The Divide

by Jolina Petersheim

  Stepping closer, Jabil takes hold of the bucket’s horsehair rope. “I’ll take this to your cabin.” His thumb traces the top of my hand. “I won’t let him hurt you, Leora.”

  This seems presumptuous, since there are more ways than just one to inflict pain. But when I glance up, the look in Jabil’s eyes tells me he would do everything in his power to fulfill that promise. Smiling nervously, I let him take the bucket and turn toward the gate. My vadder is already looking my way. His hand lifts in greeting. My nails carve crescents into my palms.

  “Leora,” he calls as I draw closer. “Good to see you.”

  I nod at him curtly. “Good to see you too.” Surprising as it is, it is not a lie.

  “Thanks. I—I’m clean now.” He has enough self-respect to stammer over the declaration.

  “That’s great.”

  “I am. Really,” he insists, sensing my disbelief. “I got better after you and Seth left.”

  I cross my arms in front of me for reinforcement, as everything from that horrific day comes back. Regardless, tears spill from my eyes. I wipe them away with my fist.

  His eyebrows lower. “Everything all right?”

  I shake my head, wondering which catastrophe I should break to him first: that I committed murder, or that his mother died. “You should’ve been with us, Daed.”

  “I know.” He looks down. “I’m sorry. I wish I could make it up.”

  “I don’t want you to make anything up; I just want you to be here when I need you.”

  He pauses, absorbing this, and then he looks at me. His countenance appears softer, relaxing the taut angles of his face. “I guess that’s better than you not wanting me around.”

  Instead of replying, I turn toward the gate. Charlie stands there—legs splayed and eyes narrowed—like he’s already regretting letting my vadder in.

  I turn back to him. “So you’re here for a while?”

  “If you’ll have me.”

  “We don’t have enough room in the cabin. You’ll have to sleep in the barn.” This isn’t true, since Grossmammi’s bed is empty, but I haven’t the fortitude to share such a tight space.

  “That’s fine,” he says. “I’ve slept in worse.”

  “Have you been staying at our old house this whole time?”

  “No, just over winter. Then I moved to the fairgrounds when it started warming up. There’s a camp there now.” He pauses. “I saw your friend Sal. With her baby and little girl.”

  My friend. Friendship doesn’t seem the way to quantify our relationship, considering how we parted. “The little girl’s not hers.” My pulse quickens as I say this, and it’s as if the increased blood flow spreads the flush of anxiety up my neck. “Did you hear anything from her uncle?”

  “Mike?” My daed seems puzzled. “He’s there, at the camp, all the time.”

  I glance back at the gate. Charlie has returned to his post. “Is Mike looking for anybody?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  Wetting my lips, I say, “Is he looking for the person who shot his son?”

  Something flickers across the surface of my vadder’s careful expression. “Alex?”

  Sweat breaks out across my body. “I killed him. I killed him that day Seth and I left you.”

  The moon, inviting and ripe, glints off the lines of quart jars carefully placed over each plant, and the centipede of hoop houses constructed over the long, single raised bed. Our greenhouses destroyed in the valley fire, Jabil and I had to improvise by bending branches into hoops, and then we covered these hoops with a series of large, thirteen-gallon trash bags someone retrieved from Field to Table before we left.

  Small pine resin torches glow inside the houses and will be replaced throughout the night—a ritual as solemn as the changing of the guard. With my face pressed against the plastic, I can see the tiny green shoots pushing through the dirt: each a promise of the harvest season when—for a while, at least—our people will no longer have to live in fear of want.

  Side by side, Jabil and I continue walking. My bare feet sink into the earth, padded with moss, and I can feel my weary body releasing the tension coiled in my shoulders and spine. Jabil crouches and holds out his lamp. Silver-pink night crawlers dart like lightning into the soil, recently turned for yet another planting of seeds. Jabil secures a squiggly handful of worms, grabbing them before they can disappear into the ground, and drops them in his tin bucket to be used for his fishing trip in the morning. “Quite the date, isn’t it?” he says, laughing.

  I do not laugh. For weeks, Jabil and I have been taking these nightly walks after the rest of the community quiets down. It’s a time for us to talk about our day and the plan for the coming week. And though we’ve often seemed as effortlessly conjoined as a long-married couple trying to reconnect after tucking our unruly children in bed, I have never considered any of these walks dates. Furthermore, Jabil’s never said anything to confirm the shift in our relationship, even if—every now and then—he looks at me like he wants to.

  Jabil presently stands, his smile slipping. “Did I say something wrong?”

  I shake my head. “Of course not.”

  His fingertips, feather light, brush against my cheek. “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  But it’s everything. I tell my heart to still, my mind to focus on the man standing before me rather than replaying the image of the man I imagined I would spend my life with, who has since abandoned me twice. When Jabil takes my hand, I let him. I even go so far as to lace my fingers through his. His grip tightens gratefully. In his other hand, he carries the bucket of night crawlers, and I imagine the two of us being watched by that brilliant lunar eye.

  We walk farther from the compound than we have all spring. Jabil pulls apart pine branches and steps underneath them. “I did this for you,” he says and shows me another patch of cleared earth. I glance at it, trying to understand.

  And then he kneels, just as he knelt before. Setting down the lamp, he presses his thumb into the soil. Next to the indentation, I can see it: the tiny bud. “I planted wildflowers,” he says. “Judith had a pack. I traded with her.”

  I kneel, then, beside him in the dirt, not caring that it is scalloping the hem of my freshly laundered dress. I touch the plant. The promise of new life, of beauty and hope awakening. Through the screened moonlight, I look over at Jabil. I see the insecurity, and the vulnerability, as he waits to find out how I will receive his gift.

  “Thank you. I’m sure the flowers will be beautiful.”

  He nods and leans forward, resting the top of his head against mine. “I was going to wait until they were in bloom,” he says. “To show you. But we never know, do we? If we have time.”

  “No,” I murmur. “We don’t.”

  Our lips touch. Unlike before, with Moses, there are no crumbling walls, no fire, no shaking or fear. Instead there is peace, tranquility, the coolness of night air brushing the back of my neck. Jabil and I pull away from each other, and then he rises on one knee and pushes off. He reaches down for my hand. “Marry me?”

  I look up at him. This proposal is so different: an inversion of every Englisch one I have ever heard. But my life is not what it once was. And neither is his. “Yes,” I whisper. “I will.”

  Jabil pulls me to my feet and encases me in his arms so wholly, I could never break free, even if I wanted to. After a moment, he asks, “Should I have talked to your vadder first?”

  I turn my head against the expanse of his chest. I think of him, my vadder, sleeping in the barn loft with Charlie. He is here, with us, and yet I treat him as I would treat any man who is an acquaintance—with deference while always remaining on guard. I laugh a little, albeit sadly at the thought, as I reply, “There’s no need.”

  Jabil nods. Then, hand in hand, he leads me back to the community. The pine torches remain lit: a practice we started after Bishop Lowell’s death, when we realized darkness makes us vulnerable. This time, a differ
ent vulnerability overtakes me. But Jabil merely escorts me to my door and says good-bye without a kiss. I enter the cabin and lie down in my muddied clothes next to my sister. I stare up at the ceiling, knowing I’m going to be staring at a similar ceiling when I enter the cabin next door as Bishop Snyder’s bride. Warm tears roll down my cheekbones, tracing the shape of my face, though I tell myself this is what I want. That there is no need to cry.

  Moses

  Josh and I stand before the map taped to a wall in his hangar. A grid stripes the northwestern section of Montana, primary-colored pushpins marking the areas the militia has explored. Three weeks have passed since Nehemiah shot the ARC soldier, but we’ve still not found their camp.

  Josh says, “Every time you guys go out, your odds of not coming back grow.”

  “I know that.”

  “We’ve no clue where they are. The ARC could even be out of state. And what do we do when we find them? It’s not like we can overthrow them like an army.”

  “I’ve thought of that as well.”

  Swearing softly, Josh bends the bill of his ball cap in his hands. “This whole thing’s so beyond me, it’s ridiculous. I mean, was the ARC orchestrated by a terrorist group? Was it orchestrated by our government to—to try to reestablish what we lost after the grid shut down?”

  I pick a handful of tacks out of the coffee cup on the stained concrete floor and push them into the areas I want to fly over once the Cessna’s finished: Missoula, Helena, Butte. Then to the north, Glacier National Park. Finding the camp’s like finding a needle in a haystack, but an aerial view’s sure better than trying to find it on foot. I look over at Josh. “This wacky conspiracy theorist from the community told me that detention camps were getting built way back, and that there were dark forces in our own government, preparing for a day like this.”

  Sighing heavily, Josh says, “Maybe it’s not just a theory.” He puts on his cap and walks past the Cessna to stare out through the hangar’s open door. “I lost friends for the sake of freedom,” he says. “Not to mention my own family.” His voice breaks. “What was it all for?”

  I come over and stand beside him. “Don’t lose faith. Nothing is wasted.”

  He looks at me. “You might think differently when you’re as old and grouchy as me.”

  “What about when you saved the lives of the airport staff? Don’t you know that wasn’t wasted, even if it didn’t turn out the way you planned? Or when you waited here, for months, hoping your ex-wife would come back? Or when you let all of us stranded guys hole up here?” We’re not the touchy-feely type, but Josh seems so despondent, I put my arm around his shoulders. “You’re a good man. The world, broken as it is, needs people like you.”

  He lowers his head, the ball cap shielding his face. I stand in support beside him—not expecting either of us to say anything else—when he breaks the silence. “The same goes for you, Moses.” He pauses. “Don’t try to forget Leora because you think she deserves a better man.”

  I ask Josh, “Sure you’re not just trying to get rid of me?”

  “If I wanted to get rid of you,” he says, “I would’ve already done it.”

  He punctuates his sentence with a grin and takes another forkful of eggs. The two of us are sitting in front of the computers at the traffic control center’s desk, squinting against the glare of sunlight flashing through the bank of windows. We’re eating breakfast, the same as we’ve eaten breakfast together every morning that we haven’t just completed a night shift and, instead of eating, are more interested in sleeping off our exhaustion on airport cots two floors below.

  But this morning’s different. The Cessna is finished. Or as finished as it can be, considering the limited tools and education Josh has had to work with—little details I am choosing to forget at the moment.

  I continue, “You don’t want to take it somewhere first?”

  “I did take it somewhere.”

  “Yeah. A five-minute loop.”

  “What?” he asks. “Don’t you trust my mechanic skills?”

  “You’re not a mechanic.”

  “And you’re not a pilot. Your point is?”

  “My point is: this sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

  Josh takes another sip of his infamous acorn coffee and winces like it’s all he can do not to spit it out. I ask, “Why do you put yourself through that?”

  “If you don’t give your body a treat once in a while, it starves itself.”

  “Seeing your face every time you take a sip of that stuff would hardly lead me to call it a treat. You will end up poisoning your body before it can starve.”

  He nods, knocking the brew back. “That’s exactly why this trip appeals to you, isn’t it?”

  “What? You think I’m going off in search of real coffee?”

  “No, a recipe for disaster is just what you like.”

  Looking down at the desk, I pick at the burnt edge where a hot kettle melted the Formica. But I still can’t hide my grin. “Guess you could say it’s in my blood.”

  After breakfast, Josh and I walk out to the hangar. Our shadows stretch tall, bisected between tarmac and grass. I see two of our men patrolling the perimeter—the distance turning them to specks. We tug apart the hangar doors and stride across the cement flooring. Opening the door to the plane, I toss my backpack up onto the seat, and it’s like a glitch in the matrix: a déjà vu of when I tossed that backpack up onto the seat the day I stole Grandpa Richard’s crop duster.

  Josh says, “You’ve got twenty-two and a half gallons of usable fuel, which should be plenty to get you to Anaconda and back. But you don’t want to give the plane too much throttle, or you’ll burn it—”

  “Josh,” I say. “I know. We’ve been over this. It’s all right.”

  “And don’t fly too low, or anyone with a rifle will be trying to shoot you down.” He adds, as an afterthought, “Don’t be stupid, Moses. I don’t want to have gone through all this work just to have you crashing this plane on your first trip.”

  I punch him lightly on the arm. “I’ll bring it back in one piece.”

  “Bring yourself back in one piece too.”

  I look over at Josh and then climb up into the plane to give us some privacy to blink the water from our eyes. I study the coordinates we’ve mapped out and the Cessna’s configuration of switches and gauges, trying to remember what Grandpa taught me and Aaron all those summers ago, when Grandma was so busy canning, she didn’t know what was taking place in the barn.

  I flip the ignition switch—the propeller flinging dust as I set the propeller control—and watch the orange tachometer arrow climb. I yell over the noise, “I’ll bring ’er back!”

  “You’d better,” he says, shutting the door. “I’ll have your hide if you don’t!”

  In lieu of a wave, Josh salutes me as I taxi out of the hangar. A stubborn lump in my throat, I salute back and shift my focus to the runway’s grid of expansion joints outlined with weeds. I glance down, checking to make sure the oil pressure and oil temperature are right, and that there’s a proper correlation between the intake manifold and the torque the engine’s developing. Once I reach the runway threshold, I advance the throttle to full, pull back slowly on the yoke, and feel that unmistakable dip in my stomach as the plane lifts and the earth falls away.

  I head south from the airport in Kalispell. I will fly over Polson, Superior, Missoula, Philipsburg, and Anaconda, searching each city for any sign of the Agricultural Resurgence Commission’s camp. Within five minutes, I fly over the mountain range where Leora and the rest of the community live, and it astounds me that they are so close when the distance between us feels like the other side of the nation. I bring the plane down and can see the cabins. From this vantage point, they are nothing but Monopoly houses circled by a wall that looks as inhibiting as toothpicks. I glimpse a woman standing beyond this wall, working alone in the garden. She rises from the dirt when she hears the noise, a hand to her brow as if to more clearly see the p
lane.

  Not until I pass over Superior have I convinced myself to keep the plane heading south instead of turning around to see if that was Leora, the woman who, despite Josh’s suggestion, I am determined to forget. I fix my gaze on the horizon and on the sheets of stratocumulus drifting across the plane, as I descend at five hundred feet per minute. The “sardine can”—as Josh deemed the Cessna—rattles and bobs with the turbulence. My eardrums ache with the pressure. Sweat gathers on my back. I’m so concentrated on flying, all other focus drifts.

  Seconds or eons pass before I’m ready to bring my airspeed down again. As the clouds part and clear, the bird’s-eye view becomes a startling reality. Buildings and houses are obliterated to rubble. Cars are blackened by fire, the glass windows and windshields busted out. Telephone poles are broken or chopped down, causing the electrical lines strung between them to drag across the grass. In Missoula, an entire block is decimated. An apartment’s facade is missing, exposing the rebar reinforcing the concrete structure and the plumbing and ductwork. I hope no one was living inside the apartment when the bomb went off.

  More than anything, though, I notice the mysterious lack of people. A few traces of smoke are visible amid the miles of ruins, but not the ones who set the fires to blaze. There is no sign of reconstruction, no sign of life resuming its ordinary American pace. There is only desolation to remind me that the world is not the same as before, and maybe never will be again.

  Leora

  THE RAINS HAVE BEEN STEADY all spring, encouraging the morels to sprout through the sandy soil, giving them opportunity for growth. I spot a large one sprouting beneath a pine, stop and crouch, plucking the strange, spongelike entity from the moss. A few smaller ones are growing around it, and I begin to gather those as well. Jabil kneels but does not gather, and I sense he is focused on me and not on our task. “You are so beautiful,” he says.

  I smile. “We’re supposed to be working.”