“You know, I can almost remember the world before the Change,” she says. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you, the things you’ve seen.”
She squeezes his fingers again, flicker-bright. And oh, his heart aches.
“I can almost remember my parents. Cindy and Marlene Bransford. Maybe you knew them?” She pauses a beat, eyes full of hope. He can only swallow around the thickness in his throat. Only shake his head, overwhelmed by… Overwhelmed.
“No, I didn’t think so. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to say thank you.” She grips his hand hard now, and he can’t bear to look up to see that she’s sincere. “Thank you. I wouldn’t have had a home if you hadn’t taken me in.”
He doesn’t feel her leave, whirl away in a new orbit, swept away by a fresh tide. When he looks up again, he can’t find her. She’s fallen into the mass of Dianas and Annes and Gilberts, and to him they all look the same.
Shouldn’t he recognize her? Shouldn’t he know her anywhere, no matter what her face or name? They’re kindred spirits after all. Why has she waited so long to take him home?
( The little girl struggles to breathe. Her freckles are so dark against her skin, which has gone so pale, her red hair bright as fire in the sun. He cradles her head, trying to hold it up, as if holding her head above the tide. It killed them, but not by drowning. In slow, insidious ways, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He’s only a simple farmer, here on vacation. Now he’s trapped, the bridge collapsed under the weight of evacuees – or bombed by the military some say. There are no ferries running from the island to the mainland, not anymore. Private boats all gone already or scuttled, trying to contain a thing that can’t be contained. There’s nowhere to go.
The supplies promised, the medical helicopters come to resupply struggling hospitals or evacuate survivors, he knows they’ll never come. But he can’t tell her this, the girl dying in his arms. She can’t be more than 16. And she reminds him of someone he knew once, a daughter or a niece, he can’t remember, won’t remember, because they’re gone and it hurts too much. He can’t think of anything to say to the girl, anything to comfort her as she gasps for breath, as her lungs collapse, as her body goes into shock, fighting against the sickness in its blood. So he says the first thing that comes to mind, a story he used to read to his niece or his daughter, the girl he can’t bear to remember, when she was a child: Ms. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place…)
One of the Gilberts brings him something to drink. It is like the tea, but thicker, and smells far worse.
“It’s for your joints,” the Gilbert says. “So they’ll hurt less. You shouldn’t push yourself so hard, walking to the shore every day. You know there are enough of us to take care of the food and there hasn’t been a raid in months. You’ve done so much for us, let us take care of you.”
He drinks the tea in silence, drawing what warmth he can from the cup. He always seems to be cold these days. Wasn’t it always summer on the island before the Change? Or perhaps it’s only the summers he remembers – sun bright in the lupins and on the waves, and Anne toddling on chubby legs, holding Marilla’s hand and laughing as the water drew near her toes.
No. He knows the memory is wrong, confused. Anne wasn’t a toddler when he first met her. She didn’t have dark hair like the girl he almost remembers, dark hair like the woman holding her hand and smiling back over her shoulder at him. It must be another story, one someone else told. He never lived that life. Never.
He squeezes his eyes closed. Maybe the Gilbert touches his shoulder and says something else before walking away. He doesn’t hear. There are low voices, a murmured conversation. He is the subject. They are worried about him. If he keeps his eyes closed, maybe they’ll think he’s asleep and leave him alone.
It’s not for them, not anymore. At first he stayed for them, the Annes, the Dianas, even the Gilberts. Someone had to take care of them, someone who remembered enough of the way things were Before to get them somewhere safe, keep them fed, keep them warm. Now it’s only her he’s waiting for, so he can sleep.
The voices move off, grow a bit louder. They’re telling stories now. Not the stories he remembers, not the stories from the old days. They’re stories of the future; they’re so full of hope it breaks his heart. They all start, “When things get better I’ll…”
He drifts off to the murmur of those voices, the fanciful tales of impossible future. So like his Anne, he thinks. Head always full of dreams. Don’t ever change.
He wakes in the silent kitchen by the cold fire. They’ve forgotten to stoke it again, now it’s only ash. It takes him three tries to push out of his chair, his old bones complaining the whole way. His fingers tremble and slip on the poker only meant for decoration. He stirs the ashes, but nothing. There’s no spark.
A scouting trip to gather more wood; the very thought of it sends a spike of pain through his lower back. His pulse thumps double time. How long does he stand that way, hand pressed to his back before one of the Gilberts – the same Gilbert? – comes through the door with an armload of firewood? He can smell the rot even from here, the dark, mossy scent. The wood is bug-riddled, but it will still burn.
“Let me take care of that.” The Gilbert takes the poker from his hand, urges him back into a chair. The fire is going soon enough and, soon after that, the kitchen fills with Dianas and Annes again.
By listening to the swirl of talk throughout the room, he learns two of the Annes left during the night. Not Annes then, something else he doesn’t have a name for. He doesn’t see the Anne that spoke to him yesterday, the one who was kind. She must have been one of the two who left, or maybe she was never here and he only imagined her.
There are only two Annes left now, and they are both quiet this morning, subdued with their heads bowed, speaking in low whispers. Perhaps they are thinking about running away, too. He watches them. Their features are drawn, pale. There are bruise-coloured shadows under their eyes. They’re afraid.
His bones settle and creak. He wills the joints to loosen. Come on, old bones, he thinks , just one more trip. I need you.
While the Annes and Gilberts and Dianas are busy, not paying him any mind, he slips out. The sun is bright and the air is fresh. It stirs the long grasses that try to tangle around his legs and for a moment he can almost pretend it’s Before, and nothing has Changed.
There’s a long, straight piece of wood beside the door, smoothed by time and his hands. It looks almost clean; he’s saved it and kept it this way, protected it. He takes it to lean on and it makes the walk a little easier. Once upon a time he would have done this in a cart. He had a good horse, didn’t he? Running to and fro to the station where the Gilberts and Dianas and Annes washed up. He gathered them in and brought them here, protected them. He even asked once, how they knew where to go so he would find them.
“Stories,” an Anne told him. “You’re a legend.”
On foot, it’s much longer. He can barely see the road through the tall grass, because who is there to travel the road anymore and keep it smooth? But it’s there, faint, a ghost of itself, and he walks it like a ghost – driving the stick in firm, buried in the red dust, using it as an anchor to pull himself along. It feels slow, unbearably slow, but he’ll get there. He can’t leave the Annes waiting. That would never do.
The sun is almost white in its brightness. He raises a hand to shield his eyes. Through his fingers, the road disappears to a vanishing point, a trick of the light and the red dust stirred up by the wind. Is that the station there already? Or is it a mirage? It wavers in the heat; he blinks stinging eyes, but it does nothing to clear his vision.
“Come on, old bones,” he says aloud. “Just a little farther.”
He ignores the ache in his joints as best he can. Ignores the erratic beating of his heart, the
tightness in his chest. He ignores the sensation of falling, his knees striking the ground and the long grasses whispering over him, hushing against his cheeks and ears like voices telling an old tale. It’s only an illusion, like the pain. He’s still walking, and that is the station ahead of him.
And there, through the haze, he can just make out the girl sitting on the platform. She’s clutching a battered case in both hands, straining her eyes to look either way. There’s hope on her face, so much hope; it’s fragile, almost-but-not-quite gone. She should know better than to give up on him. He always comes for her, like he’s come for her again now. Her hair hangs in two red plaits, one on either side of her face, framing the pale skin and the freckles. Not the boy they asked for, but something better. A girl. His girl. His Anne.
He ignores the way his left arm tingles, the tiny pains shooting from wrist to shoulder. They’re nothing. He ignores the scent of dust, thick and right next to his nose. He isn’t lying down. The world isn’t fading, crumbling, shrinking to a tunnel of grey surrounding the too-bright whiteness of the sun.
No, he’s walking up to the station platform now, suddenly shy, his heart beating too hard only from excitement and barely contained joy. Then she catches sight of him, and he knows. Her smile – all that tentative, fragile hope, all the big, impossible love no one has ever given her a chance to show before, all the moments to come, the poetry and the slate broken over Gilbert’s head, all of it. It’s all there in her smile. And he knows. She’s come home and he can rest. He’s finally found her. His Anne.
JENNY OF THE LONG GAUGE
Michael Matheson
His heart hangs from the gallows where she left it. His skin and bones she took with her, and his name he traded away long ago. What’s left of him hangs from the noose, swaying in the hot, dry wind, while his heart burns black in the beating desert sun.
The chinooks have become siroccos. They set the whole of the scaffold to creaking and his disembodied heart, tied in an oubliette bow, swings with it – traces a pendulum arc as a murder of crows descends on it with a furious beat of wings. Digging, tearing, snapping, biting, the crows feast and rise in a flurry, winging away still fighting over the last remnants of gore.
Their caws linger in the air long after they’re gone, only gristle and half-cooked ropy trails hanging from the swinging gallows knot.
◄ ►
His bones rattle in the lockbox hitched on the back of Jenny’s cart and the iron-shod hooves of her pitch team clop muted on the dusty road. She lashes the Clydes and they quicken to a trot, braying in protest as she hurries them west toward Spiritwood, making her seasonal round.
A flash of black on brilliant blue catches her eye and she turns skyward, shielding her eyes against the sweltering sun with one long hand. High overhead a murder of crows wings its way north. She frowns; tightens her grip on the reins and slows up her team. They whinny, anxious to be on, while Jenny watches the murder fly. It blots out the burnished sun as its patchwork shadow shifts and writhes along the ground, keeping pace with the welter above.
With sun-browned hands, slender, fine-boned, callusworn, she ties back wavy, black-bleached-nutmeg hair dark against the plains around her. Lets it waterfall over her shoulder as she turns in her seat to eye the lockbox on the wagon bed. “You got something to say?” The box shakes fiercely, though the wagon bed is still. “Didn’t think so.” She straightens, the box rattling on as Jenny lashes the reins. Her titan blacks neigh and pull forward past stunted trees and withering scrub.
The string of broken black bodies littering the path behind her goes unnoticed; glutted crows cawing weakly as they fade away in the choking dust.
◄ ►
Jenny pulls hard on the reins as the wagon comes to a ford in the river. Her stallions snort and shake their heads, hooves splashing into the edge of the shallow, pebbled water. The liquid runs cool on the hot metal of their shoes as they slow up and stop. Across the burbling stream, no more than a score wide, sprawls a Lowlands camp, covered wagons sending up streamers of pale smoke.
She leans back in her seat, considering, shifting into the shadow of a tall, skeletal tree with gnarled and greedy roots dug deep into the riverbed.
Eyes trained on the Lowlands camp and one hand on the reins, she reaches back into the wagon bed with the other. Roots among tossed blankets and tanned hides. Ignores the rattling box. Her fingers find the 12-gauge buried beneath a sprawl of coarse-haired hides. The metal of the long shotgun is cool against her palm as she draws it free and lays it across her lap.
She flicks the reins and her Clydes drag the cart through the splashing water, clomping hooves sending up small sprays and wagon wheels sluicing long waves into the air. The cart dips and rises again as it comes up the other side of the shallow bank. But the shotgun, clutched in long, lean fingers, never wavers as Jenny makes her way into the camp to pick up more wares before she heads into town.
◄ ►
The Lowlanders stare up at Jenny with blank, filmy eyes near blind from the driving dust. The sirocco whips at their tangled hair; picks at nests of nits and other, smaller things hiding in coarse tresses – only the elders of the tribe allowed hair shorn close to the skull. They follow her as the cart rattles through the waste of the camp. Wild dogs lie dying, poked by children with sharp sticks; the ones already dead split open to roast on cook fires. The smell of burning flesh fills the air.
Jenny slows her team to a halt, horses snapping sharply at children who come too close, made reckless by hunger. The women paw at her cart, stroking the grain of the wood. Listening to the creak of the wagon as the wind rocks it.
The flap of a covered wagon folds back, held open by a grimy hand corrupt with age spots and withered flesh. The chieftain’s face pokes out after it, eyes scrunched up against the sun, deep black irises swimming in a sea of off-colour white. He drops down from the wagon and rears up, a tall man over six feet, all gristle and burlap, wrapped in sagging flesh over strong, lank bones. “You got something to trade?” he rasps, voice ruined by too many years of drinking down the grit in the air; inclines one skeletal hand at the slow-cooking corpse of a wild dog. “We have meat.”
Jenny rises and comes to her full height, a fence post of a woman: rail thin and pole tall. Her hair streams in the hot wind and her long gauge rests in the crook of her arm, barrel aimed casually down at the face of the Lowlands chief. “I have hides,” she croaks through a parched throat and dry lips. Her eyes don’t leave his face. Around her the women paw at her boots; coo softly at the feel of the supple leather.
The chieftain caws like a brassy crow, shooing the women away. They scatter to the winds, dragging stupefied children after them. In their wake he turns again to Jenny. “Show me.”
She keeps her gun trained on the Lowlander as she dismounts and circuits to the back of the wagon bed. He shadows her, feet kicking up a sea of dust, as Jenny leans in and pulls out several coarse-haired blankets.
He grumbles in disinterest. “What else?” Jenny tosses the blankets aside. Uncovers a hoary, suntanned hide. He glances at her out the corner of one eye. “How long dead?”
Jenny shrugs, pulls a contemplative face. “Couple weeks? Crows didn’t get him.”
He nods. Looks over the rest of her wares. “I’ll take the hide. What else you got?” He leans forward to snatch up the skin and paw at the jumbled contents of her wagon.
She gives him a sly grin. “Got his bones.”
He looks up at her with newfound respect. “Fresh?”
“Same as the hide.” She smiles, yellowing teeth looking a little whiter than true in the harsh light.
“Mmm,” he grumbles. Juts his chin at the cart. Impatient.
Jenny grins wider. Grunts as she pulls the concealed lockbox from under the coarse blankets and throws back the simple catch. The box opens with a creak and the bones within rattle feverishly, straining to be heard as the lid cracks wide.
He shakes his head. Glares down at the jumble of bleached bits b
athed in their own light. “Won’t take the bones. Still got life in them.”
“They’re dead,” she says, as the dry bones rattle.
“Gallows stink is still on them.”
“You don’t want them? Fine.” She slams the lid of the lockbox down. Heads back to the seat of her wagon, calling back over her shoulder, “Plenty of medicine men who’ll take them in Spiritwood.”
“I’ll still take the skin,” the Lowlander calls after her as she settles in. “You want dog for it?”
“Gold.”
“Gold.” He spits in disgust. Looks away. “Always trinkets with you people.”
Jenny stares down at him from her perch, shotgun resting on her arm. Her horses knead the ground, restless.
The Lowlander chieftain looks up into Jenny’s eyes, appraising her. After a time he lowers his head. “Gold.”
“Good,” grins Jenny. Catches up the reins and whips her team on. “I’ll be at the other end of the wheat fields. Bring it by tomorrow.” Her twin blacks canter off, raising a man-high trail of dust in their wake.
The chieftain stares after her, squinting against the chalky silt. An old woman comes to stand beside him. Paws at the skin. He hands it to her without taking his eyes off Jenny. The Lowlander woman coughs as she wraps the skin around her shoulders and rubs it to her skin.
Grumbling, the chieftain stalks off to his covered wagon. Doesn’t look back as the woman wearing the bought skin breaks out in a slow sweat. She hacks up something fierce and slumps to the ground, dry heaving, teeth rattling loose in her skull.
◄ ►
The wagon cuts through a high swath of blackened wheat, the stunted crop long ago gone wild, carefully trained borders overrun generations back: now a small lake of stalk and chaff. Jenny uncocks her shotgun and slides it into the wagon bed without looking back. Around her the stalks bend as the wagon tramples them, springing back in the cart’s wake.
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