by Joel Varty
Before long we have several more bales of this or that strung with various rope incarnations – from a long slender orchard grass woven around thick leaves of comfrey, to more of the grape vines twisted around nettles or some such other stuff as I have never seen before. As he darts in and out of thickets and bushes, through shadow and sunlight it’s a wonder to me that only the day before yesterday we were dragging him along behind us, and now he’s carrying as much as we’re dragging – possibly more.
Eventually, he decides that we’ve gathered as much as we can carry, and I begin to notice that the terrain becomes a bit rougher, the trees getting thicker on the sides of the road instead of just being open fields. It’s clear that Jonah wanted to get as much easy picking done before we went through this wooded area. We settle back into our side-to-side shuffle and Lucia steps beside me, softly speaking.
“His brother was even more energetic than Jonah is,” she begins. “They could have been twins except for being several years apart. Jonah’s a bit taller than Ruben was, but Ruben was stronger. He seemed smarter, too, but mostly because he never tried to put his scientific talk in to real-world language. Jonah always makes sure he doesn’t try to talk above anyone, but Ruben didn’t make the effort. Most people thought he was doing it on purpose to intimidate them, but he was just a hell of a lot smarter than he had any right to be. He didn’t waste time trying to hide it.”
When I don’t push her further, she pauses for a few minutes before continuing.
“He could always put Jonah in his place, but not Aeron – that’s Jonah’s nephew, Ruben’s son. No, Aeron is altogether different – he has this way of looking at you that you don’t dare cross him. Nobody could ever tell that boy anything – and I should know.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about the family – even for a sister-in-law.” We are walking quite a ways behind the others now, but they leave us on our own.
“Well, there was always something about those brothers that was special. I wonder how much of it died with the eldest.”
“Died?”
“Yes,” she says, turning to me and lifting an eyebrow. “And that may be the cause of this whole business. Ruben had something under wraps at his lab that got him killed. Jonah wrote about it, and they are still chasing him down. It seems impossible that he’s made it this far, but I suppose that’s what comes from being unpredictable. That business at the church was... oddly effective.”
I feel the beginnings of a peculiar suspicion growing deep within my bones.
“You seem to know more than a sister-in-law ought to about that.”
“I am also the late wife of the mayor, you know. I am privy to more information that anyone else might feel comfortable dealing with. It easy, you see, knowing the direction that events are leading towards, and knowing that political pandering and back-room dealings aren’t making a difference, when the age-old struggle of power against power brings us right back to man killing his fellow man for what he controls.”
“Or she.”
“Yes,” she laughs. “That might be almost true in my case. You see, I’m not quite as innocent in all of this as I’d like to be. Nor do I wish to conceal my guilt, such as it is, since I feel that most of it has been left behind, back in that shell of a city.”
We walk on for a time. I don’t know what to say – whether to ask for the answers I don’t want to hear, or to wait and hope that the awkward moment will pass. It doesn’t, and she continues.
“You see, I never loved my husband. He was simply a means to an end, or he seemed like it at the time. He was old money, old school ties to all the inner circles. He was just given whatever he wanted. He never worked for anything, not even his election; it was always someone else doing what needed to be done to slide him into the right suit of clothes for the situation. He didn’t deserve to get what he wanted so easily.
“And he never knew when to stop,” she goes on even more softly now. “He didn’t know when he’d gone too far. Not with anything. It’s a very subtle difference, a feeling that some people seem to have and some don’t: that ability to stop before it gets outs of hand, to hold back at the right time, and to push forward when the door is open later. James never learned that.
“If his brother hadn’t killed him, then someone else would have.”
She lets that sink in for a moment, with herself as much as for me, although I am beyond incredulous at this point. I don’t know what to think. The enormous bundle of asparagus, which seemed fairly light and airy a few hours ago, is becoming immensely heavy, and I feel a trickle of sticky juice begin to inch down my back. I look over at Lucia, also struggling with a load of something green and bulky, with tears streaming down her face.
Her voice begins to tremble a bit. “They killed themselves over me, out of a love that I didn’t even know how to return, let alone imitate. Their passion spent itself in the only way it could, and ended up with both of them dead in the river. Their world ended right before ours did, you see, and I helped it happen. But it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to. They were supposed to wait until I had left before they... started.”
This is the meat of it now, I think, the reason for it all. She knows! God, she knows, and she helped it to happen. A whole city gone, people scattered helter-skelter over the country and she caused it.
And I feel it happening to me, too. This infectious love-like feeling that must have ensnared those Hadly brothers. And I don’t want to stop it. I want her to keep talking; I want to find some piece, some thread, of goodness, some vindicating evidence that will prove her intentions as good instead of evil. As if it was ever that simple.
We are at the bottom of a valley where the trees on either side have thinned out to reveal green fields and pastures. We are well behind Jonah and Angie at this point, and they are at the top of a long slope, waving us forward. Jonah is smiling an impossibly wide smile as he throws one last wave to us, and then drops his bundles and pack to bend down with his arms spread.
The sky around us is just tilting towards sunset as Jonah Truth drops to his knees, tossing his head skywards with a great laugh that comes out almost as a sob. I can hear it clearly from down here, it is so still in this breathless time of day between afternoon and twilight. Two small children fall into his arms, and an impossibly beautiful woman, at least to my sore eyes, leans over to draw him to his feet. His joy emanates like a shockwave through the stillness and hits me like a splash of cold water that leaves tears on my rough cheeks.
Jonah is home.
As I turn to follow, to meet this little family and learn more about my new friend, Lucia, another enigma, grabs my hand. She is trembling with fear.
“His name is Geron,” she says. “Geron Petreson, and he wants what Jonah has. There is something in that family that will bring us all to ruin if he gets it.”
I hold her by the shoulders as tenderly as I can, but firmly so she knows that I am sincere in what I say. “Lucia,” I say, pointing at Jonah, “I think that man has led us out of ruin, even though he was half dead for much of it. I think his purpose is to save us from ourselves.” I pull her into a real embrace and feel her melt into me, and even though I wonder if this is how her husband and who knows how many others felt about her, I know that I will do whatever I can to protect her. “We’ll figure out what to do about this Geron fellow,” I whisper, the hope building steadily inside me as we walk slowly up the hill, hand in hand.
When we crest the top, the sun is just beginning to throw orange and pink streaks across the sky. The vision below takes my breath away. A long expanse of valley, a stone house on a little hill surrounded by a wide circle of tall trees and a series of outbuildings beyond; I can’t help feeling like I have come home, too, even though I have never been here before.
Lucia squeezes my hand tighter and we descend into the valley.
Chapter Twenty-One – The Family Farm
Jewel
My Daddy is finally here! He has already shown me how
to do all sorts of things – things that he did when he was a boy, or so he says. I don’t think he’s so old. Old people don’t run around with kids, but he always follows us around. Maybe he’ll even play hide-and-seek later on. Now we’re walking up to see where the water comes from. I asked Daddy where it comes from and he said we could only find out by seeing for ourselves, so here we go.
It’s so much colder in the shadows of the trees. I will try to get him to let us walk home through the fields. We both have wet feet from trying to step across the creek on the little stones, but it was slippery and I slid off the rocks, and Daddy stepped in right up to his knees. I couldn’t stop laughing – it was so funny. Now his feet are squishing in his shoes worse than mine.
“You see those flowers, over there, Sweetie-Pie?” He always calls me that. “They’re called daffodils. This is late in the year for those, but they must like the cool.”
“Why is it so much colder here than by the house?” I ask. He likes it when I ask easy questions like this. Mummy says it’s because he doesn’t have to struggle to find the answer to easy questions, and he struggles a lot. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds hard. I don’t know why he doesn’t just stick to the easy stuff that he likes, but grown-ups never do things the easy way. So I ask him easy questions to make him happy.
“Well, Sweetie, I didn’t expect it to be this cold up here, but you can always count on it being at least a little bit cooler – especially in the springtime, when it’s so hot down in the valley. It’s always cooler here not only because of the shade, but because those mountains way off to the west cool the air off and make it drier – perfect for nice cool breezes.”
“Are we going to walk all the way to the mountains to find the water?” I ask, getting bored of his long explanations. “Does it come from a glacier or something?”
He stops walking for a minute and looks at me with his head a little sideways.
“Where did you learn about glaciers?”
“Mummy told me about them when she told me where we get our water from.”
Daddy’s smile gets a little bigger.
“Well, I don’t think we have time to walk all the way there. There’s something much closer I want to check on. It’s what will give us water in our pipes now that the power is gone.”
“Why is the power gone?”
“Because they shut it off.”
“Who’s ‘They?’”
Daddy doesn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t know who they are. They just turned everything off and let everyone wander away.”
“Is that why everyone’s scared, ‘cause there’s no power?”
“Maybe,” he says quietly, taking my hand. His hand is dirty and cold, but it still feels good, pulling me forward. “Most people didn’t expect it to happen. We don’t know what to do when everything changes so quickly. We have to learn what life is all about all over again.”
“Why aren’t you scared Daddy?”
“Who said I’m not?”
“Everybody says you’re the only one that’s not scared, that you tell everyone what to do because you’re the only one who’s thinking straight. Is that why so many people keep coming and wanting to stay with us?”
“It’s just a few people who wandered by and saw our lights, Sweetie. Most grown-ups are still afraid of the dark.”
“Mummy said you made everyone take turns staying up all night long to keep fires burning so that people could come and find us.”
“Well, I don’t like people to be alone in the dark, and it’s a lot safer if you always have someone awake.”
“Why?”
“It means that... bad people can’t sneak up on us.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Well, they might not be really bad, but they might be really hungry.”
“So we want to keep the hungry people away?”
“No, Sweetie-pie, not like that. It’s just that sometimes when people get really hungry or scared, or something like that, then they might get desperate and do things that they shouldn’t do, things they wouldn’t normally do.”
“What’s desperate?”
Daddy doesn’t answer my question – he just holds up his hand to hush me quiet. He always does that.
“Why do we have to be quiet?” I whisper to him.
“Do you hear that?” he asks me.
“What?” And then I hear it to – a clicking sound.
click-click click-click click-click
“That sound means it’s not working, honey. We have to fix it.”
We stop and Daddy wades right into the deepest part of the creek, which is rushing noisily past us. He goes right up to his waist and takes a deep breath. Then he sticks his whole head under! He pops back up holding a metal thing and a big black pipe. He starts to wade back over, with the pipe still sticking down to the stream. It looks like a big snake.
“Are you okay, Daddy?”
“Sure, Sweetie. I just had to find the pump. It hasn’t been working since I was a kid.”
“Mummy says you were never a kid. She says you grew up right after you were born, and that’s why you’re so serious.”
“Oh yeah? She said that? Well if I’m so serious, how come I tell more funny jokes than anybody else?”
“They aren’t funny, Daddy. We only laugh to be polite.”
Daddy does his little laugh that means he’s not really laughing, and looks more closely at the broken metal thing.
“How are you gonna fix that, Daddy?”
“We just need to get it un-seized. After that we can hook it back up to the pipe and re-mount in the barrel.”
“And then what? Don’t you have to plug it in, or something? I though the power was off.”
“We are going to plug it in, just not into the electricity. The creek is the power. This is a hydraulic pump that keeps the water in the line under pressure. That way we can feed the animals without having to carry it in pails.”
“But we don’t have any animals, Daddy.”
“Not yet, we don’t.” He starts tapping the metal thing against a rock, then stops. “Looks like we need some witch-piss.”
“What’s witch piss?”
“It’s something that you should never tell your mother about. It’s what my Daddy used to call a special oil that un-seizes stuff like this.”
He looks sad for a moment. I think he’s thinking about his Daddy. I’ll have to tell Mummy about witch’s piss so we can help Daddy feel better about Grandpa.
We turn back down the hill, and Daddy follows me through the woods and out into the sun. He can’t keep up, though, and I laugh when he falls down and slips right into a big mud puddle.
He shouldn’t be so serious.
…
Aeron
I see him from across the long valley. My Uncle Jonah, acting like an idiot with Jewel, sliding around in a mud puddle like some sort of clown just to make her laugh – as if we have any excuse left to be happy. Must be tough on the kids though – knowing we’re all going to die.
There are other people milling about, they seem to be waiting for Uncle Jonah: my uncle the idiot who has all the answers to everything in the world. Why are people like that? They pick someone to follow and then blindly ignore every reason against that choice. But I know the truth. I know what happened to my father and I know what my perfect Uncle Jonah did about it. Nothing, unless you call cashing in on some petty article in a magazine that got picked up by all the news syndications, and now here we are. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no gas and no power.
Jonah catches sight of me and stands stock still. Jewel sees me too, and runs quicker to come and see me. At least he doesn’t think he can just come over and pretend like nothing’s happened. He waves and starts to walk over, wearing a big silly grin. Like some kind of idiot. But he’s not. He’s probably calculating exactly how to keep me quiet. But I know. I know about the blood.
“Aeron, Aeron! Aeron Aeron Aeron!”
Jewel yells in that infectious little-girl squeal that you can’t help laughing at. “You made it!”
I bend down to hug her and she bowls me right over by jumping on me. I try my hardest not to laugh. “Well, there wasn’t anywhere else to go, was there?”
“Hey man,” says Jonah, now standing over us with the sun behind him, showing me only a bright outline of himself. How fitting. He holds a hand, but I ignore it and stand up on my own, struggling to extricate myself from the five-year-old trying to tickle me. I try not to laugh – at myself or at Jewel.
“It’s good to see you, Aeron. I was thinking about coming after you, but I figured you’d come here.”
I don’t bother to answer. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing at the contraption in his hand.
“Your project,” he says, turning to walk away. “When you get it fixed, find the submerged barrel up in the creek about half a mile up there and re-install it.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“Because now that you’ve seen it,” he calls back over his shoulder. “You won’t let me.”
I turn the contraption over in my hands. Jewel looks up at me with her young, yet knowing eyes.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a witch’s piss pump.”
…
The pump takes us only a couple of hours to fix. Eventually Jewel gets tired of watching me fiddle with the seized valves and wanders back over to the house, where more and more people seem to be milling about. I hear a few harsh, guttural words, and then my uncle’s calm but loud voice telling the man, apparently the speaker, to calm down and look at the situation. I submerge the pump in my fizzing concoction of WD-40, vinegar and some other goodies taken from the various drawers and cupboards in the shed, and walk outside.
There are a group of about twenty or thirty people milling about the yard. Jonah is up on the porch, explaining something to a couple of the local farmers. They don’t look too happy with him. As I get closer the voices seem to wash over the whole yard. I struggle with the unreality of it for a bit, but the evidence to support everything being said is all there.
