The Collective

by Lindsey Whitlock

  Dewey neared, clutching his hand and wincing with an urgency that woke Whim from her paralysis.

  ‘Posy, I have a medical kit in the cupboard by the root barrel. Can you get it for me?’ Whim asked, going to Dewey and examining his hand. Learning herbs and distilling from her father had also meant learning medicine – the two were woven together. Dewey’s hand was swollen like a gourd and seemed to have bones shattered in several places.

  Mirth came running from the Bramble house, holding a lamp. There was an alertness to her posture, like an eagle protecting its nest, and she quickly swooped towards her son.

  ‘Somebody! Wake the doctor in Kegonsa!’ she shouted, her face stony. ‘Let me see that,’ she said, reaching for her second son’s hand.

  ‘No.’ Dewey pulled his hand away. Mirth grabbed it anyway, and Dewey, worn thin, acquiesced.

  ‘You should never have been allowed to go,’ Mirth said, anger boiling in her voice. ‘Where’s Aelred? He has to answer for this.’

  ‘Aelred’s in jail,’ Allun said.

  The words hit Whim with the force of a boulder. All the strength was knocked from her. Aelred’s in jail. Her knees buckled. The dirt and leaves of the ground below her began to blur, and Whim nearly fell.

  ‘Go get Neste and Enid,’ she could hear Mirth saying. ‘Whim is in shock.’

  ‘No,’ Whim said. ‘I’m okay. I need to set Dewey’s hand,’ she said.

  ‘We need a doctor,’ Mirth said.

  ‘I know what to do,’ Whim said. And as the world around her regained its focus, she went through the contents of the medical basket – the herbs, house-made tinctures, splints, clean cloth – and pulled out what she would need. ‘Why did they arrest him?’ Whim said quietly to Dewey as she looked again at his hand.

  ‘The militia came after us,’ Dewey said, wincing in pain as Whim manipulated his muscles. ‘I had brought my gun, which made them angry. They hate to see power in the hands of people like us. Don’t look at me like that. We had to defend ourselves, Whim. I thought they were going to kill us. But then Aelred stepped in. He took it all on himself. He said it was his gun. That he had shot it, but that he would say no more about who he was or where he came from until he got a fair trial.’ Whim swallowed. ‘Your father’s an honourable man,’ Dewey said, his voice becoming sharper. ‘I wish I could say the same for my brother.’

  ‘Dewey…’ Allun warned, hovering nearby.

  ‘Elwyn did this to me,’ Dewey said. His face wasn’t far from Whim’s as she looked up from his hand.

  ‘We don’t know that, Dewey,’ Allun said.

  ‘I saw him. With his sling. I swear it, he did this to me, Allun. To his own brother,’ Dewey retorted. ‘You should have seen how he looked. Hill clothes. Short hair. Ridiculous.’ Dewey sneered. ‘What would Samuel Bramble say if he was looking down on us now? Samuel was born a slave and fought so we could live free on this land. Now one of his descendants is working on the side of people trying to exploit us.’

  ‘Leave your brother out of this,’ Mirth said, body tense. ‘Are you sure he didn’t recognise you?’ There was something almost like desperation in her voice. But the sneer on Dewey’s face grew, interrupted by violent flinches as Whim, who was listening gravely, put the splints in place.

  ‘He’s a traitor,’ Dewey spat.

  ‘Dewey, he couldn’t have known—’ Allun began.

  ‘Couldn’t he? What has Elwyn ever cared for but his own skin? His own grand life.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Whim said.

  ‘Answer my question. Did Elwyn recognise you?’ Mirth said, voice low and growling.

  ‘Elwyn again.’ The pain and anger in Dewey’s face had by this point blended into a perfect paleness as he looked up at his mother. ‘You don’t give a damn about this place. This place where our ancestors found safety after slavery, after the War. This place that fed us, that clothed us, that protected us…’

  ‘I’ve given my sweat and blood to our life here. I have given up more than you could understand,’ Mirth said.

  ‘I understand that we are being stripped of the one thing that is ours. And all you care about is whether your favourite son will still get his little leg up in the world.’

  Mirth slapped Dewey across the face. He didn’t cower. He turned back to look at her. Mirth was tall: they met eye to eye. She spoke low.

  ‘You’re right. I do care about my children more than I care about this place. And I won’t see them throwing their lives away for a hopeless cause or losing a chance to make something of themselves in this world. We are taking the relocation funds and going. And as for you, I won’t have you going off and getting yourself killed by your own bullheaded recklessness. You won’t be going off to any more of these rallies. We’re going north to Hemlock Draw to stay with your father’s cousins. You’ll come if I have to drag you.’

  ‘I don’t think there will be any more rallies, Mam,’ Allun said gravely. The sun must have been about to rise – the sky was faintly light. But it was covered in clouds, and the birds hadn’t begun to sing. Or maybe Whim just couldn’t hear them. She still held Dewey’s swollen, splinted hand. In her mind were images. Elwyn handing her his sling. Aelred being carried off to jail.

  Whim went from person to person, cleaning cuts, applying poultices. When the doctor arrived from Kegonsa, there was nothing left to be done. It was mid-morning when Whim finished. The wind was still in her ears when she returned to her silent, empty house. She fell into a deep sleep, feeling, even as she slept, the absence that surrounded her.

  When she woke, it was to the sound of screaming.

  CHAPTER 15

  Death

  WHIM RAN OUTSIDE towards the wrenching sound. It came from the Wilder house behind the post office and little general store. Janie Wilder, the postman’s wife, ran out the back door.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Janie said, thick and pale.

  She went back inside, and Whim followed. Janie’s cries filled the small space. She was a reserved and tight-fisted woman, but her voice was like an animal. ‘It was his heart,’ Janie wailed. Whim couldn’t look away from March, who lay ashen on the bed. Death wasn’t foreign to Whim; it grew around them all, natural as the cattails in the marshes. But this scene felt all wrong – this man she had known so well unmoving in his bed. The sound of Janie’s cries echoed in Whim like a drum.

  ‘He was a sensitive man. It was too much for him, the stress of this relocation, these protesters mocking him, putting pressure on him at every turn,’ Janie said, clutching at her own face. Whim felt dizzy. She had meant to come down to the post office that afternoon. She planned to talk to March about how to contact her father in jail. He was not only helpful, but also kind. And now, he was gone.

  It was summer. Badfishians had the day to mourn, but only that. According to custom, the body was burned and the ashes made into a paste with water and smeared over the doors. People grieved for the quiet man, but also knew there was work to be done.

  The town was sobered by Aelred’s arrest and March’s death – the two linked together in everyone’s minds. When people talked about the protest, it wasn’t in excitement. It had been dangerous. It had been a failure. It was what happened when you read too much, wrote to newspapers. It was what happened when you let yourself be foolhardy. Even the few people who still refused to leave town changed their attitude. Any grandness and idealism was gone. Everything was done quietly, almost in shame.

  People wrote in to get their relocation funds. The literate helped the others and showed them where to put an X in place of a signature. Meanwhile, food stores were being cleared out and eaten, curtains taken down. No one sang while they worked, or whistled. No communal fire was lit. Nights were still and dry.

  Whim wasn’t leaving, but her days were equally full. With her father gone, she had to do his work at the distillery as well as her own. She had to lift heavy crates, roll barrels – work that kept her up late into the night and had her waking to an aching body at dawn each
morning. But it didn’t make her unhappy. If anything, it kept grief and worry at bay and helped her sleep at night.

  What little spare time Whim had was spent at the post office, picking up her father’s newspapers and waiting for a letter from him. She wanted desperately to write to him herself, but what Dewey said about Aelred keeping anonymous seemed to be right. Her father’s face was sometimes in the newspapers, but his name and origin were never mentioned. Rewards were promised for anyone with information about his identity, and it seemed to be something of a fixation. The mystery gunman.

  She didn’t want to put anyone at risk by communicating with her father, but it had been two weeks since she had seen or heard from him. She had hoped he would find a way to let her know he was all right. The silence was beginning to weigh on her, and in those moments she wasn’t working or sleeping, her chest felt tight, her breath restricted. She knew that the trouble might be as simple as unreliable post – she hadn’t received any letters from Elwyn either – but she would feel much better if she could just get some assurance that her father was safe. Day by day, she doubted it more and more.

  If March were still alive, these fraught moments getting mail might have been less traumatic. But as it was, Old Finchy, March’s great aunt, now sat behind the postal counter while Janie took over deliveries and settled the accounts before moving. This surprised almost everyone, Finchy not being known for generosity. Janie forbade smoking in the store, but every time Whim went inside, Finchy had her long, thin pipe in her mouth, tobacco smoke pooling at the ceiling. Her black eyes watched Whim shrewdly. Day after day she looked on. When Whim asked if there were were any letters for her, Finchy shook her head with an air of futility and said, ‘It won’t do any good, you know.’

  Though no letters arrived, Whim faithfully read the newspapers that came for her father. When Aelred was home, she had never bothered much with news from the outside world. Until recently, it all seemed unnecessary, a distraction from real things in life: flowers, roots, meals, seasons. But now those grey pages were the height of importance. They were a link between the woods and the world – the world was where her father was.

  Whim searched for Aelred in the lines. Lists of what was known about this mystery gunman were prominent in every major paper from Hill Country. There were speculation pieces, plans for improved security measures in town centres. All of it Whim took in. She was hungry for anything that had to do with her father, anything that might help her understand what was happening.

  Two weeks after the protest, Finchy handed Whim the newspapers with the same scepticism as always, but this time a weekly journal from Liberty was on top, one that Whim had never seen before. She felt a flicker of hope at the sight of it, and began to read right there in the post office. Details Come to Light on Mystery Gunman’s Past. Whim perused the article for anything new, but it was the usual puffed-up speculation. Then halfway down the second page, her eyes lighted on words from a different article: Timothy Blackwell and his Forester nephew. Whim’s breath caught in her chest. Timothy Blackwell was insisting that his Elwyn had not known the gunman and had not been involved in the protest.

  ‘He is interested in the development of our society, not the destruction of it. That’s why he came to Liberty. To seek an education. To distance himself from his unfortunate past. Now, my research indicates that if we just had a mandatory education programme for these underserved groups, we would no longer have a savage population at our doorstep, working in our fields. I will discuss this at length in my forthcoming book.’

  Critics of Blackwell’s radical philosophy note that forcing Foresters into the education system would not only endanger students but would eventually take away from the available migrant workforce.

  Whim’s eyes were glued to the paper even as she walked towards the door.

  ‘One more thing,’ Finchy said through lips still pinched around her pipe. Whim was so immersed in the pages, she had trouble understanding what Finchy was doing when she reached down and pulled a letter from below the counter. The address was written in a hand Whim didn’t recognise, but when she opened it and saw the familiar writing inside, tears began to fall even before she read the words. Finchy didn’t comfort her, but sat looking on, smoking. There in the store, Old Finchy staring unpleasantly, Whim read the letter over and over.

  Little Whim,

  You must be worried, but there is no need for that. I have been given a cell, food and water, and should receive a trial date any day now. I cannot lie to you and say my days are pleasant or altogether free of violence. But any pain inflicted on me is nothing compared to pain I would feel looking in the mirror each day after doing nothing to defend my home or protect my people.

  The only regret I have is leaving you, dear little Whim. I hope beyond all reason that my trial will be soon and will be quick and will return me to you. The truth, I still believe, will prevail. But until we are reunited, I have consolation in your deep kindness and your capacity for mercy. There is more in those two qualities than any militia, any foolhardy boy with a gun. Who could feel hopeless while there is a girl like you in the world?

  I’ve enclosed the address of a friend I have made here. He will see your letters get to me and mine to you. Meanwhile, be assured that I am caring for myself as best I can. I am thinking of you often, loving you constantly, and am always,

  Your father

  As she read on and on, again and again, her tears grew heavier, louder, harder to wipe away. Dappled sun streamed into the room that smelt like tobacco smoke, wax and glue and sugar bins. And Whim felt life in her body, as if she had been holding her breath underwater and had just come up for air.

  ‘Thank you, Finchy,’ she said.

  And Finchy said, ‘You’re welcome.’

  When Whim finished crying and stepped outside, everything had gained a sharpness: the untended gardens, untrained pumpkin vine, the smell of dry dirt on the wind. It was a quiet time of day; mothers napped after a long morning packing and young people cooled themselves in the creek. Whim returned to the stills, bottling, testing, barrelling through the heat of the day. But the work didn’t feel as heavy as it had before. Her hands had become more capable as the days went on, her arms stronger. Whim’s mind, for the first time in so long, felt free. And it was in that freedom that an idea grew.

  When the supper hour neared, Whim went to the creek to wash the sweat from her body. Rising from the water and dressing, she saw a curl of smoke and heard humming ahead. Finchy lived down by the creek and was home tending her bees. Whim hadn’t forgotten what the old woman had once said about her father, nor had Whim forgiven it. But she also remembered a small tenderness in Finchy’s voice that afternoon, and the way the letter had been set aside. Whim went towards the sound of humming, hair dripping down her back and soaking her clothes.

  ‘I hear you, girl,’ Finchy remarked as Whim approached, not turning from her bees. ‘Well? What do you have to say? Just standing around doesn’t suit you.’

  Whim wasn’t bothered by what Finchy said. She doubted anything could bother her just then. What made Whim pause was the sight through Finchy’s open window. The lace curtains were still hanging. The lace cloth over the table. Everything was in its place.

  ‘I thought you were leaving with Janie Wilder next week. You haven’t packed your things,’ Whim said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Finchy said. ‘And I expect you haven’t either unless you’ve lost your nerve.’ Finchy turned away from the bees and removed her gloves. ‘I’m about to pour a cup of mead for myself. I suppose I can pour two.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to share your table with the daughter of a troublemaker?’

  Old Finchy raised her eyebrows. ‘He made a mess, you know, of his great “resistance”.’

  ‘Nothing good ever comes neatly.’

  ‘You still stand by your foolish father, then?’

  ‘I always stand by what’s right.’

  Finchy looked at Whim appraisingly. Then a flicker
of cold humour flashed in the old woman’s eyes.

  ‘Come in for that cup of mead.’

  Whim followed and sat on one side of the lace-covered table while Finchy sat at the other. The old woman took out two ancient crystal glasses and poured a stingy glass of mead for herself and then a stingy glass for Whim. They raised their glasses and drank. In all these years, Whim had never tried mead. Aelred had always described the local home-brewed liquors as ‘coarse’, but this was delicate and dark. It warmed Whim’s insides like they had been cold. Finchy stared at her. It seemed to Whim that everything was being inspected by those small eyes.

  ‘I’m planning another protest. Continuing the resistance…’ Whim said.

  ‘You’re a foolish girl. Like your father.’

  ‘I want you to help me.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Isolation Is a Fortress

  THE AWFULNESS OF THE DEMONSTRATION had faded like the pain where Elwyn had been hit on the head. The bullet aimed at Timothy had hit Rhoad’s foot, but the wound wasn’t deep. One life, at least, had been saved. When Timothy heard what had happened, he looked at his nephew with what seemed to be real tenderness, maybe even respect. Elwyn thought this might be a turning point for him in Liberty. He imagined stepping out on the streets and hearing people whisper in tones other than the suspicion that he had almost grown accustomed to. Maybe people in town would even admire him.

  Above all, Elwyn hoped that a turn in public opinion might mean Rhoad would change his mind and give him a job. Elwyn understood that his actions had not only saved lives, but may even have saved Rhoad’s campaign. Rhoad was running on progress, and fear makes people want to buckle down, close their doors, not open them. Maybe he would get a letter from Rhoad, apologising for the lack of welcome, asking Elwyn to help him with his work. The whole thing seemed like it could be a bizarre stroke of luck.