Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  We do not let go of each other, the boy and me, not yet. I can’t even say what I feel for him but it’s there, right away, sparkling in the harmonics of his voice, and not just in those: an energy comes out of him, signals surging through his grip, messages and motives and words: data transfer, they would say today, this child communicates through touch alone. Messages are fuzzy, unreadable, too much interfering noise over the signal, but I can see, hold his hand tight, trying to get all I can, letting him know I’m trying to read, hungry for his message and the keys he holds.

  THEY SIT ME DOWN IN the den with a cup of coffee and stand dripping with rain, clutching mugs themselves, the three woodland people in their wet pajamas.

  “This all used to be my land,” I say, my voice settling back into itself, “until I sold it some years back. And now the city has taken my house to build a turning lane and widen your street into a boulevard, replace all the cracking asphalt that the fool who built this neighborhood didn’t lay right in the first place.”

  “Do you have anywhere to go?” the man asks.

  “You have to understand, my people lived on this land for going on a hundred and fifty years.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man says. He shakes his head, as does the mother, but they do not want a history lesson. They have busy lives, want to be rid of me quick. “Do you have any family you can stay with?”

  “My daughter lives in California. Poor girl never loved this land and got away fast as she could.”

  “Could you go live with her?” the man asks.

  “We don’t have an easy relationship, and in any case, I can’t bring myself to leave it, not yet. I’ll camp in the woods if I have to, or pitch a tent in those fields.”

  They must already think I’m a crazy old woman, ranting as I did. Mine are not the ways of the world today, and gentle as they act, these are not the kind of people who understand a connection to land. On the faces of the adults there is only confusion, looking at me as though I have come out with some fragment of ancient lament:

  She was the daughter of a free farm man,

  Oh the land and fire.

  The only daughter of a free farm man,

  Sold her lonesome heart’s desire.

  I find song bubbling up on my tongue, look fast for sand to stop the melody.

  His land no longer kept her safe at dawn,

  Oh the earth’s on fire.

  That land it couldn’t save her heart no more,

  Called for flood of purging fire.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m not—you must think I’m cracked.”

  “Not at all,” the man says. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to feel guilty. It’s not about you folks. I’m an old woman who made her decisions freely.” Even if I had no real choice, even if the choice was dictated to me: by time, by laws, by debt and circumstance, by the unhappy curve of history’s low arc.

  Even as I drink my coffee with one hand the child has gone on holding the other.

  “Copley,” says the father, “let the woman go.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, “we’re acquainted.”

  “So you two really have met before,” the mother says.

  “We introduced ourselves through the fence, isn’t that right?” I say to the boy.

  “This is Louise,” the child says. “She should live with us. We have room. She can’t go camping with all her things.”

  He reminds me of boys I taught, bright ones easy and eager to please, the kind I always knew I could trust more than others.

  “Can I just ask,” I say, turning my face to the father’s dark eyes, “how you got those men to let me go?”

  Little woodland father looks uncomfortable, caught in a sudden foot-shuffling shame, staring at the white floor, the white walls, out the window. “They work for my company,” he says. “I mean—it’s not my company.”

  “But you pulled rank.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I bet you’re in a corner office.” More foot shuffling, and now he won’t meet my gaze, as ashamed as that guard with chewed-up fingernails, embarrassed by the kind of company he works for, a business that strong-arms old women out of their homes when they resist. He doesn’t realize I was teasing.

  “Would you like to take a shower?” the mother asks. I’ve managed to wash each night with water heated on the fire, keep my clothes clean, and have never been a smelly body. My hair, though, it must be a horror show, twisting into a copse of cliff-dwelling trees.

  “No, that’s very nice of you, thank you, but no. I should be going.”

  “Where will you go? Do you have a car?” the man asks.

  “I had to sell it. If you could call me a cab.” I don’t know how much money I have in my purse, and little idea where I might go. I grip at my seams but feel them beginning to give under the strain. I am an only child in old age, an adult orphan, a widow, my own child so distant I might as well be childless. I am the last tree standing on a clear-cut slope, the saws all pointed at my feet.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” the woman says, “I have to get ready. I have an early appointment.” As the mother goes upstairs the man and the child sit staring at me.

  “Sorry to take up your time,” I say to the man. “Thank you for what you’ve done. I think they would have arrested me and then I’d never have heard the end of it from my daughter.”

  The man offers me the phone and something to eat, says I must be hungry, and when I decline he insists, takes me through to the kitchen, sits me down at the counter and makes toast with nice bread. There’s a jar of jam, an expensive brand, and then the man starts asking questions: how old my daughter is, what she does, where she lives in California. Asks me if I’ve ever lived anywhere else, or if I’ve always lived here.

  “I was born in that house, grew up in it, lived in it with my husband and my parents until they passed away. I raised my daughter in that house and lived there with her and my husband until she grew up and moved out and then until my husband died. In the years since Donald’s passing I’ve lived there on my own. I was supposed to be out a few months ago but I refused to leave. I fought it for a long time.”

  “Were you a farmer?”

  “My late husband was the farmer, but I did a fair amount of the work. I was a schoolteacher for almost forty-five years until I retired. If they’ll let me I think it’s time to go back to it, now I’ve got nothing else to think about. Besides which I’ve just about spent myself down to zero fighting the city. I have Social Security and a small pension and that’s about the sum of it. I suppose I’ll have to phone my daughter, and go live with her. I went to California once. Didn’t like it much.”

  I can see the man thinking and then he excuses himself, goes upstairs, and I sit with the boy, eating toast and drinking coffee. He pours a glass of milk, makes himself a bowl of cereal, asks me if I want any. Good manners, tidy habits, dream of a child. These people don’t know what they have in such a boy.

  The man comes back, asks me if I’d like more toast, tells the boy to go upstairs and get ready for school. Strange to be sitting here, in this house I have abhorred, eating and drinking, being looked after by people I do not know, my belongings damp and dripping just inside their front door. When the man clears his throat I think: here it comes: a quick shock, time to leave. Extend the hand of hospitality so far, then yank it back when the burden curls into strain.

  “Louise, I don’t know how to say this the right way.”

  “No need. You’ve been very kind. I’ll be going now.”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. Sit down,” he says, refilling my cup. He seems to be searching his head for the right words, how to tell me to stay another ten minutes but no more. “Would—” he begins, stops, stalling out. I look at him and can’t imagine what he wants to ask. “This is going to come out the wrong
way. You’re going to misinterpret it. Please don’t. Just—” And then he says it in such simple words: “I wondered if you’d like a job.”

  He sees someone in need and wants to offer a handout that isn’t one, imagines me capable of scrubbing and vacuuming, cooking and washing, ironing and bed-making. Not a chance, not for anything, not for living here and eating free, no way will I play the maid he wants to make me.

  “I don’t know what you might be thinking, but I’m no cleaning lady.”

  “No, no,” he blushes, hands slicing back and forth over the counter. “Oh God, I’m doing this really badly. What—I mean, my wife and I wondered if you would be interested in working as a tutor, a . . . caregiver, too, something a little old-fashioned, like a governess, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure, I know what you mean. I’ve read the books. But my umbrella does not fly, and if there’s a madwoman in your attic or ghosts to battle you can count me out.” The man looks confused, as though he is already thinking twice about his offer. “Jokes,” I say, “just jokes.”

  “No, that’s fine. My wife and I don’t mind jokes.”

  “So it doesn’t matter if I can’t fly?” I say, unsure whether I feel as though I’m joking or not. I can hear the noise of my home’s destruction, feel the loss of the only place I have ever truly been myself, and this man wants me to think about a job looking after his son. They could hire anyone. Maybe he thinks he can get me cheap.

  “Flying, no, indeed, that’s not a requirement.”

  “And there aren’t any crazy people hidden in this house?”

  I think I see him hesitate for an instant, but he shakes his head, “No, no, no. No crazy people.”

  “And no ghosts of former servants haunting your son.”

  “We’ve never had anyone work for us, and besides, who believes in ghosts?”

  “Well, that’s okay then, isn’t it?”

  “You mean you’ll do it?”

  “I’m still thinking on it,” I say, for this is the truth. My mind is more than a little divided: the better part of me hovers down the hill, examining the ruins of my world. “Tell me more. Convince me I should work for you.”

  “Right, uh-huh—well, I guess it’s clear to my wife and me that Copley likes you, and that for whatever reason he already feels very attached to you, and that’s—you have to understand how unusual that is for him. He is a deeply shy little boy, and the move has been hard on him. He’s having a difficult time adjusting to his new school, and since you were a teacher, it seems like it could be a mutually beneficial arrangement. And you would be welcome to live here.”

  “In truth, Mr. Noailles, I don’t know whether to be insulted or dumbstruck.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just tell me what kind of man offers a total stranger a job looking after his child?”

  “I—”

  “This is not what I imagined when I thought of returning to teaching.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “But let me get this straight. You’re looking for someone to do a little looking after and a little educating as well. Some kind of private tutor with bells on. A nanny with knowledge.”

  “Yes, that’s about right. And you’d have days mostly free while Copley’s in school. It’s just around the corner really. Since we moved here my wife’s been leaving work early every day, but that can’t continue. Weekends would be entirely yours and we could even arrange for you to have use of a car.”

  “All this because you’re in a bind,” I say, seeing it’s a little more complicated than charity. “So I’d be doing you a favor while you were doing me a favor.”

  “How would I be doing you a favor?” the man asks.

  “By giving me a job I need as well as a way to stay on this land.”

  “I see,” he says, “yes, I can understand that.”

  I have not even seen the rest of the house, the cupboard where they might wish to keep me hidden from their glossy friends and colleagues, the way I might be made to disappear when company arrived, left to usher the child up to his nursery, to feed him bread and milk and read him stories while his parents play. I want to know terms, money, rights, responsibilities, have a clear understanding of what I might be accepting, the regime to which I would be succumbing. I’m not even sure I could sleep in this white house, knowing what I do about the man who built it, the meanness of his ways, how his machines rolled over and ruined the land. And yet, there remains the promise of the woods, a renewal of my stewardship, a way to look over and watch out for the dark spot in the lawn, where trees and the dead lie waiting. Perhaps this offer is a reminder of the obligation I bear, the story remembered, the responsibility to tell it, to teach. If the student presents himself, is it not the duty of the teacher to answer?

  We talk money, hours, references, look up the numbers of past colleagues. He phones them and then makes other calls as well. “You’re giving my name. To whom are you giving it?” I ask, as he waits on the line.

  “My company,” he says, “there’s a department. Preliminary background checks.”

  So I accept his offer, with conditions: I will provide further character and professional references; they will order a comprehensive records check to prove there is nothing about me to fear; I will undertake no housework except preparing meals for the child and doing my own laundry; I will expect a clear and written statement of their expectations of me and rules for the child; I do not believe in corporal punishment (neither do they); I will enter into the proposition for a two-month trial period, at the end of which we will all decide together, the child included, whether it is a workable situation. If it is, then the terms will be reassessed every six months thereafter and either party can end the relationship with two months’ notice.

  The man listens while I speak, nodding. “All of that sounds reasonable,” he says.

  “You don’t want to discuss it with your wife?”

  “I’ll discuss it with her in detail tonight. For now, though, do you want to come with me to take Copley to school, so you can see where it is? And I’d like to pay you an advance on the first month.”

  “That would be very kind,” I say, wondering just what I think I’m doing, throwing in my lot with these strange people in the monument to everything I have lost.

  THE WOMAN LEAVES FIRST, SAYING, when she hears the tentative agreement, how pleased she is that I will be “joining” them, as if they were a church or a cult. I wait in the kitchen while the man and boy get themselves ready and then we all tumble out of the house, the father setting an alarm and locking the back door. The car smells of newness and control. Little eyes watch me from the backseat.

  “You know there’s a shorter way to get to school through River Ranch, or whatever they call it now. It’s close enough to walk. I can easily pick him up each day on foot.”

  “That would be wonderful,” the man says. “It would be such a help. We’re still a little lost here.”

  I take note of the careful phrasing: I am “helping” them, doing them a “favor,” “joining” them, everything to make them feel less uncomfortable with the idea of employing me. I never thought I would work for white people, not like this, not putting myself into their service. This is not the same as classroom teaching, working for the state, for the good of all people, instead of the few, the rich, the privileged. I never thought I would go into service on land that used to be mine, a mammy, my brain spits up the word, wet with bile, a mammy back on the land my people inherited, land I looked after all those years, a mammy with more than a little obstinacy about her. What an undoing, what a hard, sharp unraveling of all my people built.

  The child’s school is a carousel blocked out in rainbow colors with a tower at its center and a skirt of concrete all around but without any horses or carriages to ride, nowhere to hold on, no trees either. While the man walks the boy to the door, I wait
in the car knowing I cannot continue thinking of them as the “man” and the “boy.” They are people with names: Nathaniel and Copley. To name is to acknowledge something more than presence, to know them as people with worries of their own, fears and regrets and desires. Nathaniel and Copley and Julia. No, that sequence of names seems wrong. Copley, Julia, Nathaniel: that is the true order of their private parade, the child leading us toward whatever fate will become of us all.

  PART II

  BURROW

  He sees it over and over, the boy asleep, still as a corpse. To be sure, to know if it was Carson or not, he felt he had to take apart that small form, to see whether the roots might have been blond, the eyes the same color as his own, the fingernails chewed down as his son’s always were. But the child did not seem to be Carson, or perhaps Paul could not see clearly enough in the dark to be sure. And then came the scream, the flight, the boy approaching the hatch, crouching down and crawling to his hidden entrance. Though he can’t be sure, he thinks he closed the containment door in time, an instant before the child could see the corridor of the bunker laid out beyond the pantry. The scream rings in his head, the shriek of a child that could flay skin from a man, a cry less human than animal. He will be haunted by the memory of that face: a mask distorted, stretched tight, the body cold, stone-hard, rigid in sleep, not at all like any child he has known, an offspring of some unholy union. Even in the midst of that scream, which seemed to last for hours, unrolling around the room, echoing down the deepest tunnels of Paul’s head, the parents did not wake. If that is not unnatural, nothing is.

  Now that the boy has seen the hatch he may lead others to its location. Something else must be done to safeguard the bunker from any possibility of penetration. The answer is to construct a kind of baffle at the pantry end, comprised of a three-dimensional series of false walls and dead ends that no one else will be able to navigate, so complex that anyone attempting it will lose themselves in its tight turnings before they even know they are stepping into a field of deception: it must be protection as well as trap. In the bunker’s extra bedroom, the one intended for Carson and Ajax, there is leftover lumber and other supplies: nails, screws, the parts of the now dismantled bunk beds, and his remaining tools—a bandsaw, drills and hammers, everything needed to build a barrier over a length of twenty feet from the containment door, reaching from floor to ceiling: an obstacle that will require climbing and descent to navigate. It will have to be mapped during construction or he might risk getting lost and spending days trying to find a way out. Plans! First the plans: design his warren and keep the plans hidden once the project is complete, secreted in the opening of the ventilation shaft, behind the grate, pasted flush with the curves of the pipe, where no one would ever think to look.