Gone to the Forest: A Novel (10 page)

“Is it because of the girl?”

The old man didn’t answer. Tom continued to rub oil into the
leather.

“It would be a shame—to let a woman come between
us.”

His voice catching. The words difficult to say. The old man still did not
answer. Tom put the bridle down. He turned to face his father.

“I don’t mind. I understand.”

The old man did not move.

“You can have her.”

He could not see the old man’s face. He stood in the silence with
his feet in the ash. The old man let out a short laugh. Like the muffled sound of heavy
blows. Tom continued, raising his voice.

“There is no reason for you to leave. You could both stay. I
understand.”

The old man did not move. The silence bounded through the dark. Tom peered
at him, hands trembling. He waited for the old man to speak.

“We are going.”

Abruptly, his father turned. He walked to the door and pulled it open. The
blood rushing to Tom’s head as he watched. Standing in darkness, Tom watched the
old man walk away. He tried to understand what had happened. What the old man had said.
What he meant by what he said. How such a thing could be possible. He cleaned and oiled
the bridles three times over. Then he trudged back to the house.

That was two days ago. Now Tom stands in front of the
house and watches as the procession—a short procession, very
short—moves away. The girl’s shawl flutters and then falls to her side. As
the distance grows, he watches her small hand stroke it into place. He keeps watching,
as the wagon pulls through the gate, down the track, becoming smaller and smaller. Then
his father brings his own horse to a gallop, like he cannot wait to get away from the
place. In a moment they are gone.

The servants stand stock-still. They stare after the wagon, down the
track, like that will bring the old man back. Bring Jose back. They murmur to each other
and wait. Celeste at the front of the group, peering hard at the horizon. They wait for
the cart to return, for the miracle to happen. It is not going to happen. Tom wants to
tell them this, he wants to tell Celeste, but they are not going to listen to him. There
are still puffs of dust from the wagon visible on the road and he lets them cling to
that.

Tom turns and goes back to the house. He is not aware that he is running
but his feet are pounding the stone floor. The house is dark and cool. He turns and
checks to see if anyone is following. Nobody is there, they are still standing at the
front of the house, waiting for the old man to return. Tom wipes at the sweat on his
forehead, he is suddenly perspiring, and continues down the dark hallway. He pushes open
the door to the old man’s study.

He scans the room, then heads to the desk. He opens the drawers, looking
for papers, bank notes, bonds. Keys to the safe, sacks of money and coin. None of which
he finds. He
examines the walls, looking for a safe. He looks
underneath the desk, below the tables. He shoves aside a painting on the
wall—nineteenth century, a young woman and a small dog. The safe is empty as a
drum.

He sits down. He thinks he must have fever—that must be the reason
for the room spinning like it is. There are sicknesses in these parts. There is illness
in his blood. Look at his mother. Now his father has deserted the farm, taken the money
and the valuables, and Tom does not know where he has gone. He only knows that his
father will set up a new life. The old man will have his third act.

And here is the son with nothing. The woman gone and the son’s
inheritance lost in a cloud of ash, carried away on a wagon cart. How will he make the
farm run? How will he keep it safe? The joke is this: his father could save the farm but
chooses not to. He built this place therefore it follows that he knows how to save it.
But he chooses to go away instead. People will say it is about the unrest. They will say
it is about the girl. They will say that the old man cannot bear the heat and has gone
away instead.

It does not matter what people say. What matters is this: the old man has
looked at the farm and decided it was not worth the trouble. It including Tom. The old
man has made his choice and Tom has fallen by the wayside. When Tom has always believed,
he has trusted in the bond between the land and the old man, he has allowed himself to
think his place in that bond meant more than it did. He had thought the old man would
take care of him.

Tom sits down in his father’s armchair. The
house is quiet. He looks at the papers that are scattered on the floor—he had
upended drawers in his search. He picks up the papers again. There may be something he
missed. Bank details. Offshore accounts. Hidden and electric treasure. He is not
avaricious but he is human and practical despite himself. He stands up and goes to the
desk. He looks at the papers—he reads them for the first time. He sets them down
again.

He does not really understand. Tom does not have a head for such things.
He is not accustomed to the idea of the world outside the farm. Tom has no inflated
sense of his personal capacities, he is not unusually arrogant, but he believes his
world will hold fast. The idea that changes in the world outside the farm—the idea
of the world outside in the first place—that together they can shift his personal
landscape, that is one, two, three leaps too many.

Tom does not know about appeasement. He does not know about the deals that
are made. Expropriation is not a word in his small—small and shrinking, shrinking
with each moment—vocabulary. He does not know that people can send you notices and
the notices are not just pieces of paper but pieces of paper that have real meaning in
the world.

Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and you have one month
to go. Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and the property you think of
as yours is no longer the property you think of as yours, the property you think of as
yours is something else entirely.

According to the papers most of the land no longer belongs
to them. The papers (and the maps, there are many maps in amongst the papers)
delineate the new acreage of the farm and it is dramatically reduced in size: the
ten-mile spine has been lopped at both ends and only ten thousand acres remain. The
negotiation has happened, the expropriation has begun. The land is being taken from the
white settlers. The trees and hills have picked up and gone, they have packed their bags
and departed down the track.

Like his father. They are gone in exactly the same way. Tom picks up a map
indicating the new lay of the land and then drops it. It falls to the floor and
crumples. Ninety thousand acres gone! He will need to ask his father what to do, only
his father will know. But the old man is nowhere in sight. Instead there is just his
signature, on the bottom of page after page after page.

His father is not moved by malice, Tom thinks, just by self-interest. His
father being the most selfish man that ever breathed. For the first time Tom understands
this. Only his mother was as selfish as the old man and that was why they did not love
each other but were tied together in ways they half understood and fully resented. The
two of them were the same in the end. They went in the same way. First the mother had
gone by way of sea. Now the father has gone by way of land and the son is left
alone.

Tom returns to the veranda. The servants have disappeared and the place is
quiet. So here he is. The farm is his at last. He looks out to the horizon and he is
terrified. The world outside, beyond its borders. He sees the three men and the
documents they were examining. He sees his father reading the
newspaper. The knotted grip of his hands. Tom has always been slow to understand. The
men were not there because of what happened to the girl that night. The men only being
messengers for something else. It had nothing to do with her. No man ever stayed because
of what happened to a woman.

They stayed for other reasons. And now they are gone and the land is also
gone. All that is left is the papers. The papers and with them the people who will come
to claim the land. How will it happen? Who will come? Tom’s laughter pierces
through the air. The world is shrinking to a piece of paper. A white sheet pinned to the
line and the sound of it thwacking against the wind. The land will cave. The paper is
going to tear. And him, still here.

T
here were six barns on the farm. They were simple structures. A knocked together wood frame, covered in sheets of metal. Each barn had a plastic gutter along the roof to let off water when it rained. The six barns stood in the middle of fields and were spread across the property. Inside were bales of hay, tools and spools of wire fencing.

The spools of wire were taken first. Then the shelves were emptied of their tools. These items were lifted in the night and carried away. Their only trace being footprints in the grass and tracks from where the spools had been rolled. The barn door carefully closed behind them.

A week later the bolts were knocked out and the doors disappeared. The barns stood with their entrances gaping, six barns spread across the property without a door to lock or close. The barns circulated air. Nobody took notice. There was a hush. It was long and extended. It was exactly two weeks before the windows disappeared.

They were glass and therefore valuable. For these they
came with gloves and dirty quilts, into which they packed the panes as they knocked them from the frames. They returned for the frames the next day, having realized that these were also necessary. They cut them out with saws and went away by daylight, carrying the wood tucked beneath their arms.

The gutters were next to go. The plastic pipes were pulled down from the roofs and carried away. Then sheets of corrugated metal were dismantled and vanished square by square. Holes appeared in the barn sides. Entire walls were lifted away. Eventually each of the six barns was reduced to a bare wood frame. Like skeletons with the flesh burned away.

Finally even the frames went. The wood—some of it rotten with age and damp—was taken, along with scraps that had been abandoned in the grass. Hinges and bits of metal hardware. After a brief pause, the nails were also stolen up, gathered in their palms. They were secreted away until all that stood in place of the barns were stacks of hay. These rotted in the rain.

That was the prelude, which took place in the month following the land reform announcement. Which was broadcast on the radio and published in the newspaper, the news of it spreading like water. The whites being expulsed from the land in so many inches of ink and paper. The land shifting alliance across radio waves.

Then came the thing itself. He saw them through the window. Coming with their single wagons and mules, a tide of rusty instruments. The first thing they did was mark out boundaries with the barbed wire and wood from the barns.
Dozens of parcels, one not to be confused with the other. A hundred people colonizing their own land in a fever.

The land bent and buckled under the weight of the new men. They overturned the earth in a churn of activity, demonstrating how property was the thing most worshipped in the country. This being the first legacy of the white settlers. This being what the natives had learned.

He had dismissed most of the natives in the days following the announcement. There remained only a few dozen. These natives watched as pell-mell the farms went up on the hills around them. Each new farmer was given three cows and five sheep and a burlap sack of seed with which to start operations. The soil, now rich with ash, was plowed and the seed dumped into the ground. The livestock corralled into the corners of the plots and the houses hammered together with the weathered squares of corrugated metal.

In all the effect was—not what they were used to, and not especially felicitous. The natives shook their heads. They could leave the farm and put their names down for their acre and their three cows. Others had done so. But they decided against it. They were hedging their bets. They were waiting for something more, and did not believe this was the end of the matter.

T
HE OLD MAN
returned six months later. Tom sits on the porch. It has been one month since the old man’s return and still Tom calls it the porch in his head, what was once referred to as the veranda. There have been many retractions in his life, the most
important taking place in his head. It is now spring but there are shadows from inside the house and Tom is sitting on the edge of a pool of darkness.

There is nothing cheering to see in his face. Tom has been neutered by age and disillusion. His body is still young—he can run and jump with the best of them, he can move quickly when he has to, having always been good at running, in multiple senses of the word—but his face is like an old man already dead. His world has shrunk down to a fraction of its original size and he has already grown used to it.

After the land reform announcement, Tom was alone. The land was, for the time being, safe. The farm was his and he could do with it as he wished. But this farm was different from the farm he had envisioned, the farm he had filled his days imagining. He was forced to accept the reduced state of affairs, the missing father and the missing land being one and the same, both having gone at the same time, under the same circumstances.

The missing father being in two parts: the simple physical absence and the more difficult absence of the idea. The image of the father. Which was now gone, which had crumbled in front of him. The second being the greater loss. Having lost so much, Tom was obliged to divest himself further. He dismissed most of the servants and farm hands; others left of their own accord. He did not think to ask where they were going. He sold one thing and then he began selling all of it. He took whatever was offered, not knowing how to bargain.

He sold the motorboats. The tractors and the plows. (There
was a lot of machinery. It took a lot of machinery to maintain all that land. The storehouses containing piles of hardware and tools, the ossuary of the farm as it once was.) It was not hard. His attachment was to the land, not the apparatus it came with, and the valley was crawling with new farmers. The carpetbaggers bought the equipment in bulk and sold it at premium. Everything went except the fish farm, which continued to sit in a shed adjacent to the river, covered by a sheet of tarpaulin.