The Emergency, page 29
He always remembered the pig head—the phallic snout, the pointed ears, the sinister, grinning line of mouth. The pig head on the boy’s body never left him because it shook loose a fixed truth that had been with him all his life and gave him a glimpse of something he wasn’t supposed to see, a curtain pulled back on something shameful. He remembered how Selva wouldn’t look at the fiery thing in the pig’s hand. There was no terror or abjection in her face, but a pained sorrow the way she’d descended from the Suicide Spot, as if she’d come out of an important exam feeling she’d failed, and he wanted to take the feeling away from her. He remembered the heavy, metallic weight of the gun in his hand in his pocket, and he remembered the difficulty of pulling back the hammer, and the pig convulsing as it fell sideways into Selva, and Selva going down with the pig and the goggles falling from her hand, but he did not remember firing the gun or his thought at the moment it was fired. It was as if he hadn’t actually done the thing—it happened with his unwitting participation but not his conscious will.
When the explosion in his ears died, he became aware of a silence filled with distorting light. The pig head had fallen off. The boy—Gard the Strong—Little Cronk—Big Cronk’s son—lay on the platform, his undershirt drenching red, but Rustin didn’t grasp what this meant. And now there was something else. Selva was kneeling over the boy and crying “Gard!” and she didn’t see what was going to happen. Rustin saw before she did, and none of it made sense, but he tried to get out of the hauler, tripped, and fell on the ground, got up, ran toward the platform. He must have been holding the gun because the creatures scattered. He remembered trying to reach Selva before the little boy with the feral face. It wasn’t an animal head but something more wicked, a human child’s face with the flat eyes of a wildcat stalking prey. The little boy was gliding almost casually across the platform, and Rustin was running but his legs hardly seemed to move. Selva looked up from the blood just as the little boy picked up the rod from the platform where it had fallen beside the goggles and thrust the burning eye into her face.
Rustin screamed as if the hot hard thing had scorched his own skin and shocked his own brain, but Selva fell without a sound. She lay on the platform with her legs tangled, facing the sky. When he knelt beside her, the smell of burned flesh rose to his nostrils. The left side of her face was melting from her hairline across her singed eyebrow and seared eye to her cheekbone, but he was more concerned with what was happening inside her skull. He put two fingers to her throat and found a rapid pulse. A string of drool slipped from the corner of her mouth.
Throughout the three or four minutes between the gunshot and the moment when, her head lying on his lap and her feet squeezed against the passenger door, he put the hauler in gear and gunned it out of the meadow, he was aware of almost nothing but Selva. For a few seconds at a time the rest of the world intruded. Gathering her in his arms he slipped on the platform’s bloody wood and noticed the still body of Little Cronk. As he carried her toward the hauler, the boys from the quarry came running over the lip of the hill, and he took the gun out of his pocket. He must have done the same to the creatures and the feral boy because they had stayed clear. And somewhere a voice of ashes kept moaning, “No, son, no, son.” Everything else disappeared except for her and an awareness of himself as two people, one on the outside and one inside: the first stabilizing her head and monitoring her breathing and checking for eye movement; the other screaming.
All the way back to the farm he stayed in low gear, gripping the wheel with his left hand while encircling her head in his right arm, trying not to touch her face. Once he failed to anticipate a bounce, and she moaned. She was alive, but the worst lay ahead when she would come out of shock and start to feel the surface agony of the burn and the deeper bruise to her brain. Even if they reached the city, it could be hours or days before he knew if there was swelling inside the skull, if her face could be repaired, would she lose her eye, would her brain function as it had before, would her life be an arduous struggle for six months or damaged forever, would she still be his Selva or someone else, would she live or die. But out here she would die.
Zeus had left the farrowing barn and was dashing back and forth along the fence of the pigpen, barking his deep bark to warn away a threat. Mrs. Cronk stood on the farmhouse porch with her arms folded across her bosom, looking toward the hauler. She was too far away for Rustin to see her face, but her posture suggested exasperation.
He knew, and she didn’t know. But she would soon find out.
“Zeus!” he commanded, then murmured, “I’m sorry.” The news of what he’d done could quickly spread and overtake them before they reached the city, and then there would be no way for a Burgher to explain to Yeomen. “Zeus!” he called again, for Zeus hadn’t heard—the pigs fascinated him.
Rustin thought of the grinning pig head the moment before it fell off. He had not fired at a boy, or anyone human, but at that barbarous thing, like shooting a venomous snake about to strike his daughter. What was the pig head doing there instead of Little Cronk’s? And the other heads around Selva, all making unearthly noises? Some terrible collapse had taken place in that meadow, away from parents and farmwork. The discipline of Yeoman life must not have been enough for those boys, and without it their humanity had turned bitter and contemptible. They had answered a call that sounded nothing like the old language of their fathers, or the high phrases of Together. The call promised danger, darkness, battle, and it thrilled their blood. What did the call say? Haarerrrew! “So I lost him,” Big Cronk said, and it was finally true.
“Zeus!” Rustin shouted a third time. The spell of the pigs finally broken, Zeus sprinted to the hauler, ears back like a rabbit’s and eyes seeking absolution. Rustin eased Selva’s head down onto the seat, then went around and opened the passenger door, guiding Zeus to lie curled on the floor beside the pack so that he wouldn’t move her, though he licked her hand.
The left side of Selva’s face had stopped bubbling and was turning bright red. Rustin removed the gun from his pocket and set it beneath his seat. He took the canteen from his pack and dribbled a capful of water over her burned eye. It was already swollen shut and most of the water ran down her cheek, but he tried to bathe her eye with several more capfuls. He took off his jacket and tore a strip from the cotton lining and laid it gently over the burn to protect her eye from dirt. Then he spread the jacket across her upper body. He had given Monge the medical kit, and there was nothing for her burn or pain until they reached the city by the river. But at least he had Big Cronk’s gun, with which he’d shot his son. “I’m sorry,” he said again, as they drove up the lane and away from the Cronk farm, thinking, I’m a Burgher.
5
The road began to straighten as it descended through the foothills, and Rustin accelerated. The low clouds had cleared and the shadows were lengthening. The land felt empty and silent.
He glanced down at Selva’s face. Her uncovered right eye remained closed, but from time to time she cried out. Her breathing was regular and the stench of oily fat was mostly gone, but serous fluid was seeping through the cloth. I’m going to get you home. Oh, my Sel. Those fucking animals did this to you. He loved animals, he loved Zeus like one of his children, he would never shoot an animal unless he was starving, he had only shot the pig because of what it was about to do to her, but now he wished he’d emptied the cylinder into the rest of them and the feral boy last with one shot between his wildcat eyes. They were not helpless animals, they were not innocent children, they were not ignorant youths, they had made themselves something lower, so low that they could exult in their own lowness. In the folktales he read to Selva and Pan, the animals that could talk were like us, they had human souls, but a half-man, half-goat or a woman with snakes for hair was pure conscienceless appetite. I’ll shoot the whole pack!
He didn’t know if he had thought or said it until he heard himself shout, “Bam! Bam! Bam!”
The voice of ashes kept saying, No, son, no, son. Rustin hardened against it. If those creatures were human, he hated human beings, he had no brothers and sisters. He was out here on his own with the broken fences and smothered trees, responsible only to her.
* * *
He imagined checkpoints all along the road, each manned by Yeomen fully informed and awaiting them, but not even the wolf and the bull were on duty at the hedgerows. He’d considered the possibility of a different route back but saw only cow paths leading across fields into woods. The worst thing would be to lose the way, and he stayed on the road.
The last sunlight was burning the silhouetted hills in the west when they passed the field with a fallen barn. The village of the three farmers was up ahead. As gloom closed around the hauler, Rustin kept the headlights off and shivered in his shirt.
Selva was still unconscious, but her moans were growing more frequent and louder, and when they entered the village she began to sob. “Oh God,” Rustin said. He went faster, getting ready to drive through any roadblock, and the hauler rattled and coughed as if to announce: Burghers in the village!
They were coming up to the meeting hall, the building where the trial had been held, when lights appeared on the roadside, casting a warm yellow-orange glow on the sumac stumps. Then the lights became torches in the hands of people, fifteen or twenty of them, moving quickly from the hall toward the road, flames dimming and brightening on their sticks. The villagers were shouting for the hauler to stop. They seemed taken by surprise, and there was no roadblock. The hauler couldn’t muster more speed, but the villagers had nothing fast enough to catch it except perhaps their draft horses. They would also have hunting rifles.
More than fear, a lingering need for order, a respect for rules, made Rustin brake to a stop in the middle of the road. The torches seemed to flicker like the lights of some embattled civilization. He wasn’t one of them, they were his enemies, they might try to kill him, he had killed one of them, the gun was under his seat—but a lifelong instinct led him toward rather than away from the society of others. At its heart, he knew this now, lay a doubt about his own inner stuff. Not his title or guild or principles or creed, but an elemental strength that he could summon all alone in the big world.
The torchbearers crowded around the hauler and blocked its way. They were not boys but men and women. Lit from above and below against the darkness, their faces took on the exaggerated expressions of theatrical mimes—astonishment, suspicion, curiosity, fear. Zeus began a low growl that Rustin cut short with a snap of his fingers.
“I know him!” a voice said. “He was here before.”
Through the passenger window Rustin recognized one of the three farmers—not Gandorig, but the angry one with the flushed face.
“Yes, Brother Baard, it’s me again,” Rustin said. “I need help.”
Brother Baard held out an imperious hand. “Let’s see that thing we gave you. The safe conduct.”
Rustin had known this was coming, and a sense of hopelessness overwhelmed him. “I don’t have it. The wolf threw it away, or the bull, I don’t remember. It’s gone.”
Brother Baard’s color deepened and his eyes frogged out, but before he could say anything a man behind him snorted with disgust. “Ah, those useless sons of bitches.”
Selva let out a shriek. She was awake, her good eye open and staring at her father in a way that felt at once strange and familiar. She’d never looked at him like this before, yet it reminded him of something. “Sel, Sel,” Rustin murmured, and his hand stroked her hair. The villagers, noticing her for the first time, pushed forward for a better view. Brother Baard poked his torch through her window and moved the light around the interior, and the hauler filled with the smell of burning lamp oil.
“Please don’t do that. My daughter is badly hurt.”
“What happened?”
“They burned her. See?”
With his thumb and forefinger Rustin carefully lifted a corner of the cloth where it wasn’t stuck. The skin over her cheekbone was swollen hot and red. A yellow, egg-shaped bubble had risen under her eye. There were gasps and groans, and a woman’s voice cried, “Poor thing!”
“Who burned her?” Brother Baard demanded.
Rustin was trying to establish the crowd’s mood, what they knew or didn’t know, what they would do if they knew—but thinking dissolved in the ruin of Selva’s face.
“Now don’t do that,” said the man behind Brother Baard.
Rustin had begun to weep. It had been years since he’d wept openly, with sobs that rocked his shoulders. He had held down his grief and shame with the doctor’s duty of care, but now that she was awake and looking at him, a tear rolling down her undamaged cheek from her one eye telling him Don’t lose me, now she was his daughter and he was her father who had let this happen to her, and he couldn’t stop.
Outside the hauler, voices swarmed over one another.
“That looks bad.”
“He said he was going—”
“They used to stop for plum wine. City people.”
“Probably lose that eye.”
“Going where?”
“And she was a real pistol.”
“By the Cronk farm. Said a boy named Kask—”
“The Cronk farm? That boy calls himself Gard?”
“You don’t suppose those animals—”
“Goddamn that Dirt Thought.”
“I most certainly do.”
Rustin struggled to master himself and listen. The villagers seemed to know of the goings-on at the farm, and to regard them with deep concern. Someone mentioned horse thieves—a rumor of a plot to steal the village draft horses. And it was going to happen tonight—that was why they’d brought torches to the meeting hall. Confusion dissipated as the Burgher arrivals, Selva’s burned face, the Cronk farm, and the village horses came together in a single narrative with the magnetic force of collective certainty: Gard and his unit were going to raid the village tonight and steal its horses for an attack with a larger Yeoman force against the city by the river, which would result in the destruction of this village because it was the closest major Yeoman settlement. Selva’s injury was proof of the plot—its opening blow.
“Maybe he’s part of it,” said Brother Baard, his eyes still roaming the hauler as if in search of incriminating evidence.
“Now why the hell do you think that?” asked the man behind him.
“He’s a Burgher, isn’t he?”
“He’s going to attack his own people?”
“Not that. Steal our horses, is what. We let him go once, but I said not to. Now he’s back.”
In the clamor of voices Rustin realized that the man arguing with Brother Baard was Leader Gandorig. His gesticulating hand was missing part of a finger.
Selva moaned again and reached for her father’s hand on her hair.
“Please,” Rustin said, to no one in particular since no one was listening. “We need help.”
There was a commotion. Torchbearers were moving aside, and a woman who had been standing near Rustin’s window was pushing her way around the front of the hauler. She was a small woman of middle age in a plain housedress, with her hair cut short in back and straight across her brow, and in the torch’s glare her birdlike face was twisted with fury. “Shame!” she yelled as she shoved through the crowd. “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
By the far window the woman came to a stop directly in front of Brother Baard. With her free hand she began swatting his chest.
“Shame on you, Baard Stope! Do you see that girl or did someone put out your eyes?”
Brother Baard stood stunned and mute while the woman kept striking him with the flat of her hand. Rustin decided that she was his wife. From his cramped hideout on the floor Zeus stared at her with fascination.
“Shame on all of you!” She wheeled around and shone her torch in one face after another. “Stop jabbering like a flock of geese. Aren’t you Yeomen? The girl needs help.” The voices had already fallen silent with the spectacle of her assault. The woman, no taller than the window’s height, leaned in and studied Rustin’s face with the same indignation that she’d flung at her husband. “I heard you were a doctor—doctors don’t blubber. Don’t you have something to give her?”
Rustin explained about the medical kit, but his answer only inflamed the woman more.
“You’re no more use than him. Shame!”
“I need something for pain. And to get her to the hospital.”
With the magnificent authority of her outrage, the woman organized a relief party. Brother Baard had become an irrelevant bystander. In a few minutes another woman appeared with a handful of white pills. Rustin didn’t recognize them, but he broke them up with his thumbnail and placed the fragments on Selva’s tongue, then held his canteen to her mouth, and by some act of will that lifted his heart for the first time since the day they’d left the city, she swallowed.
“Now get,” the woman whispered fiercely. “Get on home before they change their minds.” She waved her torch at the people gathered in front. “Stand aside! Emergency coming through!”
Slowly, reluctantly, compelled by a superior force, the torchbearers parted, and the hauler moved down the road.
6
Selva slept and woke and slept while Rustin drove through the moonless night. The shock of the blow was wearing off, and from time to time she began to howl in pain, and he had to remind himself that this was a good sign. He tried to think through her course of treatment at the hospital but could never get past the North Gate because he’d forgotten to ask the villagers for the pass that the Wide Awakes had given him. He had the headlights on to see the road, but it made him nervous to be a large illuminated object moving through the switchgrass fields.
