A Gift Upon the Shore (20 page)

He looked at her for what seemed a long time, then he frowned, cleared his throat.

“You're not Rachel.”

Mary laughed. That wasn't at all what she might have anticipated as his first utterance. She closed the book and put it on the bedside table. “No, I'm not Rachel. She's sleeping now.”

“Then she
is
here? There
is
somebody named Rachel here?”

“Yes, of course there is.” Mary rose, picked up the glass on the table. “You'd better get some more water down you. With that fever, you'll be badly dehydrated.” She helped him sit up and held the glass for him while he swallowed most of the water. She saw the scars on his back and again wondered about them. When he sank back and closed his eyes, she returned to her chair, expecting him to fall asleep.

But his eyes opened, focused inward now. “I had a vision. I was walking on the shore, and I was sick and sore afraid. Then suddenly there was a woman there before me, and she had dark eyes full of wisdom and kindness. She held out her hands to me and said, ‘I'm Rachel Morrow.' Then . . . she was gone. But I knew she was sent by the Lord, and if I'd just keep going, I'd find what I'm seeking.”

Mary felt as if a trapdoor had been tripped beneath her. But she reminded herself that she shouldn't expect lucidity when he was just recovering from a serious illness. It wasn't surprising that he was confused about the circumstances of his meeting with Rachel.

Mary said, “You met Rachel a few hours ago here in this room. Don't you remember?”

“No, I haven't seen Rachel yet,” he replied levelly. “Not in the flesh.”

Mary let that pass. “Well, you will tomorrow morning. Are you hungry? We have some broth for you.”

“Yes, I'd like that. But first—what's your name?”

“Mary Hope. And you're Luke, right?”

His mouth sagged open. “How did you know that?”

“Never mind. Don't you have a last name?”

“My family name is Jason, but we don't—” He stopped abruptly.

But Mary caught that potent pronoun
we
. So there were
other
survivors.

He didn't give her a chance to ask about them. “I have to go outside.”

“Outside! You're in no shape to go outside.”

“I . . . have to go to the privy.”

Mary rose. “Well, you don't have to go outside. We've managed to keep the plumbing in operation. Okay, let me help you.”

He pushed the covers back, realized he was naked, and his face went red as he hurriedly pulled the covers up again. Mary went to the closet and returned with a plaid, woolen robe—a man's robe, one of the many articles of clothing they had scavenged. He reluctantly let her help him into it, then she lighted a candle in the flame of the oil lamp, put it in a holder, and offered her shoulder. She felt his resistance to that support, but he was too unsteady to walk without it. When they reached the hall, Cleo and Candide skittered away like small, striped ghosts, while Yorick and Agate roused with threatening growls. Luke held out his hand for them to smell, with that raising himself a few notches in Mary's estimation. Then she guided him into the bathroom, put the candle down by the sink, pointed out the clean towels for his use, and asked if he needed any help.

He withdrew from her, shocked. “
No
.”

She shrugged and closed the door, returned to the bedroom for the lamp, then went to the kitchen to stoke up the banked fire in the cookstove, reminding herself that she must bank the coals again before the revived fire burned out. Rachel was expert at that, at maintaining that magic glow of fire. There were still some matches left, but they were too precious to use unnecessarily. The only alternatives now were a welder's sparker and a magnifying glass. Mary took the chicken broth out of the cooler, ladled some into a pan, and put it on the stove. Then she got a bowl out of the cupboard, changed her mind, and decided a mug would be easier for Luke to handle. Yes, there was still one left that wasn't chipped.

Then she picked up the lamp to return to her patient and found him leaning against the bathroom doorjamb. He smiled at her, and she realized it was the first time she'd seen him smile. It was an ingenuous, wistful smile, and she couldn't do less than return it. She offered her shoulder. “Come on, Luke, let's get you back to bed.”

He seemed to accept her support more readily now. He said, “This is a very fine house.”

Mary wondered what he was comparing it to, but didn't ask. In the bedroom he kept the robe on and sagged into the bed. She covered him, then left him long enough to go to the kitchen and fill the mug with warm broth. When she returned and offered it to him, he thanked her, then didn't say another word, concentrating on the broth like a starving man. When he finished it, he asked for another mugful, but this one he downed slowly, while Mary sat in the chair, watching him.

Finally she asked, “How long have you been traveling?”

“I think . . . well, it must be about nine months now.”

“That's a long journey. Where do you come from?”

He glanced warily at her. “From a place to the south.”

And he wasn't going to be more specific. Did he think she might be a threat to the
we
he'd left behind? Perhaps. She was as much an unknown quantity to him as he was to her.

He sipped at the broth, studying her. At length, he said, “You're a beautiful woman, Mary Hope.”

Again, he had surprised her. And made her self-consciously aware of her sunburned skin, of her hair cut short with no attempt at style, of her callused hands with the broken nails always stained with dirt however often she scrubbed them.

“Luke, you haven't seen many women lately, have you?”

He looked down at his mug. “I . . . I was just thinking, your husband must be very proud of you.”

A probe of sorts? Why didn't he just ask?

“I have no husband.”

“Did he pass on?”

“I've never had a husband. Rachel and I are the only ones here.”

That brought a frown of consternation. “All the others passed on?”

“There never were any others here, not since the End.”

“The End? Oh. You mean Armageddon. How did you survive all these years with no men? I mean, with nobody to help you?”

Mary shrugged. “We managed very well, actually.”

He considered that while he finished the broth. “It's a miracle.”

“Our survival?”

“Yes, and . . . and my coming here.” Then with a short laugh, “But I don't even know where I am, except I'm where I was meant to be.”

Mary didn't ask him to explain that. She said, “You're just north of what used to be the town of Shiloh Beach.”

“Shiloh? The first permanent tabernacle of the Hebrews was at a place called Shiloh.”

“Well, this town was named after the place in Tennessee where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought.”

“The Civil War?”

“The American Civil War. You know, North and South, the Blue and the Gray. Would you like some more broth?”

He shook his head as he surrendered the mug to her. “No. That was wonderful. You're a good cook.”

“Rachel cooked this, and she's a master with spices and herbs.”

“Rachel . . .” He seemed to savor the name, smiling faintly. “Rachel the shepherdess, daughter of Laban, wife of Jacob, mother of Joseph and Benjamin. And you—Mary, the mother of Jesus.”

And Mary again had that feeling that a trapdoor had disappeared from under her. She and Rachel had always considered the religious associations in their names ironic. Luke Jason obviously found them deeply meaningful.

She didn't attempt a reply to his biblical lesson, and after a short silence, he asked, “Are you Rachel's daughter?”

“No, we're not related. She took me in Before.”

“Oh.” He didn't seem to understand that, but his eyes were closing with weariness. Mary remained silent until she thought he was asleep, then she reached for the Eiseley.

But Luke wasn't asleep. He roused, asked, “What book is that?”

“It's a collection of essays by Loren Eiseley. Would you like me to read to you?”

“Who was Loren Eiseley?”

“Well, he was a poet and a scientist. He—”

She stopped, catching the look of alarm in Luke's eyes as he asked, “He was a . . . scientist?”

“Yes, he was a scientist,” Mary said, finding herself annoyed at his suspicious tone. “Is that a problem for you?”

He didn't answer her question. “Where did you get such a book?”

“Here. It's one of Rachel's books.”

“Rachel's?” That didn't seem to make sense to him. He looked across the room at the bookshelves. “Are those . . . scientists' books?”

Mary answered coolly, “Some of them.”

“Yet God sent me here,” he mumbled, and something more she couldn't understand. But her annoyance turned to chagrin when he was overtaken by a racking bout of coughing, and she was helplessly aware of his weakness, his vulnerability. When the coughing eased, he lay panting, his forehead wet with sweat, his eyes closed.

“Luke?” She took his hand, finding a stringent elegance in its form that surprised her as much as its strength when it closed on hers.

Dear stranger, stay with me
.

She remembered the scars on his back and wondered what he had suffered in his lonely travels, wondered where he'd been, what he'd seen, why he left his home, why he left the
we
he was so reluctant to talk about.

He whispered, “I have a book. . . .” Then his eyes flashed open. “My pack, where—”

“It's over there in the corner. Do you want something out of it?”

He nodded. “In the top flap . . . my book . . .”

Mary went to the backpack, and among the crumpled clothing that had a musty, musky smell, she found a Bible, its black leather binding frayed at the edges. She opened it. King James translation. Of course.

She offered it to Luke, and he said hoarsely, “You said you'd read to me, Mary Hope. . . .”

She sat down with the Bible. “Okay, I'll read to you if you'll close your eyes and try to sleep. What do you want to hear?”

“Maybe . . . yes, Psalms. There's great comfort in Psalms.”

She had to look in the table of contents. She turned the thin, brittle pages carefully and finally began, “ ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. . . .' ” And she thought,
Luke, you've come to the wrong place
.

The Seth Thomas clanged six times as Mary pushed her damp hair back from her forehead and turned to the kitchen window, her face hot from stoking the fire in the cookstove. The sun was a long way from showing itself over the hills to the east, but the sky was suffused with pellucid light like fragile porcelain.

The dawn of a new day—in more than one sense—and she met it with an odd mix of exhilaration and anxiety. She wanted to cry, but she didn't know why.

She jumped as a small, yellow tiger of a cat leapt up on the counter. “Cleo, you know better.” When she put the cat down on the floor, she saw that the kitchen was under siege: Cleo's twin, Tony; Candide, the gray tiger; Petrouchka, a placid, odd-eyed calico tom; Jet, whose leopard lines marked her as part Siamese.

Peacefully coexisting with the cats were Agate, Yorick, and Yorick's sister and brother, Sheba and Pip. All three looked more like Sparky than their mother, Ophelia, who had been in every way Shadow's daughter. Mary sighed, thinking of Shadow and her painful gait, the patchiness of her coat that had been so sable soft. She was still sleeping at the foot of Rachel's bed now, and when Rachel woke, she'd have to lift her off the bed. She was the last of the animals from Before.

“Okay, kids, I'll get your breakfast as soon as I put the kettle on.”

She placed the gray enamel kettle on the stove, then lined up the dogs' and cats' bowls on the counter. Their staple breakfast was milk and boiled chicken—guts and gristle, everything but the bones—with leftover vegetables for the dogs. This was the only meal they'd be given for the day. They had to catch their own if they wanted more. Mary put the bowls on the floor, segregating dogs and cats, but left Shadow's bowl on the counter and added an egg from the cooler.

The kettle began to shrill, and she snatched it off the stove to silence it. She didn't want to wake Luke or Rachel. Usually Rachel would already be up and about, but Mary hadn't wakened her. Let her have a little extra rest.

Or perhaps, Mary realized, her motives were entirely selfish: she wanted to be alone. She was still trying to sort out her emotions, to understand the changes Luke Jason wrought in her once-ordered world.

She turned, the muscles in her jaw taut, and took two mugs out of the cupboard, spooned chamomile and mint from their canisters into the tea ball, put it into one mug and poured hot water over it, inhaling the dusty, pungent aroma, thinking—as she did every morning—that she'd give her eyeteeth for a cup of coffee. She left the kettle wheezing at the back of the stove and took the mug out to the deck, where land and sea were drawn in soft pastels, and the air was as astringently cool as perfume. Our exquisite island, she thought, a model of what a world had been and perhaps might be again. In four and a half billion years, this world had tolerated many disasters on a planetary scale. But every disaster left it irrevocably changed.

Change. That was what she feared.

The swish of the sliding door startled her. Rachel stood at the open door ushering dogs and cats out. “Come on, everybody outside. Leave poor Shadow alone with her breakfast. Pip! Come on, little one.” When all the animals had trooped out, the dogs sallying forth to patrol their territory, the cats taking up stations on the deck to groom themselves, Rachel joined Mary at the railing, raised her mug before she took a sip. “Thanks for getting the tea ready—
and
feeding the menagerie.” Then she eyed Mary with a whisper of a smile. “You washed your hair.”