David Vann - Caribou Island

The door frame new and mounted on the outside, white and out of place against the logs. Trash bags and flats of canned goods piled all around. Closer until she was nearly at the threshold, and still she heard nothing. The cabin seemed larger now, the back wall high. Rough bark, gaps, some logs projecting out farther than others. She hadn’t noticed before how uneven the surface, valleys and ridges, a landscape set up on end. She waited at the threshold, let her eyes adjust, darker inside the cabin, but enough light coming from the window and gaps to see the plywood floor. The window itself not yet in view, set off farther to the right, blocked by the door. A dim space and no sign of Gary.

Irene stepped in, bow held close and ready.

Irene? Gary asked. He was sitting five feet from her, on a stool by the window. Lit in relief, the lines on his face. Old. What are you doing, Irene?

She stepped back. More difficult now that she was here and he was talking to her. He stood up, hands opening toward her, fingers in relief in this light. Irene, he said again.

She pulled back the arrow tight against her cheek.

I love you, Irene, he said, and suddenly it was easy again. She let the arrow fly, saw it disappear into his chest. Only the black feathers sticking out past his jacket. He was spun around to the side, looking down at his chest, and fell to the floor, facedown. The arrowhead and shaft sticking up into the air.

Gary crying. Or screaming. Some sound over the blood in Irene’s head. She walked closer and notched her last arrow. His legs and arms moving, pulling himself across the floor toward the wall. And what would he find at the wall? She pulled the arrow back to her cheek, aimed down at his back, and let another arrow fly. Another cry from Gary, the arrow too fast to see. Just suddenly there, sticking up high. But it had nailed him to the floor. He couldn’t crawl forward now. Arms and legs still moving, but not getting anywhere. Still not dead, and she had no more arrows. His screaming lower, a thing that did not sound human. Irene dropped the bow and didn’t know what to do. She stood there waiting for him to die, but he wouldn’t die. An awful, animal sound, the last sound a living thing makes. Her husband. Gary.

Irene walked outside, walked down to the shore. The lake a magnification of sky, white and overcast, cold. Irene felt hot, like she could sear through water and sky and snow, even rock. She was a giantess, powerful, able to crush mountains and scoop out lakes with her hands. Walked down the shoreline and this was her shore. Didn’t feel the wind. Had the need to run, so she ran again, ran faster than she ever had before, the uneven stones and pools and ruffs nothing. She was sure-footed. The world had never been real. There was no gravity, nothing to slow her or hold her down. She ran as her mind willed, the world an extension of her. The waves, the grasses, the snow, all of it created in unison.

But then she had to slow, began to tire somehow. Walked on all the way to the far point, close to Frying Pan Island, looked across at its shore. Felt the urge to swim there, to cross the water, leave this island, but something held her back. She had more to do. She wasn’t finished yet. So she turned around, walked back toward the cabin.

The exhilaration would leave her, she knew. It was a gift, but only a temporary one. She could feel it thinning, dissipating. Ran again, trying to recapture it. Her feet sloppy on the stones, ankles twisting. Making contact now, hard and unyielding, no longer floating above, no longer sure-footed. She slowed to a walk.

The tops of the mountains hidden from view, the summits, the wide bowls. Only the flanks below the cloud line. She wanted to cross to the mountains. The lake should have been frozen, like in her vision. She would cross and climb the mountain. That was how it was supposed to be. What she had done was supposed to happen later, in midwinter. But how could she have waited until then?

Panes of ice all along the edge, broken by waves. Small pools gone opaque. Dark rocks damp from mist or spray. This thin band, margin between water and earth. This time she had now, this brief time when anything might be possible, perhaps, when her life might be anything, but she knew there was only one possibility.

When she reached the boat, she untied the line. Thick cord, strong, thirty feet, more than enough. She walked up toward the cabin, and she went slowly now. Something in her didn’t want to go.

Alder branches brushing against her, last time on what had nearly become a path, the growth beaten down by their passings. A place never meant to be their home, a place intended from the very first to be their end. And she had gone along with that, even though she knew. Had Gary known?

When she stood over him again, he was silent, no longer moving. No more of whatever that sound had been. Something she didn’t want to hear. But now it was peaceful. He was quiet, resting facedown.

Irene set the stool at the other end of the cabin, a few feet from the side wall. Reached up and pushed the rope over a joist. The aluminum sheeting tight, but she could force it through, pulled enough to make a noose. Not sure how to tie the knot. Hadn’t looked at what her mother tied. In movies, it was a big knot with many wrappings, so she wrapped and tied half-hitches, like Gary had shown her for the boat. It didn’t look right, but it would have to do.

Irene hammered a nail on either side of the joist, forward of the rope, so it wouldn’t slide, stacked cutoffs of two-by-eights on top of the stool so she could stand higher and have farther to drop. She stood on that pile, very precarious, and put the noose around her neck and cinched it tight, then realized the rope had to be loose for the snap. So she stepped down carefully, measured while she stood on the lowest step, and pulled the rope tight. Rough on her neck, damp. She needed to tie the free end somewhere secure.

Irene looked all around and couldn’t find anything. No anchor point or post strong enough. But then she looked at Gary and thought of something beautiful. She tied the end around his upper body. Had to lift his head and one shoulder and then the other. She could smell him, his bowels voided when he died. Smell of blood, too. All of this increasing the pressure in her head somehow. That had promised to leave but hadn’t. A splitting pain, and it made her work more urgent. She cinched the rope tight around him, tied it off. The arrows would keep it from slipping.

And then she had to step outside again. The smells too much, the pain in her head. She didn’t know if she could go through with this. It was too much, really. Leading herself to slaughter like an animal. She didn’t know how her mother had done it. And so much less trapped. Hadn’t committed murder. For Irene, there was no choice, but for her mother, there had still been a choice. How had she done that?

Irene walked into the trees. Close cover a comfort now, hidden. Walked aimlessly among the trunks, followed patches of moss poking out through snow, the snow thin and light, in some places no more than a dusting, blocked by branches above. She lay down in a large patch of moss, curled on her side. Up close, like a tiny forest, each finger of moss as large and grand as any spruce and more perfectly formed. Not bent or misshapen, but symmetrical, with layers of branches exactly like a tree, and a defiance of gravity at this smaller scale, the ends of the branches unbowed. Hundreds of miniature trees reaching upward. She reached out and touched one of them, pushed it to the side and it sprang back. She snapped it off at its base, snapped off its neighbors, felled a forest.

Rose again and walked farther into the trees but didn’t know where she was going or what she was doing. Circled back toward the cabin, and when she broke from the trees, stopped and looked at the tents and the cabin, the stove set up between. Their camp. Her husband dead. A murderer. That’s how she would be known forever. Daughter, preschool teacher, wife, mother, murderer, suicide. The earlier ones would be forgotten. Only the last two remembered. She walked to the cabin door, stepped inside, and held her breath. Walked over to the stool and noose, placed her neck in the noose and pulled down with her chin, pointed a toe at the floor, checking to see whether she’d hit. There had to be air underneath still. It was no good if she hit.