Gone to the Forest: A Novel (7 page)

She wasn’t even convincing herself. His gaze slid around her neck to
her back and his body followed, his body circled round. He stood behind her. She closed
her eyes as he gripped her neck. With the other hand he yanked her to him. Held her by
the neck and pushed her dress aside. Rooted downstairs. Poked a finger in. Slapped it
with an open hand. Hard, not teasing like, not affectionate. She gasped and winced in
pain. She thought: surely not here, in front of all of them. Surely not like this.

He unbuckled his trousers and shoved right into her but she was wet so it
wasn’t rape. Which gave him no pleasure or less pleasure or a different pleasure
to the one he was wanting. So that was a point for the girl. Just one but who was
counting, you grasped at straws when you were trying to keep your head on your
shoulders. Now he was calling her a whore cunt bitch but she’d heard it all
before. Nothing new under the sun, nothing he could tell or show her. With his idiot
thrusting.
Like a dog or rat or pig. Quick as a dog, too, and it was
on to the next one.

So that was how it was going to be. So she was going to be sore but she
had her pills. A whole bottle of them on the bed stand in her room. One of the men
slapped her face and pushed her to the ground. She concentrated on the pills. She should
have counted how many. How many pills and how many men. In case there was an equivalence
lurking in the numbers. Back when this began, which already felt like a long time
ago.

Were they all going to take their turn? Was every one of them going to
line up for a poke and a stab? Or had some of the group left—scared by what they
wanted to see and what they would imagine for weeks to come, what they almost saw and
did. She tried to keep count. It took her mind off things, which were quickly becoming
painful back there. Desire ran out on you and then the fucking started. You could
disconnect but there was nothing like pain to bring you back.

Not that she wanted them to stop. She couldn’t think a thought so
clearly. She couldn’t think her way past the situation at hand, she could no
longer fathom what happened next.

To give her credit: she was not waiting to be saved. She was not waiting
for the shout of a man coming to save her from another man. (Which would have had
nothing to do with her. A man saved a woman and he was only saving some idea of himself.
A man was nothing but a continent of ideas. Whereas a woman lived on shifting ground.
Therefore it was easy to
slip between the cracks. They’d been
warning her since she was a child. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been
told.)

There was no sound of feet. No slam of door. No anger. No stopping. It
went on. What a body can take is always more than a body can take until it isn’t.
Until the body says it can do no more. Her body went past that point and she knew
nothing about it. Her head had disconnected from her body and was floating in space. Her
arms and legs were next and then it was just her torso—she’d forgotten her
torso, she had left it behind. With the wolf pack snapping at her heels. Snapping and
then biting and then eating and she was gone.

Outside, the mountain was decapitated by flame. The smoke cloud blotted
out the sky. None of the men on the veranda looked at the mountain. They were otherwise
occupied.

I
n the morning five men left and three stayed
behind. The five who left woke early. They dressed by low light and went downstairs,
whispering and motioning in silence. Tiptoeing in their socks. They found the old man
sitting at a table on the veranda eating breakfast. In the background the volcano was
still electric orange and the sky was still black.

They came to the table with their boots in their hands and told the old
man they were going. They had their own farms to attend to. The old man nodded. They
thanked him for his hospitality. He offered them breakfast. It was a visible
afterthought. The men said no. The old man nodded and turned back to his paper. News
came to the valley late, the papers a week old by the time they reached the farm.

The five men pulled on their boots and were silent as they went down the
veranda steps. Once they got to the track their gait relaxed. When they got a little
further one of them started to whistle. A tune from last night’s gramophone. A
little snippet of song. The others joined in. They formed a
five-part harmony and galloped down the road.

Five men left and three stayed behind. Like Job’s comforters. They
appeared at noon, each grasping a sheet of newspaper. They stood on the veranda and
surrounded the old man. Who sat rooted in his chair. He did not consider himself to be
trapped, he showed no evidence of that belief. But he remained surrounded by the men all
day, unable to shake them off and wearing an expression of deepening outrage.

Tom did not understand what was going on. Tom had not been on the veranda
the previous night. He had been on the other side of the house. Confined to his bedroom
with a severe case of indigestion. He spent the evening lying on the bed in a sweat.
Every ten minutes he lurched to the toilet and emptied his bowels. Temporarily relieved,
he dragged himself back to the bed, only to lurch up again shortly after.

This kind of thing was always happening to Tom. The result was always the
same: Tom was the only one who did not know. He woke in the morning and noticed that
something was wrong. Half the men had gone and the men who stayed were different. They
had changed overnight. They were emboldened and they patrolled the house like they had
the owning of it. They were no longer shamed by the old man, by the house and the farm,
but Tom did not understand why.

He did not see the girl all day but that was not unusual. She slept until
evening and did not like to be disturbed. Tom had often thought: a man could murder her
in the night and the body would not be found until next evening. A man could
creep into her room and take a cleaver to her head. Be away by
morning, in a new country by noon. It could be done. There had been rumors of such
things. They would spend days looking for a bloodstained native.

Tom had a bad sense of humor. Another one of his flaws. However, the humor
was intermittent, a nervous habit that soon gave way to anxiety. Two days passed and
still the girl did not appear. He asked Celeste about it. She said the girl was
indisposed and then shook her head. Tom asked if they should call for a doctor and she
shook her head again. Ah no, she said. No doctors. No doctors, he repeated. No
doctors.

Tom looked for his father. He found him on the veranda with the three men.
The sight of the old man surrounded unnerved Tom. He thought: the presence of the men
and the absence of the girl. He did not go out onto the veranda but he stood and saw.
His father’s face red with anger as he read the newspaper again and again. One of
the men leaned forward, his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Tom strained to hear
his words.

“You see it right there.”

The old man did not respond.

“You see the steps that are being taken.”

“I see nothing.”

The man leaned back and crossed his arms.

“The Government will concede.”

The old man looked up angrily.

“On what authority? To whose demands?”

The man remained calm. He smiled and pried the
newspaper from the old man’s hands. The old man’s face darkened at the
audacity. The man ignored him. He folded the paper in two and tucked it into his pocket
for safekeeping. Then he looked down at the old man.

“Try to imagine it. If we do not make concessions, they will tear
this country to pieces.”

Tom shook his head and stepped away. It was no time to be worrying about
the news. Going over the matter of the unrest yet again. Four days after the mountain
began to erupt and two days after the girl took ill, the volcano stopped. Across the
valley there was relief. But on the farm the situation remained unchanged. The men
showed no signs of departing. And the old man strangely powerless against them.

It was like the farm had seized up with cramp. It needed to be moved back
into life. Grasped by the middle and jolted. It was not something Tom could do, it
needed the old man’s force. There never having been anything like this before. As
it was, Tom was already unnerved. He did not like having strangers in the house. He was
constantly moving from room to room in order to avoid them. While the old man remained
fixed to the veranda, examining the week-old newspaper.

Tom went to Jose and told him they would ride to the High Point. From
there they would be able to see the mountain and assess how the land had been damaged.
The old man prided himself on his knowledge of the land. His best self was a man
patrolling his land astride a horse. He was therefore bound to join them. In this way
Tom would recover his father. He would detach him from the rubber grip of the three
men.

However, Tom’s plan failed. He went to the old
man’s study early the next morning and found the old man already surrounded by his
comforters. Tom had never seen a stranger in his father’s rooms. Now there were
three. Three, standing in the room. Sitting on the desk. Looking out the window. Tom
stopped at the door and could go no further. His father looked up.

“What is it?”

“We are going to the High Point.”

His father nodded. He didn’t move.

“When?”

“Now. Or when you like.”

A pause. His father looked down at the sheets of paper on the desk. He
shuffled them vaguely. Tom kicked at the doorjamb for his attention.

“Will you join us?”

His father shook his head. He did not look up—he waved Tom away with
his eyes still on the papers. Tom backed out of the room. He turned and heard the air
whistling through his ears. He almost stumbled in the hall but righted himself. He went
to meet Jose at the stables. They led their rides out in silence. It was only when they
had mounted the horses that Jose turned to him.

“Where is he?”

“He’s not coming.”

Jose nodded. He did not look surprised and did not say anything further.
Although they had been brought up together, of the same age and both nursed at
Celeste’s tit, Jose was a
mystery to Tom. Fatherless Jose,
halfway an orphan, who nonetheless understood things Tom could not comprehend. When Tom
looked at Jose he saw nothing but an opaque surface: the obstruction of things Jose
knew, that Tom could not hope to know. In silence, they turned the horses out and headed
to the High Point.

In the wake of the volcano, the landscape was muted but not quiet. There
were sounds throughout and the sky had the density of the ocean. Tom thought: there was
water everywhere, and waves up in the sky. Around them the farm was calm. As they
climbed they could see the force of the old man’s imprint on the terrain: the
fences corralling the fields, the plow marks in the dirt. The sky churned overhead but
down on the surface things were almost as before. The horses shied when a hawk swooped
down across the path. The two men calmed the horses and pressed forward up the
valley.

They reached the High Point ten minutes later. There, the landscape reared
up violently. The ground a lunging beast but worse. The mountain looming in front of
them, the top blown off and rivulets of lava still flowing. Tom looked across at it. He
realized that things had changed. The ground had come undone and lacked all coherence,
it rolled forward in senseless disorder. They had seen none of it from the valley.
They’d had no idea of its scale.

It was like they had crossed into another world. Tom in particular was not
prepared. He did not have the tools to understand what he now saw. He had never been
anywhere in his
life. Barely having left the farm, a city street
would have struck him like a miracle.

“What will happen now?”

He barely spoke the words, he wasn’t sure he said them at all. Jose
shook his head.

“No person knows.”

“What does that mean?”

“There has never been anything like this.”

Tom looked down at the river. He could see that it was black and brown
with debris. Close to the mountain it hardly seemed to run at all. As if it had turned
to mud. As if it would turn to stone. The mud river, the stone river, ran down from the
mountain and toward the border. Over the border and into their land. Quickly, Tom looked
at Jose.

“There is something wrong with the river.”

Jose took a long time in responding. Then Tom realized he was not going to
respond at all. He was not looking at the river but up at the sky. He was staring at its
churning brightness like he was waiting to go blind.

“What is it?”

He shook his head.

“What is it?”

Tom spoke more forcefully this time. Jose stared at the ground and still
did not respond. Then he shook his head.

“Nothing good.”

“Nothing good? That’s all you have to
say?”

Jose nodded.

“Nothing good.”

“About the river? Are you talking about the river? There is
something wrong with it.”

“Nothing good about nothing.”

Tom kicked the horse and it bolted down the path. After a second, he heard
Jose follow. Tom laughed. To have asked so many times. To have made himself ridiculous.
What had made him think the man knew something, something about the mountain and the
farm, something Tom could not see? If the natives had instinct, they had cunning, and
the two added up to nothing.

His father never had these difficulties. He gave orders and the natives
listened because they knew the old man had no want he could not satisfy himself. Tom was
different. He could do nothing of his own. He needed the servants and they were aware of
this, having had many years to realize the fact. Tom was their superior but on the farm
they were all subordinate to the old man. However. Tom reminded himself that would
change, that would all be changing, soon. His father had promised him as much.