The Cabin

(Copyright © 2008 by John E. Simpson)

I ask your forgiveness.

So read the first note which Sprouls found in the little cabin. Just that one handwritten sentence, the wording curiously old-fashioned — none of the contemporary polite-imperative please-forgive-me variations, no I’m sorry with the forced informality of a contraction. Simple, declarative, stating of fact, hoping for resolution.

Sprouls had been stuck here for two nights and three days so far, as the snow blew up against the window panes and the wind howled and forced its way in little stabbing needles through unseen crevices in the walls, between the bricks of the chimney, penetrating the fibers and polyester fill of his cheap sleeping bag. The cabin had appeared out of the whiteness like a drab epiphany. The BVM in a piece of toast. The spinning lights in a night sky. The cabin in the blizzard. Vacant, unheated until he got the fire going. Canned food. No water, but he needed none as such: he just opened the front door and carved out a potful of snow, bringing it back into the sixty-degree interior. Leave a little unmelted if he just needed to drink, bring it to a boil if it was coffee or soup time.

He had no idea why he’d agreed to the wilderness trek in the first place. Ginny, his daughter, had certainly tried her damnedest to talk him out of it. (“For heaven’s sake, Dad, you’re forty-three years old!” “Yeah, I am. And I thought you were eighteen,” he’d said, sarcastically. “Maybe I was wrong. What are you, a helpless infant?”)

And their boss, Templeton, had hit the roof. Not satisfied at all with Sprouls’s suggestion: “Just tell the clients all four of us are off at a convention someplace.” Not satisfied, heh, more like ceiling-high pissed off.

Four of them when they’d set out, anyhow. Only Sprouls himself left now and maybe, maybe one other — Evan, if anybody, whose showy muscles and wind-beaten leather complexion asserted his fitness for outdoor life. But the last time Sprouls had seen Evan, the rugged jackass was tumbling out of sight off the edge of a plateau some thirty yards distant, shouting and pinwheeling, a blur of limbs and snow.

Even less than he understood why he was here in the first place, though, Sprouls did not understand here itself.

The maps — gone with Evan — had said to expect nothing here, nothing at all. The Jeep was parked way back in the little turnout where the copter had picked them up and dropped them sixteen miles deep into the badlands; nothing at all man-made was supposed to exist between the drop point and the Jeep. No roads. No 7-11s or Wal-Marts, no schools or industrial parks or fountains or sundials or For Sale signs. Not a single housing development, not a single house, not even a vacant cabin.

Let alone a vacant cabin stocked with firewood, canned and freeze-dried food, a plain bedframe and thin mattress, and a dozen handwritten notes.

Sprouls appreciated the notes, he really did. He hadn’t thought to bring books or magazines — too much superfluous weight to lug around (even if the giant stormfront hadn’t unexpectedly entered the picture). Evan had brought a deck of cards but hadn’t — the (ha ha) selfish bastard — hadn’t even tried to toss it to Sprouls as he went over the edge.

So the notes gave him something to think about, not least because only the first was complete and legible.

That one, the first, he’d found in a little drawer suspended beneath a shelf in the freestanding pantry alongside the front window. The paper was old, or maybe just aged by the elements, and the soft gray edges of the scrap — it was a scrap, after all, ragged and asymmetrical — seemed almost unraveling. The writer had used brown ink, or maybe the ink too had just started out as something else and been umbered by time and air. I ask your forgiveness. Sprouls wondered about that — that someone who lived in a vacuum of geography, certainly by choice, would bother apologizing to someone. And then bother hiding the apology.

But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Not hiding it. Securing it. Not leaving it out on the wooden table, say, exposed, ready to disappear at the first blast of air through the open door. But rather, in the pantry, in a drawer — surely among the first receptacles a visitor would inspect. As though meant to be discovered.

Sprouls didn’t come to that conclusion all at once, but rather over the course of half a day: staring out the window, wondering about the weather and when it would relent, lying back on the mattress, lacing his hands behind his head, occasionally getting up to toss another thick foot-long stick into the fireplace, heating a can of soup. Thinking about Evan — what he would be doing if he were in Sprouls’s place. And also thinking about Terry and Mark, both of whom had insisted — showing off for Evan — on “taking the point” as Terry said, getting too far ahead, recklessly charging out onto the not-frozen-enough river. They hadn’t even shouted or screamed, just dropped as if down a trap door…

Gotta think about something else, Sprouls interrupted himself. And that was when he wondered about the note’s placement.

Up he got from the bed then even though it was now nearly midnight, his eyes scanning the room, trying to pick up another small flash of white against the dark log background. Put one and then two logs on the fire, not so much for the heat as the extra light they would give him.

The second note he also found in the pantry, tucked between a box of granola and a canned ham. This one was disappointing, though, a scrap not just of paper but of thought: not now, it said and that was all, all letters lowercase, the “w” roughly chopped off at the right. The third, discovered within the next ten minutes on the top shelf of the pantry under a big can of orange juice, offered barely more: best (something) will not know, the second word smudged and illegible, as if a drop of water had landed right there, somehow, magically passing through two thicknesses of tin and a quart of OJ.

Sprouls emptied the pantry but found no more notes there. He turned over all the cans and boxes and sacks, thinking he might find more stuck to the bottoms or wedged between folds in the cardboard. Nothing. He left all the stuff on the floor, added a log to the fire, unrolled his sleeping bag on the mattress, and was unconscious within a quarter-hour, his dreams roiled with words in faded brown.

[Continued: Read “The Cabin” (75KB PDF)]