Speck would often show me what proved to be the obvious answer, for which nobody else had the clarity of imagination and creativity. At such moments of insight, her eyes fixed on me, the tremor in her voice disappeared. A single hair escaped now, bisecting her face. She gathered her mane with her two rough red hands and pushed it behind her ears, smiling all the while at my stare. “If you ever forget, Aniday, come find me.” She walked away, moving through the forest, across the ridge and away from camp, leaving me alone with my calendar. I spied her figure progressing among the trees until she blended into the natural world. When she vanished, all I could think of was the date: February 20, 1950. I had lost so much time.
Far below, the others in camp slumbered beneath a mat of stinking blankets and furs. By listening to the traffic and following the noise to its source, I could be back among the people, and one of those cars was bound to stop and take me home. The driver would see a boy standing by the side of the road and pull off on the berm ahead of me. I would wait for her, the woman in the red coat, to come save me. I would not run away, but wait there and try not to frighten her as before. She would lower herself to eye level, sweeping her hair back from her face. “Who are you?” I would summon up the faces of my parents and my little sister, tell the woman with the pale green eyes where I lived, how to get home. She would bid me climb into her car. Sitting beside her, I’d tell her my tale, and she would put her hand around the back of my head, saying everything would be all right. I’d jump from that car as we stopped before my house, my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline, my sister waddling toward me in her yellow dress, her arms aflutter. “I’ve found your boy,” the woman would say, and my father would pull up in a red fire engine. “We’ve been looking all over for you for a long time.” Later, after fried chicken and biscuits, we’d come back to the woods and rescue my friends Smaolach, Luchóg, and Speck, who could live with us and go to school and come home warm, safe, and sound. All I had to do was to concentrate and follow the sounds of civilization. I looked to the horizon as far as possible, but saw no sign. I listened, but heard nothing. I tried to remember, but could not recall my name.
Pocketing my three tokens, I turned over the calendar and read the Shakespeare aloud to myself: “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend . . .” The people sleeping down below in the hollow were my friends. I took out my pencil and began to write all I could remember. Many a year has passed between then and now, and I have written this story more than once, but that was the beginning, alone atop the ridge. My fingers stiffened in the cold. As I walked down to the camp, the bedcovers called out to me with the promise of warm dreams.
Not long after Speck’s valentine, another gift landed in my lap. Luchóg brought it back from one of his pirating expeditions, unpacking his sack like Santa at the Christmas tree. “And this, little treasure, is for you. The sum-all and be-all of your earthly desires. Enough space here for your every dream. Miracle of miracles, and dry, too. Paper.”
He handed me a bound black notebook, the kind schoolchildren use for their lessons, the pages lined to ensure the proper placement of words and sentences. On the front was the name of the school and the title RULED COMPOSITION BOOK. On the back was a small box with this printed warning: In the event of atomic attack: close the shades, lie down under your desk. Do not panic. Inside, the author of the book, Thomas McInnes, had written his name on the flyleaf. The weathered pages were filled with his virtually indecipherable penmanship, the ink a rusty brown. As far as I could tell, it was a story, or part of a story, because on the last page, the writing ends mid-sentence with the rather cryptic See Other Book written on the inside back cover. Over the years, I tried to read it, but the point of the story eluded me. The beauty of the composition book for me stemmed from McInnes’s self-indulgence. He had written on only one side of the eighty-eight sheets of paper. I turned the book upside-down and wrote my contrary story in the opposite direction. While that journal is in ashes now with so much else, I can attest to its basic contents: a naturalist’s journal recording my observations of life in the forest, complete with drawings of found objects—a diary of the best years of my life.
My chronicle and calendar helped me track the passing time, which fell into an easy rhythm. I kept up hope for years, but no one ever came for me. Heartbreak ran like an undercurrent of time, but despair would come and go like the shadow of clouds. Those years were mixed with the happiness brought by my friends and companions, and as I aged inside, a casual nothing drowned the boy.