His hand comes out with his special oilskin holder, folded and rolled up and tied tight. It is easy to find or make do to replace almost anything except a good knife or scissors and he has found his knives and his long scissors where they'd been hidden.
He hands me my red pocketknife and I cut my fingernails with the tiny scissors and scatter them around. Next I cut his beard with these, careful around his mouth. He pulls the skin tight and I snip along, just the long ones that stick out. He is sitting on a stump and next I stand straight.
"How would it be if we cut it all off this time?" he says. "If I cut it as short as mine?"
"Why?" I say.
"So you'll look different."
"The same," I say. "I don't want to look like anyone else."
Father cuts my black hair straight across my back at the bottom of the shoulder blades so I'll still be able to pull it back in a rubber band or he can French braid it. His hair is harder to cut. It is brown and gray and curls and he says he doesn't care how it looks because he'll be wearing a lot of hats during the winter. I take hold of his hair and cut it close, as thick as my finger, right above where I'm holding.
At the end he takes off his jacket and flaps it all around and we run laughing from all the loose hairs floating through the air like we always used to.
The sun has actually come out. We're laughing. Father runs ahead slapping his head, the last hairs falling down behind him and I'm chasing. He's ahead and when I catch up he's not laughing anymore. He's standing still. I can't tell what's happened and what's changed.
"Listen," he says. "I was thinking it might be good for us to have some alone time just to range around and remember. So we can get comfortable again."
"Are you going to stay in the forest park?" I say. "I can come with you."
"Let's just decide on our watches," he says, "and then we'll meet back where we slept. You can find that again, right?
Father does not check back. He disappears through the trees tall and uncertain, not in any kind of straight line. The maple leaves are bright red and yellow and orange against the green pines. After a while that is all I can see.
First I take off my shoes and socks then put them back on since the ground is cold and wet and hard. I run a little ways and then stop so I can think. No one can see me, I'm thinking. I'm thinking how Father says someone could always see us on the farm but now here in the forest park I'm not even sure no one is watching. With my short fingernail I scratch Hello in the green of a leaf.
I circle back to get Randy, just in case. His body is cold, stiffer than usual. When I take him out of my pack I put him back in and put the whole thing on my back since I just don't know.
I walk out along the edge of the forest park and there are no criminals in their orange outfits. I do not see or hear any dogs.
"What?" I yell in the loudest voice I have ever used in the forest park. "Lala!" I say. Nothing happens and no one answers except the birds are quiet for a moment before they start up talking again.
Father is already waiting when I come back and I am early. He stands up and swings his frame pack onto his back.
"We need to find the men's camp," he says.
"I thought we decided never to go back," I say.
"Caroline," he says. "So much has changed. Stay close to me."
We walk the old path that is not a real path but when we get to the men's camp it is abandoned. It is more overgrown even than our old house was. Someone probably the rangers has picked up the trash and other than the fire rings and broken glass and torn off tree branches a person might not even know.
It's easy enough even for me to see the direction the men went. How they dragged things and stepped all over the ferns and the little maples. Father and I follow all this for only another ten minutes and then I hear a voice call out low saying how we look and then another lookout who knows who we are calls out our names.
There's only one fire. Dirty wool blankets and stained, soggy sleeping bags hang from branches. There's only about twenty people. None of the Skeleton Family, no Nameless of course but I can't even see Richard and if he was here he would at least come talk to me, or try to talk to me. It's like every person has been replaced by another person even if they all look the same and wear the kind of clothes. If Richard was here I see that I would be kind of happy but he is not.
It is only Clarence coming over to talk to us. His red beard is longer and he wears a wool-blanket poncho and a bright orange hunter's cap that anyone could see a mile away. Instead of shoes he's got the inside felt liners from snowmobile boots and they're filthy and shredded up. Closer to us I can see he's frowning.