A Gift Upon the Shore (25 page)

“Sometimes I wonder . . .”

“What, Mary?”

Mary shrugged, not sure what she was trying to say. “A thousand miles, and the only human beings he found were a few survivalists and a handful of dying victims.” Luke called them all crazy, and she could accept that of the survivalists. But the others . . . They weren't crazy. They were only hopeless. Without hope. Without children.

Rachel said, “That thousand miles covered a very small fraction of the world.”

“But that fraction
is
our world now. The rest is terra incognita for us and always will be.”

Except for the Ark.

Mary felt her mind full of cobwebs, squeezed her eyes shut to look for a way through them. Finally she said, “Rachel, I know what Luke's mission is. The Ark is dying; not enough women are capable of bearing children, so he went out to find women like me—potentially fertile.” She opened her eyes, but couldn't look at Rachel. “That's his mission, and he's made it . . . mine. He's made it possible. . . .” But the words got tangled in the cobwebs. She hadn't had time to think out the implications for her in the Ark, in fifty-three people living in a community.

She had recognized that she had an obligation, now that Luke made it possible, to bear children. Yet until he told them about the Ark, she hadn't faced the fact that to bear a child here at Amama would be futile. Here that child would grow up in solitude, condemned to live a life of savage loneliness, to die leaving nothing behind but its bones.

If that child were to become something other than a sterile end in itself, it must have a community. Community was a concept integral to civilization and humanity. Whatever her doubts about the Ark, it was a community, and now she knew beyond a hope that it was the only one she would ever encounter.

Her throat ached with the words: “Rachel, if I go to the Ark, will you go with me?”

Rachel answered without hesitation. “No. Not until I've finished with the books. That's
my
part in humankind's future, Mary.”

Mary saw the equivocal sadness behind Rachel's fragile smile and shivered as if a chill wind had brushed the skin at the back of her neck.

“Mary, the decision is yours,” Rachel said. “I can't help you with it.”

Yes, it was hers, and it had already been made. Yet it didn't seem a decision. There was no choice in it.

She watched the wavering candle flame. “Strange, isn't it? A man who insists Armageddon has already happened, that the second coming of Jesus—the end of life in this world for all good Christians—is
about
to happen, yet he worries about begetting a new generation. I don't think he really believes that Armageddon nonsense.”

“The problem is, he thinks he
should
believe it.”

Mary wasn't sure what Rachel meant by that, but she didn't want to talk about it now. What Luke believed, or thought he should, didn't matter. She had no choice.

She rose, leaned down to kiss Rachel's cheek. “Past our bedtime. By the way, that was a clever ploy, conning Luke into writing his memoirs. You'll make an author of him, and I've never met an author who didn't have a great respect for books.”

“Well, it did occur to me that the act of writing might change his attitude a bit. And you're the one who should help him with it. You're the writer here.”

Mary thought about that, tried to remember when she'd had that sure sense of herself as a writer. She couldn't recapture it. “Good night, Rachel.” She crossed to the sliding door, opened it, and looked back to see Rachel in the amber light, and in Mary's eyes she suddenly seemed small and vulnerable.

“Good night, Mary.”

No. Rachel was too resourceful ever to be lonely.

—EDWARD FITZGERALD,
THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM
(1879)

“
A
nd that spring, Luke
courted
me.”

Stephen looks at me curiously. All he knows of courtship is garnered from books he's read. On this clear April afternoon, we're outside on the deck, a limber-limbed boy sitting with his legs drawn up, arms wrapped around one knee, and an old woman absorbing the warmth of the sun on ever-aching joints and talking about her youth, about courtship.

Such an ancient ceremony, courtship. Homo sapiens was born with the rituals encoded in its genes, rituals as old as bisexual reproduction. I laugh, imagining trilobites wooing their mates with skittering minuets in the deeps of the sea; brontosauri circling one another in ponderous sarabands; smiladon yowling arias to show off his scimitar fangs.

Stephen asks, “What did Luke do to court you?”

I study him, wondering if his generation won't invent some sort of courtship rituals, even if their pairings are determined by necessity.

“Luke produced prodigies of labor that spring, Stephen. He looked at the pigpen and said, ‘You and Rachel built this.' ” And I try to imitate his indulgent tone. Stephen laughs, probably because to him I sound like Jerry. “I admitted as much, and Luke said, ‘I'll build you a new one.' And so he did. The saws and axes needed sharpening? Our plow and harness needed repair? The roof of the barn was leaking? The gateposts had rotted? The apple trees needed pruning? And our smokehouse. . . had we also built that? He would take care of it. And so he did.”

Still laughing, Stephen asks, “What did
you
do?”

“What
could
I do but . . . love him?”

In that halcyon spring Luke was easy to love. He was as powerful and graceful as a rutting buck, as solicitous as a bowerbird. He was easy to love because he tried in every way to please me. He couldn't, not in every way, not a man of his philosophical mold. But he tried. And he tried to please Rachel. He had to please her in order to please me, and he understood that. But he
wanted
to please Rachel, as a child wants to please its parents, a student its teacher, an acolyte its master.

Stephen rouses me from my memories. “Did Luke write the story of his journey?”

“Oh, yes. Jeremiah has it now. Maybe he'd let you read it. It was an arduous process, the writing of that story, but Luke took great pride in it. And Rachel inspired him to read books other than the Bible and to listen to ideas that were new to him. She told him a myth is the essence of an event. She told him to read between the lines and finally applied that principle to Genesis. She showed him glimpses of the universe.”

Glimpses. That's all he'd open his eyes to see, but I thought he understood what little he saw, and I thought he understood the significance of the books and the importance of building a place to house and protect them.

“Mary, how long did the courting last?”

“About three months, actually. It was odd about that courtship. It was tacit. He couldn't seem to work up his courage to actually say he wanted me to go back to the Ark with him.”

“Maybe he was afraid you wouldn't go with him.”

My laugh at that has a bitter edge. “I wouldn't have refused him. I had no choice. And I kept wondering why he didn't understand that. Why he wouldn't
ask
.” Then I shrug. “But I'd have done the asking if necessary. In fact, it made no difference whether I loved him or not. That only made it easier to accept what I had to do.”

But I
did
love him.

Rather, I was in love with him, and I doubt Stephen will ever understand that. My happiness hung on Luke's smile. Yet at times I was angered almost past tolerance because he couldn't fulfill all my expectations. I spun dizzily on a silken filament, and he was at the center of the web always.

I pull in a deep breath. “But perhaps I did, unconsciously, restrain him from the asking. That was because I wanted one final proof of his intentions.”

“What was that?”

“The vault, Stephen. I wanted the vault built.”

Stephen looks north toward the Knob. “Was that for Rachel?”

A perceptive question. “Partly, yes. But it was for me, too, not only because I believed fervently that the vault must be built, but because it seemed the ultimate test of his love.”

Stephen stretches his legs out, crosses his ankles. “I guess he must've passed the test.”

“Yes. Rachel and I helped, but the vault was really Luke's project. Rachel drew the plans the last week of May, and we chose the site. The drainage is good on the Knob, and it's highly visible. It gets the brunt of the winter storms, but that slope also gets sun all year long. The actual building began on the first day of June. Luke dug an excavation into the hillside, then he scavenged brick and stone from Shiloh. He used the stone for the walls and lined them and the floor with brick. Fortunately we'd stockpiled some sacks of mortar. He felled a cedar tree and split it into beams and planks for the roof and inside walls. He made the door of cedar and found brass hinges and a stainless steel chain and lock. He covered the roof with composition shingles three layers thick, added another layer of cedar shingles. Oh, it's a work of art in its own way, Stephen. A labor of love. It took him most of the summer to construct this Taj Majal.”

At that, Stephen tilts his head quizzically. “This what, Mary?”

“The Taj Majal was a very famous building Before.” And I wonder if it's still standing. Is it a vine-smothered ruin that may someday be disinterred as Angkor Wat and Chichén Itzá were and might be again?

Stephen is waiting patiently for me to get on with my story. But what can I tell him about the culmination of Luke's courtship? He wouldn't understand it, and it's none of his business or anyone else's. It belongs to me alone now, the memory, and it will die with me.

I tell him simply, “It was in June, on the summer solstice, when Luke finally asked me to be his wife. I accepted.”

—MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO,
THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
(1913)

L
uke reached the end of the path ahead of her, looked back, grinning exuberantly. The sky floated a skim of cloud as subtle as the interior of a shell, the summer-tamed waves frothed beyond the velvet sand, and Mary laughed as she ran with him toward the breakers, chisels rattling in their buckets, sand flying around their feet until they reached the dark, wet sand vacated by the tide. They walked north toward the Knob, laying strings of foot tracks over the convoluted tracks of flowing water, and Mary told him about a similar day not so long ago when she had started for the Knob with her chisel and bucket and found a stranger on the beach. Luke nodded and took her hand in his.

At the base of the cliffs on the seaward side of the Knob, the ebbing tide had exposed rock terraces paved with tiny barnacles, a brittle mosaic that wheezed under their boots. In sea-scoured hollows, small, mysterious worlds shimmered beneath aquamarine water—worlds of roseate brocades, peridot swatches, yellow-gold spikes, where sinuous green silks glowed iridescent blue when the light struck at the right angle, and sea anemones opened into exotic blossoms of pale green and pink. The terraces were transected by fissures carved by the knife of the sea, and on their honed faces, mussels crowded, tufted mats of hissing, shining blue-black shells. Mary and Luke filled their buckets with seawater and set to work, carefully prying the mussels off the rock with their chisels.

Within half an hour the tide began to turn, rising into the fissures, draining away, but returning again in the long, constant rhythms of the sea. Mary worked methodically back from the encroaching water, taking only a few mussels from any one area, always leaving the largest to live and breed. The memory of the time when these rocks were barren of life gave her a profound respect for this profusion.

When at length, the tidal surges served warning that the sea was reclaiming its own in earnest, Mary and Luke walked up the slope of the beach until they found a satin-backed log to rest on. Mary put her bucket down next to Luke's, assessing their harvest and calling it good, then sat beside him, while he delved into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped package of venison jerky. He offered her a piece, but she shook her head. “I'm too thirsty for that. You didn't happen to bring a canteen, did you?”

He motioned southward. “It's down there—the creek.”

For a while they didn't speak, and Mary cherished the tranquil silence as she watched the sea slowly flood the sand. Gulls wheeled restlessly, flying so high they were almost invisible. The weather would change soon.

Luke wrapped the remaining jerky and put it back in his pocket. “Rachel always has a different way of looking at things, doesn't she?”

Mary felt the tranquillity shiver like the water in a tide pool ruffled by a wind. “Different from what?”

He shrugged. “Different from anything I've ever known.”

“Did you expect her to look at things the way
you
were taught?”

That surprised him, and Mary felt an acid rush of annoyance. So much surprised him.

“No,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I shouldn't expect her to look at things the way I do, but I've never known any other way.”

Mary knew her annoyance was only another of the irrational emotional swings she'd been experiencing lately. But she didn't want to talk now. She simply wanted to sit here in the sun on this perfect day and watch the tide come in. With Luke. With Luke who was at his core kind and generous. With Luke whom she loved. She didn't want to probe the philosophical chasm that she knew would always exist between them.

He said, “I was thinking about what Rachel said last night, about the Book of Revelation.”

Mary winced, stared fixedly at the breakers. So think about it. Fine. Just don't
talk
about it.

“Remember,” Luke went on, inexorably, “what she said about the beast—the number of the beast—that maybe it was a code the first Christians used? I didn't know that.”

There was so much he didn't know, even about the one book he considered the fount of wisdom. Mary watched the erratic circling of the gulls, held on to her silence, tension knotting hard under her ribs.

“And what she said,” Luke added, “about prophesying the end of the world. Remember? She said to prophesy the end of a
human
world—the end of a civilization—was to prophesy the inevitable. But I still . . . I mean, it isn't the same, what Saint John was prophesying.”

Mary had read the Book of Revelation last night out of curiosity, and above all she didn't want to talk about John the Divine's frenzied visions. She had sensed too much method in the saint's madness.

But Luke wanted to talk about it, and her silence didn't deter him.

“It wasn't just the end of a civilization he was prophesying. It was . . . well, it was more than that. The battle of light and dark, good and evil. I think she's right: Saint John
was
writing in codes. But he
saw
what was coming, way back then. The Lord showed him Armageddon.”

And Mary's patience snapped at the end of its tether.

“Luke, he didn't
see
anything! He wrote what he
wished
would happen, what he knew the faithful
wanted to
hear.”

Luke stared at her, aghast. “Don't
say
that!”

“Why not? It was a piece of fiction—nothing more!”

“
No!
” And his open hand cracked against her cheek, knocked her off balance. She caught herself with her hands in the sand, her face stinging, and it was a moment before she could make sense of what had happened.

Stupid
, she thought, and the appellation was directed at herself.
Why can't you learn patience
?

And yet—

“
Damn you, Luke!
” Anger overwhelmed regret suddenly and forcibly, and she felt her lips draw back from her teeth, saw him kneeling in the sand before her, reaching out to her.

“Mary, I'm sorry! Lord help me, I didn't mean—”

“Let me go!” She tried to pull free, but his grip on her arms only tightened with her struggles, and her frustration fed her anger, until finally she began crying, and then she knew that was what she wanted—tears to wash away the poisons of doubt and fear, and Luke to hold her in the comforting cage of his arms against his chest, where she might hear his heartbeat while he said softly, over and over, “Mary, I didn't mean to hurt you. Mary, I love you . . . I love you. . . .”

And what she wanted was his kiss; a kiss to taste her tears, one for each closed eye, a kiss on her lips.

There was the catalyst, and out of it would come all the answers. She opened her lips, her arms moving around the curve of his ribs, hands reaching down the long muscles of his back, and she reveled in the unleashed shivering of nerves in her own body.

Give me this covenant, this promise
.

It didn't matter that he was impatient and inept, that the voracity of his ardor, once catalyzed, left no room for sensibility. He kissed her throat as if seeking the pulse of life there, opened her shirt to find her breasts with his lips, fumbled at her clothes and his as if they were insurmountable barriers, and perhaps he realized that she expected more than consenting rape, but he knew no art in this. And it didn't matter.

It didn't matter that he took her thoughtlessly, suddenly, that he left her nothing to savor but the sheer power of his body, that he forced himself into her against instinctive spasms of muscles and bludgeoned down that resistance by brute force. It didn't matter, because she wanted him, at any price, here within her body; she wanted that wordless covenant more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.

Mary lay with her head in the crook of Luke's arm, feeling the weight of his hand at rest on her breast, the cool wind playing a tactile fugue with the warmth of the sun on her naked skin. This she would want to remember, this warm, sated moment unshadowed by doubt.

At length, Luke stirred, propped himself on one elbow, leaned over her, kissed her, openmouthed, and when he drew away, she brushed at the sand caught in his sun-haloed beard, compared the color of his eyes to the blue of the sky behind him. He said, “Mary Hope, I love you,” and she closed her eyes, believing him.

Then he sat up, laughing as he combed through his hair with both hands. “We'll never get rid of all this sand.”

“Yes, we will—come on!” Mary rose and ran toward the ocean, feeling young and joyous. Luke followed her, and hand in hand they plunged into the breakers, laughing at the shock of the icy water, dancing like children in the white foam. Finally, shivering and exhilarated, they returned to the log, let the sun and wind dry their bodies, then dressed themselves and sat together in a pendant silence. Mary turned her face up to the sun and tried to hold on to this fragment of time.

Finally Luke said soberly, “Mary, I didn't leave the Ark just to find survivors. I went in search of . . . women who can bear children.”

She felt her smile slipping away like the moment, like a golden nugget in a mountain creek, swept out of her hand by the swift current.

“I know, Luke. And you found me.”

“The Lord led me to you. I didn't expect to find a woman I could care for. I only hoped to find . . .”

A brood mother, no doubt. He couldn't seem to finish that. She waited, and at length he said, “Mary, I want you to be my wife.”

She nodded. “I
will
be your wife, Luke.”

“But there are some . . . customs at the Ark you must understand.”

She studied his face, watched him frowning over his choice of words. He said, “You have to understand that there aren't many of us who can . . . bear or father children.”

“But you've fathered children, haven't you?”

“Yes. One. The Doctor keeps records of visitations, so he knows who fathers each child.”

“What's a visitation? Intercourse?”

His fair skin reddened. “Yes.”

“Were you married to the mother of the child you fathered? Was it one of the children who lived?”

He smiled fondly. “Yes, he lived. Jeremiah is his name, and he was born a month before I left the Ark. But I wasn't married to his mother. The child was fathered on a visitation. She's a widow. She lives in her uncle's household, and he serves as true father to the boy.”

Mary pushed the toe of her boot into the sand. “Is
any
widowed or unmarried woman subject to these . . . visitations?”

“Yes, except the ones the Doctor knows are Barrens.”

“What about married women?”

“If a woman's husband can't father children, yes.” He looked at her anxiously. “But you'll never have visitations—not as
my
wife.”

“But you'll be making visitations.”

“Yes.”

Mary shrugged. It was a highly adaptive arrangement. Still, she was relieved that she would be exempt from visitations by other men.

“Luke, how does the Flock resolve this mate-swapping with their religious beliefs? As I remember, Jesus had definite ideas about the sanctity of marriage.”

He stiffened, then said levelly, “In Romans, Saint Paul wrote that we are dead to the law, and that we must bring forth fruit unto the Lord. The Doctor says if we're to bring forth fruit, we have to do it this way. He said we must bring new souls into the world for the Lord on Judgment Day.”

So that was how the Arkites rationalized the need to procreate in the face of Armageddon. Yet Luke still doubted. She knew if she questioned him, he would deny his doubt, but she heard it in his voice.

He went on firmly, “Our ways are not the old ways before Armageddon, Mary. But there is neither love nor lust in a visitation, and the vows of marriage are still sacred.”

That sounded like a direct quote.

Mary said softly, “Till death us do part.”

“Yes. Till death us do part. Mary, we must talk to Rachel. She'll come with us. You'd never be happy without her, and she can't stay here alone.”

Mary shook her head, and there was a chill in the wind now. “Rachel won't go to the Ark with us, Luke.”

“But she must. I know the Flock will accept her. The Doctor will see her wisdom as I have. She'll be revered there, she'll be cared for. Mary, she's an old woman, and she can't—”

“She's
not
old, Luke! She's not . . . old.”

Luke put his arm around her. “I know what you mean, but . . . well, she's not really young.”

Mary let his arm rest on her shoulders without recognizing its existence. “You don't understand. Old or not, she won't go with us, not until she finishes the books. And I won't go until you finish the vault.”

“I intend to finish it. Then you and Rachel can put the books in the vault, and we'll all—”