by Lydia Millet
She made some quick gestures to Shel, who stepped over to the heater too. Bent down and held his hands close to it.
That elderly woman knew her sign language.
“The rest of you. Remain,” she said.
She had a way about her. I didn’t consider disobeying.
“You can go upstairs if you wish,” she went on. “I know you like the view. But not outside. First, bring me an ashtray, Eve.”
I hadn’t told her my name either.
“I don’t know where—”
She waved her arm at the wall shelving. Sure enough, a small metal bowl. I placed it on the arm of her chair.
Behind us Sukey came in the door with her baby. Then Dee. They stood there shyly, waiting.
“Good,” said the woman. “Let the games begin.”
She hit another button on her phone.
We didn’t know what she meant by that, but she wasn’t saying more. She tapped her ash into the bowl. We started up the stairs.
From the platform, we gazed down at the barn. It was silent and mostly dark at first. Through one of the two windows we could see a flicker.
“Hell of a candle,” said Rafe.
“They shouldn’t light candles in there,” said Jen.
Fog drifted into the beams of our headlamps. Someone’s yell broke the silence, and we saw one of the SWAT guys silhouetted at the hay door. I could tell by his headgear and the bulky belt around his waist. His back was to us, but it looked like he had his rifle lifted.
“What’s he doing?” asked Jen.
We gazed. There was more shouting. I glanced over at the cottage, whose lights were on. Its door stood open. Fathers and mothers were rushing across the grass. And filing in. I counted: eight. All of them.
A donkey walked in a leisurely way over some flagstones beside the parked cars. Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
“Seriously,” said Jen. “What’s he doing?”
“Guarding?” said Rafe.
Presently we heard a crackle. We saw flames leap inside one window. Then the other.
It wasn’t fog, I realized.
“Tell her!” said Jen. “Tell her the barn’s burning!”
So I ran down the stairs again, Juicy clattering behind me. He liked to be in on the action, Juice did.
“Your barn!” I said to the owner, breathless. “It caught on fire! The barn’s burning!”
“That old thing,” she said. “Not up to code. Should already have been condemned.”
Still calm. Completely calm.
“But—but—”
“People are maybe stuck inside,” Jack told her gravely.
“They shouldn’t have played with Tasers, then,” she said.
We stared at her. At least, I did.
“Or guns. Even worse. Against the rules.”
“Maybe they didn’t know the rules,” said Jack.
“Of course they did, little one,” said the owner. “Everyone knows the rules.”
WE LOST A good ten minutes. Had no idea what to do. Alarmed but also paralyzed. The flames were inside the barn at first, and then they were leaping from the far side of the roof. SWAT guys filled the hay door, their backs lined up, shoulder to shoulder. A wall of dark men.
One of the barn’s two windows crashed open from inside, and someone was trying to squirm out of it, but then he fell back. And flames were at the window.
That was when we knew we had to try. What if the angels were still in there?
She’d said to move the parents. And the kids. But she hadn’t mentioned the angels.
We rappelled down, so that we didn’t have to face the owner and the little boys would stay put. We tried the barn’s double doors, but they must have been chained on the inside—we pulled and pulled but could only open them about two inches.
Putting the fire out was a losing battle. We ferried buckets back and forth from a spigot, but it wasn’t helping. We tried to use the hose from the vegetable garden, but it didn’t reach.
So we got rakes and shovels and started trying to bash a hole in the double doors. The smoke was thick, and we were coughing, and it was hard to see. Parents streamed out of the cottage behind us, yelling at us to get away. Shouting that the building could collapse.
Some of them pulled at us finally, physically grabbed us and tackled us to the ground and dragged—Low met this fate, and Jen—and presently the SWAT guys were there too, and we were outnumbered.
There was a shot, which we could barely hear over the noise of the fire. Then more shots, rat-tat-tat, and various parents were crying and grabbing us.
As we got forced away from the barn doors—we’d made a couple of long, ragged rents in them—the rain picked up and thunder sounded, and soon it was pouring.
The SWAT guys herded us into the cottage, where it felt like there was no room for another body to stand. Mothers and fathers were all around.
We were crowded into that kitchen like too many people in an elevator. Even the bathroom and the bedroom. We filled up the small house.
“You’re safe,” said a SWAT guy, but then he stepped back. Dammit if he didn’t lock us in.
His voice came muffled from outside. “Just stay put now. I mean it.”
INSIDE THE COTTAGE the night got long and fuzzy. We dozed fitfully crushed into each other, heaps of us upright or sitting on the floor against standing legs. Juicy and Dee curled up on the kitchen table, and I envied them.
We were damp and black with smoke and ash, and various fathers muttered and snored. Various mothers sniveled and whispered. I worried about Jack out in the silo. I don’t remember how I got to sleep, but I must have, because gradually it was morning.
Light came filtering in and I realized the rain had stopped. We felt caged in and frustrated. Someone was talking about the broken bathroom window, and who was small enough to fit through it, when Juicy pushed Rafe against the inside of the door.
And discovered it was unlocked, because it opened.
Jack stood on the other side with Shel behind him. Sukey and the baby and Dee.
Also, Red. He shifted from foot to foot.
I hugged Jack really hard. I admit it.
Behind them, the barn was smoldering. No flames. It was still there, but mostly turned from red to black, and parts of it were caved in.
We ran out toward the field, but the helicopter was gone. Donkeys grazed on the flattened grass where it had been. And one goat.
There was one goat left. The soldiers had missed it.
We raced back to the cars. Our parents’ were still there, but the soldiers’ Jeeps were not. The gate was standing open.
Parents milled around in the front of the cottage and inside it, trying to get signals on their phone. Washing their faces and hands at the sinks. Some using the toilet, repulsively leaving the bathroom door open.
“Where are the angels?” I asked Jack. “Where’s Burl?”
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
“We went to sleep,” he said. “Beside the heaters. That lady was nice. She made us hot chocolate on a little stove and sat there in her chair smiling. She told us stories in sign language. So Shel could listen too. Then we fell asleep. When we woke up she wasn’t there.”
MY MOTHER ASKED if there was a good cell signal in the neighborhood. They couldn’t get one here, she said—not for voice calls. We said yeah, we had noticed.
She said they had to call the cops. The Fire Department. Everyone.
The parents still believed in Emergency Services.
Val said she knew where a cell tower was. It wouldn’t do any good, but she’d lead them to it. If they insisted.
“WE HAVE TO check the barn,” said Jen, after most of the parents had set out with Val. She and Sukey sat at the picnic table, Sukey giving a bottle to the baby.
The parents had zero interest in the barn. They’d let the authorities deal with it, they said.
We were outright scared to go in. The walls or roof might fall on us. And what would we disc
over? Would we find angels’ bodies?
“One side’s wide open,” said David. “No roof on it anymore. We can probably walk in that part safely.”
I didn’t want to. At all. None of us did.
But we had to.
I made Jack and Shel wait outside, and Sukey handed Jack the baby. The rest of us stepped carefully through the ashes and burnt wood. We didn’t go where flaps of roof hung down. We stayed away from the fragile walls. Everything smelled like smoke. There were no stalls anymore.
Posts and beams had fallen, and inside it was dark and hard to figure. Pieces of wall and roof shingles and planks of wood with nails in them. They had all turned black in the fire, and we couldn’t tell what was what.
Then Juicy found melted guns, snarled in a pile beneath the fallen planks of the hayloft. He found some zippers from our sleeping bags.
David found the melted sole of a boot, attached to a steel toe.
Jen found a skull. With skin and hair on it.
Right away she threw up. Jen has an active gag reflex.
It wasn’t Darla’s hair, said Low. Or any of the angels’. It was gray. And buzzed short.
More like the governor’s.
There were other bones too, ribs and big bones like leg bones. Femurs, said Juicy.
We didn’t try to count the bones or make them into people. We just went out.
We left the barn. And never went back in.
A COUPLE OF fathers had stayed behind to tinker with the cars. One of the ones we’d driven wouldn’t start, I guess. I went into the kitchen and turned on my phone.
On it I saw a few old, missed calls from my parents.
And a single new text from an Unknown Number.
It lifted a weight from me.
This is the owner. Don’t worry about Burl and the angels, it said. They are with me now.
“Hey. Come here,” called Jack, from outside. “Evie. The tree! Come see!”
I stepped out the door and turned around to look where he was looking. The skeleton of the dogwood, stripped of its leaves, had small white nubs all over the thinner parts of its branches. Hundreds. Thousands.
At first I thought, Disease. Fungus.
But then I realized they were the buds of flowers. It was fall, but the tree was covered in buds.
9
OUR BEDDING AND most of our clothes had burned, so we didn’t have many possessions anymore. Our phones and a few clothes that had been in the cottage laundry pile. Some worn-out toothbrushes and camping items.
The parents said the roads were clearing, and some gas stations had reopened.
But who would feed the donkeys when we were gone? Jack asked them. And the lone goat that had survived? He and Shel had kept it in the woods during the shooting, he told me. Held onto its collar while the others went into the field.
The parents couldn’t have cared less.
Before we left, Sukey said, she had to show them her mother’s grave.
They’d been told of the death when they were given blood—David had broken the news—but some of them had been too sick to hear, and others must have been drunk. Or distracted. They hadn’t even mentioned it.
Sukey wanted to make it real to them. She wanted it to hit home.
We walked in silence to the cairn in the field’s corner, where the forest began. The parents kept quiet, trudging along beside us, though Jen’s mother tried to reach out for her hand. She slapped the hand away.
Sukey had built the pile of rocks up to the height of a person. It was as though the cairn was a sentry. Watchful.
The stones didn’t move, sure, no. But something in their posture made you think they might.
“Do you blame us?” asked a mother. Pathetic-sounding.
“We blame you for everything,” Jen said evenly.
“Who else is there to blame?” added Rafe.
“I don’t blame you,” said Sukey. The baby squawked, and she jiggled it.
The mother looked at her gratefully.
“You were just stupid,” said Sukey. “And lazy.”
Not so grateful.
“You gave up the world,” said David.
“You let them turn it all to shit,” said Low.
I almost forgot the taste of old banana, then.
“I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t have that much power,” said a father.
“Yeah. And that’s what they all said,” said Jen.
“Listen. We know we let you down,” said a mother. “But what could we have done, really?”
“Fight,” said Rafe. “Did you ever fight?”
“Or did you just do exactly what you wanted?” said Jen. “Always?”
The mothers looked at each other. A father rubbed his beard. Others put hands in pockets, rocked back and forth on their heels and studied the pile of dirt beside the stones.
“So. There was a cremation,” said a mother. Changing the subject.
“A funeral pyre,” said Rafe.
“Sukey made the cairn,” I said.
“It’s a very strong piece,” said my father, the artist.
Sukey rolled her eyes.
She could still do that, at least.
“We should say some words,” said a mother.
“No you shouldn’t,” said Sukey.
“A benediction,” said another mother.
“We already had the funeral,” said Rafe.
“We sang a hymn,” I said. “Well. Someone did.”
“An angel,” said Juicy.
He turned and spat. It hit a father’s shoe.
“That’s disgusting,” said a mother. His.
“Good,” said Juicy.
BACK AT THE buildings Jack was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Shel, and neither were the donkeys and goat.
I guessed the little boys were walking the animals to the neighbors’ farm. It would make sense. Jack was following his own lights these days.
Juicy and Low took the all-terrain vehicles for a final spin across the field. Racing.
In the kitchen a mother was absentmindedly tidying. As though the cottage was a rental, and we had to leave it clean.
“I don’t think the cops are coming,” said a father, from the bathroom.
“You don’t say,” said Rafe.
“We have to wait for Jack and Shel,” I told my own mother.
She’d found a can of beer at the back of the fridge, and was popping the tab.
“Do you have somewhere to go, dear?” she asked.
Addressing Red, who sat at the table gnawing the dirt out of his fingernails. He’d picked up one of the useless, melted guns and stuck it into the ammo belt he wore.
Must have thought it looked dashing.
He shook his head.
“A home?” she prodded.
“Don’t have one,” said Red.
It was then I noticed his leg wasn’t wrapped up. And I realized he’d been walking normally all day.
“Wait,” I said. “Your leg. You said it was broken. Is it just a sprain?”
I was exasperated. Jack had said he wouldn’t walk right, and we’d been ready to risk our own skins.
“It was broken. She fixed it,” said Red.
“She set your leg? The owner set your leg?” asked Jen.
He shrugged. “She fixed it.”
He hiked up a pant. We saw a regular skinny, hairy leg. Just nothing wrong with it.
“Wait,” said Jen. “I saw that thing. Even a doctor . . .” She looked at me. Shook her head. Baffled.
I’d never seen the injury myself, so I had no opinion.
“She told me to stay here,” said Red.
“Who told you?” asked Jen.
“She,” said Red. “Owner. Said I’m the new caretaker.”
“You?” asked Rafe.
“She put my finger on the pad,” said Red.
He didn’t have a home. So the owner had given him one.
THE PARENTS’ AGENDA was basically what ours had been: the shelter of we
alth. We would strike out for Juicy’s mansion.
His family was still the richest.
“Do you think it might have worked?” I asked David, as he and Rafe and I stood at the field’s edge waiting for the little boys. “The plan to give the soldiers their money?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Depends how strong the security systems were on the other laptops. I’d just cracked my parents’ when the barn-burning went down. Not much cash there. That one was gonna be a wash.”
“We gave it the old college try,” said Rafe. “The diplomat’s path. A peaceful solution.”
“Wouldn’t have been peaceful later,” I said.
“True dat,” said David.
We grinned at each other, imagining the parents’ rage. Besides drinking, money was the one thing they were dead serious about.
“Evie!” called Jack. “The neighbors were home! They’re really nice. They’re going to take care of the donkeys. And Jiminy.”
Shel nodded.
“We have to go now, Jack,” I said. “It’s time.”
“I know, Evie,” he said.
WE HAD SIX cars including the van, so we had to crowd in. Jen and Shel rode in our car.
Jack had run around looking for his barn owl to say goodbye, but the owl must have been sleeping somewhere. He cried a little when he couldn’t find it, and Shel was down too. They sat close together, moping. Jen squeezed in beside me.
As the caravan pulled out Red watched us go from the top of the silo. Waved his melted gun in a rough salute.
I FELT LIKE a refugee. Or a prisoner of war. Possibly both.
My mother got on her phone as soon as she had a signal, talking logistics. Where to stop for gas and food. Where the safe zones were. She mentioned the National Guard, and something about checkpoints.
Jen and I stared out the window.
It wasn’t how we remembered. There were power lines down everywhere, and piles of fallen trees and branches shoved out of the way along the roads. There were brown rivers in ditches, with piles of garbage. People straggled along in small groups beside the road. There were abandoned cars, a jackknifed semi. Dark storefronts with doors standing open. There were roadkilled dogs and birds and rabbits and raccoons, even some deer.
There was more roadkill than I’d ever seen.
“Keep the windows up,” my mother said. “The smell!”