The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  Once, Alphonse offered to show Eban how to write, and then watched admiringly as Eban produced four pages of clear, precise print. “Did you like the story?” Alphonse asked, and Eban didn’t know how to answer—he had copied the words one letter at a time and never thought to assemble in his head what sentences they made. After that, he paid closer attention when Alphonse read, trying to make sense even of the French, and studied the books in secrecy whenever he could. Alphonse loved poetry and stories where few of the characters survived, with great sad speeches, things written in the distant past. A play about a mad king and another called Cyrano de Bergerac. The Tale of Genji. A poem called “Le Dormeur du Val.” Judy loved books of far-off battles and revolutions, stories with heroes and sacrifice. Field of Honour. Quatrevingt-treize. Les Trois Mousquetaires. The Iliad.

  Impressed by Eban’s steady, tidy handwriting, Alphonse asked him to copy a book of his own one day, but Eban declined, because he’d seen the hard look Judy gave his pages, and knew she was embarrassed by hers. Her nervy, clumsy handwriting swelled and shrank in size, slid down the page, turned to the left and then to the right, or became outright illegible as she grew tired. Alphonse would look on it without a word, and Judy and Eban both understood it was the outer limit of his patience to say nothing.

  Eban was surprised by the way he took to book-making—he enjoyed the slow, exact labour of it. It gave him something to do in the evenings, when he used to study his mother’s medical texts until he knew them almost by heart. When he was bone-tired from the day, there was satisfaction in sitting with Alphonse in silence and stitching pages to leather, while Judy wrote and his mother slept.

  He spent weeks on a small book of unmarked paper, etching a design of leaves across the leather cover with a nail heated over a flame. Once his mother found him working on it and stood over him for several minutes, until he laid the nail by his side and waited for her to speak.

  “For her,” his mother said. “You’re making that for her.”

  He nodded and raised his eyes to see her, thinking she might look pleased in her own way.

  “I’d have hoped—” she began and then fell silent. At last, she returned to her tent, leaving him there.

  When he finished the book, he left it where he knew Judy would find it. She came to him the next day with it in her hands, but didn’t thank him. He was prepared to tell her it was nothing, but didn’t know what to say when she only stood there, looking at him and running her thumb over the cover he had made so carefully for her.

  “I thought you might like to write in it,” he said at last. “Things of your own, I mean. Stories, or what you want.”

  Then she smiled and stuck the book in a pocket of the green sweater with too-long sleeves she always wore then, which he guessed she’d made herself. “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

  * * *

  —

  They make camp in silence, when the sky is dark already. They fumble, dropping things in the snow.

  They build a fire and warm what remains of the eel. He watches her face in shifting gold light and shadow. At first, she eats hurriedly, as always, and then suddenly her expression changes. She freezes, and drops the hand that holds her fork to her lap.

  “We can go back,” he says.

  She doesn’t answer or even move.

  “Judy? We can go back. Tonight. Or first thing in the morning. He won’t have gone far. We can find him.”

  She flings her fork to the ground as she stands. Watching her stumble to the tent, he calls after her, and she says over her shoulder, “Don’t. Don’t you follow me.”

  He lets her go, and then after he has cleared up the food and stamped out the fire, he pulls a tarp from his pack, spreads it over the snow and lies down. The night is clear, and for a moment, looking up, he could imagine the sky is a huge, dark blanket full of holes, thrown over something blindingly bright.

  He loves the night sky in winter, turned away from the Milky Way’s dust and clutter of light. In winter, staring into deeper space, where the stars are bright and clear, he can pick out the constellations he likes best, one by one.

  When they were very young, one night he carried his brother outside to see the winter sky. His brother had been slow to learn to walk, and still stumbled when Eban set him on the ground. Had his mother known he’d woken his brother and brought him out of the crib he still slept in, she would have been furious. But he wanted to show his brother the stars so badly that he took the risk. It was Eban’s mother who had taught him to map the stars, but somehow even then he suspected his brother would not receive the same lessons.

  “Look,” he said, pointing up, but his brother only stared back at him. “Look,” he said again. “It’s a surprise for you,” he whispered helplessly as his brother began to cry and wouldn’t stop. At last, Eban lugged him back to bed, and listened as his mother stirred at the sound of her baby’s sobbing. As she rocked the baby into the early hours of daylight, he lay awake, shaking with anger at the brother who had refused the gift he’d offered him.

  Now, reaching one hand up over his head, he traces with his finger the lines of Taurus, the bull protecting the red star Aldebaran, one of the stars his mother taught him to navigate by when they first travelled into the foothills. Among Judy’s things is a tiny round instrument made of yellow metal. A compass. She insists on consulting it, but he’s tried to make sense of it before, of the silver arrow that’s meant to point north but is now rusted into place. She can’t possibly believe it’s of use, but once or twice every day she pulls it from the yellow box in her pack and studies it.

  He would like to lie like this again with Judy, to touch her under the lit-up sky. She might ask him to name the stars for her, the way she used to when she was new to the hills. He would tell her every star he knows and even remember some of their stories, always her favourite part. He thinks to himself that he should remember to do this, the next bright winter evening that she isn’t angry with him. Of course, she prefers the summer night sky; once she said it was like an ocean made of light, and he asked her how she knew what the ocean looked like, and she said, “Everyone knows what the ocean looks like. Like you know what a giraffe is.” And he lowered his face, and after a moment, she said, “Let me get my paper and pencil, and I’ll draw one for you.”

  He waits out there a long time before he goes to the tent. Inside, she is sitting, cross-legged, with a candle in her hands, burned down almost to her fingertips. With a start, as he makes out her face, he realizes she’s staring at him.

  “I don’t know why,” she says, her eyes reddened but dry. “I don’t know why I did it. Every time I looked at him, I felt the cold the way he must feel it. I couldn’t stand it. But I swear I thought I was doing something strong. I don’t know how to make you believe me, but I didn’t see it was cruel. I just wanted to know the right thing to do, the hard, right thing. But now he’s out there, Eban, in the cold, because I am so wrong. Because I’m always wrong here.”

  “It’s not so cold,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you stop me?” she asks, almost as if she’s testing whether it’s a joke.

  He answers seriously. “I tried.”

  “I know you did.” She rubs her hands back and forth over her face. “I have this feeling, sometimes. I just want to scratch every thought out of my head and run down the hills like an animal chasing a smell. This life we have is so small. I don’t know how to fit in it. But is that brave, to try to fit? Or to run away like an animal? I thought maybe it was brave to leave Beau, and now I think what if the only thing in the world that I had the chance to do was keep that dog safe.”

  He waits, unsure how to answer, and she looks at him as if she wants him to say something so particular that he feels there’s no hope he could come up with it. Then she gasps as the flame at last burns her hands and she drops the candle to the ground. He dives for it, but it has already gone out. />
  The darkness now is total, and he hears her breathing and can almost hear the noise of her thoughts but can’t possibly guess what they mean.

  “Sometimes,” she says, so softly he almost isn’t sure she’s said it, “I can’t stand to look at you. When I do, all I see is what’s wrong with me. How unhappy I am with this tiny life that somehow is enough for you. How patient you are with me. Sometimes it makes me want to do things I know are wrong. Just to have a choice.”

  “Judy,” he says, lying down by her side, “we’ll look for him in the morning.” And this time she listens, or at least she says nothing, and puts herself into his arms.

  “It’s warm,” Eban whispers, his face so close to hers that if their eyes were open they would only see each other.

  Those are the last words he speaks before they both fall asleep, and so they still echo in his ears when, a few hours later, they wake to find the tent doubled up around them in a howling wind, as the trees outside bend and shriek.

  How could he have been so stupid? It’s been months since the foehn winds blew, but they always come in the last weeks of winter or summer, in the earliest days of season change. The eerie warm air that settles before the winds blow provides their only warning.

  He hardly hears Judy, as the tent flaps around them. He grabs at the tent pole and pulls open the zipper. “Get out,” he cries. “We’ve got to find shelter. Get out, get out!”

  Outside, Eban throws himself onto the tent to keep from losing it. Already one of the tent poles has torn lose, shredding the fabric that contained it. The gusts of wind come sudden and fierce. For a moment, the air will seem to calm, and then a roar of wind will throw down everything before it, trees buckling as if shoved to the ground by an unseen hand.

  Judy scrambles down the hill, bent almost to her hands and knees. Eban tries to follow with the tent clutched in his arms, but it’s torn out of his grasp. He watches as it disappears into the black sky. He has no time to think about what it means to lose it. Instead he stumbles after Judy, and finds her huddled down the hill in a recess in the ridge wall. He squeezes in beside her. The winds still pull at them, but at least they are out of the way of the blowing snow and the debris being volleyed through the air.

  “It’s okay,” Judy whispers. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  And then, for just a moment, he thinks he hears something. A thin voice in the distance, calling out, that could be the wind itself.

  IV

  “No,” Eban says, “no, no, no,” the words dismantled by the wind, as Judy leans away from the ledge, staring into the wild darkness, searching for the source of the call.

  The voice, if it is a voice, is the first they’ve heard since a crowd of travellers passed dangerously close to their hide the previous summer but continued on without spotting them.

  Judy ignores Eban and pulls herself above the ledge, emerging from its shelter. For a moment the wind draws back, as if inhaling, gathering lung power, and then it surges again. Something caught up in the gust strikes Judy’s shoulder and she falls back. Eban seizes her by the hips and pulls her to him.

  “I think they’re close by,” Judy shouts. “The wind makes them seem farther. But I think we can get to them…”

  Eban sees that whatever hit her shoulder caught the side of her face too. Bright blood runs along her jaw, a scarlet flag unravelling down her throat. “We can’t help them now. We have to wait. Until it stops.”

  Judy lowers her head, and he knows if he weren’t here she would heave herself, her life, into the wind for the sake of a stranger. But he knows he is right. And she must know it too, because she remains in his arms and doesn’t resist his hold on her.

  They wait.

  Impossibly, Eban sleeps. Or must have. Because when he opens his eyes, he finds the winds have stilled. And Judy is gone.

  He climbs out of the shelter, and hauls himself up onto the ledge. “Judy?” he calls.

  He finds her crouched on her knees in the woods, not far from the remains of their fire the night before. Everything—circle of stones, charred logs, wire cook rack—all of it is gone and all that’s left is a black smudge in the snow.

  Judy is bent over, studying the ground.

  “What is it?”

  “I just can’t tell. Is that a footprint?”

  He looks at the mark in the snow and the way the edge of it has crushed the snow down to the softening mud below. “No,” he says, almost sure.

  “If it is, it’s too large to be yours or mine.”

  “It isn’t. Probably in the wind a branch or something fell and left that mark.”

  She looks around, shaking her head slowly. “I’ve walked all over. I can’t find any sign. No footprints but ours. No sign of a camp or a fire. I did see what looked like some broken brush…and places where the snow looked swept, like maybe someone tried to clear away their footprints? But why would they do that?”

  “It’s just the wake of the wind. It always leaves its mark on the wood.”

  “I was sure, Eban. I was sure I heard someone. And you were too.”

  “It was just the wind,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, Eban leaves Judy alone to hunt for the tent the wind tore away, knowing she will also continue searching for someone who doesn’t exist, while he hikes into the wood to find a meal. The day is clear. A pale winter sun is melting the ice from the banks of a narrow river. Everywhere, he can hear water trickle and stream.

  The day is warm. He ties his scarf to a tree to mark it and leaves his hat and gloves at the base, opening his coat.

  He follows the river up the hill, where it meets with other feeder streams, leading him farther and farther, and higher and higher into the hills. At last he finds the springhead. There, he crouches down and fills his canteen with clean, cold water.

  He drinks his canteen to the bottom. It’s the first time in days that he has drunk his fill. The water tastes of the minerals and earth it sprang from. The hide he lived in with his mother was built around a seep spring, and he remembers still the taste of that water. Since those days, he and Judy have always had to boil whatever they drink or use the purification tablets the peddlers sell.

  The summer his mother died, the spring ran dry. It had never happened before, but that summer, a blazing sun rose each day, scorching every cloud in the sky and every drop of water in the soil. He found fish dead and wilted over the parched bottom of what had once been a brook. He travelled farther and farther in search of water and found only enough to sustain them from one day to the next as they grew weak and dry-lipped, hollow-eyed.

  They opened up the emergency barrels and drank the sick-smelling water there. They left out sheets of plastic to catch dew, and sealed plant leaves in airtight bags to release their moisture. They hardly spoke to one another. Alphonse, who’d once kept goats in the outland, kept saying that if he had brought just one with him they could have drunk its milk, till Judy silenced him. “I suppose,” he remarked softly, “it would have wanted water too.”

  They grew foul-tempered. They spent their days in the shade, moving as little as possible for fear of shedding sweat. And that was how the girl found them, stretched out beneath the trees, under a network of tarps, complaining to one another.

  The girl, whose name he can no longer recall, was maybe eleven years old. Though her thinness might have made her appear younger than she was. Eban had never seen anyone carry much weight on their body—sparse food and hard work made the people of the hills all lean—but the girl was different. Her wrists seemed to reach to her armpits, with nothing beneath her pale flesh but bone. He wondered how she had been able to carry the heavy pack on her back as far as she must have. But then, she never told them where she had come from.

  It was for that reason that his mother wanted to send her on, away from their camp. No one was allowed ne
ar their site without a convincing account of themselves. She met new peddlers from the heel end of a rifle.

  But the girl was sick, her skin damp and flushed with the fever she carried, and she shook her head violently when Judy offered the little food and water that was her portion. Eban and his mother discussed what to do. Neither felt comfortable allowing the girl to stay, but they also couldn’t stomach leaving a sick child in the wilderness alone. And as the discussions continued, unresolved, Eban watched Judy and the girl. He saw the set of her mouth when she offered the girl what would not have been enough even for herself. He saw her anguish, and wanted to be the one who could help.

  And so, in the days that followed, Eban told his mother of the girl and of her goodness. Though he had spoken scarcely a few words to the girl, he told his mother they had talked at length, and that she showed him kindness and strength, despite her illness. He said it was evident she was like them, not like the other ones, and not from the cities. He said he thought she was getting better, keeping down the food Judy gave her, and that she was quick with a bow and might well be a benefit to their camp. “She has a child’s resilience,” he told her. “Maybe she’s stronger than us. Maybe she can walk to water when we can’t.”

  He went on saying things like this to his mother for a week, while the girl stayed on, supine in a tent at the edge of the camp, rocking with chills despite the heat and wrapping herself in the blankets that Judy brought her, unable to keep down food or water.

  And at last his mother agreed that the girl would stay, and Eban went to Judy with the news. He doesn’t remember now what he hoped for. She rushed past him to the girl, to tell her. And they spent the night carrying the girl’s things to the house he had built for Judy.