Chapter 5 - The Geography of the Park
The car was silent for four miles.
The heater in the Civic took ten minutes to clear the frost from the bottom corners of the windshield, the fan clicking with a dry, rhythmic ticking—tick-tick-tick—that sounded like an old watch running down in an empty room.
Noah sat in his booster seat behind me, his hands resting flat on the plastic lid of his yellow tackle box. Ellie was asleep already, her thumb tucked into her mouth, her four-year-old body exhausted by the sheer atmospheric violence of the hallway we had just escaped.
Emma sat in the passenger seat.
She had the white bakery box on her lap, her fingers curled around the twine that secured the cardboard flaps. Her knuckles were red from the cold air, but her profile was like an iron silhouette against the gray fields of wheat stubble that flanked the county two-lane.
"Where are we going?" she asked quietly.
She didn't ask why we had left. She didn't ask if we should have stayed for the pizza. She knew the answer to those questions before we had even crossed the cattle guard at the section line.
I looked in the rearview mirror.
Noah was watching the telephone poles go by. Each pole carried a cross-arm with three glass insulators that caught the gray light from the clouds like pale green eyes.
"Noah," I said.
He didn't move his head, but his eyes lifted to the mirror.
"Yeah, Dad?"
"Do you know where the big timber is down by the river?"
A tiny hitch occurred in his throat—not a sob, just a small, sharp catch of the breath.
"The place with the stone tables?" he asked.
"The place with the stone tables," I said. "And the big fireplace where the CCC boys built the chimney out of creek limestone seventy years ago."
"It’s cold out, Dad," he said. His voice was very small, very practical, the voice of a boy who had already learned to expect that circumstances would not accommodate his comfort. "The wind is blowing the leaves off the willows."
"We’ve got the flannel blanket from the back," I told him. "We’ve got two thermoses of hot cider that your mother made yesterday. And we’ve got forty-eight wooden matches in the glove box."
I turned the wheel.
The Civic dropped off the state highway onto the washboard gravel of the river road, the stones rattling against the floorboards with a sharp, hollow chatter: clatter-clank-clatter.
Lake Thunderbird State Park in late October does not look like a place for a party.
The tourists from Oklahoma City have been gone since Labor Day. The boat ramps are cracked, gray concrete slabs descending into dark green water that smells of dried hydrilla and silt. The picnic shelters—built of massive, rough-hewn cedar posts and native sandstone during the Great Depression—sit among the blackjack oaks like abandoned chapels, their concrete floors covered in a drift of red and yellow leaves that have curled into dry cups under the frost.
We pulled up to Shelter Number Four.
It sat on a limestone bluff forty feet above the water, facing the north wind, surrounded by five ancient post oaks whose branches were bare against the iron sky.
Emma got out first.
She didn't hesitate. She grabbed the red wool blanket from the hatchback, carried it to the stone table nearest the hearth, and spread it across the rough concrete with two quick, efficient snaps of her wrists.
I took the hatchet from under the spare tire.
Behind the shelter, stacked beneath the eaves where the park rangers had left it for the winter, was a cord of seasoned blackjack oak. It was dry, black-barked timber, split two seasons ago, smelling of tannin, smoke, and old earth.
I didn't use kindling.
I took three dry oak leaves, crushed them in my palm until they were powder, and laid them on the hearthstone beneath three thin splinters of cedar I shaved from the edge of a picnic bench with my pocketknife.
Strike.
The first match flared blue, then bright, sulfurous yellow.
The cedar caught with a soft, hissing crackle.
Within five minutes, the limestone fireplace was drawing. The draft pulled the flame up into the sixty-foot chimney with a deep, hollow thrum that vibrated through the stone hearth like an engine idling in the bilge of a tugboat. The heat didn't radiate far into the cold shelter, but if you stood within three feet of the opening, the air smelled of sweet oak smoke and hot rock, clean and ancient and entirely free of pink streamers.
Emma brought the cake.
She set it in the center of the wool blanket.
It was not a commercial cake.
It was eight inches across, three layers of dark chocolate sponge filled with homemade blackberry preserves that Emma’s aunt had canned in Arkansas two summers ago. The frosting was not neon pink; it was a deep, earthy moss-green, textured with the flat of an offset spatula to look like the scales of an ancient reptile.
Across the top, molded out of tinted almond paste with two tiny chocolate-chip eyes, sat a three-inch parasaurolophus, its long curved crest arching gracefully over seven small, yellow beeswax candles.
Noah stood by the edge of the stone table.
He had taken off his mittens. His fingers were tucked into the pockets of his corduroys, his shoulders still hunched slightly, his eyes fixed on the green almond-paste dinosaur.
"Noah," Emma said softly, sitting down on the bench and pulling him between her knees. "Come here, baby."
He went.
He didn't lean his head against her chest this time; he stood between her thighs, his hands coming out of his pockets to rest on her denim-clad knees, looking at the cake as if it might disappear if he blinked too hard.
"Is this the one from the book?" he asked.
"Page forty-two," Emma said, kissing the cold crown of his head. "The one that lived by the big swamp."
I took the matches from my pocket.
One by one, I touched the flame to the cotton wicks of the seven beeswax candles.
They didn't burn with the smoky, sputtering glare of cheap birthday paraffin. They burned with small, clear, tear-shaped flames of pure gold, the scent of warm honey rising from the wicks to mix with the smell of the oak smoke from the hearth.
The wind howled through the post oaks above the shelter, tearing twenty red leaves from the highest branches and sending them skittering across the concrete floor like small, frightened crabs.
A single leaf—a five-pointed star of scarlet oak—landed on the wool blanket two inches from the cake.
Noah looked at the leaf.
Then he looked at the seven flames.
"Dad?" he said.
"Yeah, Noah?"
"Is Grandma still mad at us?"
I sat down on the stone bench beside Emma.
I reached out and took his small, cold hand in mine, feeling the dry calluses on his knuckles from the monkey bars, feeling the pulse that beat in his wrist—strong, steady, seven years old, and completely innocent of the crimes that had been committed in that faux-mahogany foyer.
"It doesn't matter if she’s mad, Noah," I said.
He looked at me with his grandfather’s hazel eyes, but there was no bifocal glass between us, no television playing a football game, no ledger being kept on the kitchen counter.
"Why doesn't it matter?" he whispered.
"Because," I told him, leaning forward until my face was three inches from his, "we don't live in that house anymore."
He thought about that for five seconds.
The wind made the seven beeswax flames bend toward the south, their tips flickering against the green frosting, but they didn't go out. They held their ground against the draft, burning clean and bright in the middle of Shelter Number Four, forty feet above the cold green water of the lake.
"Okay," Noah said.
He took a deep breath.
His little chest expanded under the heather-gray shirt, the emerald parasaurolophus stretching across his ribs as he filled his lungs with the cold, clean air of the river bottom—air that smelled of oak leaves, river silt, and woodsmoke.
May you like
He blew.
All seven flames died together with a soft, collective whuff, leaving seven thin threads of white smoke that rose straight up toward the rough cedar rafters, caught the draft from the limestone chimney, and disappeared into the high Oklahoma sky.
