Regan Wolfrom - After The Fires Went Out - Coyote

One day I’ll get up the nerve to go back and explain it to her.

The night I dropped off Natalie and Tabitha, I took that little Honda back to McCartney Lake and parked it at a cottage up the road. It still had just over half a tank, but I didn’t really have any plans for how to use the gas that was left.

Last night after Sara had gone to sleep, I decided to drive back to the Girards’ in that little car. I brought along a vest and a helmet, but I didn’t feel like putting them on. I even took off my belt, stuffing it on the passenger seat beside me. It all felt like too much to carry.

I almost got stuck a few times in the snow, and at those moments I felt pretty stupid that I hadn’t brought along a snow shovel or any sand. But luckily that little car had more guts than I expected, and I made it all the way to Bondy Lake.

I’d forgotten to bring the tarps, too.

I went back into the empty house and gathered up the bed sheets. Then I brought them down to the car and spread about half of them in the back; I folded down the passenger seat as well to get a little more room.

Then I took the rest of the bed sheets and I went to the root cellar. I strapped on my headlamp, which felt strange strapped directly against my scalp and not onto my helmet, and I lowered myself down to where the bodies lay.

I’d been worried about coyotes finding the frozen bodies, not that I was sure if they’d be able to do much with them. But most of the dead Girards looked just as they did before; there might have been some rodents down there, but I didn’t look that carefully.

Natalie and Tabitha probably looked exactly like they did the day they died.

I knew it wasn’t fair to leave Tabitha there, away from her family and then away from her best friend, so I wrapped the two of them up with the sheets.

I carried Natalie first, and I didn’t know how to feel as I balanced her over my shoulder like a surfboard, her body rigid and cold. I placed her in the car and then I went back for Tabitha.

I felt a little guilty leaving the rest of them there, but I knew it would be hard enough with two.

I drove them back to McCartney Lake to the place near Wright Creek that we’d chosen when we lost Ant. I laid them both out in the snow, Tabitha wrapped in a sheet of yellow and green flowers, and Natalie covered with pink unicorns.

I decided that one day I would go back to the root cellar, for the children at least.

I gathered some logs from our firewood pile, along with two bottles of lighter fluid, since I didn’t have any kindling. I lit the fire and I waited a few minutes for the flames to grow hot. Then I grabbed my steel shovel and shoved it into the fire.

It took much longer to dig those two graves than it did to bury Ant, and the sun had already risen before I had finished filling them back in.

I was just glad that my heart had kept up with the digging.

Kayla found me there.

“Sara’s looking for you,” she said.

I tried to give her a smile; I’m not sure it worked. “Thanks for letting me know. You’re not going to ask me what I’m doing?”

She gave me a look that surprised me, like she understood exactly how I was feeling. She wrapped her arm around me. “I know what you’re doing…and I know that he’d appreciate it, Baptiste. Ant really did love her.”

“That’s what he wrote.”

“He told me once. One night when we were out together by the lake. I asked him if he wanted to kiss me, and then he just blurted it out like he was confessing to murdering someone. ‘I’m in love with Natalie Girard,’ he’d said. And then he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and said that a blowjob would be perfectly acceptable, however.” She started to laugh. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in love with someone like Ant. It must have been so frustrating most of the time.”

“That’s what love is, Kayla. If you’re not frustrated you’re doing it wrong.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about this.” I really didn’t want to explain why I did it. I’d cared enough to drive two dead girls up from Bondy Lake, but I’d never even bothered to ask where the Tremblays had chosen to bury Marc.

“Don’t you think they’ll notice?” she asked.

“Just don’t tell them for now, okay? Let them find out another day.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Kayla.” I gave her a kiss on the forehead.

She giggled. “That means you love me,” she said.

That made me smile. “Yeah…that means I love you.”

We walked back together. And when Sara asked, Kayla told her that she’d found me out on a walk.

I doubt Sara has any idea what I was doing out there near Ant’s stand of sugar maples.

She didn’t ask me.

Today was the day for limbing and splitting the birchwood.

We’d cut down around two dozen birch trees during the late summer, while there were still enough leaves to suck moisture out of the wood. Now it was time to revisit the fallen trees and turn them into firewood. We also have around twenty balsam firs on the ground just off the road, but they’ll have to wait for sometime next week, after we’ve sobered up from New Year’s.

When we first moved into the cottage at McCartney Lake, we’d run our stove off of hastily-cut fir and whatever pre-split bundles of firewood we could find. Some of it was too green but we made it work. Graham had done his best to tell us about hardwoods versus soft, and how his father used to swear by Pacific Madrones for their firewood, which didn’t mesh well with them living in central Illinois. Based on his advice we made sure to cut some birch as well that summer, piling it on the metal racks to season for the following winter.

Now we’re hooked on birch, and it’s been easy enough to find; you just go to wherever there was a forest fire ten to twenty years ago and there you’ll find your firewood. We’ve seen colonies of young birch trees all over the district now, but it’s the older trees we need, the ones where the bark has already turned white, and the closest acreage of firewood-ready birch is on the far side of the lake. That’s where our fallen trees were waiting.

One of the only good things about the breakdown of society is that for the first few months there was plenty of equipment sitting around, waiting for you to take it all home; that’s made the job a whole lot smoother.

After being up all night, all I really wanted to do was sneak upstairs and go to sleep, but I had to set an example, or at least make sure Matt didn’t look better than me. Ant was gone, so someone needed to take his slot.

So five of us piled onto our three tracked ATVs, leaving Kayla and Fiona back home with the dogs and a shotgun, and headed off to our woodlot. Sara and I pulled the utility trailer while Graham and Lisa dragged the splitter behind them. It took three times as long with snow on the ground, the trailer and splitter wheels getting stuck in a few patches of powder on the way.

I would have liked to bring Des and Juju with us, but I wasn’t comfortable leaving just two people back at the cottage without some kind of backup. If someone came along we’d be able to hear the barking echoing out over the lake.

As expected, it was Lisa and Graham who worked the hardest out there, taking the bucked logs and setting them up on the splitter. Matt did his best on limbing with one of the chainsaws, but as always his coordination was a little off. Sara loaded the split logs onto the trailer while I did a little of everything.