A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  Mary’s eyes were burning. “Yes, we came to the same conclusion. But we didn’t find anyone.”

  “I did.”

  She stared at him. “You found someone else?”

  “Yes.” He shifted, stretching one arm along the back of the couch. “Two days west of Eugene, I stopped to camp, and I was laying out my bedroll when I saw two men standing by the fire. Lord help me, I had my rifle up ready to shoot before I even thought about it. That’s what those people in the Siskyous taught me. But I didn’t shoot. I went over to them and saw they were both old. At least, they looked old. I never did know how old any of them really were.”

  “Any of them?” Rachel asked sharply. “How many were there?”

  “Six, altogether. Three couples, husbands and wives. They lived on a farm south of the road. Before Armageddon they lived near Eugene. They were neighbors, and they stayed together when they ran away after the fires came down on the city. There’d been sixteen to begin with. The three couples, eight children, and Martin’s mother and aunt. All the children and the two elder sisters died in the Long Winter, and no babies had been bom since. They were all weak and half-sick, and I think they’d given up caring about anything. They didn’t even seem to care much about living. One of the women—her name was Ann, and I’ve never known a kinder woman—she said to me, ‘To every thing there is a time.’ Quoted me the verses from Ecclesiastes. She said that’s the way it is with life. You have to take what comes. I asked her if she believed in God and Jesus Christ, and she said . . . it didn’t make any difference.” Luke shook his head, bewildered still. “They were so good to me, so peaceable. But I didn’t understand their peace. Not one of them ever prayed; they never had services. Martin said once if God could let Armageddon happen, he didn’t see any reason to praise Him.”

  Rachel asked, “How did you answer that?”

  “Well, it was hard to answer. I mean, when I was with those people . . .” He pulled his shoulders up and back in an unconscious gesture Mary had noticed before. “I told Martin that Armageddon was part of God’s plan, that it meant the Second Coming. But he just smiled and went on with his work. They asked me if I wanted to stay the winter. It was the middle of December, and walking day after day in rain or snow didn’t sound so good. Besides, I knew they could use some help with the farm. So I stayed. For seventy-two days. I notched my stick every night. Two weeks before I left, Ann died. She . . . had a lot of pain. I helped dig her grave, and I was the only one who prayed for her, though I know the others grieved for her. I decided I had to leave; I had to keep searching. Martin told me he’d once seen smoke in the hills farther south, so I figured I’d better go see what I could find that way. Well, I wandered those hills for a couple of weeks and didn’t find any sign of people, so finally I decided to head for the coast again. The rain set in about then, and it seemed like I could never get dry or warm. I reached the coast at a town called Reedsport, but it was just like all the other towns I’d come across—half-burned, all grown over with weeds. Nobody there. By then I wasn’t feeling good, but I didn’t stop. The Lord was still guiding me, but my body wasn’t up to His guiding. I don’t remember much of the last few days. I just knew I had to keep going north. I didn’t know why.” He smiled, first at Rachel, than at Mary. “I’ve been gone from the Ark for nine months and walked over a thousand miles, and I saw nothing but desolation. The only people I found—well, in their own ways, they were crazy. But now I understand: this was God’s testing of me. He meant for me to finally come here.”

  The fire had burned down to flame-licked coals, and its gilded light drew them together in a span of warm silence. At length, Rachel said, “A remarkable journey, Luke. Thank you for sharing it with us. But I think it deserves sharing with others, too.”

  Luke stared at her. “What others?”

  Rachel didn’t answer that. She rose, went to the mantel for one of the candles, lighted it in the coals of the fire, and took it with her when she left the room. “I’ll be right back.”

  The dogs and cats stretched themselves, and Mary started to rise, but her right leg responded with a spasm of cramping. “Damn, I’ve been sitting still too long.” She looked up to find Luke standing above her, hands extended.

  “Let me help you, Mary.”

  She surrendered her hands to his and let him pull her to her feet. And why, she wondered, should that leave her trembling like a silly adolescent? She flexed her leg to restore the circulation. “You must be exhausted, Luke.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry about me, Sister.”

  “I won’t worry about you anymore—not after hearing that story.”

  “It’s the story,” Rachel said as she returned, “that you must get down in writing.” She handed him one of her small, bound sketchbooks. He opened it, but couldn’t seem to make sense of the blank pages.

  “There’s nothing in this book.”

  “Not yet. Luke, you must put your story in it. I have a good supply of India ink, and you can use my pens.”

  He still frowned at the book. “I . . . I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “You said it for Mary and me.”

  “Yes, but that was just talking.”

  “Then write it as if you were just talking.”

  “But why do you want me to write it down? If anybody wants to hear it, I can tell it to them.”

  “Not after you’re dead,” Rachel replied flatly. “Luke, your story is important to your people and your children and their children, to let them know what the part of the world you saw was like. If nothing else, it will warn them to stay away from the Siskyou Mountains.”

  He laughed at that, then, “Well . . . maybe I could write it, like you said, as if I was talking to somebody, but you’ll have to help me.”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  Luke turned, sought in the shadows for the books on the shelves. “Did anybody else ever write anything like this?”

  Rachel took up the poker and began teasing the coals of the fire together. “Thousands of people have, Luke. I don’t know offhand what I have here.” She straightened. “Well, I do have a facsimile edition of the diary of William Clark. I’ll find it tomorrow.”

  “Who’s William Clark?”

  “Half of Lewis and Clark.” Then when he still looked blankly at her: “Lewis and Clark were nineteenth-century explorers.” She finished banking the fire and turned the damper. “And now I’ll say good night. Morning comes early. Come on, Shadow.” She lifted the dog and put her down on the floor, then departed, the candle lighting her way, Shadow limping behind her.

  Mary felt an uncertain tension, standing in the near darkness with Luke. She was sharply aware of the difference in his smell and hers or Rachel’s. She had long ago learned to accept the natural odors of their bodies, and she didn’t find Luke’s offensive. Only different.

  She turned and lighted two more candles, handed him one. “Here, you’ll need some light.”

  “Thanks. Mary, I know I’m sleeping in your room. Let me sleep here on the couch tonight. I’m well enough now.”

  She smiled, but shook her head. “You still need another good night’s sleep. Go on, now.”

  He shrugged, started to walk away, then looked back at her. The words came hesitantly: “Do you understand why I’m here? I mean, what I left the Ark to search for?”

  She did, although it was only at this moment that she recognized it, and she chose not to acknowledge it. There were potentials there she couldn’t deal with yet. “It’s late, Luke. We’ll talk about it another time.”

  He nodded, moved away in a circle of golden candlelight. “Good night, Mary Hope.”

  “Good night, Luke Jason. Sleep well.”

  When she heard the bedroom door close, Mary stood motionless in the dim silence, feeling the beat of her pulse, and again she wanted to cry and
didn’t know why. Changes. She was only now beginning to sense their dimensions.

  She went to the greenhouse door and saw the light behind the glass door that opened into Rachel’s room. She crossed the greenhouse in the silver-blue moonlight and slid the door open, saw Rachel in her narrow bed, propped up with pillows, a book open in her lap, an oil light burning on the table. Shadow lay beside her.

  Mary sat down on the end of the bed. “That was quite a story.”

  Rachel nodded. “The stuff of epics. Think how quickly we’ve sunk back to a time when a journey of a thousand miles is an epic.”

  “Sometimes I wonder . . .”

  “What, Mary?”

  Mary shrugged, not sure what she was trying to say. “A thousand miles, and the only human beings he found were a few survivalists and a handful of dying victims.” Luke called them all crazy, and she could accept that of the survivalists. But the others . . . They weren’t crazy. They were only hopeless. Without hope. Without children.

  Rachel said, “That thousand miles covered a very small fraction of the world.”

  “But that fraction is our world now. The rest is terra incognita for us and always will be.”

  Except for the Ark.

  Mary felt her mind full of cobwebs, squeezed her eyes shut to look for a way through them. Finally she said, “Rachel, I know what Luke’s mission is. The Ark is dying; not enough women are capable of bearing children, so he went out to find women like me—potentially fertile.” She opened her eyes, but couldn’t look at Rachel. “That’s his mission, and he’s made it . . . mine. He’s made it possible. . . .” But the words got tangled in the cobwebs. She hadn’t had time to think out the implications for her in the Ark, in fifty-three people living in a community.

  She had recognized that she had an obligation, now that Luke made it possible, to bear children. Yet until he told them about the Ark, she hadn’t faced the fact that to bear a child here at Amama would be futile. Here that child would grow up in solitude, condemned to live a life of savage loneliness, to die leaving nothing behind but its bones.

  If that child were to become something other than a sterile end in itself, it must have a community. Community was a concept integral to civilization and humanity. Whatever her doubts about the Ark, it was a community, and now she knew beyond a hope that it was the only one she would ever encounter.

  Her throat ached with the words: “Rachel, if I go to the Ark, will you go with me?”

  Rachel answered without hesitation. “No. Not until I’ve finished with the books. That’s my part in humankind’s future, Mary.”

  Mary saw the equivocal sadness behind Rachel’s fragile smile and shivered as if a chill wind had brushed the skin at the back of her neck.

  “Mary, the decision is yours,” Rachel said. “I can’t help you with it.”

  Yes, it was hers, and it had already been made. Yet it didn’t seem a decision. There was no choice in it.

  She watched the wavering candle flame. “Strange, isn’t it? A man who insists Armageddon has already happened, that the second coming of Jesus—the end of life in this world for all good Christians—is about to happen, yet he worries about begetting a new generation. I don’t think he really believes that Armageddon nonsense.”

  “The problem is, he thinks he should believe it.”

  Mary wasn’t sure what Rachel meant by that, but she didn’t want to talk about it now. What Luke believed, or thought he should, didn’t matter. She had no choice.

  She rose, leaned down to kiss Rachel’s cheek. “Past our bedtime. By the way, that was a clever ploy, conning Luke into writing his memoirs. You’ll make an author of him, and I’ve never met an author who didn’t have a great respect for books.”

  “Well, it did occur to me that the act of writing might change his attitude a bit. And you’re the one who should help him with it. You’re the writer here.”

  Mary thought about that, tried to remember when she’d had that sure sense of herself as a writer. She couldn’t recapture it. “Good night, Rachel.” She crossed to the sliding door, opened it, and looked back to see Rachel in the amber light, and in Mary’s eyes she suddenly seemed small and vulnerable.

  “Good night, Mary.”

  No. Rachel was too resourceful ever to be lonely.

  Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears

  Today of past Regrets and future Fears. . . .

  —EDWARD FITZGERALD, THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (1879)

  “And that spring, Luke courted me.”

  Stephen looks at me curiously. All he knows of courtship is garnered from books he’s read. On this clear April afternoon, we’re outside on the deck, a limber-limbed boy sitting with his legs drawn up, arms wrapped around one knee, and an old woman absorbing the warmth of the sun on ever-aching joints and talking about her youth, about courtship.

  Such an ancient ceremony, courtship. Homo sapiens was born with the rituals encoded in its genes, rituals as old as bisexual reproduction. I laugh, imagining trilobites wooing their mates with skittering minuets in the deeps of the sea; brontosauri circling one another in ponderous sarabands; smiladon yowling arias to show off his scimitar fangs.

  Stephen asks, “What did Luke do to court you?”

  I study him, wondering if his generation won’t invent some sort of courtship rituals, even if their pairings are determined by necessity.

  “Luke produced prodigies of labor that spring, Stephen. He looked at the pigpen and said, ‘You and Rachel built this.’ ” And I try to imitate his indulgent tone. Stephen laughs, probably because to him I sound like Jerry. “I admitted as much, and Luke said, ‘I’ll build you a new one.’ And so he did. The saws and axes needed sharpening? Our plow and harness needed repair? The roof of the barn was leaking? The gateposts had rotted? The apple trees needed pruning? And our smokehouse. . . had we also built that? He would take care of it. And so he did.”

  Still laughing, Stephen asks, “What did you do?”

  “What could I do but . . . love him?”

  In that halcyon spring Luke was easy to love. He was as powerful and graceful as a rutting buck, as solicitous as a bowerbird. He was easy to love because he tried in every way to please me. He couldn’t, not in every way, not a man of his philosophical mold. But he tried. And he tried to please Rachel. He had to please her in order to please me, and he understood that. But he wanted to please Rachel, as a child wants to please its parents, a student its teacher, an acolyte its master.

  Stephen rouses me from my memories. “Did Luke write the story of his journey?”

  “Oh, yes. Jeremiah has it now. Maybe he’d let you read it. It was an arduous process, the writing of that story, but Luke took great pride in it. And Rachel inspired him to read books other than the Bible and to listen to ideas that were new to him. She told him a myth is the essence of an event. She told him to read between the lines and finally applied that principle to Genesis. She showed him glimpses of the universe.”

  Glimpses. That’s all he’d open his eyes to see, but I thought he understood what little he saw, and I thought he understood the significance of the books and the importance of building a place to house and protect them.

  “Mary, how long did the courting last?”

  “About three months, actually. It was odd about that courtship. It was tacit. He couldn’t seem to work up his courage to actually say he wanted me to go back to the Ark with him.”

  “Maybe he was afraid you wouldn’t go with him.”

  My laugh at that has a bitter edge. “I wouldn’t have refused him. I had no choice. And I kept wondering why he didn’t understand that. Why he wouldn’t ask.” Then I shrug. “But I’d have done the asking if necessary. In fact, it made no difference whether I loved him or not. That only made it easier to accept what I had to do.”

  But
I did love him.

  Rather, I was in love with him, and I doubt Stephen will ever understand that. My happiness hung on Luke’s smile. Yet at times I was angered almost past tolerance because he couldn’t fulfill all my expectations. I spun dizzily on a silken filament, and he was at the center of the web always.

  I pull in a deep breath. “But perhaps I did, unconsciously, restrain him from the asking. That was because I wanted one final proof of his intentions.”

  “What was that?”

  “The vault, Stephen. I wanted the vault built.”

  Stephen looks north toward the Knob. “Was that for Rachel?”

  A perceptive question. “Partly, yes. But it was for me, too, not only because I believed fervently that the vault must be built, but because it seemed the ultimate test of his love.”

  Stephen stretches his legs out, crosses his ankles. “I guess he must’ve passed the test.”

  “Yes. Rachel and I helped, but the vault was really Luke’s project. Rachel drew the plans the last week of May, and we chose the site. The drainage is good on the Knob, and it’s highly visible. It gets the brunt of the winter storms, but that slope also gets sun all year long. The actual building began on the first day of June. Luke dug an excavation into the hillside, then he scavenged brick and stone from Shiloh. He used the stone for the walls and lined them and the floor with brick. Fortunately we’d stockpiled some sacks of mortar. He felled a cedar tree and split it into beams and planks for the roof and inside walls. He made the door of cedar and found brass hinges and a stainless steel chain and lock. He covered the roof with composition shingles three layers thick, added another layer of cedar shingles. Oh, it’s a work of art in its own way, Stephen. A labor of love. It took him most of the summer to construct this Taj Majal.”

  At that, Stephen tilts his head quizzically. “This what, Mary?”

  “The Taj Majal was a very famous building Before.” And I wonder if it’s still standing. Is it a vine-smothered ruin that may someday be disinterred as Angkor Wat and Chichén Itzá were and might be again?