This Census-Taker (6 page)

T
he letter said
,
I will not stay here any more
.

They took me to the school to show me. I’d never been inside before: I was an uphiller with no money for lessons.

Drobe stood by the classroom door like my guard and Samma stood by me, watching my mouth move. The hunter sat me in a child’s chair-desk, the furniture combined. He gave me the letter.

It said,
I must go away because I am not happy on this hill. I will go away. Perhaps you will be angry I hope you will not you might be sad also. I am sad. But I will not live here any more. You do not have to tend my garden but I give it to you if you want. You will be all right in this house your father will take care of you as I have I am sorry I must go but I must I cannot remain any more. Your loving mother.

The teacher read the letter aloud. She saw my eyes going over the lines, she saw my panic and I think she didn’t believe I could read. When she was finished the hunter said, “So. Maybe what you saw was that. They were fighting. Then while your dad was looking for you your mum got angry and she went away. Do you think maybe that’s what you saw?”

“My father killed my mother.”

The man watched me. The schoolteacher shook the two big books she carried. “He’s allowed to confront an accuser,” she said, not to me. “That’s the law.”

“A little boy like that, though?” the hunter said. They frowned at me.

“This is your mother’s writing,” the teacher said. “Isn’t it?”

It was a big hand of sweeps and curves. Some of the letters were nearly full circles. All of them staggered up and down and around the paper’s lines.

When she taught me letters, my mother had done so with those pamphlet scraps, those cheaply printed books and stock inventories and instructions for machines. Occasionally she’d shown me ledgers and other handwritten papers from I don’t know where, in various inks and in various hands, but it was only when the teacher asked me this question that I understood that every such piece had been written by a different person, or different people, in the cases where one piece of writing was corrected and overwritten with another, as I’ve done with a few pages of the second book that I continue.

I’d seen my mother writing many times but I’d never seen her handwriting.

The letter was on thick paper in a pale blue ink that I knew she’d used but that I’d seen my father use too, to render details on his drawings of keys.

“He killed her and he put her in the hole,” I whispered. “He puts the things he kills in the hole. Sometimes he kills people and he puts them in there too.”

The officers looked at each other. “Show us,” the man said. “Show us the hole.”

T
hey let Drobe come with me but they told Samma she couldn’t. I think they were concerned she’d challenge them if she didn’t like what transpired: she raged at them when they told her she had to stay, hard enough and with enough authority to surprise them, and that it seemed to verify their intuition. They can’t have known, as I didn’t yet, that she wouldn’t leave the town. As if to lose contact with its pavings would bleed her of something.

The three officers took Drobe and me on that long walk, the clough winding in and out of sight to one side, fronted here and there with wire, the tough slope of the hill curving away on the other. The hunter, then the schoolteacher, then Drobe and I, the window-cleaner behind us so we couldn’t run away. As we entered the uplands I started to cry.

The woman turned and gave me a solicitous grimace. “Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s not nice to see our parents fighting.”

The hunter called out, “Show us the hole.”

I went trembling to him and pointed a way off the path to ensure we’d reach it without passing my house.

“Where’s my father?” I said.

“You’re all right,” the hunter said.

I stopped when we saw the cave mouth and turned to face the path below us.

“You’re all right,” he said again. He conferred quietly with the other man and pointed him to the track. The window-cleaner nodded and went that way and the hunter came back to me. “Don’t you worry,” he said.

He went first into the cleft. He beckoned me after and the teacher nudged me forward. Drobe took my shaking hand and climbed with me over the rock at the entrance. Inside the cold shadows my legs were weak.

“Stay behind me now,” the hunter said.

The teacher and he went into the shadows to the edge of the rubbish hole. Daylight reached inside the fabric of the hill but that rip was perfectly dark. The woman shone down a light. I pressed my back against the rock wall.

I thought of my mother’s hands hauling her up. Of her climbing all grave-mottled and with her face scabbed with old blood, her arms and legs moving like sticks or the legs of insects, or as stiff as toys, as if maybe when you die and come back you forget what your body is.

“You see anything?” the teacher said. She stepped back and shrugged.

“Look,” the man said. He took the flashlight and tilted it so the beam climbed from the hole as I imagined my mother doing with her face wrong and fungus in her hair. “What’s that?”

“No,” the woman said. “That’s moss or something.”

He squinted. “Well,” he said. He turned to me. “So.” He looked helpless. “There’s no way down.”

I made myself go forward till I could see white residue on the rocks.

“He’s cleaned it,” I said. “My mother must have banged it and got blood on it when she went.”

My father leaning carefully down with a sudsy mop. Soap-water wetting what was below. Down inside the hill, a second hill: a mound of trash and corpses decaying in layers and coated in hill dust in the dark. At its top, like a triumphant climber, my mother, looking sightlessly up at me with soap in her eyes.

“Why would he clean bare rocks?” The teacher wasn’t being cruel. She didn’t understand me and was trying to talk me out of terror.

She whispered to the hunter. He looked at me and sat cross-legged with the abyss at which I couldn’t stop staring behind him. “Now listen,” he said to me. “So. My friend—”

She interrupted.
“Colleague.”

“My colleague. She has the law in those books. You can’t just punish people on say-so.” He didn’t sound practiced at this soft voice. “You say your mother’s down there. You see we can’t go down there. So put a light on a chain and lower it to see? How deep does it go? How much does it twist on the way? We won’t see anything.”

I imagined that glint descending like a star falling slowly toward my mother.

“It’s what
you
say against what
he
says,” the man continued. “And we do have the letter.”

“She ain’t write that,” Drobe said. “Come on.”

“His father says she did,” the teacher said.

“What if he said something about you?” the hunter asked me. “What if he said you stole something or you
killed
a person, and we just said, ‘Oh, well then, if you say so, we’ll do law on him, then.’ You wouldn’t like that, would you? That wouldn’t be fair.” He looked over his shoulder into the black.

“She did write it.”

That was my father’s voice.

He was stood at the cave mouth next to the window-cleaner in his sash. I saw my father and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t feel my hands. He looked straight at me and I made a noise in my throat.

Drobe stepped between us. Later I remembered that and I loved him for it.

“What did you bring him for?” the hunter shouted. “I said we’d come when we were ready, didn’t I?”

“He wanted to come see,” the window-cleaner said. “What should I stop him for?”

“For fuck’s sake.” The hunter shook his head.

“What?” said the other man. “You got something to say to me? Say it to me.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the hunter said. “I said, ‘
For fuck’s sake
.’ ”

“She wrote that letter,” my father said. He was speaking to me. “We were fighting,” he said. He blinked repeatedly and I could feel his tremendous worry. He took a step toward me and I lurched back and Drobe moved to meet him.

“She was good for me,” my father said, “and I was good for her too, but not in the end.” He looked beseeching. “I’m sorry you saw it. You shouldn’t have. I was asking her not to leave, is what you saw. For you and me. For you more than me even because you needed her. I know that, I know. I wanted to stop her, I’m sorry I couldn’t. But you mustn’t go. You
mustn’t
go.”

He seemed to see Drobe at last, standing in his way. My father whispered to him, “Move.”

His voice was sudden and different and cold and Drobe instantly obeyed.

“I’m sorry your mother went away,” my father said to me. “I’ll make sure we’re all right, you and me.”

When he understood that they wouldn’t take my father to jail and they wouldn’t take me from him, Drobe screamed at the officers. Samma would probably just have got hold of me and walked away in any direction until they’d reached her, maybe hit her and taken me back. Drobe did shout at them that they were wrong, bastards, and so on.

I ran outside. The window-cleaner caught me easily. The hunter and the teacher with the law books huddled with my father in the tunnel and spoke to him too low for me to hear.

“We can’t just take you,” the hunter came and said to me eventually. “He didn’t do what you said.” He said that quickly.

“Lock him up,” Drobe said. “When the police next come they can go down there and look.”

“No one can go down there,” the teacher said.

“There’s no one there,” my father said. He sounded almost too exhausted to speak.

I said something about the customer who’d come and argued.

“Smail?” my father said. “Is that who you mean? Oh, son.

“I don’t know his second name,” he said to the others. “Smail. He came for keys. He was already on his way. He’d left, and he made sure he’d pass my house. He wanted one key to get money, one so he could travel quickly, and one for a disgusting thing, so I wouldn’t make it for him and he shouted. But I did make him the travel key. Only that one. And he went on. Ask anyone. Ask his friends. They’ll tell you he always wanted to get away, and he did. There’s no one in the mountain.”

“You,” the hunter said slowly to him. He looked at me and said it loud, as I listened. “We’ll come back.”

“You should come back,” my father said.

“I fucking mean it. We’ll send someone up and you’ll show us the boy so we know you’re treating him right.”

“Yes.” My father nodded with abrupt rage. “You
should
. Look at me. You should come back.”

The window-cleaner was looking into the sky, at the waning light. Drobe ran to me.

“I’ll come and get you,” he whispered. But the teacher was calling him and he had to turn.

The window-cleaner descended with the woman beside him. They still kept glancing up at the sun. Behind them went Drobe, watched by the hunter.

It was he, the last man, who looked back at me most, more often even than the boy.

T
here is a kind of thorned bush that thrives on the hill where I was born. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It stands about a meter tall, with compact snarled branches that grow in dense near-cylinders so its copses are like low, snagging pillars. Its all-year berries are blue-gray but in the red light of sunset their luster makes them shine like black pupils.

I stood among the columnar bushes watched by their nasty vegetable eyes.

My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.

When Drobe looked back a last time his eyes and mouth widened in horror at my expression. He would have taken a step back toward me but the hunter put his hand on him, not cruelly but removing hope of escape. The man whispered to Drobe and Drobe made some sign for me with his hands but I didn’t know what he was saying.

When they were gone I stayed behind my perimeter of sentry bushes in the failing light.

“I’m not angry,” my father said.

I was full of the injustice of it; that that was how he tried to reassure me.

“It’ll be all right,” he said gently. He stepped closer. “I’m sorry about it all.”

I didn’t move: I had no moving left in me. My father stood with only one line of thorns between him and me. He held out a hand.

And I was alone with him on the cold hill and I could do nothing. I stayed still as long as I could as if something might happen but it didn’t, and when it didn’t I shuffled as slowly as I could out from the vegetation, I dragged my toes against the ground but it was as if there was nowhere to go but to him.

He smiled as I came. He looked as if he might cry.

“Hello again,” my father whispered.

He kept his hand out until I took it.

His skin was tough and warm. I felt sick to touch it.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll feed you. Come home.”

T
hat first night alone with my father I sat in the kitchen without hope.

He cooked, glancing at me as I waited speechless and deflated like an empty bag. I almost felt too empty to be afraid until the night came all the way on and I lay in my cubby room listening for the sound of my father coming up the stairs, imagining him at my door, between his and my mother’s empty room, looking at me as if I was something curious, looking at me and not at me at the same time. I stared at the ceiling that was the attic floor, growing dizzy. I imagined my father watching me as if I was something that he should make stop moving.

I don’t remember sleeping. The next day I was slow and twitchy. I didn’t know what to do or what was to happen.

My father would make keys. I?

“Are you going to play?” he said.

He fed me again. Put food in front of me as the gray light came up, that is, though I couldn’t eat it. “I’m working all day,” he said. “This is for you for later. Don’t go too far.”

While he cut metal I opened the door to my mother’s room.

There were no covers on the bed frame, no books on the shelves or surfaces, which had been swept, so there were no dust marks where any books had been.

I walked our home’s perimeter of earth. What do you do on a day like that?

I wanted to see the letter again, as if staring at it might help me, but I didn’t know where it was.

Several times that day my father shouted for me from the house’s front step. He didn’t do so angrily: just checking, making sure I was close. He would make me answer.

I drew marks on a rock with the end of a stick I burned for that purpose. At a certain point they became letters and then words. I can’t remember what I wrote, which seems strange to me now. I wrote whatever I wrote, and stood back and threw pebbles at the words, looking for a particular parabola, an exact curve.

If they hit them,
I thought,
it means I can go.

The first throws went wide. I kept trying. When one of my stones arced up to land right exactly on what I’d written I felt squeezed inside, as if it were the writing that pulled the stones in.

He called me when the sun went down. One day had passed. I watched as the dark spread and I listened to him and I felt cold all over again. I smeared away everything I’d put down on the rock before I obeyed him. I left my slate, the stone page the hill put out for me, unreadable.

He brought me a drink of sweet herby milk while I lay in bed and he stared at me until I drank it. I hoped it wasn’t poison. He watched me with desperate fondness.

I found the letter, folded behind a jar on a high shelf in the kitchen where it can’t have been a surprise that, tiptoed on a chair, I’d find it. I read it several times and learned nothing and put it back. Sometimes when my father was not in the house, I would look at it again.

There came to be noises on the hill that were new to me. I thought birds of a kind I didn’t know might have come to live there, birds that called with rapid percussive clicks or trod heavily and quickly over twigs or pecked them hard. I climbed higher than I’d ever gone to see if I could find them but the thin cold air and ugly trees and rock cuts diffused the snapping sound so I could never track it.

I ran and climbed as I wanted but every few hours my father would lean out and abruptly call my name until I responded, so I had to stay in earshot. On that hill, on the flint on which we lived, that was some distance.

Each time I entered it the room beside mine was less and less my mother’s. I had a few of her books, but they’d been mine too, at least to use, in my care, by the time she gave me them outright by leaving, so I never felt I was connecting with her when I opened them.

The days changed and the view from what had been her window became mine. I climbed into its frame as I had once in the attic that I didn’t want to enter again. When the wind made my house lean and creak at night, I’d look up and imagine that the sounds were made by my mother shaking the walls in the upper room, staring at where the blood had been, that my father had cleaned away. I still tried to keep her face from my mind, and sometimes I succeeded and she looked at me with my father’s face or the rotting doll’s.

Once as I sat at what had been her window in cold late light I heard two shots in fast succession. They came from somewhere on the stone slopes.

At the first I didn’t even move; I was used to the sound of shotguns. What followed it, though, was a sharper ugly echoing crack like the amplified snap of dry wood. It made me start and look wildly through the glass at the flocks of birds as spooked as I.

I waited, but nothing more came.

When my father shouted for me from the front door I still hadn’t left the house and I surprised him by descending from behind him, down the stairs. I was surprised in turn because two downhillers stood on our doorstep: a thin nervous man I didn’t recognize with one of the ribbons of temporary office on his shoulder and a revolving pistol in his hand, and the sour-looking teacher.

My father looked at them, past them to the horizon for long seconds, then faced me. He was angry.

“How are you?” the woman shouted at me.

I backed away from the door and nodded without speaking.

She came in while her companion fidgeted with his weapon. She looked in my eyes and mouth and asked me whether I was all right, whether anything had happened, while my father watched and listened.

When they left she said to him, “You be careful.”

He closed the door more slowly than usual, so as not to slam it.

When he ladled out supper my father said, “Did you hear the gun today? That loud shot?” I nodded. “Not heard that noise for a long time.” He frowned. “Could be there’s new hunting, maybe.” He opened the door and looked out while midges joined us. “I used to hear that all the time,” he said. “When I was in a war. In a city.” Not the nearest one, I knew.

The boy said, “Who won?”

“High town against low?” the boy’s father said at last. “Street against street? Who won?” He looked at his son without expression. “
They
won. That shot? That’s the kind of shot you use to kill a man.”

That night I ran away.