Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  “You off to hunt?” he asked in a low voice. The rest of the family was still sleeping.

  Grey nodded. They had salted and smoked the meat of four deer, but winters were long. He and his father had decided one more would be enough.

  Outside it was still dark and the brown fall weeds gleamed with bright frost. Overhead the endless clouds and smoke flared and glowed, muttering as meteors died. Grey watched for a while as his body shivered, heating up. He thought there weren’t as many big ones - had been less for some time - at least judging by the absence of the tooth-rattling booms the largest ones trailed.

  He pulled up his parka’s hood and shouldered his father’s deer rifle, moving out to the logging road that passed the cabin’s weedy quarter-mile drive. He stepped over the downed trees his father had pulled across the road. The Willy’s was hidden behind the cabin, under a gray tarp, and its tracks had long since faded.

  His mother and father argued sometimes. She was an optimist, Grey thought. She assumed the government would have to start putting things back together - that people would find a way to save it all. His father smiled but shook his head, told her they’d wait and see. In his world it was always easier to break than to make, and he didn’t expect much from people. Grey wanted to believe in his mother’s hope. And sometimes he could, just before falling asleep.

  The young man followed the logging road for almost an hour. It was beginning to get light enough to see when he turned aside and climbed the shoulder of a low hill. Below was the brushy regrowth of an old clear cut. Saskatoon berry bushes, alders and young aspens competed with spindly lodgepole pine. The ground was a leg-breaking crisscross of old treetops and poles left by loggers after the best trees had been cut and hauled. Old roads crisscrossed the cut, their borders thick with the low brush deer liked to feed on. Grey settled on the hill, rested the rifle over a stump, and waited.

  The first birds began their chorus as he sat, shivering. Fifteen minutes later a pair of chipmunks emerged to dart along the fallen trees, tails flagging as they chirred at each other. The frost had nearly gone when a trio of deer - two does leading a fork buck - paused in the tree line on the far side of the cut. Grey moved as slowly as he could, dropping his cheek to the rifle stock and slowly swinging the weapon until he could see the deer through the scope. The varnished wood of the stock felt like ice against his face.

  His father had impressed on him the importance of not wasting what ammunition they had, so he waited for the deer. He knew he could probably hit one, but the distance was perhaps three hundred yards. Slowly, heads up and ears cocked forward, the deer moved deeper into the cut. Grey steadied his breathing and waited.

  Before the deer had closed the gap, the lead doe cocked her head, looking off to her left. The others followed suit, standing stock still. A second later all three were gone, the flare of their white tails flashing an alarm through the shadows under the trees.

  Grey was wondering what had spooked the deer when the sharp crack of a gun echoed through the morning. Several more followed, some in a rattle, one shot atop another.

  He ran all the way, but it was finished long before he reached a hilltop overlooking the cabin. The bodies had been dragged out and dumped off the little slate steppingstone path his father had made a few years before, when they’d camped here during summer vacation. It led from the cabin to the seep-spring that supplied the sweetest water Grey had ever tasted.

  In the morning light the blood was so red.

  Grey could see four men, all armed. He steadied the rifle against a tree and tried to find the first, but his eyes were blurred and the gun shook too badly. He lowered the rifle and took shuddering breaths, listening to the low keening he was making with a chilly corner of his mind.

  Two more men came out of the cabin, and began piling up the canned goods and the venison. Two of the others left, but came back in ten minutes with a pair of mules. They began loading the food.

  “Our food,” Grey hitched, teeth clenched. He wiped his nose with his parka sleeve, leaving a silver trail of snot. “That’s our food.”

  He watched through the day as the men stripped the cabin of what they wanted, and something very cold began to grown in his chest. He welcomed it. It burnt, but it felt much better than the terrified sorrow that lay beneath it. It grew heavier as time passed and finally pressed the urge to sob down, burying it deep.

  He waited to see if the men would stay at the cabin, or go to a camp elsewhere. He had something to do. He held that thought and let nothing else intrude. He had something important to do, and he had to do it right.

  “Jesus, wake up,” Josie muttered, elbowing him until he did.

  “What?” Grey blinked, rubbed his eyes. It was nearly morning.

  “You’re having some kind of nightmare and kicking the shit out of me. I think your toenails peeled all the skin off my shin.” She poked a finger into Grey’s chest, making him yelp.

  “Ah. Sorry,” Grey muttered, rising. “Chicory?”

  “In the big jar. If you make some I’ll forgive you for the beating.” Josie sat up, pulled the blankets around her and shivered. “You were mumbling about ‘something to do’?”

  Grey measured out a small handful of dried chicory roots, dropped them in Josie’s old blue coffeepot and started to build up the fire in the stove.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Grey left the Port at sunrise, after a few quick trades, the best of which was a bag full of .270 cartridge cases for a gold ring and a tin of Bayer aspirin. The trader, one of the Sikhs who had settled here a century ago, let Grey know he was in the market for deer or elk horns for his brother, a knife-maker. Grey promised to bring some in the next time he visited.

  Grey skirted the shore, keeping watch on the buildings as he made his way to the bridge. A few faces peered out of glassless windows, pale blurs against the darkness behind, but he met no one. Seagulls and crows moved from their rookeries to the beach, squabbling over flotsam and fish guts. The breeze off the lake was sweet; it pushed the stink of the squatters deeper into the ruins.

  The bridge lay straight and level across three fifths of the lake, rising at its far end into an arch that allowed sailboats to pass beneath. It was nearly a half-mile long. Old timers told Grey there had once been a floating bridge. How a bridge could float he had no idea, but this one was set on massive pilings and had survived the years with little decay. A few potholes scarred the paving of the deck, and the disintegrating heaps of rusting cars stained the concrete red-orange, but that was it.

  Grey stayed in the leftmost lane, walking steadily. Years back some enterprising thugs had tried to set up a roadblock on the bridge’s arch. They’d started demanding tolls while offering “protection”. Their handiwork was long gone, only a few pockmarks and dark smears of lead on the concrete side rails marked their mistake. The traders and locals had simply gotten together one night and removed the issue.

  From the crest of the arch, Grey scanned the route of the old highway as it curved up and around the rocky bluff ahead. A horse cart was headed slowly down, the carter leaning on the brake lever, and Grey slung his rifle before approaching. Their paths met where the bridge ended.

  The carter was a ruddy-faced man, wearing canvas pants and a homemade leather jacket, neither old nor young. They exchanged greetings and a few meaningless pleasantries. Grey asked of strangers, and the carter shook his head, but promised to keep an eye out. When they parted, Grey took a sweet-fleshed pear with him as a gift.

  By noon the pear was a memory and Grey was ten miles north on the west side of the lake, climbing a rutted road to a grassy plateau. Pausing to catch his breath at the crest, he scanned the blue water far below, marking the scattered boats of the fishers, with sails like tiny shark’s teeth. Threads of smoke rose here and there from scattered communities and lone homesteads. Below Grey, moving swiftly, was a great V of geese, heading south along the lake.

  After a drink from a water bottle and a bit of jerky, G
rey continued on. He reached Maggie’s by early afternoon.

  The ranch, with its gate, looked perfectly at home on the sun-bleached grassland, with the far peaks high and blue behind. Horses ran in small herds across the miles of the ranch’s grazing lands and far off, where the dark triangles of spruce trees began to dot the grassland, Grey could see cattle.

  The ranch itself was a cluster of eight buildings; all log structures and all over a century old. The roofs had been freshly shaked and glowed with the red-silver gleam of cedar. A rider met Grey several hundred yards from the buildings, cantering up on a blanket appaloosa.

  “You’re on Maggie’s land, Mister. You got reason to be?” the rider asked. He was young, with the scant beard of a teenager. An old rifle boot was tied to his saddle, and one hand rested on the butt of a long gun that protruded from it. Grey looked at him, keeping his own hands visible, thumbs hooked into his belt.

  “You’re new,” Grey offered after a moment.

  “Whether I am or not, I know my job.”

  Grey smiled and the rider flushed.

  “That’s not bad. You might consider starting off with a ‘good afternoon’ though, just because it softens folk up when you’re polite. They’ll listen a lot better to what you have to say.”

  A second rider was trotting up, and the first - neck now scarlet - spared him a glance before looking back to Grey, who interrupted whatever he was about to respond with.

  “I’m just pulling your chain, son. Maggie knows me even if you don’t.” Grey looked to the approaching rider and nodded.

  “Clay, your horse is still ugly,” he called.

  “Fuck you too. Must be Grey,” Clay drawled. Clay was a transplant who’d drifted north six years before, and who claimed to be from Texas. Grey thought he might be telling the truth, which was impressive, given that the cartels owned much of the southwest and a trip across their territories would have been exciting, to say the least.

  “I see you still have that damn Stetson, Clay. Where the hell do you find those anymore?”

  “Trade secret,” Clay deadpanned, settling his hat more firmly. “I don’t have your sense of style,” he added, eyeing the ratty wool toque that Grey wore.

  The younger rider turned his horse without a word and cantered back toward the ranch house. Clay watched, eyes twinkling.

  “Did you twist young Ronald’s tail?”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Grey said, eyeing the retreating teen. “Ronald? Really?”

  “He’s a good kid, just young and prone to foolishness. You must want Maggie, since we’re months ahead of your usual cabin-fever expedition to come eat all our biscuits and try to sell us something we didn’t know we needed.”

  Grey nodded. “I need to ask a favor.”

  Clay blinked. “Well, that’s new. She’s out on the top with the cattle, but you can twist her ear over supper.”

  “That would be fine, thank you.”

  Maggie Thursby was short and wide and tough. She’d raised six sons and three daughters, about half of which she’d picked up as strays from the ruins. She had consolidated the remaining small-ranch herds throughout the valley into her own over the past decade and controlled much of beef supply in the region. She heard Grey out after dinner, sipping a huckleberry cordial. Clay and Maggie’s foreman, a hulking man called Badger, listened as well. When Grey finished, Maggie leaned back, pursed her lips and looked up at the oil lamp that hung over the dining table.

  “Since I’m thick, let me sum up and make it simple,” she began in her booming voice. After years of yelling at children and cowboys, Maggie’s volume always seemed to be stuck near maximum.

  “One: We had raiders in the valley,” Maggie ticked off each point on a finger. “Two, they’re gone now, after scouting and killing at least three, and third – you have proof they mean to come back.”

  “That’s it.”

  “So what’s your favor?”

  “I need fast riders who can cover the valley and get the word out. From north to south, and let people know there’s a meeting next month so they can decide what to do,” Grey said.

  Maggie dropped her gaze to Grey and cocked her head to one side.

  “So they can?” Maggie grinned without humor. “You know it’s going to be a handful of people who decide this. You’re one of them, and so am I.”

  “Not me,” Grey said. “I’m a trapper. I don’t have land or family, and I don’t have a dog in this fight.”

  “Stop with the bullshit, Grey. I’m too old and you’re too smart. Your word matters in this valley.”

  Grey opened his mouth then closed it, shaking his head. “People need to know,” he said.

  “Then we can all feel better when we have to count the bodies, since everyone was involved?” Maggie asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes. In the end, yes. That’s why,” Grey said, flushing. His brow furrowed, and his hands gripped the table edge hard enough that his fingertips went white. “Even if it is you, and me, and Doc, and the trader council at the Port that really decide this, people have to feel like they’re a part of it, or they’ll break and run. Either before the killing, or after.”

  “There you go Grey, that’s better,” Maggie said in her sweetest voice. “You’re an honest sort, for a man with no past. But you have a hard time taking responsibility. I wonder why that is?” She rose, offering the men a goodnight.

  “I’ll send the boys out. You decide what they ought to say,” she said over her shoulder as she left.

  Badger and Clay exchanged glances.

  “She likes to get to me,” Grey muttered, releasing the table and rubbing his fingers.

  “She likes her truth direct,” Clay offered. Badger nodded.

  “Sometimes the truth doesn’t help anything,” Grey said. No one offered anything to this, and Grey excused himself to the bunkhouse for the night.

  Chapter 4: Revival

  The church was a survivor from the valley’s early days; a mission-style stone chapel with attached rectory and a long low building that had once served as classroom where indigenous children, some taken forcibly from their families, were taught about a new white God. Jesuits had built the original and its bell tower overlooked the width of the valley. It had been repaired and rebuilt seventy-five years later as a historic site, and now the wheel had come full circle and Saint Augustine’s was again an active place of worship and education.

  Grey liked the old church, nearly as much as he disliked its resident preacher.

  The church was overseen by Archibald Dove, known to the valley as The Reverend, as there were no others. Dove’s history was vague. He knew his Bible - Old more than New, some said. He wore an oft-patched black coat with collar. He had the lean, unforgiving face one associated with prophets or hangmen, and that gave his sermons a certain threatening weight. Where he’d come from, and why, remained well-worn bits of gossip with no answer.

  Grey had left the organizing of the meeting to Josie, and stayed clear of the church until the day dawned.

  People came on horseback, in carts, in converted garden trailers yoked to ponies, on a few aging bicycles and on foot, both overland and from the Port. Most families who lived near the lake kept a sailboat, rowboat or canoe. With the church just a few miles from the Port, most arrived by water and walked the remaining distance.

  Grey tried to take a headcount, but the crowd milled about until he gave up. A carnival atmosphere pervaded the meeting, with people seeing acquaintances they rarely saw, and farmers and traders making off-the-cuff deals. Children were everywhere, running and shouting, pursued by yipping, tumbling packs of dogs. Trappers and hunters talked business with fishers and scavengers. Hillman, the Port dentist, was peering intently into a bearded man’s mouth and shaking his head. Josie followed Big Tom through the mix, giving Grey a nod.

  Tom had dressed for the occasion, digging up a grey suit from somewhere and smoking a hand rolled cigar.

  Doc eased out of the crowd to stand at Grey
’s shoulder. He followed his gaze and chuckled.

  “Ah, our Tom. He’s always got to dress for success,” Doc observed.

  “Yeah. I wonder which way he’ll jump?”

  Doc shrugged. “A bunch of murderers is bad for business, so he’ll want to do something?”

  “I hope. He’s a politician, so he’ll find an angle. If not right now, then later.”

  Doc shivered. Despite the sun, it was barely above freezing. The sun had just cleared the encircling mountains, though it was nearly ten o’clock. Grey nodded toward the church and started off. Doc followed.

  Inside it was warmer, with the heat of the building’s wood furnace intensified by the body-heat of a hundred locals settling in the long pine pews. The church’s interior was lit by a wash of color from the stained glass behind the pulpit, and the narrow windows piercing each sidewall above head height. Foot-thick wooden supports walked in a double row the length of the building, the pews clustered between. The scuff and rumble of boots on the floorboards was constant and the air was thick with the pungent smells of sweat, leather, tobacco and pot.

  Some of those attending were openly armed, but no more than usual, Grey thought.

  Reverend Dove stood just below the pulpit, his hands clasped behind his back, his head down. He remained, unmoving, as the crowd gradually took its seats. Doc pulled Grey to the front left pew and sat down.

  The crowd quieted on its own, eyes going to the figure silhouetted against the great round window, imposing in his austere black and in his immobility. Voices dropped to whispers and the scuff and rumble of footsteps died out.

  Dove raised his narrow face and his voice boomed through the church, with the rolling, practiced tones of a professional speaker.

  “Friends and neighbors. Welcome.” There was a smattering of responses, and Dove nodded distantly. “I am pleased so many could come and attend our meeting this day, and I hope to see some of the new faces attending the church come Sunday.” There were a few snickers, a few agreements and a few obscenities.