A few others nodded their heads, reluctant to disappoint this kindly man, but firm believers in the church-state separation the woman was invoking.
“It’s not really religion,” the older man replied, still smiling and polite. “It’s just a philosophy, really. I know of a number of people who would welcome it. It’s a philosophy, like you and your prepper friends’ belief about how the government is out to get you, or whatever it is. We would let you guys use public space if you needed to.”
A few people giggled, but most were quiet.
The chunky-sweater lady was not amused. “That is a gross misrepresentation of the prepper movement. We’re the only people in this town who can see things clearly. You think these sheep are going to save you when all our systems break down?” She gestured to the select board members at the front of the room, who had been conspicuously silent.
A middle-aged man holding a baby shouted up at them, “This is unproductive. Salty, let’s get some order in here! What do you think about this idea?”
I knew that Salty thought Rodney Riggins was a sleazy huckster, so I was surprised to hear him say, “Let’s leave this one to a vote. If the people of Isole want to use public resources such as an auditorium to host a religiously affiliated event, I think that’s their choice. We can schedule a vote for next week.”
“This is outrageous,” the sweater lady said. She was pulling her big coat on and gathering her things. “I don’t know why I still come to these meetings. They’re a sham. If there are any other adults in this room who want to face reality, you’re welcome at our prepper meetings on Tuesdays.”
She stormed out and let the heavy door bang behind her.
When it was quiet again, the older man she’d been arguing with said, “Thank God for small miracles,” and everyone laughed uneasily, some more than others.
Isole wasn’t used to open combat, but that wasn’t the only reason for their discomfort. It was the mounting pressure to pick a side in this new war. Where Isole had once been a town of old farm families, yuppie transplants and rednecks, we were now paranoid preppers, religious fanatics and government tools. Looking around the room, you could already tell which team many had chosen. Others still looked baffled by this development, unaware that they would eventually pick a side, too.
“You’re one of the tools, obviously,” Pia said to me later that night when I explained what had happened at the meeting. She was smiling as if it was a joke, but we both knew it wasn’t. “I’m surprised you have to ask.” She had her legs curled under her on the couch and was highlighting sections of a book about canning. I was quite sure I would never see canned produce stacked in our cupboards, but I liked the idea of it under normal circumstances. “Ever since you joined that secret committee, you sealed your fate as a government operative.” She took a gulp of red wine from her mason jar.
I walked to the refrigerator to get a beer. I should not have done this—dug in for a fight—but I couldn’t resist on that night. “Well, then I guess we both know what you are,” I said from the kitchen.
She threw her book down. “Does it make you feel sane to call me crazy?” Pia said. “Will it comfort you to believe that you’re one of the rational ones after everything falls apart and we have to rely on ourselves? Are you still going to be tuning in for the president’s fucking weather briefings and attending your little planning sessions when all this is washed away?”
I pounded my beer and set it down loudly before responding. “I’m not allowed to be crazy like you, Pia. Someone has to maintain order in this relationship. Does it comfort me to pay the bills and take out the trash and make sure we have flood insurance and snow tires and all the other mundane bullshit that you won’t bother with? Yeah, it does kind of comfort me to know that our lives still work. Sorry for boring you with my prosaicness.”
Pia’s face tensed as angry tears began to stream down her face. “What’s going on with us? I feel like you hate me.”
I shook my head, confused. “I don’t know. You’re my wife, Pia. I married you and hoped to have a family with you and a long, happy life together. I love you.” I wanted to stay calm, but there was a shriek in my voice. “But we can’t have that life together from a subterranean bunker in your postapocalyptic future.”
She watched me, her eyes filling with tears. I don’t know why I kept stoking the fire, but I went on, “You don’t want children, Pia, because you are a child yourself.”
Pia threw her canning book across the room, where it hit the wall and landed on the worm box. She stomped out to the kitchen. I could hear her uncork another bottle and cry quietly, but with just enough volume to drive her point home. She wanted me to know that I was cruel. She wasn’t crying because of a weakness in her, but an aggression in me. That was the message. I hated this conflict so much, but I wasn’t ready to end it. We hadn’t spoken of conceiving a child in months and it was making me nervous. She was moving away from that fantasy as I inched toward it.
I put my coat on and took a cold Long Trail out to the front porch while Pia stayed inside to cry. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of remaining in her audience.
Christmas was one week away and we had over a foot of fluffy snow on the ground. Pia and I didn’t have a Christmas tree or any presents or anything that would have indicated that a family that celebrates Christmas lived there. For the first time ever, we just didn’t bother. Even August’s screwed-up parents had twinkle lights draped over their crab-apple tree, which sparkled through the thick woods that separated our homes. All of a sudden, this seemed unbearably sad to me and I started to cry.
The porch swing felt cold on my backside and I could see clouds of condensing breath in the soft glow of the bulb that hung above. It was too dark to observe much of anything but the sky. In the warmer months, I could sit on that swing and watch the silhouettes of the brown bats lurk above me, but they were gone, winding down for hibernation. There was nothing left outside to make me feel less alone.
Both of us were crying, hating the situation, but not quite hating each other. I wasn’t lying when I said I loved her; I did. But being together was hard now. She was isolating herself from me and I was hungrier than ever for human connection. Something about being in Isole—making friends and caring for August—made me realize how alone I had been. I suddenly felt sad for my former self—the one who had tolerated loneliness for so long.
ELEVEN
I ONLY INTENDED to close my eyes for a few minutes, to let the beer warm my brain and let Pia go to bed inside. But I must have drifted off for over an hour because my back was aching from the porch swing and my nose as frigid as the air when I startled awake to the sound of a distant screen door. It was the slow, cautious closing of someone who didn’t want to be found. It would have been inaudible to anyone else, but I had heard the distinct screech of August’s back screen door so many times by then that I caught it on the first note. It was the dead of night in December and August was taking off into the woods.
I jumped up and off the porch, realizing that I couldn’t see my footing and would need to go just slow enough not to fall. I didn’t yell for August. I wanted to catch him quietly before we woke parents and wives and the rest of the world.
It took a moment to find the head of the footpath that connected our houses and I started to panic as I waved my arms ahead of me in the dark. Finally, there was a gap and I dived through it, running with arms out and night eyes wide-open. I saw a flash of something ahead and ran faster. When I emerged from the woods, a small body ten feet ahead stopped, sensing my presence.
“Ash?” August whispered, frightened.
“Yeah, it’s me, buddy.” I walked to him now and grabbed his backpack, then his head for a quick hug. “What are you doing? This is so dangerous. You know you can’t do this anymore. Why are you out here?”
“I needed to check on my fort, to make sure it’s still
good in case one of the animals needs it for hibernation.”
August said this calmly, as if it was the most obvious explanation for his behavior, but I searched his eyes for a deeper answer. If one existed, he couldn’t seem to access it. So I walked him back to my house with one hand safely on his blue backpack. He may not have been escaping something horrific, but he was left alone to follow the whims of his imagination right out the back door and into the dark woods at night—undetected—and that was horrific enough. What if I hadn’t been outside to hear him? I couldn’t entertain the fantasies of how that night might have ended.
I led August through the front door and into the living room, where he made himself comfortable on the couch. He talked sleepily to me about the structural weaknesses of his fort that needed to be bolstered while I assembled a peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen. Apparently, there was still a patch of the fort roof that needed evergreen boughs for cover and the pine needle bed hadn’t been completed... Something about a secret door...
When I returned moments later with the sandwich, he was already slumped over, asleep.
I sat down in front of the couch on the oval rug with once-bright woven rings of color. It wasn’t soft beneath me, but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be an inch farther from August’s small body than I needed to be. So I sat and thought about what was ahead. Tomorrow, I would feed him breakfast and make sure his parents took him to school, but I wouldn’t tell the social worker about this. Her response couldn’t be predicted, and I needed more time to convince Pia that we should take August. I needed just enough time, I figured, to explain to her how frightened I had been seeing his dark shape almost disappear into the cold woods. Surely she would be moved by this. The events of that evening seemed proof to me that August didn’t just need anyone to rescue him from his negligent home, he needed someone who knew the sound of his feet on fallen leaves in the dark, someone who understood what pulled him into the woods and which animals were his friends. I was that person and I needed him, too.
I stretched out on the woven rug, my head on the sweatshirt that August had shed minutes before. With one hand around an ankle that hung over the couch, I slept.
TWELVE
WALKING THROUGH THE halls of the Isole courthouse to meet the Subcommittee in Salty’s office made me feel like a young intern, self-consciously pretending to believe that I fit in. That feeling was probably the result of the nagging guilt I felt about my real job, which I wasn’t devoting nearly enough hours of the day to. It was six o’clock in the evening on the first Wednesday of January and there was almost no one left in the courthouse. In Salty’s large but modest office I first saw Peg at the table, wearing neutral colors and a warm smile. Beside her sat Bill and Bob, the other two secret recruits for the Subcommittee. Bill was an accountant (and the town treasurer); Bob owned the outdoor sporting goods store on Main Street. I gathered that they had been best friends for most of their lives, starting careers, raising children and taking vacations together. I hadn’t had a male friendship like that since college, before Pia and I started dating. It looked a little goofy—the way Bill and Bob seemed to anticipate each other’s thoughts—but I envied them. Both wore “work flannels”—a category of dress that I had only recently discovered, which involved the same flannel shirts and rugged boots that one might wear on the weekend, but neatly pressed and free of visible wear.
The five of us sat around a circular table in Salty’s austere office, drinking decaf coffee from a pot in the corner. Salty was the unofficial leader of our gang, but Peg seemed to have all the answers. In the eight years she’d lived in Isole, she had learned everyone’s name and developed a comprehensive understanding of municipal operations. “I’ve been joining the natives for years,” she said in her Irish brogue. Peg was a botanist; she was supposed to be studying the plants, but it seemed that she had been studying the people all along.
We moved through each issue with great efficiency. Isole Public High School was to be the emergency shelter when The Storm came, with the post office serving as backup. Both buildings would have generators installed and boarding for the windows cut within the week. As treasurer, Bill could authorize spending with town money, and since we decided at the outset that we would consult with no one about how to spend it, decisions were made quickly. We would ask for permission (or forgiveness) later. It was undemocratic and satisfyingly productive.
“Next up,” Peg said, “the flood runoff plan. The snow from the last storm is starting to melt and the ground is only frozen a few inches down, so we need to act fast if we’re going to get in before the next storm. Let’s take a look at the plan and divide up the outreach.”
She spread a large map out in front of us that showed the current path of the Isole Creek and the runoff routes that would need to be created to divert water away from downtown and toward an uninhabitable marsh on the edge of Isole. Along the runoff routes, tiny cartoon houses had been drawn with the surnames of the families that lived there scrawled above—those were the people whose consent we needed.
The five of us were quiet as we read the names, most of which I didn’t recognize.
“This should be no problem,” Salty said, making a pencil checkmark beside a house that was apparently occupied by reasonable people. “I’ll give Carl a call tonight and get his permission...and the Girards...and the LeChamps...and the Kellys...they will all understand.”
Salty stepped back and circled several more houses.
“These are the people I’m anticipating we may have some problems with,” he said. “I think we need to pay them a visit and make a strong case that the town is counting on them. I don’t know how this is going to go.”
“Ash, you’ve met a few of these characters,” Peg said.
“I have?”
“Yes, this guy—” she pointed to a house that sat at the intersection of Isole Creek and a runoff route “—he’s one of your wife’s prepper friends.”
I had no idea how Peg knew about Pia’s hobbies or the preppers, but I was beginning to realize that secrets were meaningless in a town of our size.
She went on, “He’s kind of the ringleader.”
I knew who she was talking about immediately. “Crow?”
“Yes, Crow,” she said. “Just our luck that his shack sits right on this lot. He’s not going to go for this.”
“And to be fair,” Salty interjected, “we need a pretty significant chunk of his backyard to get this done. It’s not a small ask. So yeah, he’ll make a stink.”
“Bob and I will take this stretch here,” Bill said, pointing to another prong along the drainage route. “They all fall between our two houses and we know almost everybody.”
“Good, perfect,” Peg said, tapping her finger nervously on the map. “Let’s get as many people as we can in the next forty-eight hours. That way, we’ll be ready when the warm front comes through. Salty, do you want to take some of these houses on the east side, near your farm? I’ll take Crow and some of these other challenging ones. Ash, you’re coming with me.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” Peg laughed. “It’s not going to get any easier.”
With our respective assignments, everyone piled into their cars in the parking lot of the courthouse and drove in separate directions. I sat in the passenger seat of Peg’s Subaru and listened as she explained the legality of the project.
“We could probably force this endeavor through with an eminent domain argument,” she said as we pulled onto the main road. “Certainly the town or state can make a strong case to that end and that was the state’s original plan. But it would be so adversarial and costly...it would probably take years to go through the condemnation proceedings. Plus that could involve compensation to the property owners that Isole doesn’t have to spend. It’s just not an option right now, not with The Storm pressing down on us. If this
runoff plan is going to do any good, we need to get it done fast. And getting everyone’s consent is the only other legal way to make that happen. If you had asked me six months ago, I would have told you that this would be fairly easy to do. The people of Isole are reasonable. But I’m not so sure now; everyone’s wary of their neighbors all of a sudden. We have different ideas about how we’re supposed to be preparing for this disaster...and what our responsibility to the land is.”
“I never really thought about that. What do you think our responsibility to the land is?” I asked.
Peg turned off the main road and onto a bumpy dirt one that was as black as pitch, even with the snow cover.
“I think it’s to remember that we’re just temporary tenants,” she said. “The land can’t ever really belong to any of us, so our actions should consider a future when we’re not here.”
I thought about this point as the woods closed in around us.
“This is it,” Peg said and turned off the engine.
It was so dark when the headlights went off that I couldn’t tell whether we were in a driveway or just a treeless ditch on the side of the road. We both got out and took a moment to let our eyes adjust in the cold night. Through a wall of pine, I could see a sagging trailer illuminated by several naked lightbulbs that hung from the edge of the roof. There were two cars parked in front that appeared to be disintegrating into the earth and the handle of a push mower stuck out through the snow nearby. Crow’s country existence bore little resemblance to my own: it was isolated and run-down, with none of the middle-class signifiers like ski racks and greenhouses that decorated my road. Crow was poor. A dog barked from inside a shed behind the trailer and I felt myself jump as I realized that I had no idea what my role was to be on this visit. I may have been a native Vermonter, but I was surely an outsider here.
“Just hang back at the beginning and I will get things started,” Peg said, sensing my hesitation. “He’s actually kind of a lovable guy.”
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