Finch carefully opens the pocketknife and uses it to skin pieces of bark from the twigs, her hands steady and sure. She gets the twine I laid on the porch and begins wrapping it round and round in an X to tie the two pieces of wood together. I pick up an armload of wood and carry it to the porch. Since the woodstove is not only our source of heat but also our means of preparing food, we use it every day. Which means we go through a lot of wood.
Finch finishes the cross and takes it out back to where we buried Susanna. I hear her pounding it into the ground and sneak a look around the corner to see her kneeling and using a rock. Walt Whitman brushes against her back, wandering back and forth. The cross leans and she adjusts and pounds some more. I could offer to help her, but I’ve always been of the mind that my daughter should grow up to be independent and resourceful, because you never know what life might decide to throw at you. Finch is both. Besides, she would resent my offering, anyway, and she wouldn’t like it if I were spying on her, either.
At last she is satisfied. I duck behind the corner and get back to splitting wood and Finch soon comes around the front. She marches into the house, and comes out with her journal, a gift from Jake, a space where she draws and takes note of all her findings in the woods. There’s a pocket in the back where she keeps things. Pressed flowers, uncommon feathers. Her slingshot is tucked under her arm.
“Walt and me are gonna scout a little,” she says.
I nod. “Where you headed?”
She points to her left. “East.”
About a year ago I began letting her roam a bit. I still get a little nervous when she does, but she was getting antsy, pent up here all the time, watching and helping, and I felt guilty for limiting her so much. I figure a little bit of freedom—I can give that to her. She scouts the ground, looking for tracks; tucks herself down and sits real still until the critters come in. And they do. Her preternatural ability to be quiet, hide. Not sure I could find her myself if she ever decided to put me to the test. She knows the tracks of every animal that comes through here. Knows their trails, which way they move, where they bed. Knows the calls of the birds. She knows the woods just as well as I do, and she never goes far. I’ve made sure she understands: she cannot wander off.
I split the wood into quarters and leave them in a heap for Finch to cut into smaller pieces for kindling, which work well to get the fire hot quick on cold mornings. Then I move on to the bigger stuff. Overnighters, I call them: thick slabs of hardwood that I bank the fire with at bedtime.
After a while, I hear the call of a whip-poor-will: a means of communicating in the woods without hollering. I look for Finch, echo the sound. She glides into the yard with her journal in one hand and her slingshot in the other, and I take a good look at her, gangly and tall, all arms and legs. Her pants, which she has worn since last year, fall inches above her ankles.
“Well?”
“Three gray squirrels. A tufted titmouse and a pileated woodpecker.”
“Worthwhile trip, then.”
“The woodpecker’s working on a red oak, about a hundred yards up the hill.” She points. “The tree’s dead. We could use it for firewood.”
“Good find,” I tell her.
She fiddles with her pencil. “That was something, wasn’t it, Cooper? Driving on that big road to Walmart. Trucking along, the trees and cars racing past. It was like flying.”
I murmur an agreement.
“The gas station, all those houses, the things in people’s yards.” She climbs on top of a log, rocking back and forth, balancing. “And there’s more, I’m sure of it. There’s a whole world out there, Cooper.”
* * *
Dollhouses. Libraries. School lunches on those melamine trays. Funnel cakes and Ferris wheels. Swimming pools: the smell of chlorine in your hair, those white chairs that hue with mildew. Saturday-morning cartoons. Riding a school bus. Telephones: the comfort of hearing someone’s voice who is far away. Airplanes, the miracle of flight. The ocean. Crushes. Sleepovers with friends. Back-to-school shopping. Playing dress-up. Getting a driver’s license. Bowling alleys. Ice cream, hand-dipped. Sharing secrets with a best friend. Proms. Field trips. Movie theaters. Walmart.
I know the list. The many things Finch is missing out on, based on my decision to bring us here. I’m well aware that there are things that she will simply not have, some of which are rather significant. And sure, there are times when I question whether it’s fair to raise a child without certain facets of life that people consider to be central to an American childhood. Whether my own troubles have been forced upon her, whether, one day, she’ll resent that. What I rest on, though, what keeps me from getting too tangled up in feeling bad about it, is that this life I am giving her—it’s not conventional, but at its core, it’s a good life. Wholesome. In terms of basic necessities, she lacks nothing. She’s cared for. Loved.