North

by Frank Owen

  ‘That damn recipe book! It’s like your blankie, Mama. You never go anywhere without it.’

  Ruth rested the medicine journal on the pillow beside Vida’s head, as if its cures and collective history would seep into her head while she slept. And despite herself, Vida felt the deathless song of them all coming back to her in a great rush, as if the book was magic. Her whole childhood was in there, and her mama’s, and all the women in her family back in South Africa, a hundred years of them at least, from the time they started to write down the things they knew. She wasn’t alone.

  And when she thought about it now, the burning in her leg was taking up a little less of her brain. She felt the sweat cold on her chest, and grew properly sober.

  ‘Didn’t think I’d see this book again, Mama. Or you.’

  ‘We keep popping up when you need us. That’s no accident, baby. But first things first. I need to talk hard to you now, and you need to listen. So brace yourself.’

  Vida nodded. It felt strange to be lying on a clean pillow.

  ‘You know it’s bad, don’t you, Vida? We got to make a decision soon, one way or the other. We got to find a way to save that leg of yours. I don’t want to scare you, you know that. I’ve seen some pretty terrible things in my time – and some of them I haven’t told you yet – but cutting off my own daughter’s leg is about the worst of them.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that, Mama? Besides, nobody’s asking you to do it.’ She hated the way just seeing her mother made her feel five years old. The lines of suffering written on her face!

  ‘I’ll do it if I got to.’

  ‘That’s not an option right now, Mama.’

  ‘You taken a good look at it lately?’

  Vida felt the tears begin to trickle sideways onto the pillow.

  Ruth rubbed her daughter’s hand. ‘I meant it. I’m really not trying to scare you, honey. Don’t cry. Not on the book.’ She smiled weakly. ‘We’ll watch it for a day or so and see how bad it gets. That make sense?’

  Vida nodded. She wanted to curl herself up into a tiny ball and creep back inside the warm circle of her mother, forget everything and start again, before everything had gone wrong and she had got stuck in the end of the world.

  Instead Ruth sat back and started to peel the book’s pages apart, trying not to inflict more damage than there already was. Passage in a backpack had rubbed some of the writing away, and the North Platte water had smudged the ink in places into Rorschach blots: those poultices and tinctures and tips were gone forever. Wrapping it in plastic had kept the worst of the wet out, but it hadn’t worked all the way. Ruth’s lips were pressed tightly together as she turned the pages.

  Vida let her hand fall back on the sheet and listened to her mother’s harsh breathing. She could practically hear the cogs whirring in Ruth’s fierce brain.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I remember stashing something here in the way-back. Kind of a cure-all for worst-case.’

  Three quarters of the way through the book, Ruth stopped at a tiny home-made envelope pinned to a page. She pried it off carefully and opened it, like a letter from a dead lover.

  ‘What I thought.’ She shook the envelope gently at Vida, and there was a small, hopeful rustling. ‘Mullein seeds. Supposed to use the flowers, but I reckon these will be as close as we’ll get.’

  Ruth took the bottle that Dyce had left, unscrewed its lid and dropped the rough brown seeds into the dregs of the water. Then she stood and searched the room for a pestle that would fit the mouth of the bottle. She measured the rubber-capped leg of the chair.

  ‘No one is going to care about the chairs.’

  The leg broke off easily. The rest of the furniture in the Capitol Building would give up the ghost over the next few years, and there would be nothing to replace it.

  Ruth set herself to crushing the seeds. When she was done she presented the bottle to Vida.

  ‘Here, now. Sit up and drink this, and try to get it all down. Could be the difference between one leg and two.’

  ‘Thought you weren’t trying to scare me.’

  Vida sat up shakily and drank the medicine, then flopped back down, exhausted.

  ‘You just rest now. We’ll be right here. You know it.’ Ruth ran her hand down Vida’s side, then stood and covered her with a sheet. She took the medicine journal and propped it near a boarded-up window, where she hoped the faint breeze might dry it altogether. Then she turned and folded her arms, waiting for Vida to fall asleep so she could get a better look at her while she was unawares. There was another reason Ruth was dreading having to amputate her daughter’s leg – and not only because Vida was in this terrible weakened state.

  There. She was under.

  Ruth leant closer to the girl on the bed and inspected her chest. Vida had always had a little extra flesh on her, but never like this. She should look thinner, if anything, considering what she’d been through. If she’d been swept through the gap in the Wall on the Platte the same way the other survivors had, then she ought to show more damage.

  Ruth reached out and felt the weight of Vida’s breast in her hand, the way she had for a hundred girls who had come to her for help in more ordinary times.

  There it was: the dense, swelling tissue that could only mean one thing. Vida murmured, ‘Dyce,’ and moved in her sleep, and Ruth withdrew her hand. She sighed.

  Heavy times were coming for her daughter.

  She moved her hands gently over the sleeping girl’s abdomen and palpated her. Yup. There it was. Not far along, but unmistakable. Did Dyce know? Hell, did Vida herself even have a clue?

  Dyce was still leaning back against the wall in the corridor outside, his hands dangling in between his knees. He stood up fast as Ruth emerged. They were never going to like each other. She was a bitch, thought Dyce. A hard woman. And he knew she probably thought he was a lightweight, a boy who didn’t deserve her daughter, and who couldn’t protect her. Maybe she was right.

  ‘Is she going to be okay?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Ruth. ‘But I’m not sure you are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Welcome to the family, Daddy.’

  Dyce stared at her, confused.

  She stated it as plainly as she could. ‘Vida’s pregnant.’

  20

  Vida slept on and her baby slept inside her. Above their heads, word spread through the Capitol Building of the meeting in the Senate Chamber. Dyce wandered aimlessly around the halls and passages, staring ahead into a blurry middle ground, fighting the time-traveling feeling, turning the mandolin machine heads over together in his pockets like a talisman. Without his night sight he’d have taken a while to figure out his way around in the gloom of the building, but the disorientation was more than that.

  He was going to be a father!

  It wasn’t real. Think about something else, he told himself. You got time.

  He wasn’t the only one who was lost and weary. After the initial flurry of greetings, most of the Southerners had just sat, awed, staring at the portraits of stern Northern presidents in their rows on the wall. There was Renard, painted oversized, smack in the center, like an African dictator on a throne. All of the canvases except his had been torn up in their previous life, but someone had tried to tape them back together, the burnt scraps of one fixed in place by a pane of glass. They’d obviously not been welcome decoration during Renard’s rule here: too much competition. Dyce wondered why they’d left Renard’s portrait up at all. Maybe they used it for darts practice.

  He set out, intent on making his way to the chamber, which was already humming with curiosity. Some kind of meeting was going to happen, and people were settling themselves on balconies and in little camps as they waited to know their future. It was easy to tell who was Northern and who was new. The guests kept craning their necks at the vault of the dome, with its four dusty chandeliers at the corners of the supports. It wasn’t clear to any of them whether surviving as long
as they had was a good or bad omen, but this was a kind of heaven, at least, and Dyce could almost hear their prayers of gratitude rising in the windless, opulent darkness.

  The stale air was layered with more smoke, both ancient and newly risen, as if those prayers had thickened into ectoplasm. On every level surrounding the atrium there were small groups of Resistance members collected around empty oil drums, red hot with coals, adding their blue-gray smoke to the miasma. Here and there, while they waited, some women were holding damp washing close to the fires. There was food roasting too. The saliva ran under Dyce’s tongue as he caught a whiff of the blistering meat – roadkill or bushmeat, as far as he could tell. It had been caught and skewered on wire. Someone with presence of mind had taken a spade to one of the walls and sliced air vents into the plaster; one or two people had positioned themselves and tried to read by the light. Now that was faith – that books still meant something. Dyce wasn’t sure how they managed to see the words on the page.

  But there was that same music in the air, soft at first, and then, as he gravitated toward it, the notes stinging and lingering as they were plucked. Mostly home-made instruments, Dyce saw, one square-cut from a Spam tin that his bad brother Garrett would have called a hamdolin.

  But the voices hadn’t changed. Those were the way Dyce still remembered them, from lullabies and campfire rounds. A lot of people still knew the words of the hymns and the country songs, the Southern songs, mournful and triumphant. They ran under the earth if they had to, but they always emerged, their gold thread sewn into the fabric of humanity.

  ‘You play?’ It was an old white guy in a leather waistcoat. He held out his ukulele.

  ‘Not really,’ said Dyce. ‘Always wanted to learn, though.’

  ‘You got an instrument?’

  ‘Bits of one.’ Dyce decided to trust him. He pulled the lumps of brass from his pocket and showed them to the man by the light of the brazier. The old guy took a couple and felt their weight in his palm.

  ‘I can put these onto something for you, if you like.’

  ‘Well, I would like,’ said Dyce, ‘but you ought to know I got nothing to trade you.’

  ‘You’re one of the Southerners, right? You’re too new here to know how it works. But it’s your lucky day, kid.’ He spread his arms, and the leather waistcoat gaped. ‘This place doesn’t work on trade. It works on how-about-we-try-to-be-decent-humanbeings. Things are as they are, so what if I just fix something for you and we can parley later about who owes what?’

  The man took the rest of the machine heads out of Dyce’s open hand and stuffed them in his own pocket. ‘Give me a couple of days,’ he said, and then he turned back to the fire and picked up a few notes that were already in the air.

  Dyce wasn’t sure whether he’d just been robbed, plain as day. He stayed and listened a bit longer, a woman’s voice, low and sweet, singing that she’d shot poor Delia. It was the chorus that did it. Dyce decided to let the old man play his hand. Best case, he’d have some strings to learn on; worst case, he’d have to go looking for his machine heads and maybe blacken an eye for the inconvenience.

  He walked on, trying not to think about the baby. He couldn’t figure these Northerners out. It was clear even in his bemusement that there were stark divisions among the Resistance. Here there were men who looked as though they’d been released from prison, smoked with suffering; workers, slimmer and kinder-faced, who cooked or stoked fires or ran necessary errands that did not fall by the wayside even when the cities went down.

  But there were also lots of people who did nothing at all except watch, wide-eyed. Lazy? wondered Dyce. Or just off-duty, like the shrewd man with the ukulele? He couldn’t imagine how they organized the labor in the Capitol Building. Some were surely scouts and hunters and night-shift guards.

  Or plumbers. Dyce didn’t have the presence to guess or to ask, though it was clear that the building needed attention: the smell he caught passing the men’s bathroom was worse than any death he’d attended. There was a sign on the door that said KEEP CLOSED AT ALL TIMES. As he had read it, a woman dashed out in front of him, holding a hand over her mouth and nose, and coughing so hard he thought she would retch. Maybe they kept the fires burning on purpose: the wood was a kind of incense, like the stuff that Ruth liked to burn – what was it? Maybe sage, except that she called it by its older name: imphepho, the dream herb. Whatever it was, it made him cough, just like this smoke now.

  He screwed his eyes up against the dizzying smoke, and found himself following the stream of people headed for the Senate Chamber, pushing him along through the corridors with their urgency – and under that a nerviness, a fear. Maybe living in secret did that to a person.

  By the time he reached the Senate Chamber, it was too full to get a seat, so he sat flat with his back against the wall. How had anyone survived here as long as they had? Men, women, little kids, even.

  Little kids. Christ! He was about to have one of his own. Dyce thought of Bethie Callahan, how Garrett must have seen her struggling in the dust under the hard hands of her kinswomen, clutching at the ivory swan pendant for the luck that didn’t come. It bothered him that the pendant was gone too. His own creation alongside his brother’s, the only carving he had made that Garrett had ever liked. Dyce had felt the same way about the baby in Bethie’s belly – his niece or nephew.

  And now there was another little Jackson due on this fucked-up planet.

  His baby.

  Every woman old enough was pregnant – or maybe you just saw whatever you were thinking about most. Vida was in good company. Some waddled, others moved more easily. For a moment Dyce’s heart skipped back to the Mouth, and Ester’s harem of heartsick girls who had lost their babies. The colostrum-makers.

  Then a door opened, and with it came the sound of crying, only one or two, but in that small space a cacophony of little voices. Dyce looked in and saw babies on hips or laid down on grimy mattresses. Too many for a holed-up population, but at least they were here – alive and cared for.

  He wiped his face. He realized that Ruth was sitting beside him and looking at him with narrowed eyes, and he tried to pay attention to the people who were gathering around him to take stock of where they stood. He hadn’t had a moment until now to make an inventory of who else known to him had made it across the Wall. Clear across Nebraska to Des Moines! That had to mean something. He looked around, dazed, and then was thrown sideways by a thin man who had hurled away his crutches and launched himself at him, throwing fierce arms around his neck.

  ‘Sam!’

  ‘My partner in crime!’

  The man who had once saved his life at Horse Head camp grinned and grinned, and Dyce hugged him again. They thumped each other on the back, talking over one another as the other remnants of the Resistance began to assemble. Some of them were removing mattresses from the floor of the chamber: it had clearly been the warmest place to sleep. Strength in numbers, thought Dyce. More residents appeared, arranging themselves on the built-in desks and counters, and crowding the upstairs balconies like a Roman arena. There was a susurration like wheat as they talked behind their hands, and Dyce realized again that there was no wind to fear inside the Capitol Building.

  Real-life Southerners! He felt the hot eyes on him.

  He didn’t care. They were here, weren’t they? Vida and Ruth and Sam.

  And the baby.

  ‘How’s Vida?’ asked Sam. The hilarity was fading from his face.

  ‘She got cut up pretty bad on the razor wire across the river. Infected.’ Dyce shrugged and his mouth pulled down. Sam knew better than to say the worst.

  ‘She’s brave, man. She’ll pull through.’ He looked around, the real horror of what would happen if her leg didn’t heal lying thick between them.

  She could die, thought Dyce. It could kill her, either way: the baby or the hurt.

  They sat down with Ruth and scanned the gathering audience for other Southerners. They were rewarded too, as familiar faces f
rom Horse Head camp appeared, frightened, elated as they realized that Dyce had made it through. Here and there people were waving. Some began threading their way over the sloped carpet with its leafed pattern toward their fellows.

  ‘Hey.’ Sam nudged him. ‘There’s that old dude. The Weatherman. What’s his name? Felix. Check him out. Did you know he was here too?’

  Dyce shook his head.

  Felix had come in alone. Now he looked them over and lifted his shaggy eyebrows in disbelief. Then he nodded slowly – I see you, motherfucker, said that nod – and sat down behind them. The smile on Dyce’s face felt tight.

  ‘He’s a cockroach, man. There’s something not right about that guy.’

  It was the man in the leather jacket who got up on the senate bench first, the man who had Dyce’s precious machine heads in his pocket. He held his makeshift ukulele in his hand and the crowd hushed at the sight of him. Dyce didn’t recognize the song he sang, but it seemed like an old favorite here. The chorus rose with a hundred voices.

  The fox came down from the hills one night.

  What a terrible smell and a terrible sight!

  And he found a length of the old chicken wire

  And he tied one end to a tractor tire.

  He rolled it out down the middle of the farm.

  Leave him to it, son, what’s the harm?

  But now the rooster doesn’t have his hen,

  And the pig’s locked out of his fa-vo-rite pen.

  The cow’s one side, the bull the other,

  And six new lambs can’t find their mother!

  The applause was deafening – far more than the song itself warranted. The ukulele man winked right at Dyce and got down.

  Then Adams clambered onto the bench. He shushed the expectant crowd, his hands raised like a Southern preacher, inviting the spirit of God to come on down and baptize his flock. The talking petered out and the Northerners focused on Adams, unsurprised by his grizzled face with its sticking plaster, high with expectation.

  ‘You might have noticed something a little different here today,’ he began. His delivery reminded Dyce of Ed, the fat slave-driver of the Mouth. There was something similar in the meter of the two men’s speech, a lilting that seemed to point every sentence toward a grand revelation. ‘We finally found us some motherfucking Southerners!’