He scrolled through his list of editorial contacts. Travel Ho! magazine, “a forum for smart, successful, retired people!” (also known as “advertising bait”), had various themed issues lined up six months in advance. March was the spa issue, June was cruises, September was islands, December was hotel getaways. Islands, maybe? New Zealand was an island nation, after all, but Travel Ho! was probably thinking of boutique accommodations with palmy beaches and peach-skinned women sporting diaphanous scarves hip-wrapped around bikini bottoms, not a real island where people actually worked and lived and farted and fucked. Not this “sleepy cul-de-sac of Empire,” as such places had been dubbed. To be a colonial is to be born into exile. And it seemed to Rafferty that although some might choose exile, most were born into it. Perhaps, when you fall off the edge of the world, New Zealand is where you land.
But that would make for a very elegiac travel piece.
If the ferry could ever break out of this limbo of fog, they would reach Wellington Harbour at the bottom of the North Island. That was the destination. Cruise ships must dock in Wellington, he thought. Maybe a quick, front-of-the book 150-word piece—Stopover: Wellington!—with its contrasts and cozy cafés. (He didn’t think he’d ever been to Wellington, wasn’t sure, but he assumed they had cafés and that they were known for being cozy. In the world of travel writing, cafés were always cozy, as surely as secrets were always best kept.) A front-of-the-book piece like that, at $1.20 a word would fetch him—he did the math in his head—$180. No wonder he was going slowly broke.
Nonetheless, Rafferty sent off a query, ignored the avalanche of emails that had piled up even as he typed, searched instead for the 186th victim. The official tally for Christchurch sat at 185, with the city posting names as they were confirmed, alongside the dates and, when possible, time of death, but Rafferty found no one listed for the day the small man died, and he was about to shut down his computer when he decided to run an image search on “Saint Christopher’s medal” instead. Maybe the medallion and chain were worth something? It wouldn’t do the dead man any good, might as well see if he could get a couple of bucks for it. But when he pulled the medal and its clotted chain out of his jacket pocket, and compared it with the images that appeared, it became clear this was something else. Another saint, perhaps. Not Christopher. He typed in “other saints,” but that got him nowhere.
Rafferty held it in his palm. It was light, with no real weight to it. Just a trinket, really. A keepsake. The unknown saint brought to mind memories of another necklace, another ferry: a pewter locket in the shape of a heart purchased on board a Japanese passenger gift shop as an ironic gift for an unironic woman. What he had meant as playful became a conciliatory offering instead after yet another fight, Rebecca putting the heart around her neck and then disappearing with it a few days later. It was, as it turned out, a goodbye gift.
Rafferty examined the dead man’s medallion more closely. Tiny letters were engraved on the back: TLT. So he searched that, as well, found nothing of note. Just a company that sold temperature limitation thermostats. A diner that specialized in turkey, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. An Amtrak station code. A reference to a biblical passage. An Indonesian airline operating out of Australia that had gone bankrupt years before. Nothing to give Rafferty an inkling of what he was holding, its value, or lack thereof.
What Thomas Rafferty didn’t realize was that these unsecured searches he was sending into the ether on an open connection amid the yaw and roll of a vessel lost between shores were leaving a trail of silver behind, the kind a garden slug might leave across a pane of glass, faint but unmistakable. It was a trail that would eventually lead right back to Rafferty.
The dead man wasn’t done with him yet.
EREWHON
SHE PUSHED COTTON BATTING INTO the puncture wound, but the blood immediately soaked through. It was like trying to sop up a flooded bathtub with a paper towel. More cotton and cloth bandages, quickly sodden. She couldn’t stop the flow; the blood wouldn’t stop. The dying man moaned, held a folded compress to his wound. “Here,” he said. “Press down. Harder.”
She’d run to get the first aid kit, the one hanging by the barn’s front door, a metal box with a red cross prominently displayed, as required for sheepshearing stations and livestock workers. Her father had packed the kit himself, so Catherine had no idea what to expect when she sprung the clasp: moon rocks or a novelty snake or even an IOU written in a florid penmanship: “I owe you one First Aid Kit.” But fortunately, at least this one time, her father hadn’t succumbed to inscrutable whims and the random firing of neurons; there were, indeed, medical supplies inside. But her hands shook so badly she had trouble twisting off the lid to the hydrogen peroxide. With the bloodied shirt pulled open, she’d poured the peroxide directly in, and for a moment the wound emerged as cleanly as a hole punched through paper, then quickly filled again with blood. The peroxide seemed to make it worse. She heard him gurgle in pain. His entire body winced, she poured in more, unraveled another bandage, grabbed a wad of batting.
“Press,” he gasped. “Harder. Tape it.”
“Is it— Is it still inside? The bullet?” She didn’t want to reach into anybody, didn’t want to fish anything out of any wound.
“Passed through,” he said, eyes clenched, voice weak. “You’ll have to… have to tape the back as well.”
When she finished the front, she rolled him over, loose straw sticky on his back, and pulled up his stained shirt, saw a second puncture, worse than the first.
“Sulfa,” he said.
She searched the kit, powdered the wound with chalk, blood seeping through, creating a paste, but the flow slowed and she taped it up, best she could.
He rolled back, face wet with sweat. “The blood. Was it dark?”
She nodded.
“Blackened?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“It’s the liver, then. I’m done for.” He closed his eyes. So, this is dying. Eyes still shut, he asked, “Where am I?” He wanted to know where the road had finally ended.
“Erewhon Farm.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s like ‘nowhere,’ backwards, but spelt wrong.” Another of her father’s missteps. Lives lived at the end of the world.
His eyes fluttered open. Through his pain, he considered the awkward girl crouching over him. She smiled, almost shyly. “You’re nowhere,” she said. “Nowhere at all. This is where the birds turn around and come back.”
Even in his pain, he knew that tone. It was the loneliness of a radio operator late at night, speaking into the static.
“Your name,” he whispered.
“You need to go to a hospital.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“I’ll get my dad. He’ll know what to do.”
“No.” A dry swallow. Throat swollen. “They’ll kill you. And then they’ll kill your family.”
Who were “they”? There was no they. “They” was everyone and no one. “They” was a dead man pinned under a wall.
She said, “I don’t have a family. Only my dad.”
“It’s not the dying, child. It’s what comes before. They will do terrible things to your father. They will assume we were in this together, when really we’re just… strangers. Strangers on a train.”
This confused her. “No trains up here. Only some farms and the ocean.”
“How close?”
“The other farms?”
“The ocean.”
“The ocean? Just the end of the yard. There’s a cove. Really steep. It doesn’t really have a name. Fayther calls it ‘Chapel Cove,’ as a bit of a lark, because there’s a more famous one on the other side of New Zealand called Cathedral Cove. Ours is smaller, so he says it’s only a chapel. But I just call it ‘the cove.’ You can see the ocean from there.”
He started to laugh, felt it collapse somewhere in his rib cage. “So, I almost made it. There was a boat waiting, yes?”
“There was! I saw it. Do you know why it was there?”
“It was waiting. For me. The airports were being monitored.”
He began to drift away.
“You have to go to a hospital.”
He tried to speak, couldn’t. Enfeebled by bloodletting and hunger, by thirst most of all. “Water,” he whispered.
There was no reaction from Catherine’s father when she came back. She wanted to tell him, to give him some sort of covert signal, but her courage faltered and she walked into the kitchen instead without saying anything. She’d discarded the heavy barn apron she’d been wearing, now smeared with blood, had bunched it up in the laundry hamper. But her hands were still stained, and she washed them quickly in the sink. The water ran red, then pink, then clear, swirling down the drain. Catherine then filled a plastic jug with tap water, kept her back to her father the entire time, not that she needed to; he barely noticed she was there. She would always be more a theoretical construct than an actual daughter.
“Fayther…” she began.
Lost again in his schemes, softly chortling to himself, he sat at the table, filling in graphs according to formulae that existed, so far as she could tell, only in his head. She could have stood on a chair and announced, “There is a man dying in our barn. I’m going to bring him water,” and Fayther would have said, “That’s nice, dear. Have fun.”
Catherine lugged the plastic jug out to the barn, determined to get answers even if she had to withhold the water to do so. When the wounded man saw her, he tried to sit up, reached for the jug, but Catherine held it back.
“First, tell me who you are.”
“Not important.”
“If you’re not important, why is someone hunting you? Are you a spy?”
Another laugh, lost in the rattle of his chest. “A spy? No.”
“A fugitive?”
“Not a fugitive, no.”
“A murderer?”
“The water… please.”
“Not till you answer my question. Who’s chasing you, and why?”
“The why is not important. My line of work comes with certain risks.”
“You are a spy.”
She held the plastic jug to his lips, water sloshing down the front of his shirt. He drank deeply, let his head fall when he was done.
“Not a spy, no.” Memories of Falls Road. “I grew up on the other side of the wall.” Prods on one side, Catholics on the other. “Protestants carry the weight of their sins to the grave, but we pass ours off. It’s bred in the bone.” Secrets and sins, both need sharing. And confessions begin in childhood, as most things do. A rictus home that smelled of mice where the doilies hid stains in the fabric. “I have always had a knack for finding things…”
He lapsed, first into incoherence and then darkness, woke to find the light had shifted and the girl, perched over her schoolbooks, using a bale of straw as a desk. Other bales had been pulled down, hiding him from view.
He gestured weakly for the jug and she poured more down the front of his shirt. Some of it even got in his mouth.
“Thank you,” he gasped. He looked to her books. “Homework?”
She nodded. “Social science. I’m trying to catch up, so that when classes start up again, I won’t be lost in the weeds.”
“The weeds?”
“It’s what my dad says. ‘Don’t get lost in the weeds!’ ” She closed the book. “I didn’t do very well on the last quiz.” They had been asked to fill in the prompt: What the world needs is… and she remembered the mean girls, smiling sweetly, standing in turn to read their answers to the class, Mr. Duncan beaming. What the world needs is to be more inclusive. What the world needs is more empathy. Better allies. These were the answers the other girls had given. The world needs more awareness. They’d all of them mastered the required vocabulary, were singing from the same hymnbook.
“And what did you say?”
“I said: ‘What the world needs is more earthworms.’ ”
“Earthworms?”
“Earthworms mix the soil with other organic material, helps lower the acidity levels. That’s a big problem down here. But everyone just stared at me like I was wool blind.”
“Wool blind?”
“Oh, that’s what we say. It’s when wool gets too long, grows over a sheep’s eyes, and it runs around bumping into things. We also say it when someone is clumsy or stupid.”
Nice shoes, Catherine. They go well with your haircut.
The gaze of the other girls lingering on her canvas sneakers, sniggers that pretended to be smiles. She only had the one pair. Canvas sneakers and self-cut bangs. One of the girls had scribbled in Catherine’s notebook: What the world needs is better hairstyles. “The correct answer was something like ‘kindness’ or ‘love.’ ”
He shifted, winced. “For what it’s worth, I like your answer better. Your answer exists in the real world.”
“Mr. Duncan didn’t think so.”
“Well, Mr. Duncan is an ass. The world needs earthworms, not catchphrases.”
The sheep in the pen, still jumpy, were slowly getting used to the wounded man’s presence. The bales of hay that Catherine had built a wall with, blocking him from the sheep’s sight, helped. The bleat and cry. The smell of wet straw, fermenting in urine. Homey, in its way.
“Romneys?” he asked. “Or Perth?”
“Perendales. You know about sheep?”
“I do. Sort of.” Ulster was full of sheep once you got out of Belfast.
Romney sheep were on the plains, Merino crossbreeds in the hills. “People around here mostly keep Corriedales, though. Good for meat and for wool, both. One of our neighbors, he has English Leicesters. They’re really cute. Real shaggy, look like sheepdogs. My dad, he’s breeding Perendales, mainly because they’re hardier. They run around like mountain goats. Really good moms, too. Are you okay? You’re crying blood.”
He wiped with his hands, checked his fingers. Lay back, exhausted, feverish. “The capillaries have burst. Won’t be much longer now. Sunt lachrymae rerum.” He repeated this several times, even as his eyes clouded over and unconsciousness claimed him.
She would later look up these words. They were from a Roman poet writing in a long-dead language. “The world is full of weeping.” She knew that sometimes sorrow comes out as a sob, sometimes a scream. And it seemed to her that the rest of the world would always be on the other side of the door.
Dry-throated rattles. Closed eyes. Blood tears. She watched him sleep, a face full of fever and twitches. “Get better,” she whispered. I need someone to talk to.
And just when she thought he was gone, he fought his way back. Eyes bleary with blood. “The satchel,” he said.
She had laid a damp bandage over his forehead, and it was now warm, almost steaming. “You should go to a hospital.”
“The satchel,” he repeated. “Leather straps. I flung it into the loft when I first got here. Is it— Is it still there?”
Catherine climbed the ladder, found it among the loose hay: a heavy satchel, canvas, with leather straps and heavy buckles. When she brought it down, he said, “It’s yours. Take it. After I’m gone, take it.”
“Don’t say that. I don’t like it when you say that.”
“Keep it hidden. Somewhere safe.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just something I found. A game of hide-and-seek gone wrong. It’s yours, in thanks for what you’ve done.” With that came silence.
“This isn’t really a barn,” she said, prodding him back with her voice, thin and desperate. “It isn’t, not really. It’s an ‘experimental venue.’ ”
“Experimental? To what end?”
“Bolder sheep.” She was trying to keep him awake with conversation. “My dad is sort of a scientist. Self-taught. All the best scientists are, did you know that? It’s true. Newton and Pasteur, they didn’t need university degrees. It would’ve only gotten in their way. It’s why we raise Perendales. They
don’t need a lot of shepherding and they forage really well. The wool is good, a little coarse, but my dad, he didn’t choose them for the wool.”
“He didn’t?”
“He chose them for their personalities.”
“Sheep have personalities?”
“Sure. Just like people. LK-107, she’s really curious. And BH-232 is kind of mean. Our sheep can leave anytime they like. Really. They’re not prisoners. We leave the door open all the time, they just have to overcome their nature, strike out on their own. Fayther says we are breeding them back to what they were, and when it reaches critical mass, they’ll just… go. One day, we’ll come out and they will all be gone. It’s why we chose Perendales. My dad has this checklist—are they the first ones over a fence and the last ones back? Do they avoid eye contact? that sort of thing—and when one of them shows enough bolder traits, we separate them, breed them with rams of similar temperament. That’s what my dad says, ‘Rams of similar temperament.’ We’re trying to undo thousands of years of meddling. Humans have been breeding sheep for thousands and thousands of years, maybe millions, have been breeding out their true character, training them to be docile—that means shy—so they would be easier to control. Fayther says everything that is wrong with the world can be found in sheep. He says, it’s the same with people. New Zealand was like this experimental venue of its own. We’ve been bred into docility.” Her father’s words, not hers.
“And once you breed these bolder sheep?”
“Well, hopefully, they escape on their own. That way our sheep will slip in with others, breed with them secretly. It will change the gene pool, that’s where the DNA is, in the pool. The idea is to undo what’s been done, so that it will make sheepherding impossible because the sheep won’t listen or do what they’re told, so the paddocks and fields will grow back, and New Zealand will return to the wild, like how it was, not pastures, but forests. That’s what my dad says, anyway. I don’t know if it’ll work. Most of his ideas don’t.”
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