Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “On the northwest shore there was a convent called St. Gabriel,” Hadrian began.

  Hamada worked the cigarette between his lips as he contemplated the mountains of books, then pointed toward one of the stacks below the window. He approached it warily, as if the books were living things, and pounced on one at the top of the stack.

  It was a regional almanac, a commercial publication with maps and listings of businesses and towns. He quickly thumbed through it, then handed it to Hadrian opened to a two-page map of the northwest shore region sixty years before. Hadrian ran his finger northward along the shore, pausing at a beige patch marked as Blue Thunder First Nation Reserve, then moving onward to the edge of the map. No St. Gabriel.

  “Search the town listings,” Hamada suggested. “They break out business enterprises and important institutions.”

  Hadrian consulted the book again and picked out half a dozen candidates based on his rough appraisal of the geography. He took only a few minutes to find the entry, chastising himself for failing to recall that the convent had been converted. The enterprise was called the St. Gabriel Egg Farm. “I need to sit with this,” Hadrian said, “go through it in more detail.”

  Hamada gestured him toward a dusty table bearing numerous stubs of burnt-down candles. “We’ll leave you here,” the Japanese archivist said, turning with his dog toward the entry.

  Hadrian worked his fingertip up the coastline again, this time turning back to read the description of each town as he encountered it, not certain what he was looking for until his breath caught. The entry was for a village called Darby, with a single prominent landmark, a favorite with tourists who had liked to snap photographs in front of it. The Darby Correctional Facility had been built decades earlier, after the design of a famous Scottish castle. Its classical thick granite walls, read the description, give little hint of the cells buried inside. The walls of the prison had probably been destroyed by blast waves but its deep-set cells would have served as the perfect bomb shelter. Moreover, given its remote location and strong lake winds, the site may have escaped biological contaminants. What had Sebastian said? His people had found the convent two weeks before a band of men in grey clothes from the north had, and they had decided to accommodate each other.

  He paged through the book, its advertisements giving glimpses of the first world. Car washes, hamburger joints, computer repair shop, radio stations. He gazed back at Hamada, sitting by the entry with his dog. In earlier years, on days of blizzards, Hadrian and Jonah would find their way here, and all three of them would spend hours beside the potbellied stove, enthusiastically digesting the treasures of the barn. But now Hamada had grown distant, even wary.

  Hadrian returned the almanac to its stack and moved slowly toward the door, perusing other titles that had surfaced on the tide of books. Moby-Dick. America’s Favorite Folk Songs. Great Battles of the Civil War. He paused then turned back.

  Hamada did not react when Hadrian set the songbook next to him. “I have an old mule and her name is Sal,” he recited.

  “I’m sorry?” Hamada said.

  “She was here,” Hadrian said. “Nelly transcribed that song from this book. The corner of the page is folded down. It would have been a day or two before Jonah died. She and Shenker were staying here, weren’t they?”

  Hadrian expected a denial. “I don’t keep a guest log,” Hamada said instead. “You know well enough that anyone interested in my books is welcome to take sanctuary in the stables downstairs.”

  “And you know very well the owner of that house where they were taken was lying when he said they were there, keeping him against his will.”

  Hamada stroked his dog’s head. “They’d burn us down and not blink an eye,” he said.

  Hadrian put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Who is it, Takeo, who is scaring you?” If civilization were a religion, the old man would be a saint. He had suffered much on account of his books.

  Hamada’s voice was hollow when he finally replied. “We should have taken the books into the mountains years ago, Hadrian. It’s too late now.”

  Hadrian considered his companion’s mournful air, then looked about the compound. A member of Hamada’s family was missing. “Your other dog. Is she all right?” The two oversized shaggy creatures had been fixtures in their master’s life for more than a decade.

  The reply was long in coming. “She was gentle as a kitten,” Takeo sighed sorrowfully. “Never harmed a soul.” He stroked the head of the dog at his feet. “This one will bark at strangers, he’s the sentinel. But she would just run and greet them as if everyone was an old friend.”

  A knot began tying itself in Hadrian’s stomach. “What happened?”

  “It was nearly three weeks ago. I heard the first cry in the middle of the night. That must have been when they put the first nail through her. By the time I got there they were gone.” Hamada whispered now, as if he didn’t want the surviving animal to hear. “They nailed her to the gate, then cut her throat.”

  There was nothing to say. Hadrian offered a match to light Hamada’s cigarette. “Takeo,” Hadrian said at last, “when I asked for that almanac, you went right to it. It was on top of the pile, yet had little dust on it.”

  “I went to his funeral, I had to. Wouldn’t have missed it.”

  “Jonah? Jonah used the almanac?”

  “He came a few times this past year, usually leaning on a boy like a weary pilgrim. He began to take a special interest in the almanacs.”

  “You mean he used other almanacs?”

  “Last winter he spent a whole day here, looking at maps, crosschecking the almanacs and old business directories.” Hamada inhaled deeply on his cigarette and cast a sidelong glance at Hadrian. “You are his executor?”

  The question gave Hadrian pause. “I am the closest thing, I guess.”

  “If you find the one, it goes back here.” Hamada’s words came out like an order.

  Hadrian cocked his head, confused. “Do you mean a book was taken?”

  “By mistake, no doubt. Jonah knew the importance of keeping the books together. But he was the only one ever to show an interest in the directories.”

  “When?” Suddenly Hadrian had the sense of touching something important. “When did it go missing?”

  Hamada grimaced. “Last winter, before the Year-End Festival.”

  “What did it cover? What geography?”

  “South and west. The old industrial towns.”

  “Think, Takeo, old friend. Jonah must have given some hint of why these books were suddenly so important.”

  “He said his wife once worked at one of those complexes to the southwest. A medical researcher. I thought looking at them somehow made him feel closer to her. I keep my wife’s book of favorite poems close to my bed.”

  “What complex? Surely Jonah wasn’t planning to go there?”

  But Hamada was done talking. He just shook his head from side to side, then rose and locked the door to the loft before settling back to pet the old dog. He had the expression of a captain who knew he would soon go down with his ship.

  THE GLOBE THEATER was an over-painted actress, dressed in Victorian style, its ornate woodwork offering a pretense of culture that was well suited to its many productions of Shakespeare and Shaw. Hadrian lingered in the shadows beside the stage as students streamed in for an after-school rehearsal.

  A bulletin board beside him held bills for the season’s offerings and lists of cast members. Near the top was a faded broadside announcing a lecture Jonah had offered six months earlier. How Shakespeare Invented the Citizens of Carthage.

  He watched as young actors emerged in costume. Two girls in doublets picked up wooden swords and practiced a duel. A boy passed by wearing the bottom half of a donkey.

  Suddenly he was aware of a presence at his side.

  “Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, that mak’st my blood cold?” came the whisper. Sarah Buchanan wore an uncertain grin but fright was in her eye
s.

  “Not thy evil spirit, Brutus,” Hadrian replied without thinking.

  “I have heard but not believed the spirits of the dead may walk again,” the girl recited.

  “You’re mixing your scripts, Sarah,” he said.

  The girl threw her arms so tightly around him he struggled for breath. He pushed her back, holding her at arm’s length.

  “You were gone,” she said in a rush. “People told me you were dead but I didn’t believe them. I heard my father speaking to you one night, yelling at you, and ran down to see you. But he was alone, just drunk.”

  “I’ve been worried about you, Sarah. Father William is worried about you. I looked for you at the old mill.”

  “An unlessoned girl,” she replied, “unschooled, unpracticed, yet not so old but she may learn.”

  Her peculiar theatrical ramblings disquieted him. There was something new about the girl. Her energetic joy had been replaced with a nervous fatigue. Her eyes seemed to move in and out of focus. He shook her. “Sarah, that day you saw the body in the sewage pit. Who did you tell about it?”

  “For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

  Other actors were beginning to stare at them.

  “Sarah, speak straight. Did you tell someone?”

  Pain flashed in the girl’s eyes. “We didn’t see a body. We saw a funny black stick that happened to look like a hand. The governor said so, it must be true.”

  Hadrian’s heart sank. The girl, once his prize pupil, was oddly adrift.

  Sarah looked down and giggled. “Silly me, I put my shoes on the wrong feet.”

  A boy in a harlequin suit paced through the crowd, ringing a bell. “Places,” he declared.

  When her eyes found him again they seemed almost playful. “What does the director do when he realizes he is in fact just another actor? He drinks, drinks alone, drinks all night. It’s hard getting the script one page at a time.” Suddenly she became grave and seemed about to weep.

  The harlequin passed again, ringing the bell. A girl pulled Sarah away. As she disappeared behind a curtain she turned and mouthed two words. A chill rose up his back. He could have sworn they were Save me.

  CHAPTER Twelve

  IT WAS NEARLY sunset before he reached Jonah’s darkened cottage. Hadrian ventured inside only long enough to retrieve the hidden vault key before lifting a lantern from the porch. The chamber behind the vines was as he had left it more than a month earlier. As he closed the door behind him he felt an unexpected calmness. Even now the faint scent of Jonah’s tobacco still hung in the air, and for a moment he had the sense of having just missed the old scholar.

  He quickly lit the candles, then settled at the little desk, moving to one side the sword-knife he had left there and retrieving Jonah’s chronicle from its stand. He slowly leafed through the colorful manuscript, conscious more than ever that its pages must somehow unlock the secrets that had been plaguing Carthage and the camps. Sarah’s words hung like a cloud over him. The colony was indeed being played like a puppet, and the closest thing he had to a script were the pages in front of him.

  He paused over an entry from nearly a year before, reading its description of how the lacrosse championship was played during a snowstorm, then another, weeks later, describing the long graceful iceboats launched on the lake every winter. The artwork decorating these corners was of migratory birds and, as with most of the others, connected by intricate flourishes in rich, varying colors. He went back to earlier entries from two and three years before. In the margins they all had short verses, Latin phrases or just words that read like mottos. He turned back to the later page about the iceboats. The margin art had changed, the margin words had disappeared. What was before him now seemed exaggerated somehow, almost garish. He drew the lantern closer, examining the long right-hand margin, lifting the magnifying lens. A long, curving, undulating line of black ink had been laid first, with red, green, and brown lines woven over it. He forced himself to look at only the black ink, then grabbed a pencil and traced the black line on a separate sheet of paper.

  Excitement surged within as he completed the line. They were letters, grossly squat and widened. It was a visual game he’d seen Jonah play with children. When the paper was slanted away from the reader, they assumed normal proportion. The eagle suffers little birds to sing. It was Shakespeare. Standing alone, the words read like a warning. He transcribed the black shapes in the remaining margins. For a single healthy birth, the top of the page said. A banquet of corncob and frog stew, read the next. The phrases appeared both unconnected and strangely disturbing.

  He returned to the page from eighteen months earlier, describing the loss of the Anna. On the next page, for the next week, he read the Latin sentence mundus vult decipi ergo decipiatur in the margin. The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. He stared at it, puzzled and unnerved. Surely Jonah had not learned so quickly that the loss of the Anna had been fabricated.

  He pushed pages back and forth, confirming his suspicion. All the early pages had borders with plain text, but, starting a year earlier, the border text was concealed.

  Hadrian tried one more, reading first the main text describing the opening of the new public bathhouse and expressions of pleasure over the running water heated by steam, using designs of old Roman baths. Again, he traced the black lines of the margin text. Not so much the famous journalist who is mourned but the delicate painter matched so perfectly with his poet mate. A song broken amid its lyrical chorus.

  Hadrian lowered the pen. Nelly had spoken of how her television anchorman husband had died the week before the baths had opened. Jonah was not in fact offering random musings about life outside Carthage in the margins, he’d been recording events in the camps as they happened.

  He quickly pulled fresh paper from the shelf and began paging through the journal, transcribing as he read, pausing over another margin entry disguised in a vine. Malesuada fames, he read in Latin. The hunger that encourages people to crime.

  His gaze drifted back to the little stand where the journal had been kept. It was of recent vintage, he realized, not salvaged. Holding the light close to it, he began to examine its joints, then tilted it, feeling a shifting of weight beneath the top.

  It took him five minutes to find Jonah’s hidden drawer. The leather packet inside held dozens of papers of various sizes and shapes, all bearing the same handwriting. The bottommost pages were written on the backs of title pages torn from old novels. The first few were nothing but poems. His gut tightened as he read.

  Reading crumbling books by bullrush lights

  It’s not the way we expected to grow old

  In the land of the free and the home of the brave

  He could only bear to read the opening of a haiku-like verse:

  How cold are the freshly washed faces of our dead

  The later messages were all reports on life in the camps. An attempt to organize a school had failed because too many families were preoccupied with sickness and foraging for food. A new push by the Tribunal to organize midwives was described, driven by the appalling number of exiled women who died in childbirth. The list of diseases Nelly had spoken about. Others were only short questions on roughly torn slips. How long to soak the bark? asked one. Antibiotics lie at the end of our rainbow, said another. Still another gave a list of pots and pans and their capacity, asking if they would suffice. They were the other end of Jonah’s correspondence with the camps.

  He continued to stare, rubbing at his chin as realization edged into his consciousness. He had misunderstood the sequence, which meant he had misconnected the pieces. Jonah had not been randomly reporting on events in the camps, he had been participating in them. Jonah had started teaching the camps about making drugs, then, months later, hallucinogens had begun to appear in Carthage. Slowly Hadrian leafed back to the page where the margin notes had been first hidden, then replayed in his mind his conversation that afternoon. Jonah had begun disgui
sing his margin notes after the directory was stolen from Hamada’s archives.

  At last, exhausted and famished, he lowered the pencil and closed the book, pressing it to his forehead for a moment. He had not simply missed the sequence, he had missed all the important links. Nelly had told him Jonah corresponded with her about medicine. He himself had seen letters surreptitiously being delivered to the camps. But this changed everything.

  He’d assumed there had been occasional contact during the past few months but the journal confirmed that the correspondence had been constant, growing in frequency. And as the correspondence grew more active so too had the criminals. Jonah had not been engaging in casual letter writing, he had been launching his own conspiracy to counter them. But the trusting old scholar had unknowingly chosen as his messenger a fledgling member of the jackals.

  Jori was asleep at the dining table in the cottage, her head cradled in her folded arms. Arranged on an oily cloth in front of her were a small revolver, its magazine open, and four bullets. She had been cleaning a new weapon.

  Hadrian rekindled the smoldering fire and sat smoking one of Jonah’s pipes, staring into the flames. A log had crumbled to ash before he heard movement behind him, the soft metallic click of bullets being loaded into the revolver, followed by the spinning of the cylinder. Moments later Jori appeared beside him, extending a mug. “I bought fresh milk in town,” she offered, then pulled up a chair beside him.

  “I did like you said,” she explained, “but waited until lunch when the offices were mostly empty. When I stepped inside Buchanan’s office Bjorn was about to leap on me, said I had to be taken to Kenton right away. Buchanan called him off, saying that I no doubt had an amusing story to tell. He waved Bjorn outside and shut the door. By the time I finished speaking about the Anna and St. Gabriel I think he had stopped listening. He laughed, said I should see a doctor about the effect of my injuries on my brain.”