After that he looked for a house or barn to spend the night in.
On the road he saw signs of awakening: small green buds on a tree, a flock of birds, a patch of emerald-green grass, a violet growing from an ash heap.
Things were coming back. Very slowly. But they were coming back.
And not one day—and very few hours—passed that Josh didn’t think of Swan. Thought of her hands working the dirt, touching seeds and grain, her fingers running over the rough bark of pecan and peach trees, stirring all things to life once again.
He crossed the Mississippi River on a flatbed ferryboat captained by a white-bearded old man with skin the color of that river’s mud, and his ancient wife played the fiddle all the way across and laughed at Josh’s worn-out shoes. He stayed with them that night and had a good dinner of beans and salt pork, and in the morning when he set out he found his knapsack heavier by one pair of soft-soled sneakers that were just a little too small, but fine once the toes were sliced open.
He entered Missouri, and his pace quickened.
A violent thunderstorm stopped him for two days, and he found shelter from the deluge in a small community called, laconically, All’s Well, because there was indeed a well at the center of town. In the schoolhouse, he played poker against two teen-age boys and an elderly ex-librarian, and he wound up losing five hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars in paper clips.
The sun came out again, and Josh went on, thankful that the card sharps hadn’t taken his sneakers off his feet.
He saw green vines trailing through the gray woods on either side of the road, and then he rounded a bend and abruptly stopped.
Something was glittering, far ahead. Something was catching the light and shining. It looked like a signal of some kind.
He kept walking, trying to figure out what the sparkling was coming from. But it was still far ahead, and he couldn’t tell. The road unreeled beneath his feet, and now he didn’t even mind the blisters.
Something sparkled ... sparkled ... sparkled....
He stopped again and drew in his breath.
Far up the dusty road he could see a figure. Two figures. One tall, one small. Two figures, waiting. And the tall one wore a long black dress with sparkles on the front that was catching the sunlight.
“Glory!” he shouted.
And then he heard her shout his name and saw her running toward him in the dress that she’d worn every day, day in and day out, in hopes that this would be the day he came home.
And it was.
He ran toward her, too, and the dust puffed off his clothes as he picked her up and crushed her to his body, and Aaron yelled and jumped around at their feet, tugging on the black giant’s sleeve. Josh scooped Aaron up as well and held them both tightly in his arms as all of them surrendered to tears.
They went home—and there in the field beyond the houses of Mary’s Rest were apple trees, loaded down with fruit, from saplings that the Army of Excellence had missed.
The people of Mary’s Rest came out of their homes and gathered around Josh Hutchins, and by lamplight in the new church that was going up he told them everything that had happened, and when someone asked if Swan was ever coming back, Josh replied with certainty, “Yes. In time.” He hugged Glory to him. “In time.”
Time passed.
Settlements struggled out of the mud, built meeting halls and schoolhouses, churches and shacks, first with clapboard and then with bricks. The last of the armies found people ready to fight to the death for their homes, and those armies melted away like snow before the sun.
Crafts nourished, and settlements began to trade with one another, and travelers were welcome because they brought news from far away. Most towns elected mayors, sheriffs and governing councils, and the law of the gun began to wither under the power of the court.
The tales began to spread.
No one knew how they started, or from where. But her name was carried across the awakening land, and it held a power that made people sit up and listen and ask travelers what they’d heard about her, and if the stories were really true.
Because, more than anything, they wanted to believe.
They talked about her in houses and in schools, in town halls and in general stores. She’s got the power of life in her! they said. In Georgia she brought back peach orchards and apple trees! In Iowa she brought back miles upon miles of corn and wheat! In North Carolina she touched a field, and flowers sprang forth from the dirt, and now she’s heading to Kentucky! Or Kansas! Or Alabama! Or Missouri!
Watch for her! they said. Follow her, if you like, as many hundreds of others do, because the young woman called Swan has the power of life in her, and she’s waking up the earth!
And in the years to come they would talk about the blooming of the wasteland, the cultivation projects and the work being done to dig canals for flatboat barges. They would talk about the day Swan met a boatload of survivors from the destroyed land that had been called Russia, and nobody could understand their language, but she talked to them and heard them through the miraculous jeweled ring of glass that she always carried close at hand. They would talk about the rebuilding of the libraries and the great museums, and of the schools that taught first and foremost the lesson learned from the awful holocaust of the seventeenth of July: Never again.
They would talk about the two children of Swan and Robin—twins, a boy and a girl—and about the celebration when thousands flocked to the city of Mary’s Rest to see those children, who were named Joshua and Sister.
And when they would tell their own children the tale by candlelight in the warmth of their homes, on the streets where lamps burned under stars that still stirred the power to dream, they would always begin the tale with the same magic words:
“Once upon a time ...”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author is grateful for permission to quote from “The Waste Land” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: © 1963, 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
copyright © 1987 by the McCammon Corporation
cover design by Thomas Ng
978-1-4532-3152-4
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Swan Song Page 93