Gone to the Forest: A Novel (8 page)

He was calmed by the thought. They took the horses down the slope and to
the stables. The horses were skittish. They tossed their heads and once Tom was almost
unseated. When they returned to the house they saw the men on the veranda. His father
looked up when Tom approached. He said that they should order dinner for five. Beef, as
there was no fish. He supposed there was still the foie gras and the caviar. He said to
bring out whatever was left.

That night, the ash began. It happened in the middle of
the night. Tom was asleep. He woke to the sound of footfall. People banging doors
in the night. He pulled on his trousers and stepped into the hall. The servants were
running, shouting to each other. He pulled on his shirt and hurried after them. Out in
the main rooms of the house it was chaos. Everyone was awake. He spun around and grabbed
the nearest person.

“What is it? What has happened?”

He was speaking to some boy—the foreman’s son, he thought. The
boy shook his head. He pointed outside. Over the veranda. The air outside was white with
ash. He dropped the boy’s arm at the sight of it. He did not understand. It fell
thick as snow but he knew immediately that this was no snowfall. He had never seen such
fine stuff airborne. It fell like rain then swirled like snow. The rapid shifts
incomprehensible to him.

He looked down at his feet. He watched the ash scurry into the house. A
fine coating on the lawn. A little heap on the steps. The ash was ten feet away. As he
watched it came closer, covering inches and then feet within a matter of seconds. He
stood still and watched as the dust swept to his toes and then over his feet like he was
sculpture in a garden.

He swung his head up to look outside: the air was stiller than before. It
had grown thicker. More opaque. The lights from the house lit the dust several yards
deep. Then the world dropped into darkness. He could see nothing of it. No shadow or
contour—it was not normal, it was not natural, this dark.

He was now coated in dust to his calves. It unfolded like a scene from the
horror movies he watched as a child. They
gave him deep and
penetrating nightmares—his father used to laugh at the way the terror made him
cower from sleep. The way it made him wet his bed in the night. Tom looked past the
veranda in the direction of the river. He grabbed another passing boy by the arm.

“Where is my father? Is he awake?”

The boy stared at him. He shook him hard.

“Go and wake him. Go and get him.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Go!”

The boy turned and scurried away. The boy had not left the room before the
old man emerged in boots and a dressing gown, his hair disheveled. He didn’t look
at Tom. He barreled forward across the hall. He crossed the veranda, jumped down the
steps and into the airborne sea of ash. He disappeared in an instant and was gone. Tom
peered through the mist. His father had been swallowed by the swell of ash. There was no
trace of him at all.

Beside him, two servants were shouting to each other. They spoke too
quickly for him to hear.

“What is it?”

They turned to him.

“The dust—he will not be able to breathe. It will get into his
eyes. His lungs.”

He stared at them for a moment. Then he lunged forward across the veranda
and into the dust. Some of the men followed him. The last thing he heard was their feet
moving on the stone floor behind him. Then he was enveloped by the
dust. In an instant he heard and saw nothing. He was only floating through space.
It was quiet, he had dreamed of it as a child, sometimes it came to him still—the
dream of being untethered.

An instant later his mouth was full of dust and he was choking, coughing,
splattering up tears and phlegm. He stumbled over the ash—there were mounds of it
across the ground, several inches in places, gathering with speed. He flung his arms
out. Like he was looking for a wall to lean against. He felt the men enter the cloud of
dust behind him—insulated explosions, the sign of distant movement. The silence
remained unbroken.

His eyes—now open to slivers—adjusted and he saw things.
Gradations of color. Pools of light. He stumbled forward, arms spread wide. He called
for his father. Ash flew into his mouth and he coughed again. He heard nothing. There
was only a dense and regular throbbing. The ash already too much. He squeezed his eyes
and mouth shut, he pressed his palms into his face, trying to cough out the dust.

Tears streamed down his face. He was finding it hard to breathe, he saw
for the first time that he might suffocate. He told himself he knew the land well. Each
inch of soil and every rock beyond was familiar to him. He pressed forward. He knew his
father had gone to the river. There was nowhere else he could have gone. He had seen it
in the old man’s face—once he had seen the ash in the air and on the
ground.

The other men carried electric torches and now the light bounced through
the darkness. He saw one of them in the
mist. A man standing in a
pool of light. It was Jose. He was bare-chested and had wrapped his shirt around his
head. He stopped and motioned to Tom. He waved his hand through the air, around his
head. His hand, coated in dust. Tom stripped off his shirt and wrapped it, mimicking
Jose, around his mouth and eyes. He breathed easier, into the cotton fabric of his
shirt.

He left one eye uncovered and using this one eye he continued in the
direction of the river. The landscape had grown alien. He had never seen any of what he
saw now. The ground he had always known—this place, the only thing he had ever
seen or understood—had vanished. He accepted that he knew nothing of where he was.
He thought this was what blindness must be like. Nothing complete or total. The field,
constantly shifting, and small gradations of light and shadow.

Then he saw a fragment of the old man. An arm that appeared and then
disappeared. A smear of movement that was his back. He saw, in fragments, through the
dust: the old man in trouble. He lurched forward toward the shape. Guided by his single
eye, his single eye straining to hold the fragments in place. To keep the movement in
sight. He started running, knees buckling, arms flailing.

His father dropped out of his field of vision. He stopped and looked
around him. He yanked the shirt from his face and shouted.

“Father!”

The dust flew into his face. Into his eyes and he was blinded. He coughed
violently. The men moved in his direction at the
sound. He felt the
vibration of their movement. He continued shouting for his father. The dust flew into
his mouth and muffled the sound of his cries.

“Father!”

He swung his body round. Shouting in all directions. The men were close,
he could feel them coming closer. He opened his mouth and screamed again, through the
ash.

“Father!”

He tripped over the body. There it was the whole time, all this
time—closer than he’d thought or realized. He knelt down and found an arm, a
torso. He could not see so he went by touch. The cord of neck, the wings of his chest.
The body jumped and rasped.
Tom leaned closer. He could not remember the last time he
had touched his father’s body. He gripped it through the ash.

He began brushing the ash away with one hand and then with both. He swept
off handfuls of ash to reveal a patch of collar. A piece of skin. An open mouth. He
brushed and brushed and uncovered his father piece by piece. He claimed a shoulder, a
chin. Then a new sweep of ash covered him again.

Still he kept brushing at him, like a dog uncovering a bone. The ash was
gathering in Tom’s throat. He coughed. The old man’s eyes were watering and
they were turning the ash to mud on his skin. His mouth a smear of damp dust. Tom sat
back. He gave up and watched as the ash covered his father. He watched it coating his
face until it disappeared. In the distance, he heard the men moving in his
direction.

“Here! Here!”

He tried to lift him up. He hoisted him up in his
arms. The body bucked with a cough and slid out of his arms. He flopped back to the
ground. Tom lifted him again, arms twisting as the old man writhed and slipped downward
again. Tom had never realized how heavy his father was. His weight was supernatural.
Like he was made from lead and malicious in unconsciousness.

Tom’s own body collapsed under its weight. He called out to the men
again.

“Here! He is here!”

They arrived from all sides, like an ambush: men emerging from the swirl
of ash. They surrounded the father and son. They were grainy silhouettes, dark shapes
against the white cloud and dim light. They carried the electric torches pointing
downward and they looked like billy clubs at their thighs. Their heads wrapped in shirts
and scarves. Tom thought he saw Jose standing at the back of the group. He called out to
him.

The call died in his throat. He saw Jose lift his hand as if to stay the
men. They stood in a circle and did not move. Fear seized across Tom’s throat.
They would die here—it was the most obvious idea in the world. The natives turning
on them at last. They would be left to perish in the ash storm. They would suffocate on
their own land. A stupid death looking more and more likely as the men gathered and did
nothing.

The idea of their resentment never occurred to the old man. Even though
there had been incidents—servants killing their own masters in the night, nannies
slaughtering their
wards—of which the old man was aware. His
father’s power was too absolute for imagination. Tom, on the other hand, could
imagine their resentment with ease. He was aware of how little the natives liked him. In
an instant he was flooded with fear. It warped his sense of things and in particular
time. It made a second or two seem much longer and it made him hysterical without
cause.

He wondered if it would give the men pleasure to watch the two of them
die. He thought it would. He couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. That was the last
thought that crossed his mind. Then his throat closed and his consciousness gagged with
the strain. He was seized, a cloth pulled across his face to protect his eyes and mouth
and nose, all of which were burning. Through the cloth he could hear shouts and see the
whirl of ash moving fast past him.

They carried Tom and his father back to the veranda. They dropped them on
the floor, in separate piles of ash—it was everywhere, in giant drifts and piles,
all across the room—and then set to work pulling the storm doors closed. They
moved very quickly. Eyes shut, Tom’s fear dissolved and he was once more comforted
by the presence of the men. He did not see the look that passed between them. He
recovered his breath, lying still in the bed of ash.

The men pulled the storm doors into place and the house was plunged into
darkness. The whisper of ash outside. In places the bobbing of the electric torches, the
flicker of flame as the lamps and candles were lit. Tom wiped the ash from his face and
sat up.

He saw Jose, kneeling beside the old man. He cradled
the old man’s body in his arms and carefully cleared the ash from his face. The
other men ran their hands down his limbs, checking for breaks and cuts. The women were
not far behind, they came with cloths and bowls of water and they began wiping the man
clean. They were preserving something without even knowing it, not understanding the
consequences, as they worked over the old man and brought him back to consciousness.

Tom thought: the old man will live forever because they will it. Only
because of that. He felt a throb of jealousy. To be cared for in this way. To be
touched. In between the candlelight they moved. One of the women came to Tom and gently
pushed him back to the ground. He lay in the bed of ash. She dipped a cloth in water and
wrung it out slowly.

The sound of water dripping. She said to him the generator has been
clogged by the ash. It is no longer working. But the old man is fine. The old man was
safe. Tom nodded. She wiped the cloth across his face and said nothing further. She
wiped around his mouth, his forehead. Down his arms and the flakes of horned skin. She
cleared the grit from his eyes. He saw Jose, giving orders, organizing the men. He
closed his eyes. He lay back. He waited, for now.

T
wo weeks later, his father leaves the farm,
taking Jose and the girl with him.

Jose is loading a wagon full of trunks. The girl sits in the wagon bed,
wrapped in a shawl. She is propped up on pillows and there is a carafe of tea by her
side and an open tin of lobster. She stares straight ahead, eyes blank and cloudy. Her
fingers work the fabric of her dress and she trembles very slightly. The weather has
changed in the weeks since the volcano exploded.

Jose loads the wagon and his father watches. The old man is wearing a
three-piece suit for traveling. A watch and chain and his wallet heavy in his pocket. He
is bare headed. He looks and then goes to the girl. He pulls a blanket across her lap
and tells her to eat the lobster. She nods and reaches for the tin. Fumbles with a fork
and then eats it with her fingers.

His father smokes a cigarette. Jose throws rope across the heap of trunks
and valises. He pulls the rope tight and the wagon rocks and creaks. They pile more
trunks in. The girl’s
things. She has been changed but there
is still the matter of her trinkets and her objects, pilfered from his mother’s
wardrobe. They drag behind her, she is barely aware of how they drag behind her. While
his father is in the habit of traveling light. Never more than a single suitcase and now
look at him.

Two weeks. Two weeks and he has decided to leave. He has split himself
from the land, a cleaving formerly thought impossible, a separation still difficult to
imagine. But now the wagon creaks with the load it carries, there is a wagon heavy with
possessions, the old man is leaving like the other whites—and Tom is staying
behind.