A Gift Upon the Shore (19 page)

I put in, “About time for the tar paper, too. Sorry to be so slow.”

She shrugs. “Put them down. We'll take care of them later.” Then she turns away, takes the flat along the row to Enid and Grace.

I prop the squares against a fence post, take a deep breath of the musty perfume of the earth, and remember the seasons I've spent here coaxing out the green miracles with hard work. This was Rachel's garden. This was my garden. Yet now I am unnecessary here.

I start down the slope toward the house. Stephen joins me, walks silently beside me for a while, then at length he speaks. “Miriam says you hate her, you know.”

Startled, I stop, search his face. He said it so matter-of-factly, so indifferently, yet what I see in his hooded eyes is bewilderment.

“Stephen, did Miriam tell you that?”

“No, not me. I heard her talking to Grace yesterday in the garden.”

Of course. If it can be said that we have a gossip in our community, it is Grace. And if one wishes to convey anything to the community without doing so personally, one has only to tell Grace.

I turn and continue toward the house. Miriam is experimenting in manipulation and propaganda. She isn't subtle, but here she doesn't need to be.
Damn
her.

“Mary?” Stephen kicks at dandelion heads as he walks.

“It's all right, Stephen. Don't worry.”

“Do you hate her?”

And that's the question I asked myself only hours ago, but my feelings aren't as simple as an affirmative or negative would indicate.

“I wonder why Miriam would say that, Stephen. And how she feels about
me
.”

We have no further opportunity to discuss the matter. Little Mary and Jonathan are coming around the corner from the house, each carefully balancing a flat of seedlings. Stephen says, “I'd better hurry and get another flat up to the garden.”

“Yes, you go ahead.” I watch him jog toward Mary and Jonathan, stop to exchange a few bantering words with them. They part laughing.

By early afternoon the last rain clouds have vanished, the sun is striking rainbows on every blade of rain-dewed grass, and the air is as clear as a drop of water. I've draped the chairs on the deck with blankets. The wood is still damp, but I don't want to sit inside now and waste this crystalline afternoon. Shadow curls napping at my feet, and Falstaff, the old yellow tabby, has taken up residence in my lap, purring while I stroke his broad, amber back. He seldom plays the lap cat, but apparently he finds my lap in this sunny place acceptable.

I listen to the omnipresent rumble of the surf, watch the foam-laced breakers curl and spill in white avalanches, but I'm thinking about Miriam, about rumors of hate, about candles for reading. There's so little time for the children to read, especially in spring and summer when the tasks necessary to survival take up most of the daylight hours. If Miriam won't let Stephen read at night by candlelight, he's left only a short time after evening services before he goes to bed.

And Miriam is well aware of that. She doesn't want him—or any of the children—to read. Except the Bible. For her that one book is the fount of all wisdom. It is all she will tolerate in the way of wisdom.

The other adults are more tolerant, but it is the tolerance of indifference. They follow Jerry's lead in that. He sees no harm in my teaching the children, nor is he particularly interested in what I teach them. He did, after all, give his word.

But if it ever comes to a choice between me and Miriam—rather, as Jerry will see it, between me and peace in the family—I wonder how tolerant he will be.

And the family peace is fraying. I felt it at midday meal. Uneasy pauses in the conversation, uncertain glances exchanged.

Or is that only a projection of my own tension? Certainly Jerry was his usual ebullient self, eating heartily of chicken stew, peas, and potato cakes thick with butter, while he talked about the cedars he found up the Styx, which will provide good lumber for the addition to the north wing.

Shadow lifts her head, looks northward, and I see Stephen and Isaac coming around the corner of the house. They don't bother to go to the steps at the south end of the deck, but climb over the railing. Stephen waits to offer Isaac a helping hand, then as they approach me he says, “Miriam said Isaac should rest for a while. Is it all right if he stays with us for the lesson?”

No doubt Miriam is making Isaac her innocent spy. “Of course, it's all right. Isaac, why don't you go in and get a chair.”

He boosts himself onto the railing. “This'll be all right.”

Stephen gestures toward the empty chair. “You sit there, Isaac.”

Isaac shrugs, gets off the railing, stops to pet Falstaff. The cat rouses, annoyed, and leaves my lap, venting his choler with a swipe at Shadow's nose as he departs. Shadow only draws back and growls, then resumes her nap. Isaac laughs, and that brings on a spate of coughing, which he ignores as he settles in the chair.

Stephen winces at the dry hacking, then turns to me. I think he'd like to talk about Miriam, about my feelings for her, hers for me, but he is constrained by Isaac's presence. He asks, “Did you and Rachel ever go on another journey to look for survivors?”

I would also like to finish our discussion about Miriam. I don't like to leave it unresolved in Stephen's mind, but I'm equally constrained. “No, Stephen. That one trek was lesson enough. It taught us our limitations and forced us into certain decisions.”

“You mean like preserving the books?”

“Yes. Our legacy.”

Isaac asks, “What's a legacy, Mary?”

“Well, it's a sort of gift. A gift to future generations.”

Stephen perches on the railing. “Jeremiah said when Grandpa Luke was on his deathbed he told him Rachel had a divine mission to save the books.”

I nod, thinking how deceptions stick like burrs to your skirts. Luke held the secret so many years, but I encouraged Jeremiah to divulge it. It served my purposes.

“Rachel and I considered it the most important thing in our lives. Yet it was so slow. Time, that's what we were shortest on. And wax. The bees only produced so much every year, and we needed most of it for candles.”

“Wax?” Stephen asks. “How did you use wax?”

“To seal the books. First we wrapped each one in aluminum foil—we had a lot of that from our scavenging—then we covered the foil with melted beeswax. We applied it with Rachel's bristle brushes, the same ones she used for her encaustic paintings.”

“Oh, yes.” Then he adds: “I don't think I really understand some of her pictures.”

“You mean the abstracts. Maybe because they aren't pictures; they're paintings. I think what she was trying to say is that things aren't always what they seem, but they're all interrelated.”

“I think the pictures are pretty,” Isaac insists.

Stephen laughs at that, then: “Mary, what did you do after you covered the foil with wax?”

“Well, when the wax was a quarter of an inch thick, we wrapped each book in another layer of foil to protect the wax. Our packaging was at least watertight. We experimented with a couple of duplicates.” I look north toward the vault. Its brick and stone and cedar seem so solid, so steadfast, but time and weather can destroy mountains.

Stephen asks, “Will you ever open the vault, Mary?”

“Me? No. It can't be opened until your children, or their children, rediscover how to make paper, so they can copy the books and learn from them and preserve the knowledge for
their
children.”

Isaac pulls his legs up, sits cross-legged. “How many books
are
there in the vault?”

“Nearly ten thousand, Isaac.”

His eyes go wide, and Stephen sighs. “It would take forever to copy that many books.”

“A long time, at least, but the more people there are who can write, the sooner they'll be copied. Or even printed. A simple printing press wouldn't be so hard to build.” Then I laugh wearily. “Oh, Stephen, we can't predict the future. That's what Rachel said. We can only try. And hope.”

He studies me, and sometimes his eyes seem as fathomless as a night sky. At length, he nods, as if I've answered a question for him.

I shift in my chair, seeking a more comfortable position. “Anyway, sealing the books was a long, slow process. Of course, at first we didn't have the vault, so we kept the sealed books in the basement. And one reason we were so slow is that we usually read, or at least skimmed, the books before we sealed them. With each book . . . it was like sending a baby out on a river in a reed basket, hoping a princess would find it.”

“Like the baby Moses!” Isaac says eagerly.

“Yes, Isaac.” I don't point out that Moses was only one of many infants in mythology sent out on such river voyages. “The hope kept us alive and . . . yes, I'd say happy. Surviving still meant hard work, and we were always learning new skills, but there was satisfaction in that. We took pride in our strength and resourcefulness. The old griefs never quite died for us, but we were surviving as human beings, not simply as organisms do, without cognizance, without a frame of reference. We didn't surrender our humanity.”

Stephen nods, and there's a shadow of sadness in his eyes. “But how did you keep going when you were so . . . alone?”

“Well, we kept busy, Stephen. We had no choice about that. But it wasn't all work. Sometimes in the evenings we entertained ourselves with card games or Scrabble. That was Rachel's favorite game.”

“I like Scrabble, too,” Isaac puts in.

I use the Scrabble set as a teaching aid now. No one here is equal to a real game of Scrabble. “Yes, it's a good game, Isaac. But there was one entertainment we missed sorely. Music. It was a part of our humanity that was denied us. The records—oh, those silent disks. Rachel had hundreds of records, a sampling of the best music of five centuries, but even if we'd had electricity, our stereo had been destroyed by EMP. I wonder how many centuries it will take to reinvent the symphony orchestra, and if . . .” Both Stephen and Isaac are gazing uneasily at me. They don't understand what I'm talking about. Or what they've lost.

Isaac smiles tentatively, and I want to touch the soft contours of his cheeks. But I only return his smile and go on. “At any rate, our life here at Amarna was quiet and even satisfying for eight years after our trek. We had problems and small disasters, but we managed to deal with them. We lived and worked from season to season, rather than from year to year. Now, when I look back, it seems those seasons passed quickly. Then one day—the first of April, in fact—nearly half a year after the tenth anniversary of the End, everything changed for us at Amarna.”

Now Stephen smiles, too. He thinks he knows the nature of that change, thinks it was the change that Rachel and I had longed for, the answer to our hopes.

So did I, on that April Fool's Day.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON,
LETTER TO W. SHORT
, April 13, 1820

—ELIZABETH I (1533–1603),
FINIS, ELIZA REGINA
,
ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM MANUSCRIPT

T
he last two weeks in March had been gray with cold rain that beat down the seedlings in the garden and made the pasture a swamp, but this, the first day of April, dawned clear, the sun drawing a mist of steam from the rooftops and fields.

When the morning chores were finished, Mary took a bucket and chisel and set out for the beach. The tide was unusually low, exposing the rocks—and the mussels growing on them—at the base of the Knob, and tonight they would feast on mussel chowder. Yorick followed her, and she didn't discourage him, although he had a tendency to wander. She took the silent whistle; he always responded to that. Yorick was the image of Sparky, one of the litter born to fey Ophelia last fall, the last litter Sparky had fathered. The last Ophelia had mothered.

At the foot of the path Mary climbed over the logjam of driftwood cast up by the winter storms, then paused to savor the sun on the sea. The wind blew out of the east, throwing rainbows of spindrift back from the massive avalanches of the breakers, and as she watched them she remembered music she hadn't heard, even in memory, for many years. Beethoven. One of the symphonies. Which one, she couldn't be sure.

Yorick ran out to the water's edge, chased a gull that casually lifted into the wind and hovered out of reach, while Mary struck out for the Knob, her shadow stretching before her. Lean and vigorous, that shadow figure, and it reflected the way she felt today: in tune with her world, blending with her surroundings, tan chino pants the color of the light sand, blue-gray jacket the color of the heavier, dark sand.

Abruptly Yorick stopped his dance with the gull, faced south, ears forward, and began barking. Mary turned, alert, but not yet alarmed. Something was moving on the beach about two hundred yards away. She wondered why she hadn't seen it before, but it was close to the piles of drift. Maybe it had been hidden there.

It
. Why was she thinking it?

What she saw was a human being.

The chisel clattered against the bucket as the bale slipped out of her hand. She blinked, expecting the figure to resolve into a mirage, an accident of light and atmosphere. But it remained unmistakably human, despite the exaggerating effect of a backpack.

A human being.

She stood flailed by emotions, all conflicting—disbelief, hope, fear, joy—and the result was paralysis.

But that passed, gave way to caution. She called Yorick with the silent whistle, ran to the tumble of drift, and crouched behind a log, held Yorick with a hand around his muzzle to keep him from barking.

And watched the stranger draw nearer with every stumbling step.

He gave no indication that he was aware of her. Yes, it was
he
. She could see a red beard; a wide-brimmed, leather hat shadowed the rest of his face. He wore a sheepskin jacket, gray with soot and dirt, and pants of dark cloth stuffed into hiking boots. The boots had to come from Before. The backpack, too. He was tall and thin, with long legs that didn't seem to function properly, that gave him an odd, scarecrow aspect. A rifle was slung over his left shoulder.

He stopped. He was only a hundred feet from her now, and she wondered if he had seen her.

No. His eyes were fixed ahead on the Knob. He staggered, nearly fell, then got his balance again. He was
ill
. She almost cried out at that realization. When he was only a few yards away, she heard him shouting over the roar of the surf. No, he was singing. “ ‘. . . the beautiful, the beautiful river . . . gather at the river . . . flows by the throne of God. . . .' ”

But his legs couldn't keep pace with the song. Again, he staggered, his knees buckled, and he toppled like a felled tree.

Yorick slipped out of her arms, ran barking toward the man, but he didn't move.
He's dead
, Mary thought—might even have said it aloud as she ran after Yorick.

The stranger lay sprawled on his belly, face half-buried in the sand. She turned him on his side, his head lolling. He was alive, and she nearly wept with relief. But she could turn him no further until she got the backpack off, and her hands were shaking so badly, it took an inordinate amount of time to unbuckle the straps, and all the while he was straining for breath. His skin was wan as alabaster, damp with sweat, the sand clinging like a rough second skin. Mary hesitated, her mouth dry. It occurred to her that his disease might be contagious.

But even if it were, what was she to do? Leave him here to die—the first living human being she'd seen in ten years?

Finally she got the pack off, and he slumped over onto his back. Her breath catching at the feel of his skin hot against hers, she brushed the sand away from his eyes and mouth. His long, narrow head seemed skull-like, with jutting cheekbones, deep eye sockets—a face that at first seemed old, yet she realized he was younger than she. His hat had fallen off, revealing a cloth band that restrained his long, tangled, copper red hair; words were embroidered on the band, but she didn't try to read them. Where had he come from? How did he get here?

It didn't matter. Not now. She ran for the ravine, Yorick barking at her heels. She was panting when she reached the top of the path, but she still had breath enough to shout for Rachel. All five dogs—even Shadow, limping with her arthritic joints—joined the cacophony, and Rachel came out of the greenhouse. “Mary, what's
wrong
?”

Mary worked the words through panting gasps. “A man . . . there's a man on the beach . . . he's
alive
, Rachel!”

Whether he would remain alive was moot. Mary and Rachel carried him up the mud-slick path, and once they got him to the house, they put him in Mary's bed and stripped off his clothes. They saw the scars then, the white weals across his back, and Rachel said tightly, “Man's inhumanity to man hasn't abated, I see.”

His fever registered 103 degrees on Rachel's old mercury thermometer. Through the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, they alternately bathed him with wet cloths, then when the chills struck, covered him with layers of blankets, and in the rare moments when he roused to semiconsciousness, plied him with water and willow-bark tea. They couldn't leave him alone at any time. In his fever he thrashed wildly, threw off the blankets, leaving him naked to the next chill.

But by late afternoon his fever had dropped two degrees, and he had quieted enough so that they could take turns with their ministrations and the chores that couldn't be shirked. Rachel killed a chicken for supper, and while it baked, she simmered a pot of broth at the back of the stove. Finally, when they finished supper and the last of the evening chores, Rachel offered to take the first watch with the stranger. Mary went into Rachel's room and settled in her bed with Shadow lying at her back, two of the cats at the foot of the bed.

Sleep was a long time coming, and she was surprised it did come, surprised when Rachel opened the door, lighting her way with a candle in a pewter holder, and told her it was two in the morning. Mary had been dreaming. One of the old death dreams. She got out of bed and began dressing. “How's our patient?”

Rachel put the candle on the small table by the bed and sat down to rub Shadow's back. “Well, he's past the crisis. Fever's down to ninety-nine, and he woke up long enough to talk to me.”

Mary sighed her relief as she pulled on a sweater. “What did he say?”

Rachel laughed. “That I was an angel of mercy. Maybe he thinks he's died and gone to heaven. He definitely believes heaven is a possibility. Did you notice that headband he was wearing?”

“What about it?”

“The words embroidered on it. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.' ”

Mary looked at Rachel, but her face was turned away from the light, and Mary couldn't be sure of the edge she felt in those words. “He sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool good Christian. What else did he say?”

Rachel shrugged. “He asked me my name. I asked his. It's Luke, by the way. No surname.” For a moment she seemed distracted, as if she had more to say, then she looked up at Mary and offered a smile. “You'd better go see to our good Christian. I'm going to get some sleep.”

When Mary entered her room, she felt a shiver of uncertainty that she blamed on the night chill. An oil lamp burned on the bedside table, and in its glow the stranger slept. She checked the fire in the blue-enameled stove, then sat down in the chair Rachel had drawn up by the bed. Rachel's book was on the table. Loren Eiseley. Mary leaned back and looked on the face of this stranger, a man named Luke, and tried to sort out her thoughts.

The short span of sleep had put a little space between her and the clamor of emotions she had endured throughout the day: the shock of seeing another human being, the added shock of finding him so ill, the constant fear that this, the only survivor they'd met in all these years, might die before uttering a coherent word.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
. . .

And he had indeed walked through that valley, but he was out of it now. He would live. And Mary knew her life would inevitably be changed by that fact.

She and Rachel had walked their own valley and had climbed out of the shadow; they had a purpose in living, a purpose that provided them satisfaction and even pleasure. No more than a third of the books had been sealed, but they had decided that this summer they'd begin building a permanent shelter for the books, their gift to humankind and the future. But this stranger embodied the potential of a different kind of gift. At the moment she brushed the sand from his face on the beach, the possibility stirred to life, but she hadn't put it into words then. Only now did she let the words shape the idea:
this man can father my children
.

She was thirty-four years old, and in all probability capable of bearing children. The clockwork regularity of her menstrual cycles had been a continuing source of annoyance. It had been so futile, her body's monthly preparation for something that could never happen.

But it
could
happen now.

Before the End she had considered bringing a child into that world unkind at the least and certainly irresponsible. Was it any kinder, any more responsible, to bring a child into
this
world?

Yet did she really have a choice? In a world where the continued existence of the human species might be in doubt, could she choose not to bear children if she were capable of it?

She looked at the stranger's face, his forehead, cheekbones, the aquiline prow of his nose etched in lamplight that glinted in his coppery hair and beard. The face that had on the beach struck her by its look of age, now seemed young, like a hungry child's. His eyes were closed, but she had seen them, knew them to be the color of the sky on a clear, spring day. She wondered if this stranger was someone she could love.

Or someone who could be a lover?

She smiled, the muscles of her abdomen tensing against the sensations unleashed by that thought. Was that the real explanation for her desire for motherhood?

No, her need—her obligation—to bear children was something she couldn't escape. But this man as a lover . . .

She wondered why she hadn't permitted herself to think of him as a lover before. Yes, she had been intensely aware of his maleness when they undressed him and bathed him to quell his fever. Even now that he was chastely covered, she was aware of his body, flat-muscled, long-boned, with sunburned skin evolved for northern climates. Today she had been too preoccupied with his illness to think of him as a lover.

Now . . . she thought about it, thought about making love. For ten years she had lived like a nun, had resigned herself to celibacy. She'd had no choice in that.

Now maybe she had a choice.

Then her smile slipped away. She was getting ahead of events. Wouldn't it be ironic if this stranger, whom she envisioned as the father of her children, as her lover, were sterile or if he simply rejected her?

And Rachel—where did she fit into this scenario?

Mary shivered and folded her arms against her body.

Changes. This stranger potentiated changes like a magician pulling chains of bright scarves out of his sleeve.

She reached for the Eiseley and found it as difficult to read as she had to sleep a few hours ago. Yet she did at length become engrossed in the words, and she had read two of Eiseley's essays when she was distracted by a change in the pace of the stranger's breathing. She watched while he opened his eyes and looked around the room. Finally his gaze fixed on her, and she felt a spasm of fear. His eyes had been open before, but he had never been fully conscious, and she had never fully recognized that there was within that sick body a unique mind, one entirely unknown to her.