Katie Kitamura - Gone to the Forest

Tom makes a note to himself to tell Jose to clean the marks up. Now, immediately. While they are easy to wipe away. He turns to look for Jose. He walks the house in a hurry, looking for him. He finds him at last, out back, and he whispers the instructions. About the mud. In the hall. Then he returns to the veranda.

The girl stands, back against a pillar, dress lifting on the wind, and she does not turn at the sound of Tom’s footsteps. He stops at the door. His father is at the liquor trolley. He pours with a steady hand. He picks the girl’s drink up from the table and hands it to her. She takes it with a nod. The old man does not look at her. He stands beside her and takes in her view. He takes of her space. Eventually, she turns to him.

Tom watches, from the doorway. He stares, from the darkness. And then he leaves them. He goes to see that Jose has wiped away the mud and that dinner is prepared for three. When he tells him, Jose does not have the courtesy to look surprised. He says to him the table has already been set.

HIS FATHER BEDS the girl every night for the next three weeks. A native brings her two trunks. The Wallaces themselves do not appear. His father has made some arrangement — clearly his father has made some arrangement. It is true the girl has no reputation to lose and it is also true the situation does not necessarily look so bad. She is engaged to Tom. She has a place on the farm while she recovers her health and then there is the difficulty of adjusting to the life in the valley.

Which is different. Different to what she knows and not so different after all. Because she has already found her way. She is a girl who lands on her feet.

Tom walks the house and does his best to avoid her. Naturally he runs into her at every turn. She wanders the halls in a state of growing undress. A hair ribbon that has come undone, a strap that has fallen loose. It gets worse — much worse, until she is walking the halls, dragging herself from room to room, draping herself on the chairs and settees in nothing more than the excuse of a dressing gown. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes nothing more than a chemise and Tom swears it is worse than if she had been naked.

She is like a bitch in heat. The same smell comes off the animals during mating season. Then they run across the land, eyes rolling back in their heads, sick and made foul with desire. They have to lock the dogs away when they are like this. There is nothing else for it. They should do the same to the girl only it is too late and the fever has already set in. Into all of them, into the walls of the house.

Soon, within a matter of days, she finds her way into his mother’s wardrobe. Silk dresses and fur wraps and clothes, clothes far more costly than those she arrived in. Now every evening she dresses for dinner. She puts on a chiffon frock, she draws the tasseled belt tight. The colors are rich and the fabrics delicate and they are cut in the complicated way that means quality. Tom has an eye for such things. Generally useless but now put into practice.

He scans her every night and soon he notices that there are jewels, there are diamonds and emeralds, hanging from her slender wrist and neck, tucked up into her hair. She arrives with tortoiseshell clips and sapphire rings, she is practically glittering when she comes down to dinner, a shiny, ghostly apparition in his mother’s clothes. There are clear differences between the two women. Nonetheless, Tom sees his father’s gaze clamp onto her.

Now his father walks her to the table each night. She sits between Tom and his father, Tom at one end of the table, his father at the other, and the girl sitting between them. She will take Tom’s place. In no time she will be sitting across from the old man and presiding over the table. With her newfound airs and graces. Already she is playing the lady of the house and is surprisingly good at it.

Every night he walks the halls and there is a nightmare of sounds emanating from his father’s bedroom. Sickly moans and thumps in the night. Suckling and animal bellowing. The stuff of nightmares, which he remembers from childhood. He stands outside his father’s door. He lowers his head and listens. The noise is loud, the house and all the rooms are full with things, bureaus and sofas and carpets, but the sound travels just like the building is hollow.

He does not know how he will face the girl in the morning and still he does. Every morning she looks smug and suddenly well fed. Stuffed — that is one way of putting it. He understands some things about the situation. That he was marked for the fool from the start. That this was always part of the plan. That they are right to view him with contempt. No doubt they are laughing at him now, from the dampness of their bed.

Father knows best. The scales on Tom’s skin erupt for the first time in many years. It is a bad attack. He cannot sleep for the itching. He patrols the house instead, scratching at his hands, he does it for hours and it is only when the sun is rising that he goes to bed. His bedroom is on the opposite side of the house to his father’s. There are hundreds of yards between them. But now he goes to bed and the sounds follow him to sleep. He hears it all — the mysterious thumping, the shouts and moans, the loud, loud bellowing.

Across the border there is a mountain — and one morning the mountain explodes. First there is an enormous boom. The boom is not hollow but dense with noise. The natives come out of their quarters. They are standing outside, looking and listening, when the boom repeats and then dissolves into a rumble. They are watching when the top of the mountain opens and disgorges fire.

They have never seen this before. Violence from men they understand well, but from the land itself — the mountain now retching, the innards of the earth shooting up — they do not know what to think or how to understand it. A giant cloud of smoke pushes up and covers the sky. Bolts of lightning snap through the cloud. A column of red and orange forms in the middle. The fire pours straight into the sky and fills it.

They feel the explosions that follow from across the border. The ground bucking beneath their feet. They thrust their hands into the air. They try to regain balance. The explosions follow in quick succession and above them the sky is purple and orange and gray and white. They watch. Their hands are shaking and they kneel — are thrust to the ground — in prayer. Even the ones who have no religion to speak of.

The volcano erupts for four days. In the chaos of the four days and darkness the farmers let go of their routine. The livestock go unfed and then are fed at strange hours of the night. It makes them bellow in fear. They stampede across the lot and then huddle together and then stampede again. Also, they shit constantly. Streams of shit pouring out of their bodies as they squeal and grunt.

The natives are sent out to calm the herds. They press themselves between the animal bodies. They step into soft piles of shit — the shit goes as high as their ankles, it goes as high as their calves. They stroke and soothe and croon but cannot take their eyes from the sky. They wonder if it will last forever. If it will never stop. The animals can sense their distraction and are not comforted.

When four days pass the mountain’s contractions slow. It takes another two days for the cloud to ease and they see patches of sky for the first time. There is sunlight. The contractions slow again and then stop. The animals are calm — the natives and farmers alike take that to be a sign, but they still doubt the sun and sky. Four days and they are numb to the life that came before.

The mountain had been silent for a thousand years. They did not know it could explode. They had been trained to worry about other things. The ravages of colonialism. Man-made apocalypse, nuclear disaster — they have seen pictures, they have heard stories. They are not educated people in the valley and the natives in particular are prone to modern superstition. They worry about their skin and hair and wonder if they will drop dead in ten years’ time, a reaction delayed.