“I can hold the baby while you eat,” she says.
“Oh, no,” says the woman. “She doesn’t take well to other people.” She leans the baby against her shoulder and eats hastily with one hand.
When the food is gone, Sadie sees that they mean to go immediately, and it fills her with a sense of dread so keen she nearly grabs the woman’s hand where it rests on the table. Instead she says, “I wonder if you would write something for me?”
The woman nods and hands the baby to her husband. Sadie takes a pen and ink and paper from Zachary’s trunk and sets them on the table. “Only write, ‘Dear Zachary, I will be back soon. Love, your Sadie.’ ”
The woman writes, and when the ink is dry she folds the paper in quarters and hands it to Sadie, keeping her eyes on the tabletop the whole time.
“Thank you.”
“No trouble in it,” the woman says. “Thank you for the food. We’d best be going.”
Sadie watches the wagon disappear against the horizon, though it hurts her eyes to do it. As soon as they are gone, she begins to fill Zachary’s old knapsack. She takes the lantern, candles, matches, a shawl, a fat bundle of cloth scraps. She fills the rest of the space with food and a flask of water. Lastly, she slips her coat on and grabs her broom from the fireside and heads out into the prairie, where she stabs at the snow with the broom handle for more than an hour until at last she finds the spot she wants, where the handle plunges deep into the ground. She kicks the snow aside and looks at the iron bar, the icy rope. It is a wild idea, she knows, but she feels wild, trapped in the confines of the house day upon day with no sound except the screaming of the wind.
* * *
—
She reaches the floor of the cave and waits to catch her breath. Already she feels better, more at home. The cave is warmer than the prairie above. Her bag lies at her feet. It holds enough food to last her a week; she can do some real exploring without having to worry about getting back for supper. She lights the lantern and moves carefully to the tunnel that leads to the larger room. Once there, she tries a passage she has not taken before. It proves to be a short tunnel, and after a few minutes of crawling, she is stepping into another vast rock room. The wall to one side is encrusted with a brilliant white froth of minerals that glitters in the light of her lamp. She stands for a long time just looking at the light winking back at her before she brushes the stone with her fingertips, which come away coated in a powdery residue.
Sadie has been exploring for a few hours and has investigated a handful of rooms when she decides to retrace her steps, but finds that she cannot locate her marker. Standing at the entrance to the tunnel she is almost sure she came down, she moves the lantern slowly, patiently, around its dark mouth, but does not see anywhere the strip of bright red flannel that should confirm her way. She takes a deep breath and starts again at the base of the tunnel, feeling the rock with her fingers this time, waiting for the welcome softness of the cloth. Nothing. So she must be mistaken. The room is large and there are a number of tunnels branching from it; she moves to the next one and starts her search again.
Perhaps an hour has passed by the time she has checked all the tunnels she can find, and still there is no marker anywhere. She cannot believe she has forgotten to leave one, but it is just possible, with her excitement and her eagerness to move ahead. Or else she has not found the proper tunnel. Or else the marker was not tied securely, and is lying somewhere on the cave floor. None of which tells her what she should do. She has returned, or thinks she has, to where she started, that first tunnel that she initially felt confident in. She checks its perimeter one last time and then decides she must give this one a try. Soon after she enters it, though, she becomes convinced she has made a mistake. The ceiling is lower than she remembered, the way more twisted. Frustrated, she calls out, and the echo that answers her promises an open space close ahead. As she emerges, impatient, into the next room, her foot plunges into empty air and she falls headlong onto the rock, her lantern rolling ahead of her, the candle quickly extinguished.
Lying with her face to the ground, she feels the floor around her to ensure that it is solid, and pulls her knees to her chest and sobs. There is no way for anyone to find her, unless they were to come across the iron bar and the dangling rope and become curious, but there is little chance of anyone roaming across the land in the winter. Her right knee is scraped raw where she landed on it, as are her hands. She has been foolish, and now she will pay for her foolishness.
Eventually she stops crying. She feels the floor around her until she locates the lantern, gingerly touches the glass panes and finds them unbroken. Her matches are still in her pocket, and she strikes one, relights the candle, and draws a shuddering breath.
She imagines what Zachary would say, and feels ashamed of herself. She has not even looked for a way out. She could cry for days and do nothing more than make herself thirsty. Better to take stock: She has been in the cave for half a day, and has food for a week. So she will have to find another exit. There are small streams running everywhere for water, and she will be sparing with the food until she is sure of her escape route. When she gets home, she will tear up the note she left and Zachary will never even know she was gone.
* * *
—
For a while a sense of certainty buoys her—she finds another passage leading from the room and follows it, confident that she will soon be on the surface. But that tunnel branches into another, and another, and soon she can no longer say which direction she started from.
In the constant darkness, the passage of time becomes impossible to calculate. She knows only that the food in her pack is diminishing, though she allows herself only a bite or two at a time, and stretches the hours between bites as long as she can. How much time has it been? Days, certainly. Weeks, probably, but more than that she can’t say. The uneven ground and the danger of falling force her to move slowly, and she eats so little that she grows tired easily. After a while, she begins to crouch by the icy rivers and swipe at the white fish, flipping them from the water to the cave floor, where they thrash until they die and she can rinse them clean and eat them. Their skins are soft and scaleless, their bones fine as grass, but they are small and not much nourishment, and she is plagued by constant, dull hunger.
Sometimes she thinks she hears sounds: snatches of laughter, and a low, hollow whistle like a distant train. There are faces, too, in the dim light of the lamp, looking at her from the corners of the ceilings, and sometimes the sound of something scuttling past behind her, something she is never quick enough to see. She tries to call out, to talk to these fleeting forms, but never receives any answer. More and more often she takes refuge in sleep, the darkness of her closed eyes blending seamlessly with the darkness of her waking hours.
* * *
—
She wakes again and it’s indistinguishable from the last hundred times she has woken, except that when she tries to rise the effort feels too great. Her body hurts all the time, and it’s hard to remember sometimes what she is looking for. A door, she thinks. I’m looking for the door. If she stops paying attention for one moment she might find herself plunging into some unnoticed hole in the floor, but attention is hard to come by with the great heavy silence of the cave in her ears and the darkness constantly changing shapes around her. At last, she turns over and pushes herself up on her knees. She crawls through a low slot in the rock wall into a new room and sees something like a snowfall of stars against the far wall, soft blue streaks of light drifting down against the blackness. She laughs and holds out her hand, but realizes the light lies on the other side of a chasm some six feet wide that begins just past her fingertips. She could jump across it, perhaps, but if she misses she is done. So she kneels at the edge, feeling the cool air across her face and watching the drifting pattern of light on black. It must be nearly Christmas, she thinks. Maybe today. Zachary will be some
where in a saloon along the road back to her, drinking beer with strangers. Or at a boardinghouse filled with lonely men, all sitting down to roast goose and feeling grateful for a moment of warmth. And maybe not just men. Maybe some pretty young widow is smiling at Zachary, carving a helping of meat onto his plate and setting her hand on his shoulder, leaning too close. Sadie lies on her belly at the edge of the chasm and holds out the lantern to look down. At the bottom there is a distant glow like candlelight. Sadie thinks she can hear voices, and as she listens harder she is sure—a throng of people conversing. Some are laughing, even, and their voices get louder the more she listens. She can almost tell what they are saying, but the walls of the cave distort the sound, keeping it just barely unintelligible. “Hello!” she calls, but they don’t answer, don’t even pause in their conversation. Maybe they can’t hear her. She has noticed that sounds sometimes come from very far away in the cave. Once she thought she heard a lark singing just over her shoulder, but there was nothing around her but blackness.
Sadie calls out to the distant people again, but again there is no response. She lies by the chasm, pulling her fingers through the empty air just past her cheek. Where did all those people come from? What are they doing here? Maybe they live here. Maybe they have never seen the sun in their whole lives and their skin is as white as hers. She imagines a dark room filled with white-skinned men and women, children, babies. White foxes and cats thread between their legs as they stand talking, white birds sing from the crenellations in the walls. There is a long table laid with candles and heaped with food. One of the women is singing, a soft, clear melody that Sadie’s mother used to sing to her when she was a child: “And the stars fell through my fingers, Lord.” What is it called? She can’t remember the name, or the rest of the song. “Zachary,” she says, “you are missing the most wonderful party. You are missing so many things. You should be here at home with me.”
* * *
—
She wakes hours or minutes later, her cheek resting against the sharp edge of the chasm. A cool updraft still blows past her, but the raining blue light is gone, and the candle she left burning in her lantern has melted away. Where the people were she hears only the muttering of water at the bottom of the crevasse. She feels too tired to move. In her shrunken pack are two candles and a hard lump of brown sugar. I will stay here until those people come back, she thinks. Maybe they’re looking for me. Some part of her knows she is starving, that if she does not find a way out soon she will die here, that she cannot live on icy water and thin-boned fish for much longer. But it is difficult to care. The darkness feels safe, the hard rock embracing. With the lantern extinguished, her eyes trace luminous patterns against the black, carnivals of moving light more beautiful than anything she can recall from home.
But then she remembers Zachary. He may have been waiting for days, for weeks, whatever time she has been gone. He may have come home as soon as she left, may even now be standing with her letter in his hand and scanning the snow for her long-erased footprints.
She crawls back from the edge of the crevasse and struggles to her feet, reaches into the pack for a candle, but thinks better of it and stands still, listening. Tell me something, she says to the cave, and the cave breathes back at her, its million water droplets echoing against its stony heart. She puts the lantern in her pack and begins to move blind, sweeping her toes against the ground, reaching out with her hands to find the walls. There is a smell in the air, barely noticeable, that is different from the rest of the smells. She does not know what it is but she follows it, into tunnels and down slopes and through a crack in the wall so small she has to empty all the air from her lungs to get through. And then she comes around a corner and there is a slash of open space in the rock above her head, and the light burning through it makes her gasp and cover her eyes. When she has recovered from the shock, she can see that the ceiling is only a foot above her. She reaches up through the rent in the stone and feels a frigid wind against her fingertips.
Sadie knows she must pull herself up, but it seems beyond her strength. She sits on the floor and eats her last spoonful of sugar, feels its energy spill into her blood in a way that makes her simultaneously strong and dizzy. At last she puts her pack on the ground, grabs the edges of the opening in the rock, and pulls and kicks toward the light. Soon she is pushing through the snow-crusted skeletons of black-eyed Susans and rolling into the howling flat of the prairie. In the distance she can see the lightning-struck tree that marks the far side of the Burkes’ property. She clutches her arms against her chest, turns her back to the wind, and sits a long while with her eyes closed.
* * *
—
When she nears her house, she sees smoke coming from the chimney and bursts through the door. Someone looks up from the bed, startled, and for a moment her heart jumps. But she sees almost instantly that it is not Zachary. This person is fair-haired and slight, wrapped in her wool blanket. He shouts in alarm and drops the piece of wood he was carving.
“Who are you?” she says.
He gapes at her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
“Is Zachary here?” she says, but the man just shakes his head.
Sadie is shivering. She looks to the stove, where a pan of coffee steams. Not hers; she ran out before she went into the cave. But if someone sees fit to come into her house and use her things, she will drink his coffee without apology. She takes her tin cup from the hook and pours what remains into it, blows across the surface and begins to drink. “Who are you?” she says again.
“My name’s Jesse Meecham. Are you one of them that lived here?”
“I still do live here. I’d like to know who you think you are, coming into my house.” She glances around for her shotgun, spots it in the corner on the other side of the doorway, an easy stride away. She takes another sip of the coffee. The warmth moves through her body. Now that she is back in the house, she is aware of a ravenous hunger she has not felt since her first days underground. She opens the sugar tin and adds a fistful of sugar to the coffee. “You wanted to get out of the snow, I suppose?”
“I was on my way from Springfield, but a storm come up and I lost the track. When I got here there was no one about. I found your note, but after a while when no one come back I figured you was dead.”
By his voice he sounds young, maybe only fifteen or sixteen, but the droop of his shoulders gives him a sad and desperate look. He stops talking and reaches out and grabs her arm, holding on firmly but not painfully, watching her face. At last, he lets go and sits back on the bed. He seems less frightened, more watchful. Sadie steps away and takes the gun from the corner.
“You’s a real woman, ain’t you?” he says. “I thought you was a ghost. What happened to you?”
“Nothing happened. I’ve been away some time is all.”
“Why’s your face so pale?”
“Just is.”
He stares a moment more, then says, “I’ve got a bit of salt pork, if you’re hungry.”
“All right.”
The boy gets up from the bed, paws the grounds from the coffee pan, sets it back on the stove and slices the meat into it. Sadie can smell the remnants of the coffee burning seconds before the bacon fat covers them, a smell so warm and vital she feels drunk on it. When the meat is cooked Jesse forks it onto a plate, and Sadie feels every second that passes until it is cool enough to eat, until the warm fat fills her mouth. She empties the plate and says, “My husband won’t like you being here. You’ll have to leave. I’ll point you to the trail.”
The boy nods. “S’pose I could wait until morning? The day’s mostly gone.”
Sadie points with the gun. “You can take that blanket and stretch out by the fire for tonight.”
Jesse moves to the fireside and sits huddled in the blanket while she sinks down on the bed. Whatever power got her back across the prairie to home is quickl
y draining away; she feels as though she could sleep for days. She turns to pull a quilt from the shelf and catches a glimpse of herself in the square of looking glass on the wall. Even she can see that her face is skeletal and dirty; she looks like the starved deer that sometimes wander by in the winter, all ribs and joints, nosing through the snow crust for something to eat. No wonder the boy was frightened of her. She settles herself on the bed facing him and spreads the quilt over her legs.
“Jesse, did you say? Where were you headed, before you fetched up here?”
“Out California way.”
“You have family there?”
“No. Just somewhere to go.”
He gets to his feet then and comes toward her, startling her, and she has the gun up before he has taken two steps. He stops and reaches into his pocket with a shaking hand.
“A letter came for you. I forgot about it until just now.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. She sets the gun on the bed. “Would you read it to me?”
The boy nods. He crouches by the fire, opens the letter, and begins to read, haltingly and without emotion, as if each word were a separate task to him.
“Dear Sadie, I hope you have been well and that the autumn has not been too hard for you. I have come much farther east than I intended and I am writing from…Pock—Pog—I don’t know.”
“Just go on.”
“Where my father has been living these many years. He is a merchant now.”
The boy stops speaking, but he looks closely at the paper and whispers the words to himself as he reads on.
“Skip the ones you don’t know,” Sadie says. “When does he say he is coming back?”
The boy folds the letter up. “I oughtn’t to read this.”
“Read it. I can’t read.” He looks at the gun on the bed and she places it on the floor, pushing it beneath the bed frame. “All right? Read.”
All the Names They Used for God Page 2
