time, though, when he had felt her presence, and he had known as he was searching for the boy that he was once again drawing close to her territory.
He shuddered, and thought carefully before he spoke.
‘If I were you, son, I wouldn’t mention the girl to anyone else,’ he said at last, and he felt the boy nod against him.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t believe me anyway, would they?’
‘No. I reckon they’d think you were suffering from shock and exposure, and they’d put it down to that, most of them.’
‘But you believe me, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes, I believe you.’
‘She was real, wasn’t she?’
‘I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use for her. I don’t reckon that you could touch her, or smell her, or feel her breath upon your face. I don’t know that you could see her footprints indented in the snow, or discern the stain of sap and leaf upon her skin. But if you’d followed her like she asked then I’d never have found you, and I’m certain that nobody else would ever have found you either, alive or dead. You did well to keep away from her. You’re a good boy, a brave boy. Your daddy would be proud.’
Against his back began the convulsions of the boy’s sobs. It was the first time he had cried since Harlan had discovered him. Good, thought Harlan. The longer it takes for the tears to come, the worse the pain.
‘Will you find my daddy too?’ said the boy. ‘Will you bring him home? I don’t want him to stay in the woods. I don’t want the girl to have him.’
‘Yes,’ said Harlan. ‘I’ll find him, and you can say goodbye to him.’
And he did.
Harlan was already in his seventies by then, and he had a few more years left in him, but he was no longer the man he once had been, even though he, and he alone, had found Barney Shore. Age was part of it, that was for sure, but so too were the losses he had endured. His wife, Angeline, had been taken from him by a cruel alliance of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s one year before Barney Shore spoke to him of predatory girls. He had loved her as much as a man can love his wife, and so nothing more need be said.
The loss of his wife was the second such blow that Harlan would receive in less than a year. Shortly after she passed away, Paul Scollay, Harlan’s oldest and closest friend, had sat on a bucket in the little woodshed at the back of his cabin, put his shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The cancer had been nibbling at him for a while, and now had got a taste for him. He put an end to its feeding, as he had always told his friend that he would. They had shared a drink earlier in the day: just a beer or two at the pine table beside that very woodshed with the sun setting behind the trees, as beautiful an evening as Harlan had seen in many a year. They had reminisced some, and Paul had seemed relaxed and at peace with himself, which was how Harlan had known that the end was near. He did not remark upon it, though. They had simply shaken hands and Harlan had said that he would see Paul around, and Paul had replied, ‘Ayuh. I guess so,’ and that was the end of it.
And though they spoke of many things in those final hours, there was one subject upon which they did not touch, one memory that was not disinterred. They had agreed years before that they would not talk of it unless absolutely necessary, but it hung between them in the last of their time together as the sun bathed them in its radiance, like the promise of forgiveness from a god in whom neither of them believed.
And so it was that at the time of his dying, at the day and the hour of it, Harlan Vetters summoned his son and his daughter to his bedside, the woods waiting beyond, the god of tree and leaf moving through them, coming at last to claim the old man, and he said to them:
‘Once upon a time, Paul Scollay and I found an airplane in the Great North Woods . . .’
2
Fall was gone, vanished in wisps of white cloud that fled across clear blue skies like pale silk scarves snatched