“I’ll take plain old nature with a minimum of the human element, thank you,” he was fond of saying.
But then he’d met Bets, and she restored his faith in humankind, or at least in womankind, and instead of the life he’d planned as a hermit bachelor, he became a family man. Still, he answered to no one (except, it was a known fact, Bets) and lived off the sea and the land for the most part, earning a decent living as a fisherman. They’d been able to transform the cabin into a real house, with huge windows facing the bay and Kenai Mountains. Bets had eased him into one compromise after the other over the years, first with a generator, and then, once Caboose Electric Association extended their service, real electricity, although they never did have central heating. She’d confided to Kache that it was next on her list, right before the Cessna crashed.
It made sense for homesteaders, like all farmers, to have large families to help with the work. But Lettie and A.R., and later Bets and Glenn, had only had two children. Fortunately, Denny, like his father Glenn before him, was able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had a hard time hiding just how much Kache let him down on a daily basis.
A bull moose plunged through the spruce trees, and Kache slowed to a stop and let it cross in front of him. Its long legs navigated the mud with each step before it disappeared into the alder bushes. Kache drove on and turned down their private road to the homestead. But he quickly pulled over. “Road” was an optimistic term. A churned up pathway of sludge obstructed by downed spruce and birch trunks and overgrown alders was more like it. He grabbed the flashlight, which was also optimistic, the light dim, the battery exhausted. Aunt Snag knew to keep the battery fresh, but Kache should have checked it before he left. He didn’t want to walk in the dark through moose and bear country at the onset of spring when the animals experienced the boldest of hunger pangs.
His cellphone was useless; no service. He should turn back. Get in the car and head into town and return tomorrow. But his dad, his mom, Denny—they seemed so close: a slap on his back, an arm around his shoulders, as certain as the cold on his feet, and he shivered from both. He smelled the fire from their woodstove, as if they kept it burning all these years. All around him they said his name in all its variations and tones, so achingly clear: “Kache, honey?” “Oh, Kaa-achemak, there’s my Widdle Brodder …” “Did you hear me, Son? Pay attention.” He heard their snow machines, though there wasn’t any snow, though there wasn’t any them. He didn’t believe in heaven, exactly, but this place was thick with recollections and maybe something more. If their spirits watched him, somehow, from somewhere, didn’t he want to prove he had become capable of more than any of them thought possible? But had he? No. A city boy number-cruncher-turned-couch-potato who wore pretty boots and forgot a decent flashlight would hardly invoke awe. Still. If they were waiting, they’d been waiting twenty years and he didn’t want to make them wait another day.
He made his way through the mud, tripping, sinking, until the full moon rose from behind the mountains. Like a helpful neighbor in the nick of time, it shined its generous gold light through the cobalt sky. A wolf howled, holding a single lonely note in the distance. The scent of spruce and mud and sea kept dredging up the imagined hint of smoke. All those scents had always come together here. Even in the summers, a fire burned in the woodstove.
Now Kache spotted the downed trees clearly without the flashlight, and he walked as quickly as his mud-soaked city boy boots would allow—until the last bend, where he stopped and readied himself for what lay ahead.
It was then, as he stood on the road that was no longer a road, breathing deep, heart hammering, that the realization jarred him. The familiar scent. The spruce, the soaked loamy earth, the sea; yes, yes, yes. But wood smoke? It was too strong, too distinct now, not merely his imagination. It was definitely the smell of wood burning, and coal too.
He edged around the last corner, saw the house through the boughs of spruce and naked birch and cottonwoods. It stood, not a dejected pile of logs, but tall and proud, glowing with warm light.
What?
Who?
Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer.
Kache stood, staring, the cold mud oozing into his boots and now through his socks. The house stared back as it always had in his mind, glowing with light and life in the middle of the cleared ten acres.
Who in the hell?
Sweating, watching, allowing for the strangest glimmer of hope. Maybe he really had been dreaming, really had been sleeping, and now that he’d finally awoken, life might resume as it had before? Maybe all and everyone had not been lost? Maybe only he had been lost.
In these last two minutes he felt more alive than he had in two decades. Maybe he’d been under some sort of spell, broken at last on this anniversary. His mom would love the mysticism and synchronicity of that.
He shook his head, boxed his own ears. What he needed was common sense. His dad would have reamed him for not grabbing Aunt Snag’s .22 that hung on the enclosed back porch. As much as Kache hated guns, never got himself to actually shoot one, he knew it was crazy to approach the house without carrying one, especially given the lights and smoke. His dad used to say it didn’t matter if you were far to the left of liberal, if you walked by yourself in the boondocks of Alaska, you should carry a gun.
His feet started moving forward anyway. Forward to his old house, his old room. Who in the hell?
Inside, a dog barked. A shadow passed by one of the windows. The shade went down, snapped up again, quick as a wink, then shut. The other shade went down. The soft light behind them off now, replaced with the dark he’d expected to find in the first place.
He pressed his back against the old storage barn, took deep breaths and tried to line up his thoughts, which kept ricocheting off each other. He should go back, return in daylight with the gun. Call Clemsky, Jack O’Connell, a few of the others. He licked his palm and made a small circle on the mud-covered window beside him. He peered in. It was dark, and he barely made out the outline of his dad’s Ford pickup. Aunt Snag had even left that, probably driven it home that day from where his dad had parked it by the runway. She should have used it. That would have meant something.
The dog was going nuts now, continuously barking. Kache pushed on the storage barn side door; it wasn’t locked, opened easily. Along the wall he felt for the shovel, the hoe, the rake. He decided on the sharp, stiff-bladed rake. Better than nothing.
Hovering behind a warped barrel, then a salmonberry bush, he tried the back door of the house, knowing it would be locked. He crept along to the first kitchen window, remembering. That window never did lock. He slid it open, pulled himself up on one knee, lowered the rake in first, then jumped down inside with a thud.
The barking stopped, became a whine and growl. He pictured a hand muzzled around the dog’s nose. Kache tried to make himself smaller by crouching, then slipping along the wall. The thought came to him: I am not the intruder here. This is my house. He’d forgotten, taken on the attitude of a thief instead of a protector, and now he stood straight with his rake, as if that would shift the perspective of whoever was upstairs, as if the moment was a black-ink silhouette that changed depending on how you looked at it.
The whining, the growling. Kache could smell his own nerves, so of course the dog could. He ran his hand along the blue-tiled kitchen counter, up to the light switch, flicked on the lights. Nothing had changed. As always the woodstove warmed the large living room, which had once held four rooms before his mom and dad remodeled. The same furniture stood in its assigned places. His mother’s paintings still hung heavily on the thick, chinked walls. Photos of the four of them, baby pictures, wedding pictures, Christmas pictures all lined the top of the piano. He ran his finger along the top; free of dust. Games and books crammed the shelves. Kache fingered the masking tape