William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

She read these lines aloud to Slone, dulled blue ink on peach-colored paper that still held a ghostly whiff of perfume, lines from Mary to Joseph that began, “Please don’t you dare go to that jungle over there. There’s no love in war and I have all this love for you waiting. You can dodge it, Joe. Just run, come here to me, stay with me, they’ll never find you here.”

Winter diminished and breakup came, spring a savior she thought hadn’t remembered them. It was always that way, she knew. By the end of each March they always believed themselves forgotten by spring.

Slone dug a larger sod igloo into a wooded ridge near the rim of taiga, hidden from the ancient caribou trail and from the sky beneath the hemlock. Just ten feet from them in the forest no one could know they were there. She watched him work shirtless in moving shafts of sunlight, watched him dig high enough into the earth, above the water table, careful of proper drainage to keep them dry. She watched him frame the structure from spruce, make the notched posts and ridge beams, pound poles into the soil.

He built with tools others from the village had left for them in the valley—whipsaw and axe, hammer and mallet, shovel and pick, bag of nails and spikes, roll of plastic sheeting. She helped with saplings for the sod-block walls, with the pilings, helped cut and carry sod. She scraped clean the conifers for the roof. She learned how to fasten the beam joints with spikes. He taught her this with a patience that surprised her.

No windows. A rounded entrance of five feet. Together they carted the mattress and woodstove from their father’s igloo, carted the goods their father had stored for them. They trekked to both of their vehicles, hidden in the hills two miles apart, and trekked back with the duffel bags of supplies they’d been unable to carry in winter.

They moved by starlight sometimes, whenever they’d noticed the same plane in their patch of sky two days in a row, unsure if that plane was searching for them. In the purple just before dusk they’d check their quarry, traps and snares in the forest, nets in the water—they’d check when they couldn’t be spotted from the air. She wondered if the world really cared anymore about what they’d done in winter. She couldn’t be sure.

Naked in the nearby lake or river under moonlight was a startling way to be, the water still chill in midspring. They gathered food, walked a black wood they felt their way through, paths they’d made and memorized, owls and bats sounding their way. They ate grayling, jackfish, bluebell shoots. Marten and fox and deer. Each night their eyes adjusted more to the dark. He could skin a deer by moon or fire. He knew which footfall was bear, which was moose. If ever they needed to be on paths in daylight he knew to stomp through the bush, hooting as he went, so as not to come suddenly upon a grizzly or brown bear. The scourge on this land, whatever curse had been here, fled when winter relented. The animals were back now after breakup.

She’d listen to him breathe, snore beside her. When his snores stopped she’d hold her own breath and try to hear the new morning outside through the sod walls. They’d sleep through the day and he’d wake her at the gloaming. After three days of hearing no planes they’d return once again to the daylight.

They relocated Bailey’s grave once the ground was soft enough to pierce. They rescued him from the melting ice of the cemetery of Keelut and carried him in his plywood box deep into the taiga. Slone picked the spot beside the heather where they slept. He made her watch as he dug the hole, made her open the lid with a pry bar and look—not a glance but a look with two accepting eyes, and she did it because she knew that once she did, he’d never again mention what she’d done.

She possessed certain memories. She was a girl of five or six, summertime in the forest by the village, a forest of immense hemlock and oak. She could see rays of sun dispersed through the treetops, pollen suspended in the light like a galaxy of stars. Or those first years in the village schoolhouse, so long ago, their teacher a missionary from the States, a young man of beauty, she remembered. Dark hair and blue eyes—she was startled by the combination, had never seen it before. He had enough Bibles for all twelve children. He read verses as they sat rapt, not looking at their own text but at him, his lips, how they moved in such delight as if the words themselves were pleasure.

When she told Slone of her memories now, he said that memory is a trickster, the great deceiver. He couldn’t recall half of what she could. They’d gone hand in hand everywhere together, surely he’d remember too if her memories had really happened, if the pollen in the shafts of sunlight had resembled stars that summer day, if the schoolteacher had given them Bibles. He wants my memories too , she thought. He has my face and body, my every cell, and still he wants more, wants to steal my shadow too.

As kids they’d come to this country for several days each summer with nothing but their bodies. She remembered they napped naked in the sun on beds of moss, on rocks of lichen, and later in the night they wrapped around each other for warmth. It was like that again now. Daily she grew round with another, with the new one he insisted on. Inside her she could hear already the sucking, sobbing, the pulse that led to a wailing for food, want of growth. And it was then she remembered she had other hopes.

At their spot in the valley they met their mother after breakup. She smacked him on the beard, held his chin firm in her hand, squeezed his lips. She told him, ordered him to make Medora pleased, and to make her pleased too. She said his teeth were filthy. He only nodded and looked away to the hills as Medora stifled a laugh.

In sunlight and moonlight both they walked far, and along the way she gathered salmonberries, bunchberries, mossberries, birch sap, and cottongrass stems. The fireweed she picked for its color. She could see it shine, really shine, in the first hour of daylight, and often she walked without him to collect the fireweed before they slept. The warm calm of the morning, these moments alone—she could not let them pass.

A late spring breeze came in through the entrance of their igloo and she woke with a knife in her hand, hovering above him as he slept. Their mother had given her a magazine a month earlier at their meeting place, and in it she’d read that dreams are useless. They mean nothing, hint at neither future nor past. They are the discard of the brain as the body slumbers. Why then, how did she see herself with the knife before she felt it in her hand, before she woke to find herself above him about to plunge a blade into his neck? Because, she knew, we call our wishes dreams, and she put down the knife to sleep again.

Feeling thanks to:

Bob Weil, torch in the night.

Steve Almond, rabbi, brother, friend.

John Stazinski, invaluable from inception.

Will Menaker, reader extraordinaire.

David Patterson, sapient 007.

The committed staff of W. W. Norton and Liveright, paragon in publishing.

Katie, Ethan, and Aiden, forgiving in this dark.

Busy Monsters

William Giraldiis the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

Copyright © 2014 by William Giraldi