Free Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

with.
    They must find it strange, a man his age staying alone the whole winter in a cabin ten miles from nowhere; I never questioned it, to me it was logical. They always intended to move here permanently as soon as they could, when he retired: isolation was to him desirable. He didn’t dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behaviour at least was predictable. To him that’s what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. He found war irrational too, both of my parents were pacifists, but he would have fought anyway, in defence of science perhaps, if he’d been permitted; this must be the only country where a botanist can be classified as crucial to the national defense.
    As it was he withdrew; we could have lived all year in the company town but he split us between two anonymities, the city and the bush. In the city we lived in a succession of apartments and in the bush he picked the most remote lake he could find, when my brother was born there wasn’t yet a road to it. Even the village had too many people for him, he needed an island, a place where he could recreate not the settled farm life of his own father but that of the earliest ones who arrived when there was nothing but forest and no ideologies but the ones they brought with them. When they say Freedom they never quite mean it, what they mean is freedom from interference.
    The stack of papers is still up on the shelf by the lamp. I’ve been avoiding it, looking through it would be an intrusion if he were still alive. But now I’ve admitted he’s dead I might as well find out what he left for me. Executor.
    I was expecting a report of some kind, tree growth or diseases, unfinished business; but on the top page there’s only a crude drawing of a hand, done with a felt pen or a brush, and some notations: numbers, a name. I flip through the next few pages. More hands, then a stiff childish figure, faceless and minus the hands and feet, and on the next page a similar creature with two things like tree branches or antlers protruding from its head. On each of the pages are the numbers, and on some a few scrawled words: LICHENS RED CLOTHING LEFT . I can’t make sense out of them. The handwriting is my father’s, but changed, more hasty or careless.
    Outside I hear the crunch of wood on wood as the canoe hits the dock, they’ve brought it in too fast; then their laughter. I reach the stack of papers back to the shelf, I don’t want them to see.
    That’s what he was doing here all winter, he was shut up in this cabin making these unintelligible drawings. I sit at the table, my heart speeded up as if I’ve opened what I thought was an empty closet and found myself face to face with a thing that isn’t supposed to be there, like a claw or a bone. This is the forgotten possibility: he might have gone insane. Crazy, loony. Bushed, the trappers call it when you stay in the forest by yourself too long. And if insane, perhaps not dead: none of the rules would be the same.
    Anna walks out of the bedroom, dressed in jeans and shirt again. She combs her hair in front of the mirror, light ends, dark roots, humming to herself, You Are My Sunshine; smoke twines up from her cigarette.
Help
, I think at her silently,
talk.
And she does.
    “What’s for dinner?” she says; then, waving, “Here they come.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    A t supper we finish off the beer. David wants to go fishing, it’s the last night, so I leave the dishes for Anna and go down to the garden with the shovel and the tin can saved from the peas.
    I dig in the weediest part near the compost heap, lifting the earth and letting it crumble, sieving the worms out with my fingers. The soil is rich, the worms scramble, red ones and pink ones.
    Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I’m going to the garden to eat worms.
    They sang that back and forth at recess: it was an insult, but perhaps they are edible. They’re sold like apples