by Brian Hodge
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As was their custom, as the law said, as it came down yesterday in judgment, they strapped her father to the corpse at midday, when the sun was at its highest overhead.
Melody had spent the night wondering, well, what if it was cloudy. Hoping for this like she’d never hoped for anything. Maybe it would make a difference if nobody could see the sun. The law seemed firm about where it had to be. If they didn’t know, maybe they’d have to wait, if only another day. But when it came to a death sentence, one more day was everything.
By the time she’d awakened this morning, she was ready to admit that it wouldn’t have made any difference. No sun, just clouds—this was something a kid would pin her hopes on, and Melody was no kid. She was fourteen, almost, and maybe she’d never been one to begin with. She held Jeremy’s little hand snug as they watched the straps come out, feeling him grind the bones in her fingers together, and thought maybe there were no such things as kids at all in this world.
Kids were just something that used to live in the World Ago, before the Day the Sun Roared.
“In life, each of us must make room on our back for our brother, for our sister,” Bloomfield was saying. He was a big, stooped man with a big head. He postured like he was reading from a bulky book he held in front of him, but he never seemed to actually look at it. “Carrying one another toward each and every tomorrow is the only way we’ll continue to survive. It’s the only way we ever have.”
Here in the center of the village, gathered around the Thieves Pole, they had her father kneel, leaning forward onto his knuckles. Melody supposed it went easier this way, but then, how would she know? This had never happened as far back as she could remember. Only about once every ten years, her grandmother had told her. That was about how long it took for somebody to forget. Forget the lesson that the entire village was obliged to turn out and watch. Forget what the punishment was like, really like, in the end. Somebody was bound to forget, eventually.
But why why why did it have to be her father?
“As in life, then, so in death,” Bloomfield said.
Her father didn’t look up at her, at Jeremy, just knelt on the ground staring at the browning October grass, his hair hanging down in front of his forehead. Three hundred pairs of eyes all around him, gazing in pity and horror and hatred, depending on how they’d felt about the dead man.
Probably not a lot of hate, come to think of it.
She wanted him to look at her, and she didn’t. What if he saw that she wasn’t crying and thought she no longer loved him? She’d cried over her dog—she couldn’t cry for him? Could be she was still too shocked to cry. She’d never believed it would actually come to this.
While her father posed like a tilted table, they draped Tom Harkin’s body over his back, the dead man’s sightless eyes staring at the back of her father’s head, the near-naked corpse’s belly to his spine. The straps they used were designed to not be cut—not easily, anyway—made of rough rawhide that surrounded a core of chains. They looped the first strap over the both of them like a belt that wrapped around and around and around, then padlocked it to itself. There were more straps that crisscrossed at the shoulder, others that cinched the living and the dead arm-to-arm and thigh-to-thigh. Tom Harkin’s chin draped over her father’s right shoulder, like a friend whispering something in his ear. His arms trailed down along her father’s side, and when her father struggled up to his feet again, the dead man’s legs dangled in back, ready to kick him every step along the way.
“If a man robs his brother of all his tomorrows, then that man’s own tomorrows shall be spent carrying his brother in death as he failed to do in life.” Bloomfield snapped the book closed and looked at the ground as if he wanted to water it with tears. Melody knew he wouldn’t, not ever. He composed himself and gave her father the stern face again.
“Have you got anything to say, Grady?”
She watched her father adjust to the weight. He had to lean forward to keep himself balanced, like someone with a heavy backpack. A load he could never take off. If it came off at all, it would be because it fell apart, piece by piece, and that could take a long time.
“I don’t guess ‘I’m sorry’ does any good now, does it?” her father said loudly, looking ten years older in just two days. The bones of his face jutted sharply over his thin beard. His eyes were a pair of darkened hollows as he sought out Jenna Harkin, who mirrored him, looking more like his daughter in this moment than Melody figured she herself did. “But sorry I am. Sorry I took your father from you. Sorry I can’t make amends for that in a way that would do you any good. Sorry that what I’ve done has left you to the mercies of these degenerate sons of bitches standing around looking—”
He cut himself off and couldn’t continue, because some things were just too painful to say. Especially when you weren’t saying them half so much about the orphan girl as you were about your own daughter.
Melody figured she could fill in the rest and get it right enough: these degenerate sons of bitches standing around looking at you, smacking their lips like they’re the wolves and you’re the deer.
As long as a man didn’t go too far too fast, he could get away with a lot with a girl who didn’t have a father around to protect her, no matter how she felt about his attentions. It was the way of things. Not with everybody, not even with most, but there were enough men who felt that way that it mattered, because there was strength in numbers and nobody wanted to give them cause to leave the village. Or worse, turn against it. As long as they didn’t draw blood and kept things mostly out of sight, it was best to let them have their way. People were content to pretend it wasn’t happening.
They had more in common than ever now, she and Jenna.
“I’m sorry myself, Grady,” and for the moment Bloomfield wasn’t the leader of the village council anymore, just her father’s friend. “Nobody could say you didn’t have a reason. But that doesn’t change the law.”
Could she and Jenna even still be friends, though? How could you manage to stay friends with the girl whose father had killed your dog for the meat? Jenna may have even eaten some herself, if she hadn’t known it was Patches. And how could she stay friends with you when your father had gone after hers with a chunk of firewood, maybe not meaning what happened next, but still, Tom Harkin was just as dead. How could the two of you go on like before, as if none of this had happened?
Now, finally, her father looked at her, Jeremy too, back and forth, up and down, and now she was glad she wasn’t crying. That would only make it worse, sending him out the gate with her tears on his conscience. She wanted him to see her tall, even though she wasn’t. Wanted him to see her brave, even if she wasn’t that either. The rest he had to know already.
“
So go forth, Grady Banks,” Bloomfield said, “and carry the weight of your crime. Go forth, and carry the weight of the dead.”
Her father shuffled for the main gate in the village wall made of bricks and cinder blocks and the rusted hulks of what people in the World Ago used to call cars. One of the two massive doors creaked open to reveal the fields and forests beyond the gate and, in the distance, the raggedy men who lurked and dreamed, looking for a way in.
“It’s not necessarily a death sentence, you know,” said the man who’d eased up to her other side as soon as her father’s back was turned, opposite her baby brother, as though Jeremy didn’t count. Hunsicker, that was his name. He always stood like he was in a saddle, and had the littlest eyes she’d ever seen. The girls had a joke about him: he calls you “hon” and you just feel sicker.
“How do you figure that?” Melody asked.
“There’s been some that survived it. They didn’t catch nothing from the Rot that they couldn’t get over.”
“Yeah?” By now Jeremy was peering around from her other side, red faced and snuffle nosed and ready to grab on to anything that smelled like hope. She let his hand go and wrapped her arm around his head and pulled him against her and trusted she’d covered his ears. “Were they anybody you knew? You sat down and talked to them after they got to come back?”
Hunsicker worked his tongue inside one cheek. “It was a little before my time. But they say it’s happened.”
“Yeah, well, they say there’s been men that have walked on the moon, too, but do you believe that?”
His eyes got so narrow they almost vanished and he seemed to bristle, and even though she didn’t want to, she imagined what the weight of him had to feel like, and the smell of him under his clothes. Then his face relaxed again and he reached out to twirl a lock of her coal-black hair around his finger, and when it started to tug tight against her scalp, he gave it one last yank and let it go.
“You keep the faith, little sister,” he said. “And if there’s anything you need…”
She told him he’d be the first to know, because that’s what you did. You didn’t outright tell them no and make them mad enough to think they had to teach you a lesson in manners and being neighborly.
Then her heart seemed to stop awhile, and plunge from her chest through to the bottom of her belly as she watched her father struggle through the gate, but really, from behind, all anyone could see was more corpse than living man, until the gate closed and there was nothing to see at all.
Melody ran for the wall, dragging Jeremy at her side. He stumbled along to keep up, blind with tears and the back of his free hand smearing everything across his face. When she got to the north wall watchtower, the one her grandfather manned, she told Jeremy to stay at the bottom and not move, then she raced up the steps made of logs shaved flat, up and around again, like a square spiral, until she stood at the top platform, looking down on the fields and forests, and her father trudging resolutely in between.
He was headed for the tree line, every step as ponderous as if he carried on his shoulders not just the weight of a dead man, but the weight of a dead world.
She watched him go by, as slow a passage as the midday sun across the sky, until he was headed away from her again, and all she could see was Tom Harkin’s livid back and slack limbs. Once they got far enough away, weaving between the first spindly trees of the woods, it seemed as if the dead man was floating, and she supposed that was true enough, because now he was a ghost that would probably haunt her father to his grave.
* * *
Over the past two days, she’d learned all there was to know about the punishment known as the Rot, starting just after the men had showed up to detain her father for braining Tom Harkin. She’d feared what was coming even before the village council had rendered the judgment official.
The way her grandfather remembered, it had begun in the years after the Day the Sun Roared, and the World Ago shut down. Nothing ran anymore, he said. Three generations later you could still see the wooden crosses along the roads, at least the ones that hadn’t fallen down, many of them now green with plants that liked to climb, and some of them still dangling thick cables, like dead snakes. “Power lines,” he called them, and they’d fed just about everything.
Except one day they stopped working. Everything that ran on them stopped working too. Even everything that didn’t feed off the lines but ran the same way, like the cars, all that stopped working too. “Fried,” they called it. Everything had fried. All because the sun had had an angry day.
“Back then,” her grandfather explained, “everything came from someplace else. Then all of a sudden there was no moving anything anywhere, if you couldn’t move it on foot or by bicycle or with a horse.”
Melody had always had trouble imagining a world where there was that much to move, and how far it all had to go, at least until she’d seen pictures in books, but it was apparently a big deal. The way her grandfather told it, people used to go to war over big things, with big armies, and you always knew who was who, because the people who had to be killed were always far away, some godless people way over there, but now it was everybody going to war against everybody else, in a fight over what was left because there was no more coming.
They died in numbers so big she couldn’t imagine why you’d ever need to count that high. They died in such quantities that people got so sick of killing they’d do almost anything not to have to, except when they had no choice, or when they forgot.
Most, anyway. There were always the ones who still didn’t mind the deed, and never would.
And when it happened, however it happened, it was a problem. You couldn’t just let a murder go, because if there was no paying for it, that was like saying go ahead, do it again, we won’t stop you.
But coming right out and killing the killer? Nobody had the stomach for it, to be the one to wield the gun or knife or noose. It wasn’t like killing a deer, or putting down a crippled horse. Nobody was going to eat a murderer. It hadn’t come to that.
But there were no jails, either, not when people lived as nomads, survivors who’d gathered into tribes and kept on the move to scavenge what they could before moving along. They hadn’t learned to settle again in those days; hadn’t learned to stay in one place and grow and make what they needed and stop depending on people from way far away to send it.
Melody wondered who’d been the one to think up a punishment like the Rot. Who could’ve been that cruel, that wise? Someone had realized it didn’t matter if nomads had no jails, not when the killer had made his own, a prison he could carry with him.
That first night, when she’d finally fallen asleep after they’d taken her father away and cuffed him to the Thieves Pole—all the punishment the village needed, since stealing was normally as bad as it ever got—she dreamed of what she’d just learned. She’d dropped him back in time into those early days, a dead body chained across his shoulders like a deer carcass carried from the woods as he trudged along after the tribe, downwind, up and down the rolling hills and over the fields and across the crumbled scabs of the old black roads, barely in sight of them, barely able to keep up, and forced to spend the night alone as he stared in longing at the distant fires of their camp, never quite able to sleep as he lay with the corpse and listened for the feral dogs and other predators who’d come to fight him for it, and he would gladly have let them have it, if only he could.
But that was then and this was now.
Now he’d stick to the woods, she supposed. No need to travel.
More time to just sit and think of all the ways things might have gone differently.
* * *
She was determined to visit him in the early days of it, as often as she could. Family was allowed, and somebody had to take food out anyway, although the guards at the gate would always search her first, to make sure she wasn’t carrying any tools capable of cutting through leather and chains. Which stopped making sense to her almost as soon as it started
. She wouldn’t need to sneak a tool out with her, just toss it over the wall somewhere private and fetch it later.
Sometimes it seemed the men around here weren’t half as smart as she was.
Still, if they were to find Tom Harkin cut free and rotting all by himself, they would know who’d helped, and she’d be even more of an outcast than her father was now, because the banishing would be permanent. She’d have no home here anymore, so the two of them would have to run off, and the world wasn’t a safe place for a man alone with an almost fourteen-year-old daughter. He’d never allow it. Never condemn Jeremy to that kind of life either, or to never seeing his big sister again.
She would stop at the woods’ edge, calling until he heard her, then called back so she could follow the sound of his voice.
She got used to it soon enough, the sight of Tom Harkin strapped to his back, pale here, purple there, blotchy everywhere else. His corpse wore dirty undershorts and nothing else, which somehow seemed more undignified than buck naked. Flies buzzed around the pair of red, crusty-dry, chewed-up-looking wounds on his skull. By her second visit, though, there seemed to be more of him than before, and his arms and legs seemed to jut where before they’d only dangled.
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because he’s swelling up. It’s the gasses inside him,” her father said. His hair was lank and greasy, and he kept pushing it behind his ears. “You’ve seen dead animals puffed up out here in the woods, you know it happens.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think it happened to people too. That doesn’t seem fair.”
“We’re animals same as the rest.”
She looked him over, Tom Harkin like a giant, stretched-out waterskin grafted to her father’s back. He still didn’t smell so bad that she minded it, but then, it was October, which might have seemed like a blessing, the cool days and chilly nights helping to preserve the body. But everybody she’d talked to had concluded that this was just a subtler form of punishment. It made the ordeal last longer. Better, some thought, to have this happen at the height of summer, and get it over with quicker.
