* * *
—
He is startled by the sudden sound of feet hammering against the ground, as if something is charging toward him, something heavy and closer with each step. He half leaps to his feet, drawing his rifle from his pack, when he spies the bird, perched on a stump in a nearby stand of apple trees. Grouse fool him every time with the accelerating drum roll of their beating wings, summoning a mate.
The apple trees reach out of the ground like gnarled hands. As he takes aim, he wonders briefly who tended them, who lived here and when, leaving no trace but these ancient-looking trees.
With just one shot he takes the grouse down. It flutters and is still and he wrings its neck for good measure. Several of the surrounding trees still cling to the last of their harvest of fruit. The hard-looking golden-brown apples are shaded by taller trees, and he thinks that if they froze before they rotted and have not yet thawed, there might be food here for them. He plucks one and opens it with his knife. The flesh inside is threaded with golden veins, but he sees no sign of infection or rot. He takes a bite. The cold has robbed the tart sweet flavour from the apple, but he knows one squeeze will release its honey. He plucks a half-dozen of the best-looking apples, wraps them in a handkerchief and slips them into his pockets. He will cook them with the grouse. What a meal they will have. And he thinks of Judy smiling, taking bird and apples from his hands.
As he stumbles down the hill, he tells himself he hurries because the warm sun is on the grouse he carries, and not because of what Judy’s face might look like when she sees what he has brought her.
He is descending the hill so quickly that he almost misses it. His gaze slides over the dark shape at the river edge but then is caught by the trail of prints. Maybe only because he thought for a moment it might be an easy catch, he looks again at the wounded animal crouched to drink at the edge of the river.
He whispers the dog’s name as he drops to his knees. “You found us,” he says in wonder.
But Beau barely stirs at the sound of his name. Eban reaches for him. Can he be dreaming? Or could some other dog, a stranger’s dog, have wandered into the wood and only happened to cross his path?
But as he lifts the dog’s trembling body into his hands, he realizes Beau didn’t respond because he couldn’t. Black blood soaks the fur across the dog’s hindquarters, and his belly is soft and distended. He is bleeding internally. Eban is sure of it. “Poor little creature,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I will let you be.”
He lays the dog back into the dirty snow at the river edge. He must have come for one last drink, Eban thinks. “I’ll let you be,” he says again.
He tells himself that there is no way to bring Judy here in time. The dog may have only a few breaths yet to spend. Eban wonders if he was injured in the storm. He imagines the dog searching for them as the winds gathered, stumbling on as the sky heaved and flung out refuse from the wood, and knows he can never tell Judy what he saw here.
“I’ll wait with you,” he tells the dog, letting his fingertips travel gently over the depression between his eyes where he liked to be tickled. He worries his touch hurts the dog and yet it seems wrong to watch him die without extending even that kindness.
The dog lies for some time with his eyes closed, head nodding slightly, showing no sign of recognizing Eban’s nearness. Long enough that Eban begins to wonder if he should have gone for Judy.
He turns his back, unable to watch. The dog’s shallow, shuddering breaths slow, but do not end. He doesn’t know what pain a dog feels, but he feels sure it is wrong for this to continue.
He fires a single shot into the dog. His nodding skull shatters and all is still.
Eban digs a hole with his hands in the snow and then in the thawing ground beneath. He cannot dig deep enough and it may be that the dog will be found by some larger animal when the spring comes, but there is nothing he can do about that.
He lays the dog’s body in the hole, covers it over, and stands for a moment, looking down and thinking he should say something. Then he heads back the way he came.
After resting the grouse and apples in the snow where they made camp, he glimpses a trail of footprints ascending the steep ridge above. Judy. His feet sometimes losing purchase in the snow and mud, Eban clings to fir branches as he follows the prints.
After some time, he notices that it has become easier to fit himself between the trees, and without intending it, he has begun to follow a weaving route that levels the ascent. Pausing to study the brush around him, he realizes he is walking what must once have been a path. Here, the brush grows thick and low, with paper birch and eastern juniper springing up between the towering black spruce and balsam. As he travels, the sun slips in the sky, the temperature falls, and the bank of snow begins to rise.
Cresting the hilltop, he finds an alpine clearing—the lowest entrance to the barrens his mother told him never to travel into, where the tree line dwindles and snow lies like a sheet of paper over the hills and everything can be seen.
He sees Judy in the clearing and calls her name. Coming closer, he finds she has dug out a trough in the snow, and sits inside it, looking at her hand against the ground.
“It’s a boat,” she says.
Not understanding at first, he looks down and sees she has unburied the keel of a corroded vessel—he runs his hand along its curved edge, struck silent.
“They made it out of aluminum. I’d have thought they’d make a boat of wood. How long do you think that would last up here? Where would they get it from?”
He shakes his head, absently combing snow away from it with his hand. He finds beneath it the buried branches of the low-growing scrub that rings the barrens—the thing was hiked into the air by the growing forest, or by the winds, which might be wild enough at these heights to fling something so heavy so far.
“I guess you didn’t find the tent,” he says.
She doesn’t answer.
“Please don’t worry, Judy. We’ll figure something out.” Though he can’t think what. “Judy?”
And then he guesses where she has been and what she has looked for. Her ungloved hands are reddened from the cold and they both look at them. She has short fingers for her height, the hands of a child almost. A child used to work. Right then, for all the strength he knows is in them, they seem fragile and he wishes he could take them in his own.
“Did you…did you find any sign of Beau out there?” he asks.
Her mouth is drawn as tight as a stitch. “Nothing.”
He knows it is in this moment that he must say something if he is ever to.
There is a streak of blood, bright as a coin, on Judy’s left hand. Judy never complains about pain. He has only seen hurt register on her face when others suffer. Her father. The sick girl. The animal kills that feed them.
He thinks maybe that is what his mother saw in Judy. That there was no wisdom or strength in her goodness. How little it means to feel things, if you don’t do the right things.
“I should get back,” he says at last.
“That voice we heard today, Eban…”
“It wasn’t a voice. I know you looked. We saw no sign of anyone.”
“But if there was someone.”
“Even if there was—it could be just another traveller. Maybe a peddler keeping low.”
“It’s just a thought I keep having. I can’t shake it. I had a dream last night that we found the person we heard. It was a man, and he was so surprised to see us. He kept asking what we were doing up here. He kept asking me to go down into the valley and didn’t understand why I wouldn’t. He kept saying, ‘Why would you want to raise a baby here?’ ”
“Judy…it’s just a dream.”
“All my life I’ve been told to hide, but no one has ever really told me why. You worry every time we light a stick of wood, because you were taught to. But he didn
’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t know about any sickness or the other ones or whatever it is that’s wrong down there. He said everything was ready. He said everyone was waiting.”
“What are you…What do you think—”
She looks at him for a moment longer, and then down into the trees. “What if it isn’t true? What if none of it is true?”
* * *
—
Eban once asked Alphonse what it had been like. They were washing dishes together in the river; it was a sunny, perfect day, and the two had talked more easily than usual, though occasionally they could hear the moaning of the girl from her house and Judy’s efforts to shush her. Maybe they spoke only to stop hearing it.
Eban told Alphonse his mother didn’t like to talk about what had happened. He said although she spent three years in the cities, he wasn’t sure how much she even knew.
Alphonse was quiet for a few minutes and then said it was Dan who had known the cities.
He looked afraid of something. He said again that he didn’t know, that he had been scarcely six years old when he came into the outland, at the allotment border. “But,” he said, “when we found Judy, we knew how bad things were.”
Eban asked him what he meant.
“Judy thinks we went looking for her. Or for a child to adopt. That we sought her out.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Eban, Judy’s mother was from there. From the cities.”
“Do you mean—”
“Yes. But Judy isn’t. Judy is like us.”
“I know,” Eban said. Because of the fierceness in the other man’s expression, but he wasn’t sure he understood.
“There are,” Alphonse said slowly, “restrictions. Limits on women having children. And penalties. This is what we heard. I don’t know if this mother had too many or wasn’t permitted any at all. But she brought her baby to the outland to die.”
He said it was Daniel who’d seen her lay the infant in the grass and cover its tiny mouth and nose with her hand. He’d been out hunting and, without thinking, had fired a shot near her. The mother ran away, and then stood in the distance, watching him from the road. She didn’t protest as he lifted the baby into his arms, slipping the rifle under his shoulder. They looked at each other for some time before she turned away, walking back down the road, back to whatever place she’d come from.
Alphonse gathered up the clean dishes on the bank and stood. “Judy doesn’t know,” he said.
“But…” Eban searched for the right question.
“And you can’t tell her.”
“I won’t. Of course I won’t. But she…she showed me an earring that belonged to her mother. She said her mother died when she was only a few minutes old. She said that with her last words she asked if the baby was a girl, and when Daniel told her it was, she asked him to take the earring from her ear and to tell the girl it had belonged to the mother who loved her.”
Alphonse smiled faintly. “Daniel told me not to, but she wanted the story of how she was born. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. But I had an earring left me by a great-aunt, something she’d thought would still have worth. So I told Judy a story, and it made her happy. And I gave her something that had no value to me.”
“She loves it,” whispered Eban. “I’ve seen her hold it to the light, close it in her fist. She puts it in that yellow box and takes it out again a dozen times a day.”
“I know she does.”
“Does it matter that it isn’t true?”
Alphonse looked at the plates in his hand. “I don’t know,” he said.
And then he returned to the one-room house where his adopted daughter kept watch over a dying girl, which they all now knew her to be, though none of them would ever say the words aloud.
* * *
—
“Are you ready to go back to camp?” Eban asks Judy now gently. “I found us a grouse. And some apples…”
She stares out at the barrens. “There might be a lake down there.”
“Or there was.”
“Or there was.” He realizes she is sitting on the hull of the overturned craft. “You saw the path?”
He nods.
“You aren’t thinking—what are you thinking?” she asks.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“But are you thinking about them?”
“Them?”
“The colony? Are you thinking this might have been it? And nothing is left?”
He draws a breath and looks more closely at her, and then turns his gaze back to the snowscape around them. “No.”
“No?”
“This could be anyone’s old camp or settlement. And aluminum corrodes but takes a long time to give out. This boat could be from a hundred years ago.”
“Okay,” she says after a while. He reaches out his hand to help her from the boat, but she just pushes herself to her feet, and they follow their own footprints down.
He thinks he understands why she hesitated there. He felt what she did, the wrong-footedness of it, the boat in the trees, the lake beneath the snow or whatever might remain of it after the drought years. It should have felt like they were among ghosts, whoever made or travelled in that boat, and knew what it was to see water spread out farther than you could cross, and to sail over its surface, like you owned the wind and water. But under the measureless grey sky and falling snow, they were the ghosts.
* * *
—
One night, in the last week before his mother died, Eban sat up with her till dawn.
It had been almost a month since first Alphonse and then Eban’s mother had caught the girl’s fever. She lay in blankets that had been changed daily until then, stained with sweat and bodily waste. She hadn’t excreted anything since the day before, and it was no longer worth the suffering of moving her. Her skin was yellowed as blood left her face and extremities to serve her failing organs. On her arms and hands were spots like bruises, where blood pooled. He could scarcely look at her, at the caves around her still-open eyes as they withdrew into her skull, everything retreating inward, as if death were an exit not out of the body but deep into its interior.
He heard then what he was saying to her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He tried to explain. “She died four days ago. I didn’t tell you. She died here, at our camp, and she wasn’t any of the things I told you. She wasn’t good, or if she was, I never saw it. She wasn’t anything, only dying. She could have been one of the other ones. She could have meant us harm. And you were right to fear her, to guess what she was, might be. But you let her stay for me, and…” He took her hand in his, struggling, the words stuck on his dry tongue. “Because of your love for me, you did this, and now you are—”
Whatever else he’d intended to say fell from his mouth as she narrowed her eyes and snatched her hand from his. From her face, he saw he had got it wrong. And then he guessed. It wasn’t for him she did it. Nothing he’d said to her had mattered. She’d never bent her will to anything but her own resolve.
It was for his brother.
* * *
—
As they descend the path, Judy surprises him, stopping so suddenly he stumbles to avoid colliding with her. “I wish it was like that,” she says.
He understands she is talking about the boat, the lake.
“They had everything. They had the whole goddamn world. And all we do is pick their bones.”
“Judy, we have—we have each other. We have enough.”
“It isn’t enough. Are you listening to me? That is exactly the thing I’m saying to you. I am saying it isn’t enough. Not even close.”
“We’re the lucky ones,” he says, stubbornly. “We have enough to eat. We can find food and water. We keep warm. We’ve always been sheltered.”
“I migh
t have been good at something.” Her face and voice harden. “And you. Someone might have loved you.”
He stares at her until she looks away. He drinks in her shame, her anger dropping from her like a shrug. He fills himself with it like he’s starved. Like it will fill the hole she made in the middle of the squandered world.
“My father used to say we didn’t earn a perfect world,” she says softly. “I don’t have a clue what that means.”
He thinks she is impressed by her own outburst, the intensity of her feelings. For a moment, he despises her.
“Shouldn’t we get to know what it is we don’t have? Shouldn’t it be easier or harder to imagine? What would it mean? No one would die? Cherry trees?”
This answer he knows. “We would be good. It would be a good world.” He thinks of his mother. “It was.”
V
That night, as they sleep, the temperature plummets. The first time he wakes, he’s shaking with cold. His eyes open for a moment. The sky is black, moonless, pricked with stars.
They lie in the fold of a crude tarp-tent, on a bed of fir branches. He buries his head under the sleeping bag and pushes himself against Judy. She makes a sound but doesn’t move away. He sleeps again, in her warmth.
The second time he wakes, Judy is frowning at him.
“It’s soaked,” she says. “The sleeping bag is soaked. How could we sleep through that?”
“It’s okay,” he says instinctively. “It’s okay.”
She is quiet for a moment. “Eban?”
“What is it?”
“I shouldn’t have said it. Up on the path yesterday.”
He looks away. “Why did you say it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why I do the things I do anymore. I don’t know why I’m angry with you when none of it’s your fault.”
“No, it isn’t.” He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. “We can’t travel today, not with everything wet, in this kind of cold.”
“I fooled myself that we could make it into summer like this, if we had to. Stupid. We’re lucky it was snow and not rain or everything in our packs would be soaked too.”
The Second History Page 7
