The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil

Author:Josh Weil [Weil, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802188779
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

THE POINT

OF ROUGHNESS

I’m behind the barn, splitting burn wood, when I see the bear coming for our daughter. It’s December, dusk. At my back: high piles of cut rounds. Out in the field: the bucked trees stacked, their drag marks dark in all the snow, the pines looking almost black beyond. And between their trunks: a patch of true black moving. Everything else is still—the stone wall, the glass greenhouse, the sledding hill behind our home, packed hard by the weight of my wife and daughter gone down run after run—except a spot of orange: Orly in her snowsuit. Rolling snow boulders. Down by the old stone wall at the edge of the woods. Beneath the splitter’s rumble, the shaking of the pine boughs is a silent ripple washing steadily towards her.

For a second I can feel her in my hands—the heft of her when I first pick her up, my arms strained with her struggling—and then it’s just the log again and Orly is out there, suddenly standing straight up, staring into the trees. Her hands are bare—she will not suffer gloves, shucks mittens as soon as she thinks she’s out of sight—her fingers stained so bright by markers I can see them slowly curling towards her palms. She takes a snowsuit-stiffened step. Another. The first time we zipped her into the hunter’s camouflage, I crouched down, winked. Hey bub, I said, get me a beer, eh? Bess laughed. But Orly only asked, Who’s Bub? And when I poked her bright orange belly with a wriggly finger, my wife said Ev, the way I knew meant stop.

I shout it now—Stop!—I must—Orly!—because she goes still at the wall, small hands on the stones, standing on tiptoe, peering over. But in my ears there is no echo of my voice, only the thudding from the hog stall, the chugging of the splitter waiting for me to load another round. Move, I tell myself, run, can feel her grabbed away into my hug, her warmth close as I shush her, Bess glancing up, seeing us through the kitchen window … And I am grateful for the near dark that hides me still standing here. Loading the log. Cranking down the handle. There is something hypnotic about watching hydraulics work, the steel ram pushing the round, the first touch of the wedge, the slow cracking open of such a solid thing, and, anyway, it’s only a black bear, probably already gone.

They show up every spring, shaggy from sleep, coats loose on shoulder bones. Our first year here in these New England hills, one night at the almost end of winter, we stood at the bedroom window, watching them. Two cubs digging at the compost pile, jerking back from pawed puffs of heat, shaking their heads, pouncing on the fleeting steam. I looked at Bess—just that fall we’d faced it: my surety that I didn’t want to threaten what we had by having kids; her struggle with what it meant then to stay in love with me—but she was smiling, her laugh its own puff on the window.

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