A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  And slept the peaceful sleep of the muscle-weary, slept in the bliss of ignorance.

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . .

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,

  “THE SECOND COMING” (1921)

  As befitted the first day of summer, the sky was clear, the sun hot, and it was on this day that Josie Pearl, the white-and-tan Nubian doe, chose to go into labor. But Rachel didn’t discover that fact until noon.

  Mary had called Connie and Jim after breakfast and gotten a busy signal. There was an implied assurance in that, and she and Rachel went about the morning’s work, feeding and watering the animals, weeding the garden, cleaning the chicken house, and collecting eggs. The hens were producing extravagantly with the long summer days. It was when Rachel went to the bam to get fresh straw for the nests that she discovered Josie Pearl’s plight.

  And again Mary found herself an assistant midwife.

  The impending nativity attracted an audience. Rachel always left the barn door open during the day so the goats could come into its shade. Now they all gathered, drawn by the insatiable curiosity of their kind. Pan—black as night, silky beard bearing stars of dandelion seeds, the noble, fecund lord of this small harem—loudly demanded a rail position, but Rachel asked Mary to take him to his shed north of the barn. When she returned, Rachel had Josie inside the stall in the corner of the barn, while Persephone, her kid, and the three remaining does peered through the slats.

  Persephone’s delivery had been so easy, but Josie was having a hard time of it, since she had, with typical perversity, initiated herself into motherhood with twins. Once the necessary preparations were made, Rachel and Mary settled into the stall, Rachel constantly talking to Josie, stroking her head, giving her something to brace against when the contractions came. Josie, between contractions, crooned softly, talking to her kids.

  The alternating contractions and crooning continued for over an hour before the front hooves of one of the kids appeared in the vulva, then retreated, while Josie stood panting, gray tongue hanging. As the afternoon stretched on, the kid made its teasing appearance, only to retreat, again and again, and as inexperienced as Mary was as a midwife, she knew Josie was weakening, her kids’ chance at life dwindling. At length Rachel had to offer more than reassurance.

  “Mary, hold her head for me. Just keep talking to her.”

  Mary knelt in front of Josie, stroking her rough coat, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she murmured reassurances. Rachel moved around to the doe’s hindquarters, and when Josie began straining with another contraction, Rachel said, “I can see the head!” She grasped the protruding legs with one hand, worked the other slowly, gently into the birth canal, while Josie panted and heaved, and finally on the surge of a last contraction, Rachel pulled the kid out.

  A double handful of wet hair slicked in the remains of its embryonic sac, and Mary’s pent breath came out in a sigh of relief. Rachel shouted, “Give me a towel, Mary—hurry!” And when Mary brought a terrycloth towel from the shelf on the wall, Rachel cleared the kid’s throat and nose with her finger and toweled it vigorously, smiling at its outraged bleating. Then she laid the kid under Josie’s nose, and the doe began licking it. It was a black buck, so small and shaky Mary couldn’t believe it might survive. Yet second by second it drew strength from its mother’s tongue, and soon it was staggering to its feet. Rachel cleared Josie’s teat with a few pulls, then squeezed the first drops of thick colostrum into the kid’s mouth.

  The second kid, a doe, came with relative ease, and Mary was ready with a clean towel. Rachel surrendered the kid to her, and Mary rubbed it, laughing at the novel sensation of this new life warm and vital in her hands. It was entirely perfect, black like its sibling, its exotic, horizontal-pupiled eyes bright and strangely knowing. Almost reluctantly, Mary offered the kid to its mother.

  A few minutes later Josie rid herself of the placentas, and Rachel wrapped the pink-gray masses in newspaper and took them outside to bury them. Mary stayed in the stall, watched Josie licking, nudging, crooning to her newborn, while they wobbled about on fragile legs. So natural and inevitable, this age-old cycle of birth, and Mary knew she must one day take part in it. These infant animals were exquisitely beautiful in some sense that transcended aesthetics, and her yearning for that beauty was at this moment intense and undeniable.

  She looked up, distracted by a rustling in the straw on the earth floor of the barn. Rachel had returned and stood leaning on the stall’s gate. She said, “Josie, you did yourself proud.” The doe was too occupied with her offspring even to look up. Rachel took her watch out of her jeans pocket where she had put it for safekeeping during the birthing. It was a mechanical watch with a dial on which the date was revealed in a tiny window. She insisted she liked to see time in a circle; it reflected the realities of existence on a spherical, rotating world. Now, as she buckled the strap to her wrist, she frowned. “Damn, it’s nearly three. We’d better try Connie and Jim again.”

  On their way to the house, they were joined by Topaz and Shadow, who had kept their distance from the barn for the last few hours. Goats had no tolerance for dogs, nor any compunction about butting or trampling them. Once inside the house, Rachel washed her hands and put fresh water down for the dogs, then went to the telephone in the north studio. Within a minute, she returned to the kitchen, where Mary was at the sink downing a glass of water.

  “Still busy. Damn phones are probably out of order again.” She took the glass Mary offered and drank half of it, then went back to the telephone.

  Mary felt her mood of quiet elation undermined by a whisper of apprehension as she followed Rachel into the studio. She listened to Rachel’s end of the conversation, heard the name Joanie. One of the nurses at the clinic. When Rachel hung up, her eyes were narrowed, focused inward. “Joanie hasn’t heard from Connie today, but she didn’t expect to. It’s Connie’s day off. I think . . . maybe we’d better walk down to their house.”

  “But if you got a busy signal . . .” Yet Mary could find no assurance in that to dispel the fear taking root in her mind.

  “It probably means Connie or Jim were on the phone when we called.” She mustered a smile as she added: “We’ll just go check on them, and if everything’s okay, they can give us a cup of coffee.”

  Mary heard the dry, gravel crunch of their footfalls as she looked south at the distant, silent blocks of houses. They might all have been empty for any sign of life in them. She turned, stared up at the Acres house, and stopped, realizing she was holding her breath at the same moment she realized what sound she was listening for and not hearing: Sparky’s bark. They were close enough to the house for Sparky to be aware of them and raise his usual strident alarm. She glanced at Rachel, who had stopped with her. She seemed to be listening, too. Then, as if Mary had asked a question, she nodded and continued toward the house.

  Jim’s brown van was gone. There was no garage, so if the van wasn’t in the driveway, it wasn’t here. The dogs paused a few yards ahead in the driveway, sniffing the wind. Then Topaz curled her lips to show her teeth, Shadow retreated toward Rachel with an uncertain whine. And Mary felt her skin crawl with dread. She shivered as she walked with Rachel along the tree-shadowed path to the south side of the house. The front door was open a few inches. She thought, I don’t want to go in there.

  Rachel ordered the dogs to stay, then: “Mary, wait here. I’ll go in.”

  Mary shook her head. “No. We’ll go in together.”

  Inside the door was a small foyer. On the wall opposite the door, Connie had proudly hung a painting, one of Rachel’s encaustics. Now it lay on the floor, its frame splintered, bone white gesso ground exposed in a hectic pattern of crisscross streaks.
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br />   On the wall where the painting had hung was a huge hieroglyphic of a skull executed in spray paint in black and blood red.

  Mary pressed a hand to her mouth, gasping for breath, eyes closed to shut out that monstrous image, but the skull icon was limned in memory with a night of terrified flight.

  Rachel turned away, crossed to the double doors on the left that opened into the living room, and Mary swallowed at the constriction in her throat, fighting the resistance of her muscles. But again, she followed Rachel.

  Some maniacal beast had been unleashed in this room: furniture was overturned, smashed, slashed; bookshelves toppled; the white walls hideously muraled with obscene, spray-painted graffiti and stitchings of bullet holes; the cabinets where Connie kept her china and crystal empty, doors ripped off; the floor graveled with shattered glass and porcelain.

  Rachel’s whispered “No . . .” echoed in the silence, and the sheer agony in her eyes made Mary want to cry out. Then it was gone, and nothing took its place. Nothing.

  And where was Connie? Where was Jim?

  There on the far wall—that wasn’t just more demented graffiti. Spattered red brown and a curving, downward smear. Mary couldn’t see the bottom of the smear; the overturned couch blocked her view. She made her way toward the wall, glass grinding under her soles.

  Jim lay with his back against the wall, and he looked like something old and tattered that had been tossed away, his clothing and flesh riddled with bullet holes, caked with dried blood. Even his face had been smashed by craters of bullets.

  For a long time Rachel stood motionless, staring at Jim’s body, then without a word, she turned away, walked slowly toward the kitchen.

  Rachel, don’t go in there. Don’t go . . .

  Mary followed her. And they found Connie.

  On her back on the floor, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, cold, dusky skin smeared with blood. Around her neck, the telephone cord cut deep into swollen flesh. Her face was bloated and purpled, tongue protruding, open eyes filmed like acid-dipped glass.

  Mary felt darkness suffocating her, and perhaps she screamed, but she didn’t hear it; she didn’t hear or see anything until finally she recognized Rachel’s face only inches away, felt the hard grip of her hands on her arms. But Rachel’s eyes were as devoid of life as Connie’s.

  She said, “Mary, we have to go back to Amarna to get the van.”

  And Mary accepted that not because she understood it—she understood nothing at this moment—but because it imposed some semblance of structure on the chaos in her mind.

  She didn’t remember the walk to Amarna. She was only vaguely aware that Rachel left the dogs there, vaguely aware after a passage of ambiguous time of Rachel backing the VW into the driveway at the Acres house.

  Rachel took the machete from the van, and Mary followed her to the back of the house and watched with neither comprehension nor curiosity while she hacked at the blackberry vines shrouding a mound of earth. Beneath the camouflage of vines, a metal door lay at an angle in the earth, brown paint rotten with rust. Rachel had a key for the lock. Together they pulled the heavy door back, hinges wailing. Under it, nine cement steps, another door. Rachel found the kerosene lamp and matches in the niche at the foot of the stairs. The yellow light went before them into a cell of a room. Jim’s radiation shelter. Shelves filled with boxes, jars, canisters lined the walls. The air was chill and sterile.

  Rachel went directly to a cabinet by the door, and it was then that Mary realized that all this had been rehearsed in a sense. Rachel had been told what she must do in case . . .

  Mary couldn’t hold on to that train of thought. Rachel opened the cabinet. A gun rack. Two rifles, a shotgun, three handguns. Two slots were empty. She thrust a rifle into Mary’s hands. It was heavier than she expected, black metal, polished wood, the lens of the telescopic sight all gleaming with exquisite menace. In front of the trigger guard was mounted a flat, curved magazine, its steel dull and gray.

  Rachel’s voice was as dull and gray as the steel. “It’s semiautomatic. That’s the safety there. You have thirty cartridges in the clip.”

  Mary nodded, accepting those terse instructions as if this weren’t the first time she’d handled such a weapon. Yet its lethal potential didn’t take shape in her mind. She saw Rachel pull another rifle out of the cabinet, put the sling over her head, and shift the gun so that it angled across her back. Mary followed her example.

  Then together they set to work.

  Rachel and Mary became looters—purposeful, conscienceless, and guiltless—programmed by imperatives Mary still didn’t understand.

  We’ll need these things.

  Perhaps Rachel actually put it into words. Mary was sure she didn’t add: to survive.

  Through the summer afternoon under a blue sky dappled with opaline mackerel clouds, they looted the shelter and house, loaded the van time and again, drove to Amarna, emptied their plunder into the garage, then returned for more. They didn’t touch the bodies except to cover them with sheets. And Rachel didn’t shed a tear, didn’t speak an unnecessary word. She moved, as she always did, at a deliberate pace, but she didn’t once stop moving. Her eyes remained lifeless, and sometimes Mary was convinced she’d been struck blind by shock. Yet it was obvious that her eyes did at least register the images necessary to her. Her whole body seemed to function on that basic level. No doubt her heart still beat. She still breathed. Mary could see that: shallow breaths through parted lips.

  Food, clothing, linens, tools, paper, books—all the books—anything the Rovers hadn’t destroyed went into the van, then into the garage at Amarna. Mary didn’t look at any of it, refused to recognize it as touching the lives of two people she had called friends. Only one thing briefly commanded her attention: the engraved handcuffs Jim was awarded when he retired as chief of the Shiloh Veepies.

  And finally, when the last load had been piled into the van, Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat and asked, “What happened to Sparky?” But she didn’t seem to expect or want an answer to that question. Eyes fixed ahead, she drove away from the Acres house for the last time.

  When they reached the gate at Amarna, Mary got out to open it, then after Rachel drove through, she pushed it shut. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the chain and lock. Pulling up the drawbridge, letting down the portcullis. She should call Harry Berden. Not that Harry could do anything. The cavalry was under siege, too, and the captain had lost a third of his troops two nights ago in the battle of the mall. But he could send someone to decently dispose of the bodies.

  She turned away from the gate, looked up, seeking the sun, then looked down to the glow behind the wall of clouds in the west. Her watch blinked the time: 8:14. She got into the van, tried—and failed—to think of something to say to break Rachel’s terrible silence.

  Rachel stopped the van in front of the garage, but all she said was, “We’d better move some of the stuff so we can get the van inside.”

  Shadow and Topaz came to greet them, but they were subdued, panting despite the evening chill. Rachel and Mary worked in the waning light, shifting cartons and sacks into the north studio or the basement, until finally there was enough room in the garage for the van. The van was still full, but they didn’t try to unload it. All they took with them when they left the garage was their rifles. The door rumbled shut, and Mary leaned against it, her knees on the verge of giving way.

  “Where are the dogs?” Rachel asked.

  Mary found it an effort to speak. “Shadow’s in the house. I saw her when I took the last load to the basement.”

  Rachel nodded, called Topaz. She seemed to materialize out of the fading light from near the breezeway gate, and Rachel knelt to stroke her head. “Sweet lady, you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Neither do I, love, neither do—” Her voice caught, and Mary expected the break in her underlying
silence, the iron silence that bound her grief.

  But it didn’t come.

  Rachel rose and went to the gate. Mary followed her into the breezeway. The astringent smell of the firewood stacked against the house was oddly reassuring; she could hear a soft chirking from the chicken coop behind the garage.

  And a throaty, distant rumble.

  She thought herself inured to terror now. But she had only become inured to horror. This was terror, striking hard at the solar plexus.

  What she heard was the sound of a motor. A car.

  “Rachel?”

  She had heard it, too. She turned and went back to the gate. Mary stood beside her, breath caught, listening.

  Rachel whispered, “It’s coming up our road.”

  Mary nodded. It could, of course, be quite innocent. A lost tourist, perhaps. It might even be an Apie patrol.

  There. Lights glimmering through the trees.

  Topaz whined impatiently, but she didn’t bark. Maybe the car was familiar to her. Now the lights flashed around the curve; the pitch of the motor changed as the car slowed. The gate. Whoever was driving had seen the gate.

  Mary stared at the twin points of light. It occurred to her that she should go call the Apies, but at that moment the motor roared and the car hit the gate with a clanging crash, plunged through, one-eyed now, careened down the road toward the house. Topaz began barking, and Rachel shouted, “Mary, are there any lights on in the house?”