The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  She pushes him until finally he tells her what he remembers.

  The last test, his mother called it, when she showed him the second set of drawings. In three days, they would have packed and left the outland house where he was born. But, he says, he didn’t know that then.

  “And your brother?” Judy asks.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Was it before he died or after?” When he says nothing, she sighs and accepts his refusal. “Tell me about the test.”

  What Eban remembers best are the three images of a mother and child that appeared on the second test. In one they seemed to be fighting. In another the mother had gathered the child up in her arms and was looking at him with love. In the last the child was playing alone, and the mother stood in the doorway watching him.

  “Yes,” says Judy. “That’s how it was. On the pages upstairs. It was the same.”

  He nods.

  “Tell me what the mother is thinking,” his own mother had said, and Eban remembers that he was stuck on that one. He touched the mother’s face, as though he might feel her thoughts with the end of his finger.

  “She loves the boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “She likes to see him play.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t know why, but he said then, “She is worried about him.”

  His mother, who’d been standing over him, her hand resting on the back of his chair, took the chair beside him. “Why,” she whispered.

  He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t. There was some intensity in his mother that distracted him so that he couldn’t straighten out his thoughts. What was difficult, too, was that the thing he saw most clearly in the picture was that the boy had far more toys than he’d ever had, and it was hard for him to look at the mother when the toys were what interested him most in the picture. He struggled to find the right answer. “It’s because she loves him.”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s worried because she doesn’t know what will happen to him.”

  He looked at his mother quickly to see how she received this answer. Her eyes were very bright. She said, “But he’s only playing.”

  “I guess…I guess she’s worried about what will happen after.”

  “After?”

  “After. After he’s done playing. Whatever happens after that.”

  “What could happen to him?”

  He had no idea. His shirt collar, too tight, was hot around his throat. He wished he could go do his exercises outside. With that thought, he cried out desperately, “He might go out of the house later. Something could happen to him there. He could…fall, or get lost, or someone could hurt him, maybe.” Suddenly he saw it rise up before his eyes, all the possibilities taking shape. He saw, in fact, that the dangers were enormous. “He could hurt himself. He might trip or, or, eat something bad that made him sick. He could go out on the road, too far from his house. He might be so far that when he called, she couldn’t hear him. She wouldn’t know where to look for him.”

  His mother pulled him to her then, tucked his head under her chin, and put her face into his hair, so that her breath made him even hotter, but he didn’t fight her. “And so many other things,” she said quietly. “And so many other things.”

  When he finishes telling her, Judy is quiet.

  “That’s all I remember,” he says.

  She nods, though she knows the gesture is lost in the dark.

  “But after…after the test was done, she took a book from the shelf. A text I’d never seen before, on neurochemistry. She must have sent a peddler to find it for her. She made me read a chapter about the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala.”

  “You know I don’t know what those words mean.”

  “They’re parts of the brain. If they develop wrong, things don’t function the way they’re supposed to.” He paused. “The book listed a syndrome I hadn’t read about before.”

  “What does it mean, Eban?”

  “We’d been reading about neural development,” he says, as if he didn’t hear her. “For four months we’d been reading and reading again the same chapters…”

  They had spent a great deal of time on disorders that began in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. Cranial nerve palsies and ophthalmological defects that bloomed into systemic disorders by infancy or even later. He didn’t understand why the subject was so important to her, and so when she showed him the new syndrome, whole pages on a complex of indicators he’d never heard of, he asked her, “What does it matter?”

  She didn’t respond, and so he added, “It’s just that I’m not likely to ever see a person suffering from such a rare syndrome.”

  “It was a stupid thing to say,” he tells Judy now. He says he studied injuries and diseases he’d never encounter, and could never help if he did. He’d read about principles of biochemistry that would only be of use in the kind of lab where she once worked, and that he would never see. There was something else she was getting at with all of this, an idea they were completing together, and all of it mattered, and his question was an insult to the endeavour she’d begun with him the summer he turned twelve.

  “Eban,” Judy says again. “What does it mean?”

  When he speaks, his voice seems to come from a long way away. “When we were done reading, she took a silver pin and pushed it into the palm of her hand while I watched. I cried and she made me record my pulse. I would have put a hundred pins in my own body and it would have hurt less. It would have been less terrible.”

  “Why? Why did she do that?”

  “She asked me if I could see it. If I understood. She said there was sweat on my brow, that the freckles on my face looked darker because my skin had turned so pale. She asked me if I noticed that I was breathing more quickly. She said if she could take the temperature of my tympanic membrane then, it would be elevated. She pointed to the number I had written down, and said that that number, my face, they were like books where she could read what I was feeling. She said they weren’t just feelings, they were physical, chemical, electrical processes of the human body. She said those processes make us what humans are. If they fail, we become something else. And she said for a person to be altered in that way was a catastrophe.”

  “Eban, who was she talking about?”

  He says, “She told me people like us feel pity even for those who don’t know how to feel it. She said people like that, those other ones, think our pity is a weakness. She said we couldn’t let them be right.”

  Then he refuses to say anything else and they fall quiet, and eventually, they sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Food comes again. And water. When the door opens, Judy is waiting at the ladder, prepared to meet their captors once more. But she can’t see even the hands that lower the bundle of provisions. This time, only cold bread and an open tin of beans. They devour it, and then the water. They don’t save a drop. Without speaking of it, they have both become convinced that soon they will be released or killed. It won’t be long now, either way. It occurs to Judy even to wonder about the food itself, but she would rather die with a full belly of poison than starve in this hole.

  They return the filled bucket and empty food box, and when the rope appears again it is yoked to a clean bucket and a square package, wrapped in cloth. Judy seizes hold of the package, tearing at the string that binds it.

  “What is it?” Eban asks, behind her.

  She nearly forgets to remove the bucket, and from the other end of the rope comes an impatient tug. “Get it, Eban. Get the bucket.”

  He acquiesces and then asks again, “Judy, what is it?”

  She stares at it, shaking her head. “I can’t…I don’t understand them.”

  “Judy?”

  She turns to look at him in wonder. “It’s a book.”

  The cover is
crudely made, a scrap of heavy leather stitched at the spine to a stack of rough paper, the edges neatly cut. She feels the weight of the book in her hands. She turns its pages. She looks at the narrow black writing that fills them. For no good reason, tears begin to drop from her eyes.

  And then the door, which she had not even noticed was still open above, closes, and they’re plunged into darkness again. She hears her voice shout. “No!”

  “There’s something else. Judy? There was something else in the bucket. Let me check it.”

  She can’t account for the intensity of the fury she feels. The words that had only just emerged before her, the first glimpse of any meaning or answer, vanished into darkness.

  “Look,” he says, “here, look.” She can see nothing, of course, but he puts them in her hands. “Candles. Matches. And something else, I think it’s…”

  Her hand shakes as she lights the match and stares at the object he holds toward her. “A pencil,” she says.

  The match burns her fingers and she drops it into the dirt. Darkness again.

  “We should conserve,” he says, as she twists the three candles into the dirt and lights one after another with a single match. “There might not be any more.”

  She ignores him and opens the book. After a moment, he asks what it says and she whispers the words.

  Written at the top of the first page is this: “Haven Colony,” she reads.

  And then underneath: “These free people came to this place on April 11th, 2062, seeking to live among those who share our clement hearts.”

  “When is that, 2062?” Eban asks. “When did that happen?”

  “Why does it say ‘Haven Colony’? Why not ‘Heaven’?” She reads on: “There were fifty-seven of us. (See list, below.)”

  And then someone has added something, squeezed into the bottom in a different hand, the ink-blue shapes of the letters jagged and wild. “We have chosen to live by the rule of silence and to protect and enforce the rule. In this way, we protect ourselves from those who would find frailty in our charity. The rule is binding for all who freely choose to live among us.”

  “I don’t understand it. What do they mean by ‘silence’…they never speak at all? That’s why that girl’s tongue was cut? She freely chose that?”

  Judy is turning the page. “There’s more writing in that same blue ink…Someday, if we live, there will be those who wonder how we came and what sort of people we were. With these words, we answer them. And it goes on for pages, and then again here and there throughout, sometimes for pages, sometimes only a line. The rest, the parts in pencil, is only the list. Fifty-seven names, heights, weights. It says tested beside each one, and a date. And other things…here, this one says engineering, carpentry, reading, and that one says just cooking, firearms.”

  “Do you think there are fifty-seven of them now? How long ago did they come here?”

  She counts the names. “I think there were fifty-seven. Some have an x after the date, and a second date. Maybe when they died?”

  “Or left?”

  “But there are more names. It goes on. But they aren’t the same.” She shows him. “All different handwriting. No dates or measurements. This one just says, After the first snow. And then the passages get longer, and longer, some of them several pages.”

  She reads from a page at the middle of the book: “As two we came, sisters both, no others known to us, and those who knew us dead below, where a house once stood and burned, where there were once five houses and five families and a farm that grew good seed and where we kept animals for meat and fur and fed ourselves and were warm in winter and drew water from the ground in summer, and were not troubled till the fires came and the seed did not grow and the animals sickened and we ate the meat left on their bones and the fires came and our houses burned and there were no others left but we two sisters who knew no others, and we came into the hills, and walked without knowing where we walked, the smoke behind us, the hills burning, and no water to be found, and there in the hills we found this place and yield to what end we find here, be it sanctuary after long travel or—”

  “I don’t understand why—”

  “And some are only short. This one can scarcely write his letters: A man alone come from up the barrens where there is nun now and many dangurs, can find birds in ruff also the rabbit, good with knife.”

  “Why?” Eban repeats. “Why are they writing this down?”

  She finds herself turning back to the entries written in ink, a blue thread of continuity between the accounts of these strangers whose fates they can only guess. The blue entries are meticulously dated, but the handwriting becomes shakier as they go on, the letters losing form, till they look like they were blown across the page by a wind. Nearly a year we prepared, reads a passage that begins on the back of the first page, beneath the list of pencilled names. I wish we’d had ten times as much, but it still wouldn’t have been enough, considering everything we had to learn and get done before making the big move. The trip took only three days, and we had a lot to carry—

  “It’s a record,” she says. She takes the pencil in her hand. “It’s their history.”

  “But why have they given it to us?”

  “Because we’re part of it now.”

  She finds the last marked page, and enters their names beneath the last person it lists. Beside her own name, she writes, Winter. Black hair. Brown eyes. Book-writing and binding, hunting. She hesitates, unable to think of anything else she knows about herself. She hands the book to Eban and then snatches back the pencil to scrawl, Pregnant.

  He looks unhappy as he writes a few words and closes the book. “What does it mean?” he asks, and she doesn’t answer. “What does it mean?” he asks again. “Judy?”

  * * *

  —

  After the first baby was lost, Judy began to ask for the jobs that would take her farthest from their hide. She had always liked to linger in the wood, enjoying the return to Eban (Eban, soft of voice and touch, the way he held her, always a little too long, and looked at her as if he saw everything) as much as she enjoyed the time alone. But now she took on all the hunting and water-carrying work and walked for hours before even lifting her eyes to look for running water or a kill. When she finally turned back, her steps fell heavier, and she often arrived hours after dark to Eban’s anxious face, which she found she no longer liked to look at.

  But he seemed to understand. He thought he understood. She felt his patience, daily unspooling, till he had reached the end of what he believed was a fair period of time for her to grieve, and then one night, as they lay together, he whispered, “We can make another.”

  And she knew what he thought. That she grieved the child or blamed him for its loss or some other thing that could be solved by making another, as easily as a put-out fire could be lit again.

  And she looked into his pale, wide eyes and knew they didn’t see her at all. The thing that made her—more than sorrowful or even angry—the thing that made her savage with fury wasn’t what had happened to their baby, but what would have happened to it had it lived.

  * * *

  —

  Long after the candles have burned down to the dirt, the door opens above, and they tie the book to the rope and return it. The door doesn’t close, and after a time, they begin to climb the ladder, haltingly. When they reach the top, the three women stand before them, flanked by two black-haired men who seem to share the same long white face.

  “Twins,” Judy says softly, and the old woman narrows her eyes and crosses to the desk. She throws open the book, which rests there, and points at a line of handwriting. The rule is binding for all…

  “Yes,” Judy begins, and then she nods instead. She understands. But the woman thrusts out her thin hands and clutches Judy’s face, drawing her close. One hand closes over her mouth, so she can feel the knotted fingers against her lips
and teeth. She stumbles backward, trying to free herself. Eban reaches towards her, helplessly, and then his arms fall to his side, his mouth open and empty of words.

  Judy nods and nods again, as hard as she can. She understands the rule. Silence. She understands.

  At last the woman releases her, looking unsatisfied still. She points again to the page. To protect and enforce. Only when Judy puts her own finger to the line The rule is binding for all does the woman nod and seem appeased. She then turns to the second page and touches a name. Sladja. Her own name. The eighth one listed in the record. She has been here since it was made.

  Sladja then beckons to the others, one by one, and finds their names in the history. The men are called Romeo and Bobby-Rae, and their names appear on the same page as Eban and Judy’s. There are no other words by their names, no indication of even the season when they arrived, and Judy wonders how long ago it may have been.

  The sad-faced woman is Oona, and she, too, was among the fifty-seven who came here first. And the young woman is Golda. Her name is the last before Eban and Judy’s own.

  Sladja then closes the book, unlocks the second drawer of the desk, and places it inside. Laying her palms on the desk she watches them, her eyes darting from Eban to Judy, as though waiting for something more that might happen in that moment.

  There is, Judy thinks, a kind of animal happiness. Here and there she knew it in her childhood. A physical joy. She remembers it ringing in her body, a tide rising in her veins. She recalls certain sentences she read in certain books that lifted her out of herself. Sinking into the blue cold water of a brook. Nights when the air was as warm as touch, and the sky clear and drowned in stars. A sudden fall of rain. Her father lifting the child Judy from the ground after she fell, and in discovering she was not hurt, the child wept in relief and allowed herself to be soothed, and felt trust as blindly and deeply as it could be felt. The feeling sang out in her and she’d draw in her breath and sustain it as long as she could. She has not felt it for years. And she feels it now. She is in the hands of this tiny, wretched company of people who can tell her nothing. They might not help her—might harm her, even. She doesn’t know what will happen next.