Gone to the Forest A Novel

9



The house sits empty without the girl. Meanwhile the old man is much worse. He has gone into free fall. It is official. There is a measurable difference each day. Every change is a bad one. His limbs are swollen with the sickness. His skin is slick and glossy and his eyes have grown cloudy—his eyes are so cloudy it is impossible to believe they contain vision.

He cannot walk. He cannot sit up. Now he can only lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and call for more morphine. He says that he cannot breathe, I am having difficulty breathing. He tries to describe it to them. It is like someone is stealing my air. Like someone—he claws at his chest and throat. Like this. It is like this. He asks for more morphine.

Tom brings him the bottle. The old man’s eyes glitter as he looks at it. His eyes do not move as he watches Tom tap out one, two pills and then set the bottle down.

The old man grabs Tom’s arm. He lifts three fingers.

“Two.”

The old man shakes his head. He lifts three fingers again.

“I can only give you two.”

The old man shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His voice spent by frustration. Tom reaches for the glass of water.

“Open.”

The old man nods and opens his mouth and sticks his tongue out. Lips quivering. Tongue dry as dust. Tom drops the pills onto his tongue and raises the glass to his mouth. Gently he presses the old man’s jaw shut. He watches him swallow and close his eyes. His face becomes calm.

“Sleep. Until the medicine takes effect.”

The old man nods. He is covered to the neck and only his head protrudes above the edge of the quilt. Tom raises his hand to check his temperature. He stands up, bottle and glass in hand. His father does not open his eyes again.

Tom goes into the kitchen. Celeste takes the glass from his hand. She doesn’t look at him as she returns to the stove.

“I will take the meal in to him.”

He nods. His father no longer cares who serves him. He is not able to see much beyond the pain. It has got to that point. And Tom no longer cares to take the meal in himself. He is happy for Celeste to do this. She stirs a pot vigorously then sets down the spoon.

“He is not well.”

“We are running out of morphine.”

“This morning, when I went into his room—”

“There is enough for another week. If we do not up the dosage, and we may need to. The medicine does not last as long as it did even a couple days ago.”

“—he was calling out.”

“It was six hours and now it is only four. Tomorrow it will be only three.”

“And he was in distress. He had fouled himself.”

“Celeste, listen—”

“The shit was everywhere. All over the sheets. Some of it dripping onto the floor. He had shat right through his pajamas. He was crying and crying and I do not know how long he had been lying there like this, in his own shit and nobody listening. Nobody knowing.”

Tom falls silent. He sits down. He cannot look at Celeste. She is crying. A tear, another, one by one. Falling into the soup.

“The smell was terrible. I opened the door and I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know how he lay there all that time. And the shit—the shit was black as tar. Sticky like pitch.”

Tom does not want to hear this. He is stumbling, his legs are buckling, beneath the weight of the situation. The girl has gone. The old man sits in a pile of his own shit. And there is the rebellion. Will it come to them? Despite himself, he asks the question. It is impossible. Surely it is impossible. He looks at Celeste. He cannot discuss the matter with her. She has her own emotions to tend to, it is better that they keep to themselves.

He rises to his feet and asks her to look after the old man’s cleanliness. To make certain that he has not soiled himself. He is not entirely himself anymore, he says to her. He says this to her and also to himself. The old man is himself and he is also something very, very different.

Tom goes outside and sits down on the stoop. His day is filled with tasks. He feeds the old man. He checks his temperature. He changes the bed sheets. He counts the hours between pills. The days will disappear in the counting—all his time will go and then the old man will be dead and Tom will not even know where to begin. He knows only this: that when the old man dies, there will be no place for him to put all his feeling.

He is aware of a deep and growing numbness, which is spreading through his body. He can no longer think, his brain sits beneath a heavy mass of unexplored emotion. While the numbness inches across his body. Soon he will not be able to move, he thinks. Soon it will be just like he has been paralyzed, from the waist down, from the neck down, from the top of his head down to the floor.

Yes, he is tired, it is like they warned him. Tom tries to imagine the farm with the old man dead, he tries to imagine what that will mean. But without the girl and the inheritance he has no way of understanding the old man’s death. Without the girl there is nothing but the old man lying in the bed, and the old man stops all acts of imagination. He freezes the son in the present tense. Although he himself continues to die, and soon will be gone.

Tom gets up from the stoop. He goes back into the house and to the old man’s room. He hopes he will be asleep. The old man asleep and dying is easier than the old man awake and dying. The old man awake is becoming more than Tom can handle. Every interaction is increasingly strange. Each interaction is becoming a horror show.

He is not asleep. He is awake and staring at the ceiling and smiling. His eyes crawling across the wall. His hands petting and patting the covers. He looks at Tom when he comes in. It takes a moment. He motions for him to sit down.

Cautiously, Tom sits down. The old man motions for him to come closer. Which Tom does, a little. The old man motions for him to come closer still. Tom hesitates and then moves forward until he can smell the sour odor rising from the old man’s mouth. The residue of shit from the floorboards. Something new, something he has not noticed before—a sweet smell, the sweet smell of the sickness, like confectionery, seeping out of the old man’s skin. He sniffs and pushes his nose closer while his father’s eyes roam the ceiling and down the wall.

“Did she go?”

He jolts back. The girl, who has been gone a week if not longer. The old man leers at him conspiratorially. As if to say, You and I both know what I am talking about. And Tom does in fact know. But he does not know what the old man means by the leer and the wink.

“Do you mean Carine?”

“Tccch.”

That’s all his father says. His fingers back to patting the cover in place. His eyes back to roaming the ceiling. He is smiling. Wistfully, like he is listening to nostalgic music in his head. Tom has never seen his father like this. The old man does not smile. Not like this and not wistfully. Tom shakes his head.

“She is gone.”

He hopes the fact of the girl’s departure will bring his father back. But his father is a million miles away. He waves his hands in the air like he is conducting an orchestra. Then he folds his hands together and rests them on the quilt. He closes his eyes. He is still smirking.

Tom realizes that if he had a different relationship with his father, if he loved him in a way he understood, in a way that he knew to be normal, if the numbness had not overtaken his body—then he would have found this tragic. He would have been weeping into his cup of tea the way Celeste weeps into her pot of soup. But he is not. He does not have access to those tears.

Tom stands up. The old man is asleep and there is no point in his staying. He exits the room and returns to the kitchen. Left alone, the old man opens his eyes and goes back to crawling the walls with his vision.

Tom sits down at the kitchen table. His father’s eyes on the bottle. The gleam against the cloudy pupils. His thoughts return to the problem of the medicine. The old man is lusting after the pills the way he once lusted after women. And he is a man whose needs must be satisfied. He will need more pills. He will need them very soon. Tom has a headache. He tries to think through the throbbing. He thinks the nearest doctor is in Herbertville, sixty kilometers away.

He thinks but is not sure. He has never been to Herbertville. He believes it is a day’s journey. He has no idea how to organize such a journey. On a horse? In the car? Alone or with help? (Not alone. He will not do such a thing alone.) He tries to imagine himself walking the streets of Herbertville. He tries to imagine how he will explain it to the doctor. Pain management, he thinks they call it. After a certain point you have to concentrate on pain management.

He will need money for the doctor. And he will need a horse. The car is useless, the car is barely running, and then there is the fact that he does not know how to drive. Tom does not know if going to Herbertville is a good idea but he understands that he is a man without choice. People shoot cattle in the head when they are too far gone for saving. The old man is too far gone for saving but shooting him in the head is not an option as far as Tom can tell.

No—the gun being out of the picture, Tom will go find a doctor, who will give him more pills and tell him about the pain management. He will need to get Jose to travel with him. Jose is a good horseman. He has traveled the roads and knows the area well. And Jose is good with people. Tom is not good with people. He does not do well with strangers, not even with people he knows. But Jose—yes, Jose is different.

With this in mind Tom goes to find him. He walks the road leading to the stables. This road is generally deserted and runs clear and unimpeded across the land. He can therefore see the men in the distance. He counts four or possibly five. They come down the road, down from the farm, riding bicycles. They have tied plastic bags to the backs of the seats and there are plastic bags hanging and swinging from the handlebars.

Mystified, Tom stops and watches the men approach. His men, they are his natives. The sound of wheels whirring fast as the bags rock and jolt and are covered in dust. The men wear bandannas across their faces and dark glasses to protect their eyes. They have large rucksacks strapped to their backs and humpbacked they roll forward, they occupy the road, gaining speed as they move.

Two-wheeled as they are, they catapult toward him. Tom leaps to the side of the road. They come within a single foot of him but swarm past without stopping—they act as if they do not see him, their eyes invisible behind the sunglasses and road goggles. They pedal furiously and the dust rises ten feet into the air as they go.

Within seconds they are gone. Tom stares after them as they disappear down the road. They move past the gate and exit the farm. He stares at the empty road. It is silent. The stables are quiet. He listens to insect sounds and watches the dust cloud settle to the ground. He stares at the earth and is baffled.

He turns and then sees another group of men. A sea of them coming down the road on bicycles and motorcycles, these men carrying their wives and children. The men ignore him but some of the women and children, some nod or wave as they pass. None of them slow. None stop to explain. They churn more dust instead, they toss the dirt back up into the air.

They are fleeing. The last of the farmhands are leaving. They are abandoning the estate. This time Tom runs after them. He shouts into their cloud of dust.

“Where are you going? What are you doing?”

Still they do not stop and so he runs faster, waving his arms.

“What has happened? Why are you leaving?”

He is talking to a mountain of dust. They are meters away, they are half the distance to the gate, they have disappeared down the road. He stares after them. He turns and looks back at the farm. It is silent again. He watches as the road dust settles. He looks for the men, he tries to spot them in the distance, but they have disappeared and the landscape is still.

He hears a whirring sound behind him. A young boy comes cycling down the road after the pack. Tom races into the road and flings his arms out.

“Stop! Stop!”

The boy swerves and tumbles off his bicycle. He scrambles to his feet, hopping. There is a cut across his knee. Tom looks at the boy’s face. He is not certain that he has seen him before. He does not know his name.

“Where are you going?”

The boy shakes his head and rights the bicycle.

“Tell me where you are going!”

“It is not safe here.”

Tom laughs.

“What are you talking about?”

“The rebellion is coming. The men who go to the forest—they are coming.”

Tom grabs the boy by the shoulders.

“You are just a little boy. You do not know what you are talking about.”

The boy shakes himself free.

“Mister, I know what I am talking about.”

He gets back on the bicycle.

“I have to go. They will not wait for me.”

“Who will not wait? Where are you going?”

The boy shakes his head and calls out as he pedals away.

“I know what I am talking about! You will see!”

Tom watches him cycle down the road and then disappear. The farm is now completely silent. He whirls around and runs to the house. He finds Jose by the stables. He is smoking a cigarette. Tom stops in front of him, gasping for breath.

“What is it? Why have they gone?”

Jose looks at him. In the silence, Tom becomes increasingly aware of Jose’s contempt. Which for the first time he displays to Tom without mitigation. He takes his time before replying.

“They have gone.”

“Yes, but where?”

Tom is still trying to recover his breath. Jose stubs out his cigarette on the ground and then carefully retrieves the butt. He holds it in his fingers.

“They are afraid.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

He looks at Tom.

“I hope they will not come so far as the valley. But you should be prepared.”

“Prepared—for what?”

“There has been killing everywhere. Do you not listen to the radio? It started in the north and it has spread. For the past month they have been moving toward the south.”

Jose pauses. He shrugs.

“Now they have reached the south. The rebellion is here.”

Tom stares at the dirt and the dust. He has never listened to the radio, he is not interested by it. He does not even read the paper. He licks at his mouth, nervous.

“Violence about what? We gave them the land. They are taking it. We saw, just the other day—”

Tom is like a blind man. He does not see what is about to hit him in the face and knock him down. It has been shown to him but he has been looking the other way. Jose is not inclined to explain, perhaps believing the task to be insurmountable. He shrugs again.

“Yes.”

“One acre a man. Isn’t that enough? We are all the same now.”

“You have one thousand acres. You are a single man.”

“That is different.”

“Yes.”

“I will give them more land. If more land is what they want.”

“It is too late.”

Tom needs to gather his thoughts. He takes out a pack of cigarettes. He offers the pack to Jose.

“We need to go to Herbertville.”

Jose shakes his head.

“Too dangerous.”

“He needs more medicine.”

“It is too dangerous.”

“He will die if we do not go.”

“You should not be here. Do you understand?”

Tom shakes his head. The old man will die either way. The old man is bound to death. But either he will die and that will be that, or the work of dying itself will kill him. The logic is impenetrable but solid as rock in Tom’s head. He reaches up and seizes Jose by the shoulder.

“He will die. I need you to go with me.”

Jose shakes his head. Tom drops his hands. Jose fishes in his pocket for a lighter and goes back to smoking.

“I will give you something. If you go.”

“What can you give me?”

“Money. There is still some money.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

Jose puffs at his cigarette. For the first time it occurs to Tom: he tells Tom to go, but why does he stay when the others have gone? It cannot be loyalty. Tom does not believe in Jose’s loyalty. He stays, Tom thinks, out of force of habit. He is too used to them. Too used to the whites. Celeste is the same way. They cannot break the habit in the way of the others. There are too many links, of which they are barely aware. Tom waits for Jose to speak.

“I will need to see the money first.”

“Of course.”

“And we go together.”

“Yes. How long will it take?”

“Half a day by the back roads. Maybe a little longer.”

“If we leave in the night, can we be back in one day?”

“Possibly.”

Tom nods. He needs to sit down. He is feeling faint. His breath is coming short and sweat is breaking out across his forehead. He sits down on the ground, in the dirt, chest heaving. Jose looks down at him.

“What are you doing?”

He waves him off. He sits cross-legged and wheezes. He keeps his head tipped down into his chest. He waits for his breath to slow.

“Are you well enough to travel?”

Tom swallows and looks up at Jose.

“I am fine. We can leave tomorrow.”

Jose puts his hands into his pockets. He does not offer Tom his hand. He does not help him to his feet. He looks down at him. Tom sits in the dirt and watches Jose, who frowns.

“Okay.”

Slowly, Tom gets to his feet. He reaches out to shake Jose’s hand. Jose hesitates and then takes Tom’s hand. They are both confused by the gesture. Now Tom dreads the journey ahead. What is he doing? Perhaps they are both fools. After all, they are the only ones left. He should have gone long ago. But he did not and instead is still stuck on the land, it is him and the dying man, here on the farm.