A Gift Upon the Shore (44 page)

She opens the glass face of the lantern, thrusts the end of the fuse in, and it erupts in a sputter of sparks, then seems to die. But there's no hope in the lack of visible flame. It is hideously alive, burning within itself, sending out spurting fingers of blue smoke and the acrid smell of smoldering tar. Miriam rises, shouts skyward, “I am the instrument of Thy will! The Lord be praised!” then begins a stumbling retreat down the slope, and she has left the lantern, left it so I can see the fuse trailing out from the corner, and I can see exactly how fast it is burning and exactly how much is left.

I wrench myself toward the dark snake that consumes itself second by second, stretch across the stone wall, straining against the handcuffs, but my free hand falls inches short of the fuse. The key. I fumble in my pocket, fingers closing on the key to the handcuffs. The barking and shouting are closer, and Miriam cries, “Go back! The Lord's wrath will strike! Go back!”

I can't find the lock. Angrily I jerk at the handcuffs, gasp at the pain. The lock, damn it—damn her!—find the lock. My hands are shaking, I hear my panting over the hiss of the fuse. There! Key in the lock. No, it slips against the metal, and I can't hear the deadly hiss for the barking in my ear. Shadow leaps at me in a frenzy of joy. She has found me, as I taught her. She has found me. And knocked the key out of my trembling hand and out of sight somewhere in the thick grass.

“Shadow, get away!” Less than six inches of fuse is visible. “Shadow, go back! Get away from me!” I strike out at her, and she yelps; she can't understand why I hit her, can't understand that she'll die if she stays with me.

I run my right hand through the grass by the stone plinth, vainly seeking the key. My hand closes instead on my cane, I stretch toward the fuse, beat at it with the curved head. But the spurts of smoke won't stop. I hook the cane around the corner to dislodge the dynamite and find no purchase. Shadow is barking hysterically, and I hear Jerry's voice near—too near. I look around, see him no more than twenty yards away, but Miriam is running toward him, she shrieks a warning, throws herself at him, and they fall together.

And the fuse has burned past the corner.

Shadow won't leave me, paws at me, whining, and it's too late for her now. I press my face into her satiny fur, remember the night I lay in Rachel's arms while she died. “I'm sorry. . . .”

And I wait. Listen to the sputter of the fuse. Such a small sound, yet it drowns out every other sound. Until it stops.

It simply stops.

I wait.

But there is no explosion. The sounds of the night—the frogs in the pasture, the murmur of the surf, the plaintive cry of an owl— softly fill the vacuum of silence in my mind.

The dynamite didn't explode.

Maybe Miriam didn't attach the blasting cap properly. Maybe the dynamite or the fuse were too old, stored too long in a damp climate.

It doesn't matter.

I begin to laugh. I shift, put my back against the door, hug Shadow to me, and I laugh. I laugh with relief, I laugh because I'm alive, I laugh at the sheer absurdity of this little drama, I laugh at the thought of Miriam playing with the technology of destruction bom in an age she can't begin to understand, I laugh at myself for believing an artifact of that age would in her hands be a real threat, I laugh at the irony of Miriam witnessing the wretched failure of her act of god. I laugh until I cry, and the constriction in my chest seems only part of the laughter, the electric pain in my left arm only inevitable after the abuse it's had in the grip of the handcuffs.

The other witnesses to this failed act of god have drawn nearer, but now they stand transfixed. There's Jerry, with Jonathan and Stephen flanking him. Esther, her hand on Isaac's shoulder. Enid and Bernadette. Someone had the sense to keep the other children out of this. Grace must be with them.

These people aren't laughing with me, and I'm vaguely surprised. It's all so ludicrous. . . .

They're staring at Miriam.

And my laughter and tears cease when Miriam lifts her white-sleeved arms to form a ghostly crucifix, and the moonlight flashes on the knife still in her right hand, when she throws her head back, and from her throat emerges a single syllable stretched into a shivering cry of anger and anguish. “No!”

And I hear in that word other words unspoken: My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me
?

But Miriam hasn't forsaken her god.

She faces me, then moves suddenly, runs at me with the knife raised, and I gaze at the translucent light shining through her gown, remember a picture I once saw of a snowy owl sweeping down on its prey, and it was as beautiful and terrifying as Miriam is in this instant of time that I recognize as my last.

“
Mary
!”

A blur of motion rushing at me from one side, an abrupt, crushing weight—something, someone falls on top of me, comes between me and the downward arc of the knife.
Stephen
. And Miriam staggers off balance as Shadow hurtles against her, teeth ripping into her forearm. Miriam shouts in pain, kicks at Shadow, sends her tumbling, yelping, and Jerry and Jonathan and Isaac close in. Isaac, his small face tormented with bewilderment, reaches out to her, wailing her name. But she doesn't hear. Like a hunted, cornered animal, she strikes out blindly, and the knife is still in her hand.

A dark fountain in the white light, and Miriam's gown is dappled with blood, and it still spills out as Isaac sinks into his mother's arms, as she sinks to her knees under his weight, and Isaac lies with his head canted back, Miriam's hand pressed to his throat to stem that hideous fountain, and blood pulses dark from between her fingers.

I cling to Stephen with my free arm as he clings to me, and Isaac's beautiful face is still, and if it weren't for that deluge of blood, I might think Miriam is only singing her son to sleep, but her lullaby is a broken whimpering rife with anguish, and her son will never wake again. The pressure in my chest has become adamant pain as if something unseen were trying to squeeze the lifeblood out of my heart as Isaac's has poured out. So willing, it seems, that outpouring, as if the sacrifice were embraced in ecstasy.

But the dark fountain has stopped.

None of us has moved through those endless seconds while Isaac died. We all watched stupefied, none of us believing one drop of that child's blood, none of us understanding it.

Now Jerry moves. Like a man transformed into stone, he moves ponderously toward Miriam and Isaac. He speaks, and his voice is the crack of boulders falling. “What have you
done
?”

I think he might have killed her, crushed her like an avalanche, but it is then that Miriam looks up, and he stops.

Her face is in full light, alabaster white. She doesn't see Jerry. Her eyes are dead with a fathomless despair that echoes in her voice as she cries out her son's name in a keening ululation that vibrates within me as if I were a tuning fork for that one terrible note.

Miriam understands everything at this moment.

When that cry dies into silence, her head falls forward, but that is her only movement.

Jerry leans down and takes Isaac's frail body out of her arms. He looks at me, finally forces the words out, and perhaps the questions are addressed to me.

“Who will forgive her? Who will forgive me?”

There is no answer to that. He knows there is no answer. He turns, carries Isaac away, down the long, moon-silvered slope. Jonathan follows him, his face nearly as lifeless as his brother's.

And I hear someone weeping. Stephen's head rests on my shoulder as if he were a sleepy child, but these aren't the easy tears of childhood. These are the labored tears of an adult. I press my cheek against his thick, curling hair, remember a day when I asked him if he'd do the same for me.

And he answered: Yes,
I'd do it for you, Mary
.

Esther and Bernadette come to help me find the lost key, help me free myself from my self-imposed bondage, help me make my way down from the Knob; I can't walk without their support. Stephen follows us, carrying Shadow. When we're halfway down the slope, I ask them to stop.

I look back, look for Miriam.

She had not once moved since her final cry of despair. Like Lot's wife, she seemed fixed in that one place, kneeling in the grass in her white gown blackened with blood.

But now, as I look back, I can't see her.

Stephen asks, “Where is she?”

The weight of the pain has made it too difficult to breathe. I can't answer that, even if I knew the answer.

—SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642–1727)

T
he sun is moving south now as the summer wanes. Another August almost gone, another summer. At my age each season vanished is something precious lost.

Yet today I feel almost youthful with the golden seed heads of the grass rising around me, enveloping me in their piquant, dusty scents. I can forget, as I sit with my legs stretched out, one arm back to prop me, face turned up to the sun, that I will have to ask Jeremiah to help me when I decide to rise. But he'll offer his strong hand. He'd carry me if I asked. I won't. I'm still quite capable of walking with no other assistance than my cane, and I walk every day. It keeps me strong. But it's gratifying to know I can depend on Jeremiah. I have at times no choice but to depend on him and the family since that night on the Knob, since Bernadette told me I had suffered a heart attack.

Jeremiah sits a few feet away near a mound of earth sparsely covered with grass. We are in the cemetery east of the orchard. Before May we didn't think of it as a cemetery. It was simply the place where Rebecca was buried. Now there are two graves, two wooden markers with names and dates carved on them. They remind me of all the poignant little cemeteries Rachel and I found after the End.

Every day when the children gather for school, I feel Isaac's absence. This grief was inevitable; he was too fey, too frail to survive many more years. But the manner of his death has given a trenchant edge to the inevitable.

I lean forward, stroke Shadow's head. She still limps a little, but I think I notice it more than she does. And I'm grateful I still have her.

I'm grateful for many things today. Grateful for the sun, grateful for my life, grateful for Jeremiah and the accepting silence between us. He sits cross-legged, looking down the long slope toward the bam and house. He has a book in his lap. It isn't a Bible. It is the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.

And all of us are especially grateful today. I attended the sabbath service this morning. I haven't altered my habits and convictions when it comes to the religious life of the family, and in the past four months I had set foot in the church only once. That was for Isaac's funeral. I made another exception today because on this sabbath Jeremiah baptized Esther's baby. Daniel. Healthy and strong, and that's the miracle
I
celebrated. I'm not concerned with his soul. Only his body now. Later I'll be concerned with his mind. No. Stephen will probably be the one concerned with Daniel's mind.

And so will Jeremiah, who is beginning to understand the value of the human mind, who has become in a way another student. Rather, he has become a son. He has let me be the mother he wanted me to be.

I hear distant voices. Esther and Miriam are coming out of the henhouse, Esther with Daniel in a sling on her back, Miriam carrying a basket filled with eggs in her right hand. She has no left hand.

Our Astarte's perfect beauty is blemished. Like old Nehemiah, her arm has been amputated a few inches above the elbow.

I hear Jeremiah's hissing intake of breath. He's looking at Miriam, bewilderment and grief resurrected in his eyes. Part of the grief is for the sister he has, in a sense, lost. I wonder if he'll ever resolve that loss in his mind. He asked who would forgive her and forgive him. He's the only one who can.

And I wonder if I will ever look on this young woman laughing in the sun, her hair gilded with its light, without fear. Not for what she is now: for what she was, for what she could be again.

We thought she was dead.

For three days after she killed her son, Jeremiah and the others searched for her, and finally decided she had in her despair leapt off the Knob into the rock-strewn sea below. But I didn't believe that. I didn't believe Miriam would, however compelling her despair, defy the essential taboo against suicide encoded in her religion.

Yet in one sense I was wrong.

On the sixth day after that confrontation on the Knob, I had recovered enough for a walk to the tree, and Shadow had recovered enough to go with me. I wanted no human company; I was feeling smothered by solicitude. But I didn't get to the tree. Just past the east gate, Shadow stopped me with her barking. She stood sniffing the air, then limped off south down the road toward Shiloh, and all my calling and whistling wouldn't deter her. I followed her around the curve and saw something lying at the side of the road, tattered white and brown cloth nested in green fronds of bracken. Shadow's barking turned vicious, and I knew then what she had found.

Miriam. She hadn't fled her despair over the cliff at the Knob, but into the forest. She lay with her hair dull and tangled, her moonlight white gown stained with her son's blood, torn by branches and thorns. On her monstrously swollen left arm, I saw the gashes from Shadow's teeth. I remembered that purplish bronze color, that sweetly foul odor.

She was alive and conscious, terrified by Shadow's barking and perhaps by me. I quieted Shadow, then leaned over Miriam, and she looked back at me with fevered, fearful eyes. I knew she didn't recognize me even before she spoke, the words forced as if she weren't sure how to form them. “Who are you?”

I said, “I'm Mary Hope.”

That meant nothing to her. She only stared at me until I asked, “Do you know who
you
are?”

She shook her head, grimacing. “No. I . . . don't know.”

That was the way she committed suicide.

She couldn't kill her body, but she killed the self within her whose memories she couldn't tolerate.

But the self-death of amnesia might be transitory. To me, she was still Miriam, the priestess of the irrational, maniacally bent on murder—on my murder, on the murder of the past, on the murder of the future.

No one else at Amarna knew she was still alive. And she wouldn't be alive much longer if I left her here. Her eyes closed, and I couldn't see any sign of breath. I pressed my fingers under the curve of her jaw and finally found a faint pulse.

“Come on, Shadow.” And I turned away, walked back to Amarna.

Jeremiah was in the barn. I told him where to find Miriam.

Bernadette performed the surgery on the dining-room table with opium for an anesthetic, and if I had been seeking revenge, I'd have had it in the next few weeks. But I took no pleasure in Miriam's pain, not the pain of recovery, nor the agonies she must have endured during those six days she was lost in the wilderness of forest and despair.

We told her only that her name was Miriam. No more. The family agreed with me on that, although it's hard for the younger children to accept. But it has been impressed on them that they are not to say anything to remind Miriam of the past. She has been born again, and like a child she is being taught to be a human being.

Jeremiah watches Miriam and Esther as they walk toward the house. He turns away, stares at Isaac's grave, and the twin griefs haunt his eyes.

“I wonder if she'll ever remember, Mary.”

“She might. I hope not.”

“For her sake, yes.”

I don't add,
for our sakes, for the sake of the children
. I look down at the book in his hand. “Read to me, Jeremiah. Your eyes are better than mine.”

He smiles. “But I can't read as well.”

“Yes, you can. Please.”

He opens the book, turns a few pages, then, pronouncing every word carefully, reads:

Vital light. Ancient light. I think of Miriam and the well of darkness hidden in the depths of her memory. I think of the survivalists Luke found in the Siskyou Mountains, and they are a tide of darkness. And if their children survive, their darkness will flow deeper, generation unto generation, and ultimately it could quench our light. And other survivors may one day discover Amarna, unknown factors of light or darkness.

I look toward the Knob, and I can only see a corner of the vault through the fruit trees. I can do no more to keep our light burning. All that's left me is hope, and that's all Rachel and I had to begin with.

Jeremiah is still poring over the book, frowning with concentration as he reads to himself. I don't disturb him. I think of the reclusive Emily reaching across an ivy-covered stone wall more than a century and a half thick to cast wildflowers in his path.

Then I raise one hand to shade my eyes. Stephen is coming up from the house. He walks with long strides, and I think he's grown half a foot this summer. Shadow rouses, runs to meet him, and he leans down to pet her. When they reach us, Jeremiah smiles and says, “Good day, Stephen. I suppose you've been hiding with a book somewhere.”

“Well, I have to when my teacher gives me so much to read.”

I laugh at that. “I hope you're not expecting sympathy from your teacher. But I'm glad you're here. Would you like to take a walk on the beach with me?”

He nods. “I was about to ask
you
that.”

Jeremiah rises, and he and Stephen lift me to my feet. Jeremiah has my cane ready. I say, “Thank you, gentlemen.” They laugh at that word, no doubt taking it literally, and that's apt enough.

Stephen and I walk to the house, where I make a short detour to my room, then we start down the beach path. Jonathan, Little Mary, Deborah, and Rachel join us, and when we reach the beach, they spill laughing and shouting onto the sand, with Shadow running joyfully around them. The sea is the quiet, glossy sea of summer, the sand pale and drifted like snow. Stephen shortens his stride to match my slow pace as we walk along in the firm, damp sand at the water's edge.

Finally, I stop, turn to face him, and take a small, black portfolio out of my pocket. I offer it to him.

“I have some more reading for you. I finished it last night, Stephen. The Chronicle of Rachel.”

For a moment he only stares at the portfolio, then he takes it from me. “It's . . . finished?”

“Yes.”

He opens it carefully, reads aloud from the first sheet, “ ‘And it came to pass in the days before the End of the last civilization, that Mary Hope left the city to come to the sea, and there she found at a place called Amarna a woman of wisdom and courage, and her name was Rachel Morrow. . . .' ” He smiles, looks up at me. “I think now when I read this, I'll . . . understand.”

“I know you will. You proved that.” I look into his face, seeking the vanishing contours of childhood. “Stephen, there'll be so much for you to understand, and so many things will happen to you in your lifetime that will call for wisdom and courage. And I won't be here to help you, just as the day came when Rachel wasn't here to help me. In a way I grieve for you. It took me a long time to realize that Rachel grieved for me when she knew she was dying.”

He frowns, and I know he doesn't like to talk about my dying. But he's learned a lot about death this thirteenth year of his life. And about wisdom and courage. Finally he says, “I wish I'd known Rachel.”

I look out at the sea, chatoyant aquamarine, the surf casting up white laces of foam. “You know her, Stephen. And so will your children, generation unto generation. Even when her name is forgotten, they'll know her.”

And I close my eyes to listen.
I am here . . . I am always here
. . . .