The future is an abstraction — like waiting in the dark to tell a story when there’s no one there, or writing in the dark, the words only legible when the light comes, a candle or the sun-up — and the past never began.
I tried to speak, to articulate something profound, at our last emergency meeting. It had been discovered that Wildlife might be planning to relocate the town, lock, stock and barrel, and Emma had sent out a shrill email, but only a few people showed up. Present were Apocat and Kata, Harry and Gee, Tom and Lucy with their new baby girl, all their daughters, even Abi. Had there been a family reconciliation? The ethnologists sailed in late with a handful of others. I knew there were ghosts among us and that they would have the most to say if we were quiet enough to make out the words. I said something like, “If we could just get perspective we could put it all together. But we never quite manage perspective, do we? We are always acting out of what we do not know.” Emma was looking at me with compassion and pity. I saw the way Abi gazed at the young ethnologist. I had expected blame and hatred, but found only sorrow. Even Kata and Apocat were cowed. We call for forgiveness and hang up. We send unsigned confessions. We drive past in trucks, tanks, sportscars, speedboats, bicycles, semi-trailers, and shout apologies that are lost in the wind. We run as long as we can. We die arms open, only children leaping a rift from one country to another. We cut ourselves off from the mothering past in order to advance, but lose touch with the ground. The dark warm land behind us sticks to our spines as our heads swivel mid-leap. Eventually it will be death because the sky’s claim is too powerful. But for now we must fly or fall.
24.
“Not James, then?”
“Not him.”
“Not Harry.”
“No.”
Abi and her father stood poised in the centre of the living room. Their arms at their sides. Spring sunshine lit motes around them.
“A man, then, not a boy?”
“Maybe.”
“Take your time.”
“Don’t coach me.”
“There’s no rush, that’s all.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem?”
“You will make up your mind.”
“I’m your dad.”
“So?”
“I just need to know from you.”
“And then what?”
“That depends.”
“It just happened.”
“Tell it.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“It’s done, okay? It doesn’t matter.”
“Once we know, your father and I, you will be safe and we will raise this baby together.”
“No.”
“What else then?”
“I want a different choice.”
“Once everything is settled, you can work for different choices. Children are like a promise to that. But right now you must tell us and let us look after you and the baby.”
They sat facing each other, Abi on her bed, Lucy on a chair by the door, heaped clothes between them.
“Why must I tell you?”
“What happened to you was wrong.”
“I just want you to leave me alone — both of you. Leave me alone.”
“I don’t want surgery.”
“Will you die if you don’t have surgery?”
“Probably. Maybe.”
“You don’t know.”
“If I die, I die.”
They sat their horses by the barn door and watched the plain shifting under the turbulent sky.
“Sometimes you don’t seem any older than me.”
“Right. Don’t slump, Abigail. Keep your back straight.”
“The mountains look pretty far.”
“Can you ride that far?”
“I can if you can.”
“When we get going, we’ll feel better, I’m sure.”
“I don’t want anyone but you when the time comes.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t judge.”
“I’ll tell you something. I have never felt this ill.”
“Such a frail human being.”
“Such a sturdy girl. When I look at you I am so aware of beauty.”
“Let’s go.”
“Sure.”
“I mean let’s really go.”
“I’m trying to remember a place. When I was young. A beach on a small island, hot and calm. Waves like little feet on the sand. The sun on rotting weed . . . ”
“Mmm.”
“I can smell it now. Sulphur, salt.”
“Uh-huh.”
They’d left the village before dawn and were through the vines before the first birds began to sing. The blue sky mixed up with black and white clouds. The morning chill lifted as they moved north, Danny on Solomon, Abi on Red, two packhorses and the rest in a string behind them. Slow, rhythmic hooves on the packed ground.
They slept at his cabin, squalls passing overhead. They watched sheets of rain to the north and south and the room crackled with electricity.
Abi wanted to tell him he was one of three, but was afraid to say the words. She said she didn’t want him to die.
“I know,” he said.
“And I love this.”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s room to breathe.”
“Why does no one live here?”
“The Indians do.” He waved his arm toward the reserve, the smoke from a few fires hanging above the community.
“Because we put them there,” she said.
“Yeah. This is a poor land. Farming didn’t work out. Those who tried vanished in famine and locusts.”
“Before I was born.”
“Before I was born,” he said. “Are you getting what you want, Abigail?”
“Yeah. This is pretty good.”
They stayed at the cabin all next day while rain poured from the sky. Toward sunset the clouds peeled away from the west horizon and sun shot through the plain.
“Do you want to go home?”
“Maybe.”
“Last chance.”
“I’m scared.”
“We’ll go back in the morning then.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Keep going.”
“You ready for the tent?”
“I’m not ready for anything,” Abi said. “But I’ve got you to help me.”
“Good.”
Up at dawn, Danny had the horses organized by the time Abi was awake. They cooked and ate oatmeal without speaking. They mounted and left. They rode through rain and sunshine and had the tent up by noon, both quiet and exhausted.
A long night of rustlings and coyotes circling, calling, rain on the tent roof. Fear of miscarriage. Fear of death. Intercostal muscle or heart attack; indigestion or miscarriage.
Abi watched him climb into the saddle. It looked painful.
He turned. “I see you’re up, Ms Slip-Slop.”
“I feel like I’m in a dream.”
“You’re still going to have a baby.”
“Anyway.” She got to her knees looked up into his eyes. “How far to the pass?”
“Depends.” He glanced round, then said, “Should we expect your dad with a shotgun?”
“It’s not yours.”
“I dreamed he was after us.”
“This is nothing like what I thought it would be. I’m looking at you and thinking that you’re just a boy.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“No. Anyway, it’s not yours.”
“I can talk to you. No one has ever listened to me the way you do.”
“Not mine, then — ”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t understand why you should be in my life now I am old and sick and–”
“Why do you need to understand?”
“I don’t need to, but don’t you want me to?”
“We a
re doing it. Running away. We’re going.”
“Yeah. It’s a foolhardy idea.”
“It’s what you want, right? What both of us want. You always said that.”
“Sure.”
“The horses love it.”
“Except they won’t survive without us.”
“How d’you know?”
“They’re no longer wild.”
“But you did that. You brought the ponies back. They can go wild again. If they can survive, we can.”
“Ah, Abi. I don’t know if we can survive.”
“How d’you know what will happen? You don’t know.”
“I can’t get away from my illness and you can’t escape your baby.”
“So we don’t make it. We’re doing something. Nothing’s perfect anyway.”
He smiled. “I will die out there and your baby will come.”
“You’ll deliver my baby and I will die and you’ll have a baby to look after.”
“You will have twins and we’ll both die.”
“Oh my God. Twins?”
“Yes.”
“The ponies are going home.”
“True.”
“And we brought a lot of food.”
“True.”
“Is there really a valley full of animals?”
“Yeah.”
“We can drink from ponds and streams.”
“Yep.”
“We’ll find out about ourselves.”
“Everything perfect.”
25.
The sun came up over Double Mountain, the volcano, the peaks pink, the other mountains to the west starting to glow. Danny and Abi rolling up their sleeping bags, packing their tents, loading the horses, were asking for something new, their tasks prayers, and there in the morning was a scarf of pure light and all else grey and pewter. Dark going away. Light forming above the plain. Over the invisible cities, the sea and islands. A smell of green in the unsullied alpine air and the sun a molten ball.
Then they were in the foothills and saw signs of wild ponies, folded grass in moist hollows where they had lain the night before. Many birds sang and flocks were rowing overhead, tier after tier, going the way they were going.
They rested at noon, continued in a leisurely way into evening. They walked in sleepy silence, then camped while there was still light enough to explore where they were.
Mornings were for speaking. Mornings were slow walking conversation. The packhorse Concordance clanged with pots and pans. Abi’s thighs ached.
“Will we get to the pass today?”
“No, not today, Abi.”
“You know what to do, right?”
“I know what to do, sure. I’ve delivered foals. I know how to do this.”
“Okay.”
“Do you regret what we’re doing?”
“No.”
“There is something I must tell you.”
“Sounds like I may not want to hear.”
“I sold my land. The money is all for you. The money’s back there waiting.”
“We are not going back.”
“That’s fine, but that’s only one story. Another sees you living with twins near the sea.”
“Not likely.”
“There.” He pointed north at the dark slash. “That’s our lives just ahead.”
Once he could taste the mountains, Danny stopped worrying about the journey and what they had agreed to do. The idea to let anything happen, as long as they had food and shelter, seemed accountable, a number. They were together and alive and he felt his health returning, and they often walked side by side, resting the horses, as they travelled toward the pass and the valley beyond.
Abi felt herself getting lighter, her limbs flying away, as the baby grew heavier, but somehow her feet kept hitting the ground and sending her forward and the man at her side was a friend and the horses were like a continuous wall, steady and faithful. If only it could be like this, a long walk that ended in sleep that led to another walk toward those mountains. This wasn’t what James had chosen or what the village had chosen. Why should she want a complicated future? A voice kept asking: So, sexy, what have you done now? and then silence, hers and his. This morning she’d felt invisible. Sunlight had shone through the blue tent walls. Crows shrieking. His eyes hooked into hers, looked away, and all was joy.
Her baby would die and she would die, one after the other. Why must the order be discovered? She was not ready. She was ready. How can three into one equal one? Easy. The day slowly drained of light. She sank into the earth, sifting through castle, childhood, dragon, to lie on the floor of her bedroom while her dad and mom and her sisters came and went, still with no idea of what was about to happen.
It started to rain. A steady drilling downpour. Everything that frightened her was hissing beside them noisy as a rebel army. Soon the earth was a skin of thick purling water built of knife-sharp, uncombinable standing oblongs. No one back in the village had a clue. They were all talk. They knew nothing. And Abi and Danny rushed on in silence, the glassy oblongs writhing up against their dirty boots as they went on, the horses quietly following. Oh, the rebels have us by the throats. At every rise there was a pause. Abi gasped, and the oblongs squeaked.
Such beauty in the early sky after a night in the open, smoke plumes on the south horizon, rising to the cloud gap and that belt of warm blue light.
26.
The end is not the beginning even though that’s what it seems. We modify one another beyond imagination. Change is imperceptible. Glass is smudged with breath, rain, then broken. This generation remembers the last, but all else is hearsay and wish. What’s useless enough to escape notice is born in its own time. What we do without children is artifice; what we do without art is natural. That time won’t bend around me indefinitely, that the civilizing cocoon will not last till morning, that meaning will only help me through daylight hours and when night comes will swallow its objects — means I can’t sleep. Sleep dances on ahead while the choir chants every failure. My handwriting is harder and harder to read. I invented evolution and now I set stones in the morning dark. Look: Abi and Danny riding off with a string of horses. Listen: a solo frog, wind in grass, a paw on gravel. Listen: nothing.
We are becoming non-human, or non-local, or non-viable, I don’t know. And yet.
A misty April morning, branches of new leaves, sky a watery blue, and yet. We can’t relinquish the hope of comfort even though storm clouds fester to the west.
One by the river, two by the river.
Which one is kind, which is mean?
One boiling tea, one weaving baskets.
The tent, marginal home, is where the ethnologist unzipped Abi’s cut-offs. (I still don’t know about James and Danny.) The tent is where she will open her legs for Danny to help her help her baby into the world before the quarry machines engage their gears and dig conglomerate for the next century.
At the beginning of time, at the beginning of our time, just after the first summer, after holidaying in the mountains, valley to valley, picking berries and drinking from wild streams, following our noses, wind filled the trees overnight, replacing leaves with ice, and we took a path by a torrent and found a river and a dry meadow, a coulee of scrub teeming with antelope, and set to work.
There are those who never leave the village, who still linger at the edge of their yards at the end of the growing season to smoke and chatter, family to family, as cool wind blows through leafless orchards and snow begins to drift across the plain from the high peaks. For them the ebb and flow is an ordinary thing — some epochs are restless — and welcomes and questions across the fence are easy. What of the family? How is your father? How are your cousins? The to-and-fro paths worn smooth by grandfathers will soon nurse scrub and poplar. Adventure is an interruption of habit, and those who stay expect news from those returning. But they only tell what we can’t hear — and to kill time we tame the old epics.
The oral world has faded to a whisper, and wri
tten records fall short, end beyond the image after next, just shy of the new word, the new commerce.
Yet something calls the way it has always called and this will shape Abi’s response to Danny.
We all shrank like this once, after a deep sleep, before light, and called to tomorrow while a tiger roamed close. I caught the habit early and whenever I felt its breath on my neck I took up a pen. In that night-land ghosts and the unborn were indistinguishable from one another.
Now we relinquish time and easy meaning.
27.
They were drawn into the pass at dawn by the almost unwitnessed moment.
She sat staring out, her back against an outcrop. The moon was setting over the hills. Danny had had to carry her. He said she was dilated, the child was knocking her out of her orbit. He pulled down branches and built a fire. He put up the tent, found a mat and a soft blanket and opened a case of tools. He organized and supervised her limbs. He taught her to breathe. He boiled water.
The baby smuggled herself through the crush and slipped out of Abi’s womb and the trance was broken. This baby was vigorously curious. After a few moments her fierce look was replaced by a smile.
They heard hawks calling outside.
“I have never seen such perfection,” said Danny. “Look. She is already lost in brief things.”
On the other side of the pass, they came upon a goat, tall and woolly but terribly thin, wobbling in the scree. As they watched, sitting their sweating horses, Abi side-saddle, the goat bleated at them and turned to scramble away. Its middle, under the wool, was barely a thread, and the effort broke the thread and the creature was in two parts, dead on the ground.
Abi held her baby close and they left the bloodless parts and began their descent through stunted evergreens into a folded land, and were soon in a large valley with divergent paths and tricky streams, scattering herds of healthy goats.
At times they lost each other — the moment the goat died went on in their minds — each trying to hear the other off to the east or west. The ground grew boggy.
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