A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

I take a deep breath of sun-warm air, turn my face up to the sky. I’m standing at the top of the Knob, the wind tugging at my berry-dyed wool skirt, while Shadow lies in the grass at my feet. I look out at scudding cumulus clouds that cast lavender shadows on the turquoise sea, and the blue of the sky is nearly the deep, transparent hue I remember from Before. The sun eases the pain out of my arthritic joints, and I bask in it like an old, gray tabby. In my youth I never cared whether the sun shone or not and even relished the recurrent rains of western Oregon, but now I dread the rain and cherish the sun.

  I stand on this dome of solid basalt veneered in earth and grass, but only a step away is a sheer drop of three hundred feet. I lean on my cane and look down at the ocean smashing at the rocks, while they dissolve each attacking surge into swirls of foam. The flowing locks of bull kelp sway back and forth with the progress of the battle, and the surf murmurs: I am here . . . I am always here. . . . That was the song the sea sang to me in my childhood, sings still, and the colors and patterns I see call to mind a painting that hangs in my room, one of Rachel’s encaustics. Yet I know the point of departure for that painting was a piece of jasper she found on the beach.

  And I think about the Chronicle, Rachel’s story.

  It must be written. And Stephen must take part in that. He must understand.

  I gaze down into the caldron of battle between sea and land, and I know my battles aren’t over—as I had once believed and hoped. Miriam made that acidly clear this morning. I must relive the old battles and gird my loins for a new one. My last, probably.

  I turn and face south where the beach stretches, smooth as suede, a mile and more past the vine-shrouded ruins of Shiloh Beach and on into blued distance. But my old eyes seek nearer distances. There, perhaps two thousand feet down the beach, my gaze moves landward, past the eroded slope of the bank, the dark glades of spruce above it, and I survey the domain that was so long mine alone and was always Rachel’s. Amarna, she called her fifteen-acre subsistence farm, and she named the two creeks bordering it Styx and Lethe.

  Rachel enjoyed her little ironies.

  The house is only twenty feet back from the bank. To the northeast, on the Styx, is the round, slab-sided water reservoir. East of the reservoir, the garden, with its high, sturdy deer fence, and farther east, the orchard. South of the orchard, the barn. The house is gray with weathered cedar shingles, and from this distance, the geometry of its hipped roofs is cleanly evident. It was built in a symmetrical U, the open side facing the sea. There was once a patio within the U, but Rachel had it roofed with angled glass panels and the open west end closed in with more glass to make a solar greenhouse.

  From this vantage point Amarna looks much as it did when I first saw it forty years ago. The most profound change, the conversion of the garage into a church, isn’t obvious from here. The only obvious change is the one that disrupted the geometric symmetry of the house: the addition that doubled the width of the north wing. Most of the new section is a storeroom, the remainder a room that Enid, Bernadette, and Grace share. That’s the wing Jerry plans to enlarge this summer. Miriam and Esther are complaining that the basement—the half of it they’ve converted into an apartment—is too crowded with the six children, which will be seven when Esther’s baby is born this summer. I’ve heard Miriam’s complaints, seen her cold looks at me. I occupy the larger of the two bedrooms in the south wing. Alone. Yet I’m not inclined to give it up. They’ll have it in due time.

  The orchard is in flamboyant bloom, but I can only see patches of pink and white through the jack pines that provide a windbreak at the old fence line. That fence once marked the north boundary of Rachel’s property, but after the End we appropriated the adjoining meadow where sheep, goats, cows, and horses graze now. There are six new lambs, and I smile as I watch them trying their spring-coiled legs. Only one calf this spring. The goats have done better: there are three kids. No colts yet, but Scheherazade is pregnant.

  Thirty feet below me on the steep slope of the Knob is a stonewalled structure ten feet wide and twelve feet long. The vault. The vault, the crypt—treasure or tomb. It is set back into the slope, the front wall facing southeast, and from this point I look down on the peaked roof and upper part of the back wall. The rest of the wall is buried in the hillside. I start down the slope, bracing myself with my cane at every step, while Shadow runs headlong through the grass. She pauses at the vault, as she knows I will. I make my way to the thick, cedar door, touch the brass hasp and stainless steel padlock. Both metals have suffered with the years. And I wonder if these stone walls, this hasp and lock, will be enough to safeguard—

  But such speculation is futile. The Chronicle and Stephen. I must focus my energies there. Is he old enough to understand? Perhaps I’m asking too much of a child.

  But he’s not a child. Again, I remind myself of that. He’s thirteen, and the exigencies of life in this new Stone Age preclude a protracted childhood. And he’ll understand. There are qualities in him that are in this place and time unique. I have no choice but to make Stephen heir to this legacy.

  As my apprentice.

  Yesterday was the sabbath, and we ended the day, as we do every sabbath, with the family meeting, the seven adults gathered around the long table in the dining room. Last night we discussed expanding the north pasture, adding a room to the new wing, whether the old buck goat should be slaughtered so that one of the younger bucks can take his place, and the advisability of planting com in the old quarry this year. Then I broached the subject of taking Stephen on as my apprentice. Jerry thought it odd, the idea of an apprentice at teaching. I pointed out that Enid has Little Mary as her apprentice at weaving, that Bernadette has Deborah as her apprentice at herbal medicine, that Jonathan is in fact Jerry’s apprentice. Jonathan is Jerry’s oldest son and will inevitably be his successor as Elder.

  It was a question of time, really. I asked for two hours every afternoon to spend with Stephen in private tutoring. That would be time taken away from his assigned tasks, and he needed the blessing of the family for that. At least Jerry’s blessing; this is not a democracy. He finally agreed that Stephen and I could have the time between the midday meal and the afternoon break every day—other than the sabbath, of course—and no one raised any objections. Except Miriam.

  Miriam in candlelight, golden light lambent in her hair, and I thought then that her color and the chiaroscuro light might inspire a Rembrandt, someone who would understand the shadows in her incandescence.

  She recognized in my modest request a larger plan, and what I read in her eyes was elemental and frightening: a righteous rage.

  Miriam, did you think it would be over when the old woman died?

  No doubt she hoped so.

  And so this morning she tried to put the fear of god into Stephen, to bring him—and perhaps the rest of the family—to heel.

  I continue down the slope, grateful when it gentles into the pasture, giving me nearly level ground to walk on. I pass the pond near the fence and remember its genesis. There was always a seeping spring here, a slough of dampness where skunk cabbage flourished. Jerry made a pond of it to provide water for the livestock by blasting out the earth. With dynamite. He brought it with him from the Ark, and I remember clearly that crashing fountain of dirt and sod. Jerry was inordinately proud of it. But the dynamite—and there are still fifteen sticks of it in the storeroom—made me uneasy. I knew all too well how such plowshares were beaten into swords.

  I turn my back on the pond, walk through the tangy new grass to the gate, remembering how little Jerry knows of swords.

  When I reach the house, I find Enid and Grace sitting on the deck off the living room in the north wing. Grace rises when I approach. “Sit down, Grace,” I tell her. “You needn’t leave just because I’ve arrived.”

  Grace is ten years younger than I, yet to me she seems older. Of course, we all seem older. I’m older than
my grandmother was at sixty-five; the medical and cosmetic miracles she took for granted died with the golden age. Grace hides her thin, gray hair under a white scarf tied at the back of her neck. There was a time when that scarf aligned her with community tradition. Now I suspect there’s a sad vanity in it. I once heard her say that in her youth her hair was like spun gold. But the gold is gone, and Grace is a lost soul who can never find her way home again because her true home is gone.

  And in her heart, I know, she blames me for that.

  Grace stays, although she remains standing, and we three old women chat about the weather and other safe subjects, then she says she must go help in the garden. The weeds are growing like—well, like weeds, and she laughs unconvincingly as she makes her retreat.

  I sit down in the cedar-slat chair next to Enid’s, and after a long silence she looses one of her expressive sighs. “I suppose Jeremiah’s right,” she says. “We should all just forget about it.”

  Enid tends to misplace antecedents, but I know exactly what she’s talking about. Enid is tall and ungainly, her brown hair shot with gray, her face too angular to be called anything but plain, yet her smile is magnificent, a revelation of gentle solicitude. But she’s not smiling today. The lines around her eyes and mouth seem deeper.

  “Enid, we can’t just forget about a boy being whipped.”

  She shakes her head, callused hands rubbing against each other dryly. “No, and I never wanted to see Stephen hurt, and yet . . .”

  “And yet you think he deserved it?”

  “Well, he did blaspheme. I guess he did. But it seems to me the Lord would forgive a boy. I mean, I’m sure he didn’t really know She can’t seem to bring that thought to a conclusion. I don’t pursue it. “By the way, where is Stephen?”

  “Well, I suppose he’s out in the garden. Such a lovely day, and high time we got the ground ready for the seedlings.” She rises, as if goaded by that reminder of her own duties.

  “And high time Stephen was here.” I try to keep the annoyance out of my voice, but her look of dismay tells me I’ve failed.

  “Oh, I’d forgotten. Stephen begins his special lessons today. I guess Miriam just . . .” Enid hesitates, then hurries toward the steps at the south end of the deck. “I’ll go find him and tell him you’re waiting.”

  “Thanks, Enid.” I push myself to my feet. “I have to get something from my room. Tell him I’ll meet him here.”

  When I return to the deck, Stephen still hasn’t appeared. I sit in one of the chairs while Shadow circles and settles at my feet. Two of the cats, Juliet and Emily, are sunning themselves on the deck railing. In the pocket of my skirt is a small magnifying glass, and I hold in my lap a black-bound, five-by-seven-inch sketchbook. It’s only one of eight that have been hidden for many years in the bottom drawer of the chest in my room. My souvenir drawer, I call it, where I’ve consigned memories I no longer wish to be reminded of.

  Rachel gave me the sketchbooks, and I filled them not with drawings, as she would have, but with words, with a sporadic, disorganized, occasionally agonized history of the last forty years of my life. They might as well have been written in blood.

  I’m not looking forward to unleashing the memories locked within these diaries, yet I need now to make sense of them, to find the meaning, the legacy in them. To write them. I was a writer Before. I just saw the proof of that in my souvenir drawer, a paperback novel titled October Flowers. A trivial thing, so it seems now, about fathers and daughters and the men daughters love. It was dedicated to my father. Posthumously. He died when I was eleven, only three months after he and Mother and I came to Shiloh Beach for that long summer week at Aunt Jan’s house, the house by the sea that was her legacy to me when she died thirteen years later in a nursing home in Portland.

  I open the diary, reach automatically for the magnifying glass, but I don’t need it. The writing is large and legible. Still, I don’t at first recognize it. Yes, it’s my handwriting, but the years have separated me from these loops and lines. The Mary Hope, twenty-four years old, who wrote these words was not the same Mary Hope who reads them now.

  The squeak of the sliding glass door that opens into the living room rouses me. I look around and see Stephen. He wears a shirt of fine, pale wool, pants of dark leather thrust under the tops of laced moccasin boots, and a headband of goldenrod yellow. His Christian mantra, embroidered on the headband in brown thread, is ENTER YE IN AT THE STRAIT GATE. It’s all standard attire for the male members of the family, but the earthy colors suit him well. No, he’s not a child, and it seems to have happened suddenly, his growing up. And like his mother, he has a face that seems as if it has been cast in burnished bronze. But in his eyes—large, slanted into heavy lids, black and deep as night—is life and intelligence and curiosity. He reminds me at this moment of a young man I once loved when I lived in Portland, a man named Dean, who called me Green Eyes and sent me oblique smiles—leopard grins, I called them—full of wry laughter and knowing sadness.

  But now Stephen’s hooded eyes are reflective, revealing nothing. I motion him to the chair beside me. He sits down, but doesn’t lean back. I wait out his reticence, and finally he asks, “Did I do wrong, Mary?”

  “What? You mean in questioning the lineage of Jesus? Well, did you intend to hurt anyone when you asked your questions?”

  He frowns at that. “No, of course not.”

  “Then I can’t see that you did wrong.”

  He shifts his shoulders slightly, grimacing. “You always said we should ask questions.”

  “And I still say it.”

  “But Miriam said it was wrong. And Jeremiah agreed with her.”

  “And I say it was not wrong,” I answer bluntly. “Stephen, things aren’t as simple as you were led to believe when you were a child. You’re on the edge of adulthood now, and there are some hard truths you’ll have to recognize. One is that good and bad are not absolutes. They’re entirely subjective. They’re judgments. Opinions.”

  He shakes his head and for a moment seems on the verge of tears. But he won’t cry; he won’t let himself cry.

  “Then how am I to know what’s good or bad?”

  “You’ll have to decide that for yourself, and it will never be easy. Never, as long as you live.”

  He sighs, but there is no resolution in his features. He remains silent for a while, staring out at the sea, then he turns. “I’m sorry you got hurt. For me.”

  I look down at my hand, at the diagonals of burning red. “Well, you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

  He smiles, no doubt finding it incongruous that I might be in the same situation he was. “Yes, I’d do it for you, Mary.”

  “Anyway, we’ve both learned something from all this. I said you should always ask questions, but I should’ve qualified it. There are some questions you don’t ask in church.” Then I add with a crooked smile: “At least . . . not out loud.”

  “But I can still ask questions to myself?”

  “I doubt you’ll be able to stop yourself. I hope not.” I pause a moment, then: “Do you know why you’re here now?”

  “Enid just said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Did she tell you I’ve chosen you to be my apprentice?”

  Stephen stares at me. “No.”

  “My apprentice and someday my successor as teacher.”

  He seems stunned, and at first I don’t realize why, until he turns away and asks, “Why should you need anyone to be your successor?” And now I am surprised. “Do you think I’m immortal, Stephen?” He doesn’t look at me, nor even move. “It’s just . . . well, it’ll be a long time before you have to worry about anyone being your successor.”

  “Let’s hope so, but it takes a long time to learn what you must to be a teacher. That’s why I’m starting with you now. We’ll have two hours every afternoon.
Except the sabbath.”

  “But I’ll never be able to learn enough to be a teacher, to . . . take your place.”

  “Yes, you will, because you’ll never stop learning. You have it in you, Stephen, or I wouldn’t have chosen you.”

  He faces me, his dark eyes reflecting the sun on the sea. Finally he nods. “Where do I begin?”

  “You’ve already begun. You began when you read your first word. In the future you and I will cover a lot of subjects I haven’t touched on in school, but first . . .” I look down at the diary. “There’s something I have to do, Stephen. I’m going to write Rachel’s story. The Chronicle of Rachel. But it’s my story, too, and I want you to help me, to experience it with me so you’ll understand . . .” What? I don’t know how to explain what I want and hope of him. “ ‘To see a world in a grain of sand . . .’ Remember that?”

  He nods, smiling. “William Blake.”

  “Yes. Well, maybe Rachel and I are like a grain of sand, and maybe you can find the world of . . . of humanity in our story.”

  “That book—is that your story?”

  “Only fragments of it, and there are more of these books. But I never kept a proper diary. I only wrote about things that were especially important to me. The story is mostly in my head, Stephen. I have to search out the memories, then I can write the story.”

  “But how can I help you?”

  “By listening, by making my memories part of your memories.”

  He doesn’t yet understand what I expect of him, but he’s curious. He wants to hear the story. I can ask no more now.

  He pulls one knee up, wraps his arms around it. “When does the story begin?”

  I have to think about that, and I realize that nothing in my life or Rachel’s is important to this Chronicle before I came to Amarna. I’ve tried to tell the children what life was like in the time before the End, to give them a taste of that infinitely complex, glittering, and terrifying civilization. I lived in a dying golden age, a time of miracles and mania. Rachel said that one of the most profound tragedies of human existence is to live at the end of a golden age—and know it.