Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

“You can’t,” he said. “I’m just down there.”

Robert was aware of something passing between his father and the man but couldn’t place it. His father was kneading his shoulder, pressing him into his body.

“Come down here,” the man said. “Two’s enough.”

“No,” his father said. Robert felt his stomach tighten. He was getting dizzy. He thought he might throw up. “We’re leaving.”

Robert walked quickly with his father behind him toward where they had come out of the woods. “Move,” his father said. He was worried they wouldn’t be able to see the trailhead, but it was clear, as if everything were pointing them in the right direction. At the edge of the forest he looked back and saw nothing but the windswept shore, debris littering the beach. Seaweed above the tide line, dry and cracked and fly buzzing.

When they were twenty yards up the path his father said, “I need you to run.” He said it in an almost unrecognizable register, and it was this that frightened Robert. More than the size of the man. More than his dead tooth. His father’s voice. It seemed conjured from the earth, something from the soil.

They ran for what seemed like half an hour but though Robert was exhausted he didn’t slow. Twigs snapped across his face. His father’s breathing was loud in his ear. He tripped, stood. Tripped again, and felt a sharp pain in his ankle. He made no sound. He told himself that was something he was not going to do. He stood and felt his father’s hands on him, felt himself being lifted off the ground. He held tight to his father around his rib cage and his father held tight to him, carrying him down the path. Robert shut his eyes. He pushed one of his ears to his father’s chest, and became overwhelmed by the fact of his father’s jostling body, cradling his own while careening through growth. He felt his father’s breath on the top of his head. He felt his father’s beating heart. He felt his father’s arms around him, iron and unbending. They were a tree themselves, moving through other trees.

They were pushing the dinghy and had it halfway down to the water when the man came barreling into the sunlight. Robert saw his father reach for the fish club in the bottom of their dinghy, grab it, and turn. The man stopped briefly at the mouth of the trail, snorted, then resumed his charge. Arms outstretched, like wings.

What happened, happened fast. His father’s arm arced high, the man never slowed, the club came down with a sound that made Robert’s knees go out from under him. The man stepped back once, and then collapsed forward onto Robert’s father, bringing them both to the sand. His father exhaled what sounded like an animal whine, untangled himself, and then limply hit the man again with the club, this time on the back of the head. Then again, harder, with a blow that pushed his features into the sand. His father yelled something at the man, or at himself, Robert wasn’t sure. The man was motionless now, but his father, half-standing, hit him one more time. And then there was silence. The world had hushed. Robert, on his knees near the dinghy, watched a crab, watched a piece of seaweed, watched the rocks. He did not want to look up. In both hands he had fistfuls of sand. His father took him quickly in his arms and then the two of them pushed the dinghy into the water and began rowing toward Pamier, his father grunting with each stroke, Robert in the bow, as far away from his father as possible.

On the boat, they sat in the cockpit. The man, still on the beach, wasn’t moving. Someone his size, Robert imagined, would, in a few minutes, rise. But they watched for a few minutes, and nothing.

“Is he dead?” Robert finally asked. He’d searched for and found the fillet knife they’d left in the cockpit and was now holding it in his lap.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “I don’t think so.”

Robert wanted to say the man needed help, but was afraid.

“Give me your knife,” his father said.

Robert shook his head.

“I need to cut the stern-ties. Please.”

Robert handed his father the knife, and he leaned over the stern and began sawing the lines. Then he gave up. “Just untie them,” Robert said. His father looked at him and then at the cleats that held the lines, reached down and freed them. They dropped into the water with a tiny splash, and sunk.

On the beach Robert could see the bag of food they’d brought for the man, tipped over, its contents not six feet from him. The orange of the Dorito bag. The soda can catching the light. It looked like the man, carrying a bag of groceries, had suffered a heart attack and fallen. Not in the sand. Not on a desolate beach in the Broken Group on the outside of Vancouver Island. But in an asphalted parking lot, where someone would find him, tell whoever needed to be told, and be on their way.

His father stayed in the cockpit. He did not go below for the radio. He did not reach for his son. He sat perfectly still, watching the beach.

Finally he asked Robert if he was hungry. Robert shook his head. “Thirsty?” he said.

“No.”

Then he said, “Your mother loves you very much,” and Robert started crying.

The sun was high over the mast, and the dodger didn’t provide much shade. Robert’s father was sweating when he stood. He looked at the beach and then told Robert he was going.

“Where?”

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “I’ll be right where you can see me, the whole time. In sight of the boat. I’ll be back.”

“He needs help,” Robert said.

His father didn’t say anything.

“He needed our help.”

His father coughed and then asked him if he remembered how to use the radio. “I’m coming with you,” Robert said.

“No.”

His father climbed down over the lifeline and into the dinghy. Robert followed him and stood at the rail.

“Do you want the knife?” Robert said.

His father shook his head. “This is not your fault,” he said, and then pushed off the boat and began rowing to shore.

“Why can’t we just leave him?” Robert said. He knew his father, thirty feet away in the dinghy, could hear him, but there was no response.

From Pamier, Robert watched his father beach the dinghy. He stepped onto the sand and, holding the fish club close to his leg, approached the fallen man. Once he stood at the man’s side he bent over, as if whispering to him. Then he straightened up. He turned to face the woods, turned again, and lobbed the club underhand toward the dinghy. When he saw Robert watching him he raised one hand in a wave. Robert waved back. Then he saw his father bend over the man, again, put his hands on his shirt, and pull. The man was enormous, and as he watched his father lose his grip, and try again, it seemed to Robert like the man had become lodged in the earth. Eventually he came loose. And Robert watched as his father began to drag the man up the beach, toward the tide line.

It was not easy going. He could hear his father strain with the load, grunts that reached across the water as he jerked and tugged. The man’s shirt ripped and his father fell backward. He stood, wiped the back of his pants, and then clasped the man’s hands in his and pulled him that way. The toes of the man’s boots carved parallel grooves in the wet sand. Behind both of them, the trees loomed motionless, a painting of trees.

Robert saw where his father was going, and wanted to tell him to stop. At the mouth of the woods, his father straightened up, paused for breath; then he bent over, found the man’s hands again, and disappeared into the growth. The man’s trailing legs jerked incremental progress until he too disappeared into the woods, and then there was silence. Free of the stern-ties, Pamier began to drift over her anchor. The wind picked up. Robert thought of his sister, at home, and then thought of the radio. He imagined a distress signal, issuing out from his boat and pulsing under the waves, washing up across the ocean. He imagined someone who looked like his father, but older, removing the receiver and answering. Lighthouses rhythmically sweeping the bay. He unsheathed the fillet knife and lay it across his lap. He listened in their gentle anchorage to the wavelets sucking against the hull, and waited. He promised himself he wouldn’t move until he saw what he wanted to see. Someone—perhaps many—would come. They had to.