wiped his forearm across his forehead.
“Where exactly?” I asked.
He gulped for air, licked his dry lips. “The heart.” He snorted and spat out phlegm thickened by sawdust. “If you can avoid ribs, the blade will move softly. Like through butter.”
He glanced up at me uncertainly, as if he had said too much and needed my approval. I hastened to nod, and he seemed glad for my blessing. He faced the massacre of wood, weighing the axe in both arms, struggling to find something that could still be made smaller. It was then that I knew that he would not kill me. Our planning and scheduling of my execution had become something of worth, something that involved an increasing exchange of trust. The next day, when I asked him how long it would take to die from a stab to the heart, he was answering before the question was fully articulated, as if he had been making calculations all day and had been waiting impatiently to be asked. Murder: it was something to talk about and we embraced it, and soon other, more mundane exchanges were escaping our clenched jaws. “Here,” he said, tossing me half of a steak he had incinerated on the stove. “Sorry,” I said as we both banked into the bathroom at the same time. “I’ll be back around midnight, okay?” he asked late one afternoon, pausing at the door with two empty sacks looped over his shoulder. I nodded once and turned back to my homework, but inside I could barely breathe.
16.
MY FATHER CONTINUED TO disappear on weekends. In his absence I began reading the newspapers. They arrived every day in the mailbox located out where Hewn Oak hit Jackson, dozens of papers from towns all across the Midwest. When there were too many to fit, they were piled in a wooden crate nailed to the base of the mailbox post. Having nothing better to do, I began bringing these back to the cabin on my way home from school. Their mastheads touted towns big and small from Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, even a few from the Dakotas. Many of these papers originated in communities so small that the papers came out four days a week or fewer; some of them only published weekly. These I found the most amusing, with their exacting chronicles of crop growth, rambling columns referring to specific pheasants and raccoons by first names, personal accounts of exciting trips to Omaha or Ames, and dishy police blotters chocked with minor fender benders and loud noises after suppertime.
Occasionally my father read something that particularly nabbed his attention, and he would hurry to the archives of one of his dusty stacks and thumb through back issues. He did just that early in the morning on the first Saturday in October, rushing to one of the piles that made up the boundary of my floor space. Directly above me, he rustled through the pages until he found what he was seeking on the inside of the back page. The paper was old and thin enough that I could see right through it and read the backward headline: SEIRAUTIBO.
Paper in hand, he grabbed his sacks and hurried to his truck. I examined the stack. It was the Benjamin County Beacon, published in Mazel, Nebraska. Dredging up my iffy mental map of the U.S., I estimated that it was at least a five-hour drive to the Nebraska border. I listened to the spit of stones and the snapping of twigs down Hewn Oak. He was in a hurry; I had all day.
The safe in his closet resisted dozens of combinations. I planted my ear next to the dial, just like they do on TV, to hear whether any of my numbers triggered reactions. I sat on his bed—a mattress and box springs but no frame—and tried to think of obvious patterns. My mother: I tried her birthday, 12-15-60. I tried it backward, 60-15-12. I tried it European, 15-12-60. Bereft of ideas, I cranked my wrist through the numbers of my own birth date and with a clucking sound the lock unlatched. I stared and told myself it was coincidence. Everything about me, prior to crash-landing into Bloughton one month ago, should have been a mystery to my father. Yet here was a chilling countertruth.
I pulled lightly on the handle and the door of the safe squealed open. The awful stink of the cabin had an origin—it gasped out at me in a foul