A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  I see a movement on the beach and pause, knife poised for the next cut. Despite my failing eyes, I can identify the two people. I recognize Miriam’s long, bright hair, and the bearded man can only be Jerry. They both have buckets, heavy, from the way they carry them. They’ve been to the tide pools at the foot of the Knob to gather mussels. I watch them, remembering a day of my youth, and it seems in keeping with my thoughts when they stop to talk, free hands clasped, when Miriam stands on tiptoe to kiss Jerry.

  A chaste kiss, no doubt. At least, Jerry will think it that.

  They are half-siblings. Luke was their father, but they had different mothers. I wonder what Miriam would’ve been like if they’d had the same mother, if they’d both grown up in Luke’s household.

  I watch them walking toward the bank until I can no longer see them. The house is set too far back from the ravine for me to see the foot of the path. I return to my chopping.

  Jerry is, in a sense, Miriam’s lover. But then he’s also Esther’s lover, as he was Rebecca’s before she died. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forgive him for his part in her death. I know she wanted to try again to have a baby, but she’d had two miscarriages already.

  But Jerry still has his two lovers. That is, he has sexual intercourse with Miriam and Esther at intervals determined by their menstrual calendars and the days they are most likely to conceive. That calculated approach to coitus is unavoidable. Jerry is the only adult male here, Miriam and Esther the only fertile adult females. Even the risks inherent in inbreeding between half-siblings must be accepted if new generations are to survive. There are six children now, but that’s not enough, especially since Isaac may not live to produce any offspring.

  My knife slips, missing my finger only by good luck.

  Yes, it all sounds so calculating, like breeding livestock, but these people grew up with that kind of calculation. And in fact, Jerry does love both Miriam and Esther, but in the same sense that he loves the children, he loves the crones, he loves me. He doesn’t know what it means to be in love, but he loves, deeply and steadfastly.

  And Miriam? If what she feels for Jerry can be termed love, it is a jealous love, as her god is a jealous god. No doubt she feels maternal love for her children. Or is that possessiveness? Or am I coloring her with my fear? All I know is that she seldom laughs, and I’ve never seen her weep.

  I fear that absence of laughter and tears. It doesn’t indicate a lack of passion, but rather the opposite: a passion that is too volatile for its vessel.

  By the time Miriam and Jerry reach the top of the beach path, I’ve filled the basket. I rise, grunting at the aching stiffness that occupied my knees while I sat. Jerry waves at me, strides across the grass, while Miriam approaches more slowly, watching Jerry, watching me.

  I see Luke in Jerry always. He’s tall and thin like his father, but that thinness is deceptive. He is all muscle, flat and hard, his hands strong and armored with calluses. Shadow runs to him, and Jerry feints playfully with her until he has her galloping in wild circles, then he calms her with a few words. When he reaches the deck, he offers me an ebullient, “Good day, Mary!”

  “Good day to you, Jeremiah. It looks like you and Miriam had good luck in the tide pools. Good day, Miriam.”

  She smiles, although it doesn’t reach her eyes, but before she can speak, Jerry says, “Miriam, you’d better go take care of the mussels.”

  That rudeness is typical and particularly annoying because he is always blithely unaware of it. I see resentment congeal in Miriam’s eyes, but it isn’t directed at Jerry. I get the brunt of it, deep and laced with jealousy. She picks up his bucket and hers, mounts the deck steps, but at the door pauses to say, “Jeremiah, we need some wood split for the stove.”

  I restrain a smile. She’s restoring the real chain of command as it pertains to household tasks. Such things are her domain.

  But Jerry only nods. He doesn’t recognize the subtle reprimand in that reminder. When the door closes behind Miriam, he says, “Mary, we saw some whale spouts today.”

  That’s something else I’ve lost with my failing sight: the brief puffs of mist that mark the passage of the gray whales on their migrations from Alaska to Baja in the spring and back again in the fall.

  “Did you? Well, that’s always reassuring.”

  “Yes, I guess it is, but I keep hoping one of them will get beached close by where we can get at it. I know how much you love them, but we could use the oil.”

  I laugh at that, then lean down to pick up the basket of kelp. “I’d better get this to the compost.”

  “No, Mary, I’ll take it,” he insists, reaching for the basket.

  But I refuse to relinquish it. “Jerry, I’m quite capable of carrying it. I may be slow, but—”

  “You can’t carry it with your cane.”

  “I can walk without my cane if I’m careful.”

  He smiles, placating now. “I know, but I’m going out to the garden anyway.”

  With a sigh I surrender to his kindness. Besides, Stephen is coming around the corner of the house with Isaac tagging along behind him. “All right, Jerry. Thanks.”

  He departs, pausing on his way to talk to the boys, and I go into the house to wash the kelp slick off my hands. When I return, I find Stephen occupying one of the chairs, while Isaac sits cross-legged on the deck beside Shadow, and she patiently tolerates his unintentionally rough petting. Stephen watches him with the protective eye of an older brother, although Isaac is not his brother. Not genetically.

  Stephen looks up at me. “Isaac isn’t feeling good today. Bernadette said he shouldn’t work in the garden. Is it all right if he stays with us?”

  Isaac grins at me, blue eyes clear as the sky, his copper red hair shining in the sunlight. Freckles are powdered dark against his pale skin, and he is too thin, too small for his ten years. He constantly coughs and wheezes and doesn’t seem to notice it, nor does he seem to notice the malformed foot that makes him limp when he walks, stumble when he runs. He is Miriam’s child by an Arkite, and she’s the only one here who doesn’t dote on him.

  Miriam mistrusts imperfection. Perhaps she fears it. But she probably won’t have to deal with it much longer in the form of her asthmatic, crippled son. He won’t survive another winter if it brings another onslaught of pneumonia.

  She calls him god-marked.

  I lean down and press my hand to Isaac’s forehead. It seems cool, rather than hot with fever. He says, “I’m all right now, Mary. Bernadette gave me some tea.”

  “Well, if she says you’re not to work, you won’t. Not today.” I go to the chair next to Stephen’s, reach for the diary in my pocket. “Isaac, did Stephen tell you what we’ve been doing?”

  He shakes his head, and Stephen answers, “No, I didn’t tell him. I haven’t told anybody.”

  I’m a little surprised at that. And a little relieved.

  I nod without comment. “Stephen and I have been studying some history, Isaac. Mine and Rachel’s.”

  “Is that history?”

  “On a smaller scale, it’s as much history as the fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “But that was a long time ago.”

  Stephen puts in quietly, “Just listen, Isaac. Don’t argue with Mary.”

  Isaac draws his knees up, wraps his arms around them, and looks up at me expectantly. I open the diary. It’s more a prop for me than a necessity. I read it last night, polished each shard of memory. “All right, Stephen, where were we?”

  “When Rachel asked you to stay at Amarna. But you didn’t give her an answer then.”

  “No. I couldn’t. I think I knew my answer, but I had to wait until I felt stronger physically and emotionally. A week later I wrote to my boss at IDA. She telephoned me within a few days and offered me a promotion if I’d come back to Portland.” I laugh, rememberi
ng that small, but vital triumph. “That’s when I told Rachel I’d like to stay, to make Amarna my home. And then . . .” I turn a page. “Then spring came to Amarna.”

  Isaac objects, “Spring always comes to Amarna.”

  “I remember a winter when we weren’t sure of that. But my first spring at Amarna was a revelation. I discovered what seasons meant. You two don’t know what it’s like to live in a city where changing seasons really don’t mean anything. Here I watched trees flower and leaf, daffodils bloom, and cow parsnips unfold those huge, soft leaves, their stalks reaching up—well, they were higher than my head by summer. And horsetails. You know them, Isaac. They look like green bottle brushes.”

  Stephen nods and says, “Equisetum.”

  Isaac wrinkles his nose. “What does that mean?”

  “That’s their proper name,” Stephen explains.

  And I add—ever the teacher; I can’t seem to help myself: “They’re descendants of a plant called calamites that lived about three hundred million years ago and grew to be thirty feet high.”

  Isaac’s eyes widen. “Was there dinosaurs then?” But as soon as the question is out, he looks apprehensively toward the house as if he’s afraid someone might hear him. His mother, no doubt.

  “No, Isaac, there were no dinosaurs yet. Anyway, in that first spring I learned about farming—preparing the soil, planting the seeds, watching them grow, and all the while battling weeds and moles and bugs and slugs. I saw a litter of rabbits and a kid born. I saw chicks hatch. That was a new project of Rachel’s that year, raising chickens from scratch, so to speak. I learned to extract honey from the combs—no, that was later, in the summer. I learned about fishing and mussel collecting and clam digging from Jim Acres. I learned folk songs from Connie. She’d play her guitar and sing harmony to my lead. From Rachel I learned about the sea. She showed me the way wind and current and tide work together, the patterns of the sand, the creatures that leave their tracks on it. She called it calligraphy, and every animal has its own signature. She showed me the birds that call the sea home, the plants and animals that live in the tide pools. I even did some writing—Jim loaned me his old word processor—and I sold a few articles. And I saw quite a lot of Captain Harry Berden. Yes, that was the most beautiful spring of my life. But old people always say that about the springtimes of their youth, don’t they, Isaac?”

  He laughs uncertainly. “I don’t know.” Stephen only smiles and waits for me to go on.

  “I lived in a microcosm, a lovely little island. Beyond Amarna the world was falling apart. Almost literally, when you think about the California quake. Rachel said the planet was simply adjusting its skin a bit, but what a price the insignificant creatures living on the Earth’s skin paid.”

  Stephen frowns thoughtfully. “Miriam talked about that earthquake in one of her morning sermons. She said it was a prophecy of Armageddon.”

  “It wasn’t a prophecy of anything,” I reply irritably. “The San Andreas fault finally gave way. The epicenter was south of San Francisco. I remember seeing skyscrapers swaying like grass in a wind, and the dust rising where buildings collapsed, and the Bay patterned with intersecting waves like a huge moiré pattern.”

  Isaac’s mouth sags open. “Were you there, Mary?”

  I laugh at that. “No, I wasn’t there, or I probably wouldn’t be here. I saw all that on television.” That garners only a blank look from him. I’ve explained television to the children—even shown them our old set—but they can’t really understand it. Or believe it.

  I go on. “Two million people died in that quake and the tsunamis that hit the coast towns and the orgies of looting that followed. The government sent in an army of Apies and National Guard troops. Food and clothing and medicine flooded in from all over the world, and refugees flooded out. And in the midst of that appalling wreckage, Lassa fever turned epidemic.”

  “What’s Lassa fever?” Isaac asks.

  Stephen is quick with a reply. “I think that’s what Jeremiah called the great plague.”

  No doubt that came from one of Jerry’s sermons, secondhand from sermons he heard as a child. He has no more comprehension of Lassa than Miriam does of the California earthquake. Those events are part of our mythos now.

  “Yes, Lassa was a plague of sorts, Isaac. It was a contagious, viral disease. At first, people called it L-flu. But it wasn’t flu. Connie Acres showed us a bulletin from the Center for Disease Control. It wasn’t even the original Lassa fever. That was first identified years before in Africa, and it was spread by infected rats. The mutant originated in Africa, too, and by the time I read the CDC bulletin, millions of people had already died of Lassa there. In this country—we were so smug. There’d been around ten thousand deaths here from Lassa, but we thought we had the best medical system in the world. Hadn’t we finally developed a vaccine for AIDS? But this new Lassa fever wasn’t only transmitted by rats. Once it infected a human being, it could be transmitted just by personal contact, and it was almost always fatal.”

  Stephen leans forward. “But Bernadette said she had the great—Lassa fever, I mean, and she lived through it.”

  “Yes, some of the people who contracted it lived, if they got good care. But without hospitalization, the symptoms were lethal. Hemorrhaging, for instance. Bleeding that can’t be stopped, Isaac. Anyway, Lassa seemed to explode after the California quake. In the epidemic areas, it disrupted everything. In some of the cities, it was like a return to the dark ages. By late summer it was totally out of control. I made a note in my diary. . . .” I pause to flip through the pages. “Here—on September first. Twenty million people had died of Lassa in the United States.” Stephen and Isaac gaze at me in awe, yet they can grasp only a minute fraction of the hopeless terror underlying that figure.

  Not that I could grasp it any better at the time. I take a deep breath. “Lassa wasn’t the only apocalyptic plague humankind was suffering. There were the constant small wars, of course, but the other plague—and it was more deadly than Lassa, really—was starvation. I remember seeing a television news feature that showed a food drop at a camp near Mexico City. Big helicopters with bales of food spilling out into a whirlwind of dust. And the people—they looked like dry sticks hung with rags, and it seemed impossible that they could even walk. Yet they all got up and began running toward the whirlwind, toward the food. There were so many of them, they were like a dark tide. I remember Rachel said, ‘There is the future.’ And she was crying.” I clear my throat of the huskiness in my voice. “We stopped watching the television for a while after that. We closed our window to the world. But eventually we opened it again. In June the president was killed. Someone bombed the White House.”

  “What white house?” Isaac asks.

  “That was what they called the big house where the president of the United States lived. There’s a picture of it in the encyclopedia. Anyway, they never found out who did it, but the Bill of Rights was suspended, and the Apies rounded up tens of thousands of ‘suspected terrorists’—most of them guilty of nothing more than having no home or job—and threw them in detention camps, which were perfect breeding grounds for Lassa. The rampant stupidity! That was the real epidemic. Pandemic. What was happening in this country was happening all over the world.” I close my eyes, wondering how the frustration can still sting me like a thicket of thorns even after all these years. I call up a smile for Isaac and Stephen, to whom so much of this is meaningless. Yet they must understand what they can. At least, Stephen must.

  I go on, “But here at Amarna the weather was ideal, the garden flourished, and I’d become very fond of goat’s milk and learned to look a rabbit in the eye and slit its throat—and gut, skin, and dismember it. Isaac, don’t laugh. That was a real accomplishment for a city girl.”

  Of course, he does laugh, then he asks, “Who was a city girl? What does that mean?”

  “I was a cit
y girl. I came from a city, and I was—loosely speaking—a girl.” His smile is edged with uncertainty at that. No doubt he can’t imagine me as a girl. “Yes, I was young then, but the world was still falling apart. We could close our window to it, but one day it came crashing through our front door. Not literally, Isaac. That’s just a way of saying something . . . terrible happened.”

  Stephen’s breath catches, and Isaac looks up at him, blue eyes wide. Stephen asks, “Was it Armageddon?”

  He persists in calling it that because he hears the adults use that term. Yet our Elder, the arbiter of all things religious and moral here, declares that the true Armageddon, the one prophesied in such lurid detail by Saint John, is yet to come. Jerry denies the End as Armageddon because his father denied it. Finally.

  “No, Stephen, not Armageddon. Rovers.”

  “What’s a Rover?” Isaac asks.

  “They were road gangs, Isaac. Groups of people—most of them young and into heavy drugs—who lived along the highways and attacked cars, trucks, or buses. They usually killed the people in them.”

  Isaac stares at me, aghast. “Why did they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because they were insane. Insanity is one of the symptoms of too many. Anyway, the gang that attacked my bus stayed in the area all spring. The Apies sent reinforcements, and that kept them under control, but by late June the extra Apies were needed elsewhere, and the Rovers came out of hiding.” I look down at the diary, turn the pages back to June, but I’m not really seeing the writing that on these pages has become so cramped, nearly illegible.

  “It was the day before the summer solstice. A grocery day. Food deliveries had been erratic for months, but usually a Safeway convoy came in Thursday night, and everyone in Shiloh did their shopping on Friday. Rachel and I always drove down to the mall with Connie and Jim, but that Friday morning Jim phoned and said there’d be no grocery run. The night before, the Rovers hit the supermarket just as the convoy arrived. There was a small, bloody battle—Jim rather bitterly called it the battle of the mall—and a lot of people were killed or hurt, including four of Captain Berden’s officers. The Rovers blew up all three trucks. That was typical of them with cars or trucks. They just kept shooting until the gas tanks exploded. We didn’t see Jim and Connie that day. They were both busy at the clinic with the casualties. Rachel and I worked in the garden and walked on the beach, just like any other day. That night Jim called and said everything was under control in Shiloh, and another Safeway convoy would arrive Monday. So we went to bed.”