Once, Eban used to work his body until his muscles shivered. He enjoyed the shaking, and the next-day cramping, because he knew they were signs he was being remade. Bettered.
He began with push-ups; only thirty or fewer at first, but he soon had a regimen of one hundred, three times daily. And then chin-ups from the lowest branch of the nearest poplar, until one day, the branch broke at the trunk.
He watched his muscles swell with something different from pride. Relief, maybe. His frame was thin, but he got ropey, tight across the back and shoulders. Strength coursed through him, wasted and in wait even as he walked across the house or took a plate from a cupboard.
One birthday, his mother gave him a set of iron barbells and plates. He loved and was perplexed by them; objects with no use but their own weight. He wondered how she had convinced a peddler to find such an obscure thing and to carry the load so far. What it had cost her. Once he scrubbed his mother’s steel baking platter till it gleamed, scratching out the blackened crust that ringed it, and then leaned it against the wall outside, receiving the sun and casting back his altered image as he studied his own face and body.
There is something in that memory. Some flicker around the edge. He struggles to recall it.
His brother. He had found his brother at the door, watching him bend his arm and bring the weights toward him, in first one hand and then the other. He didn’t know what his brother saw. If he watched Eban himself or his reflection.
His brother had been a runner. He had been a runner the way a fish is a swimmer. His passion was slavish, almost devout. Each run, a devotion. It was in watching his brother—seeing him quit the house in the morning before the day’s first meal and return hours later, pale and sweat-soaked—that Eban came to long for strength. His brother grew leaner daily, while Eban thickened. Broadened. Gained what his brother shed.
He didn’t know where his brother ran. He tried once to follow him and tired after only a few miles. They had been warned never to take even a step in the direction that his brother sprinted, half-flying over the ground, wild-limbed. It would take a person weeks to reach the cities at any pace, but there was no way to know who might be on that road.
Some days, his brother would be gone till near dark. Eban wondered if his mother knew how far he ran. If she wondered about him, as he did. What did he think of when he ran? Where did he go? Why did he do it?
Their mother told his brother she couldn’t afford to feed him enough to waste himself pounding the road at all hours of the night and day. She said he was melting away before her eyes, burning up every calorie she could put on the table for him. Running like a rat on a wheel. Going nowhere. Using himself up. One night, he refused to eat the plate of boiled squash and lentils she set in front of him, sitting at the table still shining with his own sweat, his chest still heaving, his shoulders and elbows poking out of his T-shirt like a wire hanger. With a howl she hurled the plate to the floor and then turned away, leaned her face into her hands, and cried, her shoulders shaking. Eban stared at her in fear, but his brother didn’t seem surprised or troubled. He cleaned up the mess she’d made and left the table. If he was hungry, he didn’t complain.
After that night, she began to openly berate his brother each time he left and returned from his runs, though she never stopped him, and maybe she couldn’t have. Maybe she knew that.
And in between the things she said that made no sense, the angry, senseless slurs and reproaches, she would sometimes mutter something that helped Eban understand why she hated his brother’s running. The loneliness of it, the fanatic solitude, was wrong. And that wrong told a truth about him.
It was during one of his runs that Eban’s brother found the man and his child.
His brother had left only a short while before, so Eban and his mother looked up in surprise when he came loping back into the yard.
“Yes?” Eban’s mother said, her voice faintly irritated as it always seemed to be now when she spoke to her younger son. “What’s the matter?”
“I have to get a rope,” the boy said.
“What do you need a rope for?”
“Can you get it for me? A good long one. Maybe that one.” He pointed to the length of dogbane twine strung from the house to a post, where they hung their clothes to dry.
“Tell me why you need a rope.”
He looked surprised. “To get the man.”
Eban and his mother followed him all the way to the outer edge of the foothills, where a stand of spreading trees rimmed the valley. He led them to the trapping pit Eban and his mother had dug two years before, during a hungry summer when they’d had little luck hunting. “Maybe we’ll catch something big,” his mother had said. She’d heard rumours that there were still bears in the foothills. They’d checked the trap every day that first summer, but never caught anything except voles and pine lizards, and once a hare that had already begun to rot in the sun. It became Eban’s job to check the trap, but it was always empty and he frequently forgot.
“Down there,” the boy said.
Frowning, they stepped closer, and then they saw what was at the bottom of the pit.
“No,” Eban’s mother whispered.
Eban’s brother held out the end of the thick hemp cable she had produced from a drawer. “Will you tie this to that tree?” he asked, not seeming to notice her expression of horror as she stared into the hole.
The man must have been carrying the child when he stepped onto the lattice of fir boughs that hid the hole below. The child, who looked to have been barely old enough to walk, had been dead for several days.
The man’s body half covered the child, almost protectively. His face was turned down into the mud below.
“If you tie it, I can climb down there,” Eban’s brother said.
“Climb down?” Eban repeated stupidly as their mother staggered back from the hole that he had helped her dig.
“To check. To see if the man is okay.”
Eban pressed his hands over his eyes and then his ears. He could remember when his brother was the child’s size. He didn’t want to look into the hole again.
After a while, he heard his brother shuffling around the tree, grunting as he pulled the rope tight. Eban began walking away, away from the pit and from his mother. When he looked back, his brother was lowering himself down into the hole, clinging to a series of knots he’d tied to the free end.
At first Eban thought the cry came from his mother. That her guilt for the part she had played in the child and his father’s deaths had produced this incoherent string of sounds. But when he went to comfort her, he found her kneeling silently on the ground, covering her face with her hands.
The sound came from the hole. Eban had to look down inside it again to understand. The man lived. Eban’s brother, not yet ten years old, had dragged him from his child and was struggling to help him to his feet.
“Pull us up, Eban,” he called. “Pull us up.”
His brother had tried to tie bowline knots around the man’s legs, but the harness was slack and even if Eban could have lifted a grown man up the sheer wall of the hole, the man didn’t want to be lifted. He tugged at the knots until they released. And then he mumbled something, and looked into the eyes of the boy trying to help him.
Something seemed to give way in him then, and he allowed Eban’s brother to show him where to put his hands around the rope, and slowly dragged himself to the surface, where he lay limp on the ground. Then he rolled to his side, and for a moment, Eban thought he’d throw himself into the hole again. The man kept his eyes squeezed closed, his head turning slightly back and forth as he whispered in whatever language he spoke.
Eban’s mother took her hands from her face and watched him. “Oh god,” she said. “I am so sorry…I am…” Her voice broke, her mouth still open but empty of words.
“Water.”
Eban stir
red at his brother’s voice but didn’t answer.
“Eban, he needs water.”
His brother’s face was calm and his eyes steady. He darted off into the trees, and returned carrying a crock of water and a shovel.
“Here,” he said to the man, who seemed to be committed to dying on the ground beside his child’s grave. But to Eban’s surprise, the man jerked up and seized the water from his brother, spilling it as he gulped it down. He drank till it was gone.
“I’m sorry,” Eban’s brother said. “I’m sorry about your son.”
The man gave no sign he understood.
“Leave him be,” Eban’s mother said sharply. “Leave that man be.”
But her son ignored her. “I brought a shovel,” he said.
The man didn’t budge, but sat in silence as Eban’s brother dug a second, smaller hole beside the one where the child lay. And when the pile of freshly displaced dirt reached his waist, he offered the shovel to the man.
“No…” cried Eban’s mother.
The man stared at Eban’s brother for a long time, and then took the shovel in his own hands, looked at it, and filled the blade with dirt. He whispered some words to himself, closed his eyes, and let the dirt fall. He emptied the shovel three more times and then handed it to Eban’s brother.
The boy accepted it and filled the pit with what remained of the overturned soil.
Eban’s mother had found her feet by then. “Please,” she said softly. “Forgive me. I never imagined…”
The man didn’t meet her eyes. He squeezed her young son’s shoulder one last time, and then limped away.
They watched him disappear between the trees, heading back up into the foothills. Eban wiped his eyes. His mother looked, in that moment, like someone lost.
Then she turned to Eban’s brother.
“You should have left him there,” she said. “He would have suffered less if he had died with his child.”
His brother looked from her to Eban. “Why are you crying, Eban?” he asked. “If I’d left him there, he wouldn’t have been able to get out. There was no water or food down there.”
Their mother stared at him. She began to answer and then stopped.
No one spoke as they walked together back to the house. Eban’s mother returned the rope to the drawer and the shovel to its hook. Then Eban saw her step toward the open door. Outside, his brother could be seen far down the outland road, where he’d begun to run again.
Eban and his mother watched him grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until they couldn’t see him anymore.
He realizes Judy is standing beside him, and for a brief moment, she lets her hand rest on his shoulder. As if she knows what he is thinking. Then she lifts the pack onto her back and says, “Let’s go.”
He’s ashamed that she is carrying the weight for them both, but also relieved. Each step he takes tires him further. He wonders, and then worries, how far he will be able to travel without rest, as he trudges on.
* * *
—
As the sun sinks into the valley, a weariness settles into Eban. He knows he is moving too slowly, that Judy is fighting impatience at their meagre progress. But he finds himself helpless to do better. Tomorrow, he tells himself. He will wake rested with his muscles strengthened by a half day’s use. He’ll do better.
Judy walks slightly ahead of him, stops to wait. He tries to guess at her thoughts. It will bother her that they have no other plan. No alternative if she is wrong, if they are still weeks or more away from Heaven.
* * *
—
When they knew she was pregnant for the first time, Judy belonged more completely to him than ever before or since. “Tell me now,” she would whisper at night as they lay in the dark. “What is it doing now?” And he’d describe the way two cells became a human being, the pictures he remembered from his mother’s books.
“Will you help me?” she asked once as he sat mending some tool or another. “You know things we’ll need to teach him. Her. You had a brother. You know what a child needs.”
“I don’t know anything like that,” he said, and then saw he’d upset her. “I mean, I don’t know anything that you don’t know. I think it’s the kind of thing we’ll figure out together.”
That pleased her; he could see it did.
And then the day came when he had to tell her it was gone. He woke to find her rocking slightly in the bed beside him.
“What is it,” he asked, still drowsy.
“Nothing,” she answered, and he heard in her voice that she was afraid.
He found her with her knees drawn to her chest, a blanket wound between her legs to staunch the bleeding.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“How long?”
It had been all day. All day she’d hidden it from him. She didn’t know what it meant except that there was some unhappiness ahead for her or for their child. She hadn’t wanted him to know.
“Something’s wrong with him, isn’t it?” she asked him. “With her?”
He opened his mouth and made no answer.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
He shook his head.
Judy lowered her face. “But will she be born? Will I hold her? Will I see what she looks like?”
He tried to shake his head again and couldn’t. He let one hand fall over her hair, and they sat like that.
“Does it hurt?” he asked after a while.
“No.” But he watched her go on rocking herself from side to side until the blood flow slowed, and then she slept while he took the soaked blanket to the dump and burned it there.
* * *
—
Eban reads Judy’s shoulders as she walks ahead, the angle of her elbows, the rise and fall of her pack with each step. Judy has a fixed idea of the person she wants to be, and what that person should want or feel, and that vanity guides and confuses everything she does. Now she will want to be someone who doesn’t hesitate or delay once her mind is made up. Who is undefeated by hunger or exhaustion. But she will also want to be someone who is compassionate. She’ll wait till dark and then propose they stop. She’ll urge it, reminding him of his illness. She’ll set her mouth and say it will be fine. Then, once he has settled, she’ll suggest that she just run ahead and see what’s up the path. She’ll promise to be only a short time, and then return hours later. He will pretend he wasn’t frightened all the time she was gone.
He is thinking this when she turns around, so suddenly he nearly stumbles into her arms. “We’ve gone far enough,” she says. “Let’s stop here.”
He watches as she lowers her pack and digs into its contents. Maybe, he thinks, he was duped by her bravado. Maybe she, too, fears what they will find.
Without tents or tarps or snow to build a shelter, and without tools to find food or build a fire to cook it, there is nothing to do but sit beside each other on the ground. After a few minutes, Judy leaps to her feet and murmurs that she might be able to forage something, that she should look while there’s light.
But less than an hour later, she returns.
He’s leaning against a tree, his knees drawn up. “Did you—”
“Nothing,” she says.
He holds up the book in his hands. “I borrowed it.”
She nods.
He hadn’t wanted to read. He wanted to draw. He thought of the charcoals and paper left behind at the camp, as if longing for another human being. And then he dug out his favourite of Judy’s books, which he loves for the lavishness of its art. The illustrations are in deep, rich colours. Some are edged in gold.
“Read it out loud,” she says.
He hadn’t been reading, only tracing the brushstrokes of the illustrations with his finger. “I’ll start at the beginning,” he says, letting the weight of the pages collapse onto
the back cover, and turning over the first page. He begins.
It’s a story about how things used to be. In the story, a family lives in a city. The youngest daughter climbs out onto the roof every night, when her family think she’s asleep. Another family live in the other side of the house, and their only child, a son, meets her there. From the roof, they can look out over the sea of houses around them, and see lights shining from taller buildings, far in the distance. Eban lingers for a moment on the page that shows what the boy and girl can see from their roof.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispers.
Judy leans forward. “What did you say?”
He shakes his head, but she puts her hand on his.
“I want our baby to grow up somewhere like that,” she says. “With people all around.”
“But Judy…It isn’t like that now. Not like in your books.”
His mother never told him much about the world before, only that they hadn’t understood the threat to it in time.
“We didn’t know what those other ones were at first, not for years. And then there were more and more of them. Fewer and fewer of us. And they didn’t look any different from anybody else. But they were monsters.” They were sitting in the dirt outside their house. She was cross-legged before the solar cooker, rendering tallow, and the stink of it made him sick. The flies couldn’t be shaken or swatted away.
“Can I catch it?” he asked.
She shook her head and said it was a deficiency at birth, something missing from those babies, like an ear, but invisible.
“Then I don’t have it?” he asked, electric with relief. She looked at him for so long that the relief turned cold. Then she shook her head and said he’d passed every test she gave him.
He knew from the way she said it that something was wrong. She stood and folded her arms over her chest, looking into the distance.
He followed her gaze and saw his brother in the yard, back from running, his shirt drenched and his chest heaving as he gasped for air. And then Eban understood. The sweaty, fetid odour of animal fat hung over them, suffusing even the memory now.
The Second History Page 12