He watched me read it. “How is it?” he said.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a little higher.”
“How much higher?”
I told him. “Bad,” he said.
“Don’t think about it. I’ll get you some breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But you must eat anyway.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll try.”
And he did; propped up in bed, he ate most of a boiled egg, some more milk, and a bit of toasted biscuit. When he finished he said:
“You know what I would like? Some iced tea. With sugar in it.”
I thought he must be joking, but he was not. Poor Mr Loomis. I said: “I haven’t got any ice.”
He said: “I know. We didn’t get the generator going in time.”
A few minutes later he fell asleep again, and I decided to try, at least. I could not make iced tea but I could make cool tea, and I thought that what he really wanted was a sweet drink. People with fevers get hungry for odd things—with me it is always chocolate ice cream. There was a tin box half full of tea bags in the pantry—my mother’s, not exactly fresh, but they smelled all right. I boiled some water, poured it into a pitcher and put in two bags. After it had steeped a while I took out the bags, added quite a lot of sugar and put the pitcher in the basement. It will cool in a few hours, and I will give it to him as a surprise.
But now I face a problem. I have to go to the brook for more water, and some time soon I am going to have to go to the store, since I am running out of several things including flour and sugar. But how can I go when he is afraid to be left alone? And I ought to milk the cow again.
This morning I went while he was still asleep. Maybe if I go in broad daylight, and tell him while he is awake where I am going, he will be all right if I do not stay too long. I will have to try that. There is nothing else I can do.
I went, both to the brook and to the store, and it was a bad business, but I could not help it. At least I do not have to go again for a few days. But I can see that I have a very troubled time coming.
I am writing this in the living room; it is night, and I have a lamp lit. Everything is quiet now, at least for the moment.
This is what happened: At about four o’clock this afternoon I knocked on his door and went in. He was asleep (he sleeps about ninety per cent of the time now), but woke up and seemed calm enough. I explained that I had to go out, and he did not seem at all bothered or upset; in fact he was surprised that I was worried about it. (He had not asked me to stay at the house, of course; it was I who was afraid of going, after what happened this morning—which I think, in fact, he does not even remember.) So I felt a little bit silly, as if I had made too much of it. Still I said:
“I will take the tractor and the cart, so I can go faster and carry more.”
“A waste of petrol,” he said.
I had thought of that, but I decided to do it anyway. It was an emergency, and one that was not likely to happen again, after he had recovered.
Despite his reassurance, I rushed to the barn and hitched the cart to the tractor as quickly as I could; fortunately it is an easy hitch, with just a single six-inch pin to slide through the shaft. The cart is a two-wheeled steel trailer, square, and has a capacity of one ton. When I had it hitched I put on to it three fifteen-gallon milk cans; I had not used these when I carried water by hand, since they are too heavy, but with the tractor that did not matter, and they would hold enough for two weeks or more. I put the tractor into high gear (it can go about fifteen miles an hour in top gear) and headed first for the brook. The empty milk cans rattled very loudly, the pasture being bumpy.
I filled them (or nearly—about two-thirds full is all I can lift), went on to the store, and loaded a lot of food supplies, including tinned stuff, dehydrated soup, sugar, flour, cornmeal, dog food and chicken corn. Before leaving I also refilled the tractor’s petrol tank from the pump. After all this, including the ploughing, it had only used about two and a half gallons, not too bad. As I started back up the road towards the house I looked at my watch. I had been gone forty minutes.
I was hurrying towards the house, still in high gear, and was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away when I saw it. The front door flew open and Mr Loomis came out, trying to run but staggering. I could not see his face but the red and white pyjamas were unmistakable. He crossed the porch, stopped at the railing and held on a few seconds, then stumbled down the steps and across the yard towards the tent and the wagon. Faro ran up, tail wagging, and then backed off, staring at him doubtfully.
By this time I had reached the driveway, ! turned in and shut off the motor. Mr Loomis, running in a groping kind of way, as if he could not see well, had not gone to the tent but to the wagon. He opened the end, reached inside, and when his hands came out, to my horror, he was holding the gun, the big carbine. I jumped down and ran towards him, but before I reached him he had fired three shots. He aimed them at the second floor of the house, at my father and mother’s bedroom, and I could see puffs of white paint and splintered wood fly off where the bullets hit. The gun made a terrible noise, much louder than the .22.
I shouted—I may have shrieked; I cannot remember—and he turned towards me, swinging the gun round so it was aimed at me. To my own surprise I stayed calm.
“Mr Loomis,” I said, “you’re sick. You’re dreaming. Put the gun away.” His face suddenly looked incredibly distressed and twisted up, as if he might cry, and his eyes were very blurred. But he recognized me and lowered the rifle.
“You went away,” he said.
Just as before.
“I told you,” I said. “I had to go. Don’t you remember?”
“I went to sleep,” he said. “When I woke up I heard—" He did not want to tell me what he had heard.
“Heard what?”
“I thought I heard… somebody in the house. I called you. He was upstairs.”
“Who was upstairs?”
But he was being evasive. “Someone moving.”
“Mr Loomis, there was no one in the house. It’s the fever again. You must stay in bed.” It was terrible—standing outside in pyjamas with a fever of a hundred and five. I took the gun from his hands and put it back in the wagon. He did not resist, but began to shiver violently, and I saw that both he and the plaid pyjamas were soaked with sweat. I got him back into the house and on to the bed. I pulled the blankets over him and went upstairs to get him some dry pyjamas.
In my father and mother’s room I saw where the bullets had gone. Fortunately except for knocking plaster all over the floor they had done no real damage; they had gone through the wall and almost straight up into the ceiling, and hit nothing on the way. I would have to plug the holes up somehow, and sweep the floor.
I got the clean pyjamas and gave them to him to change. He can still do that himself; I suppose if he gets so he cannot I will have to do it. Also I will have to get him a basin to use as a bed pan since he should no longer get up to go to the bathroom.
It was after he had changed pyjamas that I realized that he had still not quite lost his illusion. I went into his room to get the wet pyjamas, to take them to the laundry room. He was lying in bed with his eyes closed, but when he heard me he opened them and said, sounding very tired:
“Is he gone?”
I said: “Is who gone?”
“Edward,” he said.
“You were dreaming again.”
He shook his head, and then he said: “Yes. I forgot. Edward is dead. He couldn’t have come all this way.”
So it was Edward again. But I am worried. If he is dreaming about Edward, who was, I suppose, a friend of his, why does he want to shoot him?
I think I had better sleep in here, on the sofa. He sleeps very restlessly, muttering and groaning.
I forgot all about giving him his tea, but it will still be good in the morning.
Chapter Eleven
June 4th Morning.
This is a terrible
day.
I do not know how high his fever has gone, because it has reached a hundred and six, and beyond that the thermometer does not show. I do not think he can live on very long with such a high temperature.
I remembered from my high-school course that alcohol reduces fever; I found a half bottle of rubbing alcohol liniment in the upstairs medicine cupboard. Every hour I soak one of my father’s handkerchiefs with that and rub his back, chest, arms, neck and forehead. He tries to draw away—I suppose it must feel like ice—but I think it does help him.
He still sleeps most of the time, and when he wakes up it is into a dream, a nightmare. Only for a few minutes now and then does he seem to be rational, and to recognize me or even see or hear me. The rest of the time he is delirious, and often he is terrified, always of the same thing—he thinks Edward is here, and is threatening him with something vague and dreadful. At least it is vague to me.
Still I am beginning to realize that something bad happened between Mr Loomis and Edward (I do not know his last name), and that they were not friends at all, but enemies, at least at the end.
Sometimes he acts as if he thinks I am Edward, but more often he stares beyond me, as if I am not there at all; he is looking at someone over my shoulder. It is so real that I turn and look myself, but of course there is no one there. At times he thinks Edward is here in the valley, in the house; other times Mr Loomis is back with him near Ithaca, in the laboratory under the mountain. And he says certain things over and over again.
It began this morning. I knocked and went into his room with a glass of the cold tea and a soft-boiled egg I had stirred up in a cup, hoping I could get him to eat a few bites. He was awake, but when he spoke it was not to me; it was to the doorway behind me. He said:
“Stay back, Edward, stay back. It’s no use.”
I said: “Mr Loomis, it’s me. I’ve brought you some breakfast.”
He rubbed his eyes, and they came into focus. But his voice, when he spoke again, was blurred and tired.
“No breakfast. Too sick.”
“Try,” I said. “I’ve brought you some iced tea.”
I held out the glass, and to my delight he took it and drank thirstily, finishing half of it without pausing. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s good.” He drank the rest, and closed his eyes. I thought it must be reasonably nourishing, with all the sugar.
“I’ll bring more later,” I said. “Now try the egg.”
But when he opened his eyes again he was staring at the door. He tried to call out, but his voice was weak:
“Edward?”
I said: “Mr Loomis, Edward is not here.”
“I know,” he said. “Where did he go?”
“You mustn’t worry about it.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “He’s a thief. He’ll steal—" He stopped, as if he had remembered something, and then to my dismay he gave a terrible groan and tried to get out of the bed.
I caught his shoulders and held him back. For a minute he fought quite hard; then he lay still, breathing fast and shallow.
“Poor Mr Loomis,” I said. “Try to understand. You’re dreaming. There is no Edward, and nothing to steal.”
“The suit,” he said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “He’ll steal the suit.”
The suit. That is what he was worried about, and still is. The safe-suit: for some reason he thinks Edward is trying to steal it.
I said: “Mr Loomis, the suit is in the wagon. You folded it up and put it there. Can’t you remember?”
“In the wagon,” he said. “Oh my God. That’s where he’s gone.”
It was obviously the wrong thing for me to have said, because now he tried again to get up. I held him down; it was not so hard, because he had used up most of his strength the first time. But I am in dread of his getting out of the bed. I am afraid he will fall and hurt himself; more important, I don’t know how I would ever get him back into it. I am sure he is too weak to walk, and I don’t know if I can lift and carry him. So I must now stay in the room with him, at least until he gets through this nightmare.
The dream is contagious. I suppose it is partly because there are only two of us, and his thoughts affect mine more than they would if I had others to talk to. I sit in the window to write, and I look out and see the wagon still there, next to the tent as it has always been, and I half expect to see someone—Edward? I don’t even know what he looks like!—prowling around it. But there is only Faro lying in the trampled grass by the tent near his dish, waiting to be fed. In a little while I will call him into the house and feed him in here.
No. I have a better idea. When Mr Loomis calms down a little, as he seems to be doing, I will run out, take Faro’s food with me, and get the safe-suit. I will bring it in and put it by the bed where he can see it. I will humour his dream to that extent. It will make him less worried.
Afternoon
I got the suit and brought it in, but a few minutes later that particular nightmare ended, and he was in another, even worse, perhaps brought on by the sight of the suit. He was back in Ithaca having a most desperate quarrel with Edward. I am glad it was only a dream, because it sounded as if one of them was going to murder the other. As he did before, Mr Loomis was carrying on a conversation, and I could hear only half of it, but he was hearing both sides. His voice was faint and mumbling, but even so it sounded cold and full of hate, and dangerous. I suppose when two men are shut up together in a confined area, the tensions between them grow terrible.
When he began talking I was sitting by the window and did not hear the first few words. Then it came clearer.
“… not for just twenty-four hours, Edward. Not even for twenty-four minutes. If you want to find your family go ahead. But the suit stays here, and the door stays locked. Don’t try to come back.”
A pause. He was listening to Edward’s reply.
Poor Edward. It was not hard to understand the situation. He and Mr Loomis were locked up in the underground laboratory, apparently alone. They must have been staying there, working late, perhaps getting some last-minute things done, expecting the people from Washington, when the bombing began. They had a radio—maybe even television—so they knew what was happening. I suppose they had a telephone, too, but that would not have done much good after the first hour.
Edward was married. He had a wife named Mary and a son named Billy, and he was frantic with worry about them.
I don’t wonder—I know how he felt. Apparently at first he was afraid to go out—they had real exploding H-bombs in that area, not just drifting fallout. But after the first few days, when things quietened down, he wanted to go and find them, and that is when the fight began.
They knew that the air was poisonous with radioactivity, and they had in their laboratory the only suit in the world that would protect against it. One suit, and two people. That was the situation. That is why, in his dream, Mr Loomis kept reminding Edward that his wife and son were dead; and I suppose Edward had a wild hope that some people might have survived, that they might be alive in a cellar or a shelter.
That was why he wanted to take the suit, even for twenty-four hours. To find them, if they were alive; and if they were dead, to settle the anguish once and for all. Perhaps to see them one more time, perhaps to bury them. I do not know.
Mr Loomis was not married; at least I do not think he was, though he has never said anything about it. And he did not want Edward to take the suit. What was the use, if they were dead? In the dream he said:
“How do I know you’ll bring it back? Suppose something goes wrong?”
And later:
“Of course they’re dead. You heard the radio. There isn’t any more Ithaca, Edward. And even if you found them alive—what then?”
A pause.
“You mean you would leave them to bring the suit back? You’re lying, Edward.”
And again:
“The suit, Edward, the suit. Think about it: it may be the last useful thing anybody ever mad
e. You’re not going to waste it on a visit to your dead wife.”
Poor Edward. He kept pleading. I found I was wishing Mr Loomis might lend him the suit, though I could understand why he would not. And I wondered why Edward did not just take it, or at least try. For instance, I thought, Mr Loomis would have had to sleep some of the time.
And then I learned; that is just what he did do. And that led to the worst part of the nightmare, for Mr Loomis, weak as he was, was trying to shout in anger and in dread, and it came out as a horrible, thin whimper. He was also trying again to get up from the bed, to sit, to raise his arms. But he was so weak I did not have to hold him. He could not do it.
I understood now why Edward had been pleading. Because Mr Loomis was holding, or dreamed he was holding, a gun. I could understand most of what he was saying; he was cursing Edward in terrible language, profanity which I will not write down here.
And then he said;
“You’re a thief and a liar, Edward, but it’s no use. Stand back from the door.”
A pause.
“No. I warn you. I will shoot. The suit will stop radiation, but it won’t stop bullets.”
I remembered. That was the first thing he had said to me when I found him sick in the tent, when he saw my rifle. The sight of it had brought him back to this moment, and now he was in it again. He was threatening to shoot Edward, as he had in the laboratory, where he had been guarding the door.
In a few more seconds it was over. He gave a desperate groan, a deeper sound than before, and then a series of strangling noises. I thought he must be trying to cry. Then he closed his eyes and lay still, except for his breathing, which was very fast and light, like a small animal that has been running. I tried to take his pulse, but all I could feel was a fluttering, so faint I could not count it.
I wondered if he had really shot Edward, and if so how badly he had injured him. An idea came to me which I did not like, but I decided I must do it anyway. I went to where I had put his suit, folded up on a chair beside his bed. I unfolded it and took it to the window, into the light.
Z for Zachariah Page 8
