Stay

CHAPTER ONE From the roof of my cabin I can see only forest, an endless canopy of pecan and hickory, ash and beech and sugar maple. Wind flows through the trees and down the mountain, and the clearing seems like nothing but a step in a great green waterfall. Even the freshly split shingles make me think of water. Cedar is an aromatic wood; warmed by the autumn sunlight of a late North Carolina afternoon, it smells ancient and exotic, like the spice-laden hold of a quinquereme of Nineveh. It would be easy to close my eyes and imagine a long ago ocean cut by oars--water whispering along the hull, the taste of spray--but there's no point. There's no one to tell, no longer a Julia to listen. Grief changes everything. It's a brutal metamorphosis. A caterpillar at least gets the time to spin a cocoon before its internal organs dissolve and its skin sloughs off. I had no warning: one minute Julia was walking down the street, sun shining on black hair and blue dress, the next she lay mewling in her own blood. The bullet wound was bigger than my fist. Then she was on a white bed in a white room, surrounded by rhythmically pumping machines. She lasted six days. Then she had a massive stroke. They turned the machines off. The technician stripped off his gloves, and grief stripped me raw. I set the point of a roofing nail against a shingle, lifted my hammer, and swang. The steel bit through the cedar right on a hidden imperfection, and the shingle split. The hammer shook in my fist. I put it down and laid my hands on my thighs. The shaking got worse. A plane droned over the forest, out of sight even though the sky was clear, a hard October blue. Birds sang; a squirrel shrieked. The droning note deepened abruptly, grew louder, and resolved into a laboring car engine. There was only one road. I didn't want anything to do with visitors. The ladder creaked under my boots, but once on the turf I moved silently. Truck and trailer were locked, and the cabin did not yet have windows to break. I collected the most valuable of the hand tools--the froe and drawing knife by the sawhorse, the foot adze and broadaxe by the sections of split cedar--stowed them in the old hogpen, and walked into the forest. Parts of the southern Appalachian forests have been growing uninterrupted for two hundred million years. Unlike the north, this area has never been scoured to its rock bones by glaciers. It has been a haven for every species, plant and animal, that has fled the tides of ice which creep across the continent every few thousand years: the ark from which the rest of the East is reseeded after the ice melts. A refuge, my refuge. On my right, brilliant white-spotted orange puffballs bloomed from the horizontal trunk of some huge tree that had fallen so long ago it was impossible to identify. It was being absorbed back into the forest: carpenter ants and fungi broke down the cellulose; raccoons and possums lived in the cavities and salamanders in the shade; deer and wild pigs ate the mushrooms. When the whole thing collapsed into rotted punk, more microbes would turn it into rich soil from which a new tree would grow. I touched its mossy bark as I passed. This was the world I belonged to now, this one, where when a living thing died it fed others, where the scents were of mouse droppings and sap, not exhaust fumes and cordite, and the air hummed with insects rather than screams and the roar of flame. Ninety feet over my head the canopy of ash and white basswood shivered in the constant mountain breeze; it was never quiet, not even at night. I stood for a while and just listened. The sudden, rapid drumming of a pileated woodpecker echoed from the dense growth ahead. I pushed through fetterbush and fern and skirted a tangle of dogwoods, trying to pin down the source. It drummed again. North. I found it forty feet up a huge yellow buckeye on a stream bank orange with jewelweed: big as a crow,Griffith, Nicola is the author of 'Stay' with ISBN 9780385503006 and ISBN 0385503008.