The scent keeper, p.3
The Scent Keeper, page 3
The days grew shorter and shorter, until finally the world tipped and the balance shifted back in the other direction. A change was coming—I could smell it. It was like the rustling in your dreams before you finally wake up in the morning. That gentle tug on the strings of gravity as the slack tide changes direction and starts to pull you out to sea.
* * *
One morning I awoke to a new and familiar fragrance coming in the front door. My father had always told me that my birthday was the first day of spring. Not a specific day of the year, but the feeling—an undercurrent of warmth waking up the earth. The scent of violets. Green in the air, he called it. It didn’t matter that sometimes we went backward into winter again; my father told me that happened all the time. There was no problem with celebrating more than once, he said, although I only got to count the first one for my age. Eleven for me, then.
My nose told me my father was not in the cabin, but as I listened I heard his footsteps approaching on the trail. There was another sound mixing in with them, too, but this one was brighter and quicker. I scrambled down the ladder. The sounds came together up the porch stairs, and then I saw my father standing in the door. With him, held loosely on the end of a rope, was a goat, black, with one white hoof. It was beautiful.
“Look what I found,” he said, as if discovering a goat was a natural occurrence. We were on a small island surrounded by water. The only new things that arrived came to us by magic, in black plastic boxes. But there was a goat, on a rope held nonchalantly in my father’s hand.
“Happy birthday,” my father said.
The goat watched me, its yellow eyes bright and amused.
“I’m Emmeline,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. The goat raised its white hoof in the air, as if to command us to do her bidding. I knelt to be nearer to her, and she lowered her hoof and leaned forward, butting her nose against my hand until I petted her.
“A real Cleopatra,” my father said. The goat looked up at him, her head cocked.
“Who is that?” I asked, gently running my hand down the stiff, short hairs of her neck.
And he told us about the long-ago ruler of a faraway country, who got her way using boats filled with rose petals and baths of musk.
* * *
Cleopatra the goat rapidly became Cleo, but both names fit. She was still young enough for a nickname, but she had aspirations of grandeur, my father said. She ruled us from the very beginning.
My father set about making a shed for Cleo—her palace, he called it.
“Your job,” he said to me, “is to get her acquainted with the island.”
“By myself?”
“You’re old enough now. And you won’t be by yourself, will you?” He smiled. “There’s nothing to hurt you here. Just promise me you won’t go to the beach,” he added, his voice serious.
“I promise,” I said, and I meant it. The idea of having free run of the island with Cleo at my side was better than anything I could imagine. I would happily take whatever restriction was required.
Every day after that, the moment my foraging or gardening or lessons were over, Cleo and I set off. At first I kept her on a rope, but it soon became apparent that she would go wherever I went—or perhaps more accurately, that I would go wherever Cleo did. She always led, but never more than four steps ahead, always looking back to make sure I was with her.
We made a game of tracking every path on the island, some so faint that I had never seen them before. I thought we had discovered them all, but then one day we found a slight indentation in the mass of salal bushes that grew between the trees like a great sea. Normally, getting through their stiff branches was impossible without a machete, but someone had made a path once and the hint of it was visible in that gap in the forward line. Cleo’s thick hide didn’t care about the sharp edges of the leaves, and her feet were sure between the roots. She threaded her way through and the trail seemed to open behind her. I followed, worried that the bushes might close again and we would never find our way home, but Cleo was determined and I couldn’t turn back without her.
After a time, I heard water slapping against rocks in the distance. The waves sounded sharper, not like the gentle lapping of the tide against the sand of our lagoon. Cleo and I pushed through a last gasp of green to find ourselves on a bare, gray landing of wind-smoothed rock, about ten feet wide, the sky huge beyond it. We inched close to its edge and stared out at an endless horizon of islands, and then down to the water far below us.
My eyes had never had such distance to travel. I didn’t know what to do with all that space. It felt as if it could reach out and grab me, take me with it. I backed up, one step at a time, until my heels banged into raw, wet wood. I looked behind me and saw a bench tucked into the very edge of the woods, half-crumpled to the ground by rain and time.
The runaway’s, I thought.
I leaned down and touched its crumbling surface, wondering what had brought that man to this open place, to sit here and look back to what he’d left. What was out there?
Cleo and I stayed on that bluff for a long time before we took the path back to the cabin. I didn’t tell my father what I’d found, worried that he might not let me go back. I didn’t know what I thought about that place; I only knew that my father had never showed it to me, and somehow it seemed impossible that he didn’t know of its existence. My father knew everything.
After that, Cleo and I started going to the bluff almost every day, and over time, my initial fear gave way to curiosity. I would bring lunch with me, and Cleo and I would share it as we sat closer and closer to the edge, watching the big water. Sometimes we saw a whale or a shining fleet of dolphins, or brown logs in the distance that looked like they were swimming. Sometimes a motorboat passed by, growling like a giant, angry insect. I had known these things only as pictures in my father’s science books, or the collection of fairy tales. Out on the bluff, the lines between the kinds of books blurred. I hid from the boats, certain they held pirates.
Once, however, I saw a boy with red hair standing at the back of a fishing boat. He looked young, perhaps my age. Cleo and I came back every day for the next week, but I never saw him again. It made me wonder, though—where was his home?
That evening over dinner, I asked my father, “Why are we here, Papa? Why are there no other people on our island?”
My father put down his fork. “People lie, Emmeline,” he said, “but smells never do.” He seemed to think that explained everything.
“All people?” I persisted. “What about Jack?”
“Even Jack,” my father said, and his face grew so dark I didn’t ask any more.
But it was then I knew I wouldn’t ever tell my father about the trail to the bluff. He had his secrets, but this one was mine.
* * *
Time passed. Another spring approached. I turned twelve, my legs and arms growing like saplings, strong and lean. When we went to the lagoon, I could now catch the clam water as it squirted into the sky, dig deep into the sand and find the waiting shells myself. I could make a fire with a bow drill and a piece of dried moss, use a sharp knife to pry a barnacle from its rocky shelf in the time it took to count to two. My foraging basket was always as full as my father’s now, and more and more often I filled it on my own, on my way back from my adventures in the woods with Cleo.
Cleo and I had taken to running along the tops of downed trees, my arms outstretched, her cloven feet sure and steady. But I wanted to be higher still. I started climbing up the standing trees, branch by branch, pretending I was Jack the Scent Hunter. Sometimes, clinging high up in the evergreen branches, surrounded by the gentle clacking of their needles, I would catch a tantalizing whiff of something else—a warm tendril of baking bread, far in the distance. A faint wake of the grumbling black odor left behind by boats. Pieces of a story my father would never tell me. A world I would never see. I would crane myself out into the air, feeling the branches bend beneath my weight. It all left me feeling more restless, and lonelier than before, but when I finally climbed down, there was Cleo waiting for me.
My father had taught me how to trim Cleo’s hooves and brush her. I loved the rhythm of my hand moving across her strong back, her teeth nibbling at me as I worked. It was a way to end each day. At night, I would hear her bleating in her shed; my father told me that goats liked to bundle up together, no matter the weather. I would wait until he was asleep and then I’d sneak down my ladder and out to her shed, snuggling next to Cleo until she quieted down. Sometimes I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until it was almost light.
Sometimes on those nights, I worried that there were too many secrets piling up between my father and me. But there was something about laying my head against Cleo’s flank, the solidity of her warm and compact body, that made me feel full inside. That made me feel as if there were more than two people in the world. So I said nothing.
THE SCENTS
That summer when I was twelve, my father started getting quieter, his stories disappearing even though winter was still a far-off thought. He no longer asked what Cleo and I had found on our explorations, and never said what he had done while I was gone, although I realized one day it had been a long time since I had come home to find a full foraging basket on the table.
But I was happy with Cleo, and I rationalized that my father wouldn’t tell me what was going on even if I asked. Then one day I walked in the cabin door and saw him standing in front of the woodstove, its door open, one of the scent-papers in his hand. An empty bottle was on the table, a ring of red wax still clinging to its stopper.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He shut the stove door and sat down heavily on the bench at the table.
“They’re going,” he said.
“What?”
“The scents. They’re disappearing.”
“Let me smell.” I thought perhaps it was his nose.
But it wasn’t. When my father raised the scent-paper to my face, there was nothing there.
“How long has it been out of the bottle?” I asked, trying to apply the scientific principles he had taught me.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It won’t change. I’ve been checking them for weeks. The top row is almost gone.”
My first reaction was a feeling of betrayal: he’d been opening the bottles without me. Then his words sunk in—the scents were leaving us.
I thought of the bottles in the upper drawers, the worlds they contained. The way some had felt like flying and others like swimming and one like being held in the gentlest arms I could imagine. I’d always thought I could hear them whispering amongst themselves as I fell asleep. When was the last time I had listened? I spent almost every night out in Cleo’s shed now. Perhaps the scent-papers had been quiet for a long time. Perhaps they’d wondered where I was. Maybe that was why they’d left.
“What were you going to do?” I asked my father, pointing toward the woodstove.
“Burn it,” he said, the scent-paper still in his hand.
The violence of the idea shocked me. “Why?”
“Some of the first fragrances men ever created were made to burn,” he said. “Per fumare—through the smoke. It was a way to talk to the gods. I wanted to send the scent home.”
“But what if we find a way to get it back? Wouldn’t Jack want us to try?”
He shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
I saw the resignation in his face. He had given something up, although I had no idea of its shape or origin. All I knew was that my father was in pain.
“Let’s burn it, then,” I said.
We walked over to the woodstove, opened its door, and stood, looking at the fire. My father paused and seemed to go inside himself for a moment. Then he dropped the paper in. We watched as the flames caught its edges and curled them into light, then blackness. The smoke that emerged was a blue so clear it surpassed the sky, the water, my father’s eyes. And then, the fragrance.
It was big and full, shimmering with a strength its scent-paper had never had. This was no brief window into a world. This was the thing itself. I closed my eyes and the cabin walls vanished. I could smell the sweet spice of just-cut grass, and a sparkling conversation of flowers—lush and creamy, sharp and quick, dusty and soft as memory itself. They came together like bird songs overlapping. There was sunshine, pulling out the fragrances with its warmth. I could feel it on my skin, surrounding me in a way the heat of our woodstove never could. I stood in the middle of it all, inhaling. I had never felt so full of anything before.
I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it left a bit at a time until there was just the rain outside and the faint smell of tobacco again.
“Oh,” my father said, and his eyes were filled with tears. He reached toward the fire as if to pull the paper out, but it was well and truly gone.
* * *
My father changed after that. He’d always been fascinated by the bottles, but the loss of that scent-paper shifted something in him. The pressure in the cabin grew until I could smell it, heavy and hot. I watched his eyes, flicking to the upper drawers no matter what we were doing. When we went out collecting food, he would return to the cabin earlier and earlier, leaving half our potential harvest on the beach. One afternoon, something finally seemed to break, and he took down another red-wax bottle, unsealed it.
“Okay,” he said, and opened the door of the woodstove.
* * *
The act of burning a scent relaxed him for a few days, but then the whole process started again. Each time it speeded up, the lull afterward disappearing more quickly, the tension rising faster. Before I knew it, the top row was gone. I was worried about what would happen when he got through those upper, transcendent bottles and found himself left with only old versions of our life.
“Why don’t we make new scent-papers?” I asked him. “We could take the machine outside. Cleo and I have found things. We could show you.”
I was willing to give him all my secrets, even the bluff overlooking the world. But my father shook his head.
“What if we made a new scent-paper of one of them?” I said, pointing to the third row from the top. “Start over?”
He looked at me, hope springing into his eyes, and for that moment I was Jack the Scent Hunter, brave and smart and full of ideas. I was Emmeline, the daughter he loved more than anything else.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try.”
He took down one of the bottles and held it for a moment. Then he snapped open its red-wax seal with the practiced motion I knew so well, and pulled out the paper inside. The scent was undetectable, as we knew it would be, but we had a plan now. Together we walked over to the stove.
“You hold it,” my father said, handing me the paper. It lay in the palm of my hand, light and full of silent mystery. It had one chance left to express itself, unless we could catch it again.
My father got down the machine. He opened the lid, exposed the holes.
“Now,” he said, and I threw the paper in the fire. As the smoke curled off its edges and the heat traveled into its core, the fragrance emerged—a bursting, juicy sweetness of flowers, a rich and humid warmth. My father depressed the button on the machine, and waited anxiously as the new paper came out of the slot. He shook it, like always, held it at arm’s length until the smoke had cleared. He opened windows, let in the fresh air. The cabin came back to itself. Finally he brought the paper to his nose and breathed in.
I watched, hope turning sour as his face fell.
“No,” he said, handing the paper to me. I inhaled, began my dive into the flowery fragrance, but then, mingled in, came the smell of tobacco. Cedar smoke. Last night’s dinner. My own sweat.
“It’s not right,” my father said.
I started to ask him what was wrong with a scent that had me in it, but I realized that even if he had an answer, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.
After that, the machine stayed on the shelf.
THE BEACH
My father put the empty bottles back in their drawers, where they sat waiting—for what, I had no idea. I spent as much time outside as possible. I wanted to be away from the claustrophobia of the cabin.
The one place I didn’t go was the lagoon. I’d promised my father back when Cleo had first arrived, and promises were broken at great risk—that was the cautionary rule of every fairy tale, I knew.
But as week followed week, I began to question that pact. My father was falling into himself. He hardly left the cabin, and I had to remind him that the garden and the chickens needed tending. Autumn was upon us—we needed to gather and dry the fish, clams, and seaweed that would get us through the winter. Those things were at the beach, but my father showed no inclination to go himself.
“Foragers feast, Papa,” I said one morning, holding out a basket.
He said nothing. Then, slowly, he shook his head. He wouldn’t leave the bottles. I could see that now.
That was when I decided—if he wasn’t going to take care of us, I would. I pulled the basket close and set out, whistling for Cleo, who came immediately to my side. When I got to the fork in the path, out of sight from the cabin, I headed toward the lagoon.
It was a fine day, the scent of the dirt and trees around me just starting to mellow after a summer of rampant growth. The berries were plentiful, and I could have gathered them, but my sights were set on the beach. I ignored the nervous buzzing in my ears, the way my nose seemed to be working overtime. We needed food, I told myself. I was going to its main source. There was nothing more or less to it than that.
Still, I paused when we reached the border between trees and sand. The lagoon was full and big, the blue above it cloudless. The open expanse felt exposed, a place where even the sky could see what I was doing. For a moment I hesitated, started to turn around. Cleo had no such compunctions, however, and raced out onto the sand.
