Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  She lay on the floor of Glory Bowen’s shack. Embers behind the stove’s grate still cast a little light and a breath of heat. She slowly sat up and leaned against the wall, the image of the child’s hands fixed in her mind. Nearby, Josh lay curled up on the floor, breathing heavily and deeply asleep. Closer to the stove, Rusty lay sleeping under a thin blanket, his head on the patchwork pillow. Glory had done a fine job of cleaning and stitching the wounds, but she’d said the next couple of days would be rough for him. It had been very kind of her to let them spend the night and share her water and a little stew. Aaron had asked Swan dozens of questions about her condition, what the land was like beyond Mary’s Rest, and what all she’d seen. Glory had told Aaron to stop pestering her, but Swan wasn’t bothered; the boy had a curious mind, and that was a rare thing worth encouraging.

  Glory told them her husband had been a Baptist minister back in Wynne, Arkansas, when the bombs hit. The radiation of Little Rock had killed a lot of people in the town, and Glory, her husband and their infant son had joined a caravan of wanderers looking for a safe place to settle. But there were no safe places. Four years later, they d settled in Mary’s Rest, which at that time was a thriving settlement built around the pond. There’d been no minister or church in Mary’s Rest, and Glory’s husband had started building a house of worship with his own hands.

  But then the typhoid epidemic came, Glory told them. People died by the score, and wild animals skulked in from the woods to gut the corpses. When the last of the community’s stockpile of canned food gave out, people started eating rats, boiling bark, roots, leather—even the dirt itself—into “soup.” One night the church had caught fire, and Glory’s husband had died trying to save it. The blackened ruins were still standing, because nobody had the energy or will to build it back. She and her son had stayed alive because she was a good seamstress, and people paid her with extra food, coffee and such to patch their clothes. That was the story of her life, Glory had said; that was how she’d gotten to be an old woman when she was barely thirty-five.

  Swan listened to the sound of the roving wind. Was it bringing the answer to the magic mirror’s riddle closer? she wondered. Or was it blowing it further away?

  And quite suddenly, as the wind faltered to draw another breath, Swan heard the urgent noise of a dog barking.

  Her heart thudded in her chest. The barking ebbed away, was gone—then began to swell again, from somewhere very near.

  Swan would know that bark anywhere.

  She started to reach over and rouse Josh to tell him that Killer had found his way, but he snorted and muttered in his sleep. She let him alone, stood up with the aid of the dowsing rod and walked to the door.

  The barking faded as the wind took a different turn. But she understood what it said: “Hurry! Come see what I’ve got to show you!”

  She put on her coat, buttoned it up to her neck and slipped out of the shack into the tumultuous dark.

  She couldn’t see the terrier. Josh had unbridled Mule to let the horse fend for himself, and he’d wandered off to find shelter.

  The wind came back, and with it the barking. Where was it coming from? The left, she thought. No, the right! She walked down the steps. There was no sign of Killer, and now the barking was gone, too. But she was sure it had come from the right, maybe from that alley over there, the same alley Aaron had taken her along to show her the pond.

  She hesitated. It was cold out here, and dark except for the glow of a bonfire a few alleys away. Had she heard Killer’s barking or not? she asked herself. It wasn’t there now, just the wind shrilling through the alleys and around the shacks.

  The image of the child’s frozen hands came to her. What was it about those hands that haunted her? she wondered. It was more than the fact that they belonged to a dead child—much, much more.

  She didn’t know exactly when she made the decision, or when she took the first step. But suddenly she was entering the alley, questing with Crybaby before her, and she was walking toward the field.

  Her vision blurred, her eye stinging with pain. She went blind, but she didn’t panic; she just waited it out, hoping that this wasn’t the time when her sight would go and not return. It came back, and Swan kept going.

  She fell once over another corpse in the alley and heard an animal growling somewhere nearby, but she made it through. And then there was the field stretched before her, only faintly illuminated in the reflection of the distant bonfire. She began to walk across it, the odor of the poisonous pond thick in her nostrils, and hoped she remembered the way.

  The barking returned, from off to her left. She changed her direction to follow it, and she called, “Killer! Where are you?” but the wind snatched her voice away.

  Step by step, Swan crossed the field. In some places the snow was four or five inches thick, but in others the wind had blown it away to expose the bare ground. The barking ebbed and faded, returned from a slightly different direction. Swan altered her course by a few degrees, but she couldn’t see the terrier anywhere on the field.

  The barking stopped.

  So did Swan.

  “Where are you?” she called. The wind shoved at her, almost knocked her down. She looked back at Mary’s Rest, could see the bonfire and a few lanterns burning in windows, it seemed a long way off. But she took one more step in the direction of the pond.

  Crybaby touched something on the ground right in front of her, and Swan made out the shape of the child’s body.

  The wind shifted. The barking came again—just a whisper now, from an unknown distance. It continued to fade, and just before it was gone Swan had a strange impression: that the sound no longer belonged to an old, weary dog. It had a note of youth in it, and strength, and roads yet to be traveled.

  The sound was gone, and Swan was alone with the corpse of the child.

  She bent down and looked at the hands. One clawing the earth, the other clenched into a fist. What was so familiar about that?

  And then she knew: It was the way she herself had planted seeds when she was a little girl. One hand digging the hole, the other—

  She grasped the bony fist and tried to pry it open. It resisted her, but she worked at it patiently and thought of opening a flower’s petals. The hand slowly revealed what was locked in its palm.

  There were six wrinkled kernels of corn.

  One hand digging the hole, she thought, and the other nestling the seeds.

  Seeds.

  The child had not died digging for roots. The child had died trying to plant shriveled seeds.

  She held the kernels in her own palm. Was there untapped life in them, or were they only cold bits of nothing?

  “Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here,” Aaron had told her. “But everythin’ died.”

  She thought of the apple tree bursting into new life. Thought of the green seedlings in the shape of her body. Thought of the flowers she had grown in dry, dusty earth a long time ago.

  “Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here.”

  Swan looked at the body again. The child had died in a strange posture. Why was the child lying on its stomach on the cold ground instead of curling up to save the last bit of warmth? She gently grasped the shoulder and tried to turn it over; there was a faint crackling noise as the ragged clothes unstuck from the ground, but the body itself was as light as a husk.

  And underneath the body was a small leather pouch.

  She picked it up with a trembling hand, opened it and reached in with two fingers—but she already knew what she’d find.

  In the pouch were more dried kernels of corn. The child had been protecting them with body heat. She realized she would have done the same thing, and that she and the child might have had a lot in common.

  Here were the seeds. It was up to her to finish the job the dead child had begun.

  She scraped away snow and thrust her fingers into the dirt. It was hard and clayey, full of ice and sharp pebbles. She brought up a handful and worked warmth
into it; then she put one kernel into it and did what she had done when she planted seeds in the dust of Kansas—she gathered saliva in her mouth and spat into her handful of dirt. She rolled it into a ball, kept rolling it until she felt the tingling running up through her backbone, through her arm and fingers. Then she returned the dirt to the ground, pressing it into the hole she’d scooped it from.

  And that was the first seed planted, but whether it would grow in this tormented earth or not, Swan didn’t know.

  She picked up Crybaby, crawled a few feet away from the body and clawed up another handful of dirt. Either sharp ice or a stone cut her fingers, but she hardly noticed the pain; her mind was concentrated on the task. The pins-and-needles sensation was strengthening, starting to flow through her body in waves like power through humming wires.

  Swan crawled ahead and planted a third seed. The cold was chewing down through her clothes, stiffening her bones, but she kept on going, scraping up a handful of dirt every two or three feet and planting a single seed. In some places the earth was frozen solid and as unyielding as granite, so she crawled on to another place, finding that the dirt cushioned beneath the snow was softer than the dirt where the covering snow had blown away. Still, her hands quickly became raw, and blood began to seep from cuts. Drops of blood mingled with the seeds and dirt as Swan continued to work, slowly and methodically, without pause.

  She didn’t plant any seeds near the pond, but instead turned back toward Mary’s Rest to lay down another row. An animal wailed off in the distant woods—a high, shrill, lonely cry. She kept her mind on her work, her bloody hands searching through the snow to find pliable dirt. The cold finally pierced her, and she had to stop and huddle up. Ice was clogging her nostrils, her eye with its fragile vision almost frozen shut. She lay shivering, and it occurred to her that she’d feel stronger if she could sleep for a while. Just a short rest. Just a few minutes, and then she’d get back to work again.

  Something nudged her side. She was dazed and weak, and she didn’t care to lift her head to see what it was. She was nudged again, much harder this time.

  Swan rolled over, angled her head and looked up.

  A warm breath hit her face. Mule was standing over her, as motionless as if carved from gray-dappled stone. She started to lie back down again, but Mule nudged her in the shoulder with his nose. He made a deep rumbling sound, and the breath floated from his nostrils like steam from a boiler.

  He was not going to let her sleep. And the warm air that came from his lungs reminded her of how very cold it was, and how close she’d been to giving up. If she lay there much longer, she would freeze. She had to get moving again, get her circulation going.

  Mule nudged her more firmly, and Swan sat up and said, “Okay, okay.” She lifted a blood-and-dirt-caked hand toward his muzzle, and Mule’s tongue came out to lick the tortured flesh.

  She started planting seeds from the leather pouch again as Mule followed along a few paces behind her, his ears pricking up and quivering at the approaching cries of animals in the woods.

  As the cold closed in and Swan forced herself to keep working everything became dreamlike and hazy, as if she were laboring underwater. Every once in a while Mule’s steamy breath would warm her, and then she began to sense furtive movement in the dark all around them, drawing closer. She heard the shriek of an animal nearby, and Mule answered with a husky grumble of warning. Swan kept push-ing herself on, kept scraping through the snow to grip handfuls of dirt and replace them in the earth with seeds at their centers. Every movement of her fingers was an exercise in agony, and she knew the animals were being lured from the woods by the scent of her blood.

  But she had to finish the job. There were still perhaps thirty or forty kernels left in the leather pouch, and Swan was determined to get them planted. The tingling currents coursed through her bones, continuing to grow stronger, almost painful now, and as she worked in the dark she imagined that she saw an occasional, tiny burst of sparks fly from the bloody mass of her fingers. She smelled a faint burned odor, like an electric plug beginning to overheat and short-circuit. Her face beneath the masklike crust of growths seethed with pain; when her vision would fade out, she would work for a few minutes in absolute blindness until her sight returned. She pushed herself onward—three or four feet, and one seed at a time.

  An animal—a bobcat, she thought it was—growled somewhere off to the left, dangerously near. She tensed for its attack, heard Mule whinny and felt the pounding of his hooves against the earth as he galloped past her. Then the bobcat shrieked; there was the noise of turbulence in the snow—and, a minute or so later, Mule’s breath warmed her face again. Another animal growled a challenge, off to the right this time, and Mule whirled toward it as the bobcat leaped. Swan heard a high squeal of pain, heard Mule grunt as he was struck; then there was the jarring of Mule’s hooves against the ground—once, twice and again. He returned to her side, and she planted another seed.

  She didn’t know how long the attacks went on. She concentrated only on her work, and soon she came to the last five seeds.

  At the first smear of light in the east, Josh sat up in the front room of Glory Bowen’s shack and realized that Swan was gone. He called the woman and her son, and together they searched the alleys of Mary’s Rest. It was Aaron who ran out to the field to look, and he came back yelling for Josh and his mama to come quick.

  They saw a figure lying on the ground, huddled up on its side. Pressed close to it was Mule, who lifted his head and whinnied weakly as Josh ran toward them. He almost stepped on the crushed carcass of a bobcat with an extra clawed foot growing from its side, saw another thing that might have once been a bobcat lying nearby, but it was too mangled to tell for sure.

  Mule’s flanks and legs were crisscrossed with gashes. And in a circle around Swan were three more animal carcasses, all crushed.

  “Swan!” Josh shouted as he reached her and dropped to his knees at her side. She didn’t stir, and he took her frail body into his arms. “Wake up, honey!” he said, shaking her. “Come on now, wake up!” The air was bitterly cold, but Josh could feel the warmth that radiated from Mule. He shook her harder. “Swan! Wake up!”

  “Oh, my Lawd Jesus,” Glory whispered, standing just behind Josh. “Her ... hands.”

  Josh saw them too, and he winced. They were swollen, covered with dried black blood and dirt, the raw fingers contorted into claws. In the palm of her right hand was a leather pouch, and in her left palm was a single, withered kernel of corn mired in the dirt and blood. “Oh, God ... Swan ...”

  “Is she dead, Mama?” Aaron asked, but Glory didn’t answer. Aaron took a step forward. “She ain’t dead, mister! Pinch her and wake her up!”

  Josh touched her wrist. There was a weak pulse, but it wasn’t much. A tear fell from the corner of his eye onto her face.

  Swan drew a sharp breath and slowly released it in a moan. Her body trembled as she began to come up from a place that was very dark and cold.

  “Swan? Can you hear me?”

  A voice—muffled and far away—was speaking to her. She thought she recognized it. Her hands were hurting ... oh, they were hurting so much. “Josh?”

  The voice had been barely a whisper, but Josh’s heart leaped. “Yes, honey. It’s Josh. You just be still now, we’re going to get you to where it’s warm.” He stood up with the girl in his arms and turned to the clawed-up, exhausted horse. “I’m going to find you a warm place, too. Come on, Mule.” The horse struggled to his feet and began to follow.

  Aaron saw Swan’s dowsing rod lying in the snow and retrieved it. He prodded curiously at a dead bobcat with a second neck and head growing out of its belly, then he ran on after Josh and his mama.

  Up ahead, Swan tried to open her eye. The lid was sealed shut. A viscous fluid leaked from the corner, and her eye burned so fiercely she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. The other eye, long sealed, throbbed in its socket. She lifted a hand to touch her face, but her fingers wouldn’t wo
rk.

  Josh heard her whisper something. “We’re almost there, honey. Just a few minutes more. You hang on, now.” He knew she’d been very close to death out there in the open—and might still be. She spoke again, and this time he understood her, but he said, “What?”

  “My eye,” Swan said. She was trying to speak calmly, but her voice shook. “Josh ... I’ve gone blind.”

  60

  LYING ON HER BED OF leaves, Sister sensed movement beside her. She came up from sleep and clamped her hand like a manacle on somebody’s wrist.

  Robin Oakes was kneeling, his long brown hair full of feathers and bones and his eyes full of light. The colors of the glass circle pulsated on his sharp-boned face. He’d opened the satchel and was trying to slip the ring out of it. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and Sister said, “No.” She put her other hand on the ring, and he let her have it.

  “Don’t get bent out of shape,” he said tersely. “I didn’t hurt it.”

  “Thank God. Who said you could go rummaging around in my bag?”

  “I wasn’t rummaging. I was looking. No big deal.” Sister’s bones creaked as she sat up. Murky daylight was showing through the cave’s entrance. Most of the young highwaymen were still asleep, but two of the boys were skinning a couple of small carcasses—rabbits? squirrels?—and another was arranging sticks to build the breakfast fire. At the rear of the cave, Hugh was sleeping near his patient, and Paul was asleep on a pallet of leaves. “This is important to me,” she told Robin. “You don’t know how important. Just leave it alone, okay?”

  “Screw it,” he said, and he stood up. “I was putting that weird thing back, and I was going to tell you about Swan and the big dude. But forget it, deadhead.” He started to walk over and check on Bucky.

  It took a few seconds for what the boy had said to register: “Swan. Swan and the big dude.”