David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

He left, he said out loud. I missed him.

He went back then for his pole and the salmon and walked on to the cabin.

His father was back at the woodpile. Tom came by, he said when Roy walked up.

I heard.

Oh. Well he was just here a minute but I ordered the supplies we need and he’ll be back with them next week on his way to Juneau. Though not really on his way exactly, I suppose. And his father grinned then, pleased at how in the middle of nowhere they were.

Roy took his salmon down to the water and gutted them. He scaled them quickly and cut off their heads and fins and tails. He wanted out of here. He didn’t care what his father thought about it; he was just going to go.

You want to leave? his father asked when he told him at dinner.

Roy didn’t say it again but just ate. He felt terrible, as if he were killing his father.

We’re not doing so bad, are we? his father asked.

Roy refused to cave in. He didn’t say anything.

I don’t understand, his father said. We’re finally getting somewhere. We’re getting ready for winter.

Why? Roy thought to himself. Just so we can survive winter? But he didn’t say anything.

Look, his father said. You’re gonna have to talk to me about this, otherwise you’re just staying and that’s that.

Okay, Roy said.

Why do you have to go?

I want my friends again, and my real life. I don’t want to just try to survive winter.

Fair enough. But what about me? You told me you’d stay out here a year, and I made my plans. I quit my job and bought this place. What am I supposed to do if you just leave?

I don’t know.

You haven’t thought about that, have you?

No. Roy felt awful. I’m sorry, he said.

That’s all right, his father said. If you need to go, then you need to go. I won’t stop you.

Roy wanted to say right then that he’d stay, but he couldn’t. He knew terrible things were going to happen to him out here if he stayed. He did the dishes and then they went to bed.

You know, his father said that night as they lay not sleeping, it’s too out of control here. You’re right. It takes a man to get through this. I shouldn’t have brought a boy.

Roy couldn’t believe his father was saying these things to him. He didn’t sleep that night. He wanted to leave. He wanted to get out of here. But as the night went on, he knew that he’d be staying. He kept imagining his father out here alone, and he knew his father needed him. By the morning, Roy felt so bad he fixed pancakes and told his father, I’ve thought more about it and I don’t think I really want to go.

Really? his father said, and he came up and put an arm around his boy’s shoulders. Now we’re talking, he said, beaming. We can lick this thing. We’ll have fresh supplies and we’ll put away enough fish and meat and I have a new idea for the roof of the cache. I was thinking…

And his father went on and on, excited, but Roy stopped hearing him. He didn’t believe anymore in exciting plans. He felt he had just put himself in a kind of prison, and it was too late to back out.

That day they began picking blueberries. They had been out here over a month, late July now, and though it was still a bit early for berry season, the berries would be fine for making jam. They picked into freezer bags, Roy remembering Ketchikan and his red coat with the hood and all the times they had hiked onto the hill behind the house to pick blueberries. They had churned homemade ice cream, soupy and rich, and stirred the berries in. He remembered the smoky smell of the air, too, and all the fall colors. It wasn’t only the trees that turned in Alaska, it was everything, all the growth, and it began turning in early August. Still too early here, but it was coming soon. In more northern parts, in Fairbanks, where his father had lived, it would begin turning very soon, perhaps even now, and by September fifteenth, nearly all the tiny leaves on the blueberry bushes would have fallen and most of the leaves on the trees, also, the end of fall and beginning of the snows. Here it would be later, but not much later. One summer in Ketchikan, he remembered, it had snowed in August. He had ridden his tricycle out into it and tried to catch the flakes on his tongue.

Later in the day, they stood on the point and caught salmon every few casts. The schools were coming in finally, not just a few isolated salmon anymore. They could see them in thick beneath the clear water, dark shapes in rows undulating slowly and in time, another thing Roy remembered. They had pulled into small coves like this one in the cabin cruiser and Roy had stood on the bow with his father and looked at all of them gathered below him and he had come to believe that all waters were like this, that all waters were so populated. The Pixies bright in among them now, just as before, Roy dragging his across their noses until one rushed forward and took it, then flashed silver as Roy yanked to set the hook. He whooped like his father did whenever he caught one, and it seemed then not so bad that they would stay out here. Roy gutted his fish when he had caught five, then ran rope through the gills.

When we really get going, his father said, we’ll be dragging twenty or thirty salmon a day back to the cabin. We’ll be so busy we’ll wish we had a second smoker.

The plane returned the next week with their supplies: more baggies, plywood, seeds, canned goods and staples, huge bags of brown sugar and salt, a new radio and batteries, Louis L’Amour Westerns for his father, a new sleeping bag and surprise tub of chocolate ice cream for Roy. The arrival of the plane made it seem they weren’t really that far away, as if a town and other people like Tom were maybe just around the point. Roy felt relaxed and happy and safe and didn’t realize until the plane started up again and was taxiing out that that feeling wasn’t going to stay. As he watched it go, he realized he was starting over, that now it would again be a month or two, or maybe longer, and he remembered, too, that they had planned to get away for at least a week at the end of summer, which was now. That had been the plan, and somehow it had not happened.

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on this. He and his father grew busier and busier in their preparations. They were up early and still working often past dusk. The mountains changing quickly then, turning purple and yellow and red, seeming to soften more in the late light, the air colder and cleaner and thinning each day, Roy and his father bundled now in their jackets and hats as they pulled in the salmon, as they cut more wood and stacked it behind the plywood walls. The time easy between them, busy and unthinking, working together to store up. Roy slept. If his father cried, he didn’t know, and for a while, at least, he didn’t care as much, perhaps because he knew now that he couldn’t get away, that he had committed himself and would stay here with his father whether his father were sick or well.

They began the home schooling in the evenings, just two or three evenings that first week. Roy read Moby Dick and his father read Louis L’Amour. Roy wrote down answers to detailed and picky and seemingly insignificant questions about plot and theme and his father said, Now that was a real Western. After a week of this, they realized they just didn’t have time for it with all the other preparations, so they put it off and went back to cutting wood and smoking fish and hunting full time.

They hunted anything now, anything they came across that they could smoke. They killed a cow moose several miles away in a marshy flat where a stream gathered before spilling into the ocean. She was alone and looking at them, chewing, her shaggy hide dark and dripping and they both fired and she went down immediately, as if she had been crushed by a great stone. His father carried the carcass back one haunch at a time while Roy guarded the rest, a shell in the chamber, looking all around him as it grew dark, watching for the red eyes of bears and whatever else his imagination could think of to fear.