After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “I didn’t feel bad,” I confessed to Beatrice. “I mean, I did. But not as much as I used to.” I wanted to go on and say: It’s like I’ve gone dull inside. Every surface of me is hardened and rubbed raw. Nothing left to feel.

  At first Beatrice didn’t respond. Then she said, “Some say raiders will control the seas in coming years.”

  I had heard this before, but I didn’t like hearing it from Beatrice, who was never one to deal in conspiracies and doomsday speculation. She went on to tell me news from a trading post to the south, how governments were trying to form to protect and distribute resources. How civil wars were breaking out over laws and resources.

  Beatrice told me about how some new governments accepted help from raiders and willingly became colonies, controlled by raider captains. The raiders offered protection and gave extra resources to the burgeoning community—food, supplies the raiders had stolen or scavenged, animals they’d hunted or trapped. But the community was bound to pay back any help offered with interest. Extra grain from the new mill. The best vegetables from the gardens. Sometimes the community had to send a few of its own people to work as guards on breeding ships and colonies. The raiders’ ships circled between their colonies, picking up what they needed; their guards enforced rules while they were gone.

  My conversations with Beatrice followed the same rhythm each time. She urged me to move onto land and I urged her to move onto water. But not this time.

  Beatrice began telling me a story about something that had happened to her neighbors the previous week. She told me how in the middle of the day shouts and yelling had erupted, coming from the sod dugout. Two men stood outside the dugout, shouting and pointing at a girl who stood between her mother and father. The girl looked about nine or ten years old. One of the men stepped forward and grabbed the girl, holding her arms behind her back as she tried to run toward her mother.

  The father charged forward toward his daughter, but the other man punched him in the stomach. The father doubled and the man kicked him to the ground.

  “Please,” the father pleaded. “Please—I’ll pay up. I’ll pay.”

  The man stomped on the father’s chest with the heel of his boot and the father curled in pain and rolled to his side, his hand shaking and stirring up small clouds of dust.

  The girl screamed for her father and mother, her arms held taut and long behind her as she tried to run toward them. The man who’d stomped on her father smacked her hard across the face, wound rope around her wrists, and knotted them. The other man lifted her body over his shoulder and turned around.

  She didn’t scream again, but Beatrice could hear her soft cries as the men carried her away.

  An hour later the village had begun to swarm with people again, footsteps echoing on the dirt paths, bright children’s voices calling to one another. Beatrice’s neighbor across the road leaned out the open window of her shack to hang a dish towel on a peg. Everything had moved on as though a child hadn’t just been taken from her parents.

  Beatrice shook her head. “It was probably a private affair. Maybe a private debt being collected and no one wanted to interfere. They don’t have control here—but still.”

  Both of our hands had gone still, the hooks glinting in the sunlight in our laps. Beatrice cast about for words.

  “Still, I worry,” she said. “A resistance is being organized here. You could join us. Help us.”

  “I don’t join groups and I don’t care about resistance. I’m not staying on land, waiting for someone to take her,” I said, nodding at Pearl, who had caught a snake and was dropping it into one of our baskets. Pearl came and sat next to us, eyes on the grass, another snake still in her hands.

  “They built a library, you know,” Beatrice said softly, with pain in her voice.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lost Abbots. At one of their bases in the Andes—Argali. They even put windows in. And shelves. Books salvaged from before and new ones being transcribed. People travel for miles to see it. Some friends told me they built it to show their commitment to the future. To culture.”

  Beatrice’s mouth tightened. Before the floods, she’d been a teacher. I knew how important learning and books were to her. How much it had pained her when her school closed and her students scattered across the country. I knew also of her lover who had been killed on his fishing boat three years before by a raiding tribe. She had been scared of the water even before that, and she cloaked this fear as a love for land.

  “Little bit of good in everything,” Beatrice said.

  I thought of the raider on the coast talking about new nations and the need to organize people. I’d heard that argument before in saloons and trading posts. That the raiders’ wealth could rebuild society faster. Forcing people to go without would get us back to where we were sooner.

  I described what a library looked like to Pearl. “Do you want to go to a place like that?” I asked her.

  “Why would I?” she asked, trying to wrap the snake around her wrist as he resisted her.

  “You could learn,” I said.

  She frowned, trying to imagine a library. “In there?”

  I came up against this again and again with Pearl. She didn’t even want what I so sorely missed, had no conception of it to desire it.

  It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought. Or maybe it’s how she was born. Maybe she couldn’t want something like that after being born in a world like this.

  Beatrice didn’t say anything more, and after we finished making lures I went into her tent to pack. I packed our grain in a linen sack, tucking it in the bottom of a bucket. I set the tomato plant in a basket and tucked a blanket around it, a gift from Beatrice. I thought of Row, imagined her wrists cinched together with rope, her cries silenced or ignored. I shuddered.

  Beatrice handed me the rolled-up map. “I don’t even have a compass to give you.”

  “You’ve given me more than I hoped for,” I said.

  “One more thing.” Beatrice pulled a photo from her pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a photo of Jacob and Row, taken a year before she’d screamed my name in that boat as it sped away. Grandfather and I gave it to Beatrice so she could ask traders in Apple Falls if they’d been seen. In the photo Jacob’s auburn hair had a gold sheen from the sunlight. His cleft chin and crooked nose, caused by a childhood schoolyard fight, made his face look angular. Row looked delicate with her small sloping shoulders and shining gray-blue eyes. They were my eyes, almond shaped, hooded. Eyes that looked like the color of the sea. She had a scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, curving over an eyebrow and across a temple. When she was two she had fallen and cut her face on a metal toolbox.

  I rubbed Row’s face with my thumb. I wondered if Jacob had built them a house at the Valley. That’s what he always said he wanted to do for me, years ago. Jacob worked as a carpenter like Grandfather. They began building our boat together, but after a while it was only Grandfather working on the boat. I had listened to their yelling and arguing for weeks and then suddenly it was quiet. That was two months before Jacob left with Row.

  Beatrice reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. “Come back,” she whispered in my ear, the phrase she whispered in my ear each time I visited. I could feel in how her embrace lingered that she didn’t think I would.

  Chapter 6

  Pearl and I set sail to the south, following the broken coast. It was rumored there was more wood for building boats down south in Harjo, a trading post in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’d use my credit at Harjo for wood and trade my fishing skills for help in building a bigger boat. My little boat would never handle the tumultuous seas in the north. But even if I could build a bigger boat, would I be able to navigate and sail it? Desperate people could always be found to join a ship’s crew, but I couldn’t stand the thought of traveling with other people, people I mig
ht not be able to trust.

  I strung a line through a hook and knotted it and did it again for another pole. Pearl and I would fish over the side of the boat later in the evening, maybe even try some slow trolling for salmon. Pearl sat next to me, organizing the tackle and bait, dividing the hooks by size and dropping them in separate compartments.

  “Who’s in this photo?” Pearl asked, pointing to the photo of Row and Jacob sitting on top of a basket filled with rope.

  “A family friend,” I said. Years ago, when she’d asked about her father, I told her he had died before she was born.

  “Why’d you ask that man about my father?”

  “What man?” I asked.

  “The one you killed.”

  My hands froze over the bucket of bait. “I was testing him,” I said. “Seeing if he was lying.”

  The sky to the east darkened and clouds tumbled toward us. Miles away a haze of rain clouded the horizon. The wind picked up, filling our sail and tilting the boat. I jumped up to adjust the sail. It was midafternoon and the day had begun clear, with an easy, straight wind, and I thought we’d be able to sail south for miles without making adjustments.

  At the mast I started reefing the sails so we’d bleed wind. Around the coast to the west, waves rose several feet, the crashing white water swirling under the dark sky. We’d faced squalls before, been tossed in the wind, almost capsized. But this one was driving straight west, pushing us away from the coast. A rag on deck whipped up into the air, almost smacking me as it flew past and disappeared.

  The storm approached like the roar of a train, slowly getting louder and louder until I knew we’d be shaking inside of it. Pearl climbed over the deck cover and stood by me. I could tell she was resisting the urge to throw her arms around me. “It’s getting bad,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Nothing else scared Pearl like storms; she was a sailor afraid of the sea. Afraid, she’d told me before, of shipwreck. Of having no harbor.

  “Take the gear under the deck cover,” I told her, the wind catching my words and flattening them. “And bolt it down.”

  I tried to ease the tension of the sail’s rigging, loosening the sheet, but the block was rusty and kept catching. When I finally got it loose, the wind picked up, knocking me backward against the mast, the rope flying through the block, sending the halyard soaring in the wind. I held on to the mast as Bird leaned left, waves rising and water spraying across the deck.

  “Stay under!” I shouted to Pearl, but my words were lost in the wind. I climbed across the side of the deck cover, running toward the stern, but I slipped and slid into the gunwale. I scrambled to my feet and began tightening the rope holding the rudder, winding it around the spool, turning the rudder so we’d sail into the wind.

  Thunder roared, so loud I felt it in my spine, my brain vibrating in my skull. Lightning flashed and a wave crashed over Bird, and I grabbed the tiller to steady myself. I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambled toward the deck cover, and ducked inside as another wave hit us, foaming overboard.

  I wrapped myself around Pearl, tucking her under me, clutching her with one arm and holding on to a metal bar drilled into the deck with my other hand. Bird rocked violently, water pouring under the deck cover, our bodies jostling like shaken beads in a jar. I prayed the hull wouldn’t break.

  Pearl curled in a tight ball and I could feel her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings against my arm. The wind was blowing straight west, pushing us out of coastal waters and deeper into the Pacific. If we were pushed any farther offshore, I didn’t know how we’d make it back to a trading post.

  Some dark feeling washed over me that felt like rage or fear or grief, something all sharp corners in my gut, like I’d swallowed glass. Row and Pearl rippled through my mind like shadows. The same question kept rising in me: To save one child, would I have to sacrifice another?

  The day my mother died I had been at the upstairs window, four months pregnant with Pearl, hand on my belly, thinking of preeclampsia, placenta abruption, a breech baby, all the things I’d thought about when I was pregnant with Row. But now, with no hospitals, not even makeshift ones run out of abandoned buildings, they seemed like certain death. I knew my mother would help me deliver Pearl like she’d helped with Row, but I was still more nervous about this birth.

  We had lost Internet and electricity for good the month before and we watched the horizon daily, fearing the water would arrive before Grandfather finished the boat.

  In the block behind our house, a neighbor’s front yard held an apple tree. Mother had to stretch to pick them, a basket hooked over her arm, her hair shining in the sunlight. The yellow and orange leaves and red apples looked so bright, almost foreign, as though I already was thinking of them as lost things, things I’d rarely see again.

  Behind her I saw a gray wall building, rising upward toward the sky. I was perplexed at first, my mind too shocked to comply, even though this was what we’d been waiting for. The water wasn’t supposed to be here yet. We were supposed to have another month or two. That’s what everyone on the streets had been saying. All the neighbors, all the people pushing grocery carts full of belongings as they migrated west toward the Rockies.

  I didn’t understand how it was so quiet, but then I realized we were in the middle of a roar, a deafening crashing, the collision of uprooted trees, upended sheds, lifted cars. It was as if I couldn’t hear or feel anything, all I could do was watch that wave, the water mesmerizing me, obliterating my other senses.

  I think I screamed. Hands pressed on glass. Grandfather, Jacob, and Row ran upstairs to see where the commotion came from. We stood together at the window, frozen in shock, waiting for it to come. The water rose as if the earth wanted vengeance, the water creeping across the plains like a single warrior. Row climbed into my arms and I held her as I had when she was a toddler, her head on my shoulder, her legs wrapped around my waist.

  Mother looked up at the water and dropped the basket of apples. She ran toward our house, crossing the street, passing a house and almost reaching our backyard when the wave crashed around her. The wave dipped over her, its white spray falling around her.

  I couldn’t see her anymore and the water thundered around our house. We held our breath as the water rose around the house, climbing up the siding, breaking the windows and flowing inside. It filled up the house like a silo full of corn. The house shuddered and shook and I was certain it’d splinter into pieces, that our hands would be ripped from one another. The water rose, climbing each stair toward the attic.

  I looked back out the window, praying I’d see my mother reappear, surface for a breath of air. After the water settled, the surface was still and my mother did not come up to break it.

  The water settled a few feet below our upstairs window. We waded and swam through the water for weeks afterward but could never find her body. We later found out the dam had broken half a mile from our house. Everyone had said it would hold.

  After Mother was gone I kept wanting to tell her about how things were changing, in me and around me, Pearl’s first kicks, the water covering all the prairie as far as the eye could see. I’d turn to speak to her and be reminded she was gone. This is how people go crazy, I thought.

  It was only a month later that Jacob would take Row. Only Grandfather and I were left in that house, sitting in the attic, that empty room the length of our house, as the boat slowly filled it.

  A month after Jacob left we took the attic wall out with a sledgehammer and pushed the boat out of the house and onto the water. The boat was fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and looked like a large canoe with a small deck cover at the back and a single sail in the middle. We loaded the boat with supplies we’d been hoarding for the past year—bottles of water, cans of food, medical supplies, bags of extra clothing and shoes.

  We sailed west, toward the Rocky Mountains. At first, the air was thin and felt hard to breathe, as if my lungs kept clutching for something more. Three months later I awoke with birthing pai
ns. The wind was so strong it rocked the boat like a cradle and I rolled back and forth under the deck cover, gritting my teeth, clutching the blankets around my body, crying in the lulls between contractions.

  When Pearl came she was glistening and pale and silent. Her skin looked like water. As if she’d risen out of the depths to meet me. I held her to my chest and rubbed her cheek with my thumb and she broke into a wail.

  A few hours later, when the sun rose and she was suckling at my breast, I heard gulls above us. Holding Pearl at my breast was both like and unlike when I held Row at my breast. I tried to hold the feeling of both of them in myself but couldn’t; one kept sliding away and replacing the other. Deep down, I had known that one couldn’t replace the other, though I now discovered I had been hoping Pearl could replace Row. I placed my nose on Pearl’s forehead, smelling her newness, her freshness. I mourned the loss of it, the loss I felt before it happened.

  In Grandfather’s last days he began speaking nonsense more and more. Sometimes talking to the air, addressing people he’d known in the past. Sometimes speaking in a dream language that I would have found beautiful if I wasn’t so tired.

  “Now, you tell my girl that a feather can hold a house,” Grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if by “my girl” he meant my mother, myself, Row, or Pearl. He’d call all of us “his girls.”

  “Who do you want me to tell?”

  “Rowena.”

  “She isn’t here.”

  “Yes, she is, yes she is.”

  This irritated me. Most of the people he spoke to were dead. “Row isn’t dead,” I said.

  Grandfather turned to me, shock on his face, his eyes wide and innocent. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s around the corner.”

  A week later Grandfather died sometime in the night. I had just finished nursing Pearl and had laid her in a small wooden box Grandfather had made for her. I crawled over to where Grandfather slept, my fingers outstretched to shake him awake. When I touched him, he was cold. His skin not yet ashen, only slightly pale, the blood having settled. He otherwise looked the same as he always did when he slept: eyes closed, mouth slightly agape.