by Penn Gates
Michael nods.
“I'll check down there right now,” she decides. “It's the first place someone would think to hide—assuming anyone's still here, which I doubt.”
Michael makes a move to join her, but she signals to him to stand guard at the door, mainly to keep him out of the way in case she has to shoot. He takes it seriously, though, leaning against the door jam so he can keep an eye on both the kitchen and the yard.
There are new wooden shelves full of home-canned fruits and vegetables and the small cellar is filled with the smell of fresh lumber. Did the kids' father take time out from his farm work to build these for his wife in gratitude for all her labor growing and preserving food for the family? He must have been a nice guy. This whole pandemic sucks so bad!
“You guys bring all those canning jars from Pennsylvania?” she asks, returning to the kitchen. “It's a miracle they made it in one piece.”
Michael says nothing.
“I'm gonna check the rest of the place,” she says. “Stay put, Michael. I mean it. If I see something moving, I will shoot it.”
He doesn't answer, but she's beginning to see that he really does know his way around guns and won't do anything stupid.
She creeps through the rooms downstairs, noting that nothing much seems out of place, then checks the upstairs bedrooms before climbing to the attic, which is empty. They didn't even have time to start stashing castoffs up here for ‘someday’—a thing her family has done for generations. Is hoarding hereditary, she wonders.
She follows protocol by calling out to Michael before she re-enters the kitchen. “All clear. Now go get your rifle.”
This one is not dumb, she thinks. I’ll bet he suggested taking the generator back to Gramps’ place, and dopey George vetoed the idea. Aloud, she asks, “Any other guns around here?”
“My father had a hunting rifle.”
“Grab it—and all the ammo you can find.”
It’s not long before he's back. Nix guesses that for him the house is haunted, at least with memories of his folks' last days.
“You know where the generator is, right?” she says.
He nods curtly. “It's my family's farm, isn't it?”
“Well then lead the way, pal. We got a lot to do in a short time.”
After they drag the generator outside, they bring out all the fuel containers stored with it. It looks like they've got almost a full load, but Nix knows they need all the fuel they can get. In the coming months, it will be the new gold, and soon enough survivors will be searching for it.
“I want to siphon the fuel out of all the farm equipment before we go,” she tells Michael. “Find all the containers you can, will you?”
“I think I remember seeing some old metal gas cans in a corner of the loft.”
“Shake 'em out first,” Nix cautions. “We'll probably still have to strain for flakes of rust, but it can't hurt. And Michael, keep clearing each building before you start searching.”
“I'm a Mennonite, not an idiot,” he snaps.
When he returns they rig up a makeshift ramp and drag the generator into the back of the wagon. They have to unharness the horse because he won't stand still, and then hook him back up. By the time they load gas and diesel containers, it's after three.
“Can you think of anything in the house we need to take today?” she asks Michael, more to give him a say than anything else.
Michael shakes his head. “There's food, clothes—probably lots of stuff we can use—but we'll have to come back for it." He takes a swipe at his nose. “Unless somebody gets it first.”
Nix doesn't know what to say to that. There's no protecting this place without occupying it, and it's unthinkable at the moment to split the group. She needs them to keep Gramps' farm going—and they need her to protect them.
“We should go then,” she says. “It'll be getting dark by the time we get back, and we still have to unload.”
“At least George will be there to help with that.”
“Someone had to keep an eye on things while we're gone,” Nix says, deciding that fire doesn't need any more stoking. “And I needed someone with me I could trust in case of trouble." She adds casually, “I think I chose the right guy.”
She senses him sit taller and square his shoulders.
“Tomorrow I'll drive the truck into Hamlin,” she says, thinking out loud. “See what's going on there.”
“I'm goin' with you,” Michael says immediately.
Nix doesn't argue. She just wishes she had two of Michael, one to watch the farm and the other to watch her back.
“Do you think there's any people left in town?” Nix asks after awhile.
“Haven't been there,” he says. “George just wants to hide out."
“But if it had been up to you—you’d have gone looking?”
“Doesn't make sense to hide your head under the covers. Either the boogeyman's out there, or he isn't. It's better to know.”
“I couldn't agree with you more." Nix is feeling a lot better about the odds than she was when they left this morning.
She allows herself to relax a little as the wagon bounces up the rutted drive of the St Clair farm. She's anticipating the warmth of the stove and something to eat. And maybe, by tomorrow night, she'll have that hot bath she's been longing for. She sighs. The only thing she really misses about her apartment is the shower and unlimited hot water.
For the first time she realizes how impersonal her place had been. Everything was beige, and nothing was natural—plastic woodwork, polyester carpet, even the cheap, starter furniture she'd always promised herself to replace with something more durable. Not a stick of wood in the lot. The solid, grounded feeling of the farmhouse, with its thick beams and heavy plaster walls, makes it seem almost organic. This place, built by her ancestors, feels like a fortress against the insanity she knows is out there. For tonight, it's enough.
◆◆◆
She hardly has time to clamber down from the wagon before George bursts out the back door.
“Thank the Lord you're back! Come quick, Miss St Clair—it’s your grandfather!”
Nix leaps up the stairs in a headlong dash toward the door. George reaches out with one long arm and stops her. “I think he is almost ready to pass. He has just been waiting to say good-bye to you, I think.”
“Get off me!” she says fiercely. “He needs me!”
Nix halts her headlong rush through the kitchen into the dining room and stares at the frail bundle on Gramps' bed. She can almost believe that the old man lying there is not her grandfather at all. His bright blue eyes had always been wide with a kind of surprise that the world was such an interesting place. Those eyes are hidden now behind closed lids, without a hint of movement behind them to show he's still in there somewhere. The deep lines of his face are smoothing like a quilt put to rights after a restless night's sleep.
Margaret sits next to the bed, hands clasped in front of her. She has closed her own eyes, the better to see whatever she's praying to, her lips moving silently. In spite of what looks like total concentration, she senses Nix standing there.
“I am so glad you are here,” she says, rising. “It is almost time.”
“The hell it is!” Nix growls. She sinks to her knees next to the bed and grips her grandfather's hand. “Gramps, wake up! You can't leave me. I need you!" She remains motionless for a long time, waiting for some sign that he's heard her, but there's not even a twitch of a finger in the cold, gnarled hand she clings to.
Nix is only dimly aware when Margaret leaves the room. Silence falls like snow, muffling the sounds of the world beyond. No one else intrudes on her last moments with the man who was more father to her than grandfather. Something wet splashes onto the back of her hand and she realizes she is crying.
“Gramps—I came so far to get here, and we hardly had a chance to talk. There's so many things I need to ask you. So many things I wanted to tell you.”
She tries to imagine how he wo
uld answer, if he could, but nothing comes to mind. It's as if he's already gone, and he's taken all her memories of him, too, leaving her with a huge hole where he used to be.
“I'm scared, Gramps,” she whispers. “Scared I won't be able to keep all these kids safe, and I want to—just like you protected me. You're the only one in the whole, wide world I ever trusted.”
She has no idea how many minutes, hours—even days—go by before she hears the unmistakable sound of the last breath Alvin St Clair will ever take. It's not the sound of a body struggling for one more gulp of oxygen to fill the lungs, one more second of life. She's heard that awful sound from victims of violence, as they lost their battle with death. Gramps just sighs, and he's gone. She knows the moment his life force leaves his body, just as she had always known whether or not he was in the house somewhere when she came home from school.
In her mind's eye, she sees Gramps standing in the drive as her druggy mother put the car in gear and took her away from the only place she wanted to be. Nix would kneel on the seat and look out the back window for as long as she could see him. Until the car drove around the curve where the lane forked and Gramps vanished from her sight.
She lays her head down and sobs.
Chapter 5
“It's my job to take care of him,” Nix says. Reddened eyes are the only sign that she's been crying. Years spent in a job dominated by men had taught her tears make you vulnerable because they're seen as a sign of weakness.
“It is not fitting for a person to prepare a family member for burial,” Margaret tells her gently. “I have done it before. It does not disturb me." She touches the back of Nix's hand lightly. “Perhaps you could choose the clothing you wish for him - ”
Nix nods, too drained to argue. “I'll go find his suit,” she says in a monotone.
His room feels—wrong. The oddness of absence. The world feels out of kilter now that he's no longer in it. No matter the crisis, Nix has always known that her grandfather was at his farm and would help her if he could.
Gramps had once told her that he'd chosen a bedroom in the oldest part of the house because he liked feeling close to all the St Clairs who had slept there before him. Nix looks around the room, drinking in details she'd almost forgotten. She runs her hands over the hand carved clothes pegs built into the wall. They're smooth and polished with age. When this room was new her ancestors had only the clothes on their backs and one special outfit to marry and be buried in. Later St Clairs were prosperous farmers who could afford more garments and a walnut wardrobe in which to hang them.
That same wardrobe still stands in the corner. Nix opens its double doors slowly. Gramps' clothes hang limply from a neat row of hangers. Their emptiness instantly brings back the reality of the dead body downstairs. She buries her face in one of his old flannel shirts and inhales the lingering scent of perspiration and pipe tobacco, with a hint of the cattle barn. She grips the edges of the heavy wood and forces herself to straighten up.
She locates his black suit and dress shirt set aside from his everyday things. The suit is pressed against a white dress that she recognizes instantly from a black and white wedding photo her grandfather kept next to his bed. Nix had never really known her grandmother, who died when she was a toddler. As a child, Nix had only understood that the pretty woman in a white veil was her mother’s mother. What had really fascinated her was how young her grandfather had looked.
Her grandmother is buried in the old family cemetery beyond the apple orchard. On her headstone, the name and birth date of Alvin St Clair is chiseled into the stone next to his wife's, the date of his death still to be filled in. In Nix's imagination, the young man in the photo merges with the old man who had been so determined to hold the memory of his wife as close to him as she'd been that first day of their married life. Nix pictures Gramps, youthful again and handsome, with his arms around the woman who has been waiting for him in heaven. The image lasts for only a second.
A coffin. My God, what are they going to do for a coffin? Nix can't bear the thought of putting Gramps into the ground wrapped in a sheet. She knows it's childish, that it doesn't really matter. Dead is dead. But she doesn't want to think of him that way, laying there in the earth, cold under the snow, encased in mud when it rains. She grabs the suit and runs downstairs.
The doors of the dining room are closed. Margaret must still be doing her work. Nix feels guilty for letting a kid take care of a corpse. But Margaret said she's done this kind of thing before, and she seems so serene. And it isn't her grandfather.
The silence is heavy, smothering. Nix gazes down the length of the hall to the gray square of beveled glass in the front door. For the first time she realizes that it's morning. The sun will rise on a day that is nothing like the ones that came before it. A sound disturbs her and she frowns. A thump. Voices. She feels her temper flair. What is wrong with them? This is a house of mourning. Can't they show a little respect?
Nix strides toward the noise, breathing hard. Shit is about to rain down on someone! She storms into the kitchen and stops so abruptly she almost falls to her knees.
“Where did that come from?” she stutters.
George and Michael are carefully guiding a simple wooden coffin through the back door.
“George made it, fast as anything,” Martin tells her, his words tumbling over each other. “And he let me hammer a nail—so I'll always remember I helped bury a good man,” he finishes, obviously repeating the words from memory.
“I am sorry it is not better looking,” George says. “But I had to use what I was finding. Thank the Lord there were some sheets of plywood in the work shed out back. I hope you do not mind.”
Who are these kids? They're like no teenagers she's ever known. They seem years older, with a wisdom that comes from a different time and place.
“Where did you learn carpentry?” she asks and realizes immediately it's a stupid question under the circumstances.
George considers the question soberly. “I was learning it from my father and uncles. They were always building something.”
The wooden canning shelves. “Of course,” she says. “I saw your father's work at your farm.”
Nix suddenly realizes just how new the brothers' grief is. They've had cause to build other coffins quite recently. Her eyes fill with tears. “Boys, thank you. This means a lot to me.”
Both George and Michael duck their heads self-consciously while Martin takes her hand and says solemnly, “You're welcome, Nix.”
◆◆◆
Nix stands at the edge of the grave and throws a handful of dirt on the coffin. St Clair dirt, she thinks, earth he spent his life tilling and planting. She steps back and watches as each of the Shirks do the same. They're all dressed neatly in black, except for the girls' aprons and bonnets, which she's already learned are called prayer coverings. She's surprised into a smile she would have thought impossible by the sight of Martin dressed in borrowed Mennonite clothing. Margaret had offered to lend her something, but Nix hasn't worn a dress in half a lifetime and she's not about to start now. She knows Gramps would agree. Hell, he wouldn't even recognize her.
They all stand quietly watching as George and Michael fill in the rest of the grave. George pauses and glances at Nix. “Do not worry,” he says. “We will find a chisel and put the date on that headstone. For now, you can record it in your family Bible.”
This is something that would not have occurred to Nix. She hasn't thought of that Bible in years. She remembers the evenings spent laying on the floor in front of the parlor stove, chin propped on her hands, as Gramps read her stories of a giant killed with a slingshot, a heathen temple toppled by a humbled, blinded hero. She'd thought they were fairly tales. She still does, but that old book also holds the history of the St Clair family, and Gramps most certainly would expect the date of his death to be recorded within it.
Later after a cold supper, which Margaret says is traditional, Nix wanders across the hall to what had always been called '
the library'. There are no books on the shelves. The room is starkly empty except for an old roll top desk and a battered filing cabinet. This is where Gramps took care of farm business, which had gotten more and more complicated over the years by taxes, farm subsidies, and a host of regulations concerning the handling of agricultural products.
The St Clair family Bible is sitting neatly on one corner of the desk. She briefly wonders who found it and how, but it doesn't take professional detecting skills to figure out that it was Margaret, who'd probably sat reading from it to Gramps while his granddaughter was riding shotgun on a broken down Mennonite wagon.
Nix drops heavily into the old oak desk chair and slowly pages through the vital statistics of two centuries' worth of St Clairs. The last name recorded is her own, beneath the name of her mother. Gramps had always worried there would be no St Clairs to inherit the land - which was not an unreasonable concern. The bloodline has dwindled to two females. And if Cindi Lou had bothered to marry my father, Nix thinks, I wouldn’t be a St Clair. Should I be grateful? Was Gramps?
She carefully inscribes the date of Alvin Duncan St Clair's death next to the spidery script recording his birth and wonders if she's committed some sort of desecration by using a ballpoint pen. She closes the old, leather bound book ceremoniously as she'd closed the lid of the coffin, and wonders what to do next.
If there's some other business to take care of she can't imagine what it is. Would Social Security really want to hear of another old person's death at this point? Does the system even exist anymore? She decides she'll let them know if and when another check comes for her grandfather. She sighs and opens the middle drawer. Whether or not she wants it, the desk is hers now and she'd better check its contents. An envelope, with her name written in Gramps' rather old-fashioned hand, has been placed where she can't miss it.
Nix knows what she's going to find before she opens it. Her grandfather has chosen to disinherit Cindi Lou and leave the St Clair farm to his only grandchild. How her mother would howl, Nix thinks. She would fight it tooth and nail in the courts, and if she somehow managed to have herself named as heir at the expense of her own daughter, she would turn around and sell the St Clair legacy for drug money. She's probably dead, Nix thinks. If the drugs didn't get her a long time ago, then Geezer did.
