The Ash Family, page 4
He put more wood on the fire. He sat beside me, pulled my back against his chest so I was almost in his lap. He held out our hands together in the light. “Christ, that’s a deep one,” he said. “It’s metal?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought you said it would be okay.”
“Do you trust me to help you fix it?” he said.
I told him I did.
“Look at me,” he said. “Do you trust me?”
I looked at his fire-blurry face. I had that feeling again that I was communicating with an animal. His eyes were fierce but his brain was blank to me. “Yes,” I said.
He squeezed my wrist and held my hand flat, grabbed a long burning branch from the fire, and crushed the flame end into my hand.
It didn’t hurt at all, really, certainly no more than it was hurting before. He lifted the branch away and we both looked at my ashy palm. A second later, the pain hit, but I could handle it by then. The splinter hadn’t budged, though the skin around it quickly blistered. I wondered if this was how he’d intended to fix it. I could still feel the warmth of his hand compressing my wrist, of all things.
“There,” he said. “Sterilized.”
If I were him, I’d have been sorry, or at least solicitous. But he stretched out on the ground, calm again, just like after he’d shoved me at the rich people’s house, shoved me and then instantly forgotten, perhaps. I ran to get my frozen water bottle from the tent so he wouldn’t hear me gasping, because now it did hurt—I’d been skinned.
I approached the fire again, numbing my hand against the bottle. It occurred to me that you could learn tolerance to pain the way that you learn math, and I found the thought comforting. I told this to Bay.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s a life skill. You can learn to make a fire with sticks, too. I practiced every day for an hour, and in a year I could do it. And in the Ash Family, there’s a guy who bootstrapped his tools from scratch. You know how to do that?”
“Using sticks?” I said.
“You make a really crude lathe. Then you make crude tools and make a better lathe. Then you make better tools. Lathe your way to a better lathe. Come down here and sit by me, baby.”
He kissed me on the lips. He pulled my hair down till my head rolled back and then he kissed me on the neck. “You’re nice,” he said. “I want you to come meet my family. You’ll fit in well. I can’t wait for them to meet you.”
I smiled. I thought that this was my victory. I thought I’d gotten something from him.
CHAPTER 4
On my first evening at the farm, the sheep guided me home. It was dusk when they whirled past me. Several men exited the barn, calling and gesturing, and the sheep shambled in. A man laid long handfuls of grain in the feeder trough. He saw me watching and said, “Not enough pasture this time of year.” I wished he would congratulate me on bringing home the herd.
No one paid me much mind inside the house, either. Warmth and smoke and a frying-onion smell billowed from the kitchen, but there was no space for me there—an older woman kneaded bread at the table, a man flipped vegetables in an immense black pan, another sliced a licheny cheese.
I was looking for Bay, and looking for a place to wash my injured hand, which was hot and sore. I hung Sara’s scarf, sweater, and jacket on knobs in the entryway. There was a tray on which sat an orange-lettered plaque that said September, and a little box below with the plaques for the other months. I walked through a dining room, a meeting room, and four bedrooms. Each bedroom contained seven bunk beds heavy with pilled blankets. At the other end was the only room with a door, and the door had a lock. I knew because I tried to open it.
I hated that they were hiding a room from me. I missed Isaac’s squat, the cat-torn corduroy couch on the porch, the loft beds with granny-square blankets in garish polyester, the walls adorned with paintings of centaurs and rats, the kitchen ceiling a bramble of Christmas lights and drying herbs and dusty feathers, the roof and porch swing always occupied by smokers, the mosquito coils, the incense, the sage, the palo santo, the hornet infestation, the bath with its border of hundreds of melted-down red candles, the freight train’s loud breathy whistle, the play parties during which Isaac and I hid out in his narrow white room, just listening. In Isaac’s squat, nothing was off-limits. I tried the locked door again.
“My friend!” someone called behind me.
It was the black-haired man who’d stared at me during breakfast. He said his name was Gemini. He was emaciated, crouched, in his thirties maybe. “Welcome,” he said, smiling at the window, the ceiling. “Dice wants to show you around the property,” he said. “You’re lucky. Sometimes people wait days to meet him.” We sat on the wide-planked floor.
“So what’s your story?” I said. I wanted a name like Gemini. I was envious of the confidence it signaled.
“My story?” he said. “There’s no such thing as the definite self.” He shrugged and smiled at the ceiling. “Dice will teach you how to see things fresh.” He stood and repositioned a shank—deer, probably—that hung, drying, from a beam. He sat next to me again. “Are you cold?”
He hadn’t looked at me yet. “Yes,” I said. “I’m cold.”
Gemini sprang up, relieved, it seemed, to have a task. He pulled a wicker bin out from under one of the bunks. He tossed me a high-necked taupe sweater constructed of thick waxy yarn. “Raw wool,” he said. “Repels more water than a slicker.” He tossed me a pair of black work trousers. I couldn’t tell if the knees were moth-eaten or worn down from labor. He found a pair of boots. “Put them on,” he said.
“Now?” I said.
“Are you embarrassed?” he said, finally raising his gaze to me. There was something canny in his look. I took off my jeans.
A man came into the room, and I hurriedly buttoned up the pants. I knew it was Dice before I looked up.
He was a small man with a slow smile. He was not a hippie. Not a professor. Not a priest. Not any of the ways I’d pictured him. Instead, he was a boxer. He seemed to have his fists up against the world. I couldn’t read his expression, whether he was assessing or prowling or lost in thought. I did not notice when Gemini vanished.
I took off my sweatshirt and pulled the sweater over my old Peter Pan blouse. The raw wool scratched my neck and wrists. The trousers were thick and unyielding, molded to a foreign person’s shape. The boots felt huge in the toes. I recognized how flimsy my old clothes were. I let my hair down over my shoulders. I was the only one on the farm with long hair.
“Hello,” I said.
“Cassie used to wear that sweater,” Dice said. So that was his voice: textured and cottony. “And Queen. Pear. And before that Bip. We don’t have possessions.”
He looked at me intently. He stood straight as a plumb line, the kind of straightness called exactly true. He was an unadorned man with buzzed silver hair and a concerned, falconlike brow, a look so intense it was almost cross-eyed.
He took out a knife, reached high—I backed away from him again, jumpy—and cut a ribbon of meat from the dangling shank. His hands were bright and raw, each finger the size of two of mine. He handed me the piece, dry and textured like grosgrain. I wondered how to tell him I was a vegetarian. Isaac had persuaded me to give up meat with a conversation about minimizing suffering, incremental change. Surely I could explain myself to Dice.
“Eat,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine. I was disarmed by his attention. He and I were alone—Isaac, who was a hypocrite, had nothing to do with it. I ate. The meat tasted like the landscape distilled into salt. Water shot onto my tongue. I felt like a dog. It was my first brush with Dice’s power: he aroused in me a violent desire to please.
Dice said, “I think you like it.” He ushered me out onto the porch and into the navy-blue night. I could hear the cowbells and sheep bells, now sporadic as the animals lay down to rest. “Who taught you to tie your shoes in runner’s knots?” he said.
I looked down at my laces, blushing. I didn’t know how to react to this quality of attention and so my body defaulted to shame. “My coach,” I said. “I’m a high jumper.” It seemed essential that he know this, as though the fact would somehow make me adequate. This walk felt like a test, and I was nervous.
“Was,” he said. I looked up at him, puzzled. “I was a high jumper,” he said softly. “Queen will show you how to move around in the tree canopy with a throw rope.” He smiled and whistled, calling something. “After you’ve been here a little while you’ll never want to think about the fake world again. Trust me on that.” His tone was complicated. He seemed to be making fun of his own seriousness. Of course this was a test: he was widening and widening his circle till I entered it. But I didn’t know it then.
Three dogs cantered through the woods. They were enormous and white, as though all their color had been filtered away.
“They kill hunting dogs,” Dice said. “That’s why we have all those signs up.”
I drew my hand back from the dog’s ear. “They’re all right with you,” said Dice, “just don’t approach them while they’re eating.” The dogs, I would learn, ate deer and wolves, and sheep who sometimes suddenly died. They would leave rib cages, bloody legs, pelvises strewn across the farm. By the forest border, we were tripping on bones and stained fur. Dice said, “Did you know that over the past hundred thousand years, humans have been getting tamer? We’re breeding for lighter limbs, smaller teeth. We’re taming ourselves. And when we’re as old as bacteria—that’s about four billion years old—we will be as radically interdependent as they are.”
“You think we’ll get to four billion?” I said.
Dice nodded. “I’ve spent a lot of time with fossils. I know how things linger. Did Bay tell you I used to work in a coal plant?” He paused. “Tell me about your family,” he said.
I told him it was just my mother and me.
“I bet she puts a lot of pressure on you,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I could see her now, her tall stomping walk and the pleasure with which she oriented her solar-powered queen of England figurine on the kitchen windowsill. The queen wore a blue skirt suit and the sun made her little hand wave daintily. My mother adored that thing, which came from one of the gift shops where she worked. “But I think she tries her best,” I said. I almost cried as I told him.
“You have to tell yourself a new story,” he said softly. “That’s all you’re crying over—a story you’ve made up.”
I wondered if this was true. My mother and I had both wanted the same thing for me—a better life than hers—but we disagreed about what better meant.
He was silent, maybe waiting for me to speak, and I surprised myself by pouring out all the details of my lies—the planned trip to Richmond, the bus to Asheville instead. He asked why I didn’t simply refuse to go to college.
I thought about her waving goodbye at the airport. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” I said.
“You’re good to chart your own way,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Our disagreement was a formality, a game. I knew Dice would win, since I wanted to be good, to believe, to be saved. But—and the Ash Family was always this way for me, beginning to end—even if it was a game, it was more honest than anything else. I hadn’t told Isaac, my mother, or anyone else my true feelings about college. And Dice had gotten it from me immediately, with no effort at all.
I wondered if he understood me like a lightning bolt understands a rod, which is what Bay had said would happen. I wondered what that meant, exactly. If I thought too hard, the sense unraveled: maybe Dice was the energy, and I the metal that pulled him safely to the ground. Or maybe it was my job to wait all day for Dice to gather over me.
“Your life in Durham, your mother’s life, was unconsidered,” Dice said, a little heat edging into his voice. “She bought into the idea that more is better. More schooling, more exclusivity, more credentials, more more more. But you are special if you can see beyond that.”
I didn’t want to hurt her, I’d told him. I imagined how hurt she’d be if she heard Dice saying this about her. I imagined her in Durham, bending over in pain, as Dice’s words struck her like a spell. I shook my head, but I was blushing.
He watched me closely. “Let me show you.” He reached toward me—“May I?,” and I nodded—and touched the center of my forehead, spreading my brow, smoothing out the furrow. My eyes closed. His hand was warm. Dice withdrew his hand and I opened my eyes. “Have you ever walked through a forest on a summer evening?” he said. “Have you seen the does with their spotty red fawns in the tall grass?”
“I have,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Listen closely. Like a guided meditation. You know that awakeness? The lightning bugs in sparkling array. Remember walking on a curving road at the peak of summer.” I pictured Hillsborough, its hilly old farms. “The plants are gently respiring, releasing all their dew.” He savored the words. I felt caught up in his delight.
It might have been how hungry I was after days of meager food, or how tired I was after herding, how torn up by all the newness, or his soft, urging, repetitive words, or something remaining from his fingertips against my brow, but I began to feel a tingling in my fingers and toes. I was no longer cold or hungry on an unfamiliar mountain farm, I was awestruck under a wild star-smeared sky. Dice’s voice was an incantation, guiding me down a gravel path. “You are passing a stream,” he whispered, “and now you are on the edge of a quarry.” I could see the quarry on the Eno in Durham, green-flooded and eternally deep. “You stumble, and begin to fall down the sheer side, against the rocks.” I could feel the immense pain in my ribs. His voice was a hush. “Now you disintegrate. You sublime into particles and loft into the air. You become one with the whole world.”
I came to in a gust of cold air, and my eyes seemed to reattach to my brain. My ears rang. We had stopped to sit on rocks by the crushed lanes of a vegetable garden. Half of it was covered in white sheets, insulating against the unseasonable cold. Collards and kale showed faintly like huge black flowers. I felt slightly embarrassed. Dice said, “Sometimes you are so fully seen that you disappear.” Later, on the edge of sleep, I thought this through and did not understand it, but at the time it was a revelation, a key: if only we all knew this, there would be no war, no warming crisis, and no extinction.
He stood. “Look at you,” he said. “So open.” He laughed. I was glad he laughed; I was tired of being so serious. “Let me tell you about the family rules. Not my rules,” he said. “I don’t have rules. Rules from the people who live here.” I could just see the white dogs in the distance, wearing each other out running up and down the slopes, snapping at the spaces between each other’s mouths. We began to walk again, but it felt different, as though I were sailing over the ground, frictionless. He said, “I know Bay has your wallet, and I know there’s nothing in it. But utopias often fall apart from lack of funds, so new arrivals sometimes choose to donate to the family.” I was trying to keep track of each new piece of information. I tripped—a branch, or a bone—and he pulled me up; it was like being winched up by a crane, irresistible. He cupped my elbow in his hand.
“Second,” he said, “utopias fall apart from love problems among members. It is important you don’t fall in love.” He was teasing me. I thought of Bay by the fire, his mouth on my neck. Dice was so much better at talking than Bay, and all kinds of considerations and judgments seemed to run in him like an underground stream; he was precise, controlled. “No couples,” Dice said, “and no children—there’s enough people on Earth already.”
We were walking now past the low twisted trees of an orchard. The dark, bone-humid night, the orange windows in the long house, the clanging bells, the piney wind: they were all his vision.
“Utopias fall apart because their buildings burn down,” he said. “We don’t bring fire into the barn.” In his voice fire sounded like far. “We don’t promise a perfect age right around the corner, either. Don’t expect New Jerusalem to come down.”
I watched a crowd of bobwhites hustle past. I hadn’t been paying full attention. I wanted practicalities.
“What about leaving?” I said. “If someone wants to go away and come back, maybe?” It sounded more like a challenge than I had intended. I still felt as though I was coming out of a trance, not quite aware of myself in my new clothes, in this new place. He glanced toward me. In this dimness, his face was just an outline.
“Why would you want to leave?” Dice said.
“Maybe to see my mother?” I said.
“Why would you want to see her, when you’re here among family that truly loves you?”
I noted distantly that I was no longer in the mood to defend my mother.
He continued on, with rules against reading and writing, phones, mirrors, soap. Rules about volunteering for hard tasks. About sacrificing for the land, facing pain for the land.
“No fake-world medicine,” he said. “No hospitals.” Especially not antibiotics, which were distorting the evolution of bacteria and creating new strains we could not defend against. He said that old witches often had the right idea: the willow-bark tea that predated aspirin, the foxglove that fixed hearts long before digitalis.
“What if someone breaks their arm?” I said.
“It’s important that we not reveal ourselves haphazardly to the fake world,” he said. “People would be threatened by our way of life and try to destroy us. We can’t be numbered.”
“You certainly wouldn’t let people”—I couldn’t say die in front of him—“wouldn’t let people stay sick,” I finished lamely.
“Beryl,” he said, his warm hand against my cheek. I hadn’t realized he knew my name. “I do not let people stay sick.”
I blushed again. “But can you fix my hand?” I said.
“Didn’t Bay?” Dice said. His tone was cross. “There’s a healer, Pear. She’ll look if it’s not better next week. Pear’s the one who fixed Bay’s arms.”
“After his dad stabbed him with scissors?”
