I wasn’t sure what we should do, but when the dogs began to move, Gwyneth said that we must move with them. They led us into the meadow, where rabbits bounded away but did not distract our guardians, and in a wide arc around the Jeep wagon before returning to the track.
The gunmen watched in silence, and if one of them thought the safest course was to cut us down with a spray of bullets, he didn’t act upon that opinion. Whatever happened to those men, we never saw them again.
Into primal woods where afternoon sunlight laddered down through branches, the dogs led us along winding deer trails. Feathery ferns, like an aviary of immense green wings that might catch a draft and soar, arced away into the piney gloom. Ahead of me, the children followed Gwyneth, all of them repeatedly melting into shadows and reconstituted in sunlight, as if the forest wished to remind me that what had been given could be lost.
The cabin wasn’t as simple as it sounds, a sprawling structure of tightly fitted logs caulked with what might have been elasticized stucco, under a slate roof hung with copper gutters that had acquired a green patina. A veranda encircled four sides of it.
While we stood in the large clearing that the house occupied, before going inside, Gwyneth said that of the many provisions stored therein, included were three years’ worth of food. But she wondered how we could possibly feed fifty dogs as well.
As if in answer to her question, the dogs retreated to all arms of the surrounding woods and, within a minute, were gone as if they had never existed. In the days to come, they would keep us company, but they would never eat anything that we offered, sniffing what we had to give them but rejecting it as though it offended their keen sense of smell. From time to time, the dogs wandered away among the trees, not all at once but each to its own schedule, and when they returned, they seemed to be well fed and content. Eventually, we would learn their secret.
80
The twins’ names were Joshua and Justin, and the girl who had come with them, Consuela, was not related to them. The boys, starved thin in punishment for the distress they caused their mother, soon fleshed out, and the bleeding evidence of near strangulation in time faded from the girl’s neck without leaving a scar. The depression in Moriah’s skull did not fill out, but her hair concealed it, and she did not suffer any ill effects from it, for she was smart and quick and full of laughter.
They wanted Christmas that year. We cut down a suitable tree and decorated it with holly gathered from the woods and with shiny metal ornaments made from tin cans and painted by hand.
In the main room stood a Steinway, on which Gwyneth played for us songs of the season. She sometimes said she didn’t know a tune that we mentioned, but whenever she tried to play it, she found the right keys and the music flowed without a wrong note through the cabin.
Because his daughter was musically talented, Bailey had stocked this forest home with other instruments: two clarinets, a saxophone, two violins, a cello, and more. We agreed that, by next Christmas, at least I and perhaps Moriah would have learned to play an instrument with which we could accompany Gwyneth’s piano.
81
On the morning of January 6, when I came into the kitchen to help make breakfast, the back door was open, and Gwyneth stood at the porch railing, staring across the clearing to the woods, where the trees were skirted with lingering shadows and crowned with early sunlight.
Outside, the day was mild for that time of year, and Gwyneth was in the grip of sadness, which from time to time troubled both of us, though none of the children.
When I stepped beside her and put an arm around her, she said, “Do you feel it?”
“What?”
She didn’t reply, and after a minute or two, I knew the cause of her melancholy. Neither silence nor sound, neither scent nor the absence of it, neither the quality of the sunlight nor the color of the sky offered any evidence that an age had fully ended and a new era had begun. Yet I had no doubt that they were gone to the last, all their vast wealth without an owner, all their amusement parks and taverns and dance halls without celebrants, every city and hamlet without a single voice, every ship upon the sea a ghost ship, and the sky traveled now only by birds.
“So soon,” she said.
It didn’t bear thinking about, but it was our gift, as it was the gift of those who had come before us, to be able to think, to reason and reflect, and with the gift came the compulsion to use it.
If there were other thinkers out there in the quiet vastness of the Earth, they were like Gwyneth and me, small groups in far-flung locations, alert to the wonder and mystery that were woven throughout the fabric of the day.
The following morning, the animals came out of the woods into the clearing and some even ascended the steps onto our veranda. There were several deer and a family of brown bears, raccoons and squirrels and wolves and rabbits. And dogs sat observant or frolicked among the other species. Former predators basked in the early sun beside former prey, watched the lingering veils of mist wither up into the morning light, wrestled playfully or chased one another without fear or menace, and so it has been ever since.
During my first eight years, when I had spent much time in the woods, no animals had feared me or stalked me. If my mother had abandoned me deep in the forest, as she once meant to do, she would have been surprised to discover that even wolves would have been my good companions. At the time, that community of the winged and the four-footed had seemed natural to me, which it had been at the start of time, which it now is again.
82
The forest deep and primal harbors nothing that kills, and in it now grow trees of which there are no photographs or descriptions in the books in our extensive library. The new trees and new vines produce scores of fruits never known before or at least not in the age recently passed. Some of the fruits are sweet, some savory, and it is with these that we are nourished and on these that the dogs and all other creatures, from bears to mice, now feed. If ever we grow a little tired of the flavors and textures of what the trees and vines produce, we at once think of new ways to prepare and serve them or else new fruits appear, different but no less delicious.
Sometimes, when I glance out of a window and see a laughing child riding bareback on a brown bear, an old fear twists through me, but it does not last.
83
On a day late that January, I read again “East Coker” by the poet T. S. Eliot, and saw something that I had forgotten: the stark but beautiful metaphor by which he described God as a wounded surgeon whose bleeding hands apply a scalpel to his patients so that “Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.” I wondered then if it was that forgotten metaphor that worked on my subconscious to see the Clears in hospital garb or if instead Eliot was a greater visionary even than his admirers claimed.
84
In our new home, the windowsills and the thresholds of doors do not bear any of the words that Gwyneth printed on the entry points of her other residences, as there is no need for them anymore. The alphabet she had used was early Roman derived from the Greek through Etruscan. Expressed in Latin, it would have read Exi, impie, exi, scelerate, exi cum omnia fallacia tua, which translates into English as “Depart, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits.” If she was protected from Fogs and whatever else might take up tenancy in marionettes and music boxes and people, Ryan Telford was not stopped by words composed with Magic Markers, perhaps because nothing curled within him except his own evil.