Gone to the Forest: A Novel (12 page)

He crouches on the edge of the bed. He is a collection of bones, a belly like a fruit pit and limbs like shards. His arms splintering at the touch. He cannot believe this body belongs to him. He is not sure that it does. He tries to do arm exercises.
He lifts his arm to the height of his shoulder and back down again. After two lifts he cannot breathe and needs to lie down. He leans against the bedpost and grips it with both hands. He levers himself down to the bed. Then he peels his hands from the bedpost and presses them to the sheet. The air rattling in his throat.

He lies in bed and waits. He closes his eyes, but his mind does not rest. He sleeps—people tell him that he is sleeping well, they tell him it is good to rest, that he needs it. But he wakes up exhausted from dreams he cannot remember, he wakes and he does not feel refreshed as he has always felt refreshed. He dreams and the dream is as intense as hallucination. But never as intense as the pain, which is nothing but unbearable sensation. Which is bound only to get worse.

So he lies in bed in terror but nobody would guess it. Never underestimate the charisma of the dying. It has attached itself to the old man. Who grows bigger and bigger with it. He spreads across the farm, that is still shrinking from expropriation, that is still being cut down to size. He seizes hold of the house and land. He refuses the transfer of ownership. But he alone knows, can see, what is coming.

The door opens and Tom enters with the soup. The old man opens one eye and watches him as he sets the tray on the table by the bed. Tom lifts his father up and props him on pillows. He reaches for the cloth napkin and carefully unfolds it. He spreads the cloth down to the old man’s swollen belly. It is hard as a rock and getting harder by the day. Tom sets a chair beside the bed, he picks up the bowl of soup and feeds him.

When the old man returned to the farm one month ago, he was on his own two legs. The unfamiliar car—scraped and sputtering as it was—came down the track and the old man sat in the back. The girl sat beside him, and up in front Jose looked not like a driver and not like a farmhand either. The car window rolled down and the old man peered up at him.

“There have been changes.”

Tom nodded. Here, too, he wanted to say. Here, too, there have been changes. It is not the same as how you left it. He was filled with anger and relief. Don’t come back / come back. The father’s face a complicated thing as it peered up at him from inside the car. That the old man thought he could return and find it unchanged. As if nothing had happened. As if he had nothing to do with the nothing that had happened. He would like to tell his father about his resentment, his lifetime of resentment, now coming to a head and barely understood. I have things to tell you, he thought. There are things you need to hear.

There was no opportunity for that. Later that afternoon his father collapsed. He fell six feet something down to the ground. The girl crying for help. The domestics running. They picked him up and carried him to the settee.

He was shivering from cold and they covered him with a blanket. There was blood on the tiles and blood on the old man’s head. They could hear his teeth chattering inside his skull. The old man lay on the settee and tried to recover and vomited twice onto the floor. The girl stood and stared, hands
on her belly. Her condition also changed. It has been like this, she said. It is getting worse.

The old man looked ill. His color was wrong. His body slipped out from under the cover—an ankle and a calf and both like sticks. Tom had never seen his father so thin, he would not have thought it possible. He turned and told one of the boys to prepare a bedroom, close to the kitchen and their quarters, where it would be easy for them to tend to the old man.

The old man heard but did not protest. He closed his eyes. The sharp smell of vomit on the air. He said to Tom that he had not been well and had come back to the farm to get better. He had come here to recover. Tom only nodded. He said the farm was not as he had left it. The old man had closed his eyes and did not respond. Tom said that things had changed here, too. I have changed. The old man still did not respond. Tom did not say anything further.

They set up three rooms for the old man. A sitting room, a study, a bedroom. The girl slept in the sitting room. The old man slept in the bedroom. He sat on the porch during the day and the girl took him on short walks. They went out across the lawn and then she would tell him he was tired. No, he would say. No. I am not tired. You are, she would tell him. And he would ignore her, but soon they would return to the house.

In this way a perimeter was established. The old man took meals in the sitting room and he spent hours in the porch’s thin spring sun. He did not regain his health. He grew thinner
instead. His color went to gray and then it went to green. In certain lights, at certain times of the day. In other circumstances it returned to its usual gray. He was constantly shifting and they were losing him in the change.

The perimeter, once established, shrank rapidly. One week and he could no longer go on his morning walk. Another week and he was staggering as he made his way to the porch. He lurched from wall to furniture as he made his way across the hall. He would sit speechless for half an hour as he recovered but he would not accept their help.

Then the old man gave up the porch and stayed in his rooms. Once his father owned everything as far as he could see. Now it was three rooms and even those rooms would go. He gave ground—each foot, every inch, signaled what was coming. It was in this way that Tom realized the old man was dying. Animals died in the same way. Their territory taken away. Cattle retreating into their stalls. Wild dogs cowered in a corner. The look of it indistinguishable.

Death equalized everything. Tom saw but did not believe the old man was dying. The confusion proof that Tom was not prepared for the end that was coming. He disavowed the knowledge, the thought like a dry seed in the palm. He clenched his fist and tried to hide it, he buried it in his back pocket. Where it sat suspended, alongside his rage toward the old man and all that he had done, the old man’s fall from grace.

A pocket full of confusion. Tom concentrates on the present. He thinks that is how he will get through this—and he is
not even sure, he could not say, what “this” is. He sits beside his father. He spoons soup into his mouth. Two days ago the old man decided to accept help. He had no real choice in the matter. He could no longer satisfy his body’s basic functions without it. In this he chose Tom, who counts for nothing and is therefore fit for the job. The old man is loath to be seen by the natives in a state of weakness. Whereas being seen by Tom is like being seen by no one at all.

So Tom now has the privilege of being intimate with his father and this is something new, something that once would have meant a great deal to him. For example, he now sits beside his father’s bed. Close enough to see the texture of his skin. The individual hairs on his arm. Close enough to smell the stench of his breath, which is stronger than he imagined. Tom brings the spoon to the old man’s mouth and obediently he opens. Both of them ignoring the obedience like it never happened.

The door opens. The girl comes in and he nods to her. She walks with effort. (Laboriously is the only word and not only because of her condition. It is not a felicitous pregnancy. It has aged her, it has drained her of life. Although she is still slim and sly, and that despite the bump.) She hobbles to a chair against the wall and sits down. The old man swallows the food in his mouth. He opens his eyes and looks at the girl.

She sits in the chair like she is pinned against the wall. Aware as she is of the old man’s animosity. Tom spoons soup into his father’s mouth and the old man continues to watch the girl. Who would like to make herself small but cannot
because of her belly. Who shrinks and shrinks back even as the belly remains. It is its own thing, it just happens to be attached to her body. They are all aware of this.

Tom looks at the bowl of soup. It is mostly eaten. He dips a piece of toast into the bowl and pushes it into his father’s mouth. He opens and chews and swallows. His eyes still on the girl. Tom picks up the tray and turns to go. He looks at the girl and motions in the direction of the door. She does not move. He looks at her again and reluctantly she stands and follows him.

They close the door behind them and look at each other. Without saying anything she reaches for the tray. Her fingers push over his and she yanks the tray to her so that the dishes rattle. He lets her take it. Her touch on his touch. She holds the tray so that it rests on her belly. Then she turns and goes, the empty tray sitting heavy on her pregnancy.

He looks after her. Eight months pregnant and that is the other thing that came home in the car. Showing, showing—her belly strains at the seams of her dress. Each day she splits another dress and must sew together a new one. The girl is still tiny and the pregnancy is unnatural. Every time her dress splits Tom expects to see a plastic belly, a padded pillow, a not truth in the shape of a truth. But there is nothing but stretched flesh, an acreage of flesh in her belly.

His father dying but still capable of engendering life. Capable of colonizing a woman’s body. He is a man after all. Tom is also a man but of these things he knows nothing. When he first saw the girl’s belly he had been overcome with jealousy.
The jealousy being in several parts, the girl’s belly further proof of his displacement, further proof also of the old man’s obscenity.

But Tom was not altogether correct in his assessment. Which means that he was not prepared when the reversal took place. He should have been. After all there was a precedent. A man can be dying but he does not change his behavior. This man in particular, this old man—he becomes more himself as he goes, he simply distills himself as he dies. His power going nowhere.

The night they returned, the three of them—his father, the girl and himself—sat down to dinner. For months Tom had subsisted on rice and beans. But that night Celeste made a heroic effort and the table was only two or three—maybe four—times removed from what it used to be. Succulent cuts of meat and fish. Tom had not seen a fish cooked or alive for months.

When the first dish arrived the old man said, “I have missed your cooking, Celeste.” He took a bite and she blushed and bustled her way back into the kitchen. But he did not finish the terrine or the soup or the courses that followed. He said that he was not hungry. They had been on the road for nearly a week. Tom nodded and said his room was prepared, he could go to bed, whenever he liked.

Only his father did not want to go to bed. He drank his port (A month ago he was drinking! A month ago he was able to sit through a meal) and stared across the table at his son. Then he announced that the girl would give birth in two months’ time.
Tom nodded. In his head he was doing the math: nine minus seven is two is six months minus seven is one month. The old man said preparations should be made.

Then his eyes slid to the girl, who looked at him blankly. She opened her mouth as if to say something. Her lips pursed but no sound came out. The old man looked at her sharply. A little later he stood up and said he was going to bed. The girl stood up with him. Her arm snaking around his. She said they could make their way alone. She said she would take care of things.

Tom cleared the table. Now that he had dismissed most of the servants the cleaning was left to him. He didn’t mind. He had become used to it, it had taken him no time to become used to it. He carried the plates, the silverware, the wine glasses. Celeste had uncorked a bottle from nowhere. Perhaps she had whole crates of wine hidden beneath the stairs—clearly there were things happening in this house that he did not know about. He put on one of Celeste’s aprons and washed the dirty dishes.

He was taking the apron off when the girl came back into the kitchen. He struggled with its knots and flaps before yanking it off at last.

“Yes?”

“A cup of tea.”

He nodded and reached for the kettle. He filled it with fresh water and struck a match against the gas range.

“No,” she said.

“No,” he repeated.

“Sit down.”

She was trying to sound like she had a handle on the situation. She did not have a handle on this or any situation, and they both knew it. Her lips cracked. Her face was tired. And yet he was helpless, though he did not feel tenderness toward her. Her presence confusing to the man. She blinked and leaned against a chair. He sat down.

“Your tea.”

She shook her head.

“I will turn the stove off.”

She shook her head again. He listened to the flame whirr behind them.

“This baby.”

“Yes.”

“Please don’t act as if it has nothing to do with you.”

The kettle was boiling. He stood and switched the gas off.

“Everything here has to do with everything else.”

He looked at her. He tried to sound reassuring. Although he himself did not feel reassured.

“We will make the preparations.”

“That is not what I mean.”

He sat down uneasily. She leaned forward.

“Don’t you want to know who the father is?”

“That does not concern me. That is between you and him.”

“You honestly don’t remember?”

She had arranged her features into a mask of anger and incredulity but did not appear to be feeling either of those emotions. She sat down next to him and folded her hands across her belly.

“You were drunk.”

He shivered.

“I don’t drink.”

“And yet you were very drunk. I was frightened when you knocked on my door. You could barely walk straight. It was over very quickly.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Your father was surprised when I told him but then he said it was as it should be.”

She has not recovered her mind, he thought. Her mind cracked back there and she has not recovered the pieces. She cannot think he will believe this story. She cannot think that he will be so foolish. He of all people. The old man’s son. And yet she continued to talk.