Gone to the Forest A Novel

4



In the morning five men left and three stayed behind. The five who left woke early. They dressed by low light and went downstairs, whispering and motioning in silence. Tiptoeing in their socks. They found the old man sitting at a table on the veranda eating breakfast. In the background the volcano was still electric orange and the sky was still black.

They came to the table with their boots in their hands and told the old man they were going. They had their own farms to attend to. The old man nodded. They thanked him for his hospitality. He offered them breakfast. It was a visible afterthought. The men said no. The old man nodded and turned back to his paper. News came to the valley late, the papers a week old by the time they reached the farm.

The five men pulled on their boots and were silent as they went down the veranda steps. Once they got to the track their gait relaxed. When they got a little further one of them started to whistle. A tune from last night’s gramophone. A little snippet of song. The others joined in. They formed a five-part harmony and galloped down the road.

Five men left and three stayed behind. Like Job’s comforters. They appeared at noon, each grasping a sheet of newspaper. They stood on the veranda and surrounded the old man. Who sat rooted in his chair. He did not consider himself to be trapped, he showed no evidence of that belief. But he remained surrounded by the men all day, unable to shake them off and wearing an expression of deepening outrage.

Tom did not understand what was going on. Tom had not been on the veranda the previous night. He had been on the other side of the house. Confined to his bedroom with a severe case of indigestion. He spent the evening lying on the bed in a sweat. Every ten minutes he lurched to the toilet and emptied his bowels. Temporarily relieved, he dragged himself back to the bed, only to lurch up again shortly after.

This kind of thing was always happening to Tom. The result was always the same: Tom was the only one who did not know. He woke in the morning and noticed that something was wrong. Half the men had gone and the men who stayed were different. They had changed overnight. They were emboldened and they patrolled the house like they had the owning of it. They were no longer shamed by the old man, by the house and the farm, but Tom did not understand why.

He did not see the girl all day but that was not unusual. She slept until evening and did not like to be disturbed. Tom had often thought: a man could murder her in the night and the body would not be found until next evening. A man could creep into her room and take a cleaver to her head. Be away by morning, in a new country by noon. It could be done. There had been rumors of such things. They would spend days looking for a bloodstained native.

Tom had a bad sense of humor. Another one of his flaws. However, the humor was intermittent, a nervous habit that soon gave way to anxiety. Two days passed and still the girl did not appear. He asked Celeste about it. She said the girl was indisposed and then shook her head. Tom asked if they should call for a doctor and she shook her head again. Ah no, she said. No doctors. No doctors, he repeated. No doctors.

Tom looked for his father. He found him on the veranda with the three men. The sight of the old man surrounded unnerved Tom. He thought: the presence of the men and the absence of the girl. He did not go out onto the veranda but he stood and saw. His father’s face red with anger as he read the newspaper again and again. One of the men leaned forward, his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Tom strained to hear his words.

“You see it right there.”

The old man did not respond.

“You see the steps that are being taken.”

“I see nothing.”

The man leaned back and crossed his arms.

“The Government will concede.”

The old man looked up angrily.

“On what authority? To whose demands?”

The man remained calm. He smiled and pried the newspaper from the old man’s hands. The old man’s face darkened at the audacity. The man ignored him. He folded the paper in two and tucked it into his pocket for safekeeping. Then he looked down at the old man.

“Try to imagine it. If we do not make concessions, they will tear this country to pieces.”

Tom shook his head and stepped away. It was no time to be worrying about the news. Going over the matter of the unrest yet again. Four days after the mountain began to erupt and two days after the girl took ill, the volcano stopped. Across the valley there was relief. But on the farm the situation remained unchanged. The men showed no signs of departing. And the old man strangely powerless against them.

It was like the farm had seized up with cramp. It needed to be moved back into life. Grasped by the middle and jolted. It was not something Tom could do, it needed the old man’s force. There never having been anything like this before. As it was, Tom was already unnerved. He did not like having strangers in the house. He was constantly moving from room to room in order to avoid them. While the old man remained fixed to the veranda, examining the week-old newspaper.

Tom went to Jose and told him they would ride to the High Point. From there they would be able to see the mountain and assess how the land had been damaged. The old man prided himself on his knowledge of the land. His best self was a man patrolling his land astride a horse. He was therefore bound to join them. In this way Tom would recover his father. He would detach him from the rubber grip of the three men.

However, Tom’s plan failed. He went to the old man’s study early the next morning and found the old man already surrounded by his comforters. Tom had never seen a stranger in his father’s rooms. Now there were three. Three, standing in the room. Sitting on the desk. Looking out the window. Tom stopped at the door and could go no further. His father looked up.

“What is it?”

“We are going to the High Point.”

His father nodded. He didn’t move.

“When?”

“Now. Or when you like.”

A pause. His father looked down at the sheets of paper on the desk. He shuffled them vaguely. Tom kicked at the doorjamb for his attention.

“Will you join us?”

His father shook his head. He did not look up—he waved Tom away with his eyes still on the papers. Tom backed out of the room. He turned and heard the air whistling through his ears. He almost stumbled in the hall but righted himself. He went to meet Jose at the stables. They led their rides out in silence. It was only when they had mounted the horses that Jose turned to him.

“Where is he?”

“He’s not coming.”

Jose nodded. He did not look surprised and did not say anything further. Although they had been brought up together, of the same age and both nursed at Celeste’s tit, Jose was a mystery to Tom. Fatherless Jose, halfway an orphan, who nonetheless understood things Tom could not comprehend. When Tom looked at Jose he saw nothing but an opaque surface: the obstruction of things Jose knew, that Tom could not hope to know. In silence, they turned the horses out and headed to the High Point.

In the wake of the volcano, the landscape was muted but not quiet. There were sounds throughout and the sky had the density of the ocean. Tom thought: there was water everywhere, and waves up in the sky. Around them the farm was calm. As they climbed they could see the force of the old man’s imprint on the terrain: the fences corralling the fields, the plow marks in the dirt. The sky churned overhead but down on the surface things were almost as before. The horses shied when a hawk swooped down across the path. The two men calmed the horses and pressed forward up the valley.

They reached the High Point ten minutes later. There, the landscape reared up violently. The ground a lunging beast but worse. The mountain looming in front of them, the top blown off and rivulets of lava still flowing. Tom looked across at it. He realized that things had changed. The ground had come undone and lacked all coherence, it rolled forward in senseless disorder. They had seen none of it from the valley. They’d had no idea of its scale.

It was like they had crossed into another world. Tom in particular was not prepared. He did not have the tools to understand what he now saw. He had never been anywhere in his life. Barely having left the farm, a city street would have struck him like a miracle.

“What will happen now?”

He barely spoke the words, he wasn’t sure he said them at all. Jose shook his head.

“No person knows.”

“What does that mean?”

“There has never been anything like this.”

Tom looked down at the river. He could see that it was black and brown with debris. Close to the mountain it hardly seemed to run at all. As if it had turned to mud. As if it would turn to stone. The mud river, the stone river, ran down from the mountain and toward the border. Over the border and into their land. Quickly, Tom looked at Jose.

“There is something wrong with the river.”

Jose took a long time in responding. Then Tom realized he was not going to respond at all. He was not looking at the river but up at the sky. He was staring at its churning brightness like he was waiting to go blind.

“What is it?”

He shook his head.

“What is it?”

Tom spoke more forcefully this time. Jose stared at the ground and still did not respond. Then he shook his head.

“Nothing good.”

“Nothing good? That’s all you have to say?”

Jose nodded.

“Nothing good.”

“About the river? Are you talking about the river? There is something wrong with it.”

“Nothing good about nothing.”

Tom kicked the horse and it bolted down the path. After a second, he heard Jose follow. Tom laughed. To have asked so many times. To have made himself ridiculous. What had made him think the man knew something, something about the mountain and the farm, something Tom could not see? If the natives had instinct, they had cunning, and the two added up to nothing.

His father never had these difficulties. He gave orders and the natives listened because they knew the old man had no want he could not satisfy himself. Tom was different. He could do nothing of his own. He needed the servants and they were aware of this, having had many years to realize the fact. Tom was their superior but on the farm they were all subordinate to the old man. However. Tom reminded himself that would change, that would all be changing, soon. His father had promised him as much.

He was calmed by the thought. They took the horses down the slope and to the stables. The horses were skittish. They tossed their heads and once Tom was almost unseated. When they returned to the house they saw the men on the veranda. His father looked up when Tom approached. He said that they should order dinner for five. Beef, as there was no fish. He supposed there was still the foie gras and the caviar. He said to bring out whatever was left.

That night, the ash began. It happened in the middle of the night. Tom was asleep. He woke to the sound of footfall. People banging doors in the night. He pulled on his trousers and stepped into the hall. The servants were running, shouting to each other. He pulled on his shirt and hurried after them. Out in the main rooms of the house it was chaos. Everyone was awake. He spun around and grabbed the nearest person.

“What is it? What has happened?”

He was speaking to some boy—the foreman’s son, he thought. The boy shook his head. He pointed outside. Over the veranda. The air outside was white with ash. He dropped the boy’s arm at the sight of it. He did not understand. It fell thick as snow but he knew immediately that this was no snowfall. He had never seen such fine stuff airborne. It fell like rain then swirled like snow. The rapid shifts incomprehensible to him.

He looked down at his feet. He watched the ash scurry into the house. A fine coating on the lawn. A little heap on the steps. The ash was ten feet away. As he watched it came closer, covering inches and then feet within a matter of seconds. He stood still and watched as the dust swept to his toes and then over his feet like he was sculpture in a garden.

He swung his head up to look outside: the air was stiller than before. It had grown thicker. More opaque. The lights from the house lit the dust several yards deep. Then the world dropped into darkness. He could see nothing of it. No shadow or contour—it was not normal, it was not natural, this dark.

He was now coated in dust to his calves. It unfolded like a scene from the horror movies he watched as a child. They gave him deep and penetrating nightmares—his father used to laugh at the way the terror made him cower from sleep. The way it made him wet his bed in the night. Tom looked past the veranda in the direction of the river. He grabbed another passing boy by the arm.

“Where is my father? Is he awake?”

The boy stared at him. He shook him hard.

“Go and wake him. Go and get him.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Go!”

The boy turned and scurried away. The boy had not left the room before the old man emerged in boots and a dressing gown, his hair disheveled. He didn’t look at Tom. He barreled forward across the hall. He crossed the veranda, jumped down the steps and into the airborne sea of ash. He disappeared in an instant and was gone. Tom peered through the mist. His father had been swallowed by the swell of ash. There was no trace of him at all.

Beside him, two servants were shouting to each other. They spoke too quickly for him to hear.

“What is it?”

They turned to him.

“The dust—he will not be able to breathe. It will get into his eyes. His lungs.”

He stared at them for a moment. Then he lunged forward across the veranda and into the dust. Some of the men followed him. The last thing he heard was their feet moving on the stone floor behind him. Then he was enveloped by the dust. In an instant he heard and saw nothing. He was only floating through space. It was quiet, he had dreamed of it as a child, sometimes it came to him still—the dream of being untethered.

An instant later his mouth was full of dust and he was choking, coughing, splattering up tears and phlegm. He stumbled over the ash—there were mounds of it across the ground, several inches in places, gathering with speed. He flung his arms out. Like he was looking for a wall to lean against. He felt the men enter the cloud of dust behind him—insulated explosions, the sign of distant movement. The silence remained unbroken.

His eyes—now open to slivers—adjusted and he saw things. Gradations of color. Pools of light. He stumbled forward, arms spread wide. He called for his father. Ash flew into his mouth and he coughed again. He heard nothing. There was only a dense and regular throbbing. The ash already too much. He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, he pressed his palms into his face, trying to cough out the dust.

Tears streamed down his face. He was finding it hard to breathe, he saw for the first time that he might suffocate. He told himself he knew the land well. Each inch of soil and every rock beyond was familiar to him. He pressed forward. He knew his father had gone to the river. There was nowhere else he could have gone. He had seen it in the old man’s face—once he had seen the ash in the air and on the ground.

The other men carried electric torches and now the light bounced through the darkness. He saw one of them in the mist. A man standing in a pool of light. It was Jose. He was bare-chested and had wrapped his shirt around his head. He stopped and motioned to Tom. He waved his hand through the air, around his head. His hand, coated in dust. Tom stripped off his shirt and wrapped it, mimicking Jose, around his mouth and eyes. He breathed easier, into the cotton fabric of his shirt.

He left one eye uncovered and using this one eye he continued in the direction of the river. The landscape had grown alien. He had never seen any of what he saw now. The ground he had always known—this place, the only thing he had ever seen or understood—had vanished. He accepted that he knew nothing of where he was. He thought this was what blindness must be like. Nothing complete or total. The field, constantly shifting, and small gradations of light and shadow.

Then he saw a fragment of the old man. An arm that appeared and then disappeared. A smear of movement that was his back. He saw, in fragments, through the dust: the old man in trouble. He lurched forward toward the shape. Guided by his single eye, his single eye straining to hold the fragments in place. To keep the movement in sight. He started running, knees buckling, arms flailing.

His father dropped out of his field of vision. He stopped and looked around him. He yanked the shirt from his face and shouted.

“Father!”

The dust flew into his face. Into his eyes and he was blinded. He coughed violently. The men moved in his direction at the sound. He felt the vibration of their movement. He continued shouting for his father. The dust flew into his mouth and muffled the sound of his cries.

“Father!”

He swung his body round. Shouting in all directions. The men were close, he could feel them coming closer. He opened his mouth and screamed again, through the ash.

“Father!”

He tripped over the body. There it was the whole time, all this time—closer than he’d thought or realized. He knelt down and found an arm, a torso. He could not see so he went by touch. The cord of neck, the wings of his chest. The body jumped and rasped. Tom leaned closer. He could not remember the last time he had touched his father’s body. He gripped it through the ash.

He began brushing the ash away with one hand and then with both. He swept off handfuls of ash to reveal a patch of collar. A piece of skin. An open mouth. He brushed and brushed and uncovered his father piece by piece. He claimed a shoulder, a chin. Then a new sweep of ash covered him again.

Still he kept brushing at him, like a dog uncovering a bone. The ash was gathering in Tom’s throat. He coughed. The old man’s eyes were watering and they were turning the ash to mud on his skin. His mouth a smear of damp dust. Tom sat back. He gave up and watched as the ash covered his father. He watched it coating his face until it disappeared. In the distance, he heard the men moving in his direction.

“Here! Here!”

He tried to lift him up. He hoisted him up in his arms. The body bucked with a cough and slid out of his arms. He flopped back to the ground. Tom lifted him again, arms twisting as the old man writhed and slipped downward again. Tom had never realized how heavy his father was. His weight was supernatural. Like he was made from lead and malicious in unconsciousness.

Tom’s own body collapsed under its weight. He called out to the men again.

“Here! He is here!”

They arrived from all sides, like an ambush: men emerging from the swirl of ash. They surrounded the father and son. They were grainy silhouettes, dark shapes against the white cloud and dim light. They carried the electric torches pointing downward and they looked like billy clubs at their thighs. Their heads wrapped in shirts and scarves. Tom thought he saw Jose standing at the back of the group. He called out to him.

The call died in his throat. He saw Jose lift his hand as if to stay the men. They stood in a circle and did not move. Fear seized across Tom’s throat. They would die here—it was the most obvious idea in the world. The natives turning on them at last. They would be left to perish in the ash storm. They would suffocate on their own land. A stupid death looking more and more likely as the men gathered and did nothing.

The idea of their resentment never occurred to the old man. Even though there had been incidents—servants killing their own masters in the night, nannies slaughtering their wards—of which the old man was aware. His father’s power was too absolute for imagination. Tom, on the other hand, could imagine their resentment with ease. He was aware of how little the natives liked him. In an instant he was flooded with fear. It warped his sense of things and in particular time. It made a second or two seem much longer and it made him hysterical without cause.

He wondered if it would give the men pleasure to watch the two of them die. He thought it would. He couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. That was the last thought that crossed his mind. Then his throat closed and his consciousness gagged with the strain. He was seized, a cloth pulled across his face to protect his eyes and mouth and nose, all of which were burning. Through the cloth he could hear shouts and see the whirl of ash moving fast past him.

They carried Tom and his father back to the veranda. They dropped them on the floor, in separate piles of ash—it was everywhere, in giant drifts and piles, all across the room—and then set to work pulling the storm doors closed. They moved very quickly. Eyes shut, Tom’s fear dissolved and he was once more comforted by the presence of the men. He did not see the look that passed between them. He recovered his breath, lying still in the bed of ash.

The men pulled the storm doors into place and the house was plunged into darkness. The whisper of ash outside. In places the bobbing of the electric torches, the flicker of flame as the lamps and candles were lit. Tom wiped the ash from his face and sat up.

He saw Jose, kneeling beside the old man. He cradled the old man’s body in his arms and carefully cleared the ash from his face. The other men ran their hands down his limbs, checking for breaks and cuts. The women were not far behind, they came with cloths and bowls of water and they began wiping the man clean. They were preserving something without even knowing it, not understanding the consequences, as they worked over the old man and brought him back to consciousness.

Tom thought: the old man will live forever because they will it. Only because of that. He felt a throb of jealousy. To be cared for in this way. To be touched. In between the candlelight they moved. One of the women came to Tom and gently pushed him back to the ground. He lay in the bed of ash. She dipped a cloth in water and wrung it out slowly.

The sound of water dripping. She said to him the generator has been clogged by the ash. It is no longer working. But the old man is fine. The old man was safe. Tom nodded. She wiped the cloth across his face and said nothing further. She wiped around his mouth, his forehead. Down his arms and the flakes of horned skin. She cleared the grit from his eyes. He saw Jose, giving orders, organizing the men. He closed his eyes. He lay back. He waited, for now.