A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  Jonathan responds, “It’s a one with six zeros after it.”

  “Yes. How long do you think it would take to count to a million?”

  “You mean by ones? Well, it’d take a long time. Maybe a couple of hours.”

  “Let’s see if we can figure out exactly how long. First, we’ll count up to a thousand and time it by the clock.” I look at the Seth Thomas on the spool cabinet on the north wall as I rise and go to the blackboard to mark down the time. “Deborah, you start. Just count as high as you can, one number for every tick of the clock.”

  Deborah only gets to twenty, then Isaac continues the count, with a few corrections, to one hundred. Mary takes it to three hundred, and Stephen and Jonathan complete it, and by then the younger ones are showing signs of boredom and agree heartily that it takes a long time just to count to a thousand. About fifteen minutes, in fact.

  Then comes the multiplication, and while the others watch, Jonathan makes the calculations on the blackboard and finally reveals that to count to one million would require nearly ten and a half days. They are all satisfactorily amazed and, I hope, have learned a little about calculation as well as measuring time.

  And million is a concept vital to these children. Their world is as small and flat as the world of their ancient ancestors. It took more than thirty millennia for humankind to discover million and the even larger numbers it spawned, and they gave us the measure of the universe.

  That measure must not be lost.

  By the time the midday meal is finished, cumulus clouds are marching in over the horizon, but they offer no real threat of rain. I find Stephen waiting for me on the deck, and once I’ve settled into my chair, he wastes no time on small talk. “Did you bring one of your diaries, Mary?”

  His impatience pleases me. I reach into my skirt pocket for a diary—the third one—but again, it’s only a prop and a prod to memory. “Of course I did. Now, where was I?”

  He turns in his chair, his hooded eyes intent. “You were telling me about Armageddon here at Amarna.”

  I open the diary, study the erratic notations, and it requires a stringent mental bracing to return in memory to that time. It reminds me that spring days spent in quiet, satisfying endeavors are the obverse of dark days spent in terror, and the coin can flip so quickly, so casually. “Yes, when Rachel and I retreated into our cave.”

  “Your cave?”

  “The basement. But it seemed like a cave to me. I felt like . . . like time had folded in on itself, and I was a Cro-Magnon woman huddled at the hearth in my cave, with the glacier wind and the Dire Wolves howling outside, and tens of thousands of years had been lost as if they’d never existed.”

  His eyes narrow thoughtfully, then he asks, “But why did you have to stay in the basement?”

  “Because of the radiation from the bombs. FEMA—that was the Federal Emergency Management Agency—had published volumes on surviving a nuclear war. Surviving! They estimated it would take two weeks for the initial fallout to clear. So, Rachel and I stayed in our cave for two weeks without once even opening a window. We didn’t know how bad the radiation was here. Actually, I don’t think we got much initial fallout. That storm protected us. But we didn’t know. Jim had a Geiger counter, but we didn’t find it in the shelter or in their house, so we didn’t know about the radiation. We didn’t know anything. That was the worst part. We didn’t know whether Jim’s radio just wasn’t working or couldn’t pick up anything through the basement walls or whether there was no one out there broadcasting. The only thing we did know is that it was colder than usual for September. We just huddled there in our frigid cave for two endless weeks—wondering.”

  I pause, look up into the cloud-dappled, springtime sky. “The odd thing is, Stephen, that was a time of hope. I mean, a time when it was still possible to hope. I imagined the worst, yes, but sometimes I imagined the best, which was that we’d made a mistake, that there hadn’t really been a war. Or I imagined that even if there had been a war, it wasn’t extensive enough to destroy all civilization. And I imagined that when we left our cave, we’d find other survivors, pool our resources, and work ourselves out of the disaster. I imagined we’d find at least vestiges of a government to help us. Of course, I realized it might not be ours. We might have lost the war.” I have to laugh as I speak those words. You can’t say that without either laughing or crying.

  Then I look around at Stephen. “But the two weeks finally ended. Rachel and I finally came out of our cave.”

  His obsidian eyes are fixed on me; he seems to have stopped breathing. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing that I had imagined.”

  I close the diary. I need no prod for memory now. Sometimes I wish I could forget.

  See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,

  Sullen and sad. . . .

  Welcome, kindred gloom!

  Congenial horrors, hail! . . .

  Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave.

  —JAMES THOMSON, THE SEASONS.

  WINTER (1726)

  While the dogs barked insistently, Rachel stood on the landing at the top of the basement stairs, her hand on the doorknob, but she paused there, and Mary waited impatiently, pulse hammering. When Rachel at length opened the door, the dogs spilled out, claws scrabbling on the oak floor. But there in the chill, dim silence, their barking ceased, and Mary looked around the house with the daunting sense that she’d never been here before. She noted the open cabinet doors in the kitchen, the disarray left in their hurried evacuation. Only two weeks ago? It seemed like something remembered from her childhood.

  She made her way into the living room. The drapes were closed. There was an emptiness under her ribs, and she wondered whether to call it hope or fear. She turned, saw Rachel behind her, then pushed the drapes aside and opened the sliding door. A rush of wind billowed the cloth as she went out onto the deck and into the outside world she’d been waiting so long to see.

  September. She had to remind herself that this was September. Indian summer.

  The wind, thick with stinging snow, pummeled her, the cold like a knife blade at the back of her neck. The deck was an untracked plane of snow, the lawn a rippled dune of snow, the beach, except for the dark band cleared by the waves, a swath of white and gray, snow and ice.

  She had to remind herself that this was morning. Her mind balked at that as it did at Indian summer. Her mind recognized this somber light as winter dusk. The horizon was obliterated by sullen clouds and a fog of snow, and she could see only a few hundred feet past the breakers, where the northeast wind blew fans of riffles against the shoreward surge. And the sea was steaming. Whirlwinds of vapor rose from the roiling surface, danced ahead of the wind.

  “Rachel . . .” The wind whipped the word away into the snow.

  Rachel stood beside her, staring out at the sea, eyes shadowed with dread. “I’ve seen snow here. Only three times in twenty years, and only in December or January.” She looked up at the oppressive clouds. “But I’ve never seen it so dark. I’ve never seen that color. . . .”

  Mary saw the odd brazen cast of the clouds. Two words came unbid and clear into her mind. She didn’t say them aloud, although she saw Rachel’s lips move as if to form them.

  Nuclear winter.

  The implications in those words were stunning. They numbed her mind as the cold numbed her body. She said dully, “Rachel, we’ll have to go down to Shiloh and see if anyone there can tell us what happened or what’s going on now.”

  “If anyone there knows.” She swept up a wad of snow from the railing with her gloved hand, then turned and crossed to the door. “Before we go anywhere, we have to find out if any of the animals survived.”

  Mary started to protest the delay, but she couldn’t bring herself to argue with Rachel. Not now. They went to the garage first, where, in that
hour of frantic preparation that seemed so long ago, they had pushed the van out and moved the chickens and rabbits in. The air was sour with the smell of droppings, and their entrance set the chickens flapping and squawking, while the rabbits scrambled for cover, eyes gleaming in the beam of Rachel’s flashlight. The living left in their wake scattered heaps of the dead.

  For the living, the first problem was water; the water basins had frozen. Mary went into the house to fill a bucket at the kitchen sink, a task that took an inordinate length of time. The pipes hadn’t entirely frozen, but only a gurgling trickle flowed out of the faucet. And while she waited for the water to slowly, slowly fill the bucket, she thought of Shiloh. They had to get to Shiloh, had to find out what had happened and what was being done.

  Finally she took the bucket to the garage and broke the ice out of the basins, filled them with fresh water. Rachel had replenished the feeders and begun picking up the carcasses. Mary helped her carry the small, stiffened bodies to the chicken coop where predators couldn’t reach them, and the cold would preserve them. She stared at the mound of dark feathers and fur turning white with snow, and all she could think of was Shiloh. All the answers were there. The only answers they could hope for.

  But Rachel had already set out through the drifts toward the barn. Mary caught up with her. They passed the garden, a jumble of frozen leaves and stalks, and the snow-blanketed beehives near the orchard. Rachel said, “If any of the bees survived, they’ll need extra honey.”

  “Won’t they freeze to death?”

  “They can keep the temperature in the hives around ninety-eight just with their body heat. But they can starve to death—if the radiation hasn’t already killed them.”

  Mary didn’t respond to that. She plodded on through the snow toward the barn. Shadow and Sparky were barking in play, leaping and rolling in flamboyant showers of white, and Rachel smiled. “Look at them. They’re so happy to be outside.”

  Mary watched them with a feeling close to resentment.

  Shiloh. She held on to that. The Apie station. Yes. Harry Berden would know what had happened, what to do.

  As they neared the bam one question was answered: Pan was alive. They could hear his throaty bleating. When they went into his shed, they found the feeder empty, the water trough covered with an inch of cracked and refrozen ice. Rachel broke the ice with a shovel, and it was a measure of Pan’s thirst that he began drinking immediately, putting aside his usual fastidious preference for impeccably clean water.

  Then they went into the barn, where the other goats and Silver milled about them, complaining noisily, but they were all alive, even Josie’s kids. Both Persephone and Josie had full udders. The kids had been weaned, but would turn to that source of sustenance and liquid again under these conditions. So would the other does. Rachel greeted them all like long-lost friends and called it a miracle.

  Mary thought of Shiloh Beach.

  Again, water was the first problem. It seemed warm in the barn—relative to outside—but a skim of ice covered the trough. Rachel cleared it, and Silver and the goats crowded in to drink. Mary climbed up to the loft and pushed three bales of hay down, and while Rachel dragged one out to Pan’s shed, Mary impatiently forked hay into the feeders.

  She knew Rachel would want to rake out the barn now, to milk the goats, to take honey to the bees, to check the reservoir, to build fires in the house, to waste time on the myriad chores she could find to do here, but Mary could tolerate no further delay. She plunged the pitchfork into the ground and strode out of the bam, met Rachel on her way back from Pan’s shed. “Rachel, please, we have to go to Shiloh.”

  Rachel studied her a moment. “Mary, don’t . . . well, just don’t get your hopes too high.”

  Mary bit back an angry retort, but she couldn’t stop the clenching of her hands. “We have to find out what happened.”

  “Yes. Well, the van won’t start.”

  “Then we’ll walk.”

  “Not in this weather. We’ll ride. Silver can carry both of us, but we’d better get more clothes on before we go. And the guns.”

  They made a strange procession, Mary thought. A horse, two women, armed with rifles, riding bareback, two dogs trailing them. Mary rode behind Rachel, swaying with her in rhythm with Silver’s steady gait, Rachel holding the reins in one hand, the other resting on the bundle of rope and burlap sacks slung over Silver’s withers.

  When they reached the Acres house, they should have had a clear view of Shiloh Beach. They didn’t. The air was opaque with snow, the dusky clouds a burden on the mind. Along the white ribbon of the road, there were no cars, no tracks. Rachel fumbled under the cuff of her glove, then pulled her muffler down. When she spoke, her words formed puffs of white. “It’s ten o’clock now. We’ll have to watch the time, Mary. We can’t stay out in this long.”

  Mary felt the cold seeping through her layers of protective clothing. “Just long enough to get to Shiloh.”

  “And back,” Rachel reminded her.

  Silver’s hooves bit through the snow to the black asphalt. Mary looked back at the trail of the mare’s tracks, braided with the dotted lines of the dogs’ tracks. Even as she watched they faded, erased by the wind-harried snow. Houses materialized one after the other out of the haze. Lightless windows made black patterns on gray and white, and not one chimney showed a wisp of smoke.

  They had traveled nearly five blocks in this dim, suffocatingly silent world when they came to the first burned house. It looked like a crude sumi-e painting, black strokes of charred studs against white drifts. From that point every house they passed was a gutted ruin. Mary couldn’t make sense of those ruins, not until she realized that in the last two weeks there had been nothing and no one to stop fire, driven by the wind, from leaping from one house to the next.

  The black and white piles were like markers in a graveyard, set at regular intervals, hinting maddeningly at knowledge held secret. Even the dogs seemed oppressed. They paced behind Silver, tails low, ears flicking constantly for a sound. Mary rocked with Silver’s lulling amble while the chill air parched her lips and throat, the snow whirled into her eyes, and even though she could feel Rachel rocking with her, she had an irrational sense that she was alone, and with every moment hope waned within her.

  The Apie station. They’d find someone there. Harry. He’d be there.

  The shopping mall began to take shape ahead of them, and as they drew nearer emerged out of the murky atmosphere as a ruin, the long, low L of buildings reduced to a snow-shrouded slag heap of rubble. The parking lot was dotted with cars, some still aligned in angled formations, and of the fifty or more cars, at least a third were wrecked and burned, as if they’d been hit by artillery shells, as if—

  Rachel said hoarsely, “They were blown up.” She pointed to the nearest hulk. “Bullet holes. That means Rovers.”

  Mary felt a chill between her shoulder blades that was not the cold as she looked around the ruins, seeking any hint of movement. But nothing moved here except the wind.

  The dogs were digging at a mound of snow near what had once been the supermarket entrance. Rachel shouted, “Shadow—Sparky, what are you into?” She slid off Silver’s back, ran to the mound, and pulled the dogs away. Mary dismounted and followed her, stared numbly at the face in the snow. A Rover. A skull design in red and black still marked his face, but the design was marred by the frozen cascade of blood from his crushed forehead.

  Rachel squinted into the shattered building. “Under those girders—that’s the rear end of a pickup. They must’ve driven it into the store and blown it up. Bastards! Why destroy everything? Did they think that would help them live?”

  Mary looked away, but she saw other similar mounds in the snow. “Rachel, we’d better get to the Apie station.”

  “It won’t be there.”

  “How do you know? It will be there.
”

  Rachel looked at her, eyes strangely opaque. Then she called the dogs and set off across the parking lot, with Silver following like another large, placid dog. Mary skirted the mounds, trying not to see the hands or knees or feet left uncovered by the snow, trying not to recognize the charred remains spilling out of one of the exploded cars. Two adults. Three children. It was like crossing a battlefield.

  But if the Rovers had spent their nihilistic passion here, maybe the rest of the town had been spared—and the Apie station.

  Highway 101 was strewn with motionless vehicles given a semblance of movement by windblown snow. Rachel and Mary trudged southward, passing one burned building after another, and finally Mary couldn’t deny the bleak truth: nothing in the heart of Shiloh had escaped the fires. They skirted cars without looking into them. They drifted down a defile of blackened relics. And when they reached the Apie station, Mary gazed at its ruins with tears freezing on her cheeks. The riven steel of the antenna tower lay sprawled atop the rubble like the bones of a dinosaur.

  So much for our link with the rest of the world, she thought. Harry Berden hadn’t gone home to Boise soon enough. She told herself that his body was probably buried in that snow white, fire black ruin, but she felt nothing she recognized as grief—not for Harry, not for her mother, not for anyone. All she felt was a keening desolation. She stood trembling, heart stuttering, and the pain seemed past bearing.

  So much for hope.

  At length, she looked at Rachel, saw the same despair in her eyes, but it was caged behind a stubborn resolve. Mary nodded. “It’s only been two weeks. The government, the army—someone will show up eventually. Besides, there must be survivors around here. We survived.”

  Rachel shivered. “Yes. We survived.” Then she turned away and walked toward the ruins of the building that had housed Connie’s clinic, and for the next half hour they searched among treacherous avalanches of fallen boards and brick. They were rewarded for their efforts with three large bottles of antibiotic capsules, two of aspirin, another of alcohol, four rolls of gauze, a package of tape sutures, an assortment of disposable syringes, a scalpel, a pair of scissors, and a box of ten twenty-cc vials of morphine. Rachel put it all in a burlap sack.