A Gift Upon the Shore (11 page)

—HERBERT GEORGE WELLS,
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
(1920)

W
hen had night come?

Mary Hope tried to remember. Minutes ago? Hours? How much time had passed, and what time was it now?

Mary's hand stirred abortively under the comforter. She didn't make the error—again—of looking at her watch. It had stopped, its minuscule circuits burned out in one silent millisecond. In that same millisecond it seemed the circuits of her mind had been destroyed, grids of perception and comprehension charred to inert threads of ash.

Rachel's old mechanical watch would still be working. They could be grateful for that.

Why?

What difference did it make what time it was now?

This was the end. Time didn't matter. Or perhaps it was only the beginning.

What is it when there is no time?

No, that was ridiculous, to say something didn't exist because the means to measure it had ceased to exist. . . .

For all the time Mary couldn't now measure—a few hours; it couldn't be more—her mind had functioned erratically on two levels she couldn't integrate. Neither the events of the last hours nor her thought sequences had imprinted themselves coherently in memory.

What am I doing here
?

Did she ask that aloud? No. It only seemed like a question that should be asked aloud.

She knew the answer. One part of her mind knew it. The other part couldn't make sense of it.

The lithium-cell emergency light glowed atop a stack of cartons. Foolish to leave it on. They should save the batteries. At the foot of the basement stairs, like the debris of an avalanche, bedding, clothing, food, tools lay in shadowed mounds. Something pathetic about the light falling on a ceiling of cobwebbed floor joists; on pocked, concrete walls where the peeling whitewash made blighted patterns; on the yellow, sawed ends of stacked firewood; on the cast-iron Franklin stove; on shelves jumbled with dusty tools and scraps of lumber and pipes and loops of electrical wire and rusted paint cans wearing their colors in serrated collars of old drips—the detritus that basements collect over the years, the kinds of odds and ends that Rachel never threw away.

What were you keeping it for, Rachel
?

At least the old mattress and springs had proved useful. Mary made herself aware of herself, of exactly where she was, and knew that was what she'd been avoiding all these hours, wherever she was and whatever she was doing. She listened for her own heartbeat, for the sound of her own breath, and she thought,
I am alive, I am here, this is now, and it is real
.

Images flickered in the nether reaches of her mind: fire and blinding white caldrons of light, black bones of girders, towering monoliths warping, splintering, disintegrating.

She was alive, but her mother was dead. Everyone she had known in Portland was dead. The city was dead, and how many cities with it?

But she was alive.

At this moment, in this place, she was huddled with Rachel on the old mattress, buried under a down comforter, propped with pillows between them and the concrete wall. Rachel's right arm was free of the comforter so she could stroke Shadow's head, while Shadow panted her fear, ears back. Sparky lay at the foot of the bed, outwardly calmer, yet his eyes shifted constantly from Mary to Rachel. Beneath one of the small, high windows, sealed with boards except for the taped hole for the intake hose, Jim Acres's filter pump thrummed like an insensate pulse. The air seemed heavy, turgid with the smell of dust and mold.

And beyond the window, the night raged. It had its own pulse.

Mary had to think about that sound, and she found it acidly ironic that it was only the howling, lashing roar of the storm that had swept in from the horizon where it lurked this afternoon.

It was only the storm.

At this moment she had no proof that anything worse than a sou'wester had occurred beyond the sealed windows.

No proof except a watch that had stopped—along with every electrical appliance in the house—and the fact that Jim's radio, the one that had been stored in the basement in its lead-sheathed box, had offered nothing but stuttering hisses of static.

And the fear and despair that finally came into focus in her mind shook her body, choked off her breath while she strained to stop a cry.

Why
?

That was the word she wanted to shriek against the hammering of the storm. But she held it back, because she felt Rachel trembling, too. They clung to each other as if each were paradoxically both the drowning victim and the rescuer. And Rachel said in a sibilant whisper, “Those ignorant, arrogant
bastards!
”

Mary didn't attempt a response to that. She knew that anything she tried to say would come out in a scream of rage and chagrin.

It would be a long night, and she wondered how they would know when it was over.

—FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
DOÑA ROSITA
(1935)

L
ike all our meals, breakfast is served at the long cedar table in the dining room. There are thirteen of us at the table; enough for a coven. Today we are treated to eggs scrambled with goat cheese, and I am treated to a duet by Little Mary and Deborah, since I missed their debut as a vocal duo at morning service. They sing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” with enthusiasm and an attempt at harmony on Mary's part. I respond with applause and words of praise. I'm always glad to hear the children make music, whatever the message in the lyrics. And I like to believe they respond to the music more than the message.

Miriam, of course, values the message above the music, and while the girls sing, she watches me as if to be sure I get that point. I smile and after the duet tell her how sweetly the girls' voices blend.

An hour later the same table serves for another activity: school. Six days a week, three hours a day, the time determined by the Seth Thomas, the only timepiece that still works. I'm not sure how accurate it is by now.

I have the children for these three hours because I once made a bargain with Jerry.

So, again I sit at the table with my children waiting.
My
children. At least, when it comes to their education, their humanization, they're mine. I look at them and think how beautiful they are, as simple and as accessible as the iridescent skin of a soap bubble, and as fragile.

I sit at the west end of the table with the blackboard on one of Rachel's easels behind me, and in my hand is a precious stump of chalk. There's one box of pastels left, but I'm always trying pieces of soft stone as a substitute. None I've found so far have worked. Nor have I found substitutes for paper and pencils for the children's use. What little paper is left I hoard like a Scrooge. Enid and Bernadette are allotted a share of the precious sheets, but only the machine-made notebook or typing paper. Still, that suffices for Enid's garden and livestock breeding records, and for Bernadette's formulas for her herbal medicines. The pencils are long gone, but there's still some of Rachel's India ink, and we make a passable ink from twinberries.

Instead of paper, the children use slates of sorts—small rectangles of untempered Masonite that Rachel had prepared for encaustics. The smooth, white gesso ground takes well the marks of the vine maple charcoal sticks I make, for which Enid knits minuscule sleeves to keep the children's fingers clean. Enid considers cleanliness next to godliness, but the children blithely smear their hands and even their faces with charcoal every day. But it's easily removed, godly cleanliness restored.

Jonathan sits on my right today. He's fourteen, Jerry and Miriam's first child, and inbreeding has shown no deleterious effects in him. He is in every way his father's son, even to Jerry's tendency to naiveté and his intrinsic dependability. And like Jerry, Jonathan isn't particularly good at reading and verbalization; his forte is mathematics, and in that he'll soon surpass me.

Isaac sits next to Jonathan, his half-brother. My sweet Isaac with his asthma and club foot. He's a little slow mentally, and I don't expect much of him in school. I'm just glad to have him here, this loving, fey child. He teaches me, I think, more than I can teach him.

On my left, Stephen occupies his usual seat. My scholar, my hope for the future of humankind—or this small colony of humankind. He is also the family's hope genetically. His father was an Arkite, so he carries neither Miriam's nor Jerry's genes. All the other children do, and sooner or later, that will cause problems.

But sooner or later, this colony will find other survivors or be found by them. That's inevitable. And necessary, although I wonder if the family will survive discovery intact. Yet change is also inevitable.

Next to Stephen on my left is Little Mary, Stephen's half-sister. She has Jerry's blue eyes and brown hair, but her skin is darker. Mary is eight, the first child born at Amarna, and Esther named her for me. An honor, I know, but I hope she won't have to be called
Little
Mary too many more years. Probably not. She's not a scholar like her brother, but she's extraordinarily adept with her hands. Now she's drawing cats on her gessoed slate, and for an eight-year-old, her drawings catch the lithe essence of catness amazingly well.

Next to Mary is her singing partner, Deborah, who has also begun scrawling on her slate. She's six, Miriam and Jerry's youngest, and Miriam's image, with her copper hair and fair skin. She's vivacious and flirtatious as I suspect Miriam might once have been. Or wanted to be. I suppose I encourage that in Deborah even at the risk of spoiling her.

The youngest of the children isn't here. She's only three, and hasn't yet become one of
my
children. Rebecca's child—the one whose birth killed her. Rebecca's last wish was that the child should be called Rachel. A fitting memorial, I think, to Rachel Morrow.

“All right, children, let's begin.” I lean forward, pick up the damp rag in its plate in the center of the table, and hand it to Mary. “You and Deborah clean your slates. Now, today we'll start with numbers. Specifically, the number one million. I've talked about millions of things before, but do any of you really know what a million is?”

Jonathan responds, “It's a one with six zeros after it.”

“Yes. How long do you think it would take to count to a million?”

“You mean by ones? Well, it'd take a long time. Maybe a couple of hours.”

“Let's see if we can figure out exactly how long. First, we'll count up to a thousand and time it by the clock.” I look at the Seth Thomas on the spool cabinet on the north wall as I rise and go to the blackboard to mark down the time. “Deborah, you start. Just count as high as you can, one number for every tick of the clock.”

Deborah only gets to twenty, then Isaac continues the count, with a few corrections, to one hundred. Mary takes it to three hundred, and Stephen and Jonathan complete it, and by then the younger ones are showing signs of boredom and agree heartily that it takes a long time just to count to a thousand. About fifteen minutes, in fact.

Then comes the multiplication, and while the others watch, Jonathan makes the calculations on the blackboard and finally reveals that to count to one million would require nearly ten and a half days. They are all satisfactorily amazed and, I hope, have learned a little about calculation as well as measuring time.

And
million
is a concept vital to these children. Their world is as small and flat as the world of their ancient ancestors. It took more than thirty millennia for humankind to discover
million
and the even larger numbers it spawned, and they gave us the measure of the universe.

That measure must not be lost.

By the time the midday meal is finished, cumulus clouds are marching in over the horizon, but they offer no real threat of rain. I find Stephen waiting for me on the deck, and once I've settled into my chair, he wastes no time on small talk. “Did you bring one of your diaries, Mary?”

His impatience pleases me. I reach into my skirt pocket for a diary—the third one—but again, it's only a prop and a prod to memory. “Of course I did. Now, where was I?”

He turns in his chair, his hooded eyes intent. “You were telling me about Armageddon here at Amarna.”

I open the diary, study the erratic notations, and it requires a stringent mental bracing to return in memory to that time. It reminds me that spring days spent in quiet, satisfying endeavors are the obverse of dark days spent in terror, and the coin can flip so quickly, so casually. “Yes, when Rachel and I retreated into our cave.”

“Your cave?”

“The basement. But it seemed like a cave to me. I felt like . . . like time had folded in on itself, and I was a Cro-Magnon woman huddled at the hearth in my cave, with the glacier wind and the Dire Wolves howling outside, and tens of thousands of years had been lost as if they'd never existed.”

His eyes narrow thoughtfully, then he asks, “But why did you have to stay in the basement?”

“Because of the radiation from the bombs. FEMA—that was the Federal Emergency Management Agency—had published volumes on surviving a nuclear war. Surviving! They estimated it would take two weeks for the initial fallout to clear. So, Rachel and I stayed in our cave for two weeks without once even opening a window. We didn't know how bad the radiation was here. Actually, I don't think we got much initial fallout. That storm protected us. But we didn't know. Jim had a Geiger counter, but we didn't find it in the shelter or in their house, so we didn't know about the radiation. We didn't know
anything
. That was the worst part. We didn't know whether Jim's radio just wasn't working or couldn't pick up anything through the basement walls or whether there was no one out there broadcasting. The only thing we
did
know is that it was colder than usual for September. We just huddled there in our frigid cave for two endless weeks—wondering.”

I pause, look up into the cloud-dappled, springtime sky. “The odd thing is, Stephen, that was a time of hope. I mean, a time when it was still
possible
to hope. I imagined the worst, yes, but sometimes I imagined the best, which was that we'd made a mistake, that there hadn't really been a war. Or I imagined that even if there had been a war, it wasn't extensive enough to destroy
all
civilization. And I imagined that when we left our cave, we'd find other survivors, pool our resources, and work ourselves out of the disaster. I imagined we'd find at least vestiges of a government to help us. Of course, I realized it might not be ours. We might have lost the war.” I have to laugh as I speak those words. You can't say that without either laughing or crying.

Then I look around at Stephen. “But the two weeks finally ended. Rachel and I finally came out of our cave.”

His obsidian eyes are fixed on me; he seems to have stopped breathing. “What did you find?”

“Nothing that I had imagined.”

I close the diary. I need no prod for memory now. Sometimes I wish I
could
forget.