Another Like Me

by Albert Norton, Jr.

  The dirt road to their ranch emptied into a wider and better-maintained dirt road, though it was all under a heavy blanket of white now. The road was in good shape. At this point in the new world, Jack had learned to discern road troubles, at least some of them, from the condition of the land alongside, well before he came upon the trouble spots themselves. It was all about drainage. Even the most rudimentary road must have some accounting for the flow of water, even here, where an average of much less than twenty inches a year would fall. Perhaps the impact of water was especially important in this country because rain was so scarce that the landscape did not support the vegetation that would help to control such water as did come, and the carvings and cuttings of water were more pronounced as a result.

  The crossroads of Alpine was only about a three-hour walk from the Alsenay place, a little less by horse. Of course, the snow lengthened that travel time. Though the horses were more frisky in the brisk air, they had to be reined back somewhat in deference to hidden dangers below the surface of the snow. Their road led to a more significant highway leading into Alpine from the north, the Coronado Highway, and for some reason, despite all the passage of time, they each of them noted the complete absence of traffic on it, as if it were a new phenomenon, before their hoof prints spoiled the virgin snow. Even the deer and the elk and the bears and the other wild things seemed to have eschewed this former human passageway.

  There wasn’t much to see in the heart of Alpine. In fact, they might have done better, for their purposes of “getting out,” to visit the upper reaches of the San Francisco River, reasonably full this time of year, or the many furrows along the stony approach to the White Mountains. Why they didn’t was owing to the tendency we all have to think that “somewhere” means a place where others are, not the wild and awe-inspiring landscapes that attest to God’s love of diversity even in hidden places. The empty crossroads that comprised downtown Alpine was disappointing, even though it was a picturesque enough place. There was, of course, no one about.

  “Let’s visit the Willises,” Peter said.

  “Do you know how to get there from here?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah, we’re actually pretty close.” They pressed on south, through the T-intersection, and then diverted onto a path that was little better than a logging road.

  “Shortcut,” Peter said.

  The logging road soon gave out entirely, but the landscape was fairly open, with wide distances between trees that helped them keep their bearings and assess the lay of the land under the snow, rather than providing any hindrance. In no more than twenty minutes or so, they again entered what they could tell must be a secondary county road, and just as they entered it, they smelled wood smoke. Just over the rise in that road, the Willis place came into view.

  “Seeing it from a different angle this time,” Jack said.

  “Looks like they’ve been out in it,” Peter said, pointing to the barn. In front of the barn, the snow had been pretty well beaten down, and it was well-trodden all about the house and barn and well into the pasture.

  Peter dismounted, and at just that moment, though they were still fifty yards or more from the house, Millie emerged from the front door. She waved and jumped off the front porch into the smooth snow of the yard in Peter’s direction, instead of descending to the beaten path that led to the barn. Peter was walking briskly toward her, having released his horse, and she was trying to take big steps in the snow. Millie was leaning well forward, but her legs battling the snow could not keep up, and she had not gotten far when she toppled forward, landing face-first in the snow.

  Peter tried to trot forward himself, but with not much better luck. In short order, he, too, face-planted into the soft mush, and they both sat back on their knees from their respective positions, laughing, their hair, face, and clothes covered in snow.

  “Gag,” Robin said.

  “Yeah, let’s head on to the barn,” Jack answered.

  Peter and Millie were quickly back to their feet and making their way toward each other again. They met and embraced. Robin and Jack carried on toward the barn, Peter’s mount resuming its plod behind them. Robin and Jack took care of all three horses, removing their saddles and bridles.

  Chapter 20

  “I’m not quite ready to go in,” Jack said to Robin.

  “Then let’s just stay here a bit.”

  The sunlight had been intermittent on their ride to Alpine and then to the Willises. When it was cloudy, there was a sameness to the landscape, a near-continuity between land and sky. Then at times the sky was distinguished from the land by varying shades of blue and grey, and by the absence of pricks of deep green that were the trees around them on the earth, peeking through their snow blankets. When the sun shone through, there would suddenly be shadows, but it never got so bright that the reflection off the snow was blinding. As the day had progressed, the brighter phases had become more frequent, if tentative. The overcast sky outside translated to muted shadows inside the barn, and a suffused light throughout. It was surprisingly warm inside it. It was a comfortable place to be, for the nonce, and Jack self-consciously relaxed into the moment.

  In a world where electricity was an occasional thing only generated with much effort, and temporarily, and where heat normally followed a period of not-insignificant personal effort, planning was required for everything. They anticipated being welcomed by the Willises, but the Willises could give only of what they had. If worse came to worse, they would need to be able to retrace their steps, regardless of the time of day or the distance. In cold weather, aside from water, all that survival requires is sufficient heat. Food and shelter we consider necessities, but even more fundamentally, food and shelter are required only for heat, internally and externally. Jack could not for a moment lose track of what was required to keep going in this new world. For him and for Robin, and for Peter, this reality was second-nature.

  By relaxing in the moment, Jack had certainly not forgotten these truths, but he was considering what we all do in our better moments. The future for us all will contain ominous dark moments, and carefree, bright moments. There is no moment of completion, in this life, when all of the moments of terror, boredom, worry, and ecstasy merge on a plateau on which the balance of our lives will be lived. It just doesn’t happen that way. Looking to the future from any moment, we should be resigned that it will continue to be a mix of fear and contentment. It is this way until we die.

  Jack strolled about the wide middle of the barn, restively, waving in the air a riding crop that he’d found hanging in a corner. Robin leaned against the wood siding of one of the animal pens, her hands out to the side and folded backward over the top, at a height almost to her shoulders. Behind her and the low wall, the pen was empty. Her horse was in the next pen over, nosing about the sparse straw topped with a handful of oats.

  “Robin, Robin. What a strange world we live in.”

  “If we’d been born into it, I suppose it wouldn’t be so strange.”

  Jack looked at her. “Just when I think you’re only a fourteen-year-old girl, you surprise me with your perspicacity.”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “And I’m fifteen.”

  “Yes, fifteen. Please, can you ever forgive me? I was there for the party and everything.” At this, Jack resumed his leisurely saunter, looking up toward the upper reaches of the barn and waving again his crop as if he were giving an oratory to a vast crowd. “I was about to say, Enigmatic One, that we are thrown into peculiar circumstances, but perhaps you’re right. Perhaps if we’d been born into this, we’d think the times not so peculiar at all.” He turned and marched a few steps toward the door of the barn, then turned again and marched a few steps back. “And yet, clearly they are. The times. Peculiar. But maybe it has ever been so. Maybe all times are peculiar, and the people living in them just don’t recognize them as such.” He whipped his crop through the air and spun around, spreading his arms in a ‘n’est-ce pas�
�� gesture.

  “All that death,” Robin commented flatly. Robin had by this time settled onto a milk can that was evidently no longer in use as such, but was instead used as a stool. She leaned back against the low front wall to the animal pens.

  Jack came to a halt—not at attention, but attentively. “Much death,” he affirmed. The death included, after all, her parents. He paused long, with a sober expression, before resuming. “You’re a Christian, right?”

  Robin cocked her head to one side, by way of saying you already know that I am.

  “Then would you mind telling me what is going on?” Jack regretted the tone as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  But Robin didn’t seem to notice the edge they contained. “I don’t know,” she said. “How would I?”

  Jack thought about whether he should press her. He’d spent countless hours with her. His daughter, in a way. And with her brother. Alone and separately. Why push now? But then why not, he thought, if he was respectful and genuine. If he’d gleaned nothing else of their operating ethic, it included that. “You’ve got this Bible. Prophecy. There’s someone above and beyond all of this who orchestrates it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And He caused all that death.” Jack expected her to remonstrate, but she didn’t.

  “Okay.”

  Jack looked at her, squinted his eyes, shook his head. “That’s not a problem for you?”

  Robin didn’t respond right away, but when she did, she didn’t respond with anger, or with consternation, or with condescension. She just said, “God’s in charge.”

  “Where does it say—”

  Robin interrupted him. “I would tell you if I thought the Bible explained this specifically. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it.”

  “God is love.”

  Robin wore a wry smile. “People are not.”

  “All those people dead.”

  “We all die.”

  Jack just looked at her. She was a giving, compassionate person, but this just sounded cold.

  Robin continued. “Everyone dies. But we don’t get mad at God because we die.”

  “I don’t get your point.”

  “I mean,” Robin said, “if we were going to get mad at God about something, why not our own death? But we just take that as being the way things are.”

  “You’re just giving me another reason to shake my fist at God, not a reason I shouldn’t.”

  “What I mean is that we get mad at God about bad circumstances, but when it comes to our own death, we just accept it. I mean, maybe we don’t exactly accept it, but we accept the fact that it’s going to happen sooner or later.”

  “We accept its inevitability.”

  “Yeah. You said once we’re all mortal or something like that.”

  “I said that the mortality rate for mankind is 100%.”

  “We can’t even imagine it being otherwise. We sit around wondering how God could allow bad things in the world but meanwhile we’re literally dying. Isn’t that even more of a reason to criticize God?”

  “You’re only fifteen. You’re supposed to be immortal.”

  Robin smiled one of her more enigmatic smiles.

  Jack continued. “So if we think God can’t be God because of the prevalence of human misery, we’re actually missing an even bigger reason for doubting God.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s staring us in the face—our own death.”

  “Yes.”

  “It still sounds like you’re telling me another reason to doubt God, not a reason to believe in Him.”

  “No, I don’t think so. People think cruelty and hunger and cold and loneliness are reasons to think God’s not real, or if He is, that He shouldn’t be worshiped. So what’s different if they find out it’s even worse than that—that at the end of it all, they just die?”

  Jack just looked at her, thereby signaling his desire for an explanation.

  “Well, it’s not like He’s somehow even less real. If He didn’t exist before, He still doesn’t exist.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Okay.” Jack knew enough about Robin not to write her off, even if the destination for this line of thought was not at all clear.

  “My point . . .” she began.

  “Ah, here we go.”

  “Stop it. My point is that the fact that there are bad things out there doesn’t explain anything about God. It only says something about people. I can’t tell you why God allows bad things, but there’s lots I can’t tell you about God. He’s God.”

  “Well then, what does it mean about people?”

  “People are born, and there’s life, but they always die. And —“ she drew out the ‘and’, “people are born, there’s life, and for some reason they sin. They do bad things. Doesn’t matter why, right now, but people certainly do wrong.”

  “So?”

  “So we die because evil is already in us and we do evil because we’re people. People are a little bit like God, but we’re not God. There is evil in the world because people are people and not God.”

  “God doesn’t have to allow it.”

  “But I think it makes sense that He would. If He didn’t, then He’d be making people something different than what they are. We wouldn’t be free. And if we’re not free, we don’t meet God face to face.”

  “Ooh, you hit the ‘freedom’ button. How are we more free? Freedom to do what? Freedom from what? What does ‘freedom’ even mean? It’s just a word we like to say.”

  “Well, we don’t have the freedom to not die. We don’t have the freedom to always do right.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Let me see if I’m going where you’re going with this thought. Everyone wants freedom, but what’s really going on is that we lack freedom in our natural state.”

  “Well, it’s natural to seek after God.”

  “But people don’t. Right? Or they do, but they find something else instead that takes His place. Isn’t that what Christians say?”

  “Right.”

  “So when I say ‘natural state’, I just mean the way I am when I wake up one morning and see the world around me but I don’t see God, and I go about my life.”

  “But remember you’re made special by God, to be a little bit like Him, and you want freedom. Just like God has freedom.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “I’m yearning for freedom, but being vague about what that even means.”

  Robin smiled. “You say it better than I could.”

  “No, no, you are the oracle. I bow to your wisdom.”

  “Stop.”

  “Well, I’m not completely kidding. Let me see. We’re in our natural state. We want freedom. We tend to think of that as somehow just having the maximum ability to do what we want. How am I doing?”

  “Good so far, I guess.”

  “But even if we have it, freedom I mean, it’s still just personal liberty all within that natural state. We’re still not free from death or evil.”

  “Sin.”

  “I hate that word. But okay, ‘sin.’ Evil that’s out there that somehow starts inside man’s evil heart. We’re all desperately, awfully, wickedly sinful.”

  “You don’t have to say it if you can’t stand the word.”

  “No, no, no, Robin, give me that old time religion. We’re evil, bad, awful sinners.”

  Robin chuckled.

  “And smelly and disgusting,” Jack added.

  “All right, all right.”

  “But I get your point,” he resumed. “The zombies want to drink and smoke dope all the time, and being able to do that seems like freedom to them. But they’re still going to die, and obviously they’re not free from evil, at least not the self-destructive kind of evil.”

  “So they’re not really free.”

  “And the Apache. Maybe they’re not drawn to muddling their minds with substances, but they’re fierce about being left alone because that’s their idea of freedom.”

  “But they
still die, and they still have the tendency to do wrong.”

  “What about the Diné?” Jack asked.

  “I’ve never met them. You have.”

  “But they’re not God, so on your theory, they yearn for freedom, too.”

  “They’re people, too,” Robin said. “And it’s not just my theory.”

  Jack was struck by the thought that for all they knew in this world, Robin shared this theory only with her brother. And Millie, if she wasn’t just reeling Peter in by saying she was a believer, too. Jack had just days before crossed over to acknowledging God as creator, but that was a far cry from buying this theory about what man was in relation to Him. Still less the whole Jesus thing.

  “Well,” he began, “The Diné toe the party line, and the party line seems to be that we’re social people, and we should make decisions together, and everyone participates in deciding everything, even the children. So they’d say they’re free.”

  “They don’t think they ever do wrong?”

  “I think they decide collectively what’s right and what’s wrong, and an individual Diné is not wrong, morally, unless he’s out of line with what the rest of the Diné deem to be moral.”

  Robin just looked back at Jack. She was difficult to read at all times, but now there was a hint in her face of what? Worry? Tension? Sorrow?

  “You look unsettled.”

  Robin shrugged, returning to her normal look, expressionless except charged with an expectant energy as always.

  “Anyway,” Jack continued, turning from her and again swishing his crop back and forth as he paced, “Freedom isn’t real freedom unless it’s the kind of freedom that means being unconstrained by our natural state. Right so far?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to help me on the bit about being face to face with God.”

  “You asked, ‘why does God allow bad things?’ I was just saying that if God didn’t allow bad things, then He’d be changing the nature of people. Changing our nature so that we only choose good things instead. Make people unable to choose bad things. Which is taking away freedom.”