Fierce Little Thing Read online

  He startled. He hadn’t seen me. He stepped off the path to let me pass. As I neared, I caught the fragrance of the goat’s milk soap he’d used to wash up, and the salt of his sweat persisting through, and I couldn’t help turn to meet his eye. His look of curiosity, and pleasure, surprised me. A thread pulled so tautly between us that I knew if could pluck it, it would make a beautiful sound. But then he looked away. He turned uphill, the wall of his back reminding me of his father—austerity, resolve.

  I went on. It was nothing more than the rush of being seen, I told myself. We’d just gotten swept up in the opportunity that the whole Unthinged World, wind-tossed, seemed to be celebrating on that new day. “Unthing Yourself,” I chanted with every footstep, just like Abraham. The path took its familiar turn downhill. Then Marta, the old woman who was not a Homesteader, stepped out from the forest, a few dozen yards ahead of me. Her attention was turned away, back into the trees. I could go on as I had with Ben, could say something free and easy about foraging, but I ducked behind a birch instead.

  Small and wiry, she wore the same L.L. Bean backpack as she had that first day, one of the frayed straps repaired with dental floss. She was speaking to someone behind her. Perhaps chiding was a better word; the timbre of her voice was quiet, but from the vehement wag of her finger, I could tell she wasn’t holding back.

  I leaned forward for a glimpse of whomever she was chastising, resting my cheek against the shiny silver bark. Her hand gestures were absolutes, slicing the air. From the woods behind her came Abraham. I’d never seen him lose his cool, not even on the dock with Gabby, but he was angry. They squared off, blocking the path. Even far away, I could see that Marta owned him; a woman nearly half his size and twice his age.

  The wind drifted her voice my way—“have no right, blocking her chance to make this place what you’ve promised, just because”—then cut away. Who did she think she was, chastising him? And not even a Homesteader. Someone called out from the water—Ephraim, maybe. Abraham raised a hand in greeting, his whole being becoming sure in an instant.

  I watched Marta watch him change. She shook her head. Her sweater glinted white as she picked her way into the wooded undergrowth without him.

  His shoulders slumped. He ran his hand through his hair. He lifted his eyes to the sky and closed them again, and breathed out and then in. I darted onto the path a few yards back, then walked toward him with an impassive face.

  He heard my footsteps. He turned uphill and gave me the same enthusiastic wave he’d offered Ephraim. “No breakfast for you?”

  I held up the blueberry muffin Sarah had pulled from the oven before I ducked out the door. Close up, he smelled of turpentine, and unwashed armpits, and something deeper: sleep, or dirt. Not sex, but hidden in the way that sex is. Seeing him locked in an argument had churned something up. I felt that same urge to kiss him that I’d known with Xavier; to get as close to eating him as I could. I blushed when his warm hand came to rest on my shoulder.

  “You’re not sad anymore.” I realized that he was right. I wasn’t happy—I would never be happy—but I was certainly no longer sad, or at least no longer only sad. The ache for you had weaned into something else, now that you and I were both making Home ours. I felt for Topsy at my waistband and squeezed his pelt.

  “I’m glad of this, but Saskia, we cannot find happiness while living someone else’s life. That’s Thinging.” He stepped forward and touched me again, this time on both shoulders. “You are remarkable, Saskia. You are enough. The work in your hands should be remarkable. It should be enough.”

  “I help Sarah in the kitchen.” This would please him, surely.

  “That’s as it should be.” He put his hand over his heart. “But you must find your own path. Your own calling. I wish for it so.”

  He reached his right hand behind his back, into the open canvas bag hanging there. He pulled out a small axe—a hatchet. Its worn wooden handle was the length of one of your shins. He held it out between us—the wedge of the blade in his palm, the smoothed grip toward me; an invitation. The hatchet was the opposite of Topsy; heavy and built to work. I shivered my finger along the blade, dark and old, flinty in spots. It wasn’t half as sharp as I thought.

  33

  “We killed someone.” Issy leans toward me, her voice steady, as though we are discussing the weather. “We killed someone we loved. Does that make it worse? It feels that way. It shouldn’t. It should be bad enough to have simply killed someone.”

  She cannot still her hands. “We were children. Does that make it better? There were five of us. Does that make it worse? Five people planned and carried out a murder, together, and no one thought to stop it. When we got away with it, we thought that was a good thing. But I think that’s the worst part of all. And now someone knows.”

  She looks around at all of Mother’s pink: the sashes on the curtains, the rosebuds on the chair. She says, “I know, with your history, with your father and all that—I know there must be part of you that hoped keeping things quiet, no trial, no press, just knowing what we did and having to live with it, was better for everyone involved. But I don’t think it’s better. I don’t feel better. Do you?”

  34

  In the woods, alone, I looked for you, for surely you would become solid at some point; you wouldn’t always only be kisses of wind or feathers in the air. I pretended I was out there to do useful things with the hatchet. I tried my hand at hacking down rotting trees, until one I felled narrowly missed knocking Ephraim off the roof of a cabin. I tried splitting firewood, but Amos chided me: “Use the maul, girl; a hatchet’s not built for that.”

  Behind the Main Lodge, there were fewer cabins, which meant fewer people to distract from our reunion. I found your footprints there. They had to be yours; I recognized your extra-long second toe. A blond tuft of your hair fluffed from the side of a bird’s nest, although I couldn’t climb high enough to touch it. One deep dusk, Tomas had pointed to the stone wall that cut across the land and told me there was a secret friend who hid behind it and came out when the sky was “like this, dark and light together” to play hide-and-seek. You. I was sure of it: you, you, you.

  There was a dead tree out there, too, or rather, a magnificent mountain of what had once been a tree, the top of which had fallen off and was now rotting into the forest floor. The remaining trunk had become a vertical toothpick of rotting wood. I’d taken to leaving you a bite of my crusts between two of its roots where they met the ground. That day, the most recent offering was just where I’d left it. There’d been not one hint of you, not even a rustle in my hair. I was a little angry, to tell the truth, because I was being so patient, and what I wanted was so simple. Why not just show yourself, if you were close?

  The hatchet was heavy. I let it fall, out of frustration, to the ground. This was stupid—I could have cut off my own toes. I must have flung it with more vehemence than I realized, because it had flipped in just the right way as to stick into a root. And I thought—aha—I could learn to throw this thing. Abraham had said my work should be remarkable; some part of me believed, hoped, imagined that I would discover I was gifted at hatchet throwing on the first try. The tool would sail from my open hands, making its own wind as it flipped away from me, and sink its tooth into the hungry wood.

  I stepped back twenty paces. Too far. I stepped forward five. That seemed doable. How hard could it be?

  It took forty-five throws for the blade to even kiss the wood, and twenty-five more to get it to stick in place, at the bottom of the trunk.

  “Persistence pays off.”

  I turned, startled, to discover Marta standing a few feet behind me. I’d heard no sign of her approach, not even over the leaf-layered forest floor. Her look of gloom irritated me, as though my triumph was something to mourn. I strode to the angled marriage of blade and wood, and pulled the hatchet out. “I saw you fighting with Abraham,” I said.

  “I don’t like it when he acts imperial.” She watched me for a minute, as t
hough she was trying to find something out. “I’m Marta. And you’re Saskia.” She pointed to the dead tree. “And that’s Fagus grandifolia, otherwise known as the American beech—from the Latin fagus, meaning beech, grandis, large, and folium, leaf. Shade-tolerant, and usually a sign that the forest is in the last stage of ecological succession. You’d say the tree is dead, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re slightly correct. This particular one is likely the victim of beech bark disease, which occurs when Cryptococcus fagisuga, commonly known as the beech scale insect, attacks the bark and creates a wound, which is then invaded by a fungus in the genus Nectria. But that’s not the fun part.”

  “There’s a fun part?”

  She grinned, the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “As decay progresses, and the tree becomes a snag—that’s the proper term when the crown has broken off—microorganisms move in. Fungi, insects, woodpeckers. Think of a snag as a hotel. As the tree ‘dies,’ really what it’s doing is sustaining life, continuing the life of the forest all around it. In fact, as it goes from injury to humus, which, in the life of this beech was a relatively quick few years—some trees, maples, for example, can spend up to eighty years in decline—it sustains more life than it ever did when it was a single organism.” A black-and-white bird flew overhead. Marta froze, so I did, too. The bird flitted onto the top of the snag and began to beat its beak against it. A hammering sound filled the woods. Marta whispered. “See? Dryobates pubescens, the downy woodpecker, picking up some grubs for lunch.”

  I wanted to pretend I didn’t care about all those facts, and ignore that this strange little woman had somehow understood I’d been hungering after the names of things ever since Grandmother told me the Devil’s Ramble wasn’t filled with purple trees, but with Japanese maples. I looked down. There was a little hump in the pine needles at my feet. It was funny, that hump; there was nothing to explain why the needles would be domed there. I crouched over it. I moved the needles aside. A beetle scuttled out. An ant skittered across my thumb. Surely Marta knew their names, but I wouldn’t ask. The undercurrent of Maine soil, damp and loamy, filled my nostrils, along with the darker, deeper dank of the rotting leaves. I could feel the woman’s eyes on me as I dug into the earth.

  Underneath the layers of earth lay a surprise. A dome of white, like something out of science fiction. But then I discovered that it was not an alien, not once I understood it. It was terrestrial: a mushroom.

  Marta walked over. All her attention was on the mushroom now. Her face was cast in delight, her eyebrows pulled up, as though she was greeting a long-lost friend. A part of me wondered if, in naming what was around us, she had bewitched me into noticing something new. Like magic words.

  Marta unzipped her backpack and pulled out a pocketknife. She flipped it open and held it out to me, as though I knew what to do next. I shook my head. It was much farther down to the ground than I thought; she reached her hand in under the leaves until it almost disappeared. She cut the stalk at the base and lifted the mushroom, so white it almost glowed, into the light.

  “Amanita bisporigera,” she said. The way she pronounced it sounded like a love poem. She used the knife as a pointer, listing off the parts of the plant as though I was familiar with the scientific terminology, which sounded vaguely pornographic: “annulus,” a ring around the stalk; “volva,” a cuplike shaft around its bottom.

  “Should you eat it?” she asked, moving the mushroom toward my face. The first and only thing I knew about wild mushrooms was that you weren’t supposed to eat them. She wiggled her eyebrows. She danced it back toward her own face. “Should I?”

  It seemed as though she was really asking. She knew the name of the mushroom, didn’t she? And its parts. She brought it to her lips.

  I nodded.

  She opened her mouth. Moved the mushroom closer. Then stopped the fruit a centimeter from her tongue. “One experiences a little tummy trouble. But the symptoms pass. By the time they get worse again, it’s already too late. Your liver and kidneys are failing. You go into a coma. Then you die. All from this humble fungus, pushing her way up from the forest floor.” She pulled the mushroom back out toward me, requiring my examination. “She has a more popular name: destroying angel. The amatoxins found in her and her sisters are responsible for almost all mushroom-related deaths.” Yet she was looking at it like it was her friend. “I suppose I’d like a turn,” she added.

  I’d forgotten about the hatchet, but that’s what she meant. She tossed the mushroom off into the forest, then held out that same hand. I gave her the tool, but I wondered how someone her age—not to mention size—could have any chance of making that hatchet stick. She ran her left hand, then her right, over the handle. She felt the head—first the blade, then the smack of it against her palm. I followed her back to the spot where I’d stood for my many attempts. She was so small beside me. She spread her legs apart. She lifted her right hand over her head and stepped with her left foot. The hatchet sailed through the air and made the sound I had wanted all along. The blade dangled from the trunk as though it had been embedded there for years.

  Marta slung her backpack back over her shoulder and started to walk away.

  “Wait.”

  She turned—not to look at me, but as though to say, fine, ask away. I had so many questions: how she knew so much about that mushroom and the trees and the birds, how someone so small and old could throw a hatchet like that, and why she’d snuck up on me, and why she had fought with Abraham, and why she had said my name so knowingly, and why she didn’t live at Home. But none of that came out.

  Instead, she spoke. “Come visit me sometime.” Then she moved into the knot of the woods.

  35

  “If Abraham is alive, he can tell anyone”—Issy cuts herself off, then censors herself—“what we did.” She looks at me with rare distaste. “Even if no one can prove it, even if we don’t go to jail, it will change how every single person thinks of us. You obviously don’t care, but I—”

  “Since when do you care what people think of you?”

  “Those of us with regular lives don’t have a choice.”

  Issy’s spent her adulthood bopping from California to Senegal to Mexico to Santa Fe, with only a hiking backpack and a pair of shoes to her name. She’s neither a homeowner nor a taxpayer. She once walked twelve miles through an Alaskan snowstorm because she wasn’t going to ride in the car of a man who yelled at an old woman about crossing the road. There’s resolve in her voice, though. Something has changed.

  “Don’t you care if people find out you murdered someone?” she asks.

  “You know I murdered someone. That’s been pretty okay.”

  Issy sighs as though I am an impossible child.

  “Anyway, why would Abraham tell anyone?” I know I’m grasping at straws. “He’d implicate himself.”

  “Who besides the five of us knows he made us do it? Really, Sask? Can you think of anyone?”

  I’ll never say, but I think of you. That word, “killed,” let loose, has flayed me like a newly caught fish. Every time I think of it, I must, of course, remember you as well.

  “Abraham’s hands are clean,” Issy says. “He made sure of that.” Her eyes fill with tears, a cloudburst of grief, but she manages to keep them from spilling over. “You know what gets me the most? How I treated my own mother because of him. And she was the only sane one.”

  “But you had time with her,” I say, trying to soothe her, “after Home. You found her, you made up for it. You had a whole life together.”

  “And then cancer ate her up. She said everyone gets a reckoning.”

  “You think Abraham is our reckoning?”

  A screech pierces from the side yard, knifing up my spine. I find I’m already at the window, ready to discover something out of a medieval illustrated manuscript on the grounds. For now, it’s sound alone, but its shadow cuts across the yard.

  36

  “Well, how much do you think
he’s giving away?” I slapped at a mosquito, from the family Culicidae (I’d looked up the name in one of the encyclopedias moldering in the Main Lodge). I was lying on the top bunk above Xavier. Most everyone was at the bonfire but we were whispering anyway; Philip’s donation to the Homesteaders was a volatile topic, despite Abraham’s insistence that it was something we should openly discuss. “Forty thousand dollars? Four thousand?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Xavier grumbled. “He told me it’s his own damn business.”

  “Or do you think Ben was right?” Even saying that name made me nauseous. Since that day on the path, when our eyes met, he had avoided me more than ever. He made sure to get Xavier to himself, but if Xavier noticed, he didn’t care. I steeled my voice. “Four hundred thousand dollars just seems like way too high for Philip to give away to virtual strangers.” This was the figure Ben had told Xavier he’d overheard his parents discussing in the middle of the night. Like most of the women, Sarah thought Home should accept the money but Ephraim was undecided.

  “Why do you care so much?” Xavier said.

  I knew my voice sounded giddy and that this annoyed Xavier, and really, I was trying to temper it. But the Unthinged World was unlike any place I’d ever known; so full of possibility. Since that day with Marta in the woods, I wanted to know the name of every single thing that grew and breathed there, wanted to eat its fruits and bathe in its waters, and I didn’t mind a bit that Philip’s money would bind us closer. The closer we got to making Home our home, the closer I got to you.