The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  There was only death over here, he thought. That’s why Jilly had brought him. She had been his guide to the underworld, except he wasn’t ready for that. He had fight left in him. All he needed was to make it back across the river.

  It was only sixty or seventy yards. He could do it. Had to do it. He didn’t care if he floated downstream a bit — which he was doing whether he wanted to or not — just as long as he eventually made it across. He plunged the oars in again, pulled and grunted with the exertion, matching strength to strength with the river’s persuasive drag. Diagonally would have to do.

  After only three or four pulls he had to stop and take a breather. Adrenaline had kicked in yet again with the promise of escape, but he was running on empty, a term that had taken on new meaning. How empty could you ever become? The damage suffered on the clifftop was deep. His muscles felt detached from his bones, as if it at any minute they might all snap. He had vomited up most of the sustenance he’d taken in, and it had come from only that one meal. He rowed some more, ached, groaned, dug in. Then he paused for breath and looked over his shoulder into the dark of the fields on the other side to measure how far there was left to go. A glint of something caught his eye. He stopped rowing. He scanned the far shore.

  Men. The dark shadows of men.

  Large men. Five, six . . . more . . . he couldn’t tell. Wasn’t sure what was solid or the product of an overextended imagination — an overturned imagination. He was almost mid-river and the boat had drifted, clockwise this time, in just this short moment of his discovery, facing downstream and picking up steam. But he didn’t dare row now. The music from the club had faded into the background behind the wall of trees that stood sentry along the island shore. The rock and roll dimmed under the wind and the water. Still, he was afraid the metallic sound of the oars in the oarlocks would carry to those shadowy figures assembling on the far bank.

  He slithered off the bench, low into the boat, and let it drift away from the gathering. He was flotsam now. Just another storm-torn branch caught in the current. He peered over the stern. It looked as if the men were launching a boat of some kind themselves. Yes, four or five of them tumbled into it, not soundlessly but without any talk. A raft, maybe four yards long, sitting low in the water with the weight of its silent cargo. They shot across the water while another raft appeared and was soon filled and ready to go.

  An invasion.

  Lightning a long way off lit up the low and heavy cloud cover, enough for Donovan to catch a profile or two of the men still left on shore. There were still others arriving down the long, slow hill. And it was clear to him who they were now, from the weight of them and the long hair flying in the wet air and the ragged beards and torn-off sleeves and weapons strapped to their sturdy backs. The Pagans were looking for their money.

  He was floating away, the river drawn toward some distant sea, without any way of knowing what side of the river he would eventually land on, assuming he would ever land at all. Having stopped rowing, his body had lost all desire to continue. It was a miracle he had gotten this far. The rest was out of his power. He moved on, two hundred, three hundred yards from the landing place, turning in a slow circle, the current strong enough to spin the boat, which he had noticed when it was upside down had little in the way of a keel. Lightning glimmered, but all Donovan caught sight of ahead was the skull on the bow of the vessel. The skull’s back was to him, but he knew it was smiling. It was all a skull could do. From relief, maybe?

  He rested his hands on the cold seat. He closed his eyes. Somewhere up ahead he would find his strength and muscle the boat over to the other shore, but for now he just needed to rest.

  The easterly gusted above him — around him — pushing the boat back toward the island shore, but by now far enough downstream that he had rounded a thickly wooded point of land and the site of the invasion was lost to him. Then suddenly there was a huge jolt that rattled Donovan’s bones and pitched him to the deck. The boat had hit something. Its momentum was stopped dead just for a moment, then it began to list to the right and slip forward again to come to rest at last in a marsh of bulrushes.

  It was quiet here, still. Somewhere a few feet away the river rushed on its course to wherever, but in this backwater there was only the gentle sloshing of the deadened waves against the hull of the boat, a somnolent lapping sound, soothing.

  And the frogs again. The peepers.

  He could not see the shore. He leaned over the gunwale, tried to judge how deep it was but saw only black, smelled only stagnation. He manhandled one of the oars out of its lock and lowered it into the water. It didn’t go far into the sludge. Like a blind man, he felt along the oar’s shaft until he came to the wet, then lifting the oar, he measured how deep the water was: seven hands, up to his midthigh, more or less. He could wade ashore. He couldn’t really see the shore, but he could hear it, the wind making havoc in the willows. He sat, slumped on the bench, and tried to summon up the energy to climb out of the boat and wade through who knew what kind of mud and crap toward nothing more substantial than the sound of earth. Who knew how deep the swamp floor really was?

  Then the shooting started.

  It sounded almost innocuous. Pop, pop, pop: fireworks a long way off. Then he heard the screams. He slid down onto the floor of the rowboat, the hold of it, and slithered on his backside to the farthest corner in the back. The explosions and shouts and screams went on and on, distant but bloodcurdling. As far away as it was, he covered his ears, as if the dying were all around him.

  Jilly! She was there. He imagined her dancing with Charlie and then the doors flying open and the Pagans entering, guns blazing. In his ravaged imagination, Donovan watched her, twirled around and around by machine-gun fire, a whole other kind of dance. He curled up into a fetal ball, his teeth chattering. It was his fault. And if that wasn’t enough, it kept on being his fault. He should never have run — should never have come here. He wrapped his head with his arms to block out the sound of the killing.

  He awoke to a splash. His eyes flew open. It was light. Gray dawn, everything shrouded in a heavy curtain of mist. His mouth was open. There was spittle on his cheek. He wiped it off, closed his mouth, swallowed hard. His throat was dry.

  Something was moving nearby. He looked over the gunwale and watched a black nose, poking out of the water, head past the boat, leaving behind a V of tiny wavelets. A beaver, he thought, but too small. A water rat — something like that. It must have seen him for it dived suddenly and was lost to view. He leaned his chin on the gunwale and waited, but it never came up that he could see. He smiled to himself. It had seen him. He was pretty sure of that. And that was good, wasn’t it? It meant he was real.

  He listened to the morning gathering itself around him. Birds chittering, some land animal nattering. A clonk, clonk, clonk that he guessed might be a woodpecker. He stared east. He didn’t think he had ever thought just how wonderful morning was, even if there was only a silvering of the sky to indicate that there might be a rising sun back there somewhere. He couldn’t see the eastern shore of the river. Couldn’t see beyond the marsh grass and bulrushes. And that made him feel safe. Safe as Moses. Except for one undeniable problem.

  He was still on the wrong side of the river.

  A red-winged blackbird sat on a bulrush only a few feet away. He watched until it, too, seemed to notice him and flew off. A wise decision. Stay with me, man, and there’s no telling what will happen. But, oh, for a pair of wings with red epaulets. Sadly, he was earthbound. Correction: waterbound.

  He was sitting in several inches of water. Had it rained again? He didn’t think so, not this much. He crawled to the bow of the boat and stared over the side. There was a hole. He looked back the way he’d come and saw a boulder some ten yards upstream. The culprit. The crack wasn’t big, but when he reached down he could feel the water bubbling in. He rested his arm on the foredeck and his head on his arm.

  I wake up to this?

  After a moment, he lifted hi
s head and looked into the gloom of the near shoreline. It was as far away as first base. Time to disembark. Either that or do the right thing and go down with the ship. But that was only true if you were the captain, he thought. And he was not the captain of this ship, just an ill-fated passenger. Then he heard a noise in the underbrush and looked again and there was someone coming. A figure moved out of the shadows into the light at the shore.

  Jilly.

  He heaved himself over the gunwale and lowered himself to the cold bottom, gasping as the water reached his crotch. But that was as far as it went. Holding on to the edge of the boat, he took a tentative step, then another. He stopped, returned to the boat and grabbed the painter, and tried to drag the boat to shore behind him. No go. The waterweeds were too thick, the weight too much, and his strength sadly diminished. He dropped the line. Charlie’s boat would sink there. The skull just smiled back at him. He turned again toward the land and the woman who’d brought him here.

  It was like moving through motor oil, black and viscous. But with each stride it was less deep, and finally he waded ashore. The southern end of the island, he guessed. She had stepped back to give him room to clamber up onto dry land, as if, like a dog, he might shake the water off. She leaned against a tree. She had changed. She was wearing a blue dress with embroidery across the chest. A party dress, he guessed. She wore a yellow cardigan over it against the morning cold. She must keep stuff at Charlie’s, he thought. She was holding something in her arms. She pushed herself away from the tree and handed it to him, a soft old gray blanket. He took it and draped it around his shoulders.

  “You’re alive,” he said. She nodded. “What about the Pagans?”

  She rolled her eyes. “They always do that,” she said disgustedly. She folded her arms. “One of the things about being alive is knowing that the Pagans are going to come.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It happens again and again. They sweep down, all unsuspecting, and kill every living soul in horrible ways. Happens over and over. The folks here, they die, then they forget about it and go on about their business until the next time.”

  He gazed at her, his head filling up with questions like Charlie’s boat was filling up with dirty water.

  “What?” she said.

  “Your place,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “When I apologized for, you know, bringing down the Pagans on you, you just shrugged. Like it was no big deal.”

  She shrugged again, but in her eyes he could see that she knew where he was going.

  “It’ll be there when you get back, won’t it,” he said. She nodded. Then he looked back across the river and frowned. “But it’s over there,” he said, not wanting to say what “there” was any more than he wanted to accept what “here” was.

  “Some places are so near to the other world they kind of operate on the same principles. If that helps at all.”

  Donovan looked down at the wet earth and shook his head. She came closer and took him tenderly by the arm. He looked up and stared at her. She had done something with her hair: there was a flower in it. “I do know you.”

  “I brought you here, Dono.”

  “I mean from before.”

  Her smile was radiant. Maybe the sun had come up behind his back, snuck up on him when he wasn’t looking, and now it was shining fully in her face. He actually turned to look, but no, just a curtain of silvery gray. He returned his gaze to her to find some of the glow had gone. She was still smiling, but she was troubled.

  “Remembering can be hard,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s this hole in my memory.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “We remember what we can bear to remember.”

  He looked down at the ground again and shook his head slowly. “I know this much. I didn’t kill my father.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then this journey has been worthwhile.”

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  She shrugged. “I’m your guide, Dono. Guess I wasn’t doing all that good a job. I came looking for you yesterday in the sleep shack. You were dead to the world. Sorry, bad choice of expressions. Then the next time I looked, you were gone.”

  “I had something I needed to do,” he said.

  “Bee?”

  “Yeah. I had to reach her.”

  Jilly nodded as if she understood. “I figured it was something like that. You were saying her name in your sleep.”

  “So not entirely dead to the world.”

  She smiled again. Then she looked past him toward the dawn, squinted as if the light must be growing — dazzling. It wasn’t, as far as he could tell, but maybe her eyes were more sensitive. “I kept looking for you at the dance, just in case you showed up. I’d have sent you packing if you did, knowing what was coming. But you figured it out yourself.”

  “Not really. Dumb luck.”

  She looked beyond him again. “You were trying to leave,” she said.

  He followed her gaze to the boat, which was sitting significantly lower in the water now.

  “Charlie’s going to love that,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about him.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “But you are worried. Your face is one big worry.”

  He shuddered, wrapped the blanket closer to himself. “I’m not getting out of here, am I.”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m not in charge. When someone turns up on my doorstep, I know to bring them here.” She reached out and squeezed his shoulder. Her hand was strong. It hurt, but it was a good hurt. “You’ve hung on a long time. Longer than most.”

  Donovan grimaced. “What am I supposed to make of that?”

  “It means there’s something you still need to do.”

  Shit you’ve still got left to do.

  He looked at her. Her eyes were shining, and he didn’t bother to see if it was the sun because he knew now that the light was coming from inside her. It gave him a kind of hope. “I couldn’t kill someone,” he said. Jilly’s hand had been resting on his shoulder. Now it traveled down his arm to his hand, which she took in hers. “Come on,” she said.

  He hurt all over and he was freezing cold and he was starving, but her hand in his felt wonderful. This was what being alive meant. What more proof did he need?

  There was a path of sorts, an animals’ path, narrow and ill-defined, but something to follow. Jilly dropped his hand after a bit because they had to walk single file. He followed after her, as docile as a lamb, and after a while the path opened up to an overgrown and drenched garden surrounded by a falling-down fence, along which grew magnificent sunflowers with their heads lowered, daunted by the night’s downpour. There were dewdrop-laden tomatoes and behemoth zucchini. There were bushes weighed down with green and yellow beans. There were carrots and beets, everything luxuriant and well tended. He smiled. He remembered helping with the weeding.

  He lifted his eyes. Beyond the garden stood a house, a small house — just a cottage. Not a dwarf’s cottage, either, with fancy painted shutters. Not a yurt or anything fanciful: a small, brown-stained, wood-sided cottage with a tar-paper roof and a woodstove. He could see smoke curling up into the leafy birch trees.

  But that was odd.

  There were leaves on the trees here, more golden than green in the sunlight. Because now there was full sunlight, and he and Jilly stood in dappled shadows. He realized he wasn’t cold at all anymore. Jilly held out her hand, as if she had read his mind, and he handed her the blanket. She folded it carefully and then held it to her chest, her arms wrapped around it. She nodded toward the cottage and her eyes asked him if he recognized it. He nodded. It was coming back to him.

  The roofline sagged, bowed in the middle. His eyes traveled to the left, knowing before he saw it that there would be an outhouse at the back end of the garden. There, right there, with a sickle moon carved into the door. He had been to this place before, when he was young. When
they were still a family.

  All those many moons ago.

  Bee sat in the waiting room where she’d met with Bell and Stills. It had been empty then; it was busy now, late afternoon on a Saturday. A different place altogether than in the small hours of a rainy morning. Thirteen hours ago. A lifetime ago.

  Her head was buried in Scott Yarabee’s neck, sobbing and accepting tissues from him to clear away the worst of what was spilling out of her face. His arm encircled her shoulder, his voice was low and calm. His sweater smelled like wood smoke. Trish was with Donovan.

  “You go,” said Bee. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m good,” he said. “Anyway, I’m afraid I might run into that she wolf.” That was how Bee had introduced the on-duty nurse, inevitably bringing to Scott’s mind Shakespeare’s “winter of our discontent.” Bee pulled away, coming up for air in order to wipe her nose again. Beside her, a little boy was revving his plastic car’s engine — “Vrrrrrm! Vrrrrmm!”— while his baby sister yowled in her stroller and their mother nattered to someone, seemingly oblivious to the combined decibel level of her children. Bee dove her head back down into the comfort of Scott’s shoulder. He patted her head.

  “I’m not a puppy,” she said.

  He got them both a coffee. Trish had been in the ICU for an hour now. “You should go be with her, Scott. I’m fine, really.”

  “Let’s finish our coffee,” he said. He took a noisy sip and gagged. “Which might be sooner than expected.”

  Even as he said it, Bee gagged as well.

  “Machine-made cappuccino,” Scott said, and somehow imbued the three words with a world of discontent.

  Bee got up and walked over to the trash can to deposit the cup and its putrid contents. She remembered Inspector Stills taking her soggy tissues to the same trash can the night before. Then she returned to Scott and stood in front of him. “Just go,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, standing up and taking her face in his hands. “You’ve been holding the fort, Ms. Beatrice Tomato Northway.”