When Catherine’s father was a young man of twenty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart stop. When he was an older man of thirty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart melt. When he looked into the face of his small daughter she made him feel the older love that was characterized less by desire than the beauty of sorrow. In this way he might have been of the Orient. In the evening, after he’d hunted the family’s food or chopped it from trees, he took Catherine in a small canoe on the river where she sat between his knees with her back to his belly and he pointed out to her the visions of the forest. They paddled among a hundred green clouds hanging from the branches that crossed the water; these clouds were like the snow walls of northern countries which formed long spiraling mazes. Corridors of the river, framed by the green wet walls, hurtled off in wrong directions. Her father knew no wrong directions. Her father knew the mazes of the river as he knew the mazes of the trees. At dusk he knew the mazes of the sky as he knew the mazes of the river. His breath in her hair was as calm and steady as the current and left a small bright trail in the twilight, so clear that when they turned back Catherine could navigate the way, following her father’s breath faultlessly and certainly home.
One day out on the water, right before the sun fainted into dark, her father picked her up to gaze over the side of the boat. There, for the first time, she saw her own face. She thought that it was a strange and marvelous watercreature, like the roots of trees with pink mouths off the coast of England or the fish that dead men watched in the dirt. Had her father looked over the side of the boat with her, she might have understood it was her face. Rather she grew up believing that this creature accompanied her wherever she went, that she could call to it in her mind and see it by her side when she walked along beaches. She claimed it for her pet. She threw it food it never ate, and when she tried to catch it, it swam from her so fast it seemed to vanish at her touch.
Their part of the forest, sitting as it did at the mouth of the sea, became a burial ground for ships, the Crowd waking each dawn to another skeleton caught among the trees. Usually no crew, or only the remnants of one, was to be found. The Crowd picked their way among each disaster with hard-headed consideration for what was of use. If there was food it was eaten and if there were clothes they were worn. The Crowd would not have objected to the honor of being deemed scavengers. They did, however, become impatient with the clutter of the boats themselves: only so much rubble of so many decks and cabins and cavernous husks could be absorbed into the thicket of the wilderness. They pushed the boats out to sea only to watch the water bring them back. Soon each tree in the village became a boat unto itself, draped in the cloth of sails and terraced with the plains of thirty bows. Sometimes on the high branch of a tall tree Catherine thought she might sail the whole forest somewhere east and north, where the mazes had walls that dwarfed the trees, and separate rooms for day and night.
By the time Catherine was twelve her father had come to believe she would never stop the hearts of men. She would in time, he believed, melt the hearts of men as she melted his, but by then he’d be gone. He laughed in relief at this, since it meant he wouldn’t lose her, and then he cried at his own selfishness, because it meant she would never be happy. That she was so composed and resolute as to survive unhappiness would not make the unhappiness any less. At any rate, as it happened her father was wrong, though he would never know it. He reached his conclusion and confirmed it to himself over the next five years of her adolescence, because her body, while strong and self-sufficient, was without the voluptuous gifts young men valued. So the boys of the Crowd pursued other girls while Catherine with her straight solid form watched alone. She was too proud, even at sixteen, to rage at the betrayal of her breasts.
They did not see her face.
They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. Her father saw her face for the first time the winter she was eighteen; for eighteen years he’d loved her face because it belonged to her. But he’d never seen it as something separate from her.
A terrible rain came lashing the forest and he took refuge after a wild night with the Crowd of setting floating bonfires to sea. In the distance a huge black ship battled through the deluge. A huge black ship battles through the deluge, he told his wife under shelter, a ship huger and blacker than we can know. One overpowering wave and the ship will come overpowering us like our own shadow gone monstrous: one ship too many for a forest of ships. He turned to look out at the bonfires sent floating out to sea to ward off the ship and now saw only sizzling embers doused in
