Free The Skeleton Tree by Iain Lawrence Page B

a plastic chair I had dragged from the beach. I even found a little box to hold our roll of toilet paper. I gathered buckets of berries: the sour salal and the hard little huckleberries.
    Frank didn’t thank me. He just dragged me into his schemes, his big plans that never worked out.
    “We’ll make an X in the clearing,” he said on our third morning. “We’ll make it so big they can see it from the space station.”
    We trudged up and down from the beach, dragging long chains of junk like old Jacob Marley’s ghost. We collected everything that was red, and we laid it out in the clearing. Frank stooped down and sighted along a stick to make sure our lines were straight. But on the first windy night, our X became a scattered sprawl of plastic bits. In a little fit, Frank kicked half the stuff back into the sea, and we never rebuilt the X.
    “We’ll build a raft and sail away.” That was his second plan, on the seventh day. He dreamed it up as the sun went down, and spent the whole night planning a great raft forty feet long. In the morning he sent me off to gather fishing floats, barrels and buckets. He took the knife and started slashing at the tangled ropes and fishing nets.
    For a while, I thought it might work. We had a small forest of logs, and more rope than we needed, and no end of things that floated. But every night the tide reached higher up the beach and stole our floats. Or the waves bashed our bundles into pieces. When Frank saw a smashed barrel tumbling in the morning surf, he looked frightened. I was sure he was somehow reliving our landing in Uncle Jack’s red boat. I actually saw him tremble before he noticed me watching. “What are you looking at, moron?” he said. That same day, he stopped work on the raft, and never started again.
    My notches on the wall spread toward the corner. Each marked another day of fishing at the pool, of hanging salmon up to dry, of arguing with Frank. Not one day was really happy, and one of the worst of all came on the morning when I went behind the bush we called our bathroom and discovered that Frank had used the last piece of toilet paper. Not even the cardboard tube was left. Not even the plastic bag. I had to squat with a fistful of leaves, and I felt like an animal.
    How we hated each other! I couldn’t stand Frank’s hair flicking, his pouting, his little laugh that made me feel so small. He
tried
to make me angry, refusing to talk about his life in the city or my uncle Jack. I sometimes thought he argued just to pass the time. He got mad when I made mistakes, when I put something down in the wrong place, when I didn’t answer fast enough. Sometimes he called me such awful names that I felt like crying.
    Frank still had the bed and the foam pad. It was the worst bed I’d ever seen, but I could hardly stand the thought that I had to sleep beside it, on the floor. I had to look up at him, while he looked down at me, and as long as he owned the bed he was in charge. If I wanted things to change, I would have to fight him for it, and I doubted I would win. He was too big and strong.
    On my half of the cabin I got the rickety table. On my half I got the fish. Another six or seven every day, they hung mostly on my side. I had to duck and weave to get around them.
    The only thing we shared was the flies. They filled the cabin as thick as raindrops, from tiny whining things to giant deerflies that could take a chunk out of a person’s flesh. They buzzed at my arms, at my neck and hair. I decided that flies were the most horrible things in Alaska, not counting Frank.
    On our thirteenth day in the cabin, the raven came back. I was sitting at sunset on the rocky point, hoping for a ship to come along, when I heard the peculiar whistle of his wings. I turned around to see him settling at the top of the skeleton tree, above the smallest coffin. He folded his wings and made a little croaking sound that I imagined was a raven’s way of saying hello.
    Hunched as he was,