They’d finished the book weeks before, so Jiselle started over again at the beginning.
That first night, there were sounds all around the house. Animals. And something else. Wind, but as if the wind were marching in circles.
“Jiselle, you need to sleep.”
The boy in the bed appeared to have been taken away and tossed back, bones beneath blankets. He did not open his eyes, and he’d eaten nothing—not a sip of water, not a cracker, not a spoonful of soup.
“Jiselle, what are we going to do?”
She closed the book.
In the morning she opened the door to the little shack, and the goose looked up.
Clearly, Beatrice had expected some animal other than Jiselle, bare-limbed, holding a long knife.
Did she understand that it was only a matter of time?
The path around the shack had been worn down to dirt, and now Jiselle knew what was making those tracks.
Had Beatrice also known? Was it why, before Jiselle cut the white throat, the goose let Jiselle gather her, stroke her pure and bristling neck, the gleaming wings, the elegant strangeness of the beak, and even closed her eyes as Jiselle drew the sharpened blade across the throat, and the blood poured over her bare arms and legs?
Afterward, Jiselle sat holding and rocking the beautiful goose in her arms.
Jiselle’s mother brought the kettle full of scalding water into the kitchen. “We had to do it,” she said, taking the bird out of Jiselle’s arms, plunging it into the water, going to work right away, hands coming up full of feathers, pulled off the body, tossed out the kitchen window and into the snow, “if it could save our little boy.”
It was clear to Jiselle, looking on, that this was something her mother had done a hundred times. Anna Petersen must have watched her own mother do it, and her father, and she had done it herself as a child on that farm, had done it in her dreams every night since then. She had, perhaps, been waiting her whole life, knowing that someday she would need to do it again.
Her mother boiled the goose soup in a pot that hung from the tripod Sam had made, and the whole house filled up with the warm smell of it, and then they brought a cup of the broth to Sam, who sat up long enough to take a sip of it, and then another.
Jiselle’s mother had given the feet and the bones to Jiselle, sifting them out of the pot with a slotted spoon, and Jiselle took those along with a handful of feathers back to the shack, and put them in the nest of Mark’s old uniforms, and left the door to Beatrice’s shack open behind her.
That night, while her mother sat with Sam, Jiselle sat on the deck in the moonlight, watching, wearing an old coat of Mark’s. She shivered as the snow fell around her, but she didn’t feel cold, breathing as quietly as she could until the sun began to rise and she finally saw the cougar slip through the hedge—slow and low on its sinewy haunches, with nightmarish glamour, an elegance made of stealth—to the shack, and as soon as Jiselle saw that the cat was there, inside, busy with the feet and the feathers, which it must have believed to be the goose that it had been stalking for so long, she leaped to her feet and ran across the backyard and into the Schmidts’ house, slamming and locking the door behind her.
“Jiselle,” her mother said, a hand to her chest, when she returned an hour later with the rifle. “You did it.”
The girls and her mother stood around Jiselle, running their hands down the gloss and wood.
“Thank God,” Sara said.
“Thank Jiselle!” Camilla said.
“It’s all I could find,” she said. “He didn’t have any food. Not even any water. All he had were boxes of seeds and ammunition and this.”
Another night passed, and then another.
“It’s not the flu,” her mother told Jiselle, standing in the threshold. “He’s sick, but not with that,” and Jiselle stood and went to her mother, put her arms around her, and sobbed into her shoulder for a little while, like a child.
On Christmas Eve, Sam drank a cup of mint tea in little sips on the couch beside the Christmas tree. Camilla sat at his feet, her hand on his knee. Sara fussed with the decorations.
Jiselle could do nothing but stand in a corner of the room and stare at the miracle of Sam. The December afternoon light shone through the window and over the snowy trees in the ravine, which seemed, also, to shine inward—breathing, botanical—with nearly unbearable brilliance. She went to the window and saw, for the first time, the potential beyond it. How little they might need that wasn’t there waiting for them.
There was wood to cut down, and in the spring there would be berries in the ravine. Now that Jiselle knew she could kill an animal, and that her mother could clean it and cook it, the world could start all over again, full of possibilities. The whole house seemed radiant with these possibilities. With the seeds she’d found in the Schmidts’ cellar, there would be vegetables, and with the rifle and the boxes of ammunition they would be able to hunt for small game and deer. Sara had found a handbook on the shelf, something of Mark’s, that explained the gutting and tanning of antelope. Surely a deer would be no different from an antelope. Only that morning, Sara had come into the kitchen with the hunting book open like a hymnal in her hands, and said, “It says here that it’s much less messy if you can string the antelope up, and bleed it before you clean it. See—”
She held up the book for Jiselle, open to an illustration of a man standing beside the carcass of an antelope hanging by its neck from the branch of a tree.
“Do we have any nylon rope, do you think, in the garage?” she asked.
Then Sara took Brad Schmidt’s rifle off the mantel and held it in her hands, weighing it.
“You’ll have to let me be in charge of this,” Sara said, “since we don’t have enough ammunition for target practice. I was the BB gun champion at Camp Newaygo three summers in a row. There isn’t anyone else here who can claim that, is there?”
Jiselle pretended to consider it, and then shook her head. “No,” she said.
The cougar had disappeared only two days before, and already the yard was full of rabbits again.
