Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  “We should be nearly at the juncture of the north and south branches of the Shenandoah,” Molly said. She turned to look at the cliffs. “Probably a couple of miles at the most, over there.” She pointed up the cliff that overshadowed them.

  Lewis nodded. “We’ll have to go back until we find a place to get the boat out of the water, go overland.”

  Molly consulted her map. “Look, this road. It comes nearly to the river back there, then goes over a couple of hills, about three miles, then back down to the river. That should clear the falls. There’s nothing but cliffs on this side between us and the north branch. No road, no trail, nothing.”

  Lewis ordered lunch, and after they had eaten and rested they turned the boat and began to row against the current, keeping close to shore, watching for a sign of the road. The current was fast here, and they realized for the first time how hard it would be on the return trip, fighting the current all the way home.

  Molly sighted the break in the hills where the old road was. They pulled in closer and found a spot where the boat could be hauled out of the water, and prepared for an overland trek. They had brought wheels and axles and axes to cut trees to make a wagon, and four of the brothers began to unpack what they needed.

  Folded neatly away were heavy long pants and boots and long-sleeved shirts, protection more against scratches from bushes than cold, which was not expected while they were gone. Molly and Lewis changed clothes hurriedly and left to look for the best way to get through the scrub growth to the road.

  They would have to sleep in the woods that night, Molly thought suddenly, and a shudder passed through her. Her sisters would look up from their work uneasily, exchange glances, and return to their chores reluctantly, somehow touched by the same dread she felt. If she were within reach, the others would have come to her, unable to explain why, but irresistibly drawn together.

  They had to turn back several times before they found a way the boat could be taken to the road. When they returned to the river, the others had the flat wagon prepared and the boat lashed in place. There was a small fire, on which water was heating for tea. They were all dressed in long pants and boots now.

  “We can’t stop,” Lewis said impatiently, glancing at the fire. “We have about four hours until dark, and we should get to the road and make camp before then.”

  Ben said quietly, “We can start while Molly has tea and cheese. She is tired and should rest.” Ben was the doctor. Lewis shrugged.

  Molly watched as they strapped on the harnesses. She held a mug of tea and a piece of cheese the color of old ivory, and at her feet the fire burned lower. She moved away from it, too warm in the heavy pants and shirt. They were starting to move the boat, four of them pulling together, Thomas pushing from behind. He glanced back at her and grinned, and the boat heaved over a rock, settled, and moved steadily to the left and upward.

  Molly took her tea and cheese to the edge of the river, pulled off her boots, and sat with her feet in the tepid water. Each of them had a reason for being on this trip, she knew, and felt not at all superfluous. The Miriam sisters were the only ones who could remember and reproduce exactly what they saw. From earliest childhood they had been trained to develop this gift. It was regrettable that the Miriam sisters were slightly built; she had been chosen for this one skill alone, not for strength and other abilities, as the brothers had been, but that she was as necessary as any of the others was not doubted by anyone.

  The water felt cooler to her feet now, and she began to strip off her clothing. She waded out and swam, letting the water flow through her hair, cleanse her skin, soothe her. When she finished, the fire was almost out and, using her mug, she doused it thoroughly, dressed again, and then began to follow the trail left by the brothers and the heavy boat.

  Suddenly and without any warning she felt she was being watched. She stopped, listening, trying to see into the woods, but there was no sound in the forest except the high, soft rustling of leaves. She whirled about. Nothing. She drew in her breath sharply and started to walk again. It was not fear, she told herself firmly, and hurried. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of. No animals, nothing. Only burrowing insects had survived: ants, termites . . . She tried to keep her mind on ants — they were the pollinators now — and she found herself looking upward again and again at the swaying trees.

  The heat was oppressive, and it seemed the trees were closing in, always closing in, yet never getting any closer. It was being alone for the first time in her life, she told herself. Really alone, out of reach, out of touch. It was loneliness that made her hurry through the undergrowth, now crushed down, hacked out of the way. And she thought, this was why men went mad in the centuries gone by: they went mad from loneliness, from never knowing the comfort of brothers and sisters who were as one, with the same thoughts, the same longings, desires, joys.

  She was running, her breath coming in gasps, and she forced herself to stop and breathe deeply a few minutes. She stood leaning against a tree and waited until her pulse was quieter, then she began to walk again, briskly, not letting herself run. But not until she saw the brothers ahead did the fear subside.

  That night they made camp in the middle of the rotten roadway deep in the forest. The trees closed over them, blotting out the sky, and their small fire seemed feeble and pale in the immensity of the darkness that pressed in from all sides and above. Molly lay rigidly still, listening for something, anything, for a sound that said they were not alone in the world, that she wasn’t alone in the world. But there was no sound.

  The next afternoon Molly sketched the brothers. She was sitting alone, enjoying the sun and the water, which had become smooth and deep. She thought of the brothers, how different they were one from another, and her fingers began to draw them in a way she never had drawn before, never had seen before.

  She liked the way Thomas looked. His muscles were long and smooth, his cheekbones high and prominent, neatly dividing his face. She drew his face, using only straight lines that suggested the planes of his cheeks, the narrow sharp nose, the pointed chin. He looked young, younger than the Miriam sisters, although they were nineteen and he was twenty-one.

  She closed her eyes and visualized Lewis. Very big, over six feet. Very broad. She drew a rocklike form, a long head and a face that seemed to flow, rounded, fleshy with no bony framework, except for his large nose. The nose didn’t satisfy her. She closed her eyes and after a moment rubbed out the nose she had drawn and put one back that was slightly off center, a bit crooked. Everything was too exaggerated, she knew, but somehow, in overdoing it, she had caught him.

  Harvey was tall and rather thin. And great long feet, she thought, smiling at the figure emerging on her pad. Big hands, round eyes, like rings. You just knew, she thought, he would be awkward, stumble over things, knock things down.

  Jed was easy. Rotund, every line a curve. Small, almost delicate hands, small bones. Small features centered in his face, all too close together.

  Ben was the hardest. Well proportioned, except for his head, which was larger than the others’, he was not so beautifully muscled as Thomas. And his face was merely a face, nothing outstanding about it. She drew his eyebrows heavier than they should have been, and made him squint, the way he did when he listened closely. She narrowed her eyes studying it. It wasn’t right. Too hard. Too firm, too much character, she thought. In ten years he might look more like the sketch than he did now.

  “Rocks! Twelve o’clock, thirty yards!” Lewis called. Guiltily Molly flipped the sketch pad to a clean page and began to draw the river and its hazards.

  Chapter 12

  Ben was bringing his medical notes up to date. Lewis was finishing his daily log. Thomas sat in the rear of the boat and stared back the way they had come. Ben had been watching him closely for the past three days, uncertain what to expect, not liking the change in attitude that Thomas wasn’t even trying to hide any longer.

  He wrote: “Separation from our brothers and sisters has been harde
r on all of us than we expected. Suggest future parties send pairs of likes whenever possible.”

  If Thomas became ill, he thought, then what? Even back in the hospital they had no provisions for caring for the mentally ill. Insanity was a community threat, a threat to the brothers and sisters who suffered as much as the affected one. Early on, the family had decided that no community threat could be allowed to survive. If any brother or sister became mentally ill, his or her presence was not to be tolerated. And that, Ben told himself sharply, was the law. Their small group could not afford to lose a pair of hands, though, and that was the reality. And when reality and law clashed, then what?

  After a glance at Molly, Ben added another note: “Suggest parties be made up equally of males and females.” She had been more lonely than any of them, he knew. He had watched her fill page after page of her sketchbook, and wondered if that had substituted in some way for the absence of her sisters. Perhaps when Thomas was confronted with his real work he would no longer stare for long periods and start when anyone touched him or called his name.

  “We’ll have to change our food-rationing schedule,” Lewis said. “We counted on five days only for this leg of the trip, and it’s been eight. You want to do the food count, Ben?”

  Ben nodded. “Tomorrow when we tie up I’ll make an inventory. We might have to cut down.” They shouldn’t, he knew. He made another note. “Suggest double caloric needs.”

  Molly’s hand slipped out from under her cheek and dangled over the side of her bunk. Ben had intended to lie with her that night, but it didn’t matter. They were all too tired even for the comfort of sex. Ben sighed and put his notebook down. The last light was fading from the sky. There was only the soft slap of wavelets against the side of the boat and the sound of deep breathing from the rear section. There was a touch of chill in the air. Ben waited until Thomas was asleep, then he lay down.

  Molly dreamed of turning over in the boat, of being unable to get out from under it, of searching for a place to surface where the boat would not cut her off from the air above. The water was pale gold, it was turning her skin golden, and she knew that if she let herself remain still for even one moment she would become a golden statue on the bottom of the river forever. She swam harder, desperate to breathe, aching, flailing, yielding to terror. Then hands reached for her, her own hands, as white as snow, and she tried to grasp them. The hands, dozens of them now, closed on nothing, opened, closed. They missed her again and again, and finally she screamed, “Here I am!” And the water rushed to fill her. She started to sink, frozen, only her mind churning with fear, forming over and over the scream of protest her lips were unable to utter.

  “Molly, hush. It’s all right.” A quiet voice in her ear penetrated finally, and she jerked awake from the dream. “It’s all right, Molly. You’re all right.”

  It was very dark. “Ben?” Molly whispered.

  “Yes. You were dreaming.”

  She shuddered and moved over so he could lie beside her. She was shivering; the night air had become very cool since they had turned in to the Potomac. Ben was warm, his arm tight about her, and his other hand warm and gentle as he caressed her cold body.

  They made no sound to awaken the others as their bodies united in the sexual embrace, and afterward Molly slept again, hard and tight against him.

  All the next day the signs of great devastation grew: houses had burned, others had been toppled by storms. The suburbs were being overgrown with shrubs and trees. Debris made the trip harder; sunken boats and collapsed bridges turned the river into a maze where their progress was measured in feet and inches. Again they had found it impossible to use the sail.

  Lewis and Molly were together in the prow of the boat, alert for submerged dangers, sometimes calling out in unison, sometimes singly, warning against hazards, neither of them silent for more than a minute or two at a time.

  Suddenly Molly pointed and cried, “Fish! There are fish!”

  They stared at the school of fish in wonder, and the boat drifted until Lewis shouted, “Obstacle! Eleven o’clock, ten yards!” They pulled the oars hard and the school of fish vanished, but the gloom had lifted. While they rowed, they talked of ways of netting fish for dinner, of drying fish for the return trip, of the excitement in the valley when they learned that fish had survived after all.

  None of the ruins they had seen from the river prepared them for the scene of desolation they came upon on the outskirts of Washington. Molly had seen photographs in books of bombed-out cities — Dresden, Hiroshima — and the destruction here seemed every bit as total. The streets were buried under rubble, here and there vines covered the heaps of concrete, and trees had taken root high above the ground, binding the piles of bricks and blocks and marble together. They stayed on the river until it became impassable, and this time the rapids were created by man-made obstacles: old rusting automobiles, a demolished bridge, a graveyard of buses . . .

  “It was worthless,” Thomas muttered. “All of this. Worthless.”

  “Maybe not,” Lewis said. “There have to be vaults, basements, fireproof storage rooms . . . Maybe not.”

  “Worthless,” Thomas said again.

  “Let’s tie up and try to figure out just where we are,” Ben said. It was nearly dusk; they couldn’t do anything until morning. “I’ll start dinner. Molly, can you make out anything from the maps?”

  She shook her head, her eyes fixed, staring at the nightmare scene before them. Who had done this? Why? It was as if the people had converged here to destroy this place that had failed them in the end so completely.

  “Molly!” Ben’s voice sharpened. “There are still a few landmarks, aren’t there?”

  She stirred and abruptly turned away from the city. Ben looked at Thomas, and from him to Harvey, who was studying the river ahead.

  “They did it on purpose,” Harvey said. “In the end they must have all been mad, obsessed with the idea of destruction.”

  Lewis said, “If we can locate ourselves, we’ll find the vaults. All this” — he waved his hand — “was done by savages. It’s all surface damage. The vaults will be intact.”

  Molly was turning slowly, examining the landscape in a panoramic survey. She said, “There should be two more bridges, and that will put us at the foot of Capitol Hill, I think. Another two or three miles.”

  “Good,” Ben said quietly. “Good. Maybe it isn’t this bad in the center. Thomas, give me a hand, will you?”

  Throughout the night the boat moved this way and that as different people, tired but unable to sleep, crept about restlessly, seeking solace from one another.

  Before dawn they were all up. They ate quickly and by the first light were on their way over the rubble toward the center of Washington. It appeared the destruction of the inner city was in fact less than on the fringes. Then they realized that here the buildings had been spaced farther apart; open land gave the illusion of less complete ruin. Also, it was obvious that someone had tried to clear away some of the debris.

  “Let’s split into pairs here,” Lewis said, taking command once more. “Meet back here at noon. Molly and Jed, over there. Ben and Thomas, that way. Harvey and I will start over there.” He pointed as he spoke, and the others nodded. Molly had identified the locations for them: the Senate Office Building was up there; the Post Office Building; the General Services Building . . .

  “We were naïve,” Thomas said suddenly as he and Ben approached the ruined Post Office Building. “We thought there would be a few buildings standing with open doors. All we had to do was walk in, pull out a drawer or two, and get everything we wanted. Be heroes when we got home. Stupid, wasn’t it?”

  “We’ve already found out a lot,” Ben said quietly.

  “What we’ve learned is that this isn’t the way,” Thomas said sharply. “We aren’t going to accomplish anything.”

  They circled the building. The front of it was blocked; around the side, one wall was down almost completely; the insides were charr
ed and gutted.

  The fourth building they tried to enter had burned also, but only parts of it had been destroyed. Here they found offices, desks, files. “Small business records!” Thomas said suddenly, whirling away from the files to look at Ben excitedly.

  Ben shook his head. “So?”

  “We came through a room with telephone directories! Where was it?” Again Ben looked mystified, and Thomas laughed. “Telephone directories! They’ll list warehouses! Factories! Storage depots!”

  They found the room where several directories lay in a pile on the floor, and Thomas began to examine one intently. Ben picked up another of the books and started to open it.

  “Careful!” Thomas said sharply. “That paper’s brittle. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Will that help?” Ben asked, pointing to the directory Thomas carried.

  “Yes, but we need the central office of the telephone company. Maybe Molly can find it.”

  That afternoon, the next day, and the next the search for useful information continued. Molly updated her Washington map, locating the buildings that contained anything of use, noting the dangerous buildings, the flooded sections — many of the basements were filled with evil-smelling water. She drew many of the skeletons they kept stumbling over. She sketched them as dispassionately as she did the buildings and streets.

  On the fourth day they found the central telephone offices, and Thomas stationed himself in one of the rooms and began to go through the directories of the eastern cities, carefully lifting out pages they could use. Ben stopped worrying about him.

  On the fifth, and sixth days it rained, a steady gray rain that flooded the low-lying areas and brought water above the basement level in some of the buildings. If the rain kept up very long, the whole city would flood, as it evidently had done over and over in the past. Then the skies cleared and the wind shifted and drove in from the north, and they shivered and continued the search.