Legend of a Suicide by David Vann Read Free Book Online

new, Roy said.
    It’s a well-built cabin, his father said. The wind won’t come through these walls. We’ll be comfortable enough as long as we keep wood for the stove. We have all summer to prepare things like that. We’ll put away dried and smoked salmon, too, andmake some jam and salt deer. You’re not going to believe all the things we’re going to do.
    They started that day by cleaning the cabin. They swept and dusted, then his father took Roy down a path with a bucket to where a small stream fed into the inlet. It ran deep through the short meadow, making three or four S-cuts in the grass before feeding out through the gravel and dumping a small fan of lighter stuff, sand and dirt and debris, into the saltwater. There were waterbugs on its surface, and mosquitoes.
    Time for the bug dope, his father said.
    They’re all over the place, Roy said.
    All the fresh water we could ever want, his father said proudly, as if he had put the stream there himself. We’ll be drinking well.
    They put repellent on their faces, wrists, and the backs of their necks, then set to wiping down everything in the cabin with bleach and water to kill all the mildew. Then they dried it with rags and began bringing in their gear.
    The cabin had a front room with the windows and the stove, and it had a back or really side room with no windows and a large closet.
    We’ll be sleeping out here, his father said, in the main room by the fire. We’ll put our stuff back there.
    So they carried in the equipment and put it in the closet, the stuff that was most precious and most needed to stay dry. They packed in the supplies, the canned goods along the wall, the dry goods in plastic in the middle, their clothes and bedding near the door. Then they went to gather wood.
    We need dead stuff, Roy’s father said. And none of it will be dry, so maybe actually we should just gather a little to take insideand then we should start building something off the back wall of the cabin.
    They had brought tools, but it sounded to Roy as if his father were discovering some of this as he went along. The idea that dry wood was not something his father had thought of ahead of time frightened Roy.
    They brought in a twisted pile of odd branches, stacked it near the stove, then went around back and discovered a piece of the wall that jutted out into a kind of box and was in fact for firewood.
    Well, Roy’s father said, I didn’t know about that. But that’s good. We’ll need more, though. This is just for a little summer trip or a weekend of hunting. We’ll need something all along this wall. And Roy wondered then about boards, about lumber, about nails. He hadn’t seen any lumber.
    We’ll need shingles, his father said. They stood side by side, both with their arms folded, and stared at the wall. Mosquitoes buzzed around them. It was cold here in the shade even though the sun was high. They might have been having a discussion about some kind of trouble Roy was in, they were so removed from what they were looking at.
    We can use poles or saplings or something for the supports, his father said. But we need some kind of roof, and it has to come out a ways for when the rain or snow is blowing sideways.
    It seemed impossible. All of it seemed impossible to Roy, and they seemed terribly unprepared. Any old boards lying around? he asked.
    I don’t know, his father said. Why don’t you take a look up around the outhouse and I’ll poke around here.
    Roy felt there was a kind of leveling. Neither knew what to do and both would have to learn. He hiked the short distance to the outhouse and could see the plants already ground down by their passing. They would wear paths in everything, everywhere they went. He circled the outhouse and stepped on one small board that had been overgrown. He pulled it out, scraped the dirt and grass and bugs off it and saw that it was rotten. He tore it apart in his hands. Inside the outhouse was a roll of toilet paper with water stains at