After Lucas’s emergence none of the news stories mentioned that arrest, but the media had found a few other tidbits on Josiah. A couple of old coworkers gave interviews describing him as a solitary guy who packed his son up to go hiking every weekend and camping for weeks at a time. One of Lucas’s teachers remembered the two as being startlingly similar. Inquisitive, you know. Both asking follow-up questions, always wanting to know the why’s and reasons for things. And of course they looked . . . they looked a lot alike. The fluster, well camouflaged, but still there a dozen years later and it wasn’t hard to see why. I printed out the picture of Josiah and Lucas on the dock together and taped it to the refrigerator, staring at it every time I felt hungry. If Lucas had been a beautiful child, Josiah was the rugged, brooding, startlingly handsome father. I didn’t blush like the teacher, though; I looked closer.
Next to the Blackthorns’ picture I’d taped another one, a shot of the Lykovs taken by the geologists who’d discovered them. There was nothing pretty about the Lykov family, not on an aesthetic scale, but something in their expressions made me pause as I stood in front of the refrigerator eating lo mein out of the carton. Joy emanated from their faces, a basic and consuming happiness. One of the rangers who visited Agafia in her later years told a documentary crew that the taiga purified people. Bad people couldn’t survive in those subarctic forests; the deadly ravines and icy bogs would swallow them whole. Taiga, he said, cleanses your soul.
The Boundary Waters had the same power. I’d heard it in my mother’s breath as she stared up at glacier-scarred cliffs, I’d seen it as we passed other campers portaging their canoes and gear, their entire lives distilled into sweat-stained backpacks with no room for abstractions like justice or its obstruction. They possessed a peace, I realized as the cold noodles slithered down my throat, that Josiah Blackthorn’s face was screaming for.
There were no outstanding warrants, Dr Mehta had said, but that final arrest stuck in my head. What was it that Josiah had needed to cleanse from his soul?
7
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
– Robert Frost
Josiah
For as long as he could remember, Josiah Blackthorn hated roofs. When he was a child, ice dams had formed on the eaves of his foster parents’ house and melted through the ceiling, dripping into the cupboards so all the food had to be stored in cardboard boxes while his foster dad spent the rest of the winter in a pissing match with the claims adjustor. They were ugly things, ceilings. His social worker’s office was covered with pockmarked, foam tiles, the grocery store lived under dusty metal crossbeams, and he’d spent countless hours staring at the bug carcasses littering the fluorescent light fixtures at his school. There was always one shadow still moving, hurling itself against the plastic molding in frenetic arcs, but in all the time Josiah watched them he never saw a single bug escape.
All roofs came with a price. His foster mother showed them the gas and electricity bills every month. She did the same thing with grocery receipts and the register slips from Goodwill when they went clothes shopping. ‘If you get something for free,’ she told all her foster children, ‘that just means you don’t know what it’s going to cost yet.’ She wasn’t an unkind woman, just mean with a dollar. She rubbed calendula on their cuts instead of buying Band-Aids and made teas out of mullein leaves for their colds. As soon as the first spring rains came, she sent the boys into the woods behind their house, showing them how to find mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, and dandelion greens. Josiah turned out to be a natural forager, instinctively memorizing the landscape, working his way farther into the shadows and hills where sometimes he would find a break in the trees and roll out an old sleeping bag so he could count the stars and hear his breath mingle with the scrapes and chirps of fellow night explorers. It was worlds better than sleeping under a stained ceiling with whichever foster boy was spoiling for a fight that week and as long as he came home with a basket full of morels, no one minded his absence.
The only thing he liked over his head, his foster dad joked as he grew up, was the hood of a car. Engines intrigued Josiah at the same level as the woods; they were a mechanical ecosystem and every part contributed to the function of the whole. He was the only kid in school who checked out books on cars and botany together. Eventually his foster parents helped him get a job doing tune-ups and let him tinker with their rusting Chevys until he saved up enough money to buy one of his own. When the foster subsidies ran out on the day he turned eighteen, they gave him a secondhand tent, wished him luck, and sent him on his way.
Josiah saw a lot of roofs over the next years and sometimes he wondered if he was the only person who noticed them. Every garage he worked at had a mechanic who’d been there for decades, with skin so stained they practically disappeared into the oil-splattered walls and telling stories that always ended with ‘Just you wait . . .’ Josiah didn’t wait. He worked as long as he could before the ceilings started to close in and the alcohol – which numbed much better than his foster mother’s aloe vera – led to fights, cops, jails, and the inevitable firings. Camping until he ran out of money, he moved to the next town, which started the cycle all over again. He fantasized about leaving it all behind, building a little cabin somewhere so remote he could never find a way back, when he met a kayaking hippie named Sarah Mason.
The girl caught Josiah’s eye the second she stepped out of her tent. She had dirty blond ringlets spilling out of a bandana and tattoos peeking out of her tank top. Her nose was burnt watermelon pink and she seemed to be alone, too, their tents pitched on adjoining campsites along Lake Macbride in the tumbling hills of eastern Iowa. He leaned back in his camp chair as she tugged her boat down to the water.
‘Can I help?’ he asked.
‘I doubt it.’ Flashing a smile, she set the boat in the lake without a backward glance. It was a two-person kayak and she used the second seat to prop up her bare feet as she paddled away.
It was the Fourth of July in a year no different from a half dozen before it. Josiah was between jobs again. He had a full cooler of beer, a week’s worth of food, and every intention of not speaking to another living soul for as long as he could avoid it, yet all that mattered to him in that moment was watching the girl lift her face to the sun. She stroked leisurely across the lake, a solar powered creature he’d never encountered in nature before.
Every morning after that he asked if he could join her, feeling more perverse each time she turned him down. She left the campsite in the morning and wouldn’t return until dusk. He offered her a beer and the only chair at his fire when she walked by at night, which she politely declined as she zipped herself into the glow of her tent. Josiah wasn’t used to rejection, at least not the sexual kind. Generally, when he walked into the first bar in a new town, mascara-smeared eyes lit up. He was a drifter, an outsider, and his otherness offered what they craved, what – by definition – they couldn’t have in their everyday lives. The less he said, the more they wanted him and he understood it. Women sought him the same way he sought the wild. This girl, though, had already found her wilderness.
Hiking through the park during the day, he tried to answer the perpetual question that framed his life: where to head next. He’d been contemplating Canada lately, a good place for a man to be alone, but suddenly solitude had lost its appeal. He found himself hiking further into the park, circling the lake, trying to catch a glimpse of his elusive neighbor. She wasn’t beautiful, she might not even be interesting, yet there was something always dancing behind her eyes and he wanted to see what it did when it was set free.
At the end of the week when kids ran screaming through the campground with sparklers and someone lit illegal fireworks off on the other side of the lake, she was nowhere to be found. Her tent was dark and she wasn’t milling around with the other campers near the grills and playground. He wandered down to the beach and lay on the sand, watching the nation’s birthday saluted with the traditional spectacle of exploding gunpowder.
‘A patriot, huh?’
Out of nowhere she appeared, easing down on her back next to him, and he was surprised by the force of the leap in his chest.
‘More of a stargazer. I’m waiting for the smoke to clear.’