“Everyone knows that,” said Peace Hope. “That’s why we’re going to do something about it.”
“You mean this afternoon. They’ll just talk it to death. What we need is people to fight for freedom, like Harriet Tubman.” The famed conductor of the Underground Railroad had actually gone on to command an army unit for the Union. As a child, Isabel had read Tubman’s biography and imagined that Tubman was her ancestor.
“It is hard for us,” said Peace Hope quietly. “We are law-abiding people.”
Isabel raised her voice. “The old-time Quakers broke plenty of laws to free the slaves.” She looked back to see whether Daniel had overheard. He smiled and walked over, and sat down next to her.
“Thee spoke well, after Worship,” he said. “I don’t agree with thee, about fighting the angelbees. But…these events need prayerful consideration.” As if uneasy with himself, he got up abruptly and returned down the trail through the cemetery. Sal and Deliverance soon followed.
Perplexed, Isabel watched him leave.
Peace Hope said, “I agree with thee.”
Isabel looked quickly at her. “You do?”
“We need to overcome the angelbees, that is true.”
“You’ll help me build the radio?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t let thee get into any such scrape without me.” Peace Hope’s blue eyes twinkled beneath her sandy curls, and her body swayed slightly above her metal arms.
“We’ll join the Underground!” Isabel whispered fiercely. “We’ll form our own secret cell, with our own transmitter—Radio Free Gwynwood. We’ll get Teacher Becca to join; who knows, she might be a member already.” Becca, who had sent the electronics book in a hamper of vegetables; who had asked Isabel to come and see her again, for some new secret. Becca had once taught a stirring lesson about Independence Day. “We’ll pledge ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”
“Especially honor.” Peace Hope added, “If we wish to overcome an enemy, the first thing is to find out how they think. Maybe we should play chess with them.”
Isabel waved her hand impatiently. “Maybe we can enlist Matthew to do experiments on them—and on the Wall. Maybe…” Suddenly she frowned. “Scatterbrain, I’m surprised at you. You’re much too virtuous to get into something like this.”
“Thee just doesn’t read thy Bible. Try John 8:32.”
Which read, as Isabel checked later, “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
IV
IN THE HEAT of the afternoon, Isabel was at the cistern again, hoisting up water for the sheep. She walked back past the house, noticing by the door three gallon jars of honey from Ruth Weiss’s apiary, enough to last well into winter. That would be for delivering the baby. Isabel remembered suddenly the fan from the Scattergoods; she would try to get it fixed before heading over to the meeting about the angelbees.
She entered the barn and sloshed the water into the trough, taking care to avoid loss. Immediately the four Suffolk ewes came running, their black legs pounding. “Meh-eh-eh,” called Hepzibah, the bossy one. They bleated frantically, jostling one another to stick their necks in the trough. Isabel hugged their greasy woolly backs and scratched their necks, especially the Dorset hybrid lamb with spotted legs, whom she had raised from a bottle the Christmas before. The ram, and the two goats, and the remaining ewes straggled in.
Andrés returned to drop off the tree clippers. “The dwarf apples are getting old. Too many sports to be pruned out.”
Isabel nodded. “You coming to the Scattergoods’?” Maybe the town would do something after all.
“Yes. Your mother will come, if she feels she can leave Alice.”
Isabel winced. Poor Alice was now on oxygen upstairs. The sheep lapped noisily at the water, and the rustle of mice could be heard behind the wallboards. Isabel remembered her mother saying about Aaron Weiss, “We did all that medical science could do.” Marguerite would be saying that again soon.
Then she thought of something and glanced at her father curiously. “What did you think, today, about that sermon of Matthew’s?”
“Sermon? You call that a sermon? No sabe ni la a.”
His vehemence surprised her. “Why not?”
“The Tree of Life, that represents the cross of the crucifixion, foreshadowed at the Fall. That’s what the priest says. You Americans know nothing about Christ.” Then he relaxed and chuckled to himself. “Imagine, that I should sermonize like a priest.”
Isabel took a deep breath, but knew better than to ask further about his past.
Just then, for no apparent reason, one ewe broke away and charged out of the barn, and the others stampeded after her. Andrés chuckled. “Sheep never change. Foolish as men.”
The hands of the grandfather’s clock stood at half-past four in the Scattergoods’ sitting room. Some two dozen people had managed to come, seated in the straight-backed pine chairs Nahum had built years ago. A welcome current of air circulated from the fan in the window, which Isabel had fixed in time.
“We are gathered to consider prayerfully the events in our skies,” Liza said carefully. Next to her sat Nahum, a man of rather pinched features who seemed to scowl perpetually. His gray-streaked hair was tied back, and he wore black every day. As a child Isabel had feared him, but he taught her a lot of good woodworking.
Carl Dreher cleared his throat. “What is there to say? The work of the angelbees is beyond our hands. Let’s be thankful for what little bit of Earth the Wall preserved for us.”
Debbie nodded and reached to retrieve Miracle, who had crawled halfway down from her lap. Faith and Charity were on the floor drawing with new crayons. Where had those come from, Isabel wondered suddenly. The monthly shipment from Sydney must have appeared at the Pylon through the cross-dimensional link, despite the absence of Alice. She remembered the spacecraft “leg” she had seen poking out of the fog, the night before. Was that the vehicle for transport of the shipment? she wondered. In any case, she must be sure to pick up the medicine box for her mother, and check the Herald for news of the Underground.
“Never,” Anna Tran spoke up, with unusual vehemence. “I’ll never, never be grateful for the Wall, till my dying day.” Her dark Vietnamese eyes glared challenging at her neighbors. A three-year-old on Doomsday, Anna barely recollected the world before the Wall, but she had always been convinced that it must fall.
“The issue is survival,” said Marguerite. “Let’s face it: we can’t make it from one generation to the next, sitting on this hot spot in the most bombed-out country on Earth. That’s clear from our birthrate and death rate. If the angelbees keep blitzing our ozone, then they don’t mean to pull out our Wall anytime soon.”
Vera Brown, Deliverance’s mother, spoke quietly. “There must be some way to clean things up. After all, this is our home.” Vera had a pedigree that traced back to colonial times in Gwynwood.
“Of course there will be a way,” said Carl. “Someday. All radiation decays. For goodness sake, Doctor Chase: What do you expect us to do?”
Marguerite did not reply, her lips shut tight, the muscles taut in her neck. Quiet in anger, she preferred to keep her dignity. Andrés put his arm around her. “Let’s take a few potshots at the beasties,” he suggested, with a wink at Isabel.
Carl half rose from his seat. “And have the whole town put to sleep again?” That was fifteen years before, when someone had popped several angelbees with a BB gun. That day, a strange fog had poured out of the Pylon so thick you could not see a hand in front of your face. Something in the fog put everyone to sleep. Isabel remembered awakening, dazed and parched.
“It only lasted three days,” Andrés replied.
“What if next time it’s permanent? Whole Wall-towns have vanished before.”
Liza said quickly, “Let us consider Isabel’s original proposal, which was to send a Committee of Concern to the Pylon. A responsible suggestion, I think.”
Isabel blinked at being called “responsible.”
She stole a glance at Peace Hope, who grinned back and lifted her gripper-hand.
There were uneasy mutterings and shuffling of feet. Debbie said, “Only the Contact can talk to the Pylon.”
“Only the Contact is ‘spoken to,’” said Marguerite. “Anyone can go and stare at the Pylon, if it comes to that. If we stare long enough, who knows what may happen.”
But others were still shaking their heads. “They’ll just put you to sleep again, if they get annoyed enough,” said Jim Pestlethwaite.
“This is an emergency,” Marguerite insisted.
“How does thee know?” Nahum spoke sharply, and the others quieted. “How does thee know what our friends from the stars have done in the sky? How does thee know the spectacle of lights is their doing? How does thee know what God intends for our town, whether life or death?”
The room was still, except for the gentle hum of the fan. Isabel thought, only a Quaker as “plain” as Nahum could call the angelbees “friends.”
“Of course I don’t know,” said Marguerite evenly. “I’ve given you my best professional diagnosis, that’s all.”
There was silence again.
Peace Hope said, “Surely, Father, we can say that we are frightened. Surely that is something we can ‘tell’ the Pylon.”
“Of course, that is a proper concern.” Nahum nodded. “All of us possess the gift of speech. To leave such a burden up to thy grandmother all these years was as ungodly as keeping a preacher in a steeplehouse.”
There was a thought. How hard had anyone tried to make “contact,” besides Alice?
“We can send people in pairs,” Liza was saying. “A vigil around the clock. I’ll take the first shift.”
“I’ll go, too,” said Carl.
Matthew said, “I’ll spell you in the morning.”
“I will join thee,” Daniel told Matthew.
“Then I’ll go next,” said Isabel quickly, “with Peace Hope.” Maybe something would happen. Even if not, it would be a good excuse to inspect the Pylon at leisure.
Chairs squeaked on the floor as neighbors got up, to get their chores done before sundown. As Daniel crossed the room, he touched her shoulder lightly. Isabel caught his hand. He turned to look her full in the face, with a friendly smile.
A rush of warmth came over her. Then with a nod he left, and Isabel took a deep breath to collect herself.
Peace Hope moved her crutch forward. “Thee’ll be staying for dinner, Isabel?”
“Thanks. Will you, Dad?”
Andrés shook his head. “Your mother won’t bother to eat if I don’t fix something.”
“Then you can take home the medicine box from Sydney. There was one, wasn’t there, Peace Hope?”
“Yes,” said Peace Hope. “The whole shipment was there outside the Pylon as usual, just by the airwall. Carl picked it up for us.”
“You checked it with the counter?”
“Yes, always.” Usually the Sydney shipment was clean, but one time it had flipped the Geiger needle clear offscale.
“What about the return shipment?” Isabel asked.
“Carl just dropped it there, outside the airwall. We’ll see what happens.”
After dinner, Isabel took the Sydney Herald upstairs to read while Peace Hope worked at her desk. She yawned, realizing her exhaustion; she thought of Liza at the Pylon and wondered how that tireless woman would manage another night without sleep. Isabel herself needed sleep, but she was determined to get what she could out of the Herald before it was passed around the town. The dingy gray paper, printed on much-recycled pulp, would have to be returned next month else the subscription rate doubled.
LABOUR OUT screamed the headline. Beneath was a photo of a party rally, the streets jammed with bicycles and solar mopeds. Buried on an inside page was another escape attempt, an explosive blast through the section of airwall that spanned the Port Jackson Harbour. The Wall supposedly thinned out underwater, they said. Not thin enough, unfortunately.
What about the Underground? What about the little airwall around the Pylon; might that one be easier to breach than the outer Wall? Isabel decided to bring a shovel, for her shift with Peace Hope.
The back page of the Herald regularly featured the Taronga Zoo. Nine tenths of the Taronga collection survived nowhere else on Earth. This month, the keepers had gotten a nesting pair of bald eagles named George and Martha to produce a fledgling. Eventually they hoped to reintroduce the pair to the wild, right here in Gwynwood.
There was a full-page ad for “electrics.” Sydney was proud of being electrified, mostly solar. If Isabel saved another month’s allowance, she might just get the solar cell she needed to amplify her receiver, if the prices did not go up…
The problem was that Gwynwood lacked goods for export. The harvest produced a surplus most years, but none of the local produce met Sydney’s radiation limits. And they had no industry to speak of.
The town had come up with one salable commodity: hand-decorated stamps depicting native American scenes. The artist was Peace Hope, who drew and painted by holding the implements between her teeth and had shown an early artistic gift. Liza would spread the glue and stamp the perforations and make packages to order. They fetched outrageous prices, in Isabel’s opinion, starting at ten Australian dollars for a half-inch portrait of a crested cardinal, on up to fifty for an old-fashioned Quaker “family scene” done in silhouettes to avoid blasphemy, each stamp having “Gwynwood, USA” penned in the corner.
Had the Scattergoods kept the money, they would have been richer than the entire town, several times over. In fact, they turned their earnings over to the Town Meeting, which then had to allocate funds. The biggest single allocation went to Marguerite for the hospital. So Isabel leafed through the medical ads, figuring that here at least were a few trinkets they might be able to buy.
There was a sale on hospital equipment. A fetal heart monitor, the cordless model, was marked down to $50.
Isabel looked up from the floor. “Look, Peace Hope: a fetal monitor. I’ve never seen one for under five hundred. We might manage the deliveries better.”
Peace Hope was working on her stamp portraits, at her desk nestled beneath the slant of the roof. Her desk lamp, running on solar storage, threw jagged shadows across the room. As usual she had her thirty-year-old tape deck playing an ancient “I Love Lucy” soundtrack, about Lucy and Ricky hunting movie stars in Hollywood. The tape had so much hiss you could barely make out what Lucy was wailing about. It focused her concentration, Peace Hope claimed. She let the paint brush drop from her mouth and said, “A fetal monitor would be a good thing. It would bring Debbie some peace of mind.” Debbie’s son Miracle had suffered brain damage from a prolonged labor.
“The sensor is a miniature microwave transmitter. I could use it to test our clandestine radio.”
“Good. I’ll chip in my allowance, if need be.” Peace Hope took up the paint brush between her lips and touched up the black face of a cardinal. On the wall above hung a framed engraving of the Scattergood family tree which traced Quaker ancestors back to seventeenth-century England. From the tape deck came Lucy’s cry of “Ricky!” followed by some unintelligible imprecation.
“I wonder how Liza is doing at the Pylon,” Isabel mused. “Do you suppose the Pylon will take any notice?”
“Only to stare back.” Peace Hope’s voice was muffled around the brush handle.
“We must get them to notice us.” Isabel caught her fist in her palm. “Teacher Becca knows something. Will you come with me to see her tomorrow?”
“Mm-hm.” After another brush stroke she added, “I still think we ought to play chess for them. No intelligent creature would pass up a game of chess.”
“You and your chess. I’m going to try an experiment. Like digging a hole under the airwall.” That could hardly be ignored.
The fluorescent bulb flickered, and the tape slowed to a drawl. Peace Hope flicked off the tape, and the lamp steadied again. “The charge is almost down.
I have to get ready for bed, while I still have good light.”
For Peace Hope, getting ready for bed was a complex operation. First she sat on her bed and got the front of her homespun dress unhooked, using teeth and gripper-hands, exposing the joint between false leg and leg stump. She dropped the clothes onto a shelf right next to the bed. With her grippers she flipped the clasp at each leg joint to release the ring clasp, and then the legs came off, revealing the stunted limb buds with which she had been born. With her teeth she flipped back her arm clasps, first the left, then the right. The left “arm” bounced on the floor with a hollow sound and rolled to the wall; the right one, a more sophisticated prosthesis with finer controls, she caught in her arm bud and set down more carefully on the shelf.
As she set the arm down next to her clothes, the Red Queen slipped out of the pocket and rolled under the bed. Isabel reached beneath the bed to retrieve the chess piece. As she did so, she spotted a paperback farther under and retrieved that also. “What’s this? Is it any good?” New books were rare; she thought she had read all the Scattergoods’ books by now.
The title was Pirate’s Flame, slashed across the cover. Below was a picture of a woman on a burning ship, her head cast back, in the arms of a well-muscled black-haired man. The woman’s dress, which was the same color as the flames on the ship, was half open below the neck.
“It is good,” said Peace Hope. “I wish I could forget it, so I could read it again.”
Isabel turned to the first page and read to herself: “…his hungry eyes devoured her neck, and her breasts, and he said, ‘Beware, maiden, for I will carry you away with me across the sea!’”
The lamp sputtered out at last, the day’s electricity spent. Out the window, in the darkening twilight, the ungodly orange of the angelbees’ handiwork had reappeared.
“Put it back, please,” Peace Hope added, “so Mom won’t see.”
“Scatterbrain, I’m surprised at you.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You’re lucky, you’ve found a boy that you care for in this little town.”
The Wall Around Eden Page 4