The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s shivering. I don’t get it. His body isn’t…It doesn’t feel right.”

  He shakes his head even though he knows it’s the wrong thing to do, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “The pads of his feet are cracked. I got ice out of the fur between his toes, but—”

  “Judy, I told you…”

  “It could be frostbite. Do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He whines when he walks now, like it hurts him. Could it be frostbite in one of the paws? From the ice?”

  “Judy, I told you before we started. It’s too far for him to walk. It’s too cold.”

  She shifts from one foot to the other, her eyes sliding off to the trees. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, you said it. You don’t know.”

  “Judy.”

  “It’s a goddamn dog, Eban. It’s a goddamn dog.”

  He doesn’t know how to answer.

  “Every other animal in this wood walks in the snow, sleeps in the cold. He’s a dog. A wild animal.”

  “He’s not a wild animal. He couldn’t have been more than a month old when that peddler brought him to us. We’re all he knows. He’s never—”

  “I’ll keep him close by the fire tonight. I’ve just got to get him warm. It won’t be too much longer.”

  “Judy, it could be weeks or months till we find them. All we know is a direction to walk. You have no idea how long it will take.”

  “What’s the point of saying that, Eban?” She hisses the words like her mouth and tongue are shaping them around a knife edge. “What does it help anything?”

  “I’m just saying. We shouldn’t have brought him.”

  Sometimes when she looks at him, it’s like she has removed him from the world with her eyes. Like he’s gone. Like he was there and then he isn’t anymore, because of how she can look at him like that.

  “When I first wanted to go to the cities,” she says slowly, “you told me it wasn’t safe. And then when I said I would go anyway, we had Beau, and you said the cities were too far for him. And then you told me about Heaven, and you said if we could find it, the people there could tell us if it was safe now. If we could make it to the cities.”

  “I did.”

  “You said that it wasn’t so far.”

  He shakes his head.

  “You said that it would be safe. For us. For Beau.”

  “No, I…I said it was safer. Not safe. And I wanted to leave in spring…”

  “Yes. Then when I agreed to go to the colony first, you said it would be safest to wait until spring. And that’s when I understood. You would never leave. There would always be another reason. Another threat. Another delay. Another way to keep us trapped and call it safe.”

  A week after Judy miscarried for the first time, a peddler had turned up at the camp, and they traded him some skins and dried meat for a box of candles, a replacement for their rusted-out skillet, and toothpaste. Judy had been the one to notice the cage on the back of the peddler’s cart. It made no sense to Eban at all, a dog too small to guard, no hunting blood in it, only one more mouth to be fed. But then there was the look on Judy’s face, and he’d found himself putting back the candles and pointing a thumb at the pup already squirming in Judy’s hands. “We’ll take the dog too,” he’d muttered.

  The same peddler had returned every season after that. He’d act pleased at how big and healthy the dog had grown, his toothless grin too wide as he stretched his hands apart to indicate the dog’s size. Now he had rabbits and wondered if they were interested. “PET?” he wrote on the bit of slate strung around his neck. He was the only peddler they’d ever come across who could write, or who would admit he could. He was a fool to trust them with such a secret. When Eban shook his head, the peddler put his hands to his mouth, as if to feed himself. When Eban shook his head again, the peddler wrote “EAT?” as if he thought Eban had only failed to understand him.

  Judy thought it was nice he came around to check on the dog, but Eban said it was only that he’d found an easy mark in them, a buyer for the least of his wares. She gave him an unhappy look, and Eban wondered why he’d spoken.

  It was around that time that the arguments began. At first Eban thought she was only being impulsive, as she always was. She wasn’t serious, he thought. She wanted a reaction from him, or maybe just to have spoken brave words.

  But the impulse, if that was what it was, took hold. For a long time it was all they could talk about, and if they weren’t talking about it, they were silent. He came to welcome the silence, for the peace it brought.

  “We can’t stay here,” she’d say. It was the staying that she got stuck on. That was the bit that seemed to catch her mind like a hook. She’d say, “Forever? Stay here forever? Live like this?”

  It seemed cowardly at first, and there were moments when the woman he loved—who was flinty and stout-hearted, and could endure anything she had to, on the strength of her obstinacy—seemed to dissolve before his eyes. When he was left to wonder if she had ever been there at all.

  He thought maybe it was the wilderness. The mud floor after her glass windows, the cold nights after her house’s hearth. He had to put his mother from his mind, because he thought maybe this was what his mother had seen in her. A weakness.

  But it was something else. She was as frightened of staying as he was of leaving. Something about their lives here appalled her. He saw it, as the months and arguments went on: the look of repulsion on her face. “We are living like rats in a HOLE,” she once yelled, knocking a pot on the fire to the ground with her hand, and burning herself. “I can’t live in fear, in hiding,” she’d plead. “I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering what will catch us here.”

  And even that wasn’t it. It came out in pieces. “Something terrible has happened. It’s happening now, right now. And we’re just useless, just waiting till some bad meat kills us off, instead of trying to help, trying to fix…” She’d get hung up there, because nothing else she could say had any meaning at all; she knew nothing of the world or its fights.

  At first he could stop her with the dog. Even if they waited till the melt, how many weeks or months would it take to reach the cities? Not even she knew. The dog took a dozen steps for every one of theirs. How could they drag him there with them, all that way, amidst hardship they couldn’t even guess at?

  With those questions, he would see surrender in her face. They might argue for hours more, but he’d have won. And then, after a while, she hardened her resolve against him. “If I have to, I’ll carry him,” she’d say. “I’ll take him with me and do whatever he needs me to do.”

  He thought he’d lost her then. But one night, as she spoke of when they’d leave and what they’d bring, he said, “It would be wiser to visit the colony first. They could tell us.”

  He didn’t know where the idea had come from, but he knew immediately it was the right one. He saw her listening, so he told her more. He told her every rumour he had ever heard of Heaven, and when she asked questions, he made up answers. He said when they found the colony, they would be among friends, who could tell them the truth about the cities. And then if they still wanted to travel on, they’d go prepared. And not in ignorance. He said this because he knew Judy despised her ignorance, and it might have been that single word that convinced her.

  After it had been decided, he wondered what it was he’d meant to do by convincing her to seek the colony instead. To delay her? Distract her? Now they are headed deeper, higher into the hills, chasing no more than a whisper in the wood, a vapour.

  He feels his whole life has been this, the evasion or pursuit of ghosts. If the colony is real, the truth can only be far darker and more troubling than Judy has considered. He knows what happens to people in the hills. Is that what he hoped? T
hat whatever they find will teach her fear at last? That it will end all talk of leaving?

  And if the colony isn’t real, what will he have gained? Will she, in exhaustion, at last consent to stay? Or will she only leave him then, there, a little later and a little farther from where she would have if he hadn’t kept her close with a lie…

  “Well,” he says now. “Well, here we are. More than a hundred miles from home. Whatever you wanted, this is it. But we shouldn’t have brought Beau along. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Eban, I don’t know if we were safe in our hide or not. I don’t know how many months or years we could have scratched out enough dead squirrels and dirty water to keep blood moving in our veins. But I know staying there, whatever it was, wasn’t ‘the right thing to do.’ ”

  She closes her coat back up and turns away, stepping off the bridge into the last mile of wood they’ve walked before.

  * * *

  —

  Though he trudges behind Judy, he can hear the whine of the dog in her arms. From behind, he can see the stiff way she holds him. He sees every sound the dog makes in the clutch of her shoulders.

  Late in the afternoon, they stop for the first meal they’ve had since dawn. They sit on their packs and eat cold eel. He remembers how they feasted on it, days ago. Now he has to chew slowly and swallow carefully, or his stomach will refuse the greasy, foul-smelling meat and the food will be wasted.

  Judy keeps the dog inside her coat and coaxes him to eat from her hand, but he lies limp in her arms with his eyes closed.

  “Here,” she says. “Here.”

  Eban feels ill as he watches Judy slip the meat into the dog’s mouth. The oils run over her fingers and the fur around the dog’s black lips. “Judy.”

  He thinks the dog is dead, but after a few minutes, its wet eyes open. He had known it was wrong to bring Beau with them. He knew the cold, long days would be hard on him. But he never guessed they would affect him so suddenly or severely. The dog is more than tired. Sick, and maybe dying. Maybe it was frostbite in his paws after all, maybe some infection. There’s no way to know for certain.

  “Judy,” he says again. All he ever does is try to make her answer him. “He’s suffering.”

  She looks at him, her face lowered so a shadow falls over her eyes. “What do you want from me.” He hardly recognizes her voice.

  “It’s too far, Judy. It’s too far to take him.”

  She buries her face in the dog and is silent.

  “You know it.”

  When she speaks again, he has to lean close to hear the words. “Remember when we got him? Do you remember that, Eban? Remember how the peddler wrote on his slate that he was the strongest one in the litter?”

  He offers her his canteen, and she pours water onto a plate and brings it to the dog’s mouth, but he refuses that too. Then they lift their packs and continue on.

  * * *

  —

  It’s near dark when Eban catches sight of Judy again. She has hurried on ahead of him these last miles and he has let her. But now he sees her on her knees in the snow, and in a second he understands.

  He drops to the ground beside her. It is always like this. Everything fine and then suddenly the pregnancy is over, a beginning and an ending with nothing in between.

  “I’m here,” he says. He puts his hands to her face, holds her face, as she stares at him.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “It will be okay. I swear it.” He looks around him, thinking about how he will make her warm, what he can build to keep her safe and dry. She’ll pass the fetus sometime this day or the next, and then bleed for days after. If it goes longer than a week, they’ll have to worry about infection. It might be some time till she has the strength to travel again, or to fight him as he tries to keep her resting.

  She stares at him, confused, and then her face alters with understanding. She shoves Eban away and pulls the dog from her coat, setting him on the ground.

  “Sit,” she tells the dog, who slumps in the snow. “Stay.” Then she gets to her feet and continues forward, her face set and determined.

  “I thought you—”

  “I know what you thought.”

  He looks back at the dog, whose face is lowered, shaking. He’s not so well trained that he’d let Judy disappear from sight. At least, he never would have before. Now he hardly seems to notice her departure. “Beau,” he says softly. “Come here, boy.”

  “No!” Judy swings around, her face unreadable. “Don’t call him. I want him to stay until we’re out of sight.”

  “Until we’re…?”

  “You were right. You were right, he can’t travel with us. It’s too far for him.”

  “But…”

  “He won’t stay in my arms. He fights me. You were right, okay? I know it. He’ll do better on his own. It’s wrong to drag him along with us. Here, he can rest as he needs to, and find shelter and—”

  “Judy! This is…” She can’t be in her right mind. Even her stubbornness can’t be so great that she would harm this animal she loves. “He will die here.”

  “No.” Judy turns her back and goes on walking away from them both.

  “Judy, he will die on the spot you left him.” As he speaks, the dog rises to his feet. As if to vindicate the owner he loves best, he takes a few leaps forward, and then pauses to sniff at something in the snow.

  Eban shakes his head. Judy is nearly out of sight.

  The dog is still on his feet, face buried in the snow, when Eban sees him last. Like Judy, the dog doesn’t look back.

  * * *

  —

  When Eban first knew Judy, she was weakened. It wasn’t her nature to retreat, and they had left their home by the allotment and she worried they were wrong to leave it. At night, after his mother and her father had gone to bed, they would sit in the last light of evening, talking about her fears. She thought their departure was both rash and cowardly. She wanted to be a survivor, someone who could make it in these hills, but they’d come into them to hide, and in this world, Eban’s world, she was helpless.

  “I used to think I was practical. Level-headed. Brave.” She looked at her hands. “Daniel told me I was. He asked me once if he should stop the work he did, because it might be dangerous for him, for us. I told him not to. I told him his work was too important.”

  She told Eban of the evening, only nine days before he met her, when she and Alphonse had left home for a walk after dinner. Daniel had stayed behind. She said they weren’t gone long, maybe an hour. When they returned, they found Daniel sprawled over the steps of their house.

  “I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. I thought at first he was sleeping. But his eyes were open. I thought drunk before I thought dead. One of his arms, I remember, was stretched out behind him over the top stair, his thumb and finger pinched together like this.” She showed him. “He kept a bowl of salt at the table and used to pinch salt into his meals like that. His hair was soaked in blood and his pistol was on the ground beside him.

  “He wrote what he wanted to,” she said, “and we let him. And they shot him. With his own pistol, they shot him.”

  “Who did?” Eban wondered, but she shook her head and didn’t want to talk anymore.

  Unlike Judy, Alphonse took to life in the hills with Eban and his mother, in his own awkward way, as if hardship and hunger were well fitted to his grief. He was a romantic. He said he came from a country where the wilderness was something you tempered yourself against. Something that changed and improved you.

  Alphonse made occasional efforts to help around the camp, but soon accepted that he helped best by keeping out of the way of Eban and his mother. He would sit in his tent and copy out books from the tiny library he had carried in two leather suitcases from the allotment. Judy said the eight-day walk might have taken only four if he hadn’t
needed to stop so often to set down his suitcases, and Eban noticed Alphonse had few other supplies of any kind, only the binding tools and single change of clothes he had borne on his back. Everything else, Judy had carried, and neither of them had enough to last a season in the hills on their own. Still, Alphonse complained only of the shelves of books, acquired over a lifetime from peddlers who knew his tastes, left to stand unread in their deserted house.

  Alphonse spent most of that first summer making a single book, thinking to sell it to a peddler in the fall. He worked a pelt into leather and then stitched it together. He had a sheaf of pages that he filled with his tiny, beautiful writing. Judy explained to Eban that this skill had bought Alphonse books and fine, strange things in the allotment. A particular peddler had acquired whatever he made every fall, and knew the sorts of things he’d want in return—sometimes only the trade of one book for another.

  But the peddlers who came up to the hills didn’t want or carry such fanciful things. A month after Alphonse finished the book, a peddler passed through, and Alphonse brought the book to him, almost shyly. As if prepared for admiration, Eban thought later. As if he didn’t know how dangerous he must have seemed to the man, then, or how contemptuous. Eban couldn’t tell from the way the peddler pushed the book back into Alphonse’s hands whether he’d taken it as a test or an insult. But he seemed in a particular hurry to finish his business with Eban, who traded cured meat and a clutch of pelts for a warm red coat for Judy, a box of birdshot and a spool of cotton wick. Nodding his goodbye, the peddler didn’t look at Alphonse once, and they never saw the man again.

  Alphonse didn’t make any more books after that, but Judy did, and he helped her. In the last hours of autumn daylight, they would sit inside their tent. Alphonse would read, a few words at a time, as Judy filled a stack of pages, line by line. Sometimes Eban sat outside their tent door to listen to stories he’d never heard before unfolding, metered out in half-sentences as Alphonse waited for Judy to catch up, her pen scratching against the paper and sometimes tearing it in her hurry. In Eban’s house there had been only his mother’s medical texts and a single book of stories from her own childhood, where the children pictured on the pages mostly met bad ends.