On the first full moon after we arrived, we blessed the place. I’d already done so many times before while grandma was alive, but this time it was my land to care for; I could feel it in the stroke of my axe on the deadwood in the orchard and smell it in the water when the tide was in. Kat brought her first Gàidhlig to the ceremony and taught me to say Tha seo math instead of so mote it be at the end. After that we called many things good, and there was a lot of good to call.
Kelsey, Grace, and Jared moved into the apartment above the garage five years later. A few months after that, Hannah was born. It had been hard for them to explain to their families how important they were to one another, especially after Grace, the only one of them who wasn’t a legal part of the marriage, conceived a child. Jared’s father had been a commercial lobsterman and a big man in Downeast Maine, so there was a lot of backlash, and they stood to lose their home over it when collective cruelty of their neighbors reached critical mass. Kat met them at a class in Cape Breton, and after they danced around the subject of spirituality long enough to realize they were dancing to the same tune, they became friends. When she found out about their predicament, she brought them home like stray kittens and asked me if they could stay.
I knew the orchard and garden would bloom earlier that year than it had in years past, and I knew they would never bloom late again in my lifetime. I knew we would have to start planting more, harvesting more, and preserving more if we expected to be independent. We would need the extra hands to keep up with it all, but it was hard for me to say yes.
“I’m worried I might need them,” Kat confessed to me that night after she tucked them into the guest beds and found me down at the shoreline again, scrubbing my naked arms and legs with handfuls of cold, wet sand. “You’re so connected…you journey to places where I can’t follow. What would happen if you went out one day and never came all the way back? How would I care for you and this place all by myself?”
“There isn’t anything wrong with me; I just can’t seem to get clean in the house.” I looked into her eyes, so dark in the moonlight, and prayed I would find understanding there. It was early March, but the snow was already melting, and I could hear the earth awake and angry under my feet, like an eight-to-fiver jolted out of bed at 5:00 a.m. by a passing siren. “The water in the house feels like the soil in the orchard, but the ocean doesn’t care yet. It’s easier here.”
“Is that why you wanted to drill another well farther inland? Why you have trouble drinking the water here?”
“No, we might really need that extra well someday… and yes.” My hands had begun to shake in the cold, but I gathered up another handful of sand and kept working.
She smiled, reached out from beneath her knitted wrap, and put her hand on my cheek. “You know, I half expect to find your sealskin locked in some barnacle-encrusted trunk on the shoreline someday, waiting there for me to die so that you can climb back into it and return to the water where you belong.” She took my hair in her hands, a tangled mess of black curls, and braided it with nimble fingers until it was out of her way. “My ancestors sang about women like you.” And then she was scrubbing my back and hips with broad, quick strokes, warming the sand and my skin with her touch.
There was a red tide bloom in May the year Hannah started keeping bees, and a few days later our little beach was smothered in rotting cod. It took a long time clear them away, but I’d sensed the algae growing in the water a week before we found the fish and brought gloves and buckets down to the water line in a plastic, 50-gallon drum. The next day, I drove into town and brought back twenty chestnut saplings. By the time we had a use for the gloves and buckets, the trees were already in the ground. It would be the better part of a decade before they began to produce enough to supplement the protein we derived from sea life, but Jared believed he could keep us in fish for awhile yet, especially if I could tell him when a bloom was imminent.
And I could. The days had long since passed when I allowed my connection to upset me. In truth, I’d begun to believe all living things possessed the same bond with the earth to some degree or another, and I came to wonder why nobody else I’d met heard and saw and felt what I did. As for me, I knew when to prune the orchard now by the keening of branches in the wind. I could hear the voice of the clouds herald the onset of bad weather several days before it actually arrived, so we almost never lost a harvest or a hive. It was like a drum in my soul, this consciousness; on the upbeat, I knew a thing was coming and made ready to receive it; on the downbeat, the thing came, and my instrument rested awhile. And when my Mother was sure I knew the rhythm to her satisfaction, she sent me farther afield to places where orphaned coyote pups needed food, or raspberries needed seeding, or trees needed planting. Sometimes I was gone for days, but I always managed to get back in time to keep us from harm.
On one such occasion I returned to find a very pregnant Kelsey teaching Hannah to milk goats I’d never seen before. Hannah spied me coming up the gravel road and came running, her dwindling girlishness outweighing her pre-teen desire for personal space, and threw herself into my arms.
“Aunt Megan, we have goats! And one of them is going to have a kid!”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mother that way.”
“I heard that,” Kelsey shouted up the road at me as she tied her sun-bleached hair into a knot and then rested her brown arms on her belly. She was glorious, a happy woman finally pregnant after years of trying, and she would be dead within the week. I was so confident, certain I could handle so natural a thing as bringing a child into the world after four years of nursing school and more than fifteen years at my Mother’s knee that when I felt the upbeat of a massive postpartum hemorrhage, I dismissed it as the work of a hyperactive imagination. My Mother wouldn’t do that to me. The downbeat took Kelsey away from us.
Grace named the boy Logan and spent the rest of her life in the shadow of Jared’s legal wife’s ghost. Jared walled Kelsey’s memory up in a room of pain with no doors and threw himself at Grace with a fervor that bordered on frenzy. I laid my ear to the drum and never got up again, not even when I was filthy and malnourished and frostbitten, not even when my fire maiden bathed me, fed me, and wept over my wounds.
Only Kat survived somewhat whole. She and Hannah started working climate magic together when Hannah failed to come out of that cave of quiet where grieving girls go. Over time she emerged though, a weather witch in her own right, come of age in an era when weather wasn’t what it used to be and needed all the help it could get. A regular circle came of that work, and Pagans from all over the province brought their wills to bear on the changing planet thirteen times a year for many years, while I went through menopause and empathized with the problems intrinsic to permanent change.
It was the chalcid wasps that finally brought me some measure of peace. The winter after Logan turned twenty-three, there wasn’t enough frost kill to keep the bacteria and the bugs from destroying the orchards when the weather warmed. We fought all spring to keep a fire blight down only to be hit with aphids and apple maggots in the heat of summer, when it was hardest to work during the daytime. I couldn’t imagine what was happening farther south; the bugs and the heat nearly killed us. But just when we thought we had lost the orchards entirely, the wasp larvae got their wings and descended on the trees like a squadron of attack bombers, glistening and deadly. I watched for three days while they harvested the parasites out of our way and Logan built the smokers that would chase them off before they turned from the bugs to the fruit. His hands were strong and calloused; but his hair was like his mother’s, and he tied it up when he went to work with a grace so like hers that it broke my heart to watch him. Everything living wants to live, but nothing lives forever.
We found six people in the chestnut orchard in late August of that same year. They were gathering nuts into burlap bags they must have taken from our barn in the night. We thought they had probably slept there too, since the goats didn’t need milking that morning whe
n Hannah went out to them. So Jared and Logan loaded their rifles and went out looking for what they thought were thieves. What they found was a wake-up call.
“Please, let us work. We just want to work,” a youngish man with a weathered, brown face pleaded with them from behind a half-full bag. “We were hungry and tired last night, but we didn’t want to take anything from you without giving something back.” An older woman who might have been his mother put her hand on his shoulder and hefted her bag in Logan’s direction.
“We’ll do whatever you ask,” she said. “This just looked like it needed doing, so I put these people to work early. We thought it best to show you some good faith.”
“What are you doing here?” Jared asked them, and lowered his gun. “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Bangor,” said a plump, brown haired woman of about thirty.
“Woodstock.”
“Moncton.”
“The three of us are from Boston,” the mother offered, and pointed to another youngish man in the group. “We’ve been traveling together for some time now.”
“Why?” Logan asked, puzzled.
“You don’t get out much, do you?” said the first man. “The U.S. and Canadian border is closed, has been since midsummer. We’ve met a lot of people like us, going north to where the food is. If you need anything from what’s left of civilization, I suggest you get it soon. There aren’t many delivery trucks on the roads since the border closed, and there isn’t as much to buy anymore.”
So Hannah, Grace, and I took the trailer into town, drew every dime out of the farm’s account, and went shopping. We bought bolts of cloth, thread, and needles. We updated our tool kit, our cookware, our linens, and our first aid supplies. We picked up lamp and candle wicks, lamp oil, fuel by the five-gallon drum and the equipment to manufacture a distillery. Finally, we stocked up on as many supplies for the windmill, the solar panels, the fences, the roofs, and the plumbing as our remaining money would allow. On the way home, Grace said that it was a good day. Hannah called it a day of severance.
Logan left with the work crew three weeks later. How could we have kept him? He was young, he had never been to public school, never seen much of anything beyond his home, and he had a right to live, despite the times. Grace and Jared blamed themselves and blamed their enduring grief, but to their credit, they never let Logan see it. We made him promise to come home if ever he was hungry or in trouble. We gave him a first aid kit, a set of cookware, and one of our precious rifles. We released him to the world. He said he’d be back the next spring to help with the pruning and planting, but we never saw him again.
That autumn and winter were the deadliest I’d ever seen. Storm surges battered the orchard closest to the shoreline so often and so hard I knew it would never recover, so I took the gas-powered chainsaw out to the trees we had just worked so hard to save and used a measure of our dwindling gasoline to cut them all down before the ocean bore them away. They had fed my family for four generations; my whole childhood was tangled up in their branches, and I owed them a proper funeral. So I got up every morning for two weeks before breakfast and went out to them in the wind, in the ice, in the high tides and keened over each one as I butchered and dismembered it for its hot-burning wood. When Jared came out to help me, I sent him away. When Hannah came out to reason with me, I sent her away too. Only Kat got close enough to bring me hot food and to put fragrant, homemade salve on my face and hands. My work gloves still smell of it after all these years, if I bury my face in them and breathe deep.
And then a bizarre, late-season hurricane made landfall and ripped the roof right off the barn, leaving the chickens, the goats, and our dried foods exposed to the weather until we could get everything into the house and garage. We lost so much of our winter stores that I was almost glad Logan had gone away; I wasn’t sure we could feed five people, four goats, a flock of chickens and a dog on what we had left. As it turned out, we didn’t feed many of the animals that hard, hard season; they fed us.
The following spring, most of the wildlife left the coast, with the exception of a few brave creatures that lived on whatever they could find locally. Our neighbors went with them, so there was no reason to go into town anymore; nobody was there. And Kat’s weather-working circle, a staple of the local Pagan community for over twenty years, dwindled away until only she and Hannah and Fergus were left to call the quarters and pray.
I didn’t leave the property all that summer; I felt my Mother’s need all right, but it was always close by, and I was always busy. The chestnuts continued to produce, and the apple trees I planted near the second well offered up a respectable crop despite the drought, but I couldn’t keep up with the orchards, the increasing vagaries of red tide bloom that required so much precision of spirit to predict, and the sickly animals orphaned by rail-thin mothers who went out for breakfast and never came back. I couldn’t hold it all together anymore and still maintain the soul wall that allowed me to keep drinking our well water and eating our food without vomiting up the riotous earth out of my stomach. I was getting old.
Late in July, Hannah made it official. “Mom and Dad want to go inland, but they’re afraid to tell you so. You’ve been so good to them, to all of us, but they don’t want to grow old in a place they can’t maintain, a place where they might not have access to hospitals or doctors when they become frail.” She paused, and gathering her strength added, “We should all go together.”
“There might not be any place for us to settle inland,” Kat told her as she bundled comfrey and strung it along the kitchen crossbeam. “And what about Logan? Don’t you want to wait for him?”
“I don’t think Logan is coming back.” Her voice was soft and strained, and she looked out of the kitchen window and down the gravel road to the place where it met the tree line. “I was all he ever had, and he was all I ever had, so one of us had to go, and he wanted me to take care of our parents.” She swallowed hard and looked back into Kat’s eyes. They widened for a moment while the fine lines around her mouth deepened into a frown and her brow furrowed in thought. Then she nodded once, briskly, and turned to me.
“I can’t leave; you know that,” I told her. “But you could.” She had been pale these last few months, and she tired more easily than she used to. She insisted she was just getting old herself, but my ear was still fixed to the drum, and I knew a thing was coming. I wanted more than anything to be two women that day; to go with my beloved into whatever safety Hannah hoped she could find for us and to stay here, where my Mother still spoke to me in angry whispers from behind the fragments of that wall in my soul.
Kat pulled the wooden combs out of her red and silver hair and refitted them snugly. “You won’t get rid of me that easily my love, so put your skin back in the trunk and quit dreaming of the sea. It’ll be there for you soon enough, when you’re ready for it.”
“Go tell your parents to come up to the house.” I took Hannah by the shoulders and kissed her cheek while she looked from me to Kat, bemused. “I’ll make some tea.”
We gave them the truck and trailer; it was theirs as much as ours, and Jared had done a lot of fine work installing the solar panels and converting the fuel system. They laid out a trip plan; Halifax, Fredericton, and then up into Schefferville. They asked us to give it to Logan if he returned, and we promised we would. And then they stammered their love and their sorrow at us and begged us to come with them, even though we all could sense it was time for us to go our separate ways.
It was easier than I thought it would be to let Grace and Jared go; we had been friends, family for the better part of four decades, but I had long ago lost my taste for people and the fuel they needed to stay alive and the dung they left behind. Hannah was a different story though, she was like my own child. When I saw that she had become so hollow she echoed herself when she talked, I took her for a walk in the chestnuts.
“It was wrong of us to keep the two of you here so long,” I told her, and she finally wept.<
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“We never made love. We never even came close. But there was always this tension between us…we used to lie in each other’s arms and cry. I loved him so much.”
“Do your parents know?”
“I don’t think so.” She wiped her face on her shirt and smoothed it back into place. “You couldn’t have cared for us better if you tried, Aunt Megan. This wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“It was everybody’s fault. It still is.” I took her in my arms and cried with her awhile. “Go find somebody to love you. You’ve done all you can, too.”
And then they were gone. Kat and I spent the rest of the season converting the lower level of the garage into living space for the goats and the upper level into a kind of apothecary where Kat would have plenty of room to dry herbs and make medicines. The barn had never completely recovered from last year’s weather; we just couldn’t spare the supplies to make good repairs. So before the hurricane season began, I took a shoulder bag of things we had made with Kat’s herbs and Hannah’s honey and walked inland to the First Nations reservation, hoping to set up some sort of trade with whoever was left there.
“We have our own bees,” I was told when I arrived, and I heard an accusation in the tone that I thought was at odds with the rusted-out cars and empty casinos around them. So I went home, and we made do with what we had in the time we had left.
It was cervical cancer, and it came on slow. Kat waned like a moon, over time, bright until she was gone. It took almost five years. In that time we saw the shoreline move inland and storm surges edge toward the chestnut trees. I was always a step ahead of it though, quick in my soul to compensate for my slow body. Our luck held us through those final seasons; the hurricanes took a little of the barn away each time they passed over, but the house and garage held on, tenacious and loyal.
The Shining Cities: An Anthology of Pagan Science Fiction Page 23