These Silent Woods: A Novel(2)

“I don’t want to eat her,” she says, wiping her face with the sleeve of her top.

“Mmm.” Deep down I’m pondering a chicken dinner in the Dutch oven, rarest of delicacies. Potatoes, carrots from the root cellar. Oh, the thought of it.

“It wouldn’t be right,” Finch says.

“No?”

“Cooper.”

“If you say so.”

“And can we bury her?”

“Sure. Behind the cabin. After breakfast.”

She hops up and we stand looking over the two dead animals. “But not the raccoon,” Finch says. “I don’t want to bury him. He took what wasn’t his. He stole.”

I want to tell her he was just hungry, but I don’t. Sometimes a person knows something, but they just don’t want to hear it; I get it. I scoop the raccoon onto the shovel. Fat, heavy thing, but funny looking now, with his flat head. “I’ll take him down over the hill. You want to come?”

She shakes her head. I look around, scanning everything. The red hand pump for the well. The clothesline with my blue flannel shirt and two of Finch’s, one yellow and one pink. The stack of wood on the porch. The dwarf apple trees, no longer heavy with fruit. Everything normal.

“Put the skillet on to heat, would you?”

She nods and bounds off for the cabin.

I check the outhouse before I leave the yard because it has always been a place that makes me nervous—far from the house, someone hiding in there maybe—and the thing is, two days ago Finch and me were out scouting and saw footprints by one of our hunting blinds. Too big to be Finch’s and too small to be mine. Which means someone else has been around, on our land. Well, not ours, technically. But ours in the sense that this parcel of ground is the place we call home. No other sign that we could find, plus they were a good ways off from the cabin, but still. Footprints.



* * *



Finch is eight now. Eight years and 316 days. Which makes her 3,234 days old because there were two leap years in there. I wonder sometimes whether parents keep track of their children’s days, and I bet they don’t. At least not the way I do, a line for each day in my notebook. I remember before I was a parent, overhearing fathers talk at the grocery store or a restaurant, and someone, maybe the waitress or something, would ask the kid how old they were. And usually the kid would answer, if they were old enough. But more than once, I saw the father answer wrong, a year behind or something, like there was a birthday party in there that he’d missed, and the kid or sometimes the mother would correct him. Not me. I’ve kept track of the days and I am grateful for each one because if there is one thing I have learned in this life, it’s that it can all end, fast. I know, too, that it will. End, I mean. One way or another—Finch and me and the chickens in this quiet pocket of woods—our life out here will not go on forever. It’s a thing I don’t like to think about.

I walk two hundred yards into the woods, to where the ground dips down and the trees quit and the land opens up a bit. I give the raccoon a pitch and he lands next to an autumn olive with a thud and the leaves above shudder and shake free, showering down white like a blessing. Scavengers will find him there soon. Vultures, crows. Maybe coyotes, maybe a bear. We have them all and sometimes the coyotes sing at night.

On the way back to the house I kneel and grab a handful of white clover. Brush the frost off with my thumb. We’ll throw it in with the eggs this morning. Good nutrition and Finch likes it.



* * *



In the yard the hens are still all riled up from the raccoon, squawking and rustling about their enclosure. They are sensitive creatures, feathers ruffled easily, if you know what I mean. I talk to them soft and low. “Girls, it’ll be all right. Cooper’s got your back. I came out as soon as I heard the noise. I took care of that mean old critter and he won’t be back. Now settle.”

We will probably get no eggs today on account of them being stressed, but we have three from the day before, in the red bowl on the counter.

Inside, Finch has the cast-iron skillet on the cookstove, heating up. She sits on the couch reading a book.

“You all right?”

She looks up and there—flash, memory, a seething wound. Cindy, Finch’s mother. Like seeing a ghost and I love it and hate it at the same time. Her blond hair and her green eyes, those are Cindy’s, no doubt. That in and of itself has always seemed to be some sort of revolt against the probabilities of genetics: my dark hair and brown eyes should’ve won out. But it’s also the way she looks at me, the way she walks, toes pointed out, the way she winds her hair around her pointer finger. All of it, Cindy’s. Her expressions, most of all. How Finch could have and be those things when the two of them only knew each other for four months.

“I’m a little mad at you,” Finch says. “For what you did in the yard.” She looks away.

I pour a teaspoon of canola oil into the skillet. Measure it because we are always rationing, always keeping track. Tomorrow, December 14th, Jake—my buddy from the Army, he owns the place—should be here with supplies. His annual trip and frankly, the highlight of our whole year. But every year at this time, I’m sweating a bit. Thinking about what it would mean for us if he doesn’t show up. We’d need to expand our hunting, maybe dig out the traps in the loft of the cabin. Most troubling of all, we’d need to go out and get supplies.