Sukkwan Island: A Novella From Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

Author:David Vann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, General, Short Stories (single author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780062002112
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

At dinner, after dark, Jim ate alone. I don’t feel like company, he said aloud. Then he went for a walk in the woods.

Jim, Jim, Jim, he spoke out loud, you have to do something. You can’t just leave your son tied up in the sleeping bag and cooling in the bedroom. Roy needs a funeral. He needs to be buried. His mother and sister need to see him.

He hiked on some more, not bothering to duck much and getting scraped up a lot by small branches, one of his hands on fire from nettles. There was no moon or anything out, and he couldn’t see a damned thing.

As he talked, he imagined he was in a great room, at a trial, and these words were being spoken to him. He was sitting at a heavy desk and listening and couldn’t speak.

How was he tied up? someone was asking. Why did you tie up your son at the table? Did that make any sense at all? And what about the sleeping bag? Was that your idea, too? Have you been planning this for some time? Was that really what this whole trip was about? It could have been suicide, sure, but it could also have been murder.

This idea stopped him. He stood in place in the woods breathing hard and hearing nothing else and thinking that they could think that. How could he ever prove that he hadn’t shot his son himself? And now he’d run away, too, and broken into someone else’s place and was hiding out with the body. How could he possibly explain any of this?

Jim was scared now for himself, and turned around to hike back to the cabin, but he wasn’t sure which way it was. He hiked for over an hour, it seemed, and much farther than he had come, he was sure, and still he couldn’t see the cabin or anything familiar or really anything at all. He had just hiked out into the dark and not bothered to pay any attention to where he was going.

The ground was uneven and occasionally he fell through where the dead wood and undergrowth had built up and he was scraped from the sides and above. He had his arms out and head turned away and was walking sideways hoping just to find his way somehow and listening but hearing only himself and starting to feel very afraid of the woods, as if all he had done wrong had somehow gathered here and was out to get him. He knew that didn’t make any sense and that scared him more, because it felt so real anyway. He seemed impossibly small and about to be broken.

He stopped periodically and tried to stand still and be quiet and listen. He was trying to hear what way to go, or because that didn’t make any sense, maybe trying to hear what was after him. Up through the trees, he could see a few faint stars much later, after the sky had cleared some.

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