“Yes, it was kind of a shock to me for a minute.”
“Thought he was dead or gone for good.”
“Did you want him to be?” Gemma asked between cracking the eggs.
“You know better than that. I guess I’m just asking if I should be worried. I know what you two were to each other. At least, I know what you’ve told me.”
“I buried Sam a long time ago.”
“Doesn’t mean you won’t have feelings when he pops back up.”
“Nothing is sure or permanent in the kind of lives we lead, I suppose.”
“Meaning us?”
Gemma placed her hands on the counter to steady them before she turned to face her husband. “Meaning him, Kyle. It was strange for me to see him today. He’s different. I’m different. Our entire lives are different.”
Kyle stepped toward her but stopped just shy of touching her. “Are you happy? Happier than you would have been with him?”
“How do I explain this? The life he had planned for us was never going to happen. It was a dream. Sam was always idealistic. He always put me up on this pedestal, wanted to worship me. I don’t think I was ever a real person to him. It was always about what I could have been.”
“Unlike me, is that it?”
“I think you and I recognize the humanness in each other.”
“Is that a disappointment to you?”
“On the contrary, it’s a relief.” Gemma reached for Kyle’s hand, wanting to reassure him and herself.
The door of the kitchen from the back of the house burst open, and four townspeople stumbled in, one being carried between the other three. All were talking at once, so it took a moment to make sense of what was happening. Gemma gripped the counter behind her with one hand and reached for a knife with the other while her mind quickly ascertained whether the people in her kitchen were a threat or not. Kyle immediately ran to them to aid in carrying the one injured.
“Here, bring him to the table,” Kyle commanded. “Gemma, hurry and clear it off. We’ll need bandages, cold water and hot. The fire’s already going outside. You there, Stanley, run out and set some water to boil.”
Gemma calmed her breathing and followed Kyle’s efficient orders. As her fear departed, she recognized her neighbors Stanley, Ruth, Jerry, and the injured man, Ruth’s husband, Jordan. “Ruth, what happened?” she queried as they cleared the table, laying him gently on an old cloth.
“Bullet or saber?” Kyle was more concerned with relevant information.
“Saber,” Ruth’s brother Jerry offered.
“We weren’t doing anything,” Ruth cried. “He’d just gotten home after the lunch bell. We were just settin’ down to eat when they burst in the door. No knockin’. No warnin’. Say they had proof my man was inciting a revolution. He’s to be arrested. Course he ain’t done nothin’, Gemma, I swear. You gotta believe me. We don’t get involved in none of that.”
Kyle had ripped Jordan’s shirt and was trying to determine the damage to the man’s torso. The cut looked clean enough, and seemed to have missed the vital organs. Blood loss was the concern. “Focus, Ruth! Tear some of those bandages or we’re going to lose him. How did the wound happen?”
“Well, all Jordan did was stand to tell the soldiers they had the wrong man. Before I knew it, one of them knocked him across the face at the same time another one had pulled out his sword. Jordan fell across it before he hit the floor. Then Stanley and Jerry heard me scream and came runnin’ in from the field. I guess the Corsairs thought they’d killed him so arrestin’ him was no use. And they left.”
Jordan lay unconscious on the table from both the blood loss and the blow to the head. So he would feel none of the stitching which was to come.
“Jerry, help me hold him down in case he wakes up. These deep stitches will hurt him,” Kyle spoke firmly but quietly.
“I suppose they’re more stupid than we thought. That’s in our favor, I guess,” Gemma mused.
“Really, Gemma?” Kyle never liked to hear the Corsairs run down, even if he wasn’t one of them anymore. “Maybe they did exactly what they’d planned. Ruth, why would they think Jordan was a revolutionary?” Kyle continued to work over her husband. “Stanley, bring in the hot water!”
“I don’t have any idea. He works at their stables and in our own fields. That’s it. He ain’t got time for nothin’ else. They seem to be makin’ a lot more phony arrests these days, if you ask me.”
“Why would that be?” Jerry asked.
“We don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Let’s try to keep ourselves calm now and focus on getting Jordan back to health, eh?” Kyle gave his final word on the matter.
Gemma put her arm around Ruth. “He’s right, honey. Let’s just try to stay calm and help Jordan. Come on outside now and let Kyle finish up with him. You don’t want to see all this.”
* * * * *
Sophie’s village of Boswell was always a coastal town even before the coast moved inland. But it was a tiny town when fully inhabited. Now the village consisted of those few families who had stumbled upon it near the end of the Second Revolution, after the raids had forced thousands from their homes. Swaths of land miles wide, burned off the earth, paths of ash led the refugees to the sea. The days of home recovery returned when the citizens roamed from village to village, looking for habitable dwellings. Here Sophie’s flight ended. Here her body landed while her heart remained with her Romany parents and sister buried in the ash. She never thought she’d suffer such a loss again as the death of her birth parents. She now sometimes found herself wondering which of her many losses was worse.
Her home was an old farmhouse, the fields now fallow and overgrown, falling off into the encroaching ocean. She would sit on the porch with the drowning sound of waves in her ears, pushing out all thought save the in and out of each wave, like the earth taking a breath, in and out, in and out. She reminded herself that this was all she had to do as well. Just breathe. In and out. The pain of those days was now anesthetized by the passage of time—more than a decade.
As Sophie walked into town with Bridget for the required town meeting, she noticed more signs painted across the town buildings than had been there even a week before. One on the side of the blacksmith’s shop was painted right on the baked brick. The words Stay the course with the Corsairs were painted in bold white letters across the puffed-out blue chest of a soldier, a smile painted on his face but unable to reach his eyes.
Holding Bridget’s tiny hand, standing in the courtyard of the village with the rest of her friends and neighbors, she listened to the troop captain drone on in an endless stream of admonitions, reading from the prepared speech from the country’s governing body, the Triumvirate. “Citizens are reminded that all public meetings are prohibited, except those called by the Triumvirate. All are urged to make accommodations for the new ration portion sizes. Each citizen will receive one quarter portion less per day, effective immediately.” As the captain spoke, the other Corsairs walked through the crowd to ensure a peaceful response, which was no response at all. “And as always,” he concluded, “we must remember to stay the course.”
“Stay the course,” came the monotone expected response from the crowd in unison. One or two people were quietly pulled out of the group for failing to parrot the response. It jarred Sophie’s ears to hear her tiny daughter repeat the same words as the rest of the crowd without thinking about it. The child knew nothing of what it meant but had learned from her mother to do what was expected and not to draw attention to herself. Sophie recognized this as a sifting process, the soldiers shaking up the crowd to see who would and would not comply with orders and expectations, regardless of the stimulus. It seemed to be happening more frequently than in past years. With more soldiers came more speeches, more sifting, and more arrests. No doubt it was why Foxglove would soon be giving her a new mission.
* * * * *
Walking back from Gemma’s house, Sam’s head felt hot. He saw pieces of his lif
e with Gemma passing before his eyes as surely as the leaves passed before his feet, and he wondered if he was dying. She was his compass, his navigation leading to the only place he’d ever wanted to be. He had never imagined a life without Gemma in it. He’d never had to. Yet here it was, staring him in the face, and he felt suddenly unmoored.
He had worked for her, yet not with her, for seven years. Even still, she was his every thought. He knew that was where the real battle would play out—in his mind. He began to wonder how it would be possible to extract a thought, a hundred thoughts, a thousand thoughts from the stage of his mind, a place, he was discovering, where he wasn’t truly master. Eyes on the ground, shuffling back toward his old home, Sam made the startling discovery that he was gone. All the things which had made him Sam had been erased. There were no traces of memory. All of his thoughts were in his lost letters to Gemma. No bits of photos, journals, or even a line of the life he had lived. It was not as if he had died, but as if he had never existed. And into the exquisiteness of the void, he fell, not knowing where he would land or into what world this non-existence would take hold.
Walking back through the door to Zacharias’ house, Sam thought he was moving more slowly than usual; everything seemed to have slowed. Zacharias sat in the rocker, gray as his hair, with Ethan at his feet, reading to him from the aged copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he’d kept hidden from the book burners years before.
“‘You have plenty of courage I’m sure,’ answered Oz. ‘All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.’”
Sam found himself being drawn into the story for a moment, remembering how much he and Gemma had longed to travel to a place like Oz together, how they had gloried in the different creatures, shivered at the thought of the Wicked Witch catching them, and joined with Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion to defeat her. His tears felt hot on his cheeks after the walk in the cold autumn air.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sam’s question interrupted the reading.
Zacharias looked at his son with pain in his eyes. He had known Sam would be hurt this day but knew there was nothing for it but to let things run their natural course. He placed the book on the floor beside him. “Ethan, boy, why don’t you run out back and see if you can find any munchkins lurking in the yard.”
“There’s no such thing.” Ethan still took everything literally and had not yet learned how to use his imagination. The need for survival left no time for play.
“Are you sure?” Zacharias grinned at him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a munchkin or two in the grove. This is just the right time to find them. Run along now. I’ll call you in a little while.”
Sam waited for the boy to leave before throwing his barb, “You lead him around with fairy stories just like you did with me, letting me believe I’d find my happily ever after today. Why in the world would you let me walk into that unprepared?”
“You weren’t really listening to me earlier.”
“I mean before. You could have written me. All these years, not a word from either of you.”
“You know the mail is unpredictable. We did write. Both of us, for years. And we heard nothing from you.”
“The Watch could have found me. There are ways to get messages through when it’s important.”
“They can’t use their limited resources for personal messages, you know that.”
“Seven years, Zacharias! Seven years I worked for her, only for her. And now this betrayal. And with Kyle! I can’t get those years back.” Sam was pacing, unable to contain his anger or his energy as his emotions overtook him.
“None of us can get the past back.” Zacharias remained calm. “We can only continue to move forward.”
“You can’t know what it’s like to have survived what we survived together. To have no one but each other to depend on for safety, comfort, and your very life.”
Zacharias took a moment to heave himself out of the rocker, a harder task in the biting chill. He brought the book back to its hiding place, giving him time to consider before speaking. “No, I didn’t survive in the woods with my Jesse as you two did. But I know what it is to put your life in someone else’s hands. I know what it is to lose the witness to your life. You know I understand that, son. Take time to mourn her, to feel your pain. But then you must move on. If nothing else, for this boy.”
“With life as uncertain as it is, how can I possibly take care of him?”
“Precisely because life is so uncertain. I asked those same questions once.”
“It’s all just too much to take in. She hardly spoke to me. I need more answers than the few she gave me.”
“Remember when I taught you to read from song lyrics in old CDs we found? You always wanted more. You didn’t want to read between the lines, to fill in the blanks with your own meaning. You wanted more words, more explanation. You are the same now.”
Sam was wandering around the room aimlessly as they’d been talking. He stopped to look out the window, musing almost to himself, “Have you ever really looked at the last leaves of autumn? They’re always brightest just before they fall, a last dance of color, making you think the glory will last forever until nothing is left but the crunch of death under your feet.” He breathed deeply, wiping the tears from his eyes.
“You never really knew her, Sam. You created her in your mind. You loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
“Don’t throw Dickens in my face!” Sam snapped but felt the pain and the truth of those words. “Z, what’s going on around here? Ge—” he couldn’t bring himself to say the name that had played on his lips and in his mind for as long as he could remember. “She was so thin.”
“They’ve lessened the rations, among other things. I want to show you something.” He walked to the hidden door beneath the stairs. Within that closet, there was another hidden door to a cabinet deeper underneath the stairs. On the outside of it were hooks and coats. No one who didn’t know the door was there would think to look twice at it. From behind the door, Zacharias pulled out a rifle, illegal for regular citizens to possess.
“What the hell are you doing with this? You could be arrested!” Sam looked over his shoulder instinctively, expecting someone to be spying, as they inevitably always were.
“Tell me what you notice about it.” Zacharias was perpetually teaching, could never just say something outright.
“It looks brand new. Not quite the same model as the ones they usually carry. What’s this here?” Sam ran his finger along an extra piece at the end of the barrel.
“That’s a silencer.”
“They’ve only had the guns as a show of force since the Second Revolution. We rarely even hear a gunshot anymore. Why would they even need silencers?”
“Maybe for precisely that reason.”
“How and where are they making new guns, anyway?”
“Now you’re asking the right questions.”
Sam handed the gun back to Zacharias as if it were a snake he couldn’t get far enough away from him. “I don’t want to get involved in this, Z. And I won’t have Ethan involved in the Watch activities. Why couldn’t we just accept the peace that was offered us?”
“A peace that isn’t really peace? They give us rules supposedly to stay safe, but safe from what and at what cost?”
“I can’t do this with you right now. I’m paying costs of my own for the crime of being too loyal. I have to take some time to adjust to the new way things are. I have to go away for a while, Z.”
“Are you sure that’s the best idea, son? It might be best to stay here and take care of this boy.”
“I can’t right now. I can’t take care of anyone. Can you please just look after him for a little while and let me heal in my own way? You know where I’ll be
if you need me.”
“You don’t mean that run-down cabin where I found you and Gemma freezing? It doesn’t even have a roof anymore.”
“I’ll fix it. Maybe it will give me something to do. I’ve gotten used to working with my hands. Things won’t seem so foreign to me. It’ll be fine. Look after the boy for me until I return.”
* * * * *
Ruth lay next to Jordan on the pallet Gemma had prepared in front of the dining room fireplace. She listened to his breathing and periodically checked his forehead for fever, waiting for any change in his condition. Kyle had said he would be fine with time, but she still feared for her husband’s life and contemplated the fragility of mortality, how it all could change or be lost in a matter of seconds.
Gemma and Kyle whispered together in the kitchen, trying not to disturb their unexpected guests but wanting to stay close to help if needed.
“I’ve received a message from the Cutler farm on the other side of the village. Mrs. Cutler is in labor. Her baby will come tonight,” Gemma began. “I’ve promised to go and help. So I probably won’t be back until at least morning.”
“Well, I can’t come with you, obviously.” Kyle looked toward his patient.
“It will be fine. I won’t be the only one there. She has her sister as well. We can handle things between us. But will you be alright here?”
“Should be. I can send for Jerry or Stanley again if necessary. We can’t use medicine from the Council of Doctors. The Corsairs wanted this man dead, and we’re aiding and abetting.”
“You don’t think they’ll come here, do you?”
“Don’t know why they should. They left him for dead.”
“Even still, you will be careful, won’t you?” Gemma’s eyes showed true concern for husband, stilling his earlier fears about her feelings for Sam.
He smiled, touching her cheek. “If you want me to.”
She leaned forward to kiss him quickly before going to pack up the things she would need.
A Light From the Ashes Page 5