The Skeleton Tree Page 5

  “Did you hear that?” I asked. “Frank! Did you hear that?”

  Half-asleep, already annoyed, he growled at me, “Hear what?”

  “That sound.”

  “What sound?”

  It came again, a tiny scratching. “There!”

  “It’s nothing,” said Frank. “Go to sleep.”

  “I think there’s something out there,” I said.

  “There’s always something out there,” said Frank. “It’s the forest.”

  The bed creaked as he rolled heavily onto his side. To him, that was the end of it. I lay back again on the floor, but I couldn’t possibly sleep. I lay still and straight, listening for every sound. But nothing moved.

  “Frank? Are you asleep?” I asked.

  He groaned. “Yes, Chris, I’m asleep.”

  I tried to speak to him nicely. “You think we’re going to get home?”

  He said nothing.

  “I think we will. I bet boats go by all the time. Floatplanes too. We might even see one tomorrow.”

  Frank was lying quietly on the bed.

  “We could take turns watching,” I said. “If we see a boat or a plane, we can shoot off the flare.”

  He didn’t even grunt.

  “Or we could use the flare to start a fire. Hey, why not?” I said. “A fire would keep us warm. It would be a signal too. I mean, if you can’t start a fire with—”

  “I know how to start a fire,” said Frank. “I told you that, moron. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

  For a while I lay silently below him. Then I said, “Frank? Just—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said. “Do you want to stay here in the cabin? Or do you want to keep going north?”

  No answer.

  “Frank, what do you want to do?”

  “Sleep,” he said. And he did. Soon he was snoring softly, and the sound was a comfort.

  Morning came in slits of gray light through the boarded window, through the doorframe, even through little chinks in the cabin walls. Cold and uncomfortable, I groaned as I got up from the floor. Frank was awake, just lolling on the foam pad with his jacket for a blanket. He watched me walk toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To look for ships,” I said.

  “Look for water,” he told me. “That’s more important. Or look for food.” He tossed the jacket aside and sat up. “Go get some seaweed.”

  I didn’t like being bossed around. “Go get some yourself,” I said.

  “All right, Chrissy,” he said with pretended patience. “I was going to get a bunch of clams or something. But if you’d rather do that, go ahead.”

  He knew exactly how to annoy me. He used just the right tone and just the right words, and he knew very well that I didn’t have a clue about clams. “Forget it,” I said.

  I shoved the door to go out, and it fell back on its last hinge, slamming into the ground. Again I saw the raven peering up at me from the body of his dead friend. As surprised as me, he thrashed his wings and soared over my head, up to the cabin roof. He rocked from one foot to the other. The feathers on his back were ragged and out of place, and he looked like a worried little man. When I crouched over the dead bird, he began to mewl sadly. When I picked it up, he howled.

  “It’s okay,” I told him.

  As large as it was, the dead bird weighed almost nothing. It felt hard and hollow, dried out like an old gourd. As I held it, Frank appeared. His hair was spiky and disheveled, like the feathers of the raven, and when he saw me he grimaced. “That thing’s probably loaded with lice,” he said.

  I dropped it. Frank stepped forward and kicked it into the bushes. On the rooftop, the raven screamed. Frank paid no attention. “You won’t find seaweed in the forest,” he said as he walked past me.

  The raven on the roof muttered and cooed. I could see the dead bird lying upside down in the bushes. So I found a stick and pulled it out again. I scraped out a little grave from the moss and the dirt.

  The raven’s cries grew louder. He swung his head and slashed his beak across the plastic. He moaned. I remembered standing over my father’s grave at the huge cemetery on a hillside, hearing my mother cry beside me. The way I’d felt then, that was the sound the raven was making.

  I placed the dead bird gently in its shallow hole, and was about to cover it over when I thought of the skeleton tree. Who wants to be eaten by worms, Frank had asked. Not a raven, for sure. I lifted the bird out of the ground and carried it down to the point. From the roof, the raven rose to follow me, and when I reached the clearing he was already perched at the top of the skeleton tree. For him, it was just a place to look out across the sea and the land. The skeletons meant nothing to a raven; for him there was no fear of death and old bones.

  It was a day with no wind, a day that felt like the end of summer. Small, high clouds dotted a sky of watery blue, and the ancient coffins looked like little boats floating on a great wide sea.

  As the raven watched, I unwrapped the red wire and hung it in a loop around my neck. I was shocked to see the deep ruts in the bird’s feathers and body. But its wings fell open, and I thought I’d set the raven free. Reaching up as high as I could, I placed the poor dead thing into a crook of the branches.

  I didn’t mean to look in the boxes. But the movement of a tattered cloth caught my eye, and I suddenly found myself staring right up through the rotted floor of a coffin, at the same skeleton that had looked down at me the night before.

  I saw shreds of moss clinging to a skull that had turned up toward the sky again.

  The wind had moved it, I told myself. But I couldn’t remember any wind.

  I ran to the end of the point. The tide was so high that most of the seaweed was underwater, but I found a few pieces of brown kelp cast up among the stones. I tore off the long leaves and took them back to the cabin. I didn’t even glance at the skeleton tree.

  Frank came in right after me, carrying an old bucket that he plunked down in the middle of the floor. He chose two sticks from the scattered firewood and squatted down to start a fire. I peered into the bucket at a squirming mass of Frankenstein creatures, half plant and half animal. “What are those?” I asked, disgusted.

  “What do you think?” said Frank.

  I had no idea. I shook the bucket to make the creatures tremble. Frank had said he was getting clams, but these weren’t clams. They had bulbous heads that looked like claws, and short, stubby bodies, and they twisted and twitched in a way that didn’t seem normal. I thought of the nuclear reactors destroyed by the tsunami. “Are they mutants?” I asked.

  Frank snorted. He rubbed the sticks so quickly that his hands moved in a blur. But no smoke or flame appeared. Just as he had last time, he soon lost patience and threw the sticks away. “Forget it!” he shouted. “We can eat them raw.”

  “But what are they?” I asked.

  He almost screamed at me. “Gooseneck barnacles, you moron!” Then he came and grabbed the bucket. When he looked inside, his expression almost made me laugh. I thought he was going to vomit. “They stick on to stuff way out at sea,” he said. “Mostly they’re dead when you find them. I never really ate them before.”

  “What happened to the clams?” I asked.

  “High tide, moron.”

  I had never gone digging for clams, but even I knew that you couldn’t do it if the beach was underwater. I watched Frank pull one of the barnacles from the bucket. He held its claw pinched in his fingers as it writhed like a maggot.

  It had brown skin as wrinkled as an elephant’s trunk. With a little tearing sound, Frank peeled that away. The flesh underneath was yellow. Frank grimaced. Then he shoved the thing into his mouth, bit off the fleshy head and dropped the claw in the bucket. He wiped his mouth with his hand.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  I laughed. His face looked sour and disgusted.

  “No, really,” he said. Then both of us laughed, and the yello
w goo of the barnacle bubbled up in his mouth. It was gross and disgusting, but the first nice moment we had ever had together.

  He ate a second barnacle, and then a third before I tried one myself. It was salty and rich, and I hated the idea that it was still alive. The feel of it sliding down my throat nearly made me gag. But the taste wasn’t all that bad.

  Frank watched as I swallowed. “Well?” he asked.

  “It’s not the worst thing I ever ate,” I said. “Once, when I was a kid, I ate dog droppings.”

  Frank laughed. “I ate glass.”

  “Really? What happened?” I said.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” said Frank. “But it was scary. My mom freaked out and called nine-one-one. They came and fed me cotton wool.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To pad the glass, I guess.” Frank shrugged. “It made me cry; I remember that.”

  It was strange to think of Frank crying. He started telling me more, then suddenly stopped, as though he’d said too much already. But we kept eating the barnacles. We finished the whole bucket, laughing together as we did silly things. I arranged four in my hand as though they were fingers. Frank dangled two from his head like alien tentacles. In that little cabin, in that lonely land, we were happy.

  “Hey, Frank?” I said.

  “Yeah?” He looked up, smiling.

  “Why did Uncle Jack take you sailing?”

  It was as though a door suddenly closed between us. I could almost hear it slamming shut. The smile vanished from Frank’s face. A half-finished barnacle drooped from his fingers.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. His voice was so cold that it scared me. “I’m glad he’s dead, and that’s all.”

  Frank stood up. He dropped the barnacle into the bucket and went out to the forest. With nothing else to do, I cleaned up the cabin. I folded the plastic sheets and pushed them under the bed. I set up the table, sorted the firewood, placed the stones in a circle again. When Frank came back I was down on my hands and knees with the red wire still around my neck, trying to find the pieces from the radio. He stepped right over me and threw himself down on the bed.

  The silence felt awful. I didn’t want to be the first to speak, but I imagined us both being so stubborn that we never talked again. A picture came to my mind of the two of us ancient and bearded, just sitting and staring at each other. It made me laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” said Frank.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Then why did you laugh, moron? You laughing at me?”

  “No,” I said. It seemed strange that he cared about that. I didn’t think people like Frank even imagined that people might be laughing at them.

  I couldn’t find the knob for the radio. So I took the paperback book, Kaetil the Raven Hunter, and sat in the chair to read it. The pages were yellow, all bent and smudged. The book must have been read a hundred times. It opened right at the beginning, as though the cabin guy had trained it.

  I started reading. But right away, Frank interrupted. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?” I said. “I’m reading a book.”

  “Can’t you do something useful?”

  I had heard the same words a thousand times from my father. Just as he might have done, Frank got up and slapped the book from my hands. “Come on,” he said. “You can hunt for treasure.”

  I’d heard that too. With that same promise of treasure, I would have gone with my father to English Bay. Now I followed Frank through the forest, along a trail that took us north to a stream of cold water. It burbled down tiny waterfalls into a pool as round as a barrel. Frank dropped to the ground and dunked his face right into the water. We had not had a drink since the day before. But I still drank like a timid animal, lifting water in my hands as I kept a watch on the forest.

  Though the water was so cold that it hurt my teeth, Frank washed his face and his precious hair, splashing silvery drops in the sun. As I gazed all around, I saw a red-handled jackknife lying near the trunk of a tree. I ran to get it, my fear suddenly forgotten. “A knife!” I shouted.

  “Let me see,” said Frank.

  The blade was open and stained with streaks of brown. “It’s kind of rusty,” I said.

  “Come on, let’s see!” Frank stood up and held out his hand. I knew that if I didn’t give him the knife right then I’d be wrestling him for it a moment later. So I passed it over, to save some time and pain.

  Frank tossed it in his palm. He closed the blade and opened it again, then held it near his eyes.

  “I don’t think that’s rust,” he said.

  He dipped the knife into the pool and cleaned the blade with his fingers. Little swirls of red drifted away. To me, it seemed creepy: first an empty cabin, now a bloodstained knife. But Frank had a simple answer.

  “This is where the cabin guy would have cleaned his fish and stuff. Maybe rabbits,” he said. “It’s lucky he dropped the knife.”

  I watched Frank flick the blade open and shut. “Okay, give it back now,” I said.

  “It’s not yours,” said Frank. “It’s the cabin guy’s.”

  “Yeah, well, if he comes back, I’ll give it to him.” I held out my hand and wiggled my fingers. “Give it back.”

  Frank tossed his wet hair. Then he smiled and held out the knife—until I reached out to take it. Then he snatched it away, slipped it into his pocket and walked on down the trail.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “That’s real nice.” I felt I could have killed him just then, and I muttered awful things behind his back.

  But I forgot my anger as we walked deeper into the forest. Moss grew thick and heavy, covering every hump and hollow, every fallen log. Where we walked it sprang right up behind us, and we left no tracks; we made no sound. The trees soared straight as columns, then suddenly spread out in a shimmering roof of green and gold seven stories high. No logger had ever been there, and the trees might have lived a thousand years.

  We didn’t talk as we walked through the forest, and then for another mile along cliffs of staggering height. Then the land sloped down to a gravel beach. And there, among stranded logs and enormous boulders, we found a fishing boat.

  Something has gone very wrong.

  Of all the things I’ve imagined, I never once thought of fog. But far to the north and out to the west, the sea is hidden by a thick, white blanket.

  A voice whispers doubts in my ear. Nobody’s coming. It was only a dream. How will anyone find us if our world shrinks to a gray circle?

  I shout aloud, trying to drive away the thoughts, “Today is the day! This is the day we’ll be saved!”

  Just off the shore a seal pops its head from the sea and stares at me with enormous eyes. It must think I’m crazy to be screaming at the sky. But I’ve told Frank that if we have any doubts, it will not happen. If we believe we’ll be saved, we’ll be saved.

  I keep chanting: “Today is the day. Help’s on the way.”

  I repeat it over and over, until the words become a senseless jumble. But the fog is growing thicker. I can see it spreading south.

  I glance back at the meadow, at the trees and the dark bushes. If Frank appears now he might lose hope. He might blurt out words that will ruin everything.

  On the grass beside my favorite chair are the drums we’ve made from a bucket and a metal barrel. I sit, take up the sticks and start to beat a rhythm on the barrel. It’s a savage sort of sound that rumbles out across the sea.

  Boom-boom, boom, boom-boom. My arms move like levers. The sticks bounce up from the drum. I drive them down again. Boom, boom, boom-boom. Frank would not believe me, but I can drum the fog away.

  I pound on the drum, but the fog keeps rolling closer. I can imagine it creeping along the shoreline, covering the river, swallowing the boulders, filling the old boat with a cold, gray gloom.

  •••

  When I first saw that boat I thought we were saved.

  It sat uprigh
t among the logs, like a bird in a fabulous nest. I thought we could drag it down to the water and sail away, and I ran toward it.

  But when I got a bit closer I saw that the boat was a wreck. A log had pierced the cabin windows—in the back and out the front. Like a huge wooden nail, it pinned the boat to the land. Shattered glass lay everywhere.

  A name was still painted on the bow, though it had nearly faded away. Reepicheep. Frank frowned as he touched the letters. “What the heck does that mean?”

  “It’s a mouse,” I told him. “Reepicheep was a warrior, the bravest mouse in Narnia, and—”

  “Who cares?” said Frank. He slipped around behind the boat, then appeared on the deck, popping up between the logs.

  The boat gave me a feeling of sadness, and I didn’t go any closer. I stood fiddling with the raven’s red wire while Frank explored the places where the fisherman had lived and worked, and maybe died. He crawled right inside the wreck, through a narrow gap between the planks and the gravel. I could hear him shouting that the engine was still in the boat, that he’d found a jigging line, that he’d found a gaff.

  When he came out he was happy. The gaff was stout and heavy, a club with a hook on the end. The jig was a pink lure wrapped with fishing line around a rusted bolt.

  Frank nodded toward the wreck. “That was his boat.”

  “Whose boat?” I asked.

  “The cabin guy!” cried Frank. “Who do you think, moron? He was shipwrecked.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s been here for ages.”

  Frank nodded. “So was the guy.”

  “Not for ten years!”

  Frank echoed me, mockingly. “Ten years. Like you would know.”

  “Then how long do you think?”

  He crossed his arms and studied the stranded boat. Waves pounded on the beach behind us. “A year,” he said. “Maybe two.”

  It seemed crazy at first, but he might have been right. One long winter of snow and storms could have made the boat look ancient.