After the Flood

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After the Flood Page 6

by Kassandra Montag


  But other times, when everything was so dark out on the sea that I felt already erased, it seemed like a kindness that life before the floods had gone on for as long as it did. Like a miracle without a name.

  By the third day Pearl pulled Daniel into her games: hopscotch on deck with a piece of charcoal, naming games for each cloud or strange wave. The next day it rained for most of the afternoon and we sat under the deck cover, telling each other stories. Pearl got Daniel to tell her stories about places he’d been that we’d never heard of. I didn’t know whether any of his stories were true, they seemed so tall, and Pearl never asked if they were true or not.

  One morning while I was caulking a crack in the gunnel with hemp, Daniel and Pearl played shuffleboard with caps from plastic bottles. They’d drawn squares on the deck with charcoal and took turns knocking their caps into the squares with sticks.

  “Why do you like snakes so much?” he asked Pearl.

  “They can eat things bigger than them,” Pearl said.

  Daniel’s cap skidded outside the square and Pearl cackled with laughter.

  “I’d like to see you do better,” Daniel said.

  “You will,” Pearl said, biting her lower lip as she concentrated.

  Pearl knocked her cap into the square and cheered, hands raised in the air, jumping in a little circle.

  Watching them gave me an unexpected good feeling, a warmth spreading slowly through me. It was like I was seeing a puzzle put back together after it had broken apart.

  “Where will you go once we’re in Harjo?” I asked Daniel.

  He shrugged. “Maybe stay in Harjo, work for a bit.”

  We needed a navigator, I kept thinking. Ever since I’d found out he could navigate I considered asking him to stay with us, to help us get to the Valley. I felt like I could trust him—or was it just that I wanted to trust him because I needed him? Daniel was clearly hiding something. I could tell by the way his expression changed when I asked him questions, like a curtain falling over his face, shutting me out.

  Pearl and I had never sailed with anyone else, and I liked being alone. Alone was simple and familiar. I felt sore from this division, one part of me wanting him to stay with us and the other part wanting to part ways with him.

  The next morning, Harjo loomed in the distance, the sharp mountain peaks piercing the clouds. Sapling pines and shrubs grew near the water and tents and shacks climbed up the mountainside.

  Daniel packed up his navigating instruments, hunched under the deck cover, his compass, plotter, divider, and charts spread out in front of him. I turned from Harjo and as I watched him put each instrument carefully in his bag, my chest grew constricted. Do you actually want to reach Row in time? I asked myself. Even if he taught me to navigate, I couldn’t afford to buy the instruments I needed.

  Only a few hours later we reached the coast. Seagulls fed on half-rotted fish on the shore. Pearl ran out among the seagulls, squawking and flapping her arms like wings. They rose up around her like a white cloud and she spun, her feet kicking up sand, the red handkerchief waving out of her pocket. I thought of Row watching the cranes, thought of my father’s feet hanging suspended. I couldn’t just do what I wanted anymore. I turned to Daniel, my chest tight.

  “Will you stay with us?” I asked Daniel.

  Daniel paused from stacking the tripod wood against the gunwale and looked at me.

  “We’re going to a place called the Valley,” I rushed on. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, a new community.” Inwardly, I winced at the lie. I hoped he didn’t already know the Valley was a Lost Abbot colony.

  His face softened. “I can’t,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. I don’t travel with other people anymore.”

  I tried to hide my disappointment. “Why is that?”

  Daniel shook his head and thumbed a piece of charred wood in front of him, the ash snowing on the deck. “It’s complicated.”

  “Could you just think about it?”

  He shook his head again. “Look, I’m grateful for what you did, but . . . trust me. You don’t want me with you much longer.”

  I turned from him and began loading the smoked mackerel into a bucket.

  “I’m going to trade this at the post. We can meet after if you want your share,” I said, my last attempt to be appealing, hoping he’d reconsider.

  “That mackerel is all yours. I owe you much more than that,” he said.

  Damn right, I thought.

  “I’ll carry it to the post for you and be on my way,” he said.

  I called to Pearl to follow us into town. We climbed rock steps leading up the mountain slope to where the town lay, wedged between a cluster of mountains.

  Harjo hummed with motion and voices. A small river cut down a mountain and fell in a waterfall into the sea. Twice as many buildings had been built in the year since I’d been this far south, with a flour mill half constructed up one side of a mountain and a new log cabin next to it with the word hotel in bold letters across the façade. Last year, the town was just beginning to farm basic crops like corn, potatoes, and wheat, and I hoped there’d be grain for a decent price at the trading post.

  The trading post was a stone building with two floors. We stood outside of it and Daniel handed me the bucket of mackerel.

  “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “First? The saloon. Have a drink. Ask the locals about work.” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “I know I owe you my life. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”

  “You could,” I said. “You won’t.”

  Daniel gave me a look I couldn’t read—one that seemed both regretful and admonishing. He bent down in front of Pearl and tugged on the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket of her pants.

  “Don’t you lose that lucky handkerchief,” he said.

  She slapped his hand. “Don’t you steal it!” she said playfully.

  His face flinched almost imperceptibly, a slight tightening of the muscles.

  “You take care,” he said softly.

  Several people exited the post and I stepped out of their way.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  Daniel nodded and turned away.

  He was a stranger. I didn’t know why I felt a twinge of grief while I watched him walk away.

  The credit I had in Harjo would buy me less than I thought. I stood at the counter, biting back irritation, shifting my weight from one leg to another.

  A middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles and a pair of eyeglasses with only one lens hobbled around the counter to look into my bucket.

  “Last time I was here I was told my credit was equal to about two trees,” I told her.

  “Costs have changed, my dear. Fish has gone down, wood has gone up.”

  She pointed to a chart on a wall which detailed equations: twenty yards of linen equaled two pounds of grain. It ran down to things as small as buttons and big as ships. She clucked her tongue when she saw the mackerel. “Oh, lovely. You must be an excellent fisher. Not easy to catch this much mackerel ’round these parts. And you were the one last year with the sailfish, right?”

  “I want to talk to you about wood—”

  “You don’t want to buy or build here, dear. We’re growing by leaps and bounds. The mayor just put a limit on cutting lumber. We hardly have any saplings and there haven’t been any shipments in three weeks. I’d go farther south if I were you.”

  My stomach dropped. How much time was it going to take to find wood, much less build a boat? Would Row still be in the Valley by then?

  “Do you have a salvage yard?”

  “Small one, up past Clarence’s Rookery. Where you sailing, if you don’t mind me asking?” The woman began weighing the mackerel and tossing it in a bin beside the scale, the meat landing with a thud.

  “Up north. What was Greenland.” I glanced around the shop and saw Pearl looking at an advertisement pinned to the wall by the front door.

  The woman clicked her tongue again. “You won’t get up the
re in a salvage boat. Sea’s too rough. If you ask me, stick around here. Richards told me they found a half-sunk oil tanker off the coast down south a few miles. Going to try and excavate it and renovate it. You know that’s what I’d love—a nice spacious tanker to spend my last days on.”

  I used my credit on linen for a new sail. The woman and I negotiated back and forth over the mackerel, finally settling on trading it for an eight-foot rope, a chicken, two bags of flour, and three jars of sauerkraut and a few Harjo coins. Pearl and I had tried to avoid scurvy by trading fish for fresh fruit in the south, but sometimes a whole bucket of fish would only get us three oranges. Sauerkraut lasted longer and was much cheaper, but you had to find a place where cabbage grew to get it.

  I handed Pearl the box of sauerkraut to carry and she said, “You got it.”

  “My one bright spot,” I muttered. The little bell attached to the door rang as another customer stepped inside. I smelled stone fruit and my mouth began to water and I turned around to see a man carrying a box of peaches to the counter. The scent clouded my mind with longing.

  “We need to tell Daniel about the advertiser.”

  I glanced down at her in surprise. I’d been trying to teach her to read in the evenings with the two books we owned—an instruction manual for hair dryers and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth—but didn’t know if my lessons had really stuck.

  The advertisement asked for a surveyor, displaying pictures of a compass, divider, and plotter, with the words earn money, quick!

  “You read that?” I asked.

  She glared at me. “Of course. Where’s the saloon?”

  “It’s pretty far. Besides, I’m sure he’ll run across the advertisement on his own.”

  “You’re only pretending like you don’t want to see him again, too!” Pearl said. She jiggled the box, the jars clinking against one another.

  I smiled despite my disappointment. She always could disarm me. I never could read her half as well as she read me.

  Chapter 9

  The saloon was a run-down shack with metal siding and a grass roof. Light filtered through dirty windows made of plastic tarp. In the dark, voices were disembodied, lifting and mixing in the shadows and the rank smell of dirt and sweat.

  Upturned buckets and stools and wood crates served as chairs around makeshift tables. A cat lay on the bar, licking its black tail while the bartender dried canning jars with an old pillowcase.

  Daniel sat at a table with a younger man who had the look of a runaway teen; disheveled, jaunty, like he could make use of anything and leave anywhere at a minute’s notice. Daniel leaned forward to hear what the younger man was saying, his brow deeply furrowed and his fists clenched on the table. His face was turned toward the door, as if trying to block the commotion of the bar from his view.

  Pearl and I were in his eyesight, but he didn’t notice us. Pearl tried to step toward him but I caught her shoulder.

  “Wait,” I said. I ordered moonshine at the bar and the bartender placed a teacup of amber liquid in front of me. I pushed a Harjo coin, a penny with an H melted into the copper, across the bar.

  When the younger man stopped talking, Daniel leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows low and heavy over his eyes, his mouth a tight line. The younger man got up to leave and I thought about slipping out after him. I had wanted to see Daniel, to convince him to help us, but we didn’t need to get involved in whatever he was part of.

  Pearl leapt toward Daniel before I could catch her. He jumped when he saw her and he forced a smile and tried to level his face into a friendly expression.

  “The advertisement even had a picture of your tools,” Pearl was saying, moving her hands in excited circles as she told him.

  Daniel smiled at her, that same sad smile he often wore around Pearl.

  “I appreciate you coming to tell me,” he said.

  Daniel wouldn’t look me in the eye, and I felt tension coming off his body like steady heat.

  “Maybe we should go, Pearl,” I said, setting my hands on her shoulders.

  An old man from the table next to Daniel’s tottered toward us and laid a gnarled hand on my arm. He smiled widely, showing a mouth with few teeth. He pointed in my face.

  “I see things for you,” he said, his voice coming out wheezy, stinking of alcohol and decay.

  “Town prophet,” Daniel said, nodding to the old man. “He already told me my future.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “That I’d cheat death twice and then drown.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “You,” the old man pointed in my face again. “A seabird will land on your boat and lay an egg that will hatch a snake.”

  I glanced at the old man. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” the old man said, leaning forward, “what it means.”

  I felt a blankness in my head, like my thoughts had nothing to connect to. A white fear rippled through me. Why did the prophet talk about snakes and birds? I shook myself inwardly. Snakes and birds were some of the only animals not extinct. He probably brought them up in everyone’s fortunes. But Row and Pearl’s faces rose up in my mind, their lives like tenuous things that could drift away.

  “Myra,” Daniel said. He touched my arm and I startled, stepping away from him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know.” I glanced around the dark saloon, the silhouette of heads bent over drinks, bodies slumped toward tables in fatigue. “We should go.”

  “Wait—can—can I stay one last night on your boat?” Daniel asked.

  I glared at him. “So you don’t have to pay for the hotel?”

  He tilted his head. “I’ll help you fish in the morning.”

  “I can fish on my own.”

  “Mom, stop. You can stay, Daniel,” Pearl said. I glanced at Pearl and she raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “Just an old friend,” Daniel said. “I’m only asking for one more night. I like being around you two.”

  He ruffled Pearl’s hair and she giggled. I regarded him coolly, arms crossed over my chest, wishing I could read his face the way I could read the water.

  “But you’re still not coming with us?” I asked.

  A pained expression crossed his face. “I shouldn’t.”

  He looked down at his hands on the table and I could feel him resisting us. As though there were two magnets in him—one pulling him away and another pulling him closer.

  Before settling on our boat for the night we searched the coast for firewood. The rule in most villages was anything small or damaged, like driftwood, could be claimed by anyone. Anything larger was considered property of the village and needed to be bought. If you were caught taking good wood that could be used for building you could be thrown in prison or even hanged.

  The three of us drifted apart across the beach, scanning the sand for driftwood or kindling. I picked up a piece of dirty cloth and pulled up a clump of dried grass and stuffed them in my pockets. Daniel walked toward me, carrying a few sticks and an old paper bag.

  “I was thinking, you might want to reconsider your trip,” he said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Atlantic crossings are rough. Your boat is suited to the Pacific coast. It’ll be expensive to build another one.” Daniel kicked sand off a rock. “News in the saloon earlier was about how the Lily Black has a new captain, who is using biological warfare now. Rabid dogs, smallpox blankets. They start an epidemic, cut a population in half, and then take it over and make it a colony. They’re looking at northern villages.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I muttered and bent to pick up a discarded shoe. I took the shoelace out, stuffed it in my pocket, and tossed the shoe aside.

  “I know this Valley place sounds nice, but . . . is it worth the risk?” Daniel asked.

  I looked at him. When he met my eyes I saw he knew I had another reason for going. His question se
t me on edge. I realized I couldn’t see Pearl anywhere on the beach. “Where’s Pearl?”

  Daniel turned and looked over his shoulder. “I thought she was just over thataways.”

  I scanned the beach. No sign of anyone, except a couple of people farther down the beach, behind a cluster of rocks. Pins and needles spread down my spine. I had heard of children just disappearing. Parents turning around and them being gone. Kidnapping was a new form of pickpocketing, and seemingly, for those good at it, just as easy.

  “Pearl!” I called, trying to stay calm.

  “Maybe she went back to the boat?” Daniel asked, in a carefree tone that enraged me.

  “Of course she didn’t,” I said, glaring at him. “Pearl!” I screamed.

  “Calm down—”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shouted at Daniel. “What do you know about losing a child?”

  I took off running, calling Pearl’s name, sand flying off my heels. To my left the mountain rose in a steep rock face and to my right the ocean stretched past the horizon. I leapt over a pile of seaweed and kept running and calling for her. It was eerily quiet on the beach, everything gone still. Even a small boat a mile from the coast seemed anchored, stuck in place as though painted into the landscape.

  I stopped running and quickly turned in a circle. There was nowhere she could have gone; it felt like she’d been lifted up into the sky. Panic rose up in my chest. I could hear Daniel’s footsteps behind me, and farther behind him the cries of seagulls.

  Pearl crawled out from a crevice in the mountain, a crack at the base only three feet wide, and she held a bundle of driftwood.

  “All the wood is in the cave,” she called out to us.

  I inhaled sharply. Her small body silhouetted by the darkness behind her, both familiar and strange, someone made from me and separate from me.

 

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