I followed him up the narrow trail, now surrounded by hulking poplars, white oaks, and birches, trying to navigate my way through glittering virgin snow. Needles of hoarfrost hung from the trees and although the moonlit sky seemed tranquil, ice-covered branches stretched toward me with menacing claws. I tried to focus on the yellow beam of his flashlight, steadily bobbing up ahead. Sometimes, when the trail curved, I lost sight of him altogether. Once I crept around a corner only to find him halted just a few yards in front in me, his light trained on a giant pinecone trapped in a web of ice.
I told myself this was the same harmless forest I’d always known, that it was simply cloaked in a temporary disguise. Here was where our father once taught Nate and me to distinguish bull nettles from powder-puff lilies, to tell snakeberry from spider-wort. Here was where he’d warned us against the marbled brown mushrooms known as Devil’s Snuff Box that liked to hide under forest decay. “Don’t go eating those,” he said. “And don’t eat these either.” He’d lifted a spray of leaves, revealing a cluster of purplish fruit. “That’s pokeberries. Birds’ll eat them cause they can’t digest the poison, but you two aren’t birds. You won’t be so lucky.”
At last, he reached the spot where he must have been head- ed. We must have passed it a thousand times in previous hikes, but somehow I’d never noticed it before. Stranger yet, our father, who took pride in this mountain as if he’d built it himself, had never pointed it out: just a dozen or so yards off the trail, concealed by a cluster of loblolly pines, was the bald knob of rock in the photograph our mother had taken so long ago.
He climbed up on it. For a good while, he just sat hunched on that naked stone, peering out into the distance, holding himself perfectly still. Then, all at once, he sucked in a ragged chestful of air, as though the specter that haunted him had finally revealed itself in all its awful glory, ready to do the both of us in. Whatever he saw, I hoped our soldier father would charge it, or at least try to scare it off with a battle cry. But he didn’t. He just sat there, staring into his past or his future or some ghoulish mix of the two, lost in an inescapable grief.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College, Karen Tucker is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.