Gone to the Forest: A Novel (5 page)

The girl does not look especially surprised. She smiles and looks away.
With one hand she smooths the front of her dress. He watches her hand flutter down its
surface. Up and then down again. Tom longs for his father, who would know what to do.
The girl continues to brush at her lap, now frowning a little. She removes an invisible
hair, dangles it from her fingers, drops it to the ground.

He says to her that he will go find his father. She is silent for a moment
and then as he turns to go, she tells him not to. Her voice rises and then falters. She
is asking him not to go. They stare at each other. She walks forward a little and then
she places her hand on his chest. He stares down at the hand. Which is small and not
particularly clean. Abruptly, he steps away.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Fine. Yes.”

“What would you like?”

“Gin.”

He nods and walks to the drinks trolley. Gin, for the first time gin. When
before it was juice and water. Suddenly he cannot wait to be away from her. The air on
the veranda is thick with the smell of the girl. Her translucent touch. He cannot think
straight. He picks up a glass.

“How do you take it?”

“On the rocks.”

He nods. He pours in the gin. The girl is sitting now.
He gives her the drink. She takes it from his hand while averting her gaze. He sits down
across from her and crosses his legs at the ankles. He is aware that he has failed. The
girl will not even look at him. So there it is. Two weeks ago his father asked did he
not think the girl pretty. Now she is here in the house and he is half wondering how to
make her leave.

He says that he will go to find his father and this time she lets him go.
She drops her hand through the air to show him just how little she cares. He can go hang
himself for all she cares, that is what she is saying. Concealment not being part of the
game at present, whatever game it is they are playing. She adjusts her legs, slyly, silk
brushing against silk, and does not watch him as he goes.

He finds his father at the front of the house. He has just returned from
examining the pools in the river. He is wearing his work clothes and his shirt is open
to expose his barrel-chested girth. Tom tells him that the girl is here. He nods and
then asks Tom why he is not with her. Before Tom responds he strides through the hall,
his boots leaving long streaks of mud on the floor.

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.

H
IS 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.

A
cross 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.

They are reading the wrong signs. The right signs have nothing to do with
history or culture. Two days before the eruption the snakes fled down the mountain. They
slid, then dropped into the river and drowned. Within hours they were washing up on the
dirt banks of the river. Stiff and twisted like small branches of wood, their bodies
rigid in death.

The news of the snakes moved slowly. The villagers in the neighboring
country were too busy gathering the bodies of the snakes, which they collected with
their bare hands in baskets and then threw onto the fire like wood. They were too busy
and so the volcano came to the valley first, before the news of the snakes that
slithered down the mountain. The news of the snakes came with the ash. The ash and the
slow clearing sky.

O
N THE EIGHTH
day the ash arrives in the
country. It is quiet for four days. The mountain belching only a pocket or two of black
smoke. The ground staying still. But then the ash happens.

It creeps across the border and into the country. It does it in the night,
by stealth. The farmers in the valley wake and there is a thick layer of gray on the
ground and in the air. They are baffled. It looks like snow but it is still hot outside
and the gray is too fine. It is hard to see, almost invisible to
the
eye. Like a dry fog. Dry to the touch and everywhere in the air. They wave their hands
through the air and their skin is parched.

By noon the valley is lost to a blizzard of ash. The children and the
local imbeciles put on swimming trunks and goggles and run through the ash. They try to
make balls of it. The ash balls fall to pieces in their hands and they throw handfuls of
dust instead. They run across the fields and their feet slip and they choke on the dust.
In places they fall to their waists in ash. They are laughing like loons, their minds
cracked.

The ash continues to fall and the layer grows higher. It does not freeze
into solid tranches. It does no melting of any kind. It only accumulates. The roads and
tracks close themselves up. The car motors eat up dust and die. The bicycle wheels do
not turn. They try to clear paths but the ash keeps falling. It is up to their waists,
up to their necks. Two children disappear into the ash and are not found.

After two days, there is a brief respite in the ash fall and the men go
out into the landscape. They try to clear paths. They fill wheelbarrows with the ash and
cart it away, briefly they try to make order of it. Then the storm picks up and the ash
plain grows higher and they retreat inside again. From the houses the windows show
nothing but a field of gray without sky or ground. They look out the windows and give
up. They bar themselves in their homes and watch the ash horizon climb up the walls of
the houses.

One week later the ash slows. The farmers and natives step out into the
monochrome landscape. Which was once their
home. Which is all they
know. They wear scarves and gas masks to protect themselves from the swirl of ash in the
air. The particles minute and lingering. Then they embark on the task of rescuing the
landscape from the ash. Digging it out like an archeological site: the evidence of their
lives.

The real miracle is the fact that so many of the animals survived. The
prescient put them in the barns. They left a native to stay with them through the ash
storm. Feeding them daily. Avoiding them when they bucked and stomped in panic. Finally
the ash stops falling and they release them into the open air. Onto the gray plain.
Their legs buckle and their knees give into the dust. But they press forward, they find
their footing, and disappear across the field.