A shrieking startled me, the wild scream of some animal hunting in the dark. Down the hillside, Pearl ran toward us.
The woman swung her ax at me and I ducked and lunged at her, swiping my knife at her neck. I nicked her skin and her hand flew to her neck. Her eyes darkened and she lifted her ax to her shoulder again and stepped toward me.
Behind her, I could see Pearl getting closer and closer. The woman swung her ax at my belly and I jumped backward. It caught me just above my right hip and pain ripped through me; my bones went watery and I fell.
Pearl crested the hill and stood near us, her red hair billowing in the wind. Her hands were empty, one hand at her side and the other resting at the opening of her satchel.
I tried to scramble to my feet, to tackle the woman before she could reach Pearl, but my legs gave out beneath me and I collapsed to the ground.
Blood dripped from the blade of the ax. The woman lifted it higher again to swing it at Pearl. Sweat poured into my eyes and I gritted my teeth, flinging myself toward the woman. I drove my knife through her boot, sticking her to the ground. She screeched and yanked at her foot, trying to pull it up. She jerked her foot up, with the knife still stuck through it, and stumbled backward and fell.
“Pearl, run!” I screamed. I tried to pull myself up again, but my legs buckled beneath me in weakness. I pressed one hand against my wound and I leaned against my other hand, knuckles digging into the dirt.
Pearl glared at me in annoyance. She reached into her satchel and pulled her hand back out, a snake writhing in her hand. It was one I hadn’t seen before, and in my clouded mind I wondered why Pearl was showing off her snakes.
Then the woman’s eyes widened in horror and she propped herself up on her elbows and scrambled back, her heels kicking up small clouds of dirt. She made small screeches as Pearl stepped closer with the snake. Terror. They were vipers, I realized. Pearl had disobeyed me this whole time. Astonishment and relief seeped through me. Pearl threw the viper at the woman, arcing past me in a brown streak. It landed on her chest, and when she lifted a hand to hit it, the viper spit venom into her eyes.
The woman screamed, clawing her eyes as the snake slithered away into the grass. Pearl took another step closer and tossed another snake on her chest. It struck her neck rapidly three times, fell away, and disappeared into the grass.
The woman crawled backward, closer and closer to the cliff’s edge, until a few rocks tumbled down the cliff, rattling as they hit rocks at the bottom.
“This one’s Charlie, my favorite,” Pearl said politely, as though introducing him. She held him behind his head and her other hand cupped his coiled body as though he were a teapot.
The woman’s eyes were slits, swollen red skin rising around them. I remembered reading those pamphlets handed out at ports, the ones I made Pearl study to learn which snakes were poisonous. Viper venom burned like an iron brand. It hardened blood in your veins, your body twitching for oxygen, pain radiating up your spine.
My own sight was going out, the world flattening and becoming distant as my vision blurred. I pulled my hand from my side, where I had been clutching my wound. Bright red in the sunlight. I felt surprised, though I already knew my blood was outside of me now.
“It’ll take a whole day before you go,” Pearl told the woman. “But since you have more bites, it may not take so long.”
I collapsed to the grass when I heard the woman’s body hit the rocks below. The last thing I saw were birds overhead. Several seagulls rose up over the cliff’s edge, flying over Pearl and me, flying past Row’s grave, disappearing over the opposite horizon like ghosts.
Chapter 58
I woke in Jacob’s bed. Jacob’s thick flannels and heavy trousers lay stacked on an open shelf beside the door. A small cluster of purple wildflowers leaned in a cup on the bedside table. Sunlight fell through the open doorway leading into the kitchen.
Daniel stepped into the room, the heels of his boots scraping against the wood floor. He stood slightly stooped, gazing at me through a lock of hair in his eyes. A white bandage was wrapped around his palm. Sunlight glinted in the glass of water he held. I inhaled sharply. Daniel and the glass of water: they made a beautiful shape I could hold on to for a while.
He held it to my lips and I drank, the liquid cleaning my senses, clearing out the brambles in my mind. He left and brought Pearl into the room. She stood before me for a minute before speaking. Her face had changed in the hours she had been apart from me. Her eyes had a heaviness I knew I couldn’t reach.
“I wanted to meet her,” she said softly.
“I wanted you to, too,” I said. She has stood before too many graves, whether in water or earth, I thought. I swallowed the thickness in my throat.
Pearl crawled into bed with me and tucked her face into my neck. Her back shuddered and she let out a sob. I stroked her hair and murmured to her. Sometimes, it was easy to forget how small she actually was.
If I sat up I could see into the kitchen and watch Daniel and Pearl rummaging for food. There wasn’t much left, but they found a rotten tomato, a half-empty bag of flour, and two eggs in an icebox. Daniel cracked an egg in a wood bowl and smelled it, then cracked the second one. They must not have been rancid, because he lit a fire on the stove and fried them up for us. After he finished cooking the eggs, he mixed water with the flour and made a lumpy kind of pancake in the skillet.
We ate in silence. Pearl licked her thumb and pressed it into the crumbs to lift each one from the plate. I looked past Daniel and Pearl at the table, to one of Row’s drawings on the wall. It was a charcoal picture of a whale. Perhaps a picture of the whale that had washed ashore on the beach below us, because the whale she drew was not in water, but caught on land.
I rested for a day, careful not to move and break open the cut in my side, where Daniel had tightly wrapped an old bedsheet around me. The next afternoon I told Daniel, “We should be getting back to the others.”
“Rest a few more hours.” Daniel explained that he’d signaled to them with a flag and written a note telling them we were safe. He’d wrapped it around a rock and dropped it to them from the cliff.
“They aren’t going anywhere, and we left them with enough food and water,” Daniel said.
He pulled a chair next to the bed and sat, taking my hand in his.
“Pearl and I are digging a grave for Jacob next to Row,” Daniel said. “The ground is frozen, so it’ll take us a few more hours to break it up.”
I nodded. Daniel watched me as if he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t speak.
“I was thinking of my mother this morning,” he said. “Something about the light here. In our last days together, she’d raise her fingers to touch sunlight and turn her hand over, like the light was running water, moving over her skin.” Daniel shook his head and rubbed his thumb over the top of my hand. “You get used to loss like you get used to water. You can’t even imagine what it’d feel like to not be with it, not have it all around you.”
I thought of how during the flood, bodies would wash up on every new shore the water made. The sun taking skin and flesh, the bones polished with each wave.
Row is gone, I repeated over and over, trying to make myself believe it. I would need to learn how to mother myself in the wake of her loss. I would need to make room for both my loss and hope, to let both abide and change as they would.
A bruise bloomed on Daniel’s chin. I touched it gingerly and he flinched. His eyes were so clear, they made me feel like I was falling. He reached out and brushed hair from my face. I leaned forward, pain radiating from my wound, and kissed him.
That afternoon, I stood, testing my balance. I could see Daniel and Pearl through the small window. They carried apples in baskets. There must be an orchard somewhere near, I mused. They walked side by side. As they got closer, I could see tears on Daniel’s face that he rubbed away with the back of his hand, keeping his chin up so she couldn’t see. I knew he had thought we might never find Pearl a
gain and had only been fronting confidence for me that night on the mountainside.
I rummaged through Jacob’s dresser drawers for more warm clothing. A cold wind ripped down the hillside, making the small house shudder. I shoved wool trousers aside and picked out a heavy sweater stitched with thick yellow yarn. A drawing poked out from under the sweater.
It was another of Row’s drawings, showing a river and sandhill cranes. It looked just as it had that day all those years ago; her memory was also my memory. One crane was drawn in midflight, above the river, heading for the upper corner of the paper. At the bottom, in a child’s near-illegible scrawl, was the word mother. I imagined her tucking herself into the memory on the same days I had, sheltering inside of it, a shared space for the both of us.
I went breathless and dizzy. I leaned against the wall and slid down, head resting on my knees; the picture dropped on the floor in front of me. I let myself weep, let the ground hold me up.
I felt like the earth during a flood, so much pouring upon me—not just the grief, but the longing, too, and I knew I had to sit and wait it out, all of it building and building, crushing me under its weight, my heart shifting in the depths, every part rearranged.
When we made it over the mountain, back to the camp on the beach, fog was just beginning to clear. Relief spread across Wayne’s and Thomas’s faces when they saw us approaching. They leapt up and hurried toward us, taking the bags from our shoulders and hugging us.
Thomas and Wayne had pulled all the salvageable wood and rope from the Lily Black and laid it across the beach to dry. But I knew it wasn’t for rebuilding a ship and sailing. There wasn’t enough wood for that, but beyond that, we were weary of the sea. We belonged here now, if for no other reason than it was where we’d wrecked. Where we’d have to rebuild.
We made a fire behind the large black rock and huddled together. While we were gone, Thomas and Wayne had collected mussels in a pail. We cooked them over the fire, talking about the village while we ate.
Daniel and I described the epidemic, the empty houses, the poisoned well, the dead Lost Abbot guards. We talked about how the Lost Abbots would return soon. They’d likely moor in the inlet to the east and climb up the mountainside into the Valley to make their collections. And we’d need to be ready for them.
Daniel had seen a large garden and orchard on the northern side of the village, now untended and gone to seed. We could turn over the soil and prune the branches, encourage new growth. Move into some of the abandoned houses and fix them up with salvaged wood from the ship. We could make a ladder to drop down the cliff side so we’d have easier access to the shore for fishing. A ladder we could pull up during attacks.
On our way back through the village, we’d seen a few more people milling about their homes and through the streets. They moved like they were still frightened, but more daring with the guards gone. Curiosity shone on their faces as they watched us walk through the village.
As I walked I planned how I’d speak to them. I didn’t have Abran’s charisma, his ability to pull people together, but I’d have to try. We needed their help if we were going to build the safe haven Abran and his brother had dreamed of.
But questions flooded my mind. Would they join us? How safe would we be with strangers? What history and secrets did they keep that would be the unwitting foundation of our community?
I looked at each face around me in the firelight. Before all this, it had been just Pearl and me, alone in the world. And now, each face was like a buoy in the dark sea. Thomas with his spirit that seemed untouched by darkness. Wayne with his willingness to step into the fray. Daniel with his steadfast presence. And Pearl, with the wildness of an animal I’d never want to tame. I felt a maternal protectiveness toward each of them. I would lead them into whatever would come, would try to fulfill my promise to Abran. When the water buried the earth, it felt like it was erasing us. The whole world a grave. But we would rise with the horizon if it continued to rise; we’d mark the sky with our silhouette before disappearing over the edge of the earth.
I remembered the time I took Row fishing with Grandfather and we had a fish in the boat that was flapping its fins against the air.
“Fly, fly,” Row had said.
We dropped him in the water and he swam away.
I had thought at the time that she’d said that because she wanted us to return him to the water; that she hadn’t mastered the difference between swim and fly. But now I think she could have just been talking about flying, since she wanted everything to be a bird. I’ve also longed for that kind of rising. For everything to rise above earth, above certain death, to have some part of you that always rises and lets you hover above what you’ve lost.
There was a pull in me toward denial. Toward believing Row could be out there somewhere. But I knew that was the kind of hope that betrays. The kind of hope that’s an illusion, that shackles you to your desire. I needed hope built on real possibilities. Hope that we could make it here; that I could care for these people. Jacob had no reason to lie to me, and the Lost Abbots had no reason to lie to Jacob. They could have put her on their breeding ship at any point they wanted; it was what they did all the time.
It was time to accept it all and find a way to go on. Row was gone; she had lived her life mostly without me. No more clawing for a different truth than that. She was mine and she also wasn’t. She was wholly her own. And our memories bound us as tightly as our bodies before her birth. Her spirit would remain like a fire in my bones.
I saw now that I hadn’t just sailed to rescue Row. I had sailed for some part of myself that hadn’t been born yet, sailing toward her, as if she were some ghost from a future I needed to create.
I had waited so long to prove myself wrong. To prove that I have room in me for everything I’ve lost and will lose, that the room in my heart will grow with loss and not contract. And I hadn’t just found it to be true; I’d made it true. I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.
I noticed Pearl had left the fire, and I glanced around the shore for her. She danced in front of the whale skeleton, sand flying from her feet. Twirling and twirling. Her hair a flurry around her face. Her figure tiny against the skeleton and the gray sky and sea beyond, the horizon a line so faint it was hard to place.
A warmth came from within and I smiled. She must be dancing to some music in her head, I thought. But then I heard it. The seagulls above, on the cliff, no longer diving for fish. Their voices lifted on the wind, bright and singular as bells. It sounded like they were singing.
Acknowledgments
To Victoria Sanders and Rachel Kahan, for their faith in this book and for helping make it better, and to Hilary Zaitz Michael, Bernadette Baker-Baughman, Jessica Spivey, Benee Knauer, and the HarperCollins team. I’m so lucky I get to work with you all.
To my writing group: Theodore Wheeler, Felicity White, Ryan Borchers, Amy O’Reilly, Bob Churchill, Drew Justice, and Ryan Norris; to Kate Sims for being a great book critic; and to my professors for always being so generous.
To Adam Sundberg, for providing a wealth of knowledge and perspective on environmental history. Any and all errors are my own.
To my family for always being so supportive of my work; to my father for building me an easel when I was a toddler; and to the one and only Fetty, for teaching me to read and write and for continuing to be my first reader to this day.
To Don, for keeping the light.
To my sons and to my husband, for everything.
About the Author
KASSANDRA MONTAG grew up in rural Nebraska and now lives in Omaha with her husband and two sons. She holds a master’s degree in English literature, and her award-winning poetry and short fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Midwestern Gothic, Nebraska Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Mystery Weekly Magazine. After the Flood is her first novel.
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Copyright
after the flood. Copyright © 2019 by Kassandra Montag. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Map design by Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics LLC
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs © Adrian Gaut/Trunk Archive (ocean); © Yevhenii Borshosh/Shutterstock (Wavy Design)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-288939-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-288936-2
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