The Hatchet

Day 34

They waited like a crew waits on the foreman.

That was the worst part. Not the gray skin or the torn clothes or the way the snow didn't melt where it landed on them. It was the patience. Three of them standing at the edge of the trees, heads tilted toward me, ready for whatever I said next.

[Awaiting maternal command.]

"I'm not your mother," I said.

[Correction: Host designation is Mother of the Horde.]

"Delete that."

[Mandate cannot be removed.]

Fine. Fourteen years on storm crews teaches you what to do when an order comes down that'll get somebody killed. You don't argue with dispatch. You find another way to do the job.

"Go," I told them. "Get away from this house. Don't come back."

They turned together, the way birds turn, and shuffled into the trees. The snow swallowed the sound of them in seconds.

Something cold slid through my chest. Not pain, exactly. More like a light going out in a room I hadn't known was there.

[Command issued outside mandate parameters.]

[Noted.]

Noted. Like a supervisor writing you up for the file.

"Noted for what?"

The letters faded without an answer. I decided that was an answer.

I went back inside because I didn't know what else to do. The cabin was a crime scene. Snow on the floor, the dark stain across the hatch, my mother's good quilt torn off the couch. I stood in the middle of it and made myself think like I was walking a downed line. Start where the damage is. Work outward.

The damage was the cellar.

I climbed down and saw it this time. The shelves along the back wall had been dragged a foot from the stone. Two jars of Mom's peaches lay broken on the floor, the syrup frozen into amber glass. Behind the shelves, the boards over the old coal chute had been pried loose. The nails were bent outward.

From the inside.

There were small black handprints on the stone where he'd climbed, coal dust and cellar dirt. I put my hand over one of them. It barely covered half my palm.

He never opened the hatch. He'd promised me, and he kept it. He sat down here in the dark and listened, and when the house stayed quiet long enough, he did exactly what I'd taught him. He found the other way out.

I had to sit down on the steps.

He'd listened for my voice and never heard it. Of course he thought I was dead. I had been.

I let myself have one minute. Then I got up, because a minute was all I'd ever been able to give anything.

The hatchet was still beside the stove. I wiped the blade on my jeans and hooked it through my belt, and it sat against my hip like it had always been there. Dad's hatchet. Dad's cabin. Dad's grandson, out there somewhere with a compass and a flashlight and whatever else a nine-year-old thinks is worth saving.

I pulled on my dad's barn coat over the ruined shirt. It should have been too big and too thin for the cold. I couldn't feel the cold at all.

When I breathed out on the porch, nothing happened. No fog. My breath came out the same temperature as the air.

I stood there a long time trying to breathe fog.

Then I heard it. A small, frantic tapping, faster than a clock. I turned toward the sound and found a chickadee in the eaves, puffed against the wind. I could hear its heart. I could hear it from twelve feet away, through feathers and snow, and something low in my stomach turned toward that sound the way a dog turns toward a can opener.

I wasn't hungry. That was what scared me. I hadn't eaten in four days, and I wasn't hungry for anything in that kitchen.

I went to find my son.

The coal chute came out under the woodshed, just like I'd shown him. Under the overhang, out of the snow, there was a scrape in the dirt where he'd dragged his pack through. Past the woodshed, beyond the two graves I didn't let myself look at, the game trail dropped toward the creek.

The first snare was forty yards down. Copper wire, double loop, staked the way I'd taught him. Empty.

The second was by the creek crossing. Also empty.

The third had a snowshoe hare in it, frozen stiff. He'd set it and never come back to check.

That told me two things. He was heading downhill, toward the old logging road. And he wasn't planning to return.

I followed the creek. My legs didn't tire. I didn't sweat. The snow got deeper and I just kept going, and somewhere in the second mile I stopped being grateful for that and started being afraid of it.

The logging road was a white ribbon through the cedars. Unplowed, untouched. I stood at the edge of it and listened for anything that sounded like a nine-year-old.

What I heard was a heartbeat.

Big. Slow. Steady as a generator idling. It came from the bend in the road, maybe two hundred yards off, and it was getting closer.

I drew the hatchet.

He came around the bend on foot with a rifle across his shoulders and a pack that looked like it weighed half of what I did. Six-foot-four of him, shoulders built hauling cable for twenty years, dark hair grown too long under a knit cap. A month on the road, and he'd still kept his jaw to a five o'clock shadow. Of course he had. Dante shaved with a pocketknife in the crew truck mirror every morning of every storm we'd ever worked.

He saw me and stopped.

"Portia."

He didn't raise his voice. Dante never raises his voice.

I couldn't make my mouth work for the second time in four days.

"You took my truck," he said.

"I left you a note."

"You left me two words on a motel door. Family. Sorry." He started toward me through the snow. "That's not a note. That's a ransom demand with no instructions."

He was ten feet away when I smelled him. Wood smoke, gun oil, a month of sweat. And under all of it, warm. So warm. His heartbeat filled up the whole road.

[Human. Pulse 71. Warm.]

I took a step back. He noticed. Dante notices everything; it's what made him a good foreman and an impossible man.

"Where's Eli?" he asked.

"I don't know." It came out cracked. "He got out. He's alive, I think, but I don't know where he is. That's what I'm doing."

He looked at the blood on my shirt. At my arm, where the coat sleeve had pulled back over that pale crescent of a scar. Something moved in his face, and he started to say something.

Then his eyes went past me, and he swung the rifle down off his shoulder.

I turned. The three of them stood at the tree line behind me, fifty feet back. They'd followed me the whole way.

"Get behind me," Dante said.

"Don't shoot."

"Portia..."

"Don't." I looked at them. I didn't say anything out loud. I didn't have to. Go.

They went. Back into the cedars, slow and obedient, heads bowed like they were sorry.

The road went very quiet.

Dante lowered the rifle an inch at a time. He looked at the trees. Then at me. Then at the trees again.

"They backed off you," he said.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

I could have lied. I'd lied to him a hundred times about where I was going and when I'd be back. But I was so tired of leaving him with two words on a door.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I'll tell you when I do."

He studied me for a long moment. Then he reached out and took my hand, the way he used to grab my wrist on a pole when I leaned too far, and his whole body flinched.

"You're freezing."

"I know."

He didn't let go. He held my hand in both of his like he could warm it up through sheer stubbornness, and his pulse beat against my palm, steady and hot and close.

"Okay," he said finally. "Which way?"

"You don't have to come."

"I walked three hundred miles to get yelled at by you. I'm not stopping now." He let go and settled the rifle back across his shoulders. "Which way, Portia?"

I pointed down the road, toward where the cedar valley opened up and a thin line of smoke rose against the gray sky, miles off.

We started walking. His heartbeat walked beside me, steady as a metronome, and I kept my hands in my pockets.

I'd noticed his pulse before I noticed his face.

That scared me more than the horde.