The Remnants

by Robert Hill

  Outside was no place to be out in at 3:33. It was no place for even a ghost to be out in gandering at goose eggs, or in an out-house playing hive-and-seek with yellowjackets lifting your laid-to-rest skirt; or hanging around a clothesline sniffing your sister’s spectral up-busters. It was no place to be gathering on True Bliss’s rooftop if you were a grackle, and it was without question no place to be pecking about on the ground outside her south-facing parlor oriel if you were a Minton. But there Hunko was, down below a south-facing window, down out of eyeshot of an intimacy too unbearable to swallow: True Bliss serving tea and crackers to Kennesaw Belvedere in the parlor of her house on the anniversary of his birth. It was hailing hard enough to make pterodactyls extinct, but Hunko wasn’t evolved enough to care. He was going to put a stop to this repast if it was the last thing he’d ever do. They’d dig out his bones in another million years and wonder what was up.

  Hunko had stormed across the day, across town, across a lifetime up to and under True’s south-facing parlor oriel, sure of what was going on in the room he was not tall enough to espy. He had waited a lifetime to be the apple that Kennesaw would bite into and leave True to charm other snakes in other trees, but she had once again tempted him with tea and crackers, and Hunko could stomach it no longer. What likelihood was there that Kennesaw would outlive his ninety-ninth and give Hunko what—a year? a month? a day?—of singular attention; he could not figure a number, it was the idea that counts. After all, he had been so patient. The long stretch of middle years had gone by and he had bid good-bye to everyone he knew but Kennesaw and True, and here was True turning one hundred and Kennesaw ninety-nine and Hunko spry at ninety but there wasn’t much time left for patience. True was as wound down as an old clock, ringing off the wrong hours every twenty-seven minutes, and Kennesaw, a minute hand behind her, stuck on five, stuck on nine, stuck on one. It would not be long now before both of them chimed their last off-hour and their wheels slipped their pins and quit spinning. Hunko’s lifetime wish seemed so close and so far at the same time: just one day, he wanted—one day—alone with Kennesaw, alone with the beat of his heart, and if it’s to be the man’s last day, let me be the beat of his. He could not jump high enough to see into True’s south-facing parlor oriel but he could see he would have to do more than wait out their assignation if he hoped to get his wish. As the heavens rained down holy hail on him he decided that he would take the parlor by storm and take Kennesaw at last for his own, as Carnival had taken Jubilee.

  There were not stones falling from heaven the day Carnival ran off with his sister in his arms, but the weight of every eye on them came down on them just as smarting. She was moaning all the way from Tumblers’ Ridge home, her swollen middle hurt her so. He thought it best to let her rest but she was the one who insisted that if they were going to leave town, let’s leave now. He ran in to gather the rucksack she had prepared; she didn’t even want to enter the house one last time, so she stayed out on the porch cradling her swell and every now and then eyeing the porch floor beneath her for any telltale proof of trouble, though none came. When Carnival reemerged, he was flushed red to his thick ears with equal parts joy and apprehension—excited to be going but uncertain as to where.

  They had no horse nor wagon, no automobile, no tractor, no bicycle, not even a wheelbarrow to get them from here to wherever; all their lives they’d walked New Eden from yonder to home like the felled Drells. But now they would do as no others before them had done, as Kennesaw had almost done but in the end, undone—they’d be walking from home to yonder for good and all. The tumblers had surely made their ways home by now; the spectators had long since brushed the grasses out of their hair and smoothed the urgent creases in their overalls; there’d be a pot boiling on someone’s cooktop and a candle stub being readied by another’s chair; and thusly the solitary nights would continue for the townsfolk who tut-tutted them, the days would follow in sameness and the same nights would fall again, but Carnival and Jubilee were setting off for a life no one else would dare live.

  It was such a different world from the start. It was dusk when they commenced their trek, still light enough to see the pounded dirt of their main road slip like a lost letter under the thick slab of new macadam of the road that had forked off their world. In the years since Kennesaw had made this same odyssey, the world beyond New Eden had encroached closer to home. Now here at this junction, hanging as high as the rising moon, they met a red eye blinking in the black that may have been as surprised by them as they were by it; perhaps that’s why it was blinking. For a few good minutes, they thought of turning back. They could have gone left, they could have gone right, but left won out, for far that way was a glow of light on the darkening horizon that the cut-through gave glimpse to, while all there was to the right was darkness getting darker and for that they might as well have turned around for home. How small and humbled Carnival felt as they trudged through the cut-through that turned a mountain into air; rock turned to molecules; once mighty, solid, there. Jubilee’s slow pace set their pace; more than once, Carnival lifted her in his arms and carried her what must have been miles. Every so often pairs of lights would creep up on them from behind or glare at them from up ahead, and as the lights neared, they slowed at the sight of this burly man and his swollen woman who looked for all the modern world like they were walking out of the past. As each pair of lights sped on and vanished and their walk returned to its dark progress, both brother and sister fought the growing loneliness of night that not even companionship can erase.

  There were signs to be seen in the dark but they missed them. The one that would have welcomed them to this neighboring town, and educated them on the familiar differences of its founding and its population, the cluster of enameled medallions alerting them to the many local affiliations of animal orders, the reflective petroglyphs indicative of the activities to be found ahead—eating, excreting, sleeping, wine tasting—and the one with the large letter H.

  They passed a cluster of houses all identical in shape, all identical in the outlines of light that leached out from the edges of their shaded, shut windows, and not that much farther on, they passed another cluster as identical in its identicals. They passed an odd-looking building of cement as long and low slung as a loaf of bread, with windows too high to see through that had boards nailed over them. A front entry, or what may have served as a front entry, was now an expanse of board as wide as two men, an expanse Carnival himself might have in its former days fit through, had he had it in himself to enter. In front of what looked to be the building’s original signage with letters gouged into wood that Carnival could barely decipher beyond an L and an I and a B, was a larger, makeshift sign that crowed a boast beyond Carnival’s ken: Coming Soon: 30,000 Square Feet of New Retail Space! They passed storefronts blazing with colored lights and fronted in plate glass that shouted out to them the abundance that could be theirs this week only at 2 for $29.99, buy 9 get a 10th for half price! What had been only pairs of lights on the road leading here was now a meteor shower of automotive glitter—flashes of lights and shiny chrome and slick reflective sheens—white lights and red lights and green and amber and orange, some steady, some winking—an eye could not rest on any one light for long. And then there was the din to this town—every surface made a man-made sound, buzzes and hums and rings and clacks and screeches, not only from the vehicles on the roadway but from the doors in the plate-glass facades, metal edges scraping against their metal jambs, and trash can lids flipping—even street corners were chattery with the sounds of invisible mechanical birds chirping.

  Back home they were accustomed to forest tracery but here above their heads were only wires and poles and vaguely windmill-ish structures of crisscrossed armatures that reached for the stars. Jubilee convulsed like the red eye earlier, a stitch in her was jabbing the devil’s rhythm. In Carnival’s arms she was as hot and sweaty as a day’s work and the stitch heaved her body inwards from both ends as if her brother was playing her like an acco
rdion. She could not speak through the pain, but the sounds that escaped her through the enveloping din were cries that would draw even a Cro-Magnon from the comfort of his cave. It must be time, Carnival thought, though he could not say these words out loud for fear of his sister’s fear. His steps became broader; the muscles that had burst his seams and set in motion the moment now in his arms ached with a new sense of urgency more powerful and more immediate than any he’d ever known. On his back the rucksack juddered and thugged against him, in his arms his sister jostled and flinched and suddenly lay limp; if he hadn’t sheathed the ax blade slung over his shoulder, it would have jumped itself right into his skull.

  The letter H he had not noticed on the sign in the dark was now a sign he could see, blue, with a white arrow on a smaller sign below it, an arrow like the one dweller first drew in his own excrement on the face of a cliff, but an eye could follow this arrow as it pointed away from the street to another sign lit from within, and Carnival’s eye scanned across the word etched on that lit-from-within sign, and if ever there was a moment a man could deem an EMERGENCY, this was it.

  From darkness to all that bright white light inside must be what folks mean when they talk about heaven. Carnival had never seen so much bright not made from the day over his head, and unlike outside it was so hushed in there he was almost ashamed to breathe. There was only one person in this bright, noiseless space—seated behind a counter, behind a box on a shelf, a box bathing her in blue, a drowsy-eyed woman of such dark complexion that Carnival was stunned any human could have lasted so long in the sun without turning to ash. A nameplate on her breast said her name was Lak’isha. What an odd name, Carnival thought. The sound of the plate-glass doors disappearing in a hush roused her attention their way, and eyeing the urgent man and his slack woman pivoted her drowse to a stick beside the box and spoke into it and filled the sleepy air around them with a single wake-up word: Kip! From behind another pair of hushing doors a boy with a man’s face stubble steered a rolling chair their way, locked its wheels, chunked its plates, and plucked Jubilee from Carnival’s arms before Carnival could even say his piece; the boy then set Jubilee on the seat and her feet on the plates he unchunked, unlocked the wheels, said over his shoulder to the drowsy-eyed woman behind the counter bay two, and with the urgency of a plowman trying to outrun a howler, wheeled Jubilee back through the inside disappearing doors where she disappeared in a hush from Carnival’s care and love and lust and fervor forever.

  People think what they want to think, but it wasn’t what people thought. In a room where Carnival was not, there was to be found in Jubilee a kind of carbuncle in the sac where no carbuncle should grow, born of too much New Eden and not enough world. It was explained to him that Jubilee’s swell was seepage and pusses swamping the sac and its surroundings, as the carbuncle in its urgency fed on his sister and grew off of her and pissed out the poisons her own body created with no help from him. In a room where he was not they opened up his sister like she was a damaged parcel and found her contents mangled and spoiled and reeking. The stitch was a burst, a dike undammed that loosed a final toxic pond. He’d known this bucktoothed beauty all his life—she was the urge he could not control; his soul, his closed boast that broke open. He thought he knew her body, thought he knew what was growing in her body, but in her body, her body was growing something else—a strange form her body could not outlive, and that strange form in her made her a stranger to them both. And now that strange form had taken from him not just the one body he finally had but, too, the one he always wanted, leaving him bereft of both the fact of their lives as well as the fiction they thought was real. A man, this time, with a man’s face but a boy’s body, said there was nothing they could have done—if only he’d brought her here sooner. More words followed but Carnival breathed in loud enough to block out all other sounds. He had heard the one word about his sister that ended his life, and so he did not ever need to hear any others.

  Carnival lived out as many years beyond burying his sister as he could stand. He had stopped his ax from swinging, which stopped his muscles from swelling, which stopped his seams from bursting, but that did not stop his urges from coming. Day followed same day and night after same night he sat his deflating self in Jubilee’s mending chair in the corner of their house between the window and the woodstove and he fondled her bobbins and he tongued her threads, and oh, how he wished he were feeding into her needle’s eye. The repetition night after same night swelled him to the edge of bursting, but he kept himself stored up; he would not let his feelings spill, not for all the rest of his years, not a single drop—not on his sister’s heck box, and not on her memory. A man can do without only so long, however, before he decides there is no reason to do without any longer, or so it may be that his body decides this for him, for Carnival’s body seemed to swell up with the same strange swell that swelled his sister to bursting, although the poisons that pissed him cold were all on account of her.

  And this is how he would remain. In the unearthed box where Hunko placed Carnival’s body encoiled with the remnants of Jubilee’s, just as their father’s body had been placed with their mother’s before them, the brother’s every uncontainable urge for his sister was entombed in its swollen state for eternity.

  Hunko would cry with like-mindedness thinking back on it if he thought he had enough time. What Carnival had lived beyond and lived without, Hunko could not bear another minute of himself. Inside was Kennesaw and the how-many-more-minutes of life Hunko might have with him, and inside, too, was True, and she was anything but a blissful impediment. He stomped his muddy boots on her front steps and he mudded her porch floor just as much, and he shoved open her already ajar front vestibule door like it was a cape and he was a bull and the door hit the wall and the glass in it smashed into a million pretty shards of un-pent resentment, and he mudded into her entry with the intent of mudding his way in between them once and for all, only once inside, he was struck dumb in his boots like a mastodon suddenly dropped in tar.

  First, there was the stench. It wasn’t from him; he checked. Then there was the clutter, not what he expected from True; that made him smile. And he was surprised to see no tea, no saltines, no sign of celebration at all in the front parlor at first glance, so he stepped with caution into the dining room and was on his way through the debris into the kitchen when down among the debris beside the table there was True—on the floor and on her side; and from the ease of her old flesh on her old face he didn’t even need to feel her skin, from that look of her alone he knew, like every old man knows—she was on her way.

  A younger man might have cried out and hurled himself hydro-electrically to make her millpond stir, but Hunko knew when calm honored calm. He knelt to her and held her hard gnarled hand in his and felt the cool of it, and touched her brow with his nubby palm and felt the cool there, too, and there was no more need to dip a toe in those waters—he had his answer, and that answer gave him peace. The end fills in an empty space like a rush of ocean and it does not matter if you witness the very moment it flows in or not—it comes; and against its force you hold what you can and you let the flow take what it must, and the feelings you may have held back for those things the flood washes away, you must let wash away with those things or you, too, will drown; and Hunko found his own tide of jealousy flowing away with the waters that carried True, and he was there on the shore waving her farewell and wishing her his most sincere good wishes that she have herself a pleasant journey. True Bliss did not reach the day that would make her a century, but Hunko figured she was part of a continuum that started the day the first green sprout lifted its head to the sky, and that made her older than one hundred years; that made her ageless. He did not have enough in him to build her a box or dig her a hole or even take her to her bed. He laid her hand down closer to her heart and patted her shoulder and stood his old self up and wiped his sniffer with the back of his hand and nodded his head at her and smiled and said, Old girl, good-bye.

  Wher
e he did churn was now in his concern for Kennesaw—where was he? Kennesaw? Ken-ne-saw! He wasn’t in the dining room, and not in the kitchen behind it, and though he heard a rattle he saw the rattle a split second later, a raccoon—git! He then dodged more debris on his way to the front hallway and into the squalor of the parlor and there behind a stack of wooden apple crates where he had not fully looked before, face down on the filthy rug, was the most glorious cleft and chisel that had ever graced the earth—his Kennesaw. Ken-ne-saw!

  Calm might honor calm when calm is all that comes but Kennesaw stirred and that sent Hunko hydraulic. He was on his old knees by Kennesaw’s side as fast as a tree can fall and turning Kennesaw over with as much care and reverence as one would turn a page of the Good Book. When he cradled Kennesaw’s head in his nubby hands and Kennesaw’s bluer-than-blues fluttered Hunko into their field of vision, and the fear in them eased to peace, and he smiled up at that Minton sniffer above, you’d swear it was a tableau of a mother and her brand new child at the moment they knew they were at the beginning of the rest of their lives.

  Hunko helped Kennesaw to his feet and sat him back down on the davenport from which he had sprung. There was a sheen of pee on Kennesaw’s chisel from where his face had planted in the puddle on the rug, and slipping down his cleft a dribble of blood from where his lip split a bit, and in the crack and crotch of his pants was a dark spot too dark to be old. Hunko smoothed the hair off Kennesaw’s brow and held his handsome old face in his nubby hand and it occurred to Hunko that in all his life he had never stood taller than Kennesaw until this very moment, and how he had kept himself a boy yearning for Kennesaw all these years until this moment when he was now needed as a man.