Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “I don’t know. Three or four days, maybe. They’ve got trucks and cars, and they’re going to be moving fast once they get started.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you get up there and start on about an army comin’ this way, and we all shit our britches. How do you know that? And what are they after? I mean, if they want to fight a war, they sure could find a better place! We’re all Americans here, not Russkys!”

  “What’s your name?” Sister asked him.

  “Bud Royce. That is, Captain Bud Royce, ex–Arkansas National Guard. See, I know a little about armies myself.”

  “Good. Captain Royce, I’ll tell you exactly what they’re after—our crops. And our water, too, most likely. I can’t tell you how I know so you’d understand it, but I do know they’re coming, and they’re going to tear Mary’s Rest to the ground.” She held the leather satchel, and within it was the glass circle that had taken her dreamwalking on a savage landscape where the skeleton on his mount of bones held sway. She looked at Swan, who sat beside Josh in the front row and was listening carefully, and then back to Bud Royce. “Just believe it. They’re going to be here soon, and we’d better decide right now what to do.”

  “We fight!” a man at the back shouted.

  “How can we fight?” an old man who supported himself on a cane asked in a quavering voice. “We can’t stand up against an army. We’d be fools to even try such a thing!”

  “We’d be damned cowards if we didn’t!” a woman said, over on the left.

  “Yeah, but better live cowards than dead heroes,” a young, bearded man sitting behind Josh contended. “I’m getting out!”

  “That’s a crock of buttered bullshit!” Anna McClay roared, standing up from her bench. She put her hands on her wide hips and regarded the crowd, her upper lip curled in a sneer. “God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear? We work our butts to the bone cleanin’ this town up and buildin’ this church back, and we’re gonna run at the first sniff of real trouble?” She grunted and shook her head in disgust. “I remember what Mary’s Rest used to be—and most of you folks do, too. But I see what it is now, and what it can be! If we were to run, where would we go? Some other hole in the ground? And what happens when that damned army decides to come marchin’ in our direction again? I say if we run once, we’re as good as dead anyway—so we might as well go down fightin’!”

  “Yeah! That’s what I say, too!” Mr. Polowsky added.

  “I’ve got a wife and kids!” Vulcevic said, his face stricken with fear. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want them to die either! I don’t know anything about fighting!”

  “It’s time you learned, then!” Paul Thorson stood up and walked along the aisle to the front. “Listen,” he said, standing beside Sister, “we all know the score, don’t we? We know where we used to be, and we know where we are now! If we give up Mary’s Rest without a fight, we’ll all be wanderers again, and we’ll know we didn’t have the guts to even try to keep it! I, fot one, am pretty damned lazy. I don’t want to go on the road again—and so I’m sticking right here.”

  As the people shouted out their opinions Sister looked at Paul and smiled faintly. “What’s this? Another layer on the shitcake?”

  “No,” he said, his eyes electric blue and steely. “I believe my cake’s about baked, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess it is.” She loved Paul like a brother, and she’d never been prouder of him. And she’d already made her own decision—to stay and fight while Josh got Swan to safety, a plan that Swan didn’t yet know about.

  Swan was listening to the tumult of voices, and in her mind was something she knew she should stand up and say. But there were so many people crowded in there, and she was still shy about speaking before strangers. Still, the thought was important—and she knew she had to speak her mind before the chance passed. She drew a deep breath and stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, but her voice was drowned out by the cacophony. She walked to the front, stood beside Paul and faced the crowd. Her heart was fluttering like a little bird, and her voice trembled as she said, just a little louder, “Excuse me. I want to—”

  The tumult started to die down almost at once. In another few seconds there was silence but for the wail of the wind around the walls and the crying of an infant at the back of the church.

  Swan looked out at all of them. They were waiting for her to speak. She was the center of attention, and it made her feel as if ants were running up and down her backbone. At the back of the church, more people pressed around the door, and maybe two hundred others were assembled out in the road, hearing what was said as it was passed back through the crowd. All eyes were on Swan, and she thought for a second that her throat had closed up. “Excuse me,” she managed, “but I’d like to say something.” She hesitated, trying to arrange her thoughts. “It ... it seems to me,” she began tentatively, “that we’re all worried about whether we’re going to be able to fight the soldiers off or not ... and that’s the wrong thing to be thinking of. If we have to fight them here, in Mary’s Rest, we’re going to lose. And if we run, and leave everything to them, they’ll destroy it all—because that’s what armies do.” She saw Robin standing over on the right side of the church, surrounded by several of his highwaymen. Their eyes met and held for a few seconds. “We can’t win if we fight,” Swan continued, “and we can’t win if we run, either. So it seems to me that what we should be doing is thinking about stopping them from getting here.”

  Bud Royce laughed harshly. “How the hell do we stop an army if we don’t fight ’em?”

  “We make it cost too much for them to get here. They might decide to turn back.”

  “Right.” Royce smiled sarcastically. “What do you suggest, missy?”

  “That we turn Mary’s Rest into a fort. Like the cowboys used to do in the old movies, when they knew the Indians were coming. We build walls around Mary’s Rest; we can use dirt, fallen trees, sticks—even the wood from this place. We can dig ditches out in the forest and cover them over with brush for their trucks to fall into, and we can block the roads with logs so they’ll have to use the woods.”

  “Ever heard of infantry?” Royce asked. “Even if we did build traps for their vehicles, the soldiers would still crawl right over the walls, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe not,” Swan said. “Especially if the walls were covered with ice.”

  “Ice?” A sallow-faced woman with stringy brown hair stood up. “How are we supposed to conjure up ice?”

  “We’ve got a spring,” Swan reminded her. “We’ve got buckets, pails and washtubs. We’ve got horses to pull wagons, and we’ve got three or four days.” Swan walked up the aisle, her gaze moving from face to face. She was still nervous, but not so much now, because she sensed that they wanted to listen. “If we start working right now, we could build a wall around Mary’s Rest, and we could figure out a system to get the water to it. We could start pouring water onto the wall even before it’s finished, and as cold as it is, it wouldn’t take long for the water to freeze. The more water we use, the thicker the ice. The soldiers won’t be able to climb over.”

  “No way!” Royce scoffed. “There’s no damned time to do a job like that!”

  “Hell, we gots to try!” the skinny black man said. “Ain’t no choice!”

  Other voices rose and fell, and arguments sparked. Sister started to shout them down, but she knew it was Swan’s moment, and it was Swan they wanted to hear.

  When Swan spoke again, the arguments ceased. “You could help more than anybody,” she said to Bud Royce. “Since you were a captain in the National Guard, you could figure out where to put the ditches and traps. Couldn’t you?”

  “That’d be the easy part, missy. But I don’t want to help. I’m getting the hell out of here at first light.”

  She nodded, staring at him serenely. If that was his choice, so be it. “All right,” she said, and she looked again at the crowd. “I think whoever wants to g
o should leave tomorrow morning. Good luck to all of you, and I hope you find what you’re searching for.” She glanced again at Robin; he felt a thrill of excitement course through him, because her eyes seemed to be aflame. “I’m staying,” she said. “I’m going to do what I can to stop the soldiers from destroying what we’ve done—all of us, each and every one. Because it wasn’t just me who grew the corn; it was everybody. I put the seeds in the ground and covered them with dirt, but somebody else built the bonfires that kept the dirt and the air warm. Other people kept the bobcats and crows away, and more people picked the corn. How many of you helped dig the spring out? Who helped gather the apple cores and worked to put this building back together?”

  She saw they were all listening, even Bud Royce, and she had the sensation of drawing strength from them. She kept going, powered by their belief. “It wasn’t just me. It was everybody who wanted to build things back again. Mary’s Rest isn’t just a bunch of old shacks full of strangers anymore; people know each other, and work together, and take an interest in the hardships everybody else has, because we know we’re not so different from one another. We all know what we’ve lost—and if we give it up and run, we’ll lose it all over again. So I’m staying right here,” she said. “If I live or die, that’s all right, because I’ve decided to stop running.” There was a silence. “That’s all I’ve got to say.” She went back to sit beside Josh. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her trembling.

  The silence stretched. Bud Royce was still on his feet, but his eyes weren’t as hard as they had been, and his forehead was creased with thought.

  Sister didn’t speak either. Her heart swelled with pride for Swan, but Sister knew full well that the army wasn’t coming just for the crops and the fresh water. They were coming for Swan, too. The man with the scarlet eye was leading them there, and he was going to use the human hand to crush her.

  “Walls covered with ice,” Royce mused aloud. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Hell ... it’s so crazy, it might just work. Might, I said. It won’t stop the soldiers very long, if they want to come over bad enough. Depends on what kind of weapons they’ve got. We break enough suspensions and axles in vehicle traps, and they might think twice.”

  “Then it can be done?” Sister asked.

  “I didn’t say that, lady. It’d be a mighty big job, and I don’t know if we’ve got the manpower to do it.”

  “Manpower, my ass!” Anna McClay told him. “What about womanpower? And we’ve got plenty of kids who can work, too!” Her rowdy voice drew shouts of assent.

  “Well, we wouldn’t need too many people and guns to hold the walls,” Royce said, “especially if we leveled the woods and didn’t leave those bastards any cover. We don’t want ’em sneakin’ up on us.”

  “We can fix it so they won’t,” a small voice said. A brown-haired boy of about ten or eleven stood up on the bench. He’d filled out since Sister had seen him last, and his cheeks were windburned. She knew that under his coat there would be a small round scar just below his heart. Bucky said, “If they’re north of here, we can take a car and go find ’em.” He drew a long-bladed knife from the folds of his coat. “It wouldn’t be nothin’ to hide in the woods and pop a few of their tires when they wasn’t lookin’.”

  “It sure would help,” Royce agreed. “Anything we can do to slow ’em down would give us more time to dig and build. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to post lookouts about fifty miles up the road, either.”

  “I doubt you’ve had much time behind a wheel,” Paul told Bucky. “If I can get a car that doesn’t sound like an elephant in heat, I’ll do the driving. I’ve had a little experience in hunting wolves.”

  “I’ve got an axe!” another man said. “It ain’t too sharp, but it’ll get the job done!”

  Other people stood up, volunteering. “We can tear down some of the empty shacks and use that wood, too!” a Hispanic man with a pale violet keloid on his face suggested.

  “Okay, we’ll have to round up all the saws and axes we can find,” Bud Royce told Sister. “Jesus, I guess I always was half nuts! I might as well go the whole shell! We’ll have to assign the work details and thrash out the schedules, and we’d better get started right now.”

  “Right,” Sister said. “And everybody who doesn’t want to help should leave and stay out of the way, starting this minute.”

  About fifteen people left—but their places were instantly filled by others from outside.

  As the crowd settled down again Sister glanced at Swan and saw the determination in her face. She knew that Swan had, indeed, made her decision—and she knew also that Swan was not going to be persuaded to flee Mary’s Rest and leave everyone else there to face the soldiers.

  So, Sister thought, we take it one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

  “We know what we have to do,” she told the crowd. “Let’s get to work and save our town.”

  80

  THE HURTING SOUND ECHOED through the freezing air, and Swan flinched. She pulled back on the rope bridle, checking Mule to a walk, and steam burst from Mule’s nostrils as if he, too, had heard and been disturbed by the noise. More hurting sounds came to her, like the quick, high whine of notes played on a steel guitar, but Swan knew she had to endure them.

  They were the sounds of living trees being chopped down, to be added to the four-foot-high wall of logs, brush and dirt that encircled Mary’s Rest and the crop field.

  Over the hurting sounds, Swan heard the steady chipping of axes at work. She said, “Go on, Mule,” and she guided the horse along the wall, where dozens of people were piling up more brush and timbers. All of them looked up and paused for a second as she passed, then returned to work with renewed urgency.

  Bud Royce had told her, Sister and Josh that the wall needed to be at least six feet tall before the water was poured onto it—but time was getting short. It had taken over twenty hours of nonstop, backbreaking labor to get the wall to its present height and circumference. Out on the rapidly receding edge of the forest, work crews headed by Anna McClay, Royce and other volunteers were busy digging a network of trenches, then hiding them under a latticework of sticks, straw and snow.

  Ahead of her was a group of people packing stones and dirt into chinks in the wall, their breath wisping up into the air. Among them was Sister, her hands and clothes grimy, her face reddened by the cold. A length of sturdy twine was draped around her neck and looped to the handle of the leather satchel. Nearby, Robin was unloading another wheelbarrow full of dirt. Swan knew he’d wanted to go with Paul, Bucky and three other young highwaymen when they’d headed north the day before in a gray Subaru, but Sister had told him they needed his muscle on the wall.

  Swan reined Mule in and got off. Sister saw her and scowled. “What’re you doing out here? I thought I told you to stay in the shack.”

  “You did.” Swan scooped up a double handful of dirt and jammed it into a chink. “I’m not going to stay there while everybody else works.”

  Sister lifted her hands to show Swan. They were crisscrossed by bleeding gashes, made by small, sharp-edged stones. “You’ve got to save your hands for better things. Go on, now!”

  “Your hands will heal. So will mine.” Swan packed more dirt and rocks into a hole between two logs. About twenty yards away, a number of men were wrestling more logs and brush into position as the wall grew higher.

  Robin looked up at the low, ugly sky. “It’ll be dark in another hour. If they’re anywhere near, we might be able to see their fires.”

  “Paul’ll let us know if they’re getting close.” She hoped. She knew that Paul had volunteered for a very dangerous job; if the soldiers caught him and the boys, they were as good as dead. She glanced at Swan, her fear for Paul nagging at her. “Go on, Swan! There’s no need for you to be out here tearing your hands up!”

  “I’m not different, damn it!” Swan suddenly shouted, straightening up from her work. Her eyes flashed with a
nger, and crimson burst in her cheeks. “I’m a person, not ... not some piece of glass on a damned shelf! I can work as hard as anybody, and you don’t need to make it easy on me!”

  Sister was amazed at Swan’s outburst and aware that the others were watching as well.

  “I’m sorry,” Swan said, calming down, “but you don’t have to shut me away and protect me. I can take care of myself.” She looked around at the others, at Robin, and then her gaze returned to Sister. “I know why that army’s coming here, and I know who’s bringing them. It’s me they want. It’s because of me the whole town’s in danger.” Her voice cracked, and her eyes teared up. “I want to run. I want to get away, but I know that if I do, the soldiers will still come. They’ll still take all the crops, and they won’t leave anybody alive. So there’s no need to run—but if everybody here dies, it’s because of me. Me. So please let me do what I can.”

  Sister knew Swan was right. She, Josh and the others had been treating Swan like a fragile piece of porcelain, or like ... yes, she thought, like one of those sculptures back in the Steuben Glass shop on Fifth Avenue. All of them had focused on Swan’s gift of stirring life from dead earth, and they’d forgotten that she was just a girl. Still, Sister feared for Swan’s hands, because those were the instruments that might yet make life bloom from the wasteland—but Swan was strong-minded and tough far beyond her years, and she was ready to work.

  “I wish you’d find a pair of gloves, but I guess those are hard to come by.” Sister’s own pair had already worn out. “Well,” she said, “let’s get to work, then. Time’s wasting.” She returned to her task.

  A pair of tattered woolen gloves was held up before Swan’s face.

  “Take them,” Robin urged. His own hands were now bare. “I can always steal some more.”

  Swan looked into his eyes. Behind his tough mask there was a spark of gentle kindness, as if the sun had suddenly glinted through the snow clouds. She motioned toward Sister. “Give them to her.”