The Collective

by Lindsey Whitlock

  The creature was loud on the tile floors, and down a hallway, a door opened. Out stepped a red-headed girl about Elwyn’s own age, and at the sight of her, Elwyn tripped over the animal, who had turned and rushed towards the girl.

  Elwyn scrambled to get up off the ground, but the girl wasn’t paying attention to him. Her arms were around the trouble-making goat, looking into its eyes and hugging him to her. In her presence, Elwyn found himself unable to move; it was like a new wind was inside him, shaking down the leaves from every tree, troubling all still waters.

  Then, a pair of lean legs blocked his view. Elwyn rose to his feet. The man Elwyn faced was half a head taller than he was and much older, in his fifties at least. The age could only be seen in the thin lines on the man’s face, tiny wrinkles in his neck, faint spots on his hands. He didn’t hold himself like a middle-aged man, or have that ‘good steadying-weight,’ as Badfishians called the customary thickening that followed settling down, having children. He looked well-composed, self-assured. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, his voice clear and firm.

  ‘I’m Elwyn. I came to Liberty to live with my aunt Piety Blackwell and her husband Timothy Blackwell. I came to study. To make something of myself,’ Elwyn said, trying to use the man’s clear tone.

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘I mean, what are you doing in my house?’

  The woman who had been at the front door finally caught up to them.

  ‘I’ll check his pockets, Mr Rhoad,’ she said, her arms reaching out for Elwyn like knotty branches.

  Rhoad raised his hand. ‘That won’t be necessary, Nan.’

  ‘Look! He brought Willoughby,’ the red-headed girl said, only looking away from the goat for a moment. Her eyes lit on Elwyn and didn’t look displeased. She returned to the goat, beaming. ‘I missed you!’ she said as she rubbed Willoughby under the chin.

  ‘Get that creature out of here,’ the old woman said, shooing the goat with her apron, to no effect. Elwyn’s gaze was again locked on that smiling girl. But the man placed a coin in Elwyn’s palm.

  ‘Thank you for delivering my daughter’s goat. Your help will no longer be needed,’ he said with a nod to the old woman. She guided Elwyn out of the house, muttering under her breath about Forester thieves coming up from the fields and causing trouble.

  As soon as Elwyn was on the front steps, the door shut firmly behind him. But he returned to his uncle’s house feeling light, stopping to pat a few horses on the nose and look in a few shop windows. Elwyn arrived late for dinner. Between bites from a large slice of Mirth’s cake, Timothy delivered a lecture on dedication, responsibility, sacrifice and, again, punctuality. Elwyn was sent to his room. His stomach ached at the sight of that cake, but he didn’t complain. He went to his room as he was told. There in the quiet and growing shadows, he sat down on his bed to inspect the missing buttons from his shirt to see what needed to be mended.

  The bedframe below him groaned for a moment, then collapsed altogether onto the ground. And as it did, it pulled on a small string that was attached to the headboard and ran previously unnoticed up the wall to the shining wooden ceiling fan. The fan turned on, flinging from its blades bits of mud and leaves all over the room, onto the fresh bed and Elwyn’s new clothes.

  Elwyn had never seen a ceiling fan before. At first he wondered if it was malfunctioning. But then he heard laughter from the bedroom door. Boaz smirked, looking even more pinched than before. But Elwyn liked pranks and mischief of all kinds, and he knew that appearances could be deceiving – wise old owls were the most foolish birds in the forest; flippant-looking jay birds were real sages. As more dirt assailed him, he smiled at his cousin.

  ‘Pretty good set-up,’ Elwyn said.

  The boy stopped laughing. And Elwyn could see, through the dirt clinging to his eyelashes, that there wasn’t anything jolly in his cousin’s face.

  ‘This is my house, forest trash,’ Boaz said, standing still as the fan’s breeze tossed the loose leaves. ‘You are not welcome here.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Sparks

  WHEN THE FIRST elderflowers bloomed, Whim Moone picked two large clumps and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. Her father came home and saw the flowers and smiled. Together they dipped them in batter and fried them and ate them hot. Elderflower season was brief, and the rest of it would be spent foraging and distilling liquor from the blossoms. Every year Whim drank one small cup. It was sweet.

  The first letter came from Elwyn that same day. Whim went down to the post office, where March Wilder was behind the counter sorting mail. There was a stack of newspapers for Whim’s father and a few invoices for the Moone’s distillery. The letter from Liberty was in the middle of it all, its heavy paper crisp and white against cheap newsprint.

  Whim opened it right away. She read about Elwyn’s long days in his uncle’s office, the memorised facts, the prank his cousin played on him and the hour Elwyn spent cleaning the bits of leaves from the wool bedspread. But that wasn’t the majority of the letter. Elwyn went on and on about a house he had visited, a house on a hill. It had been full of light, beautiful things, beautiful people.

  I don’t know how to describe it to you, Whim. You know how the woods look in May? When the leaves are new and the sun comes through them fresh and clean like water comes up from a spring? That’s how it felt inside that house. The world didn’t seem like an old place, stuck in the past. It seemed like a place anything could happen. I felt my future there, Whim. I just wish you could have been there to see it with me.

  ‘Letter from the Bramble boy?’ March asked as Whim read it again. Reading Elwyn’s thoughts, seeing his handwriting made her feel the distance between them very keenly. But she couldn’t stop reading. She was greedy for his words, even as they gave her an ache in her belly. ‘That’s the wonderful thing about working in a post office,’ March went on. ‘Some people think it’s a frivolous job, but it’s the most important work in the world. You’re a strand in a web that connects people.’

  Whim smiled. She kept the folded letter in the pocket by her chest as she carried her father’s mail back to their house down low on the banks by the marshes.

  Whim didn’t have time to write back to Elwyn right away. There was a lot work to be done in the early summer season, when the leaves and shoots were young. The Moones came from a long line of herbalists, brewers, steepers, apothecaries, distillers. Most male Badfishians spent their springs planting Hill crops and their late summers harvesting them, but not Whim’s father, nor his father before him nor his grandfather nor great-grandfather. While some people had been driven to sell their labour to pay their taxes and buy their tools, the Moones still made their own way.

  Whim put the letters against the vase on the kitchen table and picked up her basket, which she carried through the woods to fill with flowers. The sun had finished drying the dew even in the shade and the wind was growing hot. Whim worked quickly, filling her baskets with early elderflower blossoms from the patch down by the old south road, but as she worked, over the forest sounds of the birds and squirrels and the snip of her shears, there was a noise that was rare in their part of the world: the grumble of an engine, the crunching of wheels against stone. Whim looked up at the dirt road beyond her.

  She had seen cars before. Once or twice a year, one would pass through on its way to no-one-knew-where. But this was different. These trucks were large and long, yellow as the petals of a black-eyed-susan. The neglected road groaned with their weight. She counted as they passed. There were four.

  By lunchtime the morning chores were finished. Her father left the distillery and entered the house, wiping the midday heat from his face. Whim had set the table for them – a vase with a branch of elder, two linen napkins, two plates. She poached them each a goose egg, which they ate with pearly cattail roots and lettuce.

  Aelred Moon was quiet at the table, cutting into his egg with a fork. His eyes were handsome even when he was dark or sad, but that day he smiled and Whim smiled ba
ck at him, finally feeling something like herself again.

  ‘I saw something interesting today,’ Whim said, taking a drink of chilled birch tea. A knob of ice from their ice house clanked against the glass.

  ‘And what was that, little Whim?’

  ‘Automobiles. Four of them. They were there on the south road.’

  She took a bite of lettuce, expecting interest. But instead a wrinkle formed between Aelred’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. They were big and long, more like train cars than automobiles,’ Whim continued.

  She looked up from her plate at her father. Any laughter in his face had gone. He wiped his mouth with a napkin.

  ‘Which way were they headed?’

  ‘East.’

  The wrinkle between his eyes had deepened. He seemed lost in thought.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Whim asked.

  Aelred shook his head as though shaking away flies. ‘It’s nothing.’ He picked up his fork and ate a cattail root. He gave Whim a reassuring smile that seemed difficult for him.

  They finished their lunch, both of them putting the incident behind them. Whim looked over the accounting log while her father cleared the dishes and swept the floor. When the day’s heat had passed, they continued their work into evening – Whim in the forest, Aelred at the distillery. As the sun grew low, laughter and the smell of cooking fires began to perfume the settlement. Whim wrote at the little desk by her bedroom window, telling Elwyn the odds and ends that might interest him, and then she joined the others making their way up into the middle of town. The day’s work was done. Old men shelled peas and told hunting stories, old women smoked pipes, and children poked embers with large sticks.

  When the first squirrels were pulled from the fire, Caradoc Alfin began to play his concertina and Aelred joined in singing. The sun slanted through the trees, catching the leaves, and it looked like thousands of green lanterns in the branches. The meat was good. And the music was, too. Those summer nights had a way of seeing people past the small tensions and misgivings always present in tight-knit communities. A man swept up his wife and danced around and around the fire, and people began to clap along. Their faces were pink with pleasure. Whim smiled as she walked towards the Bramble house. Mirth was outside the open front door, talking to the mother of Allun’s fiancée and eyeing the roast squirrel.

  The Bramble house was an old place, one of the few still built around the trunk of a tree, and it was nearly as familiar to Whim as her own. She had lived there for a year after her mother died. Her father had been unwell, and Mirth had feared the effect of it all on the young, quiet girl. In her forceful, forthright way – still regarded with some suspicion – Mirth insisted on taking little Whim until Aelred sobered up and was able to care for a child. In time he was grateful. But he still felt an uneasiness around Mirth, that Hill woman marrying into the Forester ways, tough and pushy as an ox. Whim didn’t feel that way. To her, Mirth was strong and natural as the trees themselves.

  Whim said hello to her before she climbed up the branch of the low oak, where Enid and Neste Bramble dangled their legs and shared a bowl of pickled fiddleheads. Enid was telling a story about tracking a fox. She had finally found its den and was waiting in a tree for it to emerge when she saw Elis Arwell passing by on the lake path some thirty yards away. He was shirtless with a fishing pole over his shoulder, and she stood up and leant around the trunk to get a better look. She leant and leant and leant so far, she fell right out of the tree, flat on the ground, just as the fox was poking its nose from its hole.

  ‘All in all, worth it for a better look at Elis in just his undershorts,’ Enid said. Whim was laughing and took a fiddlehead as Neste, never liking to be outdone, began her own story.

  As they talked, the sun sank below the horizon. Sparks flew up and faded. Aelred had gathered a crowd of children around him, telling the story, as he had done many times before, of the beginning of the Collective:

  ‘In the beginning, there was the sky and there was water. And in time, land pushed its way up, and creatures crawled onto this land, and we people lived in the middle of it all. But there was just one big slice of land on that giant water, and life got a bit boring for everyone. So to keep things interesting, the land broke up into hundreds of pieces. All different sizes: some cold, some warm, some flat, some tall, some bare, some full of mountains and rivers. And the creatures, now a good distance away from each other, found their own ways of being, of looking, of talking to each other.

  ‘But we people thought we were clever. We made boats and used them to trade ideas and goods. And then, when we got tired of that, we turned each other into ideas and goods. Sold each other. Killed each other for a bit more land. Worked each other to death for a bit more money.

  ‘But it didn’t go on like that for ever. Those who were oppressed rose up against their oppressors. The factories were burnt down, the slave-owners killed; war broke out. Justice, you see, doesn’t come easy. The war was long and terrible, and the land we love was soaked in blood. By the time it was over, we hardly knew who we were any more, or who anyone else had been.

  ‘Then, from the ashes of what had been our cities rose new ideas. Some people, like the Hill folks, wanted to return to the farms and rebuild the cities, but this time more gently, more removed from foreign greed and ideas. Not us. We Foresters didn’t want to be a part of any kind of domination. We returned to the land to live in harmony with it, not to rule over it. And so for these 180 years, we’ve lived a life of peace, with our place and, what is even more difficult, with the other people who inhabit it.’

  That was where the story ended. The children didn’t stay up much longer than that. Drinks were poured and the music grew slower. Dewey, the second-oldest of the Bramble kids, shook the branch to tease Whim, and then sat down beside his sisters and ate the rest of the fiddleheads.

  As Whim sat in the tree, the talk and world growing quiet around her, the thought of taking Elwyn up on his offer, joining him in Liberty, passed through her mind. It did every night. But that evening as the darkness grew deeper, as fathers carried the last children to bed, most of them already asleep on warm shoulders, she felt no regret. None. It was just a typical summer night in Badfish Creek, but Whim did not take it for granted. That evening under the stars, she felt keenly the value of what she had, and she held it very close and very dear.

  Aelred did not need to ask his daughter about the automobiles again. The next day they came back, not just driving by, but parking right in the middle of Badfish Creek. The paths were only just wide enough and branches broke and groaned as the trucks parked.

  ‘Don’t mind us. We are just here to collect some data and take some measurements,’ the men said, stepping out of their vehicles.

  CHAPTER 8

  Stirring

  WHIM GATH ERED FLOWERING MINT that grew along the east side of the house. She put the herbs and water in a large glass jar and set it along the south-side wall to steep until the water was dark and the sun-tea could be strained. Whim had meant to set out the tea first thing in the morning, but she woke to an empty house; when she went down to the distillery to see if her father was there, she found the stills untended and herbs still heaped in their baskets.

  It was Sunday, but the work had to be done. She started a batch of medicines before the plants lost their potency, prepared a shipment of liquors, balanced the accounting book. She went back home, washed, ate her egg. Put out the tea. Still, her father was not home. Whim spread a napkin on the kitchen table. On it she set a boiled duck egg, a jar of cold watercress soup and a wooden spoon. Her hands moved with ease as she folded and tied the napkin sides, but she didn’t feel the same ease inside. She carried the bundle out into the woods.

  It was not a long walk to the road, but it was enough to get a sense of the forest. Everything was quiet, but also almost electric. She could sense the buzz of the leaves as they fanned out for the sun’s rays. It was a perfect noon, full of the life th
at was usually invigorating, but that day it agitated her.

  Coming over a hill, beyond the elder and sassafras, Whim saw her father. He was in the same place he had spent so much of the last couple weeks, a few feet from the road, sitting with his back against a tree. Every day since the trucks left Badfish Creek with samples and charts, Aelred had been spending more and more time there. He sat with a notebook in hand, recording any automobiles. When he wasn’t there by the road, he wasn’t at the distillery or in the kitchen. He was at his desk, sending letters or reading and mailing articles to underground newspapers.

  When Whim reached him, Aelred looked up at his daughter and smiled. But his face was worn. Little grey hairs had formed around his temples. She crouched down and spread out the napkin.

  ‘You forgot to eat breakfast again,’ she said.

  ‘Whim, you are a treasure and a delight for ever.’

  The road was silent, and he looked away from it while he ate with his daughter. For a moment, he was himself again.

  ‘So, little apple blossom. What fine plans do you have this Sabbath day?’

  Whim lay on the ground, her stomach on the cool earth. Ants crawled in front of her on their urgent, mysterious paths.

  ‘I’ll pay a luncheon visit, then I think I’ll go home and paint.’

  ‘A day fit for a queen!’

  Whim didn’t ask how he would be spending his Sunday. He would be there by the road. Recording. Waiting. She was quiet, and her face must have betrayed some of her feelings.

  ‘What is it, my Whim?’

  She looked up at her father, but she didn’t know how to say the things that were troubling her. Whim tried to smile for him as she excused herself. Then she walked back home and prepared for lunch. With a basket of cakes and a couple of jars of dandelion-blossom jam, yellow as summer, she set off to the Brambles’. Outside the shelter of her shady stone home, the air had grown hot. But it was still the early days of summer; Badfishians hadn’t yet got into the habit of closing up the house after breakfast to keep out the swampy heat. Children wandered in and out of doors; people called out of windows, sweat misting on their skin.