A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  Stephen is waiting patiently for me to get on with my story. But what can I tell him about the culmination of Luke’s courtship? He wouldn’t understand it, and it’s none of his business or anyone else’s. It belongs to me alone now, the memory, and it will die with me.

  I tell him simply, “It was in June, on the summer solstice, when Luke finally asked me to be his wife. I accepted.”

  In its essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves.

  —MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE (1913)

  Luke reached the end of the path ahead of her, looked back, grinning exuberantly. The sky floated a skim of cloud as subtle as the interior of a shell, the summer-tamed waves frothed beyond the velvet sand, and Mary laughed as she ran with him toward the breakers, chisels rattling in their buckets, sand flying around their feet until they reached the dark, wet sand vacated by the tide. They walked north toward the Knob, laying strings of foot tracks over the convoluted tracks of flowing water, and Mary told him about a similar day not so long ago when she had started for the Knob with her chisel and bucket and found a stranger on the beach. Luke nodded and took her hand in his.

  At the base of the cliffs on the seaward side of the Knob, the ebbing tide had exposed rock terraces paved with tiny barnacles, a brittle mosaic that wheezed under their boots. In sea-scoured hollows, small, mysterious worlds shimmered beneath aquamarine water—worlds of roseate brocades, peridot swatches, yellow-gold spikes, where sinuous green silks glowed iridescent blue when the light struck at the right angle, and sea anemones opened into exotic blossoms of pale green and pink. The terraces were transected by fissures carved by the knife of the sea, and on their honed faces, mussels crowded, tufted mats of hissing, shining blue-black shells. Mary and Luke filled their buckets with seawater and set to work, carefully prying the mussels off the rock with their chisels.

  Within half an hour the tide began to turn, rising into the fissures, draining away, but returning again in the long, constant rhythms of the sea. Mary worked methodically back from the encroaching water, taking only a few mussels from any one area, always leaving the largest to live and breed. The memory of the time when these rocks were barren of life gave her a profound respect for this profusion.

  When at length, the tidal surges served warning that the sea was reclaiming its own in earnest, Mary and Luke walked up the slope of the beach until they found a satin-backed log to rest on. Mary put her bucket down next to Luke’s, assessing their harvest and calling it good, then sat beside him, while he delved into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped package of venison jerky. He offered her a piece, but she shook her head. “I’m too thirsty for that. You didn’t happen to bring a canteen, did you?”

  He motioned southward. “It’s down there—the creek.”

  For a while they didn’t speak, and Mary cherished the tranquil silence as she watched the sea slowly flood the sand. Gulls wheeled restlessly, flying so high they were almost invisible. The weather would change soon.

  Luke wrapped the remaining jerky and put it back in his pocket. “Rachel always has a different way of looking at things, doesn’t she?”

  Mary felt the tranquillity shiver like the water in a tide pool ruffled by a wind. “Different from what?”

  He shrugged. “Different from anything I’ve ever known.”

  “Did you expect her to look at things the way you were taught?”

  That surprised him, and Mary felt an acid rush of annoyance. So much surprised him.

  “No,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I shouldn’t expect her to look at things the way I do, but I’ve never known any other way.”

  Mary knew her annoyance was only another of the irrational emotional swings she’d been experiencing lately. But she didn’t want to talk now. She simply wanted to sit here in the sun on this perfect day and watch the tide come in. With Luke. With Luke who was at his core kind and generous. With Luke whom she loved. She didn’t want to probe the philosophical chasm that she knew would always exist between them.

  He said, “I was thinking about what Rachel said last night, about the Book of Revelation.”

  Mary winced, stared fixedly at the breakers. So think about it. Fine. Just don’t talk about it.

  “Remember,” Luke went on, inexorably, “what she said about the beast—the number of the beast—that maybe it was a code the first Christians used? I didn’t know that.”

  There was so much he didn’t know, even about the one book he considered the fount of wisdom. Mary watched the erratic circling of the gulls, held on to her silence, tension knotting hard under her ribs.

  “And what she said,” Luke added, “about prophesying the end of the world. Remember? She said to prophesy the end of a human world—the end of a civilization—was to prophesy the inevitable. But I still . . . I mean, it isn’t the same, what Saint John was prophesying.”

  Mary had read the Book of Revelation last night out of curiosity, and above all she didn’t want to talk about John the Divine’s frenzied visions. She had sensed too much method in the saint’s madness.

  But Luke wanted to talk about it, and her silence didn’t deter him.

  “It wasn’t just the end of a civilization he was prophesying. It was . . . well, it was more than that. The battle of light and dark, good and evil. I think she’s right: Saint John was writing in codes. But he saw what was coming, way back then. The Lord showed him Armageddon.”

  And Mary’s patience snapped at the end of its tether.

  “Luke, he didn’t see anything! He wrote what he wished would happen, what he knew the faithful wanted to hear.”

  Luke stared at her, aghast. “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not? It was a piece of fiction—nothing more!”

  “No!” And his open hand cracked against her cheek, knocked her off balance. She caught herself with her hands in the sand, her face stinging, and it was a moment before she could make sense of what had happened.

  Stupid, she thought, and the appellation was directed at herself. Why can’t you learn patience?

  And yet—

  “Damn you, Luke!” Anger overwhelmed regret suddenly and forcibly, and she felt her lips draw back from her teeth, saw him kneeling in the sand before her, reaching out to her.

  “Mary, I’m sorry! Lord help me, I didn’t mean—”

  “Let me go!” She tried to pull free, but his grip on her arms only tightened with her struggles, and her frustration fed her anger, until finally she began crying, and then she knew that was what she wanted—tears to wash away the poisons of doubt and fear, and Luke to hold her in the comforting cage of his arms against his chest, where she might hear his heartbeat while he said softly, over and over, “Mary, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Mary, I love you . . . I love you. . . .”

  And what she wanted was his kiss; a kiss to taste her tears, one for each closed eye, a kiss on her lips.

  There was the catalyst, and out of it would come all the answers. She opened her lips, her arms moving around the curve of his ribs, hands reaching down the long muscles of his back, and she reveled in the unleashed shivering of nerves in her own body.

  Give me this covenant, this promise.

  It didn’t matter that he was impatient and inept, that the voracity of his ardor, once catalyzed, left no room for sensibility. He kissed her throat as if seeking the pulse of life there, opened her shirt to find her breasts with his lips, fumbled at her clothes and his as if they were insurmountable barriers, and perhaps he realized that she expected more than consenting rape, but he knew no art in this. And it didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter that he took her thoughtlessly, suddenly, that he left her nothing to savor but the sheer power of his body, that he
forced himself into her against instinctive spasms of muscles and bludgeoned down that resistance by brute force. It didn’t matter, because she wanted him, at any price, here within her body; she wanted that wordless covenant more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.

  Mary lay with her head in the crook of Luke’s arm, feeling the weight of his hand at rest on her breast, the cool wind playing a tactile fugue with the warmth of the sun on her naked skin. This she would want to remember, this warm, sated moment unshadowed by doubt.

  At length, Luke stirred, propped himself on one elbow, leaned over her, kissed her, openmouthed, and when he drew away, she brushed at the sand caught in his sun-haloed beard, compared the color of his eyes to the blue of the sky behind him. He said, “Mary Hope, I love you,” and she closed her eyes, believing him.

  Then he sat up, laughing as he combed through his hair with both hands. “We’ll never get rid of all this sand.”

  “Yes, we will—come on!” Mary rose and ran toward the ocean, feeling young and joyous. Luke followed her, and hand in hand they plunged into the breakers, laughing at the shock of the icy water, dancing like children in the white foam. Finally, shivering and exhilarated, they returned to the log, let the sun and wind dry their bodies, then dressed themselves and sat together in a pendant silence. Mary turned her face up to the sun and tried to hold on to this fragment of time.

  Finally Luke said soberly, “Mary, I didn’t leave the Ark just to find survivors. I went in search of . . . women who can bear children.”

  She felt her smile slipping away like the moment, like a golden nugget in a mountain creek, swept out of her hand by the swift current.

  “I know, Luke. And you found me.”

  “The Lord led me to you. I didn’t expect to find a woman I could care for. I only hoped to find . . .”

  A brood mother, no doubt. He couldn’t seem to finish that. She waited, and at length he said, “Mary, I want you to be my wife.”

  She nodded. “I will be your wife, Luke.”

  “But there are some . . . customs at the Ark you must understand.”

  She studied his face, watched him frowning over his choice of words. He said, “You have to understand that there aren’t many of us who can . . . bear or father children.”

  “But you’ve fathered children, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. One. The Doctor keeps records of visitations, so he knows who fathers each child.”

  “What’s a visitation? Intercourse?”

  His fair skin reddened. “Yes.”

  “Were you married to the mother of the child you fathered? Was it one of the children who lived?”

  He smiled fondly. “Yes, he lived. Jeremiah is his name, and he was born a month before I left the Ark. But I wasn’t married to his mother. The child was fathered on a visitation. She’s a widow. She lives in her uncle’s household, and he serves as true father to the boy.”

  Mary pushed the toe of her boot into the sand. “Is any widowed or unmarried woman subject to these . . . visitations?”

  “Yes, except the ones the Doctor knows are Barrens.”

  “What about married women?”

  “If a woman’s husband can’t father children, yes.” He looked at her anxiously. “But you’ll never have visitations—not as my wife.”

  “But you’ll be making visitations.”

  “Yes.”

  Mary shrugged. It was a highly adaptive arrangement. Still, she was relieved that she would be exempt from visitations by other men.

  “Luke, how does the Flock resolve this mate-swapping with their religious beliefs? As I remember, Jesus had definite ideas about the sanctity of marriage.”

  He stiffened, then said levelly, “In Romans, Saint Paul wrote that we are dead to the law, and that we must bring forth fruit unto the Lord. The Doctor says if we’re to bring forth fruit, we have to do it this way. He said we must bring new souls into the world for the Lord on Judgment Day.”

  So that was how the Arkites rationalized the need to procreate in the face of Armageddon. Yet Luke still doubted. She knew if she questioned him, he would deny his doubt, but she heard it in his voice.

  He went on firmly, “Our ways are not the old ways before Armageddon, Mary. But there is neither love nor lust in a visitation, and the vows of marriage are still sacred.”

  That sounded like a direct quote.

  Mary said softly, “Till death us do part.”

  “Yes. Till death us do part. Mary, we must talk to Rachel. She’ll come with us. You’d never be happy without her, and she can’t stay here alone.”

  Mary shook her head, and there was a chill in the wind now. “Rachel won’t go to the Ark with us, Luke.”

  “But she must. I know the Flock will accept her. The Doctor will see her wisdom as I have. She’ll be revered there, she’ll be cared for. Mary, she’s an old woman, and she can’t—”

  “She’s not old, Luke! She’s not . . . old.”

  Luke put his arm around her. “I know what you mean, but . . . well, she’s not really young.”

  Mary let his arm rest on her shoulders without recognizing its existence. “You don’t understand. Old or not, she won’t go with us, not until she finishes the books. And I won’t go until you finish the vault.”

  “I intend to finish it. Then you and Rachel can put the books in the vault, and we’ll all—”

  “You can’t just put them in the vault. They’d rot away to nothing. They have to be sealed, each one. Oh, Luke, we explained that to you.”

  He took his arm away from her shoulder, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “That could take years, Mary. I don’t understand why . . . why it’s so important to her.”

  Mary stared at his hawklike profile against the pale sand, and she wondered why she’d thought he did understand. His willingness to labor mightily on the vault had nothing to do with the books.

  But he must understand—somehow, on some level.

  “Luke, you said you made your journey because you had a vision.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Rachel had a vision, too.”

  Luke straightened, sought in Mary’s eyes verification of that assertion, and she made sure he found it.

  “Her vision came in a dream, Luke, like yours. In her dream she found a book lying on the beach as if it had been washed up there. She said it was bound in white leather and had pages of gold and letters of light. The message told her that she’d been allowed to live and her books had survived for one reason—so that she could preserve the knowledge of the past for future generations. It said: I have laid up a gift upon the shore from the children of yesterday for the children of tomorrow.”

  Luke was enthralled, and Mary felt her stomach chum in recognition of a betrayal. Rachel would never sink to mythmaking to justify her intentions.

  Yet she had declared she would play any role, would kill or die for the books.

  Luke said, “Then it was the Lord who commanded her to preserve the books. I . . . didn’t realize. . . .”

  “I know. But she—don’t tell her I told you about her vision. She considers it . . . a private matter.”

  “Between her and the Lord, yes.” He sighed. “I understand why she can’t come to the Ark now. The Lord will watch over her until her task is finished. But then, Mary, then she can come to the Ark.”

  Mary felt her eyes hot with tears. “Then she must come to the Ark.”

  “Oh, Mary.” He took her in his arms, held her gently like a frightened child. “We’ll come back to Amama next spring to visit her and make sure she’s all right. The Doctor will understand. And I’ll tell her how to find the Ark. I checked my map, and it’s only about four days from here. Mary, everything will be all right. The Lord is smiling on all of us. I know it.”

 
And Mary yielded into his embrace. “I know it, too, Luke.”

  They walked back to Amama on sand soaked by the surging and ebbing waves, its surface transformed into an endless mirror reflecting the opalescent clouds, and it seemed they were walking on the sky.

  After supper, when the lowering sun cast a ruby light into the house, Luke excused himself and went downstairs to the basement to his makeshift bedroom. Rachel wished him good night with a smile that faded as soon as he turned away, then she went out to the deck to watch the sunset. Mary followed her, stood at the railing beside her, blinking into the sun that hung above the horizon under orange clouds whose reflections made the sea molten, gave the breakers a blue cast. The wind had stopped, waiting to turn; the air was sweet with the vital scents of summer.

  Rachel said, “There might be a green flash.”

  They waited while the Earth moved, and the glowing disk of the sun touched the horizon, slowly slipped beyond it, and finally vanished with a brief, pinpoint flare of blue-green light.

  “Ah!” They spoke almost in unison, laughed at the concurrence of their amazement, and in that moment Mary remembered all the sunsets they had watched together, hoping for that rare ah!

  Rachel went to one of the cedar plank chairs Luke had built for them, waited for Mary to sit down in the other, then said, “I assume Luke finally got around to declaring his honorable intentions.”

  Mary looked at her, saw her oblique smile. “Yes. Finally.”

  A brief silence, then: “How soon will you be leaving?”

  “Not until the vault is finished. I don’t know, exactly. Rachel . . .” Mary wanted to plead, to beg, but she only said, “You could go with us.”

  “No, I can’t, Mary. You know that.”

  “But when you’re finished with the books . . .”

  “Maybe.” Her eyes narrowed, accentuating the web of lines surrounding them. “I’m not sure I’d be welcome in a place like the Ark.”