He barked again, and again was answered by only silence. If this was a new game, he did not like it.
He picked up the toy soldier and began to retrace his trail. As he loped out of the woods, a jay streaked in above him, shrieking. The fox froze, torn.
His boy was waiting to play the game. But birds! Hours upon hours he had watched birds from his pen, quivering at the sight of them slicing the sky as recklessly as the lightning he often saw on summer evenings. The freedom of their flights always mesmerised him.
The jay called again, deeper in the forest now, but answered by a chorus of reply. For one more moment the fox hesitated, peering into the trees for another sight of the electric-blue wedge.
And then, behind him, he heard a car door slam shut, and then another. He bounded at full speed, heedless of the briars that tore at his cheeks. The car’s engine roared to life, and the fox skidded to a stop at the edge of the road.
His boy rolled the window down and reached his arms out. And as the car sped away in a pelting spray of gravel, the father cried out the boy’s name, “Peter!” And the boy cried out the only other name the fox knew.
“Pax!”
“So there were lots of them.”
Peter heard how stupid it sounded, but he couldn’t help repeating it. “Lots.” He plowed his fingers through the heap of plastic soldiers in the battered cookie tin – identical except for their poses: standing, kneeling, and prone, all with rifles pressed hard to their olive-green cheeks. “I always thought he just had the one.”
“No. I was always stepping on them. He must have had hundreds. A whole army of them.” The grandfather laughed at his own accidental joke, but Peter didn’t. He turned his head and looked intently out the window, as if he had just caught sight of something in the darkening back yard. He raised a hand to draw his knuckles up his jaw line, exactly the way his father rasped his beard stubble, and wiped surreptitiously at the tears that had brimmed. What kind of a baby cried about something like this?
And why was he crying at all, anyway? He was twelve and he hadn’t cried for years, not even when he’d fractured his thumb bare-handing Josh Hourihan’s pop fly. That had hurt a lot, but he’d only cursed through the pain waiting with the coach for X-rays. Man up. But today, twice.
Peter lifted a soldier from the tin and drifted back to the day he’d found one just like it in his father’s desk. “What’s this?” he’d asked, holding it up.
Peter’s father had reached over and taken it, his face softening. “Huh. Been a long time. That was my favourite toy when I was a kid.”
“Can I have it?”
His dad had tossed the soldier back. “Sure.”
Peter had stood it up on the windowsill beside his bed, pointing the little plastic rifle out in a satisfying show of defence. But within the hour Pax had swiped it, which made Peter laugh – just like him, Pax had to have it.
Peter dropped the toy back into the tin and was about to snap the lid back on when he noticed the edge of a yellowed photo sticking up from the mound of soldiers.
He tugged it free. His dad, at maybe ten or eleven, with one arm draped around a dog. Looked like part-collie, part-a-hundred-other-things. Looked like a good dog, the kind you would tell your own son about. “I never knew Dad had a dog,” he said, passing the photo to his grandfather.
“That’s Duke. Dumbest creature ever born, always underfoot.” The old man looked more closely at the picture, and then over at Peter as if seeing something for the first time. “You’ve got the same black hair as your dad.” He rubbed at the fringe of grey fuzz banding the top of his head. “I had it too, way back. And look, he was scrawny then, too, same as you, same as me, with those ears like a jug. The men in our family – I guess our apples don’t fall far from the tree, eh?”
“No, sir.” Peter forced a small smile, but it didn’t hold up. “Underfoot.” That was the word Peter’s father had used. “He can’t have that fox underfoot. He doesn’t move as fast as he used to. You stay out of the way, too. He’s not used to having a kid around.”
“You know, war came and I went and served, like my father. Like your father now. Duty calls, and we answer in this family. No, sir, our apples don’t fall far from the tree.” He handed back the photo. “Your father and that dog. They were inseparable. I’d almost forgotten.”
Peter put the photo back into the tin and pressed the lid down tight, then slid it under the bed, where he’d found it. He looked out the window again. He couldn’t risk talking about pets right now. He didn’t want to hear about duty. And he sure didn’t want to hear any more about apples and the trees they were stuck underneath. “What time does school start here?” he asked, not turning round.
“Eight. They said to show up early, introduce yourself to the homeroom teacher. Mrs. Mirez, or Ramirez … something. I got you some supplies.” The old man nodded over to a spiral notebook, a beat-up thermos, and a bunch of stubby pencils bundled together with a thick rubber band.
Peter walked over to the desk and put everything into his rucksack. “Thanks. Bus or walk?”
“Walk. Your father went to that school, and he walked. Follow Ash to the end, turn right on School Street, and you’ll see it – big brick building. School Street – get it? You leave by seven thirty, you’ll have plenty of time.”
Peter nodded. He wanted to be left alone. “Okay. I’m all set. I guess I’ll go to bed.”
“Good,” his grandfather replied, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice. He left, closing the door behind him firmly as if to say, You can have this room, but the rest of the house is mine.
Peter stood by the door and listened to him walk away. After a minute, he heard the sound of dishes clattering in the sink. He pictured his grandfather in the cramped kitchen where they’d eaten their silent dinner of stew, the kitchen that reeked so strongly of fried onions that Peter figured the smell would outlive his grandfather. After a hundred years of scrubbing by a dozen different families, this house would probably still smell bitter.
Peter heard his grandfather shuffle back along the hall to his bedroom, and then the low spark as the television caught, the volume turned down, an agitated news commentator barely audible. Only then did he toe off his trainers and lie down on the narrow bed.
Six months – maybe more – of living here with his grandfather, who always seemed on the verge of blowing up. “What’s he always so mad about, anyway?” Peter had asked his father once, years ago.
“Everything. Life,” his father had answered. “He got worse after your grandmother died.”
After his own mother had died, Peter had watched his father anxiously. At first, there had just been a frightening silence. But gradually his face had hardened into the permanent threat of a scowl, and
