The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  Praise for

  THE

  SECOND HISTORY

  “Silver Slayter’s examination of how humans carry on through apocalyptic hardship is complicated, contradictory, urgent with warning—but the turn at the end, a small readjustment that changes every understanding, gives a prickling, green-shoot feeling of that thing in short supply these days, hope.” —Marina Endicott

  “The Second History brings the lovers Eban and Judy to life with such deep wisdom and exacting detail that they will last forever. This novel is about risks in desperate times, the paralyzing power of fear, and the struggle for freedom. But mostly it’s about love, one of the most honest renderings of romantic love I’ve ever read. It’s about how we pull each other through. Here is a truly mesmeric story, tender, unflinching, quakingly good.” —Lisa Moore

  “The Second History takes place in a post-post-apocalyptic world where cities, and even communities, are fabled things of the distant past. It follows a young couple wandering through the frozen wilderness in search of a colony of humans, a haven they think is called Heaven. On the way, they survive unimaginable human and natural predations only to arrive in a place no rumour could ever have conjured. In this harrowing novel of human resilience, Rebecca Silver Slayter creates a world of dread and beauty so convincing it feels like it might be about tomorrow. Gorgeously written and packed with unforgettable scenes, The Second History is a towering achievement.” —Michael Redhill

  “Told in luminous, propulsive prose, The Second History is a unique love story that looks ahead to find its way home. A balancing act of grace and suspense.” —Iain Reid

  Copyright © 2021 Rebecca Silver Slayter

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Excerpt from “No Long Way Round” in Sea Change by Jorie Graham.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jorie Graham. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The second history / Rebecca Silver Slayter.

  Names: Silver Slayter, Rebecca, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200364103 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200364219 | ISBN 9780385694445 (softcover) | ISBN 9780385694452 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8637.I36 S43 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook ISBN 9780385694452

  Cover design: Emma Dolan

  Cover image: Malorny/Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Acknowledgements

  For my mother and my father

  You have your imagination, says the evening. It is all you have left, but its neck is open, the throat is

  cut, you have not forgotten how to sing, or to want to sing.

  — Jorie Graham, Sea Change

  I

  It is the end of their last day. The sun is drawing up from the wood all around him, the tree shadows leaning in, long and black, and still she hasn’t returned. He goes looking for her along the usual paths.

  He finds her in the forest, bent to the ground beside a sack of bones. She’s nearly a mile from where they sleep.

  He calls her name again, but she doesn’t answer.

  Judy once told him that this was the way things happened. He doesn’t remember now what she was talking about—the progress of some chore; the melting of the ice at spring. She said, “Things happen little by little, and then all at once.”

  Watching her now, he is slowly realizing something that, he suspects, it will soon seem he always knew.

  She appears to be studying the ground, hunched on all fours, her head hung over the snow. He hesitates, wondering what she’s searching for there, when her body claps to the ground.

  He waits until she finishes retching. Something they ate. The water.

  She wipes her mouth and stands, unsteady. It’s near dark now, and she is mostly silhouette, her face unreadable, her black, tight curls feathering into the darkness as if she’s dissolving into the night sky.

  He turns his eyes away from her, toward the pit where few trees grow. Down at the centre, old machines rust under a thin carpet of grass and debris, erased now by a thicker cover of snow. The hills are full of the old dumps, and when they first arrived here, they dug up every one they could find within a day’s walk. Judy knew of someone who’d contracted tetanus and died, his body arched like a bow, after stumbling into an old cache of steel netting, so she insisted they rebury anything they couldn’t use. But there was so much they could. At this dump, he remembers, he found an axe head, the handle rotted away years before. He sharpened it and polished it until it shone, and traded it to a peddler for a bag of dried beans that fed them for a month.

  For a long time, they stand like that, not looking at each other, and then he says, “You’re pregnant again.”

  It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t answer. Instead, she empties her sack into the pit and begins trudging back toward the path.

  He looks down to the bottom of the pit, at the smudge of pink she made with the waste of all the animals they skinned and smoked to take with them. At the tiny skeletons, broken in the snow. “Judy…”

  Finally, he follows her, and only when they reach the camp does she turn back to him. “Please don’t, Eban.”

  “Judy.”

  “It won’t make any difference. Okay?”

  He feels frustrated the way he is always frustrated by her. “You can’t stop things from being the way they are just by pretending, just because you want them some other way—”

  And then she looks at him. “Can you be very honest with me now?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “How long do you believe this will be a problem?”

  He twists under the conviction of her gaze. “I just want us to do what’s safe. I didn’t say it was a problem. I would never say that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But I hear you think it.” She shakes her head. “Why not go, when it never helped anything to stay?”

  “No. No. We’re not leaving, not when you’re—”

  She tells him she will go in the morning. That he can stay, but she will go. It’s what she has told him again and again and again.

&nbs
p; Anger and worry and something else he can’t name fill his head, stoppering his mouth. But he knows at dawn they’ll leave together.

  They go to bed in silence, and she is soon asleep. Beside her, he lies awake, trying to recall the day she began to drift from him, first by inches, then by miles.

  Things happen little by little, and then all at once.

  He watches but doesn’t touch her, though he feels the desire in his hand, to feel her hair, the hard muscles of her back, turned toward him. He watches her the way he wishes he’d been watching when it happened. Maybe only for a minute he turned his eyes from her, and that lit-up bit of her, star-bright and searing, went out. Something he loved is gone now from her face. And he understands that, without knowing it or meaning to, he is the one who took it away. In the end, that’s why he agreed to leave. To evacuate the place that has been their home together.

  Because somehow, he did what happened to her.

  * * *

  —

  This is what he dreams.

  His mother is waiting for him outside, where he discovers that the fire has burned through the plug of sod he always smothers it with before bed. She looks reproachfully at him and then up at the smoke, weaving into the sky. “They’ll find you,” she says.

  He wants to explain that he didn’t mean to be so careless, that he always checks the fire before bed. When she was alive, she never let them light a fire, but, he wants to tell her, it was different then. It had last snowed when his mother was eight years old, the year they closed the border and talks on rebuilding the cities collapsed. She rarely spoke to him about her childhood, but she loved to tell him about the last time it snowed. How she’d woken in the middle of the night and not known why. How she put her face to the window of the outland house her family had moved to one year earlier—the house that felt, still, like it belonged to the people who had abandoned it after the second tsunami, leaving their pictures on the walls and their books on the shelves. How slow and white and strange the snowfall was. One day, months later when, a hundred miles away, the fires began to burn, she glimpsed ash in the sky and thought that by some miracle in that scorched summer another snow had come. But she never saw snow again.

  It was two winters after her death that he woke one morning to a white forest, and the winter after that he lost a toe to the cold and was in bed for weeks with a fever. It was, he and Judy decided, safer to light the fire. This year, the trees had scarcely dropped their leaves before the snow came, and so he dug a pit in the ground where the flames would be hidden from view, and on the upwind side he dug a tunnel to ventilate the fire, oxygen feeding the flames and raising the temperature, so the buried fire would release only a thin stream of smoke that vanished inches from the ground.

  The firepit allowed them to cure and stockpile meat so they could better endure times of hardship, when illness or foul weather or bad luck would otherwise have left them hungry. Each afternoon he gathered green switches to bridge the hole, and suspended a pot overtop filled with whatever they’d managed to kill or preserve. They’d lit a fire every night for months, and no one, not even a peddler, had passed their hide. Don’t worry, he wants to say to his mother. I’ve thought of everything.

  But he finds himself unable to speak. The words stick to his tongue, and he feels only a deep sadness at seeing his mother again. He wants to appease her fears for him. He wants to take her into the shelter to see Judy. He wants to tell her he might be a father.

  But he can tell she knows what he and Judy have planned. Somehow she knows that at dawn they’ll leave the place where they were safe.

  She beckons to him to follow her and then leads him along the ridge he climbs every day down to the brook. She wades through the water, looking back at him to ensure he is behind her. Silently, he follows. Though he has spent the last four years among these trees, these hills, the land soon becomes unrecognizable. She is, he realizes, taking him to the valley.

  He tries to catch her, to stop her from going farther, but she is moving faster and faster and he can only chase her vanishing figure in the trees.

  At last the woods thin and the mountains resolve into foothills, and she stops at a crest, pointing to the unending view before them, at the things he’s known only from rumour, the houses, the cities, the people, the sea. “Look,” she says.

  And he does.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Eban wakes to the noise of Judy gathering together their things outside. He can hear her hurry and impatience. She would have packed days sooner if he had let her. Now she’ll be looking to fight with him, with a ready answer if he questions anything. In this mood, he knows, she’ll leave important things behind, and he’ll say nothing when, later, elsewhere, they find what they need missing.

  It’s still dark. Their shelter is the best he has ever built. Overhead, where the branches weave together in an artful bit of joinery he takes particular pride in, he can see light pierce through on certain mornings.

  No light today.

  He peels back the roll of woollen blankets, the synthetic sleeping bag with its dizzying design of colours he has never seen elsewhere. He lets the cold sink into him. Feels the nerve endings shrill to attention, a shiver of awakening all over his body.

  When he stands and lights a stub of candle, he sees Beau has waited for him, huddled by the door in a ball of chestnut-coloured fur. Eban reaches out his hand and lets Beau push his black nose against it, though he knows the dog only stayed near because Judy shut him in. He follows her everywhere she goes, while his affection for Eban seems only dutiful. To Judy, he is devoted, adoring, a disciple of her fleeting attentions.

  “Judy,” Eban calls as he pushes open the door. During the night it must have snowed again; he has to push hard to scrape the door through the accumulated snow, though it has already been opened that morning. “Tell me what needs doing.”

  He sees their packs laid out by the firepit, already full. They’ve discussed for weeks what will be left behind. Nearly everything.

  Judy appears from behind the shelter. He can hardly see her; the branches overhead make lace of a faint blue light, illuminating only the edge of her cheek, the end of her nose, a coil of hair. Her arms are full. He reaches to take what they hold, but she pushes past him. For a moment he wonders if she didn’t see him, or didn’t hear him call her name.

  She kneels before the packs and slides more things—the axe, two of their smaller pots, the fishing kit—inside. There is something else. It’s from the protective way she holds them, as she slips them into an outer pocket, that he knows what they are. Her books.

  He recognizes at a glance the ones she has chosen. One translated from Russian, split into four volumes of tiny, scarcely legible writing. One about an island that he watched Judy copy from an edition of her father’s, the first summer he knew her. A book of fairy tales, each page illustrated in fading paint. The pages of poetry they cut from a rotting binding, now tied together with string. He’s surprised to see she has left out the stories about gods, the strange play that made her cry when she read it out loud to him, and the French books she sometimes would translate for him. He is not surprised to see she left his mother’s compendium of medicinal plants and herbs, or the book about a robber and a nun he bought from a peddler, thinking to please her, which she at last, when he asked, explained was not serious.

  And if she’s brought the books, he knows she’ll have brought her things. She keeps her things, wrapped in cloth, in a dirty yellow box, made of some ancient polymer. Its rusted hinges gave out years earlier, when she was a child, but still she keeps it. She ties the box shut with a braid of string, and rarely opens it in front of him. In the last year, she has found more and more objects to add to it, and opens it only to slip each new object inside.

  He has come to understand the things she keeps. Beautiful objects from before that have no use. Things of met
al mostly, or glass. Things that have endured since the time when they had purposes. A string of jewels with a pin that she calls an earring and says was her mother’s, though he knows that’s not true. A glove that isn’t warm. A piece of a machine for counting time, and he forgets what else. A green shoe with a pointed heel, so it raises her inches from the ground when she crams her foot into it and stands, teetering, on one leg. She loves that shoe.

  Even in their arguments, she never mentioned bringing her things, or the books, but he knows not to say anything now.

  Only when she stands does she address him. “Can you manage the bedding?” she asks.

  He nods, though she still isn’t looking at him. Beau, at her heels as ever, barks. “Ssh,” she says. “Beau, sit. Stay.” She leaves the dog by the shelter, adoration fixing him to the ground, tail beating with gladness. Eban returns to the shelter and lights a second candle by the door.

  The sleeping pad will have to stay behind. It won’t compress enough to fit into his pack. He chooses the warmest, most tightly woven blankets and rolls them into as small a bundle as he can. He finds a tattered sack in the corner crate among the things they seldom use. He pounds the bedding into the sack with his fists, and then, in the remaining space, he fits the sleeping bag as best he can, though it bursts from the top of the bullet-shaped sack like a neon aneurysm.

  He looks at the things they’ll leave behind. The other blankets, the extra traps, the pouch filled with his mother’s belongings, the chair he made for Judy, the dishes, the jars of dried and preserved summer forage, his drawings, Judy’s dress. The shelter itself. It took him an entire summer to build, too much time. It had meant a hungry winter. But they’d be there longer than he had stayed anywhere before, maybe forever. It was, he thought, their home, his and hers, and should look like something that would last.

  The structure is just a simple box, but has a feeling of permanence. Sometimes he pauses outside it in the last hours of the day and admires the wood and stone painted in auburn evening light. He’d carried loads of stone up from the river and laid them out, three-wide, in rows. With a pack of mud and clay he’d filled in the cracks between, where wind smuggled in the cold. Ribbons of grass and reed wove together a roof of weathered branches. When it rained, he hung a synthetic cover they’d purchased from a peddler over top. It was more than a shelter. It was a home. He’d imagined one day he might build a hearth. He’d built it right, so it would keep them warm and dry, and last. “No window,” he’d explained patiently again and again to Judy, even after he didn’t feel patient any longer. “Cold looks for weakness. Everything I did there with the leaves and mud and stone would be for nothing if I left a hole for wind to rush in.”