A Gift Upon the Shore (5 page)

“How many books did she have?”

“I don't know exactly. Thousands. What we have in the house now is only a few hundred. The duplicates.”

He looks up toward the Knob as if he could see the vault, but doesn't seem to find it necessary to say anything about it. “Her neighbors—Jim and Connie—where did they live?”

“About half a mile south toward Shiloh. The ruins of the house are still there. They helped with Rachel's garden and livestock and shared the harvest. Jim was a retired engineer, and his pension couldn't even keep them in food. Rachel had a small income she'd inherited from her parents, but it was a pittance with the inflation that hit in the years before the End.” But I see that I'm not making sense to him. He doesn't fully understand the concept of money. How could he understand inflation and a world economy skewed by a glut of population and by small, vicious wars that destroyed industries, cut off most of the world's oil supplies, and disrupted trade networks?

“Did Rachel have a lot of livestock?” he asks.

That's the economy Stephen understands, the elementary economy of food production. “Not as much as we have. Let's see, she had chickens, rabbits, bees, goats, and one horse, a bay mare she called Silver. The mare was about as far as you could get from the original Silver.” His puzzled look tells me I must explain the Lone Ranger, and before I've finished that, Rachel's choice of a name for the horse loses its humor. Finally, I add, “She also had the two shelties, Shadow and Topaz.”

“Didn't you tell us one of her dogs was named Sparky?”

“Well, Sparky was Jim and Connie's dog to begin with. The shelties—Jim told me they came from a kennel in Oldport that got burned out by a road gang. The two pups were the only survivors, and Rachel adopted them. Same story with Silver. She came from a stable in Shiloh. The owner rented horses to tourists, but he went broke and sold off the horses. For dog food, probably. By the time Rachel heard about it, Silver was the only one left. Rachel didn't need a horse—couldn't afford to keep it in hay—but she took Silver in. Just like she took me in.”

Stephen smiles gently at that, but his smile fades as he says, “You still grieve for her, don't you?”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

He nods. “I still want to cry sometimes for Rebecca.”

We're both silent for a while, sharing the pain dulled by three years, but still persistent. I loved Rebecca like the daughter I never had. So frail and fey, she argued nothing, accepted everything. Even death when it came in the trappings of agony. She left us little Rachel and the memory of music, of the clear honey of her singing.

Stephen's hands close into fists. “I don't understand why Rebecca had to die.”

Miriam called it the will of god.

“I don't understand it, either, Stephen.”

“Maybe that's something we're not supposed to know.”

I hesitate, wait until he looks around at me. “Stephen, reasons are human inventions. I mean, reasons as opposed to explanations. You can invent a reason that will satisfy you, but you should be aware that it's an invention.”

I let him think about that a moment, then I look out at the surf. “I've lost track of my story. Where was I? Somewhere in the middle of my recovery, I guess. I was bed-bound most of the time for about a week, and Rachel and Connie and Jim took care of me like I was a long-lost relative. I told them about the house Aunt Jan had willed to me, about my plans to live there and write. And they tried to warn me. Shiloh was a shadow of what it had been when I was there as a child. That's why Connie took care of me at Rachel's house instead of sending me to a hospital. There
wasn't
a hospital closer than Portland. The USMA hospital in Shiloh had closed six years before. Connie ran a small clinic, and that was the only medical facility in the area. The town of Shiloh wasn't even incorporated by then. Jim was the last mayor, by the way. He was also chief of the local Veepies.”

“What does that mean—Veepies?”

“Well, it was from the initials VP, for Voluntary Police. They were townspeople who helped the Federal Auxiliary Police, the Apies. Anyway, all Jim ever got out of ten years as chief of the Shiloh Veepies was a set of engraved handcuffs.” I have the handcuffs now; they're among the memorabilia in my souvenir drawer. Stephen watches me, but remains silent, and at length I continue: “They tried to prepare me for what I'd find at my aunt's house, but I didn't listen. I didn't
want
to listen. I'd quit my job in Portland, left the few friends I had there, left a man I loved, left my mother. Poor woman, she never got over Dad's death, and then I left her. I asked her to come with me, but she wouldn't. She was afraid. She didn't know why, and that was the saddest part. But
I
couldn't stay in the city. I had my dream—my dream of living by the sea and writing. And I had a house. All mine, free and clear. My house by the sea . . .”

A
gray day, the clouds like fog waiting to settle on the land. It was the first time Mary Hope had been outside the house, except for occasional forays onto the deck. Yet she felt strong today, ready to get on with her new life. She knew she could deal with anything now. She had survived her trial by fire—with a little help from her friends.

Mary accepted the cane Rachel offered, declining the crutches Connie had provided. She didn't need them now. Nor did she need any medication stronger than aspirin. On this day of all days, she didn't want her head muddled. Rachel was quiet, almost taciturn. She didn't argue with Mary about forgoing the crutches, nor comment when she had to help her into the old, red VW van.

Rachel backed the van out of the garage down a long driveway to a turnaround, then headed east, and Mary saw Amarna for the first time, saw the whole of it: the house weathered into its setting, the spruce trees on the bank ragged silhouettes, the bamboo south of the house lushly exotic. In her mind, bamboo was a tropical plant, but that giant grass flourished in this wet, temperate climate. She saw the high deer fence surrounding the garden; the orchard, veiled in the pink of furled buds; the barn, built by a carpenter, simple and functional, and like the house, covered with gray cedar shingles tinted green with microscopic moss. Silver was at the watering trough by the barn, flanked by three brown, lop-eared Nubian goats.

Rachel's domain was fenced with barbless wire. When she reached the gate in the southeast corner, she had to stop and get out to unlock and open the gate, drive through, and get out again to close it. Then she drove along a gravel road that curved to the south. At one point she gestured toward the side of the road. “That's where I found you.”

Mary didn't remember the place, only what brought her to it, and she shivered. “You're a true good Samaritan, Rachel.”

Rachel laughed. “I doubt that.”

“I mean it. I'd have died if you hadn't found me.”

Rachel glanced at her, but made no comment, concentrating on shifting gears where the gravel road met a paved loop. Mary leaned forward, hands braced on the dashboard, her pulse quickening. She remembered now. This loop marked the end of North Front Road, which ran parallel to the beach for a mile before angling inland to make a Y with Highway 101. Aunt Jan's house was at the south end of town, but in that childhood summer she and her parents had explored all of Shiloh by bicycle or on foot. Rachel pointed out the Acres house northwest of the loop, but Mary was too distracted by memories and anticipation to garner more than an impression of ochre-stained wood and great spans of glass. Nor was she interested in the other houses as they drove along North Front Road. Maybe there were a lot of
FOR SALE
signs, but she ignored them.

The shopping mall at the junction of North Front and the highway surprised her. It had been built since she was last in Shiloh. Rachel said, “This is really Shiloh's downtown these days.” Yet half the mall's shops were vacant. Mary ignored that, too.

And on the highway, which served as Shiloh's main street, she ignored the empty buildings and boarded-up windows. There were still shops open for business here. The bakery—yes, she remembered that and its rich crumpet bread—a barber shop, a laundromat.

After three blocks, Rachel turned left into a parking lot. On the south was an aged building with scarred, brick walls. That, Rachel informed her, was Connie Acres's clinic. Mary only glanced at it. North of the parking lot stood a new building, flat-roofed, olive drab cement block, metal letters above the entry:
U.S. AUXILIARY POLICE STATION, CENTRAL OREGON COAST DIVISION
. A communication tower loomed over the building, its dish antennas bizarre blossoms on the latticed steel stem. Six black Apie patrol cars were lined up in front of the station.

Mary still didn't understand why Jim Acres insisted on going with them to her aunt's house, why he further insisted that they meet him here. And when he came out of the station, it was in the company of an Apie captain who looked like a model for a recruiting poster.

When Rachel and Mary got out of the van, Jim made the introductions. Captain Harry Berden, tall and hard and handsome. He spoke with a Western drawl and hailed from Boise, Idaho. Mary found herself pleased with his assessing gaze as he courteously expressed regret that she'd been caught in the Rover ambush.

But she was less than pleased when Jim put in casually, “Harry's going to drive us down to your aunt's house in his patrol.”

Mary looked at Jim sharply, but he seemed incapable of meeting her eye. She smiled at Harry Berden and said, “Well, we'd enjoy your company, Captain, but I don't really think we need a police escort.”

“You do, ma'am,” he answered soberly. “Take my word for it.”

Then he explained in his easy drawl that after the oil crunch hit Shiloh so hard, the few people who stayed—no more than five hundred, he estimated—had moved into the north end of town. There was safety in banding together. The south end, well, it had been left to the squatters. And he explained that 101 was a hobo's highway, a migration route for the homeless and hopeless. And he explained that the Apie garrison here was understaffed, under-equipped, and they had more pressing problems than what he called the wild geese. The highway was turf to road gangs; the Rovers that attacked her bus were still holed up somewhere around Shiloh. And he explained that he knew from the address that her aunt's house was within the area occupied by the nomads. Forfeited to them.

Squatters' land, he called it.

Mary listened, feeling unexpectedly dizzy, and she wanted to deny it all with a laugh, but she read something in Captain Berden's eyes that made any denial a delusion. Those young eyes—he was no more than thirty—were suddenly old. There was no despair in them; only a bleak acceptance that was as much a witness to old wounds as a scar.

Yet she couldn't surrender her dream. She had nothing else to hold on to. She had to see the house for herself.

And she did.

Squatters' land. It had been a pleasant neighborhood, most of the houses weekenders, but well kept. Now it was as desolate as a war zone, half the dwellings burned ruins engulfed in blackberry vines. Mary sat in the backseat of the black car and stared out through bullet-proof glass, her mind denying the reality her eyes presented her. She caught glimpses of the squatters, ragged wraiths peering through broken windows, running across yards inundated by brittle, gray weeds. One of them—an old man with a prophet's beard—paused to give the police car a defiant finger before he disappeared behind a burned cottage.

She wondered numbly why the captain finally stopped the car. She didn't recognize the house. This was only a shack giving way to weather and weeds, shingles blown off the roof, a climbing rose gone wild festooning the porch, growing through the broken windows.

It was Aunt Jan's prized climbing Peace rose. This was Aunt Jan's house. Mary felt that realization reverberating within her at the same moment she saw three shadowy figures burst out of the front door and vanish within seconds.

She knew she should surrender then. But she couldn't. Not yet.

At the captain's suggestion, Jim stayed in the car. He knew how to use the radio. Berden and Rachel went into the house with Mary.

The musty emptiness, the sour smell of filth and mildew, made her skin crawl. All the furniture was gone—except for the charred fragments of carved table legs and chair backs in the fireplace. The sound of the surf echoed hollowly against the smoke-grimed walls; the west windows were empty rectangles. She made her way to the kitchen in the northeast corner. No stove or refrigerator, no cabinets, not even a sink. Pipes thrust out of scarred walls, and in one corner three rats foraged on a mound of garbage. Mary stumbled back, caught her foot on a loose floorboard, and gasped with a spasm of pain.

The bathroom door was missing and so were the fixtures, except for the toilet that overflowed with foul, brown liquid. She went to the bedroom door. Where the door had been. A mattress, strewn with tangles of dirty blankets, lay on the floor. Tom organdy curtains writhed in the wind that blew cold through the empty window frames.

A shadow of movement drew her to the north window. Behind the house next door, three people were standing, waiting. Two bearded men. A woman. No, a girl. Maybe seventeen. She stared at Mary with dark, unblinking eyes, and Mary read there fear, anger, resentment, and a hunger that transcended the simple need for food, a hunger Mary knew to be beyond appeasement, and perhaps the girl knew it, too.

They stared at each other through the empty window, each looking into another plane of existence, and all that stood between Mary and that hungry-eyed, feral creature was a distance of a few yards.

Then abruptly the squatters turned, ragged clothes flapping, and they disappeared.

And at that moment the dream died beyond hope of resurrection.

The wreck of the house might be repaired—if she had the tens of thousands of dollars to spend on it—but the squatters, the wild geese, would still be here, waiting. The deed that had been the lucent focus of all her hope was only a scrap of paper. This house was theirs now.

Rachel and Captain Berden were waiting for her when she returned to the living room. They didn't speak, nor did she. She was looking for something, although she didn't understand what, not until she found it. A memento of the dream.

It was on the mantel. She wondered how she'd missed it before, how—and why—it had survived.

The old Seth Thomas clock.

It was made of quarter-sawed oak, its design stringently simple, the face set in an arch from which the sides fell straight to a curved base. The wood and glass were coated with grime. Mary opened the small door on the front panel. The hinges were stiff, but nothing inside seemed to be broken. She pushed the pendulum. It swung, ticking at a stately pace.

Aunt Jan's great-grandmother brought this clock with her when she came west as a bride, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, by ship around the Horn. Aunt Jan had told Mary that long ago in the summer of her childhood, when she let Mary wind the clock.

Now Mary picked it up, held it against her body, saw her tears fall onto the begrimed wood, and she knew it would have been simpler if the Rovers had killed her, too. Like Laura and her baby. That had seemed so cruelly meaningless, but death has no meaning if life is meaningless. And her tears were equally meaningless, but she couldn't stop them. She knew the feel of these tears. Grief. She grieved again for her father, even for her mother. Grieved for Aunt Jan. Grieved for that feral-eyed girl.

Grieved for a dream.

She felt Rachel's hand on her shoulder. “Mary, let's go home.”