by Roger Wall
“We trapped a rabbit, Granddad, a good size one,” I said.
Otis opened his eyes but didn’t move.
“I was thinking about your father. The time he was feeding a deer corn out of his hand near the gardens. When the deer stretched its neck to eat, he slipped a rope around it. The deer bolted and he fell down, and the deer pulled him across the fields. When the deer paused, he jumped up, laughing. The deer took off and knocked him off balance again. Finally, he circled around a tree so the rope would hold it. As the deer struggled, neighbors came running with clubs. Then we built a fire in the playing field and roasted it, with garlic and rosemary. Everyone was there, your mother, father, me, you, all our neighbors. The meat was very tasty.”
“That’s what my father was like?”
This was the only story, full story, really, that Otis ever told me about my father.
Otis sat up and smiled. “Javier drank too much, but he was very funny. Always joking. Never mean.”
I imagined standing in the meadow, near the river, watching my father be towed by the panicked deer. I wished I had been the one to witness this.
“I’m ready to go home now. We’ll have the rabbit,” Otis said.
At the entrance to the cave, in the belly of the clay stove, I laid a nest of dried grass and twigs and brought it to smoke with my bow and stick. When it flared, I blew on the flame to ignite the pieces of split driftwood, which crackled and caught. The fire was alive, and I hovered over it, absorbing its heat and not backing off when sparks popped toward my face. I unfolded my wooden chair, the one I had rubbed with the purple juice of June berries to distinguish it from Otis’s dirty-yellow chair, and settled onto the wobbly seat.
After a while, when the fire had died down to a thick bed of coals, I set the oven grate, which I had extracted from a mangled stove in the town’s ruins, on top and weighted one corner with a rock to steady it. Into the rabbit’s flesh I rubbed garlic from the garden and sagebrush I had collected from a field beyond the broken wind turbines and crystals of salt that I had found on the edges of a dried-up pond. The fatty skin sizzled and sputtered. I breathed in the greasy air.
During my years in White Earth River, rabbit was my favorite animal: easy to trap, kill, and clean; the fur, once enough skins were tanned, made a warm blanket or coat; and one plump adult was just enough for two people.
I helped Otis walk from his bed across the willow mats to the front of the cave. Instead of seating him at the table, I lowered him against a cottonwood post, the one with the notches marking the seasons, until he was on the floor. I preferred sitting on the floor to eat; Otis’s legs were too stiff to bend very much so they stuck out straight in front of him. The notches on the post, including the most recent one I had made to mark the end of the cool season, rose above Otis’s head. There were twenty-eight notches, one for each season that we lived in the cave. I started to make them sometime before I learned to read, when I began using a knife, around what I guess was age three or four.
“You’ll need rope, a lot of rope,” Otis blurted out, with a forcefulness that startled me. His plate almost fell from his lap.
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
I leaned toward him and steadied his plate.
“Yellow rope. And pulleys, too,” he said. “You’ll have to scavenge those. A block and tackle, if you can find it.”
“Block and tackle?” I tore dark meat off a rabbit leg with my teeth. I loved the greasy taste of its legs and thighs.
“Volume one, or maybe two,” Otis said.
He was referring to the Encyclopedia of Simple and Not So Simple Machines. When I was young, he had read the three volumes to me, but often I didn’t pay attention to the descriptions of mechanical devices. I preferred The Child’s Compendium of Story and Verse, a book Otis found impractical, a waste of time, which was surprising, given his own interest in stories as a way to justify his life.
“What about the orange rope?” I asked. We had a coil of that in the cart down in the garden. I pulled the other leg from the carcass and began eating it with both hands, as though I were eating an ear of corn.
“The ancestors specified yellow, During-the-Event. A continuous thread of yellow, from the cave to the juniper.”
“When did they say that?” I asked, my mouth full, as I chewed the meat. “You never told me this.”
“The yellow will help me find my wife.”
“Are you going to eat your rabbit?” He hadn’t touched it.
“A few more bites.”
A continuous thread of . . . off-hand inventions, that’s what the ancestors seemed to have specified. And this latest addition to the burial plan—sprung on me in the middle of eating roast rabbit!—I wanted to ignore, although I knew this wasn’t a choice, that it would require a trip to the ruins to scrounge for rope. But not yet. First, I cracked open a femur and sucked the sweet marrow from the bone.
“You’ll remember the knots?” Otis asked me.
“Don’t worry.”
“Wait until I’m nice and stiff. That’ll give you plenty of leverage. And remember, my body mustn’t touch the ground until I’m in the grave.”
“I’ll remember.”
It was a fanciful plan, trussing up Otis’s body with yellow rope, setting a block and tackle and pulleys, and hoisting his corpse across the valley, one that would have taken me days to rig, if I knew how, using equipment I would never find in the ruins. How long would the rope have to be? At least a kilometer, maybe two. Otis seemed to believe he could fly to his grave like a spirit, with, of course, mechanical assistance. I took his plate and ate his portion of rabbit.
“Yellow rope. Okay,” I said, unfolding my legs and standing up. I dropped our plates in the wash pail. I left the rabbit carcass, with a thigh and leg remaining, for later, and covered it with a cloth to keep away the flies.
“Check by the back door. In the storage room,” Otis said. “There’s always yellow rope there.”
“Where do you want to wait? On the floor or in the bed?”
“Right here, but I’d like the pillows.”
I covered him with a patched cotton blanket and wedged behind his back the two feather pillows I had made from geese I’d netted on the playing field.
“If you have to go, use this,” I said and placed a plastic bucket beside him.
“I’m not doing that anymore.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You just ate, remember?”
I scrambled down the flanks of the butte and traversed to the right, to the perimeter road on the edge of the town site. The overgrown grid of dirt streets was littered with the debris of collapsed homes, much of it now buried in the weeds and grass.
On the night the town was destroyed, the heavy machines passed through the rows of flimsy prefabricated houses like harvesters reaping an unwanted crop. The machines’ steel treads compressed and churned up the earth. Their wide blades and scoops leveled homes and flattened the community center, Catholic church, food distribution annex, clinic, and government representative’s office. They spared the old oak tree, which marked what had been the center of the town and was now only accessible by following a jumble of paths lined with thistles and cottonwood saplings. Thistles hadn’t grown in the town before the machines arrived, Otis had told me.
I followed an overgrown lumpy tread to the house that Otis and my parents had once lived in and where I was born and spent the first five months of my life. Unlike the other houses in the town, ours was never completely demolished. Perhaps the machine operator had been hasty, or bored, and had only swiped at the house with the long arm of his machine. Maybe he’d said to himself, “Good enough,” and had left the house to sag and split apart on its own.
A portion of one wall still stood: a plane of colors—early spring green, robin’s egg blue, and goldenrod yellow—rising from what must have been the living room up through the stairwell and into the upstairs. I wondered if my parents had slept up there and me with them.
Staring at the wrecked house upset my stomach.
This hadn’t always been the case. When I was a child, the destroyed town had had no significance to me. I had had no knowledge of what the town had been or awareness that I had been born and lived there with parents who then disappeared. The town was just a place that contained “buried treasure,” as Otis would refer to our finds of clothes, furniture, tools, dishes, and an occasional book. It was just a jumbled up and broken place that we sometimes walked through on our way to and from the cave, and sometimes a place to which Otis would abruptly shuffle me from the garden and down into our house’s basement. Was he evading agents, left-behind people, wanderers looking for food? He never said.
In fact, had Otis been able to keep the tragedy of the Event to himself, and not named me after it, I would never have questioned him about my parents. If he’d spoken only about our life in the garden and the cave, or hadn’t spoken at all but simply grunted at me, I would have remained ignorant of the Event.
I felt my stomach bloat and press against the leather belt holding up my shorts. My bowels were turning. I dropped my pants and squatted.
Otis only spoke a few times of the continental disaster that coincided with the destruction of White Earth River: the massacre of old, sick, hungry, displaced, unskilled, and undesirable people. When government agents entered White Earth River with their machines, they were seeking revenge for Sammy Goldrausch’s murder, but also for an easy way to dispose of a handful of old people and a few of their adult children living in a co-housing retirement project in the country. Two birds with one stone. Another town off the list.
“When the seas took New York, that’s when we started to shut down,” Otis would say. “The diplomats came home, government recalled the military, international trade stopped. No one could have predicted how fast life would deteriorate, not even the men and women whose jobs it was to predict these kinds of things.”
The United States merged with Canada to control the resources of the North American continent. Then the two powers decided they had to include Mexico, too, because the Mexican border was too long to patrol. “With all the unwanted people, you’d think the government could’ve extended the metal border fence with a human one to keep out intruders. But what government in its right mind would pass out rifles to millions of idle, hungry people?” Otis would ask. “It would be like Tony LePerle, only on a larger scale.”
Canada and the United States decided to site the capital, the Center, in the geographic center of North America—Rugby, North Dakota—to emphasize their dominance over Mexico. I guess Otis was lucky to be living in Bismarck; work in the Center offered him protection from what went on elsewhere.
Even with only three countries to govern, there were still too many people to feed. The government adopted a policy of population assessment, relocation, and culling—what Otis said was a fancy word for slaughter. The rich, smart, and lucky found places in industrial, manufacturing, or agricultural preserves; or in institutions, like schools and hospitals; or in the military on bases spread over the continent; or in one of the regional cities or the capital, the Center. The government ran everything.
Some people tried to retreat into clusters and live off stored provisions, but once they ate all their canned food, they had to search for more. They joined the waves of migrants fighting over food and water as they made their way inland from the flooded coasts. Some of these people were government rejects, others had fallen through the cracks and were never classified. They became stranded along highways, on foot and in vehicles, out of water, food, and gas, with no idea of where they were going, “just inland.” “Now the government had them where it wanted them, all together like that,” Otis would say. “Of course, natural attrition killed a lot. But the military’s flame cannons took care of the rest. Incinerated them. Cars burned for days. Tony LePerle saw some of the remains,” Otis would recount. I suppose Otis was in White Earth River, then, with Malèna, before she died.
I stepped over a scattered pile of white moldy siding and weathered gray trim to the door of the storage room. It had been built as an addition to the back of the house and, like the wall leading to my parents’ upstairs bedroom, was still standing. Otis had cleared out his tools years ago. There wasn’t any yellow rope on the floor or hanging on the wall; I doubt if there ever was.
I remembered a coil of rope, white rope, with blue-and-white plastic rings on it, in the corner of the boathouse, beneath the rack of blue life preservers. This would have to do, I thought.
I walked east through town and crossed the White Earth River on the footbridge. At the junction of paths leading to Cemetery Butte and the playing field, I took the left fork and followed the river toward the narrow white sand beach where Otis and I bathed. The boathouse was at one end of the beach, with a dock extending out its back door. Up from the beach was the old soccer field where, as the town was being shut down, people had built fires and roasted game. Once the town’s people had disappeared, a flock of geese took over the field. They avoided the area by the soccer goal posts, where charred wood from the fires lay: they must’ve known that other animals had been slaughtered and cooked there.
The metal wheels rattled in their track as I lifted the door of the boathouse.
I had remembered the rope as white and was prepared to tell Otis that it was all I could find but was relieved that the rope was yellow after all. Otis would be happy; at least this part of his burial plan would be realized.
“Yellow rope,” I said and dropped it on the willow mat and handed Otis a bight. “I found it in the boathouse.”
Otis rolled the shiny rope between his thumb and finger.
“I don’t like the feel of this,” he said. “Too slick. Knots won’t hold. It’s better that we use the orange rope. Why did you waste your time looking for this?”
I took the end of the rope from him and threw the coil across the floor.
“It’s yellow. It’s always good to have yellow rope around,” I said.
“I guess so. I’m a little hungry.”
I made a soup with the rest of the rabbit plus a few carrots and onions and a handful of mashed garlic cloves. Instead of walking Otis to the front of the cave to eat, as I had earlier in the day, I let him sit up in bed, his back supported by the junipers. As before, I sat on the floor, with my own back pushing up against my bed frame, and faced Otis.
“Do you feel it?” Otis asked after he’d sipped a spoonful of soup.
“No, not really,” I said.
He was speaking of death. He spoke of it as though it were a visitor he was eager to welcome into the cave. I chewed the soft ribs of the rabbit. A few bands of flesh were still attached.
“Hmm . . . So you don’t feel it, then?” he asked.
“No, I guess not,” I said.
What I felt was the waiting, for another revision of the burial plan, for one more day.
“Well it’s there. In the air. A disturbance. I’ve only sensed this a few times in my life . . . when Malèna passed.”
“I don’t know what happens when it comes, Otis. Maybe your heart just stops beating, like the animals we kill. Maybe that’s all. Maybe there’s nothing more.”
“They have spirits, too.”
I didn’t want to argue about the existence of spirits. Or the signs of impending death. The carrots, I noticed, could have been simmered a little longer.
“When we were up on the butte, I began to worry that my spirit isn’t strong enough to join Malèna’s. That I’m so weak and thin I won’t be of much use to the tree. Or Malèna. Then I began to think about you, how I hadn’t taught you everything you needed to know. That I’d forgotten something, but I couldn’t remember what it was . . .”
His voice broke. I didn’t like it when he sounded so mournful.
“I know all I need to know,” I said. “I planted the garden by myself this season, remember. And you’re eating the rabbit tonight. You’re not going to die anytime soon.”
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br /> “No, there was something . . .”
“It’ll come to you.”
I couldn’t fathom knowing more than I did. Our life was simple. We got up in the morning and worked in the garden, we ate vegetables and trapped or caught and killed game, we talked to pass the time, we read the few books we had, sometimes I wandered off on my own, we slept when darkness arrived. That was the extent of our life. It had a rhythm, which I had mastered.
Otis began coughing, and I took away his bowl and stood ready to slap his back if he started choking. But he didn’t. The coughing stopped. I waited until he was breathing steadily and then went to the front of the cave for another helping of soup and the asparagus leftover from the day before. As I lowered myself to the floor again and crossed my legs, Otis started to speak.
“When your mother and father went to the playing field that night, when the machines came, the air was unsettled, too,” he said. “The men always hung the deer from the soccer goal posts before they staked it out to roast. Everyone was happy, together in front of the fire, drinking your father’s tesgüino. But I was too tired to go along that evening, and your mother asked me to take care of you. I brought you down into the basement. It was quiet there, like the cave. But the air wasn’t right.”
I stopped eating and looked at him. My parents went to the playing fields that night? My mother asked him to take care of me? Wait a minute, I thought, they weren’t supposed to appear in our story.
“Later, the basement walls started vibrating. For a long time, two hours at least,” Otis said. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I thought it might be an earthquake, and I tried to remember, when had there ever been an earthquake in North Dakota? Then the vibrating got louder. The basement was shaking. An engine was groaning. Steel treads were clanking against the ground. I could smell the diesel. I thought it was on top of us and waited for the ceiling to collapse. Metal clanked against metal. A huge weight slammed into our house. The framing ripped. Nails screeched as they let loose. Our house was coming down. I thought we’d be crushed and I got down on my knees and held you and prayed to God. I was never religious, never went to church, but there I was praying to Malèna’s god. I didn’t think it would come to this. Arrest and relocation maybe. But destruction? That was a surprise.”
