The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [115]
3
46
Yesterday morning I left Esther resting on my cot and walked out into the swale to collect wood. She would not miss me, perhaps not even know I was gone. I chose a southerly trail and jumped through the brush and shittings until I found a nest of felled branches, then took my time striking them into pit-size pieces for burning.
It is late autumn, I think, three years since I dropped down the Jewish hole at Forsythe and made my escape back to the old hut, where the feed has long since snuffed out. The hut makes a small home for me now. The orange cable has gone cold.
I have not kept faith with the calendar. My timekeeping is promiscuous at best. Perhaps it’s already winter and the climate is only slow to frost.
I am not so troubled by the season; it’s the shrinking of light that gives concern. The darkness of this New York has grown more severe lately, blotting up from the soil before the sun has even withered off for the day. It’s a soaking darkness, cold on my body when it comes.
The pretext for my outing yesterday was wood, more fuel to warm our forest hut, but in truth I was looking for something else. Something that will help Esther. What I was seeking is small and it has a face and it breathes so prettily, in little wet gusts of air. Often it comes along willingly. It harbors a medicine inside its delicate chest.
One day, when Esther has healed, when she can sit up and see, when she can tolerate my presence as her caretaker and endure me, if silently, I would like to take her on a tour of this valley in the woods behind her old house.
I can show Esther where I kept watch of the quarantine for so many months, years, the bench I built into the mud, the blind of trees I thickened, branch by braided branch, so I would not be discovered. I can point to where I sat, mime how I looked out across the river until my face ached, hoping to see her behind the town gates.
A more difficult story to reveal to Esther will be how, when I first arrived home—if such a word can apply to our Jewish hut—I contemplated going into the old neighborhood after her. I weighed the risks, keeping her safety in mind, then finally decided against such an incursion. I knew Esther was inside the child barracks and close to a failed immunity—her age was simply no good anymore, and we all grow up to speechlessness now, don’t we?—and I knew she’d soon be released without any perilous invasion by me.
What’s the mime for such a rationalization? I would have saved you but I knew I didn’t really need to, since you were probably going to be released soon. My body lacks the finesse for that kind of message. Those contortions are beyond me. Instead I might stare into space and let Esther see—she’s a smart young woman—that the issue is pretty fucking complicated.
One might argue that, absent of speech, deprived of all communication, a father dissolves. The title finally expires, and the man probably follows. You don’t strip away a father’s title and expect the man to live. A former father is just a man who once had a duty to answer. Perhaps he can barely recall what that duty ever was. It nags at him as something he forgot to do, something he did only poorly. Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.
Perhaps it is better now to liken a father to an animal parent. Certain caretaking is observed, but when the offspring matures, alienation and estrangement set in. Rivalry. The youngster grows preternaturally angry at the father, for some reason angrier at the father than at any other creature, and the father opens a small hole in his chest to accommodate this anger, which flows in rapidly. An emotional ecology is observed, with the energy composted and renewed in the chest