Back to the Garden

by Clara Hume

  "Leo, let's go over to help Maisie find her past if we can," I heard my lover whisper to me.

  We stood at the tree that owned itself and were ready to die from the heat. But the house was apparently only a couple blocks away, if Maisie remembered right.

  We followed Maisie and Caine, who walked hand-in-hand, and Fran grabbed my hand too and walked resolutely with me. We left the others at the wagon; they would drive behind us.

  Fran's little hand felt sweaty in my own, but it was good having her by my side. How big her brightness had loomed on that Idaho mountain, yet how silent she had become the last few weeks, among so many other people whose lives were as big as her own.

  We walked as a group down the cobblestone drive. Trees rustled around us, while the sun dripped overhead. On one side of the road rose a dirty bank leading way to nothing but trees and weeds; it smelled heavily of earth. On the other side, said Maisie, was where her Mammaw Grace and her mother had been born and raised. South Finley Street. We didn't see another soul, just a few homes scattered amongst the southern foliage—houses that might have once been solid but now had hanging shingles, weedy pathways, and sagging porches, with only a few artifices left behind. Finally we came across one that held a hint of Queen Anne style delicacy, though it wasn't a Victorian, being only one story with a wraparound porch.

  "This is it," said Maisie.

  A torn curtain hung out a glassless window. Didn't seem to be anyone at home here. But Maisie ran up the steps to the porch, nostalgically touched an old lime-colored settee next to a spittoon, and ran inside yelling, "Mama? Mammaw?"

  The front door was hanging on a hinge, but Maisie ignored it. As I watched Caine walk quickly in behind her, we could hear Maisie's voice echo throughout the house. We slowly filed in behind, noting complete disarray—torn-up orange shag carpet in the living room, ripped drapery, toppled furniture, a rat scurrying along the wall and then disappearing.

  Maisie opened all the closets and turned toward a middle bedroom door, which led to a stairwell cellar. She climbed down two steps at a time, enough ambient light from the curtainless windows in the room above leading her way.

  But nothing was there. And that's when Maisie said, "No way. I can't believe they aren't here."

  Caine held her as she cried softly, but soon she struggled back to herself and began to search drawers and tabletops for notes, mementos, anything to show that her mother had even made it here. In the meantime, Caine said he'd go look for neighbors. "I'll see if I can find anyone who could tell us anything," he promised Maisie, who nodded red-eyed.

  In the meantime I whispered to Fran, "How long ago did her mother come down this way?"

  "I think about the same time as my momma," Fran whispered. "I hope I don't find this kind of thing when I get to Beaufort."

  "Don't worry now, Fran. We'll take it as it comes," I said.

  Buddha and the rest pulled up in the wagon, and Caine remained gone for another half an hour before walking back to the house with a tiny, ancient black woman named Laura Hunt, who said she had lived in the neighborhood for half a century.

  "Says she saw your mom and her mama a couple years ago, but old Grace died and your mama left to go back to Silver City."

  Maisie collapsed on the old sofa in the living room. She hung down her head to cry, but no more tears came, just jerks and shrinking animal-like sounds. Caine and Laura flanked her on either side. The old woman rubbed her hand and said, "You don't know, honey, maybe she's still alive."

  Caine massaged Maisie's back.

  But in the end, there was nothing to do here except try to figure out from Laura when Katherine Segal, Maisie's mom, might have left and what route she might have taken. Unfortunately, the old woman knew nothing.

  We were now settling into the late afternoon when we should have been getting on down the road, but it looked like we'd stick around for a while, in the least so Maisie could begin to emotionally bury her lost loved ones and maybe even find out if any other surviving neighbors had talked to her mother before she took off.

  Fran and I went into the kitchen to see what we could find to make for supper. A canister of flour sat on a dusty checkered countertop, but the flour was ruined with weevils. Dented and rusted cans stood upright in a cockroach-infested cabinet, so we just figured we'd go make a bonfire outside near the front porch and cook food we had with us in the wagon. Fran decided she'd heat up some broth and mix in spices and veggies with it.

  "How you doin, babe," I asked her out on the porch, as she mixed the soup in a kettle. I started a fire with porch planks and kindling from the treeline across the road.

  "Well, to be quite honest, I haven't felt very good lately. Only, I'm quite convinced it isn't the flu, as whatever it is has been with me for a couple months and the flu wouldn't last that long."

  "Pregnant?" I asked.

  Fran turned away abruptly, as if I'd slapped her.

  "Well?" I finally asked. I had only been joking. I could tell by her reaction that I might be right and this was no joke, nor time for anything less than serious. Time seemed to freeze. I forgot about dinner.

  "Yes, Leo. I think I am." Her voice was whimsical.

  She still wasn't looking at me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and hugged her from behind. "Really, baby?"

  "I didn't try to," she informed me, still not looking at me.

  "It's not a disaster," I warned her, smiling. In fact, I was tickled. I added, "I'd be happy about it if it's true. But if it is, I think the sooner we get back to the mountain, the better, don't you?"

  Fran ripped herself away from me and just ran down the road. I figured I should let her be, but was unsure why she couldn't share this with me happily. I followed her, even though I knew her way of dealing with things was to figure stuff out by herself. Therefore, she had to run away from me. I remained at a distance but kept her within my sight.

  She rounded a corner, and I noticed that this pocket of the neighborhood looked like a tornado or hurricane had hit it. Trees fallen, buildings crumbled, nobody sitting on porches here either—the homes themselves barely standing. I watched Fran from a distance. She was wearing one of her cotton skirts and a mid-drift. Her skin was dark and her hair golden. Her thin, graceful being could be in a movie, I thought. I pondered back on my acting days and remembered how a heroine often became a central beauty in windswept, war-torn landscape, and I saw how she could fit that bill. A heroine might have a secret, some drama kept inside, and she was no different right now.

  Hot damn, I thought. I am going to be a father. And she is my cohort in all this. I was hiding best I could behind a latticed archway over a path to a great old southern home—a house that was now just a frame with dead flowers out front. The archway itself was somewhat collapsed.

  Fran slowed down eventually. She stopped to look around in a gas station. She still didn't notice me, even though I could see myself standing there like a fool with a puzzled look, trying to figure her out. I hid well, and she walked further for blocks. I think she was probably lost in thought. She didn't act afraid of this strange land, and as I followed her, I wished I had brought a gun, but I hadn't planned on this. At all.

  In a few more blocks, she dipped inside a store that didn't seem completely torn apart, and I let her be. I waited out front, hidden still. I was getting bored, wondering what she was up to. Maybe she was having cravings.

  I thought of when we might have conceived of this life, and figured it had to be less than four months prior, because she wasn't showing yet. I couldn't figure when she had gotten pregnant. Anywhere from Idaho to on our trip recently, I figured.

  Each time we'd made love had been like a dream to me. Meeting Fran to begin with had always been surreal, like I was walking around in a fog. Yet, she was my new best friend, and our relationship had cemented given that we had so many pragmatics to work on day in and day out. How to eat, how to find water. When it came time to be alone, we slipped into another world.

  Fran finally cam
e out of the store and ambled back down the road with a bag in her hand. I couldn't take it anymore and shot out of my hiding place and ran right to her and said, "Please don't run off like that. I was so worried."

  She shyly smiled up at me and said, "I just had to think."

  "About what?"

  "Well, kinda about bringing a baby into this world that hardly has a hope," she said.

  "If anyone can do this, you and I can."

  She looked at me with true relief in her eyes, and even though I was scared, I felt like I had said the right thing.

  "What's in the bag?"

  She grinned mischievously and said for me to follow her. We walked back over to the house on South Finley, and Fran opened the bag to reveal the goods.

  "I felt like any minute now there would be a zombie poking its head around the corner," Fran said. "It was one of those strange places, where the sun crept in through dirty windows. Anyway, the store shelves were messy. Not much left there. But I had to use the bathroom and walked to the back of the store, where there was a stock room that hadn't been touched. Oddest thing. It was locked with a padlock, but nothing I couldn't bust open."

  Her burlap sack contained batteries, chocolates, peanuts (though some were wormy), a flashlight, matches, and some ancient bottled water. The chocolate had melted several times over throughout who knows how many years, but it was still a treat to us. We decided to come back and get everything else in the padlocked closet before leaving town.

  The others came out to view the new treasures, and in the background a kettle of soup simmered over the makeshift fire.

  Later I felt Fran's stomach with my hand, and of course she was still tiny and there was no visible movement from our child inside, but I awed in wonder that there was a new life within her right now that was part of both of us. Fran shifted as if to get away and said, "I really want chocolate. You wouldn't believe how much."

  I laughed.

  It was after dusk now, after we ate and made camp outside Maisie's mammaw's old house. I brought out my guitar and we sang old songs almost all night. I figured we were here for a few days.

  Caine had not found any other neighbors around to ask whether they'd known or seen Katherine. He observed Maisie all night, and though she had been sad, she dug out some black rum from the house's cellar. Fran was bummed she couldn't have any rum now but ate some chocolate with Buddha, and all seemed to be right in their world.

  Old Laura Hunt joined us, and as time wore on and the firelight licked the endless night of zombie-nightmare, tornado-torn, heated Athens where a tree that owned itself was dying down the road, we sang songs and drank into the sunrise. I kept taking requests as I played the guitar, and we tried to remember songs. We had known of music in the digital age, but what had really persisted was the music our folks had sung to us from their memories of their parents singing to them, and so on.

  Laura's bony fingers tapped the porch railings rhythmically while we sang folk music. She grinned toothlessly while sipping shots of rum with the rest of us. Her facial expression was expressive with gleeful rejuvenation. It must have been refreshing for her to find people come through this vacant city. Her movement bounced in the firelight.

  Fran was high on chocolate and trying to pull herself together. She was looking shyly at me too, and I wondered if every day of our future would be filled with such discovery.

  I was getting drunk and sang about a robin's eggs and poetry. At some point in the night, Maisie, who had drank more than anyone, jumped up from her tacit seat on the porch steps and said it was time to leave.

  "My mom's gone. My mammaw's gone."

  She instructed Laura to tell anyone who might know anything, to tell them we were headed toward Beaufort and then back to Sandpoint, Idaho.

  "Don't leave me yet," said Laura. It seemed to be the first fun night of her life, and we agreed to stay with her and also figured Maisie would change her mind about leaving immediately once she sobered up. Caine took Maisie over to the wagon so she could sleep it off. Daniel and Elena retired early with their child. But the rest stayed up, including Fran.

  I played the guitar loudly through the night and into the morning. It didn't matter. Nobody was around to complain. Buddha had a look of intent satisfaction on his burly face the whole night.

  We stayed with Laura for one more day and night. She was tempted to come east with us but instead decided to stay home. Home, she said, was not always where you wanted it to be. Sometimes it was where your roots were instead of your branches.

  Elena—Chapter 23

  I lost track of days. My breastmilk was drying up too, and we had to figure out how to purify the water as best as we could for Kristy's sake. I had plenty of dried milk powder, and we'd brought along some calcium hypochlorite to kill bacteria. This life on the road had been hard on our little family. But Daniel took me aside on one particularly hot and frustrating day and said, "Darling, if we survive this, we can survive anything."

  "We survived Cameron," I reminded him. And then I said, "We have to go back to the mountain, Daniel." I didn't want to sit around in Beaufort long either, even if we found my dad. I wanted to be back up to Sandpoint by this fall.

  He agreed with me and thought that the rest were probably thinking the same thing.

  I asked Fran, and she said, "Hell, yes. I want to go back too, as soon as we can." She also had been tired and sick and found it hard to carry on day after day.

  We now saw how much our world had changed. We'd felt it up on Wild Mountain too, but nothing like down in the deserts. Even the plains were turning dryer, and we'd heard via Joe's radio occasional reports that the Great Lakes were slowly diminishing as well.

  When younger, I had imagined a gigantic, robotic oil machine stomping over woodlands and seas, spilling its lifeblood and ruining everything in its path. The robot wore a collar and leash, and industry leaders pulled it along. They marched over slushy water in the Arctic where sea ice had once been and stopped the robot in order to plant a new oil flag for more deep-sea drilling.

  I wondered if we were going to unintentionally create another nation of greed someday, and sometimes I looked around at Daniel and our daughter, and our friends, and questioned if we had it in us to ruin the Earth and destroy people who kept it close to their hearts in a sacred way. Fran and I had often talked of how our fathers had created laws for the mountain in order to prevent environmental disasters from happening in the future—if we even survived the future.

  Mother died when I was a little girl, and I remember during one of her last days, she took my hand and said that I should always seek to find the truth. "If there's another great society someday," she had said, "Listen to your leader and read your history books. If your leader tries to tell you the planet's resources are there for you to abuse, you turn your pages back in time and see what happened. To the rainforests, to the fisheries, to the air we breathe, to the oceans. In the Americas, they had vast misinformation spread throughout the land. Oh, they knew what was happening. It seems to me a final hoarding of wealth ensured a few people temporary safety before it all fell apart."

  She would go on rants like that between fits of coughing, and I didn't say much of anything at all.

  Instead of ranting, I wrote stories or sewed clothing for my friends and family. My escape was reading and dreaming of clean water. I thought of Melville's spirit-spout. I cried when I realized these things wouldn't be seen in my lifetime.

  Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and rem
orse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

  Now as our wagon rolled on through the dry, empty, cloudless roads, we came across endless and mindless death—people and horses and cows—sometimes stabbed or shot or strangled, some having died naturally with their guts hanging out and with buzzards and flies circling overhead, I'd think to myself, could it have been different? Was my crowd of friends capable of such future devastation? Would our children and grandchildren get a bad seed and not do the right things?

  I often broke down crying when nobody else was looking, which was hard since we were often staring at each other through the sweltering, dim insides of that wagon. I thought of our precious planet that may take thousands of years to recover. I thought of our own ephemeral existence and the death that had affected all of us in our lifetimes. Our parents, our children, sometimes our brothers and sisters and great friends.

  I could hear my mother's whispers to me at times, like during those dog-day afternoons on her deathbed, which was just a small room in our cabin up on the mountain.

  I forgot about her often, too, because I was so young when she died, but Daddy, he was a different story. He was always a providing father, but became a lonely man after she died. Fran's parents saved him in many ways, and after Fran's father died, we suspected our surviving parents had turned to each other in intimacy, but we couldn't prove it.

  As soon as Mrs. Herrera, Fran's mother, stated she wanted to visit her sister, it didn't take but a few hours for my father to help her plan the trip and then go with her. Maybe they had decided to start a new life together, in a place that one of them still could call home. Fran and I could never prove anything, though, so we stuck with the story that our parents had just gone off together because they were great friends and there was no way my dad would let her mother go alone.

  At least my father told me good bye.

  Fran's relationship with her mother was not as close as it could have been. Barbara, her mother, was a fussy, loud, and boisterous woman, often going on about trivialities. Fran had taken after her more laid-back and observant father, and instead of becoming a cute socialite, as her mother had been in her prime, Fran had grown into the new world as an isolated being, one ruled only by her own judgments. When her dad died, she began going off on her own for days at a time, always riding her horse out to who knows where, and she'd return later looking like a madwomen with her hair full of briars and mud caking her skin. Her mother would screech and draw a bath, and lecture to no end, and in the meantime Fran would stare off into the distance, usually out a window, in her own little world while occasionally saying, "It's okay, Mom. I know this mountain. I was fine. I am fine."