This Census-Taker (8 page)

My father turned and screamed at the officers, “
Which
of you
did
this?” in a voice much louder than any I’d heard him use before. He slung the bread away and it bounced into a corner where I eyed it. “I’ll kill you if you
touch
my boy ever again,” my father shouted. “I will
kill
you.”

The officers blinked at each other in shock.

“It’s those bridge rats he runs with,” the window-cleaner said. “They been scrapping. We ain’t touched him.”

“Calm down, mate,” said the officer who’d beaten me. “Take your damn boy home.”

My father bared his teeth at them. I saw him compose his face and turn to me as calm as he could make it. “They lost me your breakfast,” he said. He smiled at me. “I’ll get more.

“Come on,” he said. He held out his hand. “Time to go.”

The shutters were up, the shops open, the roads full. Men and women swept away dust. My father pulled me out into the last few hours of that day—the square was crowded—and I saw Drobe and Samma and the others. They stood by a wall in my line of sight as if they might be there by chance. My father saw them too, and without expression gestured at them to keep away.

He held your hand tight while you stared at them. He rushed you across the square, disturbing greedy birds.

People watched him. He went to a bread-maker’s and called for a loaf but the woman shook her head. “No bread,” she said, and turned from him. There was plenty visible through the flecked window.

My father approached a man frying skewers on a big metal plate but he too shook his head at our approach and sort of reached his arm around his food as if it were a child that he was protecting.

Every vendor refused my father’s custom. They gathered, they watched us with implacable faces, no warmer to me than to him. I don’t know if he did, but even with my face still hurting from the policeman’s blow I felt stung by the indignity of their shunning. I suppose it meant they believed me, but I felt shame.

Samma and her gangmates watched me and I them. They shadowed us as one at a time the shopkeepers refused my father, and all their customers folded their arms and went silent until he took me away.

What about me?
I thought.
Can you take me? Please, let me stay.
But the law had said I was his and they had a lot of respect and fear for the law in that town.

My father didn’t stare anyone down but nor did he wither under their disapproval.

He judged the sky. “You’ll have something at the house,” he said. “We have food there. Good long walk and we’ll build an appetite.”

As my father led me from the square toward the edge of town, Drobe motioned to me. He looked strained and he kept staring up and out beyond the town with an immense, furious eagerness, but he made sure to catch my eye, and indicated, as he had before, for me to wait. He looked hunted.

In the foothills, we rounded the last turn and passed out of sight of the main street. I kept turning to glance, to see a last glimmer of the bridge over the gulch with early anglers lined up on the railings ready for the first bats, washing flapping from high windows like flags. My father knelt before me.

“That’s enough,” he said.

He shook my hand gently and made me look up at him while my feet picked over stones and the air went thin. “That’s enough. These’ve been bad days I know and I know you’ve been scared and you haven’t known what’s happened or what to do. I don’t blame you. I understand. But this stops now. No more running away. No more hiding in the town. Or anywhere. No more. All right? You understand me?”

He shook my hand again until I answered yes.

“Good. There’s just the two of us now, we need each other,” he said. “We need to look out for each other, don’t we? So. We’ll learn. No more running away. Good. If you ran away again I’d have to come and find you and I’d be upset and angry.

“Now, you, come and eat. Those bastards in town…”

He checked himself. As if I hadn’t learned from the gang any word he might use. As if I hadn’t known them before that, from books my mother had me read.

A
nd I did not run away again, though I thought of doing so many times, and made one more half-attempt.

Again I took to the topmost room.

As soon as my father left me alone, and too fast to reconsider, I took a candle and crept back up into that attic for the first time in months. And though I was quivering as I climbed, when I entered, even despite the dark, I felt no fear, no shock. Only a hollowness.

What the hunter had said was true: the blood was wiped away. So were my own drawings, which I’d thought secret.

The room would shake in the strongest winds, and I’d look many times across the night and the ruckusing air of the uplands and imagine being out in that, heading away from the hills, but I always stayed. I can’t say I
chose
to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything. A gusted thistle! That’s what I thought I was like, for weeks. Thinking my own past self is mostly a mystery story.

My father continued to make his keys. For himself, I supposed.

During the daylight, I wandered. More than once, from far off, from somewhere in the steepening zone between the town and my part of the uphill, I heard that chattering call. I heard the complaints of animals carrying loads. Once more I heard the
boom-snap
of those two distinct and distinctive shots.

I can’t tell you what my father wanted from me; it may be that all he wanted was me. He loved me, but he had loved my mother too, and that love didn’t preclude me watching him and waiting for any shift to come over his face. It didn’t stop me wondering.

I can’t tell you what he wanted from me because he asked so little. Now that I was back, my father was content for me to kick my stones through the fence and over the edge again. To explore up and down, to watch fighting chuckwings and rock rats hunting for worms.

I took a last few of my mother’s papers up to the windy top room where I read them several times, or tried to—some were beyond me. Instructions for wall building; an allegory about selfishness set among animals; a description of a carved box that was supposed to contain a person’s soul, kept in a museum, in a city of which I’d not heard.

Mostly my father cooked but sometimes he had me do it. He’d stand covered in key dust in the kitchen doorway, murmuring to himself. He would offer advice on what to put into the pot with what. I obeyed as if he was issuing orders. I’d always be quiet in his company. He never told me to take our garbage to the hole in the hill.

I didn’t know how to tend the garden: I’d watched my mother do it but had asked no questions. All I could do now, with a growing sense of duty, was prod at the dry earth with her trowels, mimicking as closely as I could the motions I’d seen her make. I patted dying beans. Turning over the dirt, sometimes I would bring up trash.

Once I said to my father, “Why do you want me?”

I still think that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done. I was outside and he was in his key room. I saw him as I dug and I stood before I could hesitate and I shouted it through the window. When he looked up, I thought for a moment it was with the open face, his blank face, but it wasn’t.

“Don’t say that,” he said. He whispered it to me through the window. He put his hands to his cheek and his trembling mouth. “Don’t. Don’t.”

I
wondered what would happen when we ran out of food. We had sacks of pulses and several loaves of the bitter bread of that town, which lasts for weeks and won’t go bad. There were dry stores in the pantry, a tiny room in which I would sometimes stand and close the door to be surrounded on three sides by rising shelves of jars, of desiccated things, of salted bits, and, more every week, of cobwebs and the husks of spiders’ meals and the bodies of the spiders themselves that my father would not sweep away except accidentally as he reached for food. So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be finished soon, leaving us with those items of which we had a surplus, like dried mushrooms, which would far outlast anything else. I wondered if my father would simply refuse to address this. If he would make meals or have me make them with fewer and fewer ingredients so our diets would continue a while as they were but grow daily and weekly more thin, more flavorless, until for the months until the last jar ran completely out we would be dining on mushrooms, mushrooms for breakfast, soaked in water and salt, mushrooms crushed for lunch, fried in oil until the oil ran out and then simply seared and blackened in a pan over the fire for our suppers, or gnawed raw, until even they went and we would die, one after the other, the taste of mushrooms in our mouths. I couldn’t decide whether I, being smaller and eating less, would die more quickly than he in this mushroomless state or more slowly. I couldn’t decide which would be better or worse. If he went before me, of course, then I would be able at last—I can’t parse or explain this logic—to descend to the town, and ask for food, not mushrooms, and to live. But then I decided that I would be so weak I’d be past moving and would die after all too, looking at dead him all the while, in that circumstance.

We did not die. One warm morning I entered the parlor and blinked to see that a large jar at my head-height had been cack-handedly refilled, leaving lentils spilled across the dusty shelves. That there were new pickles, and stacks of flatbread.

I don’t know when or how my father was ordering food, which merchants were providing it or when they were delivering, but here in his hilltop house he was clearly not so shunned as he had been. Whatever money he had was good again.

Days after the appearance of the pulses, a young grocer walked into my view up the hill, in each hand a bag bearing the sign of her shop. She saw me in my spying place on a promontory. She hesitated, then sped up to make her sale.

W
eeks after my return as I sat on the low branches of a tree watching my house, I heard stone knocking on the wood and I looked up to glimpse a boy wave at me from behind a rock. He let go of a handful of pebbles.

“Drobe,” I whispered with a great rush of hope, but immediately knew I was wrong.

I recognized him from the bridge house but I’d never known his name, and I didn’t ask now. He was a slight boy between my age and Samma’s, and he watched me with a sharp and agitated face, staying behind a rise, out of sight of the house in case my father was at his window. I climbed the stone behind which the boy sat and spoke without looking at him, for the same reason.

He looked around, unendingly astonished at the landscape. It was the first time he’d been out of the town.

“We’ve got plans,” he said. “We’re going to get you away. Samma said to tell you. We’re working on plans.”

He gave me hard sweets they must have stolen.

“That’s from Samma,” he said.

“Will she come?”

He blinked at me in guarded surprise.

“She won’t come?” I said.

I had by then some sense of how we’re all curbed by scends directed at us and by our own compulsions, even something of Samma’s own, but you must remember I was very young. Perhaps I thought my want would obviate them.

“She give me a message for you,” he said. “Listen. ‘Some of them say they’ll never take your dad’s money.’ ” He concentrated and repeated it singsong, as she must have drilled him.
Some
of them
say, they
’ll never
tay,
kyore
dad’s mon-
ay
.

“ ‘That your ma’s not forgot,’ ” he said. “ ‘That they think of you.’ ”

“What do they think of me?”

“Don’t, I lost my place. Wait. ‘That your ma’s not forgot. That they think of you. Help’s on the way, we know what to do.’ We heard there’s officers coming,” he said. I could hear when he went off-script.

“Officers have already come,” I said. “They wouldn’t help me.”

“Proper ones. Not the sash-danglers.”

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “They already came.”

He paused and looked worried at his memories. “Wait,” he said. “All right, it ain’t them, then. Someone’s coming, to help, I think. Samma knows. We can tell them about what your dad done and they can do something so you’ll be able to come down to our house.” He brightened.

“
Who
is it coming?” I said. “Do you mean…Drobe said someone was sent from way away, come to check on things—”

“Drobe…” The boy shook his head and looked away. “I mean maybe that’s it. I don’t know who it is he’s talking about. The thing is with Drobe…” A moment passed and he shrugged.

“I just heard there’s
officials
come to the town,” he said uncomprehendingly. “And I’m telling you we’ve got plans for your dad. Samma said. We ain’t going to let him keep you here. But Samma, she says we have to wait a bit, because if we just bring you back now they’ll find you again like before. They’ll be watching now, and then we’ll be in bad trouble and then we can’t help you, can we?”

He didn’t look at me.

I wandered uphill. He followed me by hidden ways.

We threw stones at a stump. His aim was much better than mine. He broke off a twig with his first attempt and made himself laugh because now, he said, it looked like a fat and angry bird.

“Where is Drobe?” I said.

The boy wouldn’t look at me.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Gone.”

“What?”

“He’s gone. He left. He’s gone.”

I stopped myself crying out.
“Where?”
I said. “
Where’s
he gone?” I had to say it through my teeth. I wondered if my father had found him.

“I don’t know. One day he just wasn’t there. He’d been spending time with someone, then one day his friend was gone, and that was it.” I thought for a second he meant me but he didn’t. I could hear suspicion when he said
friend
. “He said there was nothing he wanted here any more. And one night he went. So now he’s nowhere.”

“He’s somewhere,” I said. I wanted to say more but neither of us knew what so we shared a sad silence.

When he looked into the sky at last and I could see him prepare to leave, the boy told me, “Samma’s been saying. You hear people talking about your dad.” I didn’t move. “They’re all angry with what he done. What you said. Then after a bit you hear them talking about the keys he did for them. What they do. Like…” He cast about for an example. “Like it changes the weather, one woman says.” He inclined his head eagerly. “Samma said we might take it from her—the key I mean—and see if it does.

“I mean I wouldn’t buy it,” he said quickly, “I wouldn’t give him any money for anything now, but if we could get a key like that…Well, I mean, changing the weather. Or anything.” He looked at me cautiously and shrugged as if surely I must see. “I mean, that’s something?”

I’d never used any of my father’s keys.

The boy waited but I wouldn’t speak. I didn’t suggest he stay out of sight while I crept inside to see what I could find or that I’d leave the workroom window unlocked for him that night to climb in through. I wouldn’t look at him. I said nothing about the keys at all. Eventually he went.

Sometimes when my father walked on the hills I’d stand in the entrance to his workroom and smell metal dust and oil and see some half-finished shape in his vise.

I don’t know when his customers started to come back. At first I didn’t see them, only heard voices in his room. First a man, then later a woman, explaining what they needed the metal to do. Then I’d hear the rasp of my father working.