by Andy Cox
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PATRIMONY
MATTHEW CHENEY
Illustrated by Richard Wagner
1
For most of my life, I worked in the gravel pit as an overseer. There had been gravel there for a long time, but there wasn’t much left. Mostly, we spent our days trying to decide where to set off dynamite. We didn’t have a lot of dynamite, so we wanted to be precise. We would go for weeks and even months without lighting a single stick. I spent my days – ten-, eleven-hour days – telling the workers to try over here, to look over there, to dig here, to prod there. We sought the best rock, the least sand.
Eventually, the workers went away. I don’t know if the supply ran out or if we sent word that we had no more dynamite, and therefore no more gravel, no more need for workers. I don’t know. They never told me those sorts of things.
“We’re done,” my manager said to me one evening. I’d noticed how few workers we had left, and I knew there was no dynamite. I didn’t need to ask questions. I bowed my head for a moment, thought about the good times when we had plenty of workers and more dynamite than we knew what to do with, and then I let the memory go, and I never returned to the gravel pit.
One privilege of being an overseer is that you are expected to take some of the workers home, to provide for them, and to have them work for you. I had been able to build a comfortable house on Tower Hill because of this privilege. There is an unspoken privilege, too, one rarely discussed but certainly acknowledged, the privilege of taking any worker as a lover. Some overseers I knew long ago sought out workers with whom they could have a procreative relationship, but even in the early days, I never desired that. We live inside an apocalypse; giving birth is immoral. I tried to love a few of the female workers, but it was impossible. Despite our precautions, I couldn’t escape the fear that somehow I would impregnate her and she would want the baby to live. All very unlikely, but nonetheless, it made it impossible for me to touch a woman, never mind function in a sexual way with one. The men were easier, less threatening, more casual, more anonymous. I didn’t form an attachment with any of them but one, and he had died many years ago, and I worked very hard to forget him. (Truly, now, I don’t even remember his name.)
When the stranger came to town, I had no formal job, since I was not qualified for any of the salaried work that was available, and no overseer was in the mood to retire from the jobs that would suit me – the telegraph office, the butchery, the place where they weigh the water, the treadmill. I spent much of my day at the town library, and Mrs Vax, the librarian, told me she would have happily hired me if there were any money in the budget, but I knew even she barely made enough to meet her basic needs. I was one of the only people in town who went to the library anymore. It had many books, because though hardly anyone read books, they all revered them and didn’t want to throw them out, and so when a house was taken over after the inhabitants moved away or died, the books were sent to the library, and Mrs Vax organized and catalogued them all neatly. (The library building had previously been an immense department store, and there was more than enough room for everyone’s books.) Once upon a time, I’d tried to read books about science and mathematics, but now I spent my days reading novels about people in love.
The stranger rode into town in a horse-drawn Toyota, some husk he’d found in a junkyard, but instead of horses to draw it, he had a pack of dogs, dozens of them. We heard them coming from miles off, at first a sound like distant, dying birds, a shriek across the sky, but as they got nearer, the sound seemed more orchestral, and then when it was within a few hundred yards, we knew exactly what it was, the sound of a thousand dogs howling and barking.
There weren’t a thousand dogs, though it sounded like it. A few dozen, perhaps. Mutts, all, but mostly large and seemingly healthy. I was in the library when I heard them outside. Mrs Vax stood paralyzed behind her desk. “I hate dogs,” she said. “I thought they’d all died.”
“They’ll last longer than us,” I said. “We’re their servants, really. They’ve got us trained.”
I went to the big doors at the front of the library and looked out at the scene. The stranger ascended from the Toyota, as tall as an old oak tree. He wore a black coat that reached down to his ankles. His head was covered with multicolored scarves. His hands were claws.
And then he stood in front of me.
“Is there water here?” he said.
“They sell it by the pound down at the waterworks,” I said.
“I want it by the stream, not the pound,” he said. “I have dogs that need water.”
“You’ll have to talk to them down at the waterworks,” I said.
“What’s this place, then?” he said.
“The library,” I said.
“Ahhh,” he said, starting to unwrap the scarves around his face, “so I have, indeed, reached civilization.”
He brushed past me and bolted toward the books. He ran fingers along the spines as if they were piano keys in an arpeggio. “Magnificent organization!” he called out across the breadth of the library, his voice oddly powerful in the cavernous space.
“Mrs Vax is still working at it,” I yelled across the expanse, my voice thin, brittle. “The Dewey system wasn’t precise enough, copious enough, and so she’s converting it all to Library of Congress, but…” There was no point in continuing. My voice had become dust motes. Meanwhile, Mrs Vax cowered behind her desk.
Moments, or perhaps hours, later, the stranger strode to the desk and slapped a single thick volume down.
“I am taking this book. Psychopathia Sexualis. It was not what I was looking for originally, for I dared not dream to encounter it again. You have exceeded my expectations. I will sign it out for one week. You have my word. Create an account for me, a library card, whatever you want. Use whatever name you will. None of that matters. You know who I am. I shall be in this town. And exactly one week from now, I will return this book to you. Until then, please be well. I look forward to seeing you again.”
As the man moved toward the door, I said, “What do you intend to do here for the week?”
He approached me slowly, deliberately, his eyes fixed on mine. “My good man,” he said, pressing himself against me, his voice now a whisper, his breath brushing against my lips. “I intend to do what none of you will.” The scent of him, thick and earthy, filled my nostrils. “I am the savior of the human race.”
And then he was off – out – away.
After a moment, I followed. I kept a good distance, and it was not difficult to listen for his dogs and gauge where he had gone. He surveyed the old residential area, darting into one house after another, until he found one that would suit his needs. It had, I later learned, running water and a sunny master bedroom with a huge four-poster bed and a mattress that had, somehow, not rotted or mildewed into nothingness.
I will not write here of his deeds, for there is nothing in their awful details that could enlighten you. The terror he wreaked was particular for each woman, but for those of us who were not its immediate victims, it was a singular event, a week that could be characterized as a relentless, piercing scream or a razor blade drawn slowly across our ears and eyes.
To my shame, as soon as I knew what the stranger intended, I hid away in my house. We all did. We had become experts at averting our eyes, bowing our heads in darkness, huddling in corners, accepting fate, hoping against hope that we would not be next.
I heard that in the first days, at least, when he saw a woman he told her of his intentions, he offered himself to her, he proposed that he would do anything within his power to make her happy and comfortable if she would not resist him. His desire, he said, was simply to procreate, and he had no care for
how it happened. Few women were anything but disgusted, and it was their disgust that infuriated him. His fury fed him, pushed him toward greater and greater violence, until in the last few days he walked naked through the streets, smashing his way into homes and hideouts, tearing and slashing into lives, never satiated – indeed, the more he ravaged, the more he sought to ravage.
On the seventh day, he ceased. Once again wrapped in his clothes, he assembled everyone he could find on the dead grass of the town common. He brought a girl forward, the youngest and healthiest among us, a mere fifteen years old.
“I have saved this one,” he said, “for you. Who will it be?” His gaze searched the crowd. “You—” A boy, only a few years older than the girl. “Take her to that house. It has a fine bed, comfortable, a good place for love. You know what to do, yes? No more of your herbs, no more of the barriers, the socks, the sponges – all that accoutrement of sterility – no more. Just you and her and you inside her until you release, until you implant yourself.”
“I cannot, sir.” The boy’s voice was breathy, timid.
“Cannot? Or will not?”
“I do not understand.”
The stranger grabbed the boy, tore at the boy’s belt and his pants, and then with his other arm clawed for the girl, pushed her close against the boy, slashed at her dress with his sharp fingers, tore her naked, then embraced the two bodies, manipulated them, aroused their instincts even as their eyes shed tears and their lacerations shed blood, until the deed was done and the stranger stood back and the boy and the girl slumped to the ground. The stranger betrayed no joy or horror. He was, he seemed to think, simply an intermediary, a necessary force, an overseer.
Mrs Vax stood at the back of the crowd, weeping. The stranger approached her and held out the library’s book. “I am returning this, as I said I would. I am a man of my word. You should put this book on a pedestal at the front of the library. You should build churches in its honor.” Mrs Vax held out her hands, but the moment the book touched them, she pulled her hands away and the book fell to the ground.
“I had thought,” the stranger said, “that I had found civilization, finally. A place where men might still be men. Alas. I must travel on.”
And then he was back in his car and his dogs were pulling him away from us and we stood until dusk in the town common, listening until the last animal howl had faded to silence.
2
At first, there was no way to forget the stranger. We went back to our everyday lives, but soon the evidence of his work was apparent. Some of the women died in suicides and hemorrhages, two in childbirth. In the end eleven babies lived.
I hid away in my house. I could not go back to the library, and I rarely went into town except for provisions, because as long as I stayed home, I could forget. I spent my days working in the yard or reading some of the books I had at the house, old paperbacks mostly, which I’d gotten long ago from people I no longer remembered. I became sharply concerned with dust, and I cleaned every room in the house at least once each day. At night, I lit candles and stared out at the stars, or strummed some songs on a ukulele I’d found in a box at the library, and which Mrs Vax told me I could have for myself, as nobody else would ever want it.
And so it was that I knew nothing of the women’s plans. I pieced the story together later. I record it now so that you may know something of what your mothers did, and why.
The kernel of the idea originated with Mrs Vax, who offered the library as a meeting place to the mothers before they gave birth. Other women, ones who escaped pregnancy, joined the group as well. Mrs Vax provided them with materials concerning their situation, and inevitably their interests roamed a bit wider to the circumstances that might provoke such a man as the stranger to be who he was, to do what he did. Whatever questions the women raised, before and after the children were born, Mrs Vax found answers for. Over the period of three – almost four – years, various plans were proposed and evaluated. Contact was made with other towns. Quiet routes of communication and barter were established. Maps were made.
The ultimate plan emerged not only from careful deliberation, but also from a bit of luck: a neighboring town had a few weapons that still worked, and somebody found three sticks of dynamite in the bottom drawer of a desk at the gravel pit office.
And so a posse set out in search of the stranger, the procreator, the father. They rode horses gathered from the plains beside one of the towns that was part of their network, a town where women had spent many months capturing and training the horses, then teaching each other to ride. The posse was made up of the best riders and the strongest, fiercest women from all the towns, the women who would have no fear of a fight, yet who were also disciplined enough to stick to the plan no matter what happened and no matter their anger.
It took them five months, but they found him.
They watched him in a town near the coast. They descended at night. They pulled him from a woman he had bound to a bed. He fought them, bruised them, cut them. He escaped to his car and his dogs, but spies from the posse were ready, and the dynamite destroyed the road just in front of him. The dogs died, but the stranger was merely battered and unconscious.
The women broke his arms and legs, then dragged him back to town. They announced their plan and invited anyone to follow them back. A few joined them, but most did not. He had only arrived the day before. The town had suffered many tragedies for many years. The stranger was just one more.
The posse brought him back over many miles through all the towns he’d visited. They attended to his wounds, keeping infection away, but keeping the bones broken, the body in pain. He screamed through many nights, they said, and they savored his screams.
In each town, people joined them, walked with them, fed them, bathed them, clothed them.
Finally, after nearly a year away, they returned to our town. Word had spread through the network that the stranger had been found and his punishment had begun. The excitement spread beyond the women; it was then that even a hermit such as myself could not escape the news. People talked of little else, and in my occasional trips to the store for grains and oils, I heard the tales, which every time got more ornate: the stranger would be brought to us without limbs or tongue, they said; and then they said he would arrive flayed and yet alive; and then they said he had been chopped into pieces and yet his mouth still issued ugly words.
Of course, that was not how he arrived.
The posse rode into town on horses festooned with garlands and ribbons, surrounded by women, men, and children from places far and wide. The stranger lay in an enclosed wagon pulled by eight ponies, a black wagon built like a coffin with windows on its sides and top. He had long ago stopped screaming, his vocal chords shredded, his mouth full of dust. Nurses attended him, healing only what was necessary to keep him alive.
The women removed the stranger from the coffin wagon and brought him to the town common, where other women had set up a table and chair. They lay the stranger across the table.
One of the women from the posse called out to the crowd: “We have asked Mrs Vax to speak for us.”
Mrs Vax stepped forward. “We have sought something more than justice,” she said, “because what would justice be for us? What would justice be for the mothers or their children? There is no justice. There is existence: our common fate, our burden, our curse.”
Behind her, women strapped the man to the table with long leather belts.
“We have come to know it is monstrous to bring children into this world. It happens, yes, here and there, now and then. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. We all had parents, and though we resented them their weakness and their self-indulgence, we also understood. Some of us have felt the same desires. Most of us. We all agreed on the morality, and yet understood the violations. We never hated the children who were born, and even now, after all we have experienced, we cast no blame. The young will suffer much, as all the living suffer. Better to have never been, yes, always. But we m
ust make the best of what we have been born to. We, the born, must care for each other.”
The stranger’s clothes had rotted during his journey. They were foul and soiled, and only bits remained, bits which were now removed. The nurses cleaned him with soft cloths and soap and water.
“But this man is a monster, a creature undeserving of our care – and worse, a force of evil, of destruction, a creature that spreads and magnifies suffering. We have never seen his like. We hope never to see it again. We must remember.”
The mothers all had knives. They moved closer to the stranger on the table, surrounding him. Their movements were obscure to us, but once they pulled away, the effect was clear. They had severed the stranger’s genitals and stuffed them in his mouth.
They lifted the stranger up and set him on the chair. The nurses massaged his jaw and throat until, after many minutes, he had chewed and swallowed himself.
They left him in the town common for many weeks. Nurses attended him around the clock, making sure to feed him just enough, to give him just enough water, to staunch his bleeding, to keep his bones broken and also to keep him alive.
And then one day he was not alive.
The nurses went away, but the corpse remained. No-one dared go near it. Animals chewed at the flesh and bones. The stench hung in the air through days and weeks of putrefaction. Finally, some animal or perhaps some disgusted person hauled the remains off to the woods.
3
The facts of your existence were never hidden from you. The fate of your father was only spoken of with vague words. “One day you’ll be told,” they promised you. Mrs Vax was the one who asked me to chronicle it, shortly before she died. For many years, I could not bring myself to tell the tale. I did not want to think of it. We were all ashamed, even though I have yet to hear from anyone who wishes it to have been done differently.