THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  It was a walk one late afternoon that prompted Molly to take up Wally Schuman's suggestion. The rays of sun were slanting low through the trees, and, when she looked carefully at one of the low maples, she noticed for the first time it had no new buds. Examining the other trees, she found that many of them, invariably the maples and beech, were utterly devoid of buds. The discovery was frightening. It meant that many of the trees in the forest wouldn’t be having leaves in the coming spring. Were they dead? she wondered. Had the summer heat and drought taken this toll? What would the woods look like in the spring?

  Molly started by writing a small piece. In essence, most of it was excerpted from her journal. In it she wrote about life in the country, about the chickadees and nuthatches and bright red cardinals that came to Tripoli's feeder, about how the boughs of the tall spruce in front of the farmhouse, when heavy with snow, looked like the outstretched arms of an old man struggling to keep the load aloft. Of course, she wrote about Danny, too. How he had been endowed with the wonderful ability to listen and sense all that was in the natural world around him. And she wrote about her discovery of the budless trees and how Danny, she now understood, had been sent by the old Hermit to warn of an impending calamity. That people, herself included, would have to change what they did or how they did it.

  She sent the article to Wally Schuman and was surprised not so much that he published it, but by people's reactions. Her observations must have hit a responsive chord, because two days later there were a flurry of letters to the editor about her article. Upon close examination of the trees in their yards and woods, others around the county had also come upon the same worrisome phenomenon of budless trees. And it was not limited to just the maple and beeches, but to some species of birches, too. Molly's article, they wrote, had the ring of authenticity and truth, and, yes, Daniel had been right. All the respondents were hoping for further stories from Molly.

  She did another piece. This one was solely about Danny, recalling him as a small child, then describing in detail his return, his transformation, his incredible gifts. The headline for the piece was entitled,“Just Listen.”This, too, brought a chorus of cheers.

  “I knew it,” said Wally on the phone. “And the Gannett Wire Service wants to carry your articles—with your permission, of course. Generally, we share with our other papers.”

  “Sure,” said Molly.

  “And it means a bit more money, too.”

  The prospect of being able to help pay her way at Tripoli's was inviting. So she sat down and wrote another article. This was about herself and was much harder to write. Almost confessional in tone, she examined her own situation while working for the magazine.“I was so terrified at the prospect of losing security that I allowed myself to become distracted from what was essential in life. I was so swamped with the informational noise of the everyday that my connections to the essentials of the Earth had become severed. I had come to believe that fruit and vegetables grew in supermarkets, that milk was made in containers, and fish magically laid themselves glassy-eyed upon beds of ice. And all for me.”

  “So, what do we do now,” she asked,“now that the dairy farmers don’t have enough hay for their cows because of the summer drought, now that we’ve depleted the oceans of fish?”

  A day after the article appeared nationally in the Gannett papers, Molly began receiving letters from all over the country. There were so many letters that Josh Miller, the mailman, couldn’t leave them in the box and had to come up to the front door lugging a sack.

  “Hey, you’re getting famous,” he said, slipping the bag off his shoulder and letting it fall at her feet with a grunt.

  “Hardly,” she laughed.

  “Everybody I know here in Newfield still talks about Daniel. What with all the stuff that's happening, folks are scared.”

  “And you?”

  “Geez,” he took off his wool cap and scratched his bald head.“Of course. But what can I do? I’m just a lousy postman. Well, happy reading,” he said and jumped into his jeep and headed off to the next farm.

  Molly opened the sack and started eagerly reading the letters. A woman in Ohio wrote that over the last month she had been discovering the bodies of red-breasted nuthatches and pileated woodpeckers in the woods near where she lived. “I told my husband about it, but he says that sometimes birds just die. But these are hardy winter birds, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my thirty years of birding.”

  A country vet in Minnesota wrote that his small town had been experiencing an outbreak in rabies the likes of which he had never seen. He had already euthanized dozens of dogs and cats attacked by rabid animals. “I’ve been telling folks that the reason for the outbreak is that the population of skunks and raccoons has been going through the roof. Everywhere you go, you’re just about tripping over them.

  “My belief is that the previous mild winters we’ve been experiencing out here have let the rabbits and mice survive in big numbers. And since they are the primary food for the raccoons and skunks in the spring, the weather is at the source of this outbreak. Well, that's what I’m telling folks, but nobody's listening. Maybe you could mention something about it?”

  There was a letter from a citrus farmer in the Florida panhandle; he and his neighbors were having a miserable crop because of poor pollination. The bee population had undergone an inexplicable die-off—and this time it wasn’t mites.

  Molly even had a letter from an Eskimo in Point Barrow, Alaska. Because the ice had closed so late this year, the whales didn’t leave as usual, and now pack ice from the Arctic Ocean had moved in to close off their escape. He himself had counted over a dozen trapped whales milling around, frantically trying to find a way out of the bay.

  “Interesting,” said Tripoli when he came home and started reading the letters.“No one thing in itself is really proof but, speaking as a cop, altogether this gets pretty suspicious.”

  “Right,” she continued his thought.“It's all anecdotal. But taken collectively, you start to get a pattern.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  The Gannett office in Washington called to ask Molly if she would like to do a regular, weekly column. Molly was both flattered and intimidated.

  “We thought we’d call it ‘Just Listen.’”

  Molly gave it a moment's thought. Thought about Danny, who had been gone six months.“Okay. Sure. Why not.”

  The column she submitted cited the surprising response she had gotten from her first article. Those letters spoke to her of a deep concern that was nationwide in scope. “I had always thought that environmental concerns were limited to a select few, the elite and fringe groups. But now I see that people all over the country, in all walks of life, really do care about the Earth.”

  And for the next three days, Josh Miller found himself lugging even heavier sacks of mail up to Tripoli's farm.

  By the time she took the microphone at Tuesday night's Common Council meeting, everybody in attendance at the overflowing session knew who she was.

  “I’m a little nervous talking to so many people at once. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I…if I…” She fumbled with her notes.“If I can’t get my notes straight,” she said, and the people laughed politely. Finally, she tossed her cards away. “Look, I’m not going to make this sound easy or cheap. We’ve got a chance right now to change the way we’re living. Replacing all the city vehicles with more efficient cars means the city will probably have to float a new bond issue. Tax rates are going to go up. There's no way around it. But it's going to drastically reduce the amount of energy we use and the pollution we emit. Most important of all, we have a chance in this small town to set an example for the rest of the country. And we’re not doing this just for ourselves. We’re doing it for our children and their children.”

  Molly spoke with such passion, surprising even herself, that when she finished people were on their feet applauding.

  Afterwards, she
invited everybody out to see her new two-seater parked in front.“Every time I brake,” she explained,“instead of heating up the brake pads, I turn a generator and it recharges the batteries that drive the electric motor. And it's a wonderful car to drive. And park. Just look at it,” she said proudly.

  When Molly's first check arrived from the paper, she decided to use it to continue fixing up the house. Molly, who had never given much thought to interior decoration, now took a surprising pleasure in it. She hung curtains and rearranged the furniture. She found some old antiques hidden in the far reaches of the attic: a table that they moved into the dining room and an old chest that was perfect for their bedroom. Here was a realm where one had some control, she thought, where life had definition, tasks had beginnings and ends, and accomplishment could be measured by simply looking and seeing.

  “I need some help,” she said on a Saturday morning when Tripoli was home for the day. “I found an oak hall-tree hidden up in the barn.”

  “A what?”

  “It's this thing you put in the hallway and hang coats and hats on.”

  “Oh, one of those.”

  “There's all this heavy junk in the way. I can’t move it and I was hoping you could help.”

  “Yeah, sure!”

  They went together out to the barn and Tripoli unlatched the door. It opened with a creak.

  “Oh shit!” he suddenly exclaimed.

  “What's the matter?”

  “Another animal is missing! Wait,” he said, moving in, Molly right behind him.“Let me count.” He counted as they kept milling around.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  He searched all through the interior of the barn, went behind the bales of hay, everywhere a yearling sheep might have hidden.“It's a lamb. I’m missing a lamb. Damn. It was the littlest one, too.”

  Together they hunted all over the farm, then trudged through the deep snow on the adjacent properties. There was no sign of the lamb. Not even tracks.

  “Someone's stealing them. It's obvious,” he said over dinner a week later, after still another lamb vanished.“Some neighbor is having lamb chops at our expense!”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Molly, coming back from the stove with a second helping of spinach lasagna.“Sleep out there with a gun?”

  “Well, the thought had occurred to me.”

  “Come on, Trip,” she said, serving him.

  “Enough. Enough,” he held up his hand as she mounded the pasta on his plate.“Hey, you trying to make me fat?”

  “Not a chance. You’re too busy running around. Don’t worry. But if you really want something to worry about—”

  “What?”

  “My period,” she said. “It's weeks late. My breasts are swollen.”

  It took him a moment, and then a smile spread on his face. “Interesting,” he said finally.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “You know, I was beginning to wonder. You seemed kind of different.”

  “Boy, for a cop you really are slow.” She punched him playfully in the shoulder.

  “A baby,” he muttered softly to himself.“A son.”

  “Or a daughter.”

  “Whatever. I’m not particular. I’ll accept any flavor at this stage in my life.” He got up, took her in his arms, and kissed her. Running his hands over her belly he claimed he could already feel the baby. He bent down and put his ear to her stomach and swore he could hear a tiny heart beating.“How wonderful!” he murmured.

  Long before Tripoli arose to go to work, Molly was up. She built a fire in the downstairs stove and sat alone in the darkness, waiting for the light of dawn, listening to the wind howling around the farmhouse. The morning was cold, colder than it had been all of December. The previous night, the temperature had plunged to five below and the thermometer had hardly budged above the zero level as the day began. All through the dawn, the wind kept buffeting the house, rocking it gently and causing its heavy timbers to groan as though it were an old ship at sea.

  Later, as Tripoli stood shaving, he looked in the mirror and saw Molly standing in the doorway watching him.

  “What's up?” he asked without turning. The lines in her face were deep and there was a dismal aura of sorrow about her.

  “I’ve always felt that somehow Danny was alive,” she said, her voice barely audible.“But now I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, just as she started to weep. She came into his arms and burrowed her face into his neck, smearing shaving foam on her cheek and hair. In the deathly cold, the swaying birch tree outside the bathroom window creaked with each gust as if in pain.

  “There's no way he could survive this. No human being could.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen, the coals in the stove burned red hot, whipped by the draft from the chimney. The panes in the old windows shuddered. The entire house seemed to be crying out for relief.

  “I think that this new baby is meant as a substitute,” she said finally.“To replace Danny.”

  “Don’t be silly.” He stroked her head, took his towel and wiped off the soap.“People are allowed to have more than one child, you know. God doesn’t play bait and switch. Daniel's okay.”

  “How can you say that?” she asked looking up at him with reddened eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “But I just got this feeling.”

  “There's no way. You’re trying to console me.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Yourself then.”

  “You have to have a little faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  Over breakfast, she sat motionless over her coffee.“You’d better go. You’re going to be late. Again.”

  But he couldn’t leave her, not like this. He got up from the table and opened the door to the stove to toss in a piece of wood. The air rushed in, sending up a hail of sparks.“If you think about all that has happened,” he said turning to her as he knelt in front of the stove, his face glowing in the heat, “you begin to realize that it all goes beyond anything we can really comprehend—or imagine. I really and truly believe we’ll see Daniel again.”

  “Oh, how I wish I could believe that.” She turned and looked out the window. The sky turned black and a gale of wind-whipped snow blew past, obscuring the barn. Then, almost as quickly, a break appeared in the clouds and a column of bright sun beamed through. Molly watched it dance over the land, illuminating everything in its path.“You’re right. I don’t understand anything. Why was it Danny, of all the children in the world? And if this old man had all this wisdom, this message to bring—whatever it was—why didn’t he just do it himself?”

  “I’ve wondered about that, too,” said Tripoli, getting up and standing behind her chair to gaze out on the wintry fields. “Daniel called him father. And John. And I kept thinking. John? John? His name wasn’t John. But when I read those old books we found in the hut, I realized that there were pieces in there that looked like they were taken from the Bible. From the Koran. God only knows where else. It was like a synthesis of all religions. John? Yes, I thought. Of course. John the Baptist.”

  “Huh?” she turned to look up at him.

  “Matthew thought of himself as John the Baptist. He was meant to teach and mentor Daniel, to baptize Daniel in the wealth of all this amassed knowledge.”

  “You mean the old man was…?”

  “He thought he was.” said Tripoli.“In any event, Daniel was the chosen one. He was the culmination, the very purpose of the legacy. The time is ripe. The world is floundering. It's in a precarious, unstable, sick state. It needs a quiet, intelligent voice. The old man, whoever he was in fact, chose Daniel for this role. You see, Daniel was meant to be of this world, and yet not of this world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That's why he came back. Look, the old man was not against technology. Daniel told me how he had asked him about television and computers and cell phones. He
knew all about them. And those old volumes were full of all kinds of innovative devices, clever ways of pumping and impounding power, growing crops, harnessing wind and tidal forces, using renewable resources. The people in the chain of the legacy weren’t primitives. Just the opposite. They were way ahead of us. In some sense, light years ahead. And Daniel was meant to be the bridge—between the old and the new. That's why Matthew let him come back. It was to be as much a part of his education as living in the woods.” Tripoli became excited as he spoke, and his enthusiasm began to infect Molly.

  “And now?” she asked, knowing what he was going to say but needing to hear it.

  “Daniel has to live on. Don’t you see, it's our only hope. The world's hope. If I didn’t believe that, I don’t think I could go on myself.” He told her about Christ's parable of the soils that the priest had shared with him. About the good ground that bore fruit.

  “That's all very nice,” she said. “But all you have to do is look outside. How can he keep warm? What can he eat? He's still human, you know. And the ground is hardly ‘good,’ it's frozen solid!”

  Molly hadn’t seen Rosie since Thanksgiving, but she did keep in contact with her by phone. Rosie had suffered a bad bout with the flu and couldn’t seem to shake it. The boys, on the other hand, were healthy and growing like crazy. Ed, she told her, was now working not only full time, but putting in overtime. “For once, everything's going great. If I can just get back on my feet, things’ll be perfect.”

  “As soon as you’re feeling better, we want to see you guys.”

  “Well, sure!” said Rosie. “Just give me a few more days. I’m dying to see what you’ve done to the place.”

  Molly then told her that she was expecting.

  “Oh, that's wonderful!” exclaimed Rosie,“Better than wonderful. Hey, I’ll bet Tripoli's tickled.”

  “I don’t know if he's quite absorbed it yet.”

  “Maybe he's just in shock,” said Rosie with a laugh.