“Is that so, that our hatred matters not?” Daniel half smiled. “If so, that’s the virtue of powerlessness.”
“But how are we to survive without power?” It was always like this; they agreed about nothing, yet there was no one else she wanted more to talk with.
As they approached the turn for the Scattergoods’ house, their steps slowed. Isabel turned to face him. His eyes, though beautiful, had shadows beneath. “Your medicine is ready. I’ll bring it over, this afternoon.”
“Why, thanks. What shall I send back with thee? A sack of potatoes, I suppose, in return for the gift of life.”
She looked away. “For that matter, it was Peace Hope’s stamps that bought the medicine.”
“So the gift goes around the circle.” From his breast pocket, Daniel took a neatly folded handkerchief of home-spun. “I thought thee might like this.”
Isabel stared in surprise at the neatly sewn piece. The Scattergoods spun and wove all their linens, with enough left over to clothe half the town, and Daniel sewed all his own shirts. But the handkerchief had an embroidered border as well, a simple design, little six-pointed stars all along the edge. Isabel flushed, and her dark complexion turned chocolate. Without looking up, she managed to thank him. When at last she did look up, he had turned, his back receding up the road home.
VII
THAT WEEKEND, ISABEL found out what a bris was. The ritual for Ruth’s son was performed at home, and somehow just about everyone in town managed to crowd in. The mood was festive, not only for the birth but also since the deadly streaking had been stopped in the sky. Becca directed the service, standing in for her lost brother, and Marguerite assisted with the circumcision. In her readings, Becca made much of the significance of the firstborn son, who now received his name, Benjamin. Becca commented on the absence of Jewish men to perform the rite, noting that during the captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt the men had similarly been in short supply, and that Moses’ wife Zipporah had been called upon to perform circumcision in an emergency.
Afterward there was more good corn and beans and honeycakes than anyone could eat. Ruth’s baby nursed quietly, gazing at his mother’s face, where wisps of her tied-back hair strayed down. Grace hung over Ruth, begging to hold the baby again when he was done.
Isabel moved through the crowd, until she reached Becca. “How is your window screen holding up?”
“Excellent, thank you very much. I’ll be sending you a special something, by and by.”
Something about radios again, or the Underground perhaps. Isabel keenly looked forward to it. “Have you had any more…visitors?”
“Oh, they’re still afraid of the heat. But they’ll be back.”
Vera Brown was listening in, so Isabel changed the subject. “What did you think of Teacher Matthew’s sermon last Sunday?”
Becca said, “For a Christian, it wasn’t bad.”
Vera moved off again, toward Deliverance, who was chatting excitedly with Daniel.
“Matthew is a fine man,” Becca added, “though he needn’t be so apocalyptic about trees. The Tree of Life will outlive us. We have a saying: bear a child, write a book, and plant a tree.” She added, as if hearing Isabel’s thought, “Not necessarily in that order.”
Then Ruth hurried over, the baby consigned to other hands. “Isabel, would you spare a minute to come out to the apiary? The bees are giving trouble; they don’t escape fast enough. You might be able to rig up a better frame.”
Isabel followed Ruth outside, her curiosity piqued by this odd-sounding problem. Ruth gave her gloves and a net veil which came down over her head and shoulders. The beehives stood under an oak on the south side, stacks of white-painted wooden boxes carrying the vertical frames of honeycomb. Ruth lifted the hive cover and the bees could be seen, crawling over the hexagonal cells full of stored honey.
“The stacked boxes have no top or bottom,” Ruth explained, “so the bees can pass easily between the brood chamber below and ‘supers’ of stored honey above. But to harvest the honey, you have to smoke the bees out of the supers. The problem is getting them to stay out.” Ruth pointed to the division between the brood chamber and the first super. “You put a barrier in between, called an escape board, like this one.” She picked up a wire-mesh panel with a two-inch hole in the center, framed to the horizontal dimensions of the hive. “Now the bees can escape the smoke through that hole, reaching the brood chamber, but not find their way back to the supers.”
“That’s clever,” said Isabel.
“But they don’t escape fast enough,” said Ruth. “It takes more than a day, and without bees to fan the supers, the honeycombs will melt in the heat.”
“More holes, maybe?”
“Then the bees will find their way back. There’s another design, conical escape holes that funnel out. I saw it in the Herald.”
“Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Mentally Isabel sized the frame, estimating the lumber she would need. Overhead she glimpsed a couple of angelbees hovering as if curious.
“The angelbees always come around,” said Ruth. “All those little hexagons—anything six-sided fascinates them. But they don’t bother the hives. The hives are doing fine, all except one that lost a queen. Its workers gave up, and the hive went to waxworms before we got it requeened. I’m still not sure that it will take. Aaron was so good with the bees.” Ruth’s face wrinkled, and she bit her lip. “Isabel?”
“Yes, Ruth?”
“You know Becca likes having you young people around.”
“I try not to bother her overmuch,” Isabel replied cautiously, recalling Becca’s words about visitors.
“Never mind that, you hear? You come around, now. Becca needs more company; she just hasn’t been the same since—” Ruth broke off. “She was so close to her brother. He had a gift with words, he could paint pictures for her. He was like her eyes. I’m worried that—” She turned away and pressed her hands to her forehead, then she patted Isabel’s arm. “You come around, that’s all.”
“Sure I will, Ruth.”
On the way home in the carriage, Marguerite shared the bad news about Charity. “I couldn’t spoil the occasion, but—the fracture was not a hole in one.”
“No?” Andrés observed. “Children knit bones fast.”
“Not when there’s osteoma.”
Isabel lost her grip on the reins and had to lunge to retrieve them.
“I don’t think it’s metastasized,” Marguerite went on. “But I think the leg will have to go.”
“You’re the doctor.”
“Andrés, for God’s sake, we have no facilities for major surgery. The child belongs in the…” The only hospital was upstairs.
“Could you not transport her to Sydney somehow? Maybe in the mailbag?”
“We tried that once before,” Marguerite reminded him quietly. Humans were transported only to random destinations, and they never came back.
After the horse was unhitched and watered, Isabel rejoined her father in the sheep barn. He gave her his usual bear hug that swept her off her feet. After he set her down, she asked: “Dad, why don’t we try to blow out the Wall, like they do in Sydney?”
Andrés shrugged and patted the back of Esmeralda, his favorite ewe. “For my village in Valdivia, when the darkness fell, it was just el destino, fate, you understand? For you Americans it was different. You invented the bomb in the first place.”
“But we didn’t start the war.”
“Who is to blame: he who drops the match, or he who fills the barn with gasoline?”
“The Herald had a piece about how there couldn’t have been enough bombs to trigger the Death Year. The angelbees must have dropped their own bombs.”
Andrés looked up, as if trying to recollect something. “A professor once wrote a book to prove that the Germans never built gas chambers.”
“Anyhow, why should that make us powerless? Where’s the virtue in powerlessness? All we do is attend la ruca and hear sermons where nobody even ag
rees what’s being spoken of.”
“That’s just the point. You see, Belita, all these trifles—a cross here, a star there—millions have killed for them, all in the name of religion or country. So, your elders made a promise, to the souls of los huesos.” The bones, outside the Wall. “We promised that there would be no more conflicts, ever, and that the survivors would work together in everything, even matters of religion. Especially religion,” he amended.
“But still nobody agrees on anything. Nahum Scattergood doesn’t even go to Worship.”
“Nahum is a Quaker; you should know him better than I.”
“I’m not that kind of Quaker. Besides, I’m a Catholic, too.”
“Not till we have a priest to baptize you. Perhaps someday someone will transport one.”
VIII
THE NEXT DAY, following Meeting for Worship, Liza called on volunteers for a College Committee, to establish a curriculum for a Gwynwood College. Several elders offered to help, and everyone in Isabel’s class signed up right away. Isabel was tremendously excited about it, although she could not imagine how it would be managed.
That evening her friends gathered at the Wall behind the cemetery, as they often did, to share music and talk about Sydney and, now, to wonder about a “college” for Gwynwood. What classes would be most important—history or physics, literature or the arts? What about all the dead languages? Isabel insisted on physics first.
Across Gwynwood Hill, the setting sun poked out from beneath the thick dark cloud bank that capped the town like a giant pancake. A hopeful sign, the clouds might mean that rain was due. Outside the Wall, the skies above the deadland remained clear in all directions. Rain had been scarce outside ever since the Death Year, due perhaps to the acceleration of the greenhouse effect from the carbon dioxide released by Doomsday’s firestorms.
Isabel leaned back on the ground, breathing in the cool air with its scent of grass. Jon Hubbard was playing the guitar, and Peace Hope had a real knack for the harmonica, which she played using a special rubber attachment on her right gripper-hand. Sal rested her head on Jon’s shoulder, looking quite sharp in her new blue dress with the lace trim. Deliverance had made the dress, learning to sew with Anna Tran, the town’s best seamstress. Deliverance sang along with Daniel, her voice a rich soprano that always stood out during the hymns. It made Isabel feel self-conscious about her own deeper voice, which croaked by comparison, she was sure.
The sun touched Gwynwood Hill, shedding pink across the pines and upon los huesos outside the Wall. Overhead, the pancake cloud was darkening with turbulence, and fitful winds were lifting branches of the trees.
Deliverance looked up. “We’d better be getting home.”
“Just one more song,” Peace Hope insisted. “Who knows this one?” She began on the harmonica, but Jon’s hands fell beside his guitar. Isabel did not recall the tune either, but Daniel began to sing:
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,
and I will pledge with mine,
Or leave a kiss within the cup,
and I’ll not ask for wine.
The thirst that from the soul
doth rise, doth ask a drink divine,
But might I of love’s nectar sip,
I would not change for thine.”
Isabel wished she could hear his voice and see his eyes that way forever. But as they started on the second verse, lightning illuminated the forest and a thunderclap nearly deafened her. A second bolt of lightning hit, then a third. Right above them, an angelbee came ablaze in a ball of flame.
Isabel cried out and rushed to help Peace Hope away from the danger. Others screamed and fled back toward the Meetinghouse.
She looked back. The flames were still leaping in the air. “Daniel, wait. It might start a brushfire.” With the wood so dry, they could ill afford a fire out of control.
But the rain fell at last, a downpour that drenched them to the skin. Clean, nourishing rain for the corn to drink, rain to fill the cistern again. The fireball from the ill-fated angelbee hissed and vanished in a cloud of steam.
It rained for three days. Though much needed, the rain made the barn a less pleasant place in the mornings, with the stench of manure. Mice scurried in the corners, and Isabel actually caught one alive. She named it Peewee, and made a cage for it out of chicken wire. She built an exercise wheel for Peewee; the mouse took to it and spent all night racing for miles. She helped with the corn harvest until she was exhausted, then started rereading The Dispossessed until she fell asleep.
The rain also prevented further attempts to test the Pylon by fire. Then the Town Meeting voted to forbid any further use of fire before the Pylon. Isabel was outraged, but most of the townspeople were too afraid of being put to sleep. They voted narrowly to allow attempts at “prayerful visitation,” which Nahum spoke out for despite his objection to the circle of fire.
“So what do we do now?” Isabel wondered. The Lucy tape was creaking away as usual, and Peace Hope was penning outlines of finches and cardinals.
“Try the…” Peace Hope mumbled.
Isabel slipped the pen out of Peace Hope’s mouth. “Please, Scatterbrain.”
“Try the carrot, perhaps, instead of the stick. Find a gift they desire, as much as they hate fire.”
Isabel snapped her fingers. “Hexagons! Hexagonal polyhedrons. Where’s that sketch?”
She snatched up the sketch pad and flipped to the drawing of the “spacecraft,” with its hexagonal facets. “How tall was that thing, do you think?”
“Half again as tall as me,” said Peace Hope.
“With or without legs? Yours, I mean.”
“With legs, silly.”
Isabel went home to dig out old cardboard cartons from the attic and set to work with sliderule and compass to design a model, roughly lifesize, of the structure she had seen at the Pylon. While Andrés shook his head at her, in her garage workshop, Isabel pieced together the cardboard shell, first each half with a hexagon surrounded by three hexagons alternating with squares, then she fit the two halves together. “Legs” she tacked on, six of them, made of peeled birch branches.
“There,” Isabel told Peace Hope at last. “Do you think that will appeal to their vanity?”
“It feeds thine, that is certain.”
Isabel turned on her, furious, until she saw Peace Hope laughing at her. “You’re just jealous of another artist.”
They carted the construction out to the Pylon, as close to the airwall as they could manage. They camped out for the night, to see what would happen. Nothing did.
The next morning, they left the construction sitting in the grass and they departed, Isabel to the corn harvest and Peace Hope to her stamps; it was gluing-and-cutting day. The morning after, the structure had vanished.
“They accepted our gift,” Peace Hope mused. “I wonder…”
“So where does that leave us?” Isabel demanded.
“There’s always, thee knows, the Trojan Horse.”
That was a twist. To hide herself inside the cardboard box and…Isabel felt her hair stand on end. Slowly she shook her head. “I admit, I haven’t the guts for that.”
“Of course not, silly. How foolish of me to suggest such a thing.”
Still, Isabel felt that she had failed her pledge of life, fortune, and sacred honor. If she ever did find the Sydney Underground, whatever would they say?
The Scattergoods were impressed by the “gift,” and even Nahum commented favorably. After some thought, Daniel decided to resume occasional nighttime vigils at the Pylon. Isabel was pleased, although privately she doubted it would do any good.
That afternoon, Jon Hubbard stopped by the Chase house to deliver a covered basket from Becca. Instead of garden vegetables, the basket contained an ancient shortwave radio receiver, its case worn and rusted; it must have lain in a closet for years.
Isabel was beside herself. She hooked the cord up to the generator and twiddled the dials.
Nothing happened.
She pried the case open, to test connections with her voltmeter. The problem was revealed: several empty clips betrayed the loss of circuit elements, presumably cannibalized for some other use. She tried to guess the original circuitry, inserting transistors and capacitors from her plywood board, but it was no good; the speaker was dead as the deadland.
Undaunted, Isabel set the receiver on her workbench for further tinkering and went upstairs for her daily scrub-down of the hospital. Her mother was still keeping watch on Alice, and she had prepared a letter to Sydney regarding Charity’s leg.
The Gwynwood College opened in the third week of September, after the main crop was in. At first, the “college” classes looked just like an extension of the one-room grammar school, run by Teacher Becca in the Weisses’ basement, beneath portraits of the two school heroes: Helen Keller, a Special who had made good, and John Dickinson, a colonial Quaker who had opposed the War of Independence. But some of the college classes were to meet in the homes of the teachers, away from the distracting younger ones. It was hardly the Sydney Uni, but Isabel felt very proud, determined to excel and to quiet the murmurs that there were more crucial tasks than book learning.
Isabel and Peace Hope had carried on a scholastic duel as far back as she could remember. In history, Peace Hope got back papers with lots of admiring red “Goods” in the margin, whereas Isabel’s papers got more cross-outs and shocked question marks. Latin went better, as did Braille and signing; but science was Isabel’s forte. Isabel chose physics, and Peace Hope joined her just to prove there was not something she could not do. Matthew Crofts agreed to teach it, out at the Browns’ house where he had lived since the Death Year. The six students shared College Physics by Miller, the book Isabel’s mother had used.
Peace Hope’s choice was a second year of French. “French,” Isabel grumbled, having had her fill of Latin, “another dead language. Why bother; to speak with the dead behind the Wall?”
Peace Hope said, “I want to read Tristan and Isolde.”
So now here they were at French again, along with Daniel and Jon and Teacher Debbie. Debbie’s eyes were sunken, and Isabel felt sorry for her, knowing she had bleeding with her pregnancy, placenta previa—she would have to look that up. But the class looked even worse than Isabel had expected. Instead of Tristan, they were reading a children’s tale called Le Petit Prince. The Little Prince was a Special, Isabel decided, although not as bad off as Grace Feltman, since he managed to fend for himself alone on his own little planet. His planet was inhabited by sheep, like Australia. To escape his planet, he had harnessed a flock of migrating birds.
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