The Skeleton Tree (22 page)

“Okay, get off,” he said. “Come on, Chris, get off me now.”

I stood up and looked at the plane. It was a sparkle, a speck, too small and too distant to show windows, or even a tail. But I heard a clinking sound as Frank opened the metal cylinder. I saw him take out the last match.

“Don't!” I said.

He struck it on the cylinder. A whorl of smoke appeared, and then a little flame, and he touched it to the spilled gas.

A river of fire swept in a second to the feet of the wooden saint. It licked at his legs; it climbed his oil-soaked robes. He stood in a pool of fire, with flames leaping from his hands and head, and the smoke streamed across the clearing.

“They'll see that,” said Frank. “They'll see that for sure.” He didn't get his huge pyre below the skeleton tree, but the burning gas made clouds of smoke, and he waved his arms at the tiny dot of an airplane. “Down here! Down here!” he screamed.

Flames flickered along the saint's outstretched arm. His fingers started burning like candles. High above us, the jet flew on toward the west. In a minute it was gone, and its contrail faded away.

Frank stopped jumping around. He looked at me sheepishly, but there was still a huge grin on his face. “They saw it,” he said. “I know they did. It's true—we're going to be saved.”

Maybe it was all part of the plan. The fuel, the saint, the matches…They had all come together to make my dream true. In twelve hours, the plane would cross the ocean. In twelve more, it might be back. Someone would report the fire. Someone else would be sent to investigate. Yes, it all made sense. “Three more days,” I said.

“Three days more,” said Frank.

We grinned at each other. “Let's save the saint,” I told him.

If he had saved us, we owed him a favor. I filled my bucket-drum with water and we doused the flames. Though charred and blackened, the saint still smiled serenely.

The day ended with hope, but with a new worry as well. If the fire went out now, we could never get it going again. We brought in armloads of wood and stacked them around the cabin walls. Frank rubbed his hands. “Guess what?” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“It's your turn for the bed.”

That surprised me. Maybe Frank was just being kind, thinking we had only two nights to go before we were saved. But he might have been afraid I would fight him for the bed. If I'd beaten him once I could beat him again, and there would be nothing worse for Frank than losing a fight. Everything had changed.

At first it felt wonderful to stretch out on the foam mattress. What a change to look down at Frank on the floor. I loved the softness of the foam pad, the warm air that wafted up from the fire. But then I started thinking about the cabin guy, and how I was lying in the exact place where he had been lying when the grizzly bear burst through the door. And maybe
that
was why Frank had surrendered the bed. He felt safer on the floor.

Beside me in his plastic chair, Frank stretches. He yawns. “Fog's burning off,” he says.

I see that he's right. The fogbank has dwindled to a thin mist, retreating to the south. I had hoped so hard for this to happen, but now I find I'm disappointed. Nothing was hidden within the fog; no ship is plowing toward us. I can see all the way to the horizon, across an empty sea, and our rescue suddenly seems unlikely.

Frank has lowered the book to his lap and is squinting over the ocean. “What time is it now?” he asks.

Until this morning we measured our time in days. Then we started counting hours. And now the minutes seem important. I glance at the watch, Thursday's last gift to me. “It's ten past one.” Already afternoon. I feel a hollowness in my stomach as I calculate how long is left to go.

Frank has become bored with the book. He has left Kaetil stranded at sea and now he sits with his chair tilted back on two legs, his fingers meshed into a pillow behind his neck. “You know,” he says, “I miss that stupid raven.”

I want to tell him,
Then you shouldn't have got angry. You shouldn't have chased him away.
But, really, I was the one who did that.

“What if it's true?” says Frank. “That I could be dead if not for that bird?”

So now Frank believes that Thursday saved him? I wish he'd changed his mind a lot sooner.

“It's weird, eh?” he says. “I wonder if he's hunting with wolves. Or maybe they got him.”

A lonely wolf was howling in the morning. It sang a long and haunting song. Frank listened as he lay on the floor with his arm covering his eyes. “Wouldn't it be funny if that was Thursday?” he asked. “He could be doing wolf imitations.”

It was an idea that Frank got from the book. Into my mind came a picture of the raven perched in a tree, howling like a wolf.

I got up and roasted an entire salmon for breakfast. I peeled off the skin and tossed it into the fire. Frank watched me, and I knew what he was thinking: I was squandering our food. But I
had
to do that. To save it would mean I didn't believe.

“Two more days,” I said.

“Two days more,” answered Frank very quietly.

“Help will come in two more days,” I said.

It was like a little grace. After we'd said it, we ate. Into the fire went the bones, the fins, a scandalous amount of scraps. As soon as we finished I went searching for my raven.

I trekked along the sandy beach, bonking empty bottles together as I shouted his name. When I reached the end of the beach I took a stick and scraped
THURSDAY
into the sand, with letters six feet tall. Then I threw the stick away and sat to watch the waves come in.

I told myself that Thursday would appear before his name vanished. If he didn't, it would mean he was dead. I would stop searching.

In front of me, the waves burst in their creamy rows, pushing shallow fingers across the sand. They crept a little higher each time. When they touched the tips of my letters, they rushed forward along the narrow canyons I'd gouged with the stick. Bit by bit, they rubbed out Thursday's name.

When Frank came to join me, the letters were still there, but barely visible. “Hi,” he said in a cheery voice. “Hi, Chris.”

I didn't want to talk; I didn't want to look away from the letters in the sand. Frank sat beside me, and together we watched the ocean rub away the raven's name. The waves rolled over the beach, erasing every sign of Thursday. I stood up, feeling sad and beaten. When I looked at Frank, I saw my father.

He had hacked off his tangled flop of hair. His forehead was high and white, and he was smiling, an exact copy of the picture back home, of my father peering up from a lean-to.

“What are you looking at?” he asked. Embarrassed, he started tugging at his hair.

Side by side, we walked along the beach and up the trail. As we reached the forest, the rain began, and with every hour the day got colder. Soon I could see my breath, and I knew that Frank had been right; there was not a chance we could live through the winter. We were going to be rescued just in time.

Already the nights were longer than the days. When the sun vanished over the sea, there were more than twelve hours of darkness ahead. We spent them talking, and Frank told me at last about Uncle Jack.

I learned that our uncle had drifted in and out of both of our lives. In Kodiak he had made two phone calls, one right after the other.

“I was really surprised when he asked me to go sailing,” said Frank, putting wood on the fire. “At first I didn't want to. But he kept saying, ‘Oh, come on, Frankly.' ”

I laughed.
“Frankly?”

“That's what he called me sometimes,” said Frank. “He asked me, ‘Don't you want to meet your brother?' I said, ‘Not really, Jack.' ”

Jack.
That sounded sadly familiar. In Cubs, all the boys had called him Jack. He had wanted me do the same thing, to be his friend, as though he was the world's oldest twelve-year-old. But it never felt right to me.

I wondered would have happened if Uncle Jack's plan had worked out, if I'd arrived in the middle of the afternoon instead of the dead of night. “Chrissy, meet Frankly, your brother….” Would we have been friends right away? I watched Frank poke at the fire, but I couldn't figure out what he was thinking. “Are you sorry he asked you to go sailing?” I said.

Frank leaned back as a cloud of sparks swirled from the fire. “You know something?” he said. “I'm not.” He squinted through the fire's heat. “It's funny. I'm kind of glad.”

I felt the same way—that I was better because I'd gone sailing, and for all that happened. I'd lost an uncle but found a brother, and I thought Uncle Jack would be happy with that. Frank curled up in the corner and we slept a little, off and on. At the first sign of light we trooped outside to wait for the sun to appear. I took the tin pan and a stick, and I made all the noise I could.

“One more day! One day more!” we shouted together. “Help will come in one day more!”

For all ten hours of sunlight, the wind blew hard. The waves piled up and hammered at the shore, and snow fell in flurries of stinging crystals. We danced to stay warm, around and around the watchful saint, shouting that help was on the way. We grabbed on to his scorched wooden arm as we wheeled around him. Our fingers turned black with charcoal, which was soon smudged on our faces. Like painted savages we kept dancing, around and around and around again.

Frank was grinning like a fool. He believed in every way that we were spending our last moments below the skeleton tree.

We drummed on buckets. We danced through the grass and over the stones, and our shadows grew steadily longer. The sky turned a lovely deep red as we whirled through the grass. Then the moon rose silvery white, and out in the forest the wolves took up our song.

That last night seemed endless. Knowing we'd be saved before the
next
night came, we couldn't possibly sleep. So we built up the fire at the end of the point, and I read to Frank from
Kaetil the Raven Hunter.
He sat in his favorite plastic chair, his hands clasped behind his head. We reached the last chapter. We reached the last page.

Kaetil stood face to face with the man with yellow eyes. In his hand was a battle sword made by a wizard. On his shoulders perched the leather-hooded ravens, wearing silver talons sharp as razors. With a shout, the man with yellow eyes came charging toward him.

Kaetil raised his arm and sent the ravens soaring. They flew on ebony wings. Up, up, up to the sky on their ebony raven wings. The Skraeling swung his battle-ax. Kaetil swung his sword. One was fast as lightning. But the other was even faster. And in the blink of an eye—

“Wait!” shouted Frank. He reached across the fire. “Give me the book.”

“Why?”

“Just give me the book.” His fingers waggled. “Come on. Please.”

I thought he wanted to be the one to read the last little part. So I passed him the book.

He ripped out the last page and he burned it.

“What are you doing?” I said. The page twisted and writhed. The words bubbled up as the ink began to boil. Then the paper burst into flames and was gone in an instant.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“I don't want to know how it ends,” said Frank.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I
never
want to know,” he said. “I don't read endings. It's more real that way.”

“You're crazy,” I said. But I laughed.

The light from the fire washed red and yellow across Frank's face. He was smiling. “It's better to wonder,” he said. “You can decide for yourself how it ends.”

I saw what he meant. Kaetil would have won his fight and killed the man who'd killed his father. But now it was possible that he lost, and the story would never really end. But it seemed strange for Frank to think that way. I couldn't imagine that he'd read more than a dozen books in his whole life. How many could he have put away unfinished? As he took his stick and poked at the ashes of the page, I wondered if it was something he'd learned from our father. Maybe Dad, impatient as always, could never be bothered with reading a whole story. I imagined him closing
Where the Wild Things Are
halfway done, leaving poor Max surrounded by monsters.
“You can decide for yourself how it ends,”
Dad would say, and he'd turn out the lights, leaving little Frank staring scared in his bed.

I hated things that didn't end. I always wanted to know what happened to everything.

I stood up. “I've got to look for Thursday,” I said.

From the fire I pulled a burning stick to use as a torch. But I hardly needed it. The rain had ended and the moon was big and bright. It would be a beautiful morning on the day the men would come. I walked under the skeleton tree and down that dark tunnel through the bushes of salal. But I didn't go very far past the cabin. In the mud where the trail forked to the north and the south, I found a footprint of the grizzly bear.