ONE
Something wrong, I can feel it: a sting pricking the skin and stitching inward.
A dream, maybe. Memory. Both have brought me their share of grief. I force open my eyes, the slightest tinge of gray seeping through the curtains. Not yet day. But light enough that I can make out the silhouette of her curled on the little bed beside mine, blanket tucked to her chin and wrapped tight around her small legs. Finch, sleeping. Safe.
Sleep pulls, a mighty and sinewy force.
But— Outside the cabin, movement. Something scuffling past the window. A struggle. Thump, death cry, distress.
Up now, Cooper. Get up.
I kick the covers off, sit up. Grab the headlamp, strap it to my forehead. I slide the Ruger, already loaded, from under the pillow next to mine.
Finch rolls over and sits up. She rubs her eyes. “What is it?”
“Stay here.”
I slip out of the bedroom. In the main room, I grab the shovel that’s always resting against the door, its metal handle propped beneath the doorknob. Slide the top lock, unhook the bottom one, the wooden door tight and moaning as I yank it.
Outside, still dark, the sun not up but coming, the woods gray and the trees, looming in shapes: dark sentinels, soldiers. All these years and still everything always comes back to that. War.
I flash the light around the yard, looking. Most likely just an animal, I know that, but last week we woke up and one was gone, a fat Neptune hen that strutted around like she owned the place. Poof, gone. No scat, no prints, nothing. Just a small hole dug under the fence. Well. Fox, coyote, raccoon, fisher: despite my good efforts to safeguard the place, the girls are an easy meal for any of them, and depending on how much time has passed, how long it took me to wake, the whole flock could be wiped out, all four of them, and then we’re in real trouble because we’ve lost our one and only guaranteed source of protein. Which is not a spot we can afford to be in, once January comes and the snow hits.
Something in the coop, I can hear him thrashing. A low growl. I pound on the metal roof the way I do to get the hens out when they’re on the eggs and don’t want to move. The sound thunders down and the whole structure shudders like the roof’s about to cave in. The thing scuttles out just like the hens always do, wobbles quick down the little ramp and into the grass. I shine the headlamp and see the eyes glowing, a menacing yellow-green in the dark. Raccoon. A bird in his mouth, limp. Smart little devils, that’s what Aunt Lincoln always said. And mean. He snarls and shows his teeth and lunges toward me as if to say, Go ahead.
Which I do. I open the gate and take the shovel and knock him good over the head and then again, smack smack smack, until he lies still and even though I’m sure every ounce of fight in him is gone, I keep on hitting him. I know there’s a meanness in that, striking him all those times, but sometimes a thing inside of me flashes, dark and despicable: it’s there, it’s part of me, and on occasion it lurches forth and can’t be held back. The hen twitches, the raccoon’s jaws still tight around her neck. I use the shovel to pull her free and somehow she is still alive so I hit her too, once, on her tiny head, hard enough to knock that little brain of hers right loose and crush the skull. I kneel down and shine the light on her. Finch won’t be happy about losing one of our girls. Neither am I, but Finch—she’ll take it personally.
“Cooper?”
I startle: her voice in the darkness.
“Told you to stay in the house, sugar.”
She has always had a way of moving undetected. Which is what I’ve taught her. How we live. Most kids, they lumber through the woods, kick up the leaves, chatter and scare everything off but the thrushes. Not Finch. Mostly this is a good thing, with us needing to hunt for food and live in quiet, but sometimes she does it and catches me off guard, like now, out in the yard and the dark, and me thinking I was alone, no audience to observe the dirty work of doling out death.
She stands beside me, her palm on my back. She puts her hand on my jaw and moves my head to shine the light on the chicken. “It’s Susanna,” she says.
I pull her onto my lap.
“You hit her.” She shivers, nothing but her pajamas on and it’s December and cold, the yard glistening with frost. She tucks her bare feet onto my knees.
“She was suffering.” We have gone over the ethics of the woods. We live it every day and have since she was a baby. You do not kill something just to kill. But also: you relieve suffering when you can. “She would’ve just lay there and died slowly, so what I did, hitting her, that sped it up is all. Helped her along.”
Finch pulls away, kneels down and strokes Susanna’s black and white feathers. She’s a Barred Rock, a pretty thing as far as chickens go. Me, I’m doing calculations and hoping she was one of the hens that was three years old and didn’t lay every day. We like our eggs. Need them. Come winter, with less sunlight and the hens’ productivity tapering off, we already won’t get enough.
Behind Finch, the woods burn purple red and then the sun pushes up out of the horizon. All the saplings and pines, the sun stretching its arms and everything bright and bathed in light and throwing new shadows, the world coming alive. I squeeze Finch’s hand.
“I don’t want to eat her,” she says, wiping her face with the sleeve of her top.
“Mmm.” Deep down I’m pondering a chicken dinner in the Dutch oven, rarest of delicacies. Potatoes, carrots from the root cellar. Oh, the thought of it.
“It wouldn’t be right,” Finch says.
“No?”
“Cooper.”
“If you say so.”
“And can we bury her?”
“Sure. Behind the cabin. After breakfast.”
She hops up and we stand looking over the two dead animals. “But not the raccoon,” Finch says. “I don’t want to bury him. He took what wasn’t his. He stole.”
I want to tell her he was just hungry, but I don’t. Sometimes a person knows something, but they just don’t want to hear it; I get it. I scoop the raccoon onto the shovel. Fat, heavy thing, but funny looking now, with his flat head. “I’ll take him down over the hill. You want to come?”
She shakes her head. I look around, scanning everything. The red hand pump for the well. The clothesline with my blue flannel shirt and two of Finch’s, one yellow and one pink. The stack of wood on the porch. The dwarf apple trees, no longer heavy with fruit. Everything normal.
“Put the skillet on to heat, would you?”
She nods and bounds off for the cabin.
I check the outhouse before I leave the yard because it has always been a place that makes me nervous—far from the house, someone hiding in there maybe—and the thing is, two days ago Finch and me were out scouting and saw footprints by one of our hunting blinds. Too big to be Finch’s and too small to be mine. Which means someone else has been around, on our land. Well, not ours, technically. But ours in the sense that this parcel of ground is the place we call home. No other sign that we could find, plus they were a good ways off from the cabin, but still. Footprints.
* * *
Finch is eight now. Eight years and 316 days. Which makes her 3,234 days old because there were two leap years in there. I wonder sometimes whether parents keep track of their children’s days, and I bet they don’t. At least not the way I do, a line for each day in my notebook. I remember before I was a parent, overhearing fathers talk at the grocery store or a restaurant, and someone, maybe the waitress or something, would ask the kid how old they were. And usually the kid would answer, if they were old enough. But more than once, I saw the father answer wrong, a year behind or something, like there was a birthday party in there that he’d missed, and the kid or sometimes the mother would correct him. Not me. I’ve kept track of the days and I am grateful for each one because if there is one thing I have learned in this life, it’s that it can all end, fast. I know, too, that it will. End, I mean. One way or another—Finch and me and the chickens in this quiet pocket of woods—our life out here will not go on forever. It’s a thing I don’t like to think about.
I walk two hundred yards into the woods, to where the ground dips down and the trees quit and the land opens up a bit. I give the raccoon a pitch and he lands next to an autumn olive with a thud and the leaves above shudder and shake free, showering down white like a blessing. Scavengers will find him there soon. Vultures, crows. Maybe coyotes, maybe a bear. We have them all and sometimes the coyotes sing at night.
On the way back to the house I kneel and grab a handful of white clover. Brush the frost off with my thumb. We’ll throw it in with the eggs this morning. Good nutrition and Finch likes it.
* * *
In the yard the hens are still all riled up from the raccoon, squawking and rustling about their enclosure. They are sensitive creatures, feathers ruffled easily, if you know what I mean. I talk to them soft and low. “Girls, it’ll be all right. Cooper’s got your back. I came out as soon as I heard the noise. I took care of that mean old critter and he won’t be back. Now settle.”
We will probably get no eggs today on account of them being stressed, but we have three from the day before, in the red bowl on the counter.
Inside, Finch has the cast-iron skillet on the cookstove, heating up. She sits on the couch reading a book.
“You all right?”
She looks up and there—flash, memory, a seething wound. Cindy, Finch’s mother. Like seeing a ghost and I love it and hate it at the same time. Her blond hair and her green eyes, those are Cindy’s, no doubt. That in and of itself has always seemed to be some sort of revolt against the probabilities of genetics: my dark hair and brown eyes should’ve won out. But it’s also the way she looks at me, the way she walks, toes pointed out, the way she winds her hair around her pointer finger. All of it, Cindy’s. Her expressions, most of all. How Finch could have and be those things when the two of them only knew each other for four months.
“I’m a little mad at you,” Finch says. “For what you did in the yard.” She looks away.
I pour a teaspoon of canola oil into the skillet. Measure it because we are always rationing, always keeping track. Tomorrow, December 14th, Jake—my buddy from the Army, he owns the place—should be here with supplies. His annual trip and frankly, the highlight of our whole year. But every year at this time, I’m sweating a bit. Thinking about what it would mean for us if he doesn’t show up. We’d need to expand our hunting, maybe dig out the traps in the loft of the cabin. Most troubling of all, we’d need to go out and get supplies.
It could happen, him not coming, and I know that; it’s always lurking at the edge of my mind, me and Finch at the start of winter without ample food. The snow piling up, the roads unpassable. I pluck an egg from the red bowl. “I’m sorry about Susanna.”
“It’s just that maybe we could’ve nursed her back to health. Maybe she would’ve been all right, if she’d had some time. If you’d given her a chance.”
“No, Finch. That raccoon had her by the neck, and it was broke, I saw how it was bent.” I turn from the woodstove and look her in the eye. “Maybe it would’ve taken a while, but she wasn’t gonna make it, sugar.”
“Well,” she says quietly, “I don’t see how that makes it right, what you did.”
I crack two eggs and drop them into the skillet, edges turning white, hissing, lifting. I sprinkle the white clover and add a dash of salt. “Sometimes what’s right isn’t all that cut-and-dried, Finch. Hate to say it, but it’s true.”
She stretches her legs out onto the little green trunk we use as a coffee table and then snaps her book closed. She walks the book over to the bookshelf in the corner and slides it into place—tidy little creature, Finch is, with the books organized by genre—and then spins to look at me. She saunters over, mouth twisting to the side. “But you always say there’s a right and wrong, and you have to do what’s right,” she says, peering into the skillet. She looks up at me. Those penetrating green eyes, wanting an answer.
But. This house with two rooms and four blankets, an old table, a bookcase. We have a kettle, a Dutch oven, a cast-iron skillet. A sink with a little window that looks out over the long dirt road that leads here. Two shelves above the woodstove. A small and insulated world for both of us, and there is a simplicity to it that makes it difficult to explain the complexities of life. The unreliable and often shifting line between right and wrong. The truth is, sometimes Finch probes for answers that I simply cannot give her, not because I don’t want to, but because there is too much to explain. She has never known anything but this cabin, the woods that hold it. It’s the life I chose for us. Well—it wasn’t so much a choice, I guess. It was the only way.
Let it suffice for me to say this: sometimes bad things happen and you’re unprepared and you make choices that seem good to you at the time, and then you look back and wish there were things you could undo, but you can’t, and that’s that.
I flip the egg and the yolk sizzles.
“Jake will be here soon,” I say, hoping to divert her attention.
She grins. “I know. Tomorrow.”
I look at my watch: a Seiko, doesn’t need a battery. Nicest thing I’ve ever owned, a graduation gift from Aunt Lincoln. Thirty-three hours. Maybe thirty-two if he times it right and misses the traffic. We’ll hear the engine, first: a low purr against the whisper of pines. We’ll see the truck emerge, the silver hood gleaming in the sun, the branches that hang over the road, lifting like a drawn curtain. He’ll pull into the yard, quiet the engine. He’ll climb from the truck, use his arm to lift the bad leg, wince as he stands. He’ll lean against his cane and grin, that wide smile, his mouth the only part of his face that made it through the blast unscathed.
Finch will run to him. Throw her arms around his waist and nearly knock him over and he’ll throw his head back and laugh and carry on about how big she’s gotten since he last saw her.
Finch and me will unpack the supplies, load after load. Up the steps, across the porch, into the cabin. We’ll have venison stew, open the front of the woodstove, listen to the fire crack and spit. Once Finch can’t stay awake any longer, we’ll lean into the night and sit in the living room and Jake will ask about our year, and I’ll ask about his health, and we’ll laugh and for a week everything will feel good, almost.
Jake will be here and we’ll be all right.
“You got your gifts all ready?” I ask Finch, although I know she does. They’ve been ready for weeks.
“Yep. A bone knife, some pressed violets from last spring.” She nods toward a pile on the countertop. “And,” she adds. “My cardinal.” Finch is quite the artist, and her sketch of a cardinal perched on a branch is one of her best pieces yet.
“Good,” I say. “What do you say we bury Susanna after breakfast, then we’ll split some firewood and stack it out back? Snow will be here before you know it. Less than a month, I bet.”
Finch looks up, her eyes brimming with excitement. “My sled.”
I split the eggs down the middle and scoop half onto Finch’s plate and half onto mine. “Your sled.”
Last year, Jake brought one, but we had a light winter, weeks and weeks of sleet and ice but not one good snow.
I grab an apple from the bowl and pull my pocketknife out and slice it down the middle. I set the plates on the table. “Breakfast.”
Finch climbs onto her chair. “I’m gonna make a cross for Susanna, to put at her grave.”
“There’s some twine in the chest.”
“I’ll need my hatchet. And can I use your pocketknife?”
“If you’re careful.”
Finch pushes the egg around her plate. “You think this one was hers?”
Finch and her impossible questions. Why does lichen grow on trees in this part of the woods but not in the other parts? Why do chickens have round eyes? Do you think Emily Dickinson was lonely?
We have four chickens. Three, now. Twenty-five percent chance it was Susanna’s. “We can say it was hers if you’d like.”
Finch nods and scoops a bite of egg onto her fork. “Her last gift to us.”
Copyright © 2021 by Kimi Cunningham Grant
