“Here I am rushin’ around and runnin’ my mouth, not giving a thought in the world to how you are taking all this. Shit, shit, shit.” My eyes must have been huge by then because she took one look at my face and busted out laughing.
“You should see yourself! What, ain’t you never heard a woman cuss before? Lord, child, they have kept you in a little glass box all your life, haven’t they? Well, all the better, then. It’s time for you to get out there in the world a little bit. See some things! Lord knows one of us should. I wish I knew half the things you know how to do. I’da been long gone from here before you was old enough to remember you met me. My mama didn’t know too much herself, and my daddy…” She made a soft grunting sound, almost like the wind had been knocked out of her. But then she waved her hand, like she was brushing something aside. “Well, my daddy wasn’t shit. And when David married Rachel, it was just me and him left. He took care of me the best he knew how. He brought me here, and I guess I can’t complain too much. Things sure could have been a whole lot worse for me. But not you. Ami girl, you’re about to have you a little adventure!”
Five
Before I knew it, I had my bedroll and Amber’s pack strapped to my back. Strangest of all, I was wearing pants! Amber gave them to me and told me to put them on, and she wouldn’t listen to any arguments. They were made of some kind of thin material that she said would keep me cool without leaving too much skin out for the bugs and would dry real quick if it got wet. She said she’d packed me an extra pair plus some shorts, but I couldn’t wear those after sundown if I didn’t want the mosquitoes to eat me alive. Same went for sleeves on the shirts she’d packed. It felt strange wearing those pants after a lifetime of nothing but loose dresses, and I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling of having my legs all closed up in material. And the shoes! It seemed crazy to be walking around in the heat of June with those springy, spongy shoes tied onto my feet.
After a rushed goodbye, Amber all but shoved me out the door and told me to be careful. She said the others had wanted to be there to see me off, Rachel and Billie and David and Jacob, but they couldn’t risk rousing Papa’s suspicion. That made sense, but I still wished they could’ve been there to tell me goodbye. That first moment after Amber shut the door behind me, I think that was the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. And for a motherless girl, that is saying something.
I felt sure that everyone was asleep, but I avoided the hi-way just the same. All it would take was for Papa or Ruth or that man, as I still thought of him, to look out the window and see me in the bright moonlight, and my little adventure would be over before it ever got started. I sprinted across the wide, shining road and down the slope into the woods. From there I followed alongside it without too much trouble. When the sun came up, I’d have to move deeper into the woods.
It wasn’t that long ago, my grandma Ruth used to tell me, that cars came down that hi-way all day and most of the night, heading down to the Gulf from places like Mississippi and Tennessee. We had an old truck that could go a little ways on a sun charge, and I had seen Tennessee and Mississippi as shapes on a map and been made to learn the spellings of their names, but those places seemed so far away to me, not just in place but in time, that I could never really imagine them. I would look at the old junk heaps of cars and trucks that rusted on the handful of abandoned farms around us and try to picture it in my mind, a whole river of them moving down that hi-way, full of people going somewhere. Their destination, the Gulf, was even harder to imagine than Tennessee or Mississippi, since both Ruth and Papa told me those places weren’t really too much different from Alabama, where we were. I knew they had cities, just like Alabama once did, but they also had the country, which was where the compound was and always had been, according to them. But the Gulf was told to me as a place of wide, sparkling blue-and-green water as far as the eye could see, bordered by sand that was white like sugar, which I had both seen and tasted, thanks to Great-Great-Grandpa Jedidiah. Having no real way to imagine it, I would confuse things in my mind, thinking of that soft white sand as a taste of sweetness on my tongue, bordered by endless salty water.
I had seen a picture of the ocean, which the Gulf was a special part of, in those old 1992 encyclopedias Ruth used to teach me out of when I was little, but she said pictures didn’t do it justice. I had also seen pictures of children in those same books, some even with light brown or almost black skin, wearing every kind of thing you can imagine, alone and in groups and with their parents. There were little babies in those pictures, held so sweetly by their mamas or tied to their backs in bright strips of colored cloth. But they were still the hardest thing for me to picture when I tried to imagine that stream of cars passing in front of Heavenly Shepherd Trailer Sales, which is the name on the sign that still stands, somehow, in front of the compound. I mean the children. Families with little boys and girls, yellow-haired or dark-headed or reddish like me, smiling out from back seats on their way to swim in all that big water. I had never seen a real, actual, flesh-and-blood child, and like the Gulf or China, I found them hard to imagine. Until I ran, I was always the smallest person in my world, and what I knew about the outside of myself was no more than could fit in the palm of my hand.
It was late when I set out, and I should have been tired, but I was too wound up. I thought back to that afternoon, when I’d walked into the yard after my foraging trip. Could that have really been that same day? It felt so long ago, like years had passed since I’d been that silly girl swinging a bucket of berries and singing while I walked. I hadn’t been worried about a thing in the world. The last thing I ever expected was to find a stranger waiting to give me worries aplenty. For the first time, I thought to wonder where he’d come from. How had Papa and Ruth planned the whole thing? I had definitely never seen the man on the compound before that day, and no one really left for more than a day or two of hunting, fishing, or hauling. I guess it could have been then. I never really gave much thought to the comings and goings of Papa or my uncles. The women mostly stayed on the place, cooking and cleaning, sewing and growing the garden, tending to the chickens, churning butter. The men handled the cattle and the big peanut field, hunted deer and rabbits. A couple of times a year, they’d make a longer trip to the river, about a day’s walk from the road, to fish and go duck hunting.
Maybe it had been on one of those trips that Papa had met Ezekiel Johnson. It made sense, I guessed. A man with no home, or not much of one, might drift along the riverbanks living off the land. I felt a little surprised as I realized how good that sounded to me. I started to imagine myself in a little cabin some fisherman had left behind, close enough to hear the sound of the water through my windows when I lay down to sleep at night. I could fry up a fish fresh-caught from the river for my breakfast. I could set snares and traps in the woods, forage for wild carrots and poke and strawberries. It was easy enough to find peach trees and even plums in summer. It could be my own Banks of Plum Creek.
I walked along for hours, my mind wandering. I was thankful for the bright moon that saved me from needing my flashlight. It felt funny to think that same moon was shining over the compound, that it was still there the same as always, with my whole family asleep in their beds. I wondered how long they would be awake before they knew I was gone. Well, before Papa and Ruth knew. My aunts and uncles had known even before I did, hadn’t they? As soon as they heard about Zeke Johnson, they must have started planning. Maybe even before that, I guessed. They all knew this day would come.
Eventually the day started catching up to me, and then all at once I felt so tired I could barely stand. I went a little deeper into the woods, farther from the road, and found a good spot to make camp. There was a small tarp and some lengths of cording in the pack Amber had given me, and I strung up a little shelter from a low branch. Then I unrolled my blankets and was gone as soon as my head hit the pillow. You’d think I’d be too scared or worried to fall so quick into such a black, heavy sleep, but I guess those hours of walking
had given my mind time to run itself out. I slept for hours and woke up when the sun was already high in the sky. I figured they’d be up and looking for me now around the compound.
I wondered how long it would take for the thought to settle in that I might have gone farther than just across the woods to my usual stomping grounds. My clothes were all still there, I’d barely taken anything from my room, and no one knew what Amber had in that little trailer to recognize that things were missing. Oh, Ruth and Papa would be hopping mad that I wasn’t right there at breakfast, showing off my woman skills to that man. But I was pretty sure it would be tomorrow before they really started to think I was gone. They didn’t think I had it in me. It gave me a little bit of satisfaction to know that they were wrong, but the thought of them coming after me still made my heart pound.
It was hot and muggy enough to make me wish I’d gotten up sooner, so I decided to change into a pair of the shorts and a short-sleeve shirt Amber had packed for me. Now, I slept out in the woods all the time, but I’d never felt the need to change clothes out there before. I felt silly looking around and worrying that someone might see me when I knew good and well it was just me, the birds, and a family of squirrels watching from their nest in the fork of the big oak I’d camped under, but I couldn’t help it. Then I found out that taking pants off didn’t work exactly the same way as putting them on, which I had only ever done the one time, and I got my feet tangled up and fell over trying to get out of the blame things. Since I was down there I figured it might be safer to stay that way, so I scooted myself over to where I was sitting on my bedroll and peeled them the rest of the way off.
Putting on the shorts was a lot easier, but I had to laugh when my feet came right back out the leg holes almost as soon as I’d stuck them through the waistband. It felt more like putting on underpants than pants! The short-sleeve shirt wasn’t so bad, and I tied the shoes back on even though I still wasn’t sure they were strictly necessary. I got up and walked around in a little circle, trying to get used to having so much skin out in the open. It felt strange, but these clothes were admittedly cooler and easier to move around in than my old dresses. By the time I ate a little bread and goat cheese from the pack and rolled and tied up my blankets, my hair had fought its way almost completely out of the braid I’d started out with the night before. It stuck to the sweat on my face and neck, and on impulse, I picked up my knife to hack the whole mess off. I knew I was just bluffing, though. I could never go back home with short hair. Clothes were easy to take off and put back on, but I’d been growing that hair since I was twelve and Papa made Ruth stop cutting it off at the shoulders to keep the tangles at bay. I dropped the knife into my pack and twisted the whole mop into a big knot as high up on my head as I could get it.
The undergrowth got too thick for me to venture very far from the road, but I pushed in as far as I could for fear of being seen. The sun was too hot out on the road anyway, but the mosquitoes were worse in the shade. I walked for a few hours in a sweaty daze before I came across the exit to what was left of a town. It curved off the hi-way so part of it hung in the air, held up by big round concrete pillars, and the pavement had broken off in big chunks and fallen to the ground underneath.
I knew I should keep moving, but curiosity got the best of me and I picked my way down the embankment to the low road. It was all abandoned gas stations and restaurants up above, but down there was just houses. It looked like they had been laid out in neat rows, with little square yards out front and a porch on each house, but now the yards were all grown up in tangles of weeds and vines, and a lot of the houses had either burned or caved in from weather. The brick ones had held up best, but only a few with metal roofs still looked anything like whole. There were old rusted-out cars and trucks in front of a lot of them.
It was spooky, walking along those abandoned streets. I was used to big empty spaces, but this was a place meant to hold people in. There used to be families living in those houses, and now there was nobody left. I guess I’d never really felt it before, what it meant that the world had emptied out. It looked like God had reached His mighty hand and turned the whole place upside down and just shook it until all the loose pieces fell away and were lost. All that was left either grew out of the ground or was nailed to it, and every bit of it looked broken and wrong. I could hear the sound of my own breathing all of a sudden, too loud and heavy. Even the silence was wrong in that place. Papa preached that vengeance was God’s, and it sure looked like He had taken vengeance on the people who used to live in this town. And all the towns like it, all the cities and countries of the world. It took my breath away to see even that little piece of it.
At first when the scientists and the government agents noticed the birth counts going down, they didn’t think nothing of it. This was a story Ruth had told me many times and one I had heard all the grown people talking about since I was too little to really even understand it all. Things were different back then in the mid-2000s—people lived fast lives. Everything was lit up and electric and run by machines, everyone driving their cars around everywhere they went. This made the air and the water real dirty, even though most of the cars had changed over to run on electricity instead of gasoline, and it made the people tired and run-down and mad all the time. Papa said his grandpa Jed had often preached about things he heard growing up and how, back then, children were not always looked at as blessings from God, and sometimes people even did terrible things to them. This hurts me to try to think about, and Ruth would not explain what kind of terrible things, since she said it was in the past and gladly so. I’m not too sure she even knew the specifics, having been born and raised a girl on the compound, but I guess they’d both heard the grown-ups’ whispers and stories the same way I did. I walked through that empty town and tried to imagine what terrible things might have gone on inside those houses, but I couldn’t. The whole place felt empty and sad now, but it was hard to believe that the people who lived in those little houses and sat on the porches had been evil.
Ruth said that at first it seemed like people just didn’t want to have so many babies anymore, which should have showed right off that something was wrong, because, to hear her tell, they shouldn’t have had babies since they didn’t want to take care of them and barely knew how anymore. That would have showed sense, she said, and Lord knows people didn’t have too much good sense in those days. For one thing, young girls and unmarried ladies had been having babies on accident for as long as anyone could remember, which was a whole possibility that I couldn’t really get clear on, but then all of a sudden, that wasn’t happening so much. And then by the time Jed married my great-great-grandmother Anna, it was hardly happening at all.
People were glad about that at first, since this had always been a real big problem as far as they were concerned. But then they added that up with the fact that ladies were also not having babies when they did mean to, and suddenly they had much bigger problems than all those accident babies put together. People panicked. Then came the parts that Ruth would not tell me much about, but I have heard bits and pieces when they thought I wasn’t listening or forgot I was around. I know that some that could still have babies were not godly women, and they didn’t waste any time turning a profit on what they could do. Other people who were lucky enough to have babies and little children had them stolen away, or one parent would sell them without the other one knowing. It was terrible times, when the right hand could not trust the left, and the whole world just started to fall apart. That’s when the government stepped in.
At first, they didn’t take the babies away. They opened Centers for the Preservation of the American Family in every state in the nation. Couples with children under twelve were invited to come and live there, where the kids would be safe and the husbands and wives could trust each other again (and make more babies), since it would not be possible to sell a child off on the sly the way they had been doing. Unmarried mothers and their kids could come too. I’m not sure when the invitat
ion became a requirement, or how, but Ruth had told me many times that when people are scared, they will agree to almost anything. And they were scared. I guess no one really understood until it was too late that if there are no children to pass things on to, well, what is the point of anything? Their whole society was based on the idea that your parents sent you to school so you could grow up and get a good job making lots of money, then you could get married (or not!) and have kids and start the whole thing over again with them. Even the ones who didn’t want to have kids of their own knew that somebody’s kids would be around to keep everything going. I heard Papa preach on this many times. He said this was the folly of modern life and the reason the Lord brought about the downfall. He had to break the cycle.
Pretty soon, the children and babies living in the Centers got old enough to start trying to have babies of their own. And here is where I think things started to get sticky. I guess some of those boys and girls did like any young people would have done before in their towns or at school and found sweethearts in the C-PAF where they lived. But some didn’t. States would organize party weekends and things with the teenagers from three or four C-PAFs so those who were unattached could try to meet a partner. Sometimes this worked, but other times it didn’t. I used to ask Ruth why this should be so hard and didn’t they want to get married and have babies so they could carry out God and the government’s plan, but she would just look at me darkly and say I should never confuse God and the government. Also, she said that not all people want to do God’s will and follow the natural way, but when I pushed, she wouldn’t say any more on the subject.
But as it turned out, even those who wanted to follow the plan were mostly out of luck. That is where the sticky part comes in. Because once those girls got old enough to start trying and once it was shown that the trying wasn’t going to work for some of them any more than it had for all the women still living on the outside, those girls and their families had to go. They had been sheltered and given everything they could need or want in the C-PAF, and then all of a sudden, they were out in the real world, where things were considerably worse than they had been when they went in ten or fifteen years before. It also did not take too long for the government to figure out that all those boys were a whole lot of trouble and that it didn’t take that many to do what needed to be done, so they weeded out all but the cream of the crop. Only the smartest, healthiest boys were kept to father the last hope of the dying human race.
The Ballad of Ami Miles Page 4