Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

The most vital thing is to protect one's children. There is no part of the soul or body that is complete without that guardianship, no part that is even alive. He feels the pressure of the sentiment on his cheeks, his shoulders, his eardrums, his bladder. Somewhere in the woods his son is running around shooting an imaginary enemy with an imaginary gun, and soon he will come home needing dinner. The table should be set in preparation; no time here to waste talking to strangers.

When he looks out restlessly through the window the sight of the manor house catches his eye again, dragged through time, exiled in the present moment.

“That's funny,” he says, bewildered, and the man and woman turn to him.

“What's funny?” The woman puts her hand on his thigh.

“That building was there yesterday, and the day before.”

The snow goes on weaving patterns before his eyes.

There is a gunshot. Bang! Henry shouts and his fingers form a gun. Alice wants to try walking but the snow is deeper than her, at least just here. She is now one and a half: how fast the time has gone! She windmills her legs and he clings to her while his wife and Henry follow behind. His wife sings. Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do. Her voice carries out across Quail Woods in clean pleasant lines until it meets the moors.

“Henry, stay with me,” his wife says.

“Want to go to Jake.”

“Stay with me. Jake is looking after Alice.”

He waits for his wife and son to catch up. His wife is out of breath because of the snow and Henry's five-year-old weight on her hip; he kisses her cold cheek and then Henry's. Henry reaches out for him and he leans back; what can he do or say? He does not want to give his daughter over, and as the snow falls on them he holds her closer, pulling the yellow blanket around her. Joy's recent letters are in his pocket and brushing against his leg as he manoeuvres himself through the snow.

“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness ,” his wife announces. “And they were happy to be encamped in their stone house, and not the glass house. And they found a cherry tree, and its branches were possibilities, possibilities within possibilities. Some possibilities were to become real, and some were to always remain just possible.”

He smiles at her, stoops, and gathers up a snowball which he throws lightly at a tree. With some effort Helen holds Henry at the end of her reach and turns slowly in the snow, until his weight is too much. She sets him down onto his own feet.

“And from them came two children, a boy and a girl, and their eyes were as the eyes of doves by the rivers of water, washed with milk—”

“—and fitly set,” he finishes. “And the snow was milk and the sky was milk and their hearts and brains turned to milk.”

His wife scoops snow from a tree and throws it at him. They laugh, even Henry laughs. Alice chatters Jape, Jape, like a bird, and a gunshot bounces out across the canopy of branches. It splices the possibilities into sometime and never. He thinks of all those things his life will not be, and wonders what he is without them.

(And as the snowballs fly in a three-way him-wife-son tangle they seem to break up and spill across the air until the air, the trees, the whole forest are dripping with white milky liquid in which the only colour, just beyond them, is yellow, yellow dress, yellow foam, a pair of yellow shoes surfacing and submerging as the mother and child try to stay afloat.)

“Want to go to Jake,” Henry grizzles, as Helen hoists him up again to her hip. “Go to Jake.”

“I'm with Alice at the moment, Hen.” His words come out as steam on the freezing air. “Later you can come to me.”

His wife observes the now sleeping child on his shoulder, and she scratches her cheek and tightens her hold of Henry.

“It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

So then Alice is three, and his wife is walking barefooted along the path in her miniskirt, blotched in the green-and-yellow camouflage of the sunlight as it fights through from above. The overhang of trees sieves the light of its heat. Everywhere there are patches of yellow that force through from nowhere and give the effect of a dream. There is so much yellow that it works its way up his legs as he paddles through it and he feels like he is coming alive.

He is at his wife's side carrying Alice on his shoulders so that she can become a tree; she threads her fingers through his hair and chirps, Jape, Jape. Henry runs ahead and throws pinecones at targets on trees — a knot in the bark or a red cross painted to mark the tree as fit for felling. Most of the trees are marked.

He comments that woods are going to be cut down, and Helen replies that it is sad to lose the woods, their lovely woods where they like to come walking.

To lighten the mood he reminds his family that it's been three years since Alice was born, which means that their three years of kashrut is done. The day is gorgeous, the height of summer and so he suggests that they go home and get up the ladder and pick cherries. They'll make, let's see, a pie.

Helen crouches and rummages in a bag; she pulls out some cake which she unwraps from its cling film and hands to them. You're eating the yellow sections first, she says as they tuck into the cake. Yes, he explains, because he doesn't like them. So in that case you leave them 'til last. No, he assures her, you save the best 'til last.

A series of gunshots rupture their debate. There is a war, or there has been a war, or — what? — he doesn't know now, reaching back into the memory is like putting his hand into a box blindfolded, knowing there are objects but not knowing quite what they are. War plays its part, but maybe it is just its steady tick that has never left him. Maybe just the tick of his own maudlin heart.

Henry points out onto the horizon through the trees and asks why the horizon is so straight. When Helen embarks on an elaborate explanation of God's aligned and unswerving nature, he steps in to tell his son it isn't straight, it just appears that way; but at that point Alice whispers in his ear Jape, I want to pick them, and he loses interest in arguing about horizons.

Pick the cherries? he asks, and his daughter nods.

He kisses her cheek, of course, of course, whatever she wants she can have.

The only ripe cherries will be on the highest branches, Helen says tersely.

He stands in the middle of the path and closes his eyes to the next stream of gunshots. Helen turns her face up to the sound and shivers as though she wants to run from it all, that beat of darkness that seems to follow them around. When she looks back at him she eyes him curiously and tells him he looks just like a soldier, so serious, dressed in that military light.

He says he is trying to work out what's on the other side of that sound.

Peace, she answers. There's nothing quieter than the quiet after noise.

Jape, Alice whispers again to his ear. I want to pick them.

And then the next day, there is no Alice, and the cherry tree droops its branches in sympathy, or is it guilt.

The woman comes into the room, waving her arms: Jake, you have put your clothes in the oven. Jake, you have fed Lucky five times today, she'll die if you don't stop it. Jake, you are wearing one shoe, one slipper; always wearing your coat, like you're about to escape at any minute, take it off. Jake, you are jostling about, do you need the loo? She looks like a mad woman, in and out like this with smoking clothes and dog bowls, getting red in the face as her voice rises.