Free Gone to the Forest: A Novel by Katie Kitamura Page B

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.

5
    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’sthings. 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.
    I N THE PAST two weeks Tom’s fear
     had grown as the valley recovered and the old man’s face grew quiet and watchful.
     The ash was cleared from the pastures and shoveled from the roofs of the houses. The
     natives hauled it away in wheelbarrows and made giant heaps on the edge of each village.
     Then the sky was clear and only the ash heaps stood like obscure markers to the
     storm.
    But on the farm: a record of ongoing catastrophe. When the fish began to
     float in the river, Tom saw the inverse to everything: the fishing, the food on the
     table, the money. Everything that had drawn the girl to them in the first place. The
     dreamlike arms and legs of the river farm, which sat useless in the water, corralling
     fish that were going nowhere. As the bodies gathered they added pressure and weight
     until the legs creaked and cracked and then broke.
    As soon as the ash stopped the old man sent the
     natives into the river to retrieve it. They listened to him give the order and stared
     into the water. They didn’t move. They stared at the mass of rotting flesh and
     turbid sludge. Then they looked at him as if to say: if that was what he ordered (it
     was). If that was what he wished (it was). They stripped down to the waist and stood on
     the banks of the river. They waited to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t
     and they tied cloths around their faces and dropped into the water.
    They began moving at once. Standing waist deep in the river, they used
     their hands to push the bobbing fish away. They moved in the direction of the river farm
     and then fanned out to circle the apparatus. Their faces impassive behind the cloths.
     Slowly they surrounded the apparatus and then reached for the legs, which were slippery
     with muck and rot. They turned to pull it toward land.
    The