Tarry This Night

by Kristyn Dunnion

  “You have never known the earth, topside, where Satan reigns. Where dim-witted government heretics revel in depravity. You were born inside our sacred nest, or else brought below as babes. But I know better. As do your mothers.”

  “Heresy and murder, mayhem and destruction, that which lies above. Amen,” they say.

  Father Ernst paces the length of the table. “We lived in that contaminated world and tilled the soil, harvested and stored the grain. We dug this refuge, poured the concrete, planned our survival. We worked alongside so many Martyrs in the Great Standoff. We bunkered our faith and sealed shut the doors to temptation.”

  Cousins sing, “Forty hands high, the roof. Forty hands wide!”

  Father Ernst is on track now; he is bringing it home. “We guard the Doctrine!”

  Silas shouts, “We guard the Light!”

  Father Ernst says, “We are God’s glory!”

  Silas shouts, “We are the Light!”

  Thunder: little feet kick, hands drum the table top, and the Family begins to sing:

  “Raise thee, praise thee, upward shall we climb,

  Though Satan’s pow’r has but an hour and ours eternal shine.

  Raise thee, praise thee, upward shall we climb.

  Our Father’s will protects us still and leads us topside time.”

  Voices fill the Great Hall. Mother Susan’s scratchy soprano floats above, and every now and then thin, crackling notes make themselves known in tuneless wonder—Cousin Silas—otherwise it’s an excellent rendition of the Ascension Song. Cousins clap. Blood pumps, skin warms, and vibrations of their joy shimmy fine dust in the air from joints in the support beams, from the trusses and rebar above. The children’s faces redden and shine, and tiny veins stick out on their necks. Music is their God gift; the black cloud of sin dissipates, the Devil in exile.

  Father Ernst bangs the table, triumphant. “This is the Word and the Law. Time for Doctrine Studies, children,” he says, dismissing them with a wave.

  “Cousin Hannah, a word.” He strides to unlock his chamber door and she comes to him. She comes with her sly smile and small, hungry hands.

  CHAPTER 3

  Susan watches Ernst, back to his usual commanding self. Hannah—the swagger of being chosen, of holding the man’s desire. The girl always struts. Shoulders back and small chest raised, she thrusts from the hips as though wading upstream.

  Once, about a year ago, midway through Devotions, Hannah faltered. Air whooshed out of her, dragging an animal moan. She gathered her skirt and raised it high, showing grey socks, down-covered stick-shins, the large knobs of her knees, her worm-white thighs. Female parts exposed before the disbelieving circle. Her eyes rolled. Her head and shoulders shook. Foam spotted her lips. She thrust herself, gurgling and grotesque, toward Cousin Paul. Susan was the first to react, shouting, “Hie thee!” The boy ran. Susan and Rebekah dragged Hannah to the infirmary where she convulsed, then lay still, the rage come upon her and gone at last, Satan having rushed right through. How pale, how queerly quiet she was for days until Susan bade Father visit. It shocked her that he would mount a girl in that condition. But hymns were sung for their union. Hannah was draped in the marriage shawl and thusly named a wife. Ernst has scarcely bothered Susan or Rebekah since that night, to their private relief.

  “Shoo,” Susan says to the children. She proceeds to wipe the long table, the benches, and then to fetch the straw broom from the kitchen corner to sweep the floor. Rebekah makes a half-hearted gesture to take the broom and Susan clucks her teeth. May as well keep at her interminable sewing. No one else is so adept. Other than working her quilt incessantly, as she’s done for weeks now, Rebekah’s been little use all day. Ruth also mopes, now that Paul is gone. It’s a disgrace.

  Susan begins on the far side nearest Father’s chambers, sweeping in long strokes away from the walls, piling the debris right in front of his door. She leans heavily against it while she stoops to brush the dirt into the dustpan. Inside, the girl murmurs something, her fairy laugh teases. That insipid voice. How Ernst can take it, Susan doesn’t know. There. His chest-deep rumble, a kind of sigh. Susan pictures him: eyes closing, mouth opening, the pink of his tongue parting the wiry moustache. It has been a very long time, but Susan remembers the prickle and itch of that long beard against her skin. She would rash up, especially along the neck, and those hives had their own telling, their own kind of pride and shame.

  For a while she herself was his first choice, despite her clubfoot, her bent back. She was a seventeen-year-old runaway when Memaw Ruth and Mother Deborah, God rest them both, found her hiding out in the gas station restroom attached to the diner on I-75, trying to ditch her lunch bill. They were driving back from the city, had stopped to fill the tank, and if it weren’t for Deborah’s delicate stomach, they might have never met. God Himself only knows what would have become of Susan. How kind was Memaw Ruth, holding Susan’s dirty chin between those soft fingers and seeing her, seeing everything—the backpack, the hurts, the fear in her eyes.

  “Come,” she had said. “We have a farm. You’ll work for your bed and board, but only doing what suits you, no more and no less than anyone else. You’ll come to church. But you can leave whenever you like. I promise, you’ll be let alone.” As she spoke, Memaw Ruth wetted a paper towel and wiped at Susan’s face, the grime and sweat, the dried ketchup at the corners of her mouth.

  A peculiar sensation—Susan’s insides heating and shifting unexpectedly, the swell catching at the back of her throat. At first she suspected the meatloaf sandwich was off, that she would pay in other ways for thieving. But this unfamiliar feeling did not vanish in the coming weeks. It would subside then flourish again whenever Memaw was near. Susan never spoke that first day, only nodded, and waited while the women conferred with a solemn, handsome man. It was settled. Father Ernst paid Susan’s lunch bill, and she climbed into the back of their Chevrolet pickup and off they drove, to her new home.

  Still sweeping, Susan fans out toward the table. The children are down in the empty bunkroom, now a classroom, their voices contained by the concrete walls. She likes being alone; it’s rare. More space to think and not think without their fuss. She has to go back near Father Ernst’s door for the dustpan, and as she bends she hears sounds like a bird cooing, a rising insistence, that babydoll voice gasping, and Ernst extolling great effort, grunting, grunting, and a strangled shout: release.

  Susan has heard this all before, of course. Ernst has become louder but is otherwise much the same. It’s Hannah that confuses her—what is the point in pretending? The girl couldn’t really like it, could she?

  Susan didn’t mind obliging Father Ernst. He had been good to her. But she would not say she ever looked forward to it. Memaw was the one she loved. Memaw gifted her orthopaedic shoes to help correct her damaged foot. Urged her to take calcium supplements and to practice spine-strengthening exercises. In the months following her arrival, Susan wore the heavy shoes on sunset walks along the ridge—a halting gait, the right always leading, the left dragging behind, hip resisting. Each step buoyed and lured her with apparitions of an unexpected future—Susan, tall and slim; Susan dancing with grace; Susan, pretty and friendly and liked. Normal, at last.

  Father Ernst began to appear regularly, often sitting beneath a gnarled apple tree that overlooked the valley, as good a place as any for her to rest and talk. Later, he nestled close and held her hand while he explained about his marriages, how the wives worked together and how the children were a Holy tribe, belonging to all of them equally. Later still, he talked about their vows and, eventually, one night he asked her to lie back and give herself to him the way his other wives did. Susan did so, silent, on the least lumpy piece of ground. She never mentioned her personal history of this same thing, never told him that she had been lying down for men since she was a child. Lying down, she had learned, was better than being knocked down. Her permanent injuries evidence.

  “I had to go slow with you,” Ernst once said. �
�I knew some of your great sorrows from that life before the Farm, and I wanted you to decide.”

  Had he truly known? If so, how dare he approach her at all?

  Susan sweeps with great momentum; she is raising the dust. Come to think on it, had she actually decided? Or had she merely permitted it—a different thing entirely.

  At the time, Memaw Ruth had her suspicions and oh so gently broached the topic. They were rolling pie pastry in the big kitchen, and Susan was nervous. Would Memaw be cross or jealous? Would their friendship be affected? She didn’t notice the tension creeping into her shoulders, but Memaw Ruth observed the stretch of the dough, the way Susan flattened one side into the counter without mercy, tearing it. Ruth’s lightly floured hand rested on Susan’s and she stopped working the pin.

  “I don’t begrudge Ernst taking another wife,” she said. “I can’t bear more children, and we’ve only the one daughter, my own Ruth. But I promised you’d be left alone here. I worry this is not what you truly want.”

  Susan said, “Oh, it don’t bother me much.”

  And Memaw said, “Susan, it should feel better than that, it should feel welcome.”

  Susan gaped in amazement. “Why would any woman welcome it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, the apples are bad for my backside. But pinecones, that’s where I draw the line.”

  Memaw stared, uncomprehending.

  “Father Ernst took me in the orchard until I asked otherwise, on account of the apples staining my dress. Now he likes it in the forest under the pines, but those cones hurt like a son of a gun.”

  Memaw coughed and smiled behind her hand, then tossed some flour at Susan, who blinked rapidly and barked a strange laugh. They looked away. Looked back. And they began to snort and hoot, and when one finally wound down, the other would crumble and the laughing start up again.

  How she loved Memaw, like no other.

  Despite that odious wifely chore, if anyone ever bothered to ask—and no one had, not before and not since Memaw—Susan knows what she would say. That Ernst was the first man to ask her opinion about anything. The first man to look her in the eyes and speak in quiet full sentences. The first to give and not just take, take. It counted for something. It counted for a lot.

  CHAPTER 4

  Paul crouches on the rise camouflaging the bunker entrance, rifle across his knees, facing what’s left of the compound. He runs his hand the length of the barrel, reacquainting himself with the Ruger Scout. It resides in Father Ernst’s locked chamber except for when Paul comes topside to hunt, same with the ammo. Wind pelts hot sand that stings his back through the coveralls. Even with the Desert Locust goggles, his eyes water from brightness. He’s a blind mole after being underground. He stays put a long time, adjusting. So long that his feet sink, and a warm ledge drifts against him. He is part of the landscape, hot and white. If he falls asleep, he’ll be buried alive.

  He slithers several feet to a gnarled shrub—big sagebrush—and curls in its fragrant shade. The marked temperature difference stays the perspiration that has begun to bead and run along his hairline under the rubber gas mask. He lifts binoculars and scans. It’s as though the entire farm has sunk, like Atlantis, since his last forage. Sand has drifted to banks that hug and obscure piles of debris, sloping and cresting, catching the sun. Like a photograph he once saw of the Arctic—only that was snow and glacial ice reflecting radiant light.

  Had it faced any other direction, the bunker entrance would be buried, the family inhumed. He should find a shovel. Keep it inside the first set of doors, in case.

  Eventually, he picks out the military fence lining their property. Homeland Security tape, pulled loose and knotted, flaps in places along the barricades, the only detectable movement. No guards. No soldiers. The outpost tower that the military constructed after the Standoff looks abandoned, tilted, a cenotaph leaning toward its own grave. The church is more or less the same—gutted. Blackened from a long-ago fire. The collapsed steeple blanketed. The main barn’s skeleton languishes; granary gone, roof caved in, main supports lurching toward one another like the ribs of an ancient whale. Deborah’s clapboard is gone, same with Mary’s. The original farmhouse, Memaw’s A-frame, is mostly levelled. A remnant of chimney reaches up from the rubble, a desperate brick hand. Cabins are brick piles and charred logs. Those buildings were picked clean a long time ago. All save the kill house which endures, squat and disquieting, at the edge of sand-whipped fields, gone to seed. He can take cover inside until evening, when the temperature drops. Its thick cement walls protect from heat. Once in, he’ll lose his sight advantage—no windows.

  Tonight he must venture across the sands. A vulture circles far off, near the forest. Trees mean water, soil, shade. But anyone could be camping out, making a pit stop. Humans are the thing to worry about now, especially revolutionaries, members of the rumoured underground coalition. They’d kill him on sight. Cousin Thomas spied several on missions, even tracked them through the forest. Likely how he met his demise. So Paul carries a knife and the long-range Ruger Scout. The magazine holds ten rounds, and there’s the box of ammo in his pocket. Gunshots will attract attention; there’s no telling who or what else would come sniffing around, but he can’t risk an injury fighting close. He’ll go either to that wooded glade, the outline of which he can discern through the glass, or veering slightly north, to the white cliff beyond. There he’d be able to survey: settlements, agriculture, military activity. Less chance of food, but he’d be able to find out what, if anything, is going on.

  Little Jericho River follows the base of the white cliff, winding its way to a deep pond where he and his father used to fish. Twilight used to bring all manner of animals to drink. He and his dad would harvest cattails. They boiled the rhizomes and stems, and steamed the leaves that tasted a lot like spinach. In early summer, they’d break off the spikes and eat them like corn-on-the-cob. Plus spindly stalks of wild asparagus, plantain, lamb’s quarter, and the curled tips of bracken—all delicious when steamed and sprinkled with salt. Farther in, a small marsh was home to a tiny, perfectly balanced universe: frogs on lily pads, snapping turtles, and long-legged hunting birds poised to strike. But on his last expedition, the river was dangerously low, dried to mud bed in places. Most of the plants gone. He had to dig in the outside bend like a burro to drink, and although the water that pooled through into the hole was naturally filtered by the soil, it was likely tainted with bacteria or microbes. He didn’t have any more purification tablets and hadn’t made a fire to boil the water before drinking. Probably what made him sick. He’d been too weak to climb the escarpment and had barely found enough food to sustain himself. Fish bellies broke the surface of the oversized puddle—all that remained of the lake. Hardpan extended beyond; he was able to scrape the salt crust to fill a sack, but it’s a wonder he made it back to the bunker.

  He might survive the trek to the cliff, but he’ll die if there is nothing left to nourish him.

  Or—and this is a wild thought—he could head in the opposite direction, to the city. Follow the highway. He could find the authorities, whoever is left. No doubt Father Ernst is still wanted for domestic terrorism, instigating the Standoff. Would they believe a scrawny young man? They might arrest or kill him instead, and then what? The Family would die. He pictures a SWAT team bursting the bunker doors, jogging the tunnel, surprising them mid-prayer. Shooting the whole lot. Children and women. His sister, whom he is sworn to protect. His lover.

  Drought has worsened, certainly. That began long before they went to ground. He remembers men hunched around the table, maps spread, Farmer’s Almanac so thumbed it could stand open on any page, tracing the desert spread with calloused fingers. California, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Arizona—those were a given. The central and southern plains succumbed as well; the Big Drought ravaged most of the country. Reservoirs were low, even in the Northeast, and precipitation fell so far below normal each season it was difficult to measure.

  “Why n
ow?” some asked.

  “God, of course,” Father Ernst said. “God is punishing the heathens.”

  Paul’s dad said, “Greenhouse gases, industry, climate change.” When Father Ernst took exception, he argued. “Ernst, they’re draining the water table to irrigate. Sucking it right out from underneath themselves. Landslides, sinkholes. Remember Florida?”

  The men removed their hats and stood a moment in silence. Paul followed suit. “Remember Florida,” they said. “Remember New Orleans.”

  “It was only a matter of time. It’s science, not God’s vengeance.”

  Father Ernst ended the meeting and told Paul to wait for his dad outside while the others dispersed. He could hear them yelling, even through the thick door, the closed windows. Nobody else contradicted their leader, ever.

  His dad, later called a traitor. Ritually unnamed.

  Paul’s dad could do anything. Start fire without matches. Find water, treat it. Harvest edible weeds. Read the constellations to find his way. He’d given Paul the Ruger, taught him how to use it. Taught Ruth how to survive too, although she was pretty young. Paul keeps at her, quizzing her skills. What would their dad do, search for information or search for food? He can almost hear his dad’s voice. Head to the forest. No use learning anything if it’ll just get you killed.

  Thinking in the past can get you killed too.

  Paul loosens his fists and warm sand streams through his fingers like a girl’s long, unknotted hair, until his hands come up empty.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sometimes Rebekah sees the future. It is jagged, frequently brutish, and she herself is never there. Things that have already come to pass: she envisioned the twins turning in Susan’s rough hands, wiped clean of afterbirth. This well before Susan even fell pregnant. Saw Mother Deborah covered in the cancerous sores that, a decade later, consumed her. Dreamed Paul trembling, lips parted, aching for her, months before their first kiss.