by Wren, M. K.
“It’s unnatural for a man to cut his hair or beard.”
She laughed. “Oh. The Samson syndrome.”
He ignored that. “When we reach the Ark, you’ll have to cover your hair. Do you have a scarf or bandanna?”
“What the hell’s wrong with my hair?”
“Mary, don’t say words like that!”
And they had gone to bed in silence, separately.
Last night, while the fire still burned bright, he took out his Bible and asked her to read aloud the passage he designated: Saint Paul outlining in rigorous detail the proper behavior for women.
And yet—she sighed in resignation. At other times he was still the Luke she loved, naive, but kind and gentle. She pressed her hands to her abdomen, wondering if one missed period could be taken seriously.
Then she rose and put the sketchbook in her pack. Luke had left the rocks and was walking up the beach. When he reached the campsite, he grinned proudly as he showed off his catch of iridescent black kelp fish, but across his right forearm was a scraped cut, and his shirt was tom at the shoulder, the ragged edges bloodstained.
“Luke, what happened to you?”
“Oh, I just slipped and went down on the barnacles.”
“Well, let me clean those cuts.”
“All right, but first I have to clean these fish.”
“The fish can wait a few minutes.” She went to her pack, found a handkerchief, then with her hand on Luke’s arm, led him to the creek. “Take off your shirt.”
He did, knelt with her on the bank while she dipped the handkerchief in the chill water and washed the cuts. They were only minor abrasions, except for the one at the swell of the deltoid. “Luke, you might have a new scar to add to the ones the survivalists gave you.”
He looked at her, then turned away, eyes averted. “I didn’t say that’s where I got those scars.”
Mary was bewildered, at first positive that he had said he’d acquired the scars at the hands of the survivalists. But maybe she’d only assumed . . .
“How did you get those scars?”
He rose, pulled on his shirt, ruefully noting the tear. “When we get to the Ark, you’ll have to mend this for me.”
Woman’s work, no doubt, but she refused to be distracted. “Someone whipped you unmercifully. Who, Luke? And why?”
“I have to take care of the fish.”
“Luke!”
Her importunate tone stopped him. He studied her, while she waited, a seed of fear growing in her mind. Then he said, “It was a long time ago, and it was a just punishment.”
“Punishment! What did you do to deserve that?”
He took a deep breath. “I spoke blasphemy.”
That explanation seemed so unlikely, she laughed. “You?”
“Yes, me!”
Abruptly she sobered. “Please . . . tell me what happened.”
He folded his arms against his chest. “It was in the Blind Summer. I was sixteen then. It was such a hard time for us. There was so much grief and sickness and hunger, so much . . . disagreement. Lord help me, if I hadn’t said it right out in church in front of the whole Flock—what was left of us—it wouldn’t have been so bad.”
“Said what?”
He seemed to find repeating it difficult. “I said—well, I said there wouldn’t be any Second Coming. It’d been nearly a year since Armageddon. I said the Doctor was wrong about the Second Coming.”
“And that was blasphemy?”
He frowned irritably. “Of course, it was!”
“Is it written in the Bible that the Last World War—or whatever it was called—was Armageddon? It was the Doctor who made that assumption. You didn’t blaspheme. You only disagreed with him.”
Luke shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. The Doctor— he’s a special man, chosen of God.”
“A man who has visions,” Mary said with cold irony.
“Yes! He’s our rock, like Saint Peter was the rock of the new church of Jesus Christ.”
“Was it this rock who punished you so terribly for disagreeing—”
“For blasphemy, Mary, before all the Flock!”
“Was he the one who whipped you?”
“No, the Doctor left it to my father to punish me, since he was Elder of our household. And afterward I went before the Flock in the church and . . . well, I don’t remember much of that. The glory of the Lord came over me. They said I spoke in tongues. It was the first time for me.” He sighed. “And the last.”
Mary looked into his troubled face, and he seemed so achingly vulnerable, she couldn’t hold on to her anger. Bringing to heel the defiant boy Luke had been was a necessity of survival for the Flock. They couldn’t afford dissension or rebellion. But Luke paid a high price for their unity. She put her arms around him, closed her eyes when she felt his arms strong and needing around her.
Finally she drew away, waited until he could return her gaze. “You’d better take care of the fish. I’ll get the fire started.”
He kissed her forehead. “I knew you’d understand, Mary.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?”
He laughed self-consciously. “I guess because I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand, Luke.” She understood far more than he did. “Come on, let’s get supper ready. I’m hungry.”
There was more to understand before the night was out.
After supper they sat together on one of the sleeping bags watching the fire, while the surf whispered constant assurances in the darkness, and Mary felt her equilibrium restored.
Until Luke rose, put more wood on the fire so that it flared harshly in her eyes, and she braced herself as he went to his backpack, returned with his Bible. He knelt, facing her. “Mary, the reason I didn’t want to go on to the Ark today is that before you reach its gates, you must take Jesus into your heart as your personal savior.”
She found his earnestness annoying. “I must what?” He started to repeat the formula, but she interrupted him. “What would happen if I weren’t a Christian? If I were a Jew or Buddhist or Muslim or agnostic or—heaven forfend!—an atheist? Would I be denied entrance to the Ark?”
His face was slack with confusion. “Mary, the Ark is a place for Christians, for the blessed who have accepted Jesus—”
“Then if I’m not a Christian, they’ll turn me away?”
“I . . . yes. We’d have to, because only—”
“Then you should be grateful Rachel and I didn’t refuse to let you in at Amarna until we were sure your philosophy agreed with ours. You’d be dead, Luke, and swept out to sea with the crabs eating your carcass!”
He stared at her, then looked down at the Bible, contemplated it a moment, and his chin came up. “That was different. You’re not sick. You come to the Ark as my future wife; you’ll be part of the Flock.”
Mary finally shrugged, reminding herself that it didn’t matter, all this literalist drivel. She had come this far because she had no choice. She was doing what she had to do. And if it would satisfy Luke . . .
“My mother made sure I was baptized properly in a proper Christian church, Luke. Isn’t that enough?”
“You were baptized?” he asked eagerly. “The Lord be praised! Then you’ve been consecrated to Jesus. But you must make that commitment anew, you must be reborn into the love of God and His only-begotten Son. Mary, you must do it! Come—kneel here before me.”
Something in her balked still, but she shifted position until she was on her knees facing him. Let him do his mumbo jumbo. It didn’t matter.
“Pray with me, Sister! Pray with me!” He took both her hands in his and with his head tilted heavenward, eyes squeezed shut, he exhorted his god to accept this poor sinner who longed fo
r his grace and his love and for eternal life in the wonder of his presence. He exhorted at length and in repetitious detail, while Mary knelt, staring at him, hands numbed in his tightening grip as he droned on and on, and there was in his voice a hypnotic cadence enhanced by the flickering light of the fire. The flames blinded her, surrounded Luke with darkness in which nothing could be seen to exist, and at some point—she didn’t know how she reached it— she found herself weeping, heard her voice responding with Luke’s, and she didn’t know what she was saying, what he was saying, and her knees ached, every muscle in her body ached, and she cried, “Yes, yes, yes!” And finally Luke’s voice rang out with a last “Amen!”
In the sudden silence Mary heard the murmur of the sea. I am here . . . I am always here. . . . And she sought in the darkness the pale light of the surf, but her fire-dazzled eyes recorded only illusions of flame.
Then Luke’s arms closed around her, and she turned into his embrace. He said, “Mary, oh, my sweet Mary, I love you.”
She lifted her face to his, whispered, “Then make love to me, Luke. Tonight. Make love to me if you love me.”
He pulled away from her, gently but uncompromisingly.
“The Doctor will marry us when we get to the Ark.”
Mary felt those softly spoken words as she had his slap on her face that June day at Amarna. She got to her feet, stared down at him.
“I suppose now it’s fornication!”
He fixed his gaze on the ground. “It’s just not right. . . .”
“Why was it right at Amarna? Not once, but many times it was right!”
“Mary, that was different,” he mumbled.
She walked out of the firelight to her sleeping bag, unlaced her boots with shaking hands, then got inside the bag, jerked the zipper closed, bitter words on her lips crying to be spoken. But she held them back. She heard Luke getting into his sleeping bag, the zipper buzzing.
She lay facing away from him, toward the sea, and pressed a hand to her body, wondering again if that useless organ within was becoming a womb.
If not, would she have to wait for a sanctioned visitation from her sanctioned husband? The thought brought a sardonic, silent laugh.
“I can’t hear it.”
Mary pushed the bandanna away from her ears and looked back along the dirt road cut through a stand of second-growth Douglas fir. Alders, vines, and grass encroached on the road. The morning sun fell in misted shafts through the trees. The only sound she heard was the chromatic warble of a bird she and Rachel had identified only by its call and named the mad bird for the manic edge in its repetitive song.
“You can’t hear what?” Luke asked.
“I can’t hear the ocean.” The words were like the closing of a door.
“No, it’s at least two miles behind us.” With one hand on her cheek, he turned her face toward him. “You’ll miss the ocean, won’t you?”
She looked up at him, reveling in his solicitude. Yet she recognized behind it the anticipation he couldn’t contain. Luke was coming home. After a year, two months, and ten days, he was coming home, and from the moment he woke her this morning with a gentle kiss, he had been so full of joy for his homecoming that she had warmed to it, held on to it, hoping to make his homecoming her own.
“Come on, Mary, just a little farther, then there’s a view of the Ark.”
And he set off down the road with long strides. She hurried to catch up with him, and when they reached the viewpoint, he stopped, the tears in his eyes at odds with his smile. “There it is, Mary. There’s Canaan Valley. Oh, Lord, praised be Thy name!”
They stood at the top of a steep slope shorn of trees in an old clear-cut. Caught somewhere between fear and hope, Mary looked southeast into a valley cradled between two low, forested ridges. The valley had an east-west alignment, with the river Luke called the Jordan trailing along the south boundary, the sun flashing on its dark waters between the barred shadows of the trees on the far bank. At the center of the valley, arranged in a circle perhaps four hundred feet in diameter, stood the twelve households Luke had described, all built of peeled logs, roofed with hand-split shakes. Each household had three small, shuttered windows on its long back wall and a brick chimney against one of the shorter end walls. The air was veiled with their smoke. Rock-lined paths led from the households to the center of the circle like twelve spokes toward the hub of a wheel. At the hub stood the church. It was also built of logs and shakes, the entrance facing west beneath a steeple that thrust high above everything around it and pointed a long shadow toward Mary and Luke.
But Luke hadn’t told her about the palisades of vertical logs that connected the households at their outside corners, that made a fort of the circle, and she wondered what enemies those walls were built to exclude.
All of the valley was fenced. Barbed wire, perhaps; she could only see the evenly spaced fence posts from here. A road emerged from the forest in the northwest at an angle toward the southeast, passed a gate on the fence line, then continued at that angle until it reached the median of the valley, where it turned east toward the open gate of the Ark. South of the road lay a huge garden and a greenhouse. Across the road on the north was another garden, and east of that, an orchard, and farther east, a cemetery. Near the river, a barn presided over a corral and a cluster of smaller buildings. In the pasture at the northeast end of the valley, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats grazed. The southeast end was fenced off for a hay field; pyramids of curing hay dotted the pale stubble. And apparently the Flock was successful at growing grain of some sort this far inland. The tawny field at the west end of the valley was ready for harvest.
Mary released her pent breath in a sigh of satisfaction. The orderly arrangement of fields and fences and buildings seemed inevitable and right. She found Luke’s hand in hers, and knew the future hung suspended for them on a golden thread, and there was beauty in it.
And there were people.
At first she didn’t recognize the tiny, dark objects moving about in the gardens and fields, and she wasn’t prepared for the exhilaration galvanized by that recognition.
There were more than fifty people down there—feeling, talking, thinking, laughing, crying, living human beings.
She whispered, “Luke, there are so many people.”
“Yes, Mary. You’ll never be lonely again.” He pulled her bandanna down a little over her forehead, tightened the knot at the back of her neck, then cupped her face in his hands. “They’ll be surprised to see a woman in pants, but that can be remedied. I want them to see how strong and proud you are, Mary Hope. I want them all to love you as I do.” He leaned down to kiss her, lingering long over it.
Mary couldn’t doubt it now. This was her homecoming, too. Of course, these people would have different beliefs and standards, but she would adapt, she would make herself acceptable, she would do anything necessary to become a part of this living community, to make her children part of humankind.
They were only a few yards from the fence-line gate when the church bell began ringing. Mary wondered, and laughed at the thought, if the bell was tolling for them in a way John Donne hadn’t intended.
Luke lengthened his stride. “The noon bell. Everybody’ll be going back to the Ark for midday meal.” He reached the gate and unhooked the chain, called out to the four men leaving the west field. They stopped, staring at him, while he pushed through the gate, fumbling at the straps of his pack. The men approached cautiously, and Luke flung off the pack and ran toward them, and when they recognized him, they also began running, and they met with embraces and jubilant cries. Men and women were streaming out of the gardens now. Shouts brought more out of the Ark, and Luke walked up the road to meet the continually swelling throng.
Mary didn’t take exception to being left behind. She unbuckled her pack, put it down by Luke’s, and closed the gate, then watched the
milling crowd in which he had lost himself. So much joy there, both for Luke and his friends. She caught a glimpse of Luke holding a baby. Was it his? She realized then how few children there were— no more than seven under the age of fifteen—and how few old people.
All the men were bearded with long hair confined by headbands. Many of them wore knit sweaters of undyed wool; others wore collarless, long-sleeved shirts of the same ivory color. Their loose pants were a deep maroon, stuffed into the tops of boots, some of which were leftovers from Before, while others were a kind of moccasin boot laced nearly to the knee.
The women were similarly clothed, except they wore long, dark skirts and white scarves tied at the back of the neck, as Luke had tied her bandanna. But it was red, and Mary was acutely aware of how strange she’d look to these people—a woman with a red head covering, a woman wearing pants.
There was a man walking at a brisk pace down the road from the Ark, and Mary felt every muscle tighten. This was the Doctor. She could tell little about him at this distance except that he was tall and lean to the edge of emaciation; that he had long, gray hair fine enough to blow back from his face with his vigorous strides; that his beard fell nearly to his waist. What convinced her that he was the Doctor was the reaction of the Flock. They moved as one toward him, but didn’t envelop him as they had Luke. They left him a little space, and in that space he and Luke met and embraced.
They talked for a while, and finally Luke, then the Doctor, then the rest of the Flock, turned to look at Mary. Soon they all began moving in her direction, the Doctor, with Luke at his side, in the lead. She stood fast, her heart pounding, until Luke motioned her to come forward.
She did, and when she was about twenty feet away, the Doctor stopped. Luke and the Flock took their cue from him and also stopped. They were silent. Over fifty people, and the only sound she heard was the fretful crying of the baby. She was the focal point of every eye, and she read in them a spectrum of hope, suspicion, doubt, amazement, and curiosity. But it was the Doctor who held her attention as she approached him. And to see the Doctor and Luke side by side was to see Luke in the present and in the future. The long, narrow faces were cast of the same mold, the deep-set eyes were of the same color, and there was in the Doctor’s gray hair and beard a sandy cast that hinted that he had once been as copper-haired as Luke was now.