by Lou Cadle
The young man who’d mentioned his grandfather spoke. “One next to the marker, and one a bit away from that. Is that right?”
“Perfect.”
A young woman said, “And we were told to dig one over by those crab apple trees. I hope you don’t mind, but I picked up a fallen crab apple to take with me. It’s rotting, but maybe something will grow from it.”
“That’s fine,” Joan said. “I’ll get you some more to take with you tomorrow morning. And thank you for digging my son’s grave.”
“We’re not quite finished,” said the young man. “Should we get back to it?”
Dev said, “Yes, and thank you. If one of you wants another go at this man, feel free to come and try. Maybe someone else can get him to talk where we can’t.”
Vivian said, “I doubt it. But I’ll take my turn with the shovel again.”
“Pickaxe now,” the young man said. “It’s pretty hard work with all the rocks.”
A woman said, “We piled up the rocks so you can put them over the graves. That’s what we do, so animals don’t dig.”
Dev nodded at her. They did that as well. And the reason was the same as Sierra’s for not wanting him and Zoe to see Arch’s body. That’s not how you wanted to remember someone you love, by seeing bones pulled out of a grave by scavengers.
“Okay,” Dev said. “We all have something to do.” Too many somethings, was more like it. “Let us know when the graves are done, please, and we’ll have our funerals.”
Chapter 23
Pilar spoke last at Arch’s funeral, the last of the three that afternoon. “We were neighbors but didn’t often see eye to eye, back when all this started. We didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Sometimes I was right, but as things turned out, he was right more often. Over the years, we grew to be friends. We were, after all, the only two old guys around. We’d both been on airplanes. We’d both experienced things that your grandchildren won’t believe ever happened. There’s something to that, to the power of shared experiences.”
He looked around. The Payson people and the others were standing well back but listening, respectful. “But more than that, he was family. All of the people are, the people who live here, and even those like Rudy who lived here for a short time. And Mark, your father, he’s like our cousin, extended family we don’t see often enough. All of us here are family for having lived through many of the same challenges. And when you are shoulder to shoulder with someone, fighting a battle, or digging a grave, or trying to squeeze the last bit of energy from a bank of batteries, that forges something between you. Arch wasn’t my brother. But you know, he grew to be. He really did. And I’ll miss him.”
Joan, who wore around her neck a stained and fraying stole from her time as an Episcopalian priest, said, “Dev?”
He shook his head. He would come out tomorrow evening, when he had done the chores of the day, and talk directly to his father. He didn’t need everyone else to hear those words. It didn’t escape him that it was the sort of thing his father might think.
“Okay then.” She looked around, but everyone else had said what they cared to. She stepped forward and took up a handful of dirt. Holding it over the grave, she recited, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” She sprinkled the dirt into the grave. “Rest in Peace, Arch. We love you.”
Zoe and Dev went forward to toss a handful of dirt in the grave. When Dev had seen the shape of the wrapped body, he was glad Sierra had kept him from seeing the scene of the death. Even that vague shape in the grave was going to trouble his sleep tonight. He dropped the gritty handful, and held onto Zoe as she dropped her handful of dirt, sobbing, and then he walked her away. Pilar and Sierra took up shovels and began to fill in the grave. Everyone in the neighborhood would take a turn. It was seen as the last loving act in a long lifetime of them.
“Dad?” Zoe said, once her sobs had stilled.
“What, hon?”
“Are you okay?”
“As okay as I can be. How about you, Punkin?”
She smiled. “You haven’t call me that in years.”
“You made me stop.”
“I like it. Today at least, I like it. It’s so hard.” She began to sob again.
He stopped and pulled her into his arms. There was nothing he could say to her. He couldn’t even say, “It’s going to be all right.” Because he didn’t think it was going to be. They’d gotten a few more details out of their prisoner, and Dev was certain that they would end up paying for what they’d done today. The only silver lining was that it would take time for the retaliation to come, as much as a month. Time enough to talk once more with the other communities and make a plan. Time enough to pick through every bit of debris out on the highway and find all the weapons and ammunition that had survived the day’s battle.
They might come up with a better plan as a neighborhood. But he didn’t think he’d be the one to come up with it. Not tonight, at least.
Curt shot the prisoner before supper with his crossbow. While six of them prepared a light meal, which they would be eating in moonlight at this rate, the rest of them dragged bodies out to the main highway for burning. The Payson people were worn down from all the physical labor of the grave-digging on top of the march up here.
When he worked with Vivian, who insisted on helping drag the bodies, she said, “Tell you the truth, we haven’t been sleeping all that well, worried about this day.”
“Did you know you were going beforehand, like we did? Or did they just march into town and point at you this morning?”
“They asked for volunteers, half women, half men, between eighteen and twenty-five. Wasn’t as if there were a lot of us who fit those limits. So I stepped forward.”
“Brave of you.”
“Better me than some others. We have one gal who has a mental disability. She’s just not all that smart, I mean. Sweet girl, but she’d not be the one to go. And there’s Jorge. He fell off a roof and limps. Not him either.”
“I’m glad they didn’t get you up there.”
“I’m relieved, but I don’t see any way around it if another group of them comes and demands the same thing.” She stopped and laid down the legs of the body they’d been hauling. “Sorry, I have to rest a half a second.” Reaching around her back, she rubbed it. “I look like my grandmother, rubbing my back.”
Dev had the soldier’s shoulders and didn’t put them down. He waited for her to be ready to lift the legs again. “It’s nice you have one still alive. Grandmother, I mean.”
She looked troubled. “I’m sorry you lost your dad.”
“Me too,” he said. “Though he could be a pain in the ass sometimes, I did love him.” His throat closed on the end of the sentence.
“I was so lucky, compared to many. During the epidemics, I mean. Mom said we have good genes for fighting off disease. I guess we do.”
“Your kids will survive because of that. That kind of thing matters again. People with good vision and good hearing, people with the ability to fight off disease, people with good balance so they don’t fall off roofs or out of trees. It all matters.”
“Strong people,” she said, agreeing. “Okay, I’m ready.” She lifted the corpse’s legs again, and they carried the body—which had begun to smell bad already—to the growing pile.
Dev hoped not too much of his father was on the pile. There were pieces of bodies as well from the grenade explosions, and he knew some of what they’d burn tonight could be from his dad. Sierra hadn’t let him look, but he knew it was bad from the shape of his father’s covered body in the grave.
Another thing it was best not to dwell on.
“I think we’re almost there,” she said, looking around. There
was another pair of people carrying a body up the highway, but otherwise, the only bodies left were horses’. A job for tomorrow. Vivian said, “I’d love a shower. Or, I guess you guys don’t have a lot of water.”
“We have enough for that, considering everything you all have done today. We tend to go with sponge baths many days, but anyone who digs or gets dirty takes a shower. Easier to wash people than sheets. You can have a warm one if you want warm, or a cold one if you want cold.”
“How do you have warm water? Does it come out of the ground like that?”
“Pilar had some solar shower bags. I guess they were good ones, because they’ve held up for twenty-five years. Or two of them have. I’m sure he put both out.”
“Cool is probably better. Damn, it was hot today.”
“I think it’s getting worse every year.”
“Mom says it is better up here in the mountains, cooler the higher you go, but I don’t know about that. I mean, we walked up a long hard hill, and it’s still hot.”
“Yeah. But Payson was likely five degrees warmer today. Maybe ten.”
“Glad I missed it, in a way. But it’ll be good to be home tomorrow.”
“Let me show you the bathhouse. Since you are taking a cold shower, you can use ours.” The bodies were all piled up now, and everyone was drifting back toward his house.
“Okay, thanks.”
He walked her back. Zoe was setting up the picnic table with food, covered with worn dishcloths to keep any flies off them. Not that they had many flies. Too hot for them, even.
He showed Vivian how the shower worked, and then walked back toward the house a dozen steps before he stopped and simply took everything in. He surveyed the land—the land that was his now, he realized. Not his folks’. His.
Everything made of wood was sun-bleached and rotting. The pine trees were largely dead of bark beetle damage, tall pines that could, if it ever stormed again, come down through the shop or house roof, or onto the sleeping hens and kill them all. The house roof was patched with shake he’d cut himself with a hatchet he sharpened every two weeks. The only reason the house and shop hadn’t fallen down on their heads was how dry the climate was. Mold and mildew couldn’t survive here, no more than their rabbits had been able to.
It wouldn’t last forever. There was the truth of it. It wouldn’t even last long. If Zoe got together with one of the young men and had a child, by the time that child was Zoe’s age, it would be living in a shack made up of boards salvaged from the wreck the house would become.
But by then, the climate would be worse, the drought worse, the heat unthinkable. He wasn’t enough of an optimist to imagine this would reverse itself in one lifetime.
And, sad as he was over his father’s death, he saw something for the first time. It really was his land to do with as he would. He was the leader of his small family. And therefore, these were his decisions to make.
He could think short-term and keep on as they had been, trying to cling to the vestiges of civilization as it had been. Or he could take a brand-new approach and think not of the fall season or next year, but of five years from now, ten years from now, a generation from now. What would his grandchildren become? Farmers? Nomads? Would they sleep outside, or in dugouts or log cabins or tipis they rolled and carried with them every season? And how could he make decisions right now that would make those grandchildren more likely to survive?
Sleep eluded him that night. He took an extra turn watching the pyre of the dead soldiers, there with water and a blanket to prevent a wildfire from spreading, and at other times, he sat at the picnic table, having ceded his father’s room and the extra furniture to the guests, and he thought and thought.
Chapter 24
“Here’s how I see it,” Dev said.
Sierra thought he looked older today. The death of Arch had hit him hard. But he seemed to be holding it together. Better than she would when Pilar died. Yesterday had been taken up with pulling the horses around to the pyre, after first saying goodbye to their guests. It was morning now, and the fire of horse bodies was barely smoking, and now they were all here again, just the neighborhood, gathered around the Quinn picnic table.
“I would give anything to have my dad back, and Rod, and Yasmin. Anything. This isn’t about that, is what I want to say to start.” He looked around. The neighborhood was all gathered. Dev took a deep breath. “In a way, this week is going to end up a good thing for us.”
There was a shocked silence, and then several voices were raised in protest.
Dev held up a hand, and people quieted down. He had their respect, and her own. “I’m not talking about the people we lost. That’s not a good thing, could never be good. That’s pure pain.” He looked around. “I’m talking about something bigger. You know why we’re in this trouble? I don’t mean the trouble with the military, though that’s bad enough. I mean the big trouble, the original trouble, when America had its gasoline shut off and had no other way to get things done. We shouldn’t have been in that position. Our leaders should have been thinking about the day it happened decades before. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but Pilar, Joan, wasn’t gas going to run out soon anyway?”
Pilar said, “It wasn’t an infinite resource, that’s for sure.”
“But no one figured out another way to transport stuff like food and screws and lumber, or thought to create several centers for growing and manufacturing so goods didn’t have to be transported so far. I mean, what you did, Pilar, and my folks, with your power plants and gardens, that could have been scaled up. Every household in America could have done it. If things would have been in place when oil ended, lumber mills could have switched to hand-felling trees and owned horses to deliver the lumber to stores. It didn’t have to be like it was.”
Joan, who looked ragged, emotionally wrung out from losing a son and conducting three funerals, said, “Not people in Phoenix. That city was never sustainable. It was crazy to build a big city there in the first place.”
“Part of the sickness back then,” Dev said. “It was a sickness of attitude. Everything was done via short-term thinking. We want what we want right now. Businessmen wanted to get filthy rich right that moment, no matter what it cost. No one wanted to switch to another way of living and work a little harder at that, so gas kept on being burned. People thought nothing of driving a two-hundred-fifty-mile round trip to see some stupid sport being played. And look at the result.” He waved around himself. “Look at the trees, dead from the heat and disease. Look at what we’re wearing and our houses. Look at our garden, how dry it is already. And the hens. I remember when the hens had grass to eat in the yard. They live in dirt now. We have to throw scraps over to them or they’d have no green stuff at all.”
All this was true, but Sierra wasn’t sure what point he was coming to.
“We’re better off in one way than regular people in the cities were back then. We do think longer-term. We save seeds, we make sure we are careful with water, we compost so our soil stays fertile. But we still don’t think long-term enough. In our own way, we’re no better than the greedy bastards who got us to this point.”
Pilar said, “I’m not sure that’s fair, Dev.”
“Fair, unfair, what does it matter if there’s truth in it? Here’s how I see it. We need to start looking further ahead than next year. Brandie is going to have a baby in six months. What is the life that baby will have when she’s twenty? Will it be hotter? Yes. Drier? Probably. What if the hens all died of a disease next time, or the amaranth does? That baby won’t be here. She’d die too. So will all of us. We’re just one disaster away from starvation.”
Sierra said, “We’ve been lucky that way.”
“And so our disaster wasn’t a plague of locusts or a plant disease. It was this bunch of military guys. And we know they’ll be back, a bigger disaster still. They’ll kill us. Hell, they could burn us out and it’d kill us as completely as bullets would, and they could save their ammo.”
&
nbsp; “They won’t burn us out,” said Troy. “They’d want the food, the hens.”
“Probably so,” said Dev. “But my point is, we’re thinking too short-term still. I believe in God. I know some of you don’t, but I do. The way I see it is, God gave us a brain. He gave us the ability to think ahead longer than a year, and it is our obligation to God to use that brain. Same thing if you don’t believe and think it’s all evolution. We evolved to use our brains to make plans, and the ones who will survive are the ones who can plan best. Survival of the fittest, right? That doesn’t mean who has more bullets or bigger biceps, not usually. It means the one who thinks best.”
“Where are you going with this, Dev?” Pilar said. “I don’t disagree with you, but your point?”
“We need to leave this place,” Dev said. “Right now. Forever.”
Sierra had been thinking the same thing.
“We need to pull up stakes while we have this month to do it, and find more fertile land. Cooler weather, and a year-round water source.” Dev looked intently around the circle of people.
Sierra did too. There was shock, but it was turning on some faces to a more thoughtful expression. A few people looked a bit angry, but not everyone. She wasn’t sure how she felt.
A pang of grief hit her at the idea of giving up her home, of all that Pilar had worked to build. She thought of every shovelful of dirt she’d turned over, all the times she had sat on the deck and had a good conversation. Of the old times, when refrigerators and fans worked, and the comfort of that.
But these weren’t those times.
She thought, then, of Rod and Arch and Yasmin’s bodies, torn from the weapons the military had carried. She glanced at Pilar and imagined seeing him cut down like that the next time. Unacceptable.
Dev said, “We have a resource now we didn’t before. We have a horse. We can build a wagon with the wood in my porch and the shop walls, and I know Curt with his know-how can re-invent axles and wheels. We can carry a lot with a wagon. It limits us to roads and cleared spaces, but that’s okay.”