The Retreat Read Online Free PDF Page A

dreamed of fried eggs and a chicken roasted on a spit. Great mounds of food marched across his vision: hamburgers, potatoes, slabs of butter, Klik and Velveeta cheese laid out across stacks of bread. By the seventh day he was eating grass and sucking on bark. His leg was badly swollenand he had fixed a splint from two branches and bound them at his ankle with the shoelaces from his runners. Only once did he experience dread, and this was late one night when a storm came out of the west and extinguished his fire and left him shivering and frozen. In the morning, snow covered the island and the trees and the rocks. Seen from above, the land mass upon which he lived would have appeared as a white comma drawn against the dark roiling paper of the lake. And inside that comma he existed. The dread arrived with the image of blankness and the understanding that he could not be seen even if someone were looking. That night, in a dream, his grandmother came to him and called his name and then sat beside him and moaned words that he did not understand into the fire before them. One of her hands was withered and crooked and she held it out over the flames as if to warm it. Then she leaned into him and whispered that he should go home. “Go home,” she said. He woke from this dream and looked about, and he thought of his brother Nelson, whom he had not seen in nine years, and he thought of the night he was alone just after Nelson had been taken away, and how his chest had felt hollowed out, and that after a while he could no longer remember what his brother looked like, or the sound of his voice, his shape, or his smell. The wind had stopped and in its place was the sound of his breathing, irregular and thin.
    On the ninth day he stood weakly on one leg by the rocks at the edge of the island, peeing into the water, when a barge that carried propane from cabin to cabin along the lake’s sinuous interior came out of the light fog. Raymond lifted a hand and lowered it and then lifted it again and tried to callout, but his voice had disappeared. He lifted both hands to the sky, and from the deck of the barge a man in a red coat lifted a hand in return greeting. The man’s mouth opened but Raymond did not hear a sound. The barge charged on. It appeared that the greeting was a simple hailing hello from boat to island and back again and that there was nothing unusual about a shrouded figure on a blank island. And then the barge slowed and turned and hovered off the leeward shore while a small boat was lowered from the deck. Two men clambered into the boat and rowed towards shore and it would have appeared to any literate onlooker that this was a re-enactment of the discovery of a new land.
    Raymond hobbled across the rocks and then slid on his bum to the water’s edge where he leaned forward, his face tilted towards the approaching boat. So logical and wise and right was this rescue that there was nothing to be told. And no one to tell. And so he relayed a fiction, a heroic story of sorts: his boat had capsized nine days earlier and he had swum to shore and survived on a few frogs and a bird, and he had drunk the water from the lake and sung songs to his ancestors, who sent the Canadian shipping barge bearing propane across the water to pull him from this grave.

II

The Retreat

T he Byrd family left their home in June and drove east across a country that was flat with fields newly planted. The sky was deep and whitish blue and the towns they passed through were small and isolated. Early that first morning, when everyone was sleeping except for Lizzy and her father, Lizzy bent and smelled the head of the smallest kitten. Her father had just told her what had to be done. He was telling her because she was seventeen. She needed to understand, and if she understood, then she could help the younger children understand. He said that her mother agreed. In fact, it had been her suggestion. The Doctor didn’t allow animals at the Retreat and they