by Wren, M. K.
Shadow is sniffing about in the rocks, and I reach for the silent whistle on its chain around my neck. What she might find to eat on the beach can harbor salmonella and prove a deadly repast. I blow at the whistle, hearing only a faint wheeze, but Shadow looks up and lopes toward me. The whistle was Rachel’s, and it has served well through all the generations the first Shadow and Sparky begat.
When she reaches me, fur beaded with water and sand from her futile pursuits of gulls, she lies down at my feet and smiles at me.
Anthropomorphism again?
I am the alpha in Shadow’s mixed species pack. She trusts me and lets me dominate her and seems to enjoy physical contact with me. She moves closer, presses her forehead against my leg, and she knows I’ll stroke her head, scratch her back. It’s bonding behavior, I suppose, and it works. I’m bonded to her as I seldom was to humans.
But she stiffens now, looks intently to the south, gives a sharp bark, then catapults into a run toward the figure walking up the beach.
Stephen. I told him to meet me here this afternoon. I watch, laughing, but a little envious, as he runs exuberantly, with the unaware grace of youth, to greet Shadow, then runs with her until they reach me, waiting inert and weary on the log. He isn’t even panting.
“Good day, Mary.”
“Good day to you, Stephen. You and Jeremiah and Jonathan certainly did yourselves proud on your fishing expedition.”
He nods, grinning proudly. “The salmon run’s the best I’ve ever seen. We could’ve brought back more than the one wagonload, if we had a way to take care of them. Jeremiah says we should build a bigger smokehouse.”
Jerry and the boys were gone for two days collecting their bounty. They returned with it yesterday evening, and this morning the women and girls were busy cleaning the fish and hanging them in the smokehouse.
I remember a time when Rachel and I wondered if we’d ever see another salmon running the Coho River.
Stephen sits beside me, legs stretched out, heels digging into the sand. “Are you going to tell me more about your story, your . . . Chronicle?”
His interest pleases me, even if it’s still only curiosity. “Yes, of course. But most of this part still has to come out of my memory. I hadn’t begun my occasional diary yet.”
“How can you remember things that happened so long ago?”
“Sometimes—at least, at my age—things that happened long ago are more vivid than things that happened just yesterday.”
He seems to consider that, then: “What happened after Rachel found you?”
I look out at the tumbling breakers and back into memory. “Well, she went to get Jim and Connie Acres. They were her nearest neighbors. Jim brought his old brown Dodge van. He was a big man, hair like those clouds, white on top, gray on the edges. I remember when he carried me to the van, I held on to him like a frightened child, and he smelled of soap and . . . it seemed like sage. He reminded me of my father, and that made me cry.” Now I can smile at that memory, at Jim assuring me I was safe. He didn’t understand why I was crying, and I was too weak to explain.
Stephen prompts me. “Did you come to Amarna then?”
“Yes. When we reached the house, Jim carried me inside and put me in the bed in the spare room. Well, it’s Jeremiah’s room now, and it was mine until after Rachel died. Anyway, once I was in bed, Connie took over. She was a paramedic. A doctor of sorts.”
“What did she look like?”
The memory is poignantly clear. Constanza Jensen Acres, of mixed ancestry that combined so beautifully. “Well, she was tall and thin, Stephen, and her hair was salt-and-pepper gray. She moved like a dancer. An amazing woman. And within an hour she had me numbed with a local anesthetic and the wound cleaned, sutured, and bandaged. She plied me with antibiotics and gave me a tetanus shot. The wound wasn’t serious, but I’d lost a lot of blood. Anyway, I went to sleep, and it was a long time before I woke up enough even to know where I was. I remember lying on that narrow bed wondering what kind of hospital they had in Shiloh where the walls were wood-paneled and lined with bookshelves. Then it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t in a hospital at all when I saw the paintings on the wall across from me. They were all abstracts: amorphous forms and colors that seemed to glow. I thought I saw images in them I recognized, yet when I tried to name them, they vanished.”
Then I look down at Shadow. “I was sure I wasn’t in a hospital when I saw Shadow asleep at the foot of the bed. The first Shadow, I mean. As soon as I moved, she jumped off the bed and started barking, then Topaz appeared in the doorway, barking too. Finally, Rachel came to quiet them. She sat in a chair by the bed and answered questions for me. You know, where am I, what happened, that sort of thing.”
Stephen leans down to stroke Shadow’s head. “You knew then you’d come home, didn’t you?”
I consider his question, knowing that to him it is rhetorical. He doesn’t understand that I lived in a world of myriad alternatives, that I had another vision of home.
“No, Stephen, I only knew then that I’d found a friend. That was miracle enough.”
Nor does he understand how rare it was then, finding a friend. I wonder if he really knows what the word means. There are so few people in his world, and they’re all family, all part of his tribe.
He turns, studying me intently. “Mary, what was Rachel like? I mean, you talk about her all the time, and you showed us the pictures of her, but I don’t really know what she was like.”
I nod, pausing before I answer. “Well, the first thing you should understand about Rachel is that she was an artist. Her life centered on art. Sometimes people bought her paintings. Not many by the time I met her. Most people didn’t have the money to spare for what was considered a luxury. Yet art was one of the first expressions of our humanity, Stephen. Cro-Magnon didn’t consider it a luxury. Anyway, Rachel was fifty years old when I came to Amarna. She’d lived alone here for twenty years and never married or had children.”
“Why didn’t she have children? Was she a Barren?” Stephen doesn’t ask why she didn’t marry. That institution means little to him.
“No, she wasn’t a Barren. She chose to remain childless because at that point in our history, she considered bringing more children into the world a crime against humanity.”
His dark eyes widen. “A crime?”
“Yes. I’ve told you about the billions of people burdening this small planet, but I know it’s impossible for you to imagine them. Rachel said that nature wouldn’t tolerate too many of anything, wouldn’t tolerate imbalance. The scales were shifting even then. She didn’t have children because she was too capable of loving them, and she’d seen the writing on the wall.”
“Like Daniel. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” Then with a perplexed frown: “But what writing did Rachel see?”
“A balance will be struck. That’s what she saw.”
The breakers turn slowly like liquid green glass, crash into white froth, and I remember the seas of years past, remember watching them with Rachel. The balance was indeed struck. But waves have broken on this shore for millennia and will continue to do so for millennia to come, whatever humankind’s fate. Rachel understood that splendid indifference, and she wasn’t afraid of it.
“And yet . . . she hoped, Stephen. She always hoped that humankind would learn tolerance and kindness and restraint, that we wouldn’t throw away everything we’d learned and built. I think painting was her way of expressing her hope and her amazement at the world. And painting gave her sharp eyes.” Stephen smiles tentatively at that, and I add, “It trained her to see things most people missed and in ways most people wouldn’t think of. Yet she also approached the world as a scientist would, and she never considered that a paradox.”
“What do you mean, as a scientist would?”
Do I detect an edge of suspicion in spite of a
ll my teaching? Perhaps. I’m not his only teacher.
“I mean Rachel wanted to understand the world around her as it really is. She thought it was magnificent and wanted to know about it. Of course, no one can understand everything there is to know about the world, even if everything were known. She said reality is always in the process of being defined. But she learned everything she could.”
Stephen picks up a strand of sea grass weathered to translucent fibers and absently wraps the pale ribbon around one finger, while I wait for the question he hasn’t yet decided to ask.
In time, he puts it into words. “Miriam says there are some things people can’t know. Shouldn’t know.”
No doubt she would add, some things people must take on faith.
I ask, “Do you believe there are things people shouldn’t know?”
He unfurls the ribbon of grass. “Miriam says it’s written in the Bible.”
“Maybe it is. That doesn’t answer my question.”
He looks at me, and the grass slips from his hands, snakes along the sand with the wind behind it. Perhaps it’s because we’re alone and away from Amarna—away from Miriam—that he considers the question carefully and at length answers, “I don’t see why it should be wrong for me to know anything.”
And I close my eyes, let my breath out in a long sigh.
“It isn’t wrong, Stephen. Don’t ever let anyone make you think it is. Anyway, I was telling you about Rachel. She wasn’t doing much painting when I came to Amarna, but the house was still more a studio than a home. The big workroom in the center—that was a living room before she bought the house, but she made it into a studio for encaustic painting. Those are the ones done with wax and heat. And she made the dining room into a watercolor studio. Sometimes I still call it the north studio.”
Stephen is intrigued. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to him that the house wasn’t always exactly as it is now and has been all his life. “What else was different?” he asks.
“Well, nothing, really. Before she bought the house, the living room was a sort of sun porch, I think, but when I came it was much the same as it is now, except we replaced some of the furniture.”
“Was the fireplace still there?”
“Oh, yes. Rachel heated the house entirely with wood. That was the cheapest source of heat for her since she had plenty of trees on her property. In fact, the old wood cookstove in the kitchen—well, it was an antique then, but she used it. I remember how amazed I was at that stove when I took my first look around the house. But the thing that amazed me most was the books. Nearly every wall had bookshelves, and more books were stacked on every table and even on the floor. I knew then I’d found a kindred soul.”
“How many books did she have?”
“I don’t know exactly. Thousands. What we have in the house now is only a few hundred. The duplicates.”
He looks up toward the Knob as if he could see the vault, but doesn’t seem to find it necessary to say anything about it. “Her neighbors—Jim and Connie—where did they live?”
“About half a mile south toward Shiloh. The ruins of the house are still there. They helped with Rachel’s garden and livestock and shared the harvest. Jim was a retired engineer, and his pension couldn’t even keep them in food. Rachel had a small income she’d inherited from her parents, but it was a pittance with the inflation that hit in the years before the End.” But I see that I’m not making sense to him. He doesn’t fully understand the concept of money. How could he understand inflation and a world economy skewed by a glut of population and by small, vicious wars that destroyed industries, cut off most of the world’s oil supplies, and disrupted trade networks?
“Did Rachel have a lot of livestock?” he asks.
That’s the economy Stephen understands, the elementary economy of food production. “Not as much as we have. Let’s see, she had chickens, rabbits, bees, goats, and one horse, a bay mare she called Silver. The mare was about as far as you could get from the original Silver.” His puzzled look tells me I must explain the Lone Ranger, and before I’ve finished that, Rachel’s choice of a name for the horse loses its humor. Finally, I add, “She also had the two shelties, Shadow and Topaz.”
“Didn’t you tell us one of her dogs was named Sparky?”
“Well, Sparky was Jim and Connie’s dog to begin with. The shelties—Jim told me they came from a kennel in Oldport that got burned out by a road gang. The two pups were the only survivors, and Rachel adopted them. Same story with Silver. She came from a stable in Shiloh. The owner rented horses to tourists, but he went broke and sold off the horses. For dog food, probably. By the time Rachel heard about it, Silver was the only one left. Rachel didn’t need a horse—couldn’t afford to keep it in hay—but she took Silver in. Just like she took me in.”
Stephen smiles gently at that, but his smile fades as he says, “You still grieve for her, don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
He nods. “I still want to cry sometimes for Rebecca.”
We’re both silent for a while, sharing the pain dulled by three years, but still persistent. I loved Rebecca like the daughter I never had. So frail and fey, she argued nothing, accepted everything. Even death when it came in the trappings of agony. She left us little Rachel and the memory of music, of the clear honey of her singing.
Stephen’s hands close into fists. “I don’t understand why Rebecca had to die.”
Miriam called it the will of god.
“I don’t understand it, either, Stephen.”
“Maybe that’s something we’re not supposed to know.”
I hesitate, wait until he looks around at me. “Stephen, reasons are human inventions. I mean, reasons as opposed to explanations. You can invent a reason that will satisfy you, but you should be aware that it’s an invention.”
I let him think about that a moment, then I look out at the surf. “I’ve lost track of my story. Where was I? Somewhere in the middle of my recovery, I guess. I was bed-bound most of the time for about a week, and Rachel and Connie and Jim took care of me like I was a long-lost relative. I told them about the house Aunt Jan had willed to me, about my plans to live there and write. And they tried to warn me. Shiloh was a shadow of what it had been when I was there as a child. That’s why Connie took care of me at Rachel’s house instead of sending me to a hospital. There wasn’t a hospital closer than Portland. The USMA hospital in Shiloh had closed six years before. Connie ran a small clinic, and that was the only medical facility in the area. The town of Shiloh wasn’t even incorporated by then. Jim was the last mayor, by the way. He was also chief of the local Veepies.”
“What does that mean—Veepies?”
“Well, it was from the initials VP, for Voluntary Police. They were townspeople who helped the Federal Auxiliary Police, the Apies. Anyway, all Jim ever got out of ten years as chief of the Shiloh Veepies was a set of engraved handcuffs.” I have the handcuffs now; they’re among the memorabilia in my souvenir drawer. Stephen watches me, but remains silent, and at length I continue: “They tried to prepare me for what I’d find at my aunt’s house, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen. I’d quit my job in Portland, left the few friends I had there, left a man I loved, left my mother. Poor woman, she never got over Dad’s death, and then I left her. I asked her to come with me, but she wouldn’t. She was afraid. She didn’t know why, and that was the saddest part. But I couldn’t stay in the city. I had my dream—my dream of living by the sea and writing. And I had a house. All mine, free and clear. My house by the sea . . .”
A gray day, the clouds like fog waiting to settle on the land. It was the first time Mary Hope had been outside the house, except for occasional forays onto the deck. Yet she felt strong today, ready to get on with her new life. She knew she could deal with anything now. She had survived her trial by fire—with a little help from
her friends.
Mary accepted the cane Rachel offered, declining the crutches Connie had provided. She didn’t need them now. Nor did she need any medication stronger than aspirin. On this day of all days, she didn’t want her head muddled. Rachel was quiet, almost taciturn. She didn’t argue with Mary about forgoing the crutches, nor comment when she had to help her into the old, red VW van.
Rachel backed the van out of the garage down a long driveway to a turnaround, then headed east, and Mary saw Amarna for the first time, saw the whole of it: the house weathered into its setting, the spruce trees on the bank ragged silhouettes, the bamboo south of the house lushly exotic. In her mind, bamboo was a tropical plant, but that giant grass flourished in this wet, temperate climate. She saw the high deer fence surrounding the garden; the orchard, veiled in the pink of furled buds; the barn, built by a carpenter, simple and functional, and like the house, covered with gray cedar shingles tinted green with microscopic moss. Silver was at the watering trough by the barn, flanked by three brown, lop-eared Nubian goats.
Rachel’s domain was fenced with barbless wire. When she reached the gate in the southeast corner, she had to stop and get out to unlock and open the gate, drive through, and get out again to close it. Then she drove along a gravel road that curved to the south. At one point she gestured toward the side of the road. “That’s where I found you.”
Mary didn’t remember the place, only what brought her to it, and she shivered. “You’re a true good Samaritan, Rachel.”
Rachel laughed. “I doubt that.”
“I mean it. I’d have died if you hadn’t found me.”
Rachel glanced at her, but made no comment, concentrating on shifting gears where the gravel road met a paved loop. Mary leaned forward, hands braced on the dashboard, her pulse quickening. She remembered now. This loop marked the end of North Front Road, which ran parallel to the beach for a mile before angling inland to make a Y with Highway 101. Aunt Jan’s house was at the south end of town, but in that childhood summer she and her parents had explored all of Shiloh by bicycle or on foot. Rachel pointed out the Acres house northwest of the loop, but Mary was too distracted by memories and anticipation to garner more than an impression of ochre-stained wood and great spans of glass. Nor was she interested in the other houses as they drove along North Front Road. Maybe there were a lot of FOR SALE signs, but she ignored them.
