the press of his talons. I remembered my father reaching down to steady me when I was a little kid, his fingers squeezing in that same way.

Where the river was shaded by trees, I saw my reflection. It was twisted by the ripples and currents, but I was still shocked by the sight. A boy in plastic rags with a raven on his shoulder, two enormous salmon hanging from his hands. To me, I looked heroic.

I decided that this was how I wanted to go home. I imagined TV cameras crowding forward as I stepped out of a helicopter—straight from the Alaskan wilderness—my capes fluttering, my dark raven turning his head. I saw my mother crying, the mayor stepping out to greet me.

All the way to the cabin I thought about this: about getting home, of the things I would do and the food I would eat. I wondered if everything would seem different. I wondered if I would miss Alaska in any way. I actually wondered if I would miss Frank.

Near the end of the beach I found a roll of orange tape. It had
CAUTION
written on it, again and again.
CAUTION
,
CAUTION
,
CAUTION
for yard after yard. Thursday played a game of chasing its fluttery end as I walked. But he left me at the edge of the old forest, suddenly flying away without any sort of cry. His wing brushed my face as he flew past. Alone, I went on to the cabin, where I found new sheets of plastic stretched across the roof, weighted down with rocks and branches.

Inside, Frank was sitting on the edge of the bed. He wasn't
doing
anything; he was just sitting and staring. His hair was wet. His capes and boots lay on the floor in a little puddle. On the hand that Thursday had cut he wore a black ski glove tattered by the surf, so big that it made him look like Mickey Mouse.

“What's
that
for?” I asked, laughing.

He didn't answer.

“Well, I got two fish.” I held them up for him to see. But still he said nothing; he didn't even lift his head. “What's the matter?” I asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “Leave me alone, will you?”

“But—

“Just leave me alone!” He flopped down and rolled his back toward me. I thought,
Okay, I'm
not
going to miss Frank when I get home.

In the evening the wind began to rise. And it just kept rising. Lightning flashed through the forest, and thunder boomed, far away. The surf became the footfalls of giants, thumping on the land. Though sheltered in the forest, the cabin shook so badly we thought it might break apart. The plastic sheeting flailed and flapped. Raindrops driven sideways by the wind pelted the walls like handfuls of pebbles.

Water poured through the roof in rivulets. Frank's repairs had made no difference. In the flashes of lightning we saw the drops falling. And we saw ourselves then too, sitting in plastic and shivering from the cold. We looked up at the creaking of the trees, expecting one to come crashing through the roof and squash us.

I worried about Thursday and wished he was with me. I hated to think of him hunched in the dark, alone and afraid as he tried to keep warm.

Then I thought of the skeleton tree and how its branches would toss and bend. I pictured the coffins rising and falling, and the skeletons shaking inside them.

“This might go on for days,” I said to Frank. “If we can't go fishing we might starve.”

“It'll be calm by morning,” said Frank. In the dark, he was invisible. “The bigger the storm, the sooner it ends.”

He was right. The ending came well before dawn, with a shriek of wind like a human cry. Then everything fell silent, except for the booming of the waves. We heard the little plops of water dripping from the roof.

For once, Thursday didn't wait until daylight. He cried out with a crow-like caw as he came through the window. It was so dark that he might have been a phantom. But his talons clicked on the floor as he landed beside me.