The Emergency, page 19
Her father was stroking Zeus’s head, and when Selva finished he fell into a silence that lasted his entire cigar. Her need to punish him spent, she walked down to the lake to wash her face. The cold, black water reminded her that she hadn’t bathed in two days. Tomorrow she would get clean and change her clothes. And then what?
She found him just where she’d left him, propped on an elbow, staring into the fire, still holding the burnt-out cigar. She was used to her father always busy at something, straightening up a room or sharpening a knife when he had nothing else to do, as if idleness was physically painful for him. Now only his eyelid moved, twitching again. This annoying tic alarmed her.
“Aren’t you going to bed?”
No answer.
“You’re just going to sit here?”
“Possibly.”
“What are you thinking?”
Still mesmerized by the fire, he smiled wanly. “The last thing Big Cronk said to me. I completely forgot till now.” She waited. “He said, ‘It’s not personal, doc, but you and the girl should go back to your city.’” He looked up at her with a plea in his eyes. “I’m too old to rethink everything.”
Selva wondered what that meant to him—what it would mean to her. Like returning to the Better Humans workshop and finding Hebe an inert and mute dummy. Or saying “Together” again and again the way she and Pan would keep repeating an ordinary word like “kitchen” until it had been reduced to comical absurdity. Or Monge laughing at her vain dream. It occurred to her that she and her father had both come out here under a false pretext, both carrying an assumption too fragile to survive the journey.
She felt something that she had never felt before. It was the pity of a mother knowing how hard the world was and how frail her child. She wanted to hold him and tell him that they were going to be all right, that she would take care of everything. And this feeling brought a sudden sense of her aloneness, the awful responsibility she now had for them both, and she knew that this was what it meant to be a parent—what it had always meant to be him, bearing the weight of her life every day whether she was aware or not. A rush of love came over her, not like last night by the campfire, not as his little girl, but seeing him for the first time as he was, and now she didn’t want to burn any of it, she wanted never to forget this moment for the rest of her life.
She laid her hand on his shoulder. “Papa, we did a good thing today. We did what we came to do.”
“That’s kind of you, Sel, but I’ve put us in a hell of a fix.” He sat up and shook his head as if to get rid of a spell, like Zeus shaking off water after a swim, and he explained with unsparing clarity how his faith in the Cronks, humanity, and himself had placed the two of them in a trap from which he could see no way out.
Selva fell asleep with the sensation of a snake biting deep into her heel.
10
After morning porridge, she splashed cold lake water over her body and then dressed in an old blouse and pair of pants that she’d brought as a change of clothes just in case. The leather notebook was still in her jumper pocket. She left it in the tent and returned with her father to the Stranger encampment, but there was nothing to do except wait until evening for her father to examine the wound. Selva stayed away from the boy. To distract herself from the sky, she gathered the children for games, jumping rope with a vine, climbing pine trees, teaching them to play hopscotch on a board drawn in the dirt with a stone from the stream, and the whole time the sun stared at her as the boy had in the moment before he laughed. She knew from the trembling in her hands that the sky overhead was a void today and the universe drained of meaning, but she kept checking her pulse anyway, hoping to find it was slowing down, until the girl in the torn frock began to copy the gesture, putting her fingertips to her own wrist and moving her lips.
Throughout the day Selva’s father kept to himself in their tent, visiting the Stranger encampment only to remove the wen from the tradeswoman’s cheek. Just before sunset he returned to examine the boy. When he found Selva his face was grim. The pink tissue exposed by surgery was already turning black. The rot had traveled deep into the foot. In the morning it would have to be cut off.
“With what?”
“My knife, if it’s sharp enough. Poor kid.”
“And then what do we do?”
He looked at the ground and shrugged. He covered his eyes and shook his head. It was the most abject thing she’d ever seen him do, and again she became aware, now that the last trace was gone, of the immense effort it must take to be her father every moment of her life, the restraint of every weak human impulse—always having to know, manage, get through. And that was when the idea came to her.
She was afraid of falling asleep before her father, but excitement kept her awake long after his breathing slowed. When he was snoring deeply, she took her empty book bag and crept out of the tent and put on her shoes. The paraffin lamp lay on the ground outside the flap, where he kept it for nighttime needs. She found a pencil, tore a blank page from the leather notebook, and wrote: Gone for med supplies. Your nurse assistant who loves you. She placed it on the notebook at the foot of his bedding and accidentally shone the lamp near his face. In the half-light she noticed that his beard was growing in, the way it always used to on camping trips. She imagined returning from her mission and pulling aside the tent flap, calling “Papa!,” his sleepy confusion, his dawning amazement, and she would feel happiness not for herself but for him as she never had before in her life, and this would be the something incredible that she had known was going to happen, not as it turned out to her alone, but to them both.
Zeus was lying by the remains of the fire, and when she emerged he got to his feet. “Stay, Zeus,” she whispered. “I wish you could come with me.” He gazed at her with patient resolve, and when she started to walk away he followed. She turned and pointed: “You stay, Zeus. Stay with Papa. He’ll need you.” Zeus sat in his solemn good-boy posture and whimpered, but this time he didn’t follow.
Even with the lamp casting its light eight feet ahead, the distance that had taken forty minutes by daylight in the opposite direction two days ago now took her more than an hour. She tripped once on a root and fell, and during the climb up the riverbank to the stone bridge she kept slipping backward. Once she was on the lane, the going got easier but she felt exposed. By sheer luck the pants and blouse, a hideous outfit she never would have worn in the city except to help her father in the garden, were dark brown.
The smell of manure told her the farm was just around the next bend and down the hill. She turned off the lamp. The only noise was the light tread of her feet through the grass, shush-shush. Shadowy barns loomed on either side of the lane. The farmhouse was dark. Animals and humans all seemed to be asleep.
And the toolshed door was hanging loose. For a moment she wondered if this, and not the ready mouth of a sharp-toothed plate, was the trap—if they were waiting for her, just as Big Cronk had somehow known they were coming. The shed was windowless and pitch-dark, so she lit the lamp before taking a step inside and closing the door behind her.
She found herself in one of the secret places that stored the alien knowledge of the Cronks, objects with which they were at ease and for which they had names and uses that she’d begun to learn: plows, spades, harrows, scythes, adzes, and augers propped against the walls, bags of peat and lime stacked on the dirt floor, shelves cluttered with hammers, boxes of nails, chisels, block planes, plumb bobs.
Her father had always preached respect for this world of Yeoman things. He liked to remind Selva that the Rustin guild also required the skilled use of hand tools. Their visits to the farm were entirely his doing: “Good experience for the kids to have.” Her mother was impeccably friendly with all three Cronks, but she had little enthusiasm for spending precious vacation time on the farm, and it became obvious to Selva and even Pan that these expeditions caused tension between their parents. After one visit, when their father was rhapsodizing about the beauty of nature and the benefits of physical labor, their mother cut him off with an unusually caustic tone. “Hugo, please. Stop this fantasy. You wouldn’t want this life for a minute. These people are isolated and ignorant. The Cronk boy is hopelessly backward. We have nothing in common other than small talk. I sincerely doubt they want us here.” Selva, more attuned as usual to her father, had found this judgment harsh and unfair.
Half a dozen saws hung from nails driven into the rough wood of the shed wall. She spotted one that she thought could serve as a bone saw: short, stiff, fine-toothed, sharp to her thumb, without much rust. She took it from its nail and placed it blade down in her book bag. Half her mission was done. She felt a surge of confidence.
Selva had been in the root cellar only once, last summer. Mrs. Cronk had told her son to bring in a sack of yams for the pies she baked and sold at the annual district fair—and since the Rustins happened to be visiting that day, why not show Selva where they stored their winter vegetables? Little Cronk had led her behind the farrowing barn to a structure whose like she’d never seen before—a hump of earth over a set of wooden bulkhead doors in a low stone wall. He had thrown the doors open (she remembered them being unlocked), and she had followed him down a short flight of steps into a tiny underground chamber with barely enough headroom for Little Cronk to stand up straight. In the light from the bulkhead she saw that the walls were lined with storage cubbies built from logs, containing piles of potatoes, onions, turnips, carrots, and yams. The room was cooler than the summer air outside, and moist. The earthy smell of root was overpowering.
Little Cronk crouched to gather an armload of yams in his canvas sack. When he stood up and looked at Selva with his imploring face, she thought she was going to faint. The room was too small, he was too near, there was nowhere to go. For the first time she noticed that his eyes were unusually close together. For what felt like half a minute his lips formed the first syllable of several different sentences. Her answer for every one of them was no.
“Do you want to see where my father keeps his bottles?”
She didn’t say no. Discovering that she did want to see, she held her breath and said nothing. He crouched again and reached deep inside a cubby next to the yams. He pulled out a corked bottle of dark brown glass.
“Come here, look.” He gestured for Selva to kneel beside him. At the back of the cubby a dozen identical brown bottles were stacked on their sides. “Most of them are millet beer but some are grain whiskey. The strong stuff.”
These last words sounded unlike anything Little Cronk had ever said to her. Until then it had all been simple declarative sentences. Suddenly he had a point of view—had almost cracked a joke. This only seemed to make her claustrophobia worse, but she waited for what he would do next.
Little Cronk bit the cork between his molars, pulled it out with a dull pop, and sniffed. “Whiskey,” he pronounced, with a touch of pride in his knowledge. “Don’t tell my parents.” He raised the bottle to his mouth and took a long, deep gulp, meeting her eyes to be sure she was watching. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and extended the bottle to Selva. She politely declined. She was not going to take her first drink of alcohol on the verge of fainting in a root cellar with Little Cronk.
He replaced the bottle in the cubby and looked at her. “I’m not as dumb as you think,” he said. “I’m not a farm animal. Someday I might visit your city.” She didn’t answer, but she watched the look on her face kill the little dream that had gathered in his eyes.
Those few minutes underground were by far the most intense experience she had ever had on the Cronk farm, with him. It felt as if he had suddenly broken loose of the constraints that made every moment together excruciating. And yet nothing important had come close to happening—none of the thrilling mysteries that Selva and her school friends speculated about, always ending in hysterical laughter. And when she and Little Cronk came up into the daylight, a sack of yams on his shoulder, and he closed the doors and led her back to the farmhouse, they returned to silence as if nothing had happened at all.
Selva gave one of the bulkhead doors a tug, and it swung open. The lamplight on the steps showed no animal traps. The Cronks wouldn’t imagine any Stranger knew about their root cellar. She knelt by the yam cubby and felt for the nearest bottle. She pulled the cork with her teeth the way Little Cronk had done and brought the bottle to her nose. She was pretty sure it was millet beer. That wouldn’t do for what the Monge boy was going to endure in the morning. She wanted two bottles of the strong stuff.
The next one had the harsh, medicinal smell of her father’s whiskey. She stuffed it in the book bag beside the saw, and as she reached for a second bottle she became aware of a figure standing above her in the bulkhead.
“Don’t move, fucking Stranger, or I’ll blow your head off.”
11
“I’m Selva!”
She held the lamp to her face. Instantly the light blinded her so she could no longer see the figure up in the bulkhead, but she knew it was Little Cronk.
“I’m not a Stranger. I’m Selva.”
“Come closer where I can see you.”
She stood up and moved to the bottom of the steps with her arms raised, the lamp swinging overhead, throwing her shadow back and forth against the root cellar’s walls.
“What the hell are you doing here? I nearly shot you.”
Little Cronk was only a dark outline against the night sky, but his body seemed larger than before, almost filling the bulkhead opening, and his voice sounded different. Not deeper—it had broken a few years ago—but stronger, a voice no longer unable to say what it meant, as if a brake that held it down had been released.
“Can I come out?”
“No. Give me that bag.”
Little Cronk lowered the rifle’s barrel and, ducking under the bulkhead, took two steps down. Selva handed her book bag up to him, and he examined the bone saw and whiskey bottle inside. She set the lamp on the bottom step so that it illuminated him from below. The person she’d imagined at the wheel of the hauler the other day was not quite the one looking at her with intense suspicion. He was wearing nothing but shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, probably what he’d been sleeping in. The scrawny body that had grown longer every year without ever thickening now looked inflated—not just more powerful, but deliberately so: the neck a solid column, the chest pressing through his undershirt, the veins in his upper arm and thigh and calf muscles straining beneath the skin like sculpted clay. His hair, which used to hang uncombed in tangles over his eyes and ears, was now shaved smooth halfway up his head to an oval of short, bristly fur lying on his scalp, making her think of Zeus’s flank after the surgery. His face was unevenly bearded, with bald patches on his cheeks and under his mouth and barely a trace of mustache, while a curtain of strands grew so far down from his chin that it covered his Adam’s apple. All this wasn’t the natural result of farmwork and adolescence but the product of sustained effort. So was the expression on his face, which she had never seen before: chin raised, lips pressed together with the lower one jutted out, glowering. He was Gard the Strong—but his eyes were still the eyes of Little Cronk, hurt, expectant, searching hers for something that only she had the power to give.
She told him exactly what she was doing here, on the farm and in the root cellar. Remembering her father’s caution against getting caught in lies, she didn’t try to use Kask the Yeoman boy again, but she also left some things out, including how Monge’s foot was injured. She tried to gauge whether Gard knew of her earlier visit; she concluded that he didn’t and that it was better for him not to know. Her story made him glower harder and also laugh once or twice, sneeringly, with the curled lip she’d pictured before, but she kept talking, slipping into the tone of old acquaintances, for she had always been able to gain advantage over him with words, and she felt that he might be softening, might confiscate her book bag and send her away with a jeer about stupid city girls—until Gard whipped a clenched fist across his chest to cut her off.
“Selva Rustin”—he gestured at her with the gun barrel— “I charge you as a Burgher spy. I charge you with conspiring against my people with the Stranger enemy to steal our land from its rightful owners and poison our Yeoman stock. You will be tried tomorrow at the limestone quarry. Do you have anything to say?”
He had spoken more words than she’d heard in all the summers of visiting. Where had he learned to talk like this? Again she felt like complimenting him, but instead she burst into unexpected and violent tears.
“Papa is going to worry about me. When he wakes up he’ll be so worried.” She knew that her father would blame himself.
“And he’ll come looking for you. Stop your pussy girl moaning, I haven’t done anything yet.”
Gard waited for her to stop, but the sobs kept heaving through her shoulders. The thought of her father had sprung open a deep well of loneliness.
“I had a feeling that hauler belonged to you,” Gard muttered. “No Burghers ever come around here.”
Even as Selva wept, she mustered a pretend outrage that instantly turned real. “You stole it.”
“Looks that way.”
“How are we going to get back to the city? We don’t want to be here. We want to go home.”
“It was on our land. We recognitioned it.”
“You mean requisitioned.”
This was a mistake. Gard narrowed his eyes until, with the shaved head and primitive beard, he resembled some archaic figure from a display case in the bones museum.
