This Census-Taker (10 page)

A
man came.

My father had gone downhill. I was upstairs, drawing on the walls, to repopulate them at last. The animals I drew looked different now. I added faces and stood them upright. The new arrivals eyed the streets where their predecessors had been and I whispered to them all. I could feel the house buck in the gusts, and through the windows I saw trees hurled around.

Someone knocked and I started so violently I hurt my neck. But I knew it wasn’t my father so I ran down the stairs and opened the door.

Strips of leaf and twigs rushed into the kitchen. I braced. The sky was all flat cloud but bright. I was looking into a silhouette. I blinked to clear the wind from my eyes.

“The key-maker’s not here,” I said. “You can wait outside. I don’t know how long he’ll be. Or you can go back to the town and he’ll be here again tomorrow.”

“I’m not here for the key-maker,” the visitor said.

I could see his outlines now. A man who held something in his hands.

His skin was deeply lined, but I don’t think he was much older than my father. He was bald but for an island of short gray hair at the front of his forehead and a rim of it at the back of his head. He was tall, not as rangy as my father but thin and tough looking. He wore glasses. The reflections on their lenses hid his eyes. He had on a dark gray suit with a white shirt. All his clothes were dusty. The bridgetown people didn’t wear ties and I was bewildered by the stripe of black-blue cloth crisscrossed with a simple design.

He carried a big rifle over his shoulder, a box in his left hand, a clipboard in his right.

The man reared back his head and I saw that his spectacles were made of shifting planes. I’d never seen such machines as bifocals. He looked at me through the magnifying facets.

“He isn’t here,” I repeated.

“I’m not here to speak to him,” the man said. He spoke with a kind of singsong enthusiasm. He used my language well but I could tell it wasn’t his own. “That is, I am, eventually,” he said. “I will. He’ll be back. It’s very much my job to speak to him. But I came here now because he isn’t here.”

His accent was familiar to me.

He said, “I came to speak to you.”

I didn’t let him into the house and he didn’t ask to enter. He put down the leather box-suitcase. He held his papers flat against his body. Below us on the slope I could see a swirl of dark frozen air, a hillside squall throwing one of the brief year-round bursts of snow that characterizes that region. It sounded like voices.

“So, I
am
here to speak to your father,” the visitor said. “But not yet. I have to do a job. I will be asking him questions. I’ve been working in the town, and I’ve kept hearing about things that I need to follow up. That I need to know more about.” He looked at me carefully until I lowered my eyes.

A guffaw shocked me.

“My mule,” the man said. He pointed down the hill to where my own unseen goat was answering his animal.

“I have to make a record,” he said. “I’m here because I need information from certain people in town. Your father’s one of them, because of where he was born. So I need to know things. Like what he does.”

“We’re not in town,” I mumbled.

“This counts as town.”

“I can tell you what he does,” I said.

“What money he makes,” he continued. “How long he’s been here. Where he was born I
know
. Which is the point.”

I shifted.

“What he did back there. At different times, good, and not good. People in town have told me a lot about this and that’s all very well but I do need to know from him. He’s the last subject here, but one. This is the last household. I need to know about his family.” He tilted his head. “Which means I have to know about his children, and I’m going to ask him about them. Which means you. Yes.

“And,” he said, “I have to ask him about his wife.”

“You know,” I said instantly.

“What’s that?”

“You
know
.” I dredged it out. “They said. Down there. They
told
you. About my mother.”

“Below?” He didn’t look away from me. “They did.” I strained to hear. “They did tell me things but I do need to know for certain. I need to hear from the key-maker himself. And his family.”

“You know she’s gone.”

I stretched up on tiptoe and looked past him down the rocks. The tiny storm was done. They last only seconds, and if you’re caught in them their snowflakes are so minuscule and dry they feel like cold dust.

The man’s weapon had two barrels and they were not the same. One was thick enough that I could have put two of my fingers into it, the other perhaps half that bore.

“This?” he said. He took it from his shoulder and held it for me to see. “It’s a combination gun. Look, two triggers. This”—he tapped the broad-gauge tube—“a shotgun. It spreads possibilities.” He made an extending cone with his hands. “And this?” The other. “This rifle’s a long-range single shot.”

He showed me how he’d aim with it.

“You can shoot one, the other, or both. The rifle shoots right down the very center of the spread. Like an average. A range and its mean. This is an averaging gun.”

He shouldered it carefully again.

“They said your father’s wife is gone, yes, that’s what they said to me,” the man said. He held his pen above his clipboard. “We can get started,” he said. “We can save time. You tell me about it.”

And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I’d grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading. The foreign man would have to work on me.

He waited with his pen ready. He said to me, “What I do is I count people. I count people and things.

“Not everyone. If you counted everyone you’d never stop, would you? I’m putting things in sets. My job’s to count just the people who were born where I was, or whose parents or grandparents were. Then I write down what I’ve counted. That’s my job. I started years ago, when we decided we had to take stock of things. After troubles. We needed to know where we were. Where we all were. So I go all over counting people from my home. I’ll show you where I put it all. There are books.

“Your father came here a long time ago and he’s my responsibility. I have to mark his details, you see. I
know
you were born here. If I’m marking down about him that means I have to mark down something about you. And something about your mother. I have to get the details right. There aren’t many in this town who come from where I do, but there are a few. One’s a poultry farmer. She told me there was one more person of my polity up here. On this job, yours is the last family I have to account for.”

I told him what my father had done.

I told him what he’d done not only to my mother but to the others, to the people and the animals. I told the man as he stood on my front step in the leaf-dust, disallowed from the house because my father had forbidden me to let anyone in.

The visitor listened. I couldn’t see what he wrote down.

I don’t know if my voice shifted up and down with hope and desperation. I didn’t know when my father would come home. I wouldn’t look in the direction he’d taken, nor would I step forward to see the path, with him perhaps rising on it now. I told it all again.

It must have been confused and it must have taken a while. I sat cross-legged in the threshold and kept talking. The man stood and wrote. Twice his mule called for him and he ignored it.

I didn’t tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help. I told the man because he asked me to, because that was what he said he wanted. For his notes.

“Where was she from?” he said.

I shook my head. I was crying a bit by then, without noise.

“From here,” I said. “But she went to live by the sea. That’s where they met. I have something she wrote. But I don’t think she wrote it. D’you want to see?”

“I do.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“You told all this to the people in the town,” he said.

“They said they can’t do anything because of no proof.”

He looked up and said, “Do you know why your father ran here in the first place? I know. Where do
you
think your mother is?” He said that quietly and didn’t lower his clipboard.

My voice caught and it took several attempts to answer.

“In the hole,” I said.

“In the hole. Maybe you can show me the hole.”

I did nothing and he regarded me.

“You remember the job I have to do?” he said. “You remember I need to write down everything I can about your mother? So I should see what there is to see so I can get all my details right.

“Show me.”

I took him to the rubbish hole.

We went around the house and up onto the rough ground between thorns and dock bushes and a few meters beyond the closest trees I passed by where I’d buried the bottle with the skeleton still inside.

Looking back I saw the roan mule on the path. A big animal laden under packs. It looked up as we came into its sightline and put back its ears and huffed at us as we ascended.

I stood at the cave mouth’s rocky stockade and gestured within.

The man entered. He walked in and stopped where the crack split the darkness of the cave with a darker cut. He leaned carefully over as the hunter and the schoolteacher and my mother and father had done.

He got onto his hands and knees and gripped the edge and lowered his head into the rift. I watched him with my hands held tightly to my chest.

I said, “It goes on down.”

“It does,” he said. He didn’t turn to me and his voice was faint. He was speaking into the dark.

“No one can see inside,” I said. “No one can see down there.”

“Well,” he said. He rose. He turned and came back into the day brushing dirt off his knees and the palms of his hands. “I have to be sure, that’s part of my job. So let me see.”

When he left me there I was too surprised to be afraid as he walked briskly back the way we had come. I didn’t know if I was wanted so I waited and he quickly returned carrying a satchel.

“One thing I do have to count,” he said, “is spouses.”

He took out a tube of glass or clear plastic the size of a hammer handle and pressed something, shook it, and the cylinder glowed. It went quickly, coldly bright.

I climbed over the entrance rocks and came into the cave toward him.

The man held out the stick of light and dropped it into the hole.

I gasped to see it plummet, fleetingly illuminating the jagged rock sides, dwindling, knocking loudly end to end on the stone until it was invisible.

We watched. The man exhaled.

He took out a flashlight, thick rope, hooks and spikes and buckled leather for his chest, into which he shrugged. I watched with some growing emotion.

“No one can go down,” I said.

“Yes, well, I have a job,” he said. He hammered clasps into the rock. “I have to count. I have to track everything.”

He attached hooks and the cord to these anchors. He spooled it around his harness.

“You can’t,” I said desperately. “You can’t.”

“Do you know how you could help me?” he said. “You know what I need? You should listen. Can you do that? Listen as hard as you can. And if anyone’s coming you should shout down and tell me.”

He gave me another of the tubes. It was pleasing and heavy in my hand. I could see two just-distinct clear liquids inside. “If you hear anyone, you press this.” A plunger to crack the wall between the chambers. “Can you do that? Then you shake it and drop it right in.”

“What if I hit you?”

“Then I’ll have a bump on my head.” He made a silly face.

“What if it breaks on the rocks?” He shook his head and tapped it on the rock to show me it was tough.

“But you won’t turn it on unless you hear someone?” he said.

I promised.

He took his glasses off and cleaned them and put them on again. He wound the strap of his flashlight around his wrist.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Well now.”

Spooling out the line, the man stepped over the lip into the hole.

He moved fast, keeping the line taut with one arm while he braced himself expertly against outcroppings and in nooks with the other and with his legs, and scuttled down the stone.

The dark took him. I watched the line tremble and stretch.

I watched his glow go down.

I
couldn’t hear him any more but for a minute his light switched back and forth in the pit, once shining right up out of it and into my eyes. Then he turned it off or passed below an overhang.

The cord thrummed.

In my mind I saw him, a tiny figure suspended and sinking in a great chamber toward the pile. I imagined him shining his light down at it.

I thought there might be sounds from the hill path outside. I was afraid. That my father was returning.

And I imagined the man touching down on the dreadful hill inside the hill and I thought of what I would do if my father came and found me now, waiting there, and of what he might do. I started to shake as if I was frozen cold. I didn’t know whether because of the thought of what the man would find or of the thought of my father finding me.

If my father said something, what would I say back?

I’d try hard not to look at the line stretching down. I’d keep my eyes from the hole. But that wouldn’t distract him. He would see the line. He’d look straight at it and a terrible expression would come over him, not the calm he wore when killing but anger that there was an intruder and a great determination not to let the man have the knowledge for which he was searching, and my father would pull a knife from his pocket and go toward the cord to cut it.

So would I struggle with him? He would throw me down into the gap if I did, killing me in a new rageful way. I resolved that I
would
struggle with him, that I’d try to stop his knife and give the man time to come up again. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be brave enough.

I stood alone and held the tube, ready to make it glow, ready to drop it.

There were animals close by and I could hear the sounds of the hillside but, though I thought I did, many times, I didn’t hear my father returning. I stood in the cave for minutes, for an hour, for more than an hour. I watched the daylight change outside.

Down in the ground, perhaps the man climbed. Or did he dig?

I stared at nothing in the shadow in the hill. I was racked by scenes, moments that I didn’t want to imagine, the man’s story now, his under-hill investigations. I wanted not to imagine anything like the whispering and snarling dead who filled my head, dead people clotting in a great pile, sliding over the house trash like a band of murdered animals gone blind and stupid with rage in the darkness, furious with anyone still alive, a familiar figure at their head.

The stretched cord’s noises, its creaks and snaps, changed. It vibrated more quickly. The man was ascending.

I pictured him bracing. Climbing.

“Quick,” I struggled to whisper, into the hole. I spoke in a tiny voice. “I think my father’s coming. I keep hearing noises. You have to hurry.”

No light came up. The man had been in darkness down there, and he was ascending in darkness.

The man was ascending, I thought, and then I thought,
What if the man isn’t ascending?

What if it isn’t him rising?

How long might they have been waiting down there? Waiting to overpower whoever brought a way out, ingrate escapees. Little sounds welled out of my throat and the black welled up out of the gap. The light-tube shook in my grip.

I knew who would climb first, who would be at the front of the mass, whose ruined fingers and nails it would be slapping onto the sharp flint at the edges of the crack, who would rise out of the under-hill to meet my eye, whose cold grave-stained face full of disappointment.