Lost Everything (12 page)

Out on the river, the ferry’s paddles slapped toward shore, toward the camp. On it, a man with two camels, ropes around their necks. A woman dressed in clothes made from blankets. Four children without an adult, the second-oldest bossing the oldest around, bickering as though they were married, while the youngest trailed her foot in the water and the second-youngest squinted at the pages of a water-warped book. Sergeant Foote, in a long dress, boots, and sun hat, a suitcase at her feet, watched the shore approach. The chaotic shape of the
Carthage,
the crew crawling across its skin. The refugee camp a strip of grays and browns, rising ashen smoke, sprawling across the shore. She turned to her reflection in the window of the ferry’s pilothouse. The shape of a woman again. Almost believable that she had never seen an entire town on fire around her, animals bleeding in the street, the cries of dying horses. But the war was there to be noticed, in the eyes, in the hands. She would have to be careful, or look for the other ones who had the signs. Her targets must have them, after all they had been through. Had her commander been able to see into her head at that moment, he would have reprimanded her. Compassion has no place in your mission, he might have said. But she could not help it. Did not want to. She imagined sometimes that kindness would come as an annihilating flood. Drown the war and us with it, recede just when we were on the edge of death. Leave us lying faceup on the ground, staring into the brilliant sky. Thankful for every breath.

In Southern Pennsylvania there is now only a grayness beyond the hills. A long line of people in the narrow road below, winding among the empty farms. Untied sheets floating above them like flags. They are half dead already, ash and sallow skin. Yet it takes so little to bring them back to life. I open the front door and bring out food, and the shuffling stops, necks turn. Parents push their kids forward, become happy to the brink of tears to see their children fed. As if it is enough to sustain them, too. They hug me, offer me something from what they have left. A mechanical eggbeater, a pair of leather shoes. Something for when I have to go, too. All of us linked in chains of small kindnesses, the length of the road, from town to town, city to city, stretched across the land, lashing us together. We should be killing each other now, and some of us are. But others of us are meeting under highways, exchanging news and small peaches. Asking how everyone is. There are children playing soccer in debris-strewn streets. People holding each other on the chipped steps of dusty churches. We are not done for yet. If I did not believe that, there would be no point in writing, in trying to find you, so that we might speak to each other, tell each other what we have to say.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT, VIOLENCE BROKE
out on the shore at Millersburg. It began with grain alcohol and shouting. Fights in the street at the park’s edge, a woman bleeding from the shoulder and forehead. A flash of fire, a house lighting up. The flames taking it faster than anyone expected. The man who had lived in it just standing there, shaking his head. He had refused to leave the town, even as his neighbors cleared out. No war, no refugees, no nothing, could chase him away. He had been born in that house, on the tiles of the bathroom floor. An only child. When he was seven, he had climbed up to the roof, did not know how to get back down. Did not understand why his parents were so upset with him, why they held him so tight after the neighbor got a long ladder and brought him back to the ground. When he was sixteen, he went up there again with a girl he knew his mother and father disapproved of. They stayed there all night while all four parents scoured the town for them. Watched the first glimmer of sun pour across the sky. She kissed him twice, fidgeted with a bra strap. Said she would come back, and shimmied down the gutter. He did not see her for a week, and when at last he found her, walking with her head down on the side of the road, passing the grocery store on the way out of town, she would not talk to him, say where she was going. Then he did not see her at all, and for months afterward, he did not know what to do. He took it hard, too hard. He hated the house, hated the town. Almost hated his parents, until he realized that they had taught him everything he needed to pull himself from the wreckage. They saved him, and for all the years they had left, he tried to show them how grateful he was, was never sure he succeeded. He got everything his parents had when they died. Always said he would trade it all in to have them back. But now the flames had his house. What would he trade now if his parents were to approach him, standing at the threshold, staring back at him? The guardians at the gate needing only a bribe to let them come back?

There was no time to think about it. All around the house, young men were gathering, staring into the flames. Kids that the war had entered. A boy with a brown shirt who had seen men with guns—he would never know who they were—come to his house, force his father to his knees in the living room and shoot him in the face, take fistfuls of his mother’s hair and lead her to the front yard. An hour later, she was disemboweled, her pants off. Then the men picked the boy up by his legs and swung him against the wall until his head cracked and he was bleeding all over the floor. They left when they thought they had killed him. He did not know when it was that he came to. His head in shock. His father on the floor next to him, bent backward, his blood dark brown and dried into the carpet. Through the window, he could see only his mother’s legs in the grass. There are people who live through that, with it. They put a hundred miles between themselves and the screaming memory of what happened to them—never far enough away that they cannot see it, hear it, but never so close that they cannot make themselves into something else. Not this boy. There was never the chance to walk the miles. His life was that living room, that yard, after the atrocities, for from Baltimore to Harrisburg, the country had shown him nothing else. Now he looked into the flames, grabbed the end of a burning timber, and spread them. Lit a rag on fire and threw it into the next camp. Destroyed a suitcase that had made it all the way from North Carolina to there. Four shirts. Six books tied with twine. The woman who owned these things came up to him, hollering, what the fuck are you doing? But there were already more boys throwing fire, the flames crawling across the park.

The crew pulled the alarm on the
Carthage,
a cascade of bells, and Captain Mendoza rushed from her cabin, looked at Millersburg, and spat orders. The lines were loosed, the ship pulling from the shore, and Sergeant Foote and twelve other refugees who had boarded hours ago watched the land recede. Twenty-two boys gone feral with violence who saw them trying to leave ran into the water, threw burning sticks that made spirals of fire in the air. Three of them bounced off the hull and fell, hissing, into the water. Then there was only the light from the flames on the shore, the heads of the children in silhouette. Their ragged howls carrying across the water, as loud as ever.

*   *   *

SUNNY JIM AND REVEREND
Bauxite lay in the smoldering dark, ears cocked to the screams outside. The tang of ash too strong to be a small fire. It was like Reverend Bauxite’s church after the bombs. The charred pews, the broken windows. The stains on the stone. He had kneeled at the ruined altar, mumbling his prayers. Trying to give the building, the people who had gone with it, the best funeral he could. Talia, Talia, if only you were still here.

“Do you think we’re all right?” Sunny Jim said.

“I think we’re fine,” Reverend Bauxite said. “They’ll never let the violence aboard.”

“Do you think they have a choice?”

“As long as we can move, they do.”

Crashing splinters. A yelp, simian. No. The sound of all the birds on deck, frantic in their cages.

“I know you think I waited too long,” Sunny Jim said. “To go get him.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Reverend Bauxite said. “I’ve never been married. Never had a child. And I have enough respect for both to know that I can’t imagine it.”

They both felt the untruth in what he was saying. It had been only a matter of months, but it was months of bombs and ruin, of running in the dark, both of them making sure they could always see the boy, making sure Aaron’s arms were locked around their shoulders. Sunny Jim had seen how fast Reverend Bauxite’s hand opened toward the boy when they heard the artillery coming, how fast Aaron’s hand reached out and took it. Saw, too, how Reverend Bauxite looked Merry over when he met her, appraising her for how well she could protect the child, overlooking everything else. She reminds me of Aline, he said. With that single sentence, understanding why Sunny Jim loved his wife better than anyone. And then, after Aaron was gone, the way they talked about the boy, wondered what he was playing with, what he was eating, whether he was sleeping better or worse now that it was so quiet around him. Consoling themselves with the idea that he felt too safe with his aunt to miss them. They were both his parents now, Reverend Bauxite could feel it, though he had no idea how to tell Sunny Jim that.

“You think it was too long,” Sunny Jim said.

“Yes.”

“…”

“…”

“I waited so long because I knew my sister could handle it,” Sunny Jim said. “You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“I have so much faith in her. Can’t imagine her ever letting anything happen to him.”

“But now—”

“—Yes, now everything’s different.”

“…”

“Reverend? Do you believe that after the storm, there’s nothing?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“…”

“Ten years ago,” Sunny Jim said, “whatever time I had, it was enough. Wanting more than that seemed like I was pressing my luck.”

“I understand.”

“But Aaron’s changed all that. Aaron and the storm.”

“Yes.”

The Big One was making converts of us all, Reverend Bauxite thought. Perhaps questions of faith and questions of what we had done to the planet had always been converging. Both had their deniers, people who claimed no responsibility. Things just happen, they said. But among the faithful—those who had seen enough evidence to believe that things happened for a reason, and that we were part of it—there was a sense of having sinned, and of there being a reckoning for those sins. The hope that if we changed our ways we would be saved. The paralyzing fear that we’d done too much and were already damned. It had been that way for a long time, and the planet had taken many things back from us. But the Big One was making it acute. It was an epiphany, the appearance of the divine on earth, and we could not deny its power any more than we could read its intent, or foretell the consequences. As if the war was not enough. As if, all at once, we were being forced to eat all the poisonous fruit we had been cultivating for years, eat it without knowing how to survive it. Reverend Bauxite had to believe we would survive, that something better was coming. On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast, he thought. Of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever.

But it was so hard to wait, to know what to do until then. For Reverend Bauxite, the central question of being God’s instrument was the dilemma of righteousness or mercy: whether one should condemn or forgive. The crucifixion was supposed to have solved that problem—he had been told that, it was part of his training. The cross was love overwhelming justice, love in the divine destroying the need for a balancing of the scales on earth. Reverend Bauxite understood that on the page. The idea could still stir him, make him try to accept what he had seen. But there had been too much death, too many people scorched in flaming buildings, too many people blown to pieces in the street. Too many people he loved were gone for him to believe that faith demanded he abide it. Was there not a jagged stone of pride, a kind of judgment, embedded in the admonition to accept the world as it was and turn to the devotion of the divine? Was it not a small claim to know God’s mind? He did not know, could not pretend he would ever have an answer. He knew only that he could not look upon so much wrong and not act, and he asked for forgiveness only in the sense of comprehending his imperfection in not being sorry for some of the things he had done. He knew, too, that he had not always been true even to the path he had chosen, that he had erred often—been too merciful when righteousness demanded expression, been righteous when mercy was needed. There were two peoples in his head, the righteous and the merciful, in conflict with each other and arguing among themselves. He would never find an agreement that satisfied them, Reverend Bauxite knew. He was not smart enough. It was the nature of his faith. And that was only the beginning, for within each position, the questions compounded, fractured, turned inward, pointed outward.

But now his only friend left in the world, the father of his child, was standing in the middle of it. Tell it to him straight, said the righteous people. Tell him Aline’s dead, dead and gone, and shatter him. Then help him come together again, so he can get Aaron and deal with the world before him without ever looking back, even once. There is no time for anything else. But the merciful smiled. You do not see? they said to the righteous ones, all in unison. He needs her to live right now. She is not yours to take from him, only his to release. Reverend Bauxite could not see into his friend as well as he wanted to. But he saw something: how Sunny Jim had been pulled apart, the man who married Aline now separate from the new father who held his wailing son on the first day of his life.

Sunny Jim’s wife and son were the poles of his existence, and now they were opposed, moving away from each other. The husband saying to hang on, to wait. He could suspend himself until she came back—for she had to come back, she had to, even though every word he said about her, every utterance of her name, abandoned a small part of her, and a piece of him, to the world. He was not ready for that, or for the waves of grief that would come for him afterward, but he did not know what else to do. And then there was the father, calling to the husband, laying a hand on his forehead: Get ready, for the time is coming when you will let everything go, so that you can give it all to your son, the one you love most in the world. And it will all be worth it, even when you cannot recognize what you are in the light that follows. Sunny Jim could almost see it, this better place. He did not know how to get there, but knew, just knew, that Aaron did. Thought maybe his son would let him come with him. And maybe when they arrived, Aline would be waiting.