David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Are you all right? his father asked, and he put his arm around his boy’s shoulders. We’ll be all right here. Okay? I’m just talking. Okay?

Roy nodded and stepped out of his father’s grasp to continue looking for wood.

They brought what little they had found back to the cabin, and it was clearly not much of anything, so his father took out the ax, but then looked up at the sky and changed his mind. You know, it’s getting a little late in the afternoon here, and we need food and we need to set up our bunks and stuff, so maybe this should wait.

So they got at the dry wood that was in the small box behind the cabin, which they found had an access door from the inside, and they used some of this wood to get a fire going in the stove.

It will be our heat, too, his father said. It’ll keep us toasty, and we can get it to slow-burn all night if we close off the vents.

We’ll need that, Roy said. Though he knew it wouldn’t be like Fairbanks here. Single digits and below zero would be rare. His father had promised everyone that. He had sat in their living room with his elbows on his knees and stressed how safe and easy it all would be. Roy’s mother had pointed out that his father’s predictions had rarely come true. When he had protested, she’d brought up commercial fishing, the hardware store investment, and several of his dental practices. She hadn’t mentioned either marriage, but that had been clear, also. His father had ignored all this and told them that mostly it would be above freezing.

Once they had the fire going, Roy went for cans of chili in the other room and his father asked for bread, too, to toast on top. It was dim in the cabin, even though it was still afternoon outside and the real darkness wouldn’t come until very late. He did remember this, all the evenings as a little kid he’d had to go to bed while it was still light. He wasn’t sure what the rules were now, but it seemed like all the normal ones about homework and bedtime were off. He’d never be busy and never have to get up for school. And he’d never see anyone else other than his father.

They ate their chili out on the porch, their booted feet dangling. There was no railing around the porch. They watched the calm inlet and an occasional Dolly Varden leaping. There were no salmon leaping yet, but that would come later in the summer.

When’s salmon season again?

July and August mostly, depending on the type. We might get the first run of pinks in June.

They stayed on the porch after they were done and didn’t say anything more. The sun didn’t set but sat low on the horizon for a long time. A few small birds came in and out of the bushes around them, then a bald eagle came down from behind, the sun golden on its white head, its feathers a chalky brown. It flew to the end of the point and landed in the top of a spruce tree.

You don’t see that everywhere, his father said.

No.

Finally the sun started dipping down and they went inside to arrange their sleeping bags on backpacking pads on the floor of the main room. Roy could see red in the sky outside their narrow window as he and his father undressed in darkness. Then they lay in their bags, neither one of them sleeping. The ceiling vaulted out from Roy and the floor hardened beneath him and his mind wallowed until finally he drifted off, then came back because he realized he was hearing his father weeping quietly, the sounds sucked in and hidden. The room so small and Roy didn’t know if he could pretend not to be hearing, but he pretended anyway and lay there awake another hour it seemed and his father still hadn’t stopped but finally Roy was too tired. He stopped hearing his father and slept.

In the morning his father was grilling pancakes and singing softly, “King of the Road.” He heard Roy wake, looked down at him grinning. He lifted his eyebrows up and down. Hotcakes and cream-of-mushroom? he asked.

Yeah, Roy said. That sounds great. It was like they were just camping.

His father handed down a big plate of hotcakes with cream-of-mushroom soup on top and a fork and Roy set it aside for a moment, pulled on his jeans, boots, and jacket, and they went out onto the porch together to eat.

It was late morning, a breeze already coming up the inlet and forming small ripples in the water. The surface was opaque.

Did you sleep well? his father asked.

Roy didn’t look at him. It seemed his father was asking whether he’d heard him weeping, but his father had asked as if it were a regular question. And Roy had pretended just to be sleeping, so he answered, Yeah, I slept all right.

First night in our new home, his father said.

Yeah.

Do you miss your mother and Tracy?

Yeah.

Well, you will for a while probably, until we get settled in here.

Roy didn’t believe he could get settled to the point of not missing his mother and sister. And they were going to get away periodically. That had been another of his father’s promises. They would come out every two or three months or so for a visit, two weeks at Christmas. And there was the ham radio. They could pass along messages with that if they needed to, and messages could be passed to them.

They ate in silence for a while. The pancakes were a little burned and one of them doughy inside from being too thick, but the cream-of-mushroom on them was good. The air was cool but the sun was getting stronger. This was like Little House on the Prairie or something, sitting out on a porch with no railing and their boots dangling and no one else around for miles. Or maybe not like that, maybe like gold miners. It could be a different century.

I like this, Roy said. I’d like it to stay sunny and warm like this all year.

His father grinned. Two or three months anyway. But you’re right. This is the life.

Are we gonna start fishing?

I was just thinking about that. We should start this evening, after we work on the lean-to for the wood. And we’ll build a little smoker back there, too.

They put the dishes in the small sink, and then Roy went to the outhouse. He held the door open with one foot and inspected all around the seat as best as he could, but finally he just had to use it and trust that nothing was going to take a bite out of him.

When he returned, his father grabbed the ax and saw and they went looking for board trees. As they walked through the forest, they looked at trunks, but mostly it was just hemlock in here, no thicker than four or five inches. Farther up the draw the trees shrank even more, so they turned around and went down along the shore to the point, where a larger stand of spruce grew. His father began chopping at the base of one that was farther in and partway around the point.

Don’t want to wreck our own view, he said. It occurred to Roy that maybe chopping down trees here wasn’t even legal, because it was some kind of National Forest, but he didn’t say anything. His father had been known on occasion to ignore the law when it came to hunting, fishing, and camping. He had taken Roy hunting once in suburban Santa Rosa, California, for instance. They had only the pellet gun and were going for dove or quail on some land they found beside a road that was fairly out of the way. When the owner walked down, he didn’t say anything but just watched them as they got back into the car and drove away.

Roy took over with the ax, feeling the thud each time through his arms and studying how white the chips of wood were that flung out loosely around the base.

Careful how it falls, his father said. Think about where the balance is.

Roy stopped and studied the tree, then moved halfway around it and gave the last two blows and it fell away from them, ripping down through branches and leaves, other trunks quivering under the shock and looking like a crowd of bystanders at some horrific scene, all of them trembling and thrown and an odd silence afterward.