The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page B

living on School Street. The house was one block from the museum. Dad held my hand as he looked at where he’d once lived.
    We spent the night in a private campground on the banks of the Annapolis River. There was a caged raccoon by the campground office. It was pacing back and forth and it had a mangy, greasy coat. Dad told me he thought it was some sort of attraction. I cried when we left the office.
    All that afternoon I could think of nothing but how to get back to that cage without getting caught. It was my birthday. At the river we swam, and I played on its muddy bank. We went to The Big Scoop for supper and I got to have a milkshake and a piece of cake. On the drive back to the campsite my arms and legs were gimpy and Dad joked that I was in a sugar coma.
    That night I told Dad I had to pee and climbed out of the tent. The arc lamp by the office shone yellow light onto the grass in the field. Thousands of moths and other insects circled the light. The only sounds were the hum of the lamp and the continual ding when one of them bounced off the metal dome. I jogged across the field to the office. The building was dark. A dog growled in the yard as I unwound the wire holding the raccoon’s cage door shut. The raccoon hissed at me with what strength it had left. I backed up, cajoling it in a whisper, and gradually it moved toward the opening. It scurried out and made for the nearest tree. The dog barked and came running to the end of its rattling chain. The raccoon went up the tree and clung to a branch to look down at me with its bandit eyes. I skulked into the shadow that the building threw and waited. The dog lost interest, sniffed its way back to the office porch, circled once around, and flopped down. The raccoon climbed backwards down the trunk and waddled off into the woods.
    I peed on the grass and then returned to the tent.
    â€œWhat took you so long?” Dad murmured.
    I told him I was looking at the stars. I hated to lie to him, but I knew that nobody should find out I had let the raccoon go. I had learned that keeping a secret meant telling not even those you trust.
    Dad looked puzzled when he saw the open cage the next morning as we checked out. I avoided his eyes while he paid the owner of the campground, who was annoyed that someone had let his raccoon go.
    In the car Dad said, “It’s true what he said. It’s no different than stealing or breaking a window on purpose.”
    â€œI’m glad it was set free. What’s wrong with that?”
    â€œIt’s not wrong, Bean. But it’s against the law. If everybody did what they thought was right, we’d be living in chaos.”
    â€œThen I’d like to be living in chaos.”
    He laughed and reached across to squeeze my knee until I squealed.
    We drove up to Cape Breton. There were dirty-faced kids on the side of the road, begging for candy when they saw our licence plates. We camped in the Highlands and hiked in stunted spruce forests. When it came time to head south again, I didn’t want to leave. This happened to me whenever we packed up our tent and headed home. I would not be able to sleep on the ground, go to bed as soon as it got dark and sleep under the stars, or listen to the creeping noises on the other side of the thin canvas walls for a whole year. That year the longing was more profound. Part of me thinks we would have done well to stay instead of driving back onto the ferry in Yarmouth.
    In September I helped weed the flower bed on the south side of the house. We pulled out dandelions and grass from around the peonies and cleared an area for the lupine seeds we had brought back from Nova Scotia. Dad hoped they would sprout and grow enough before the fall to have a head start the next spring. I pushed a stake into the ground to mark the spot. In the vegetable garden there were still weeks of tomatoes and beans. We harvested the onions and potatoes late that month and stored them in a cool part of our