Chapter 19 Remembrances
It has taken me two months to write this entry. As a best practice, I prefer to write these accounts when the event is fresher in my memory. Still, I needed the time I needed.
I suspect no one who reads this will have met my apprentice, Mr. Green. I myself knew him a terribly short time and that time was marked by a string of tragedies. I have detailed those events in previous entries.
A tragic loss is like a lightning strike.
In the moment, it is too fast to process with anything beyond instinctual reaction.
It is too bright and sudden and absolute.
It is a flash and then an emptiness. The real tragedy comes home to us as thunder, rumbling across the distance, that terrible roar of expanding air that shakes the world.
The crack. The flash. These are just the birth of a new sorrow.
The aftermath is what haunts and harms most acutely.
That thunder can roll on for a lifetime. Sometimes, more than one.
I shall say that it speaks well of Mr. Green that the first rumble which followed his loss was, most of all, the rumble of kindness.
There was an outcry of grief from those few here who knew him.
There was a deluge of support from the cryptonaturalist community.
Seven colleagues responded to Ms. Rodriguez’s thoughtful and presumptuous broadcast asking for help on my behalf. They arrived early the next morning.
They were:
Juniper Gray
Max Dean
Laksha Patel
Angela Hall
Cat Stone
Jake Threepwood
Willow Armstrong
It was a large gathering by cryptonaturalist standards, though I was hardly in any condition to receive them.
They were well-meaning and I was not hospitable.
Max Dean broke the lock on my crawler tunnel shed when he arrived from Chicago and Jake Threepwood infuriated me by being both far too ill to travel and utterly unwilling to explain how he got here, but all of that aside, it was still good to see them. In retrospect, if not in the moment.
My injuries were grim. The past two months have been a painful process of sloughing skin and endless wound care.
My face, hands, and feet are still a patchwork of raw pink and something resembling reptile molt.
Still, I am sensible enough to feel fortunate.
My body is healing faster and more completely than I had any right to expect.
The Tree of Swans continues to shape my physiology in unpredictable ways.
Though on the morning I limped back into camp with the aid of three teenagers, I was not ready to feel fortunate.
The end of the glass fawn’s influence made healing possible.
Yet, in the short term, the victory seemed primarily to make space for physical and emotional agony.
The dead remained dead. The lost remained lost. Injuries were still injuries.
Even so, our world continued intact, and I thought it a miracle that the young people who accompanied me sustained only superficial damage.
Their psychological burdens may be a different matter.
Ms. Dancer was kind enough to summon an ambulance and deal with questions. I shunned medical care and the complications that would have accompanied it, but I paid a high price of pain and doubt for that decision.
The community members who arrived did the circuitous things people do to show support for a person in a time of suffering and mourning. They cleaned. They made too much food. They endured strained silences to keep me in close proximity to warm bodies.
At some point in my long life, I acquired the ability to shut down sadness when I chose.
At some point later, I acquired the wisdom to realize that sadness has its place and purpose.
What is there to say about Mr. Green?
What is there to say about his actions?
He sacrificed himself to save others. To save me. To save a knot of locals he barely knew and an untold number of strangers he would never meet.
His principles were stronger than his instinct for self-preservation. He picked up the glass fawn, stepped through the Hole in Nothing, and was gone.
The hole vanished with him. Nothing reemerged.
The horned wolf, Catskill, he called it, howled like the north wind, like a wounded thing, and leapt off into the night. I felt the earth tremble at that sound. Imagining what such a creature does in its grief is beyond me. I will not guess.
Perhaps Green lives on in some unknowable way. If I had anticipated events, I could have better prepared him.
Useless thoughts.
Clara and I still suspect that, eventually, his atoms must return to this dimension, though that process may take a decade or it may take a thousand years of slow osmosis through the walls of our reality.
Yet, with the hole closed, even that small comfort may only be wishful thinking.
I doubt we can begin to conceptualize the number of variables involved.
It is also possible his remains have already returned, nourishing the cycle of living things, a part of the wholeness of nature. Such thoughts carry a kind of comfort for me. Would they have comforted him, I wonder?
My worst fear is that, in carrying the fawn through the hole, Green could have been fully torn away from our version of reality, where we may take for granted such comforts as change or sleep or even our cycles of life and death. I try not to dwell on that fear.
I find myself cherishing a sentimental hope that, if nothing else, his dust returns to these mountains.
I want him to be a part of this landscape, this beautiful place that he should have absorbed into his heart over slow years of learning.
I want that old wolf who guards this region to know that his human ally has come home to rest.
Fanciful thinking, I know. Something about him encourages that sort of whimsicality. It is difficult to put my finger on precisely why.
I honored Mr. Green’s final request, planting his acorn in the center of his campsite. I caged it off from questing squirrels and I can scarcely walk past without checking on its safety.
I paid Ms. Dancer to keep his camp unoccupied, more of a symbolic gesture than a real practical necessity.
Now, his hateful vehicle can sit there in peace, no doubt becoming a nesting place for mice now and wasps in the spring.
Already, the car has gained a respectable coating of leaves and twigs.
Someone tucked a king of clubs playing card beneath one windshield wiper. I cannot guess why.
Ms. Dancer was eager to learn the significance of the caged acorn and I answered her questions. On one frosty morning a few days ago, I caught her sipping from her thermos and talking to it. I believe she was complimenting the sunrise.
I looked in on Alf and Jerome at the Count and Countess gas station last week.
How I do loathe that awful place. They were surprisingly well and cheerful.
They both had visible discoloration on the tips of their noses, ears, and fingers that I expect will take many months of healing, though I don’t think they will scar.
I am told the young woman Casper had similar injuries.
I did not express to them my thought that it is surpassingly strange any of them survived their encounter with the fawn.
Naturally, our conversation turned to Mr. Green and the quiet young man, Jerome, asked if I thought it was odd to miss someone you barely knew.
I told him, “No.”
I do not think it odd at all.
I offered Alf and Jerome the same comfort I offer to myself, the knowledge that Mr. Green achieved precisely what he set out to do. He left his old life far, far behind. He found something meaningful in the woods. He did something worth doing with his time here.
You might assume that losses like this are easier after centuries of living and countless such wounds on my heart.
I wish it were so.
V. Blackwood: Journal 516, PG 101
It is March 12th and the heavy snows of this winter have melted from all but the most shaded hollows. The mountains are muddy and disheveled. Here, a hanging limb broken in the January ice storm. There, a temporary stream of snowmelt carving a trench in the soft topsoil along Moss Man’s Row.
There is a fresh smell in the air and the pregnant quiet of a deep breath before a song. The sap is rising. We are at the tail end of maple syrup season and many heavy buckets have visited the sugar shacks and the low, boiling fires. The woods are waking up.
Now it’s maple sap. Soon it will be spring beauties. Jack-in-the-pulpit. May apples. The whole green cacophony that feels impossible in early March and inexorable by mid-April.
One awakening is particularly pleasant to me this morning.
The acorn I planted at Mr. Green’s campsite has germinated.
I checked the cage just after dawn and there it was, a scruffy sprout that will be a spread of small oak leaves in a few weeks. That little banner of growth suggests that the seedling’s taproot is already sunk deep. It is good. I may trim back the surrounding canopy to ensure plenty of sun.
Come autumn, it will be a foot tall.
Twenty autumns later, perhaps forty feet.
Today, it is a small thing, a token thing. It feels like a large victory.
I pointed the seedling out to Ms. Dancer and she fussed over it as if I had shown her pictures of a new baby. She may always be counted upon for enthusiasm. I suggested that if she insisted on watering it with sassafras tea, that it should at least be cooled first.
“Of course I cool it first,” she said.
When the snows were a white vastness that grants even our simple, human eyes something akin to real night vision, I thought I saw the horned wolf pacing around Mr. Green’s campsite. I suspect it allowed me to see it, though I cannot guess its purpose. There were no tracks the next morning.
Some of my colleagues have asked if I will turn toward a special emphasis on studying the horned wolf, a new and largely unknown cryptid, no doubt an important strand in the web of global cryptoecology. It is certainly a rich avenue of inquiry.
The answer is no.
That line of study strikes me as simultaneously impolite and rather unlikely to yield much new data.
I have roved above and below these mountains for more than a century and had never heard so much as a rumor of the horned wolf prior to Mr. Green’s arrival.
There are many worthy aspects of nature that simply will not humor methodical observation. I have made peace with this.
However, I often tell the askers that I am considering such a study, if only to fend off other researchers for now. Not that the wolf needs my protection. If it does not want to be found, I have complete faith that it will be so.
How humbling is nature? How many lives could you spend studying a single tree and still feel yourself a neophyte in the school of its character? What a gift it is to know that the ship of our curiosity will never run aground in the seas of Earth’s mysteries.
V. Blackwood: Journal 516, PG 165
There are many dates that loom large in my mind. Scores of births and deaths. Scores of victories and defeats. Things as trivial as the first time I saw a movie—June 22nd, 1922. Things as distasteful as the first time I was shot—December 13th, 1754.
I was beginning to think most of the dates on the calendar had become significant for one or more noteworthy memories, but October 3rd was not one of them until last year.
A year ago to the day of this writing.
It is a cliché, but it is hard to believe he has been gone a year.
I thank time for numbing pain. I curse time for numbing pain. In all my years of life, I have not decided if the human brain is meant to manufacture contradiction or if contradiction is merely the by-product from other vital processes. The results are the same.
Tonight, I have invited Ms. Dancer to the cabin to share cheese on toast with me in remembrance of the lost. I will drink wine. I will indulge in maudlin frivolity. I will not write about it here.
I have business to attend to before this evening.
There is always more to do and somehow we must honor the parts of us that deserve to mourn the past while also honoring our drive to build a worthy future. Somewhere between those opposing weather fronts is the storm of my present thoughts.
I must return to work.
Today is for the future.
Tonight is for the past.
The present takes care of itself.