A Gift Upon the Shore (18 page)

“There's also the problem of acidification. Not many of our books are printed on paper that won't acidify. There are ways to stop it, but they're too technical for us. I think all we can do is seal the books as nearly airtight as possible, then hope that someday, someone will learn how to make paper and ink—or even a crude printing press—so they can copy the books before they disintegrate.”

That seemed a remote possibility, and Mary was again aware of the chill in the wind, the acrid smell of the smoke from their signal fire.

Rachel seemed to sense her doubt. “Mary, we can't predict the future, and I know it's unreasonable to ask more of life than life, but I do, just as human beings always have. This is my
more
. Maybe nothing will come of it but a pile of rotten paper. But I have to try.”

Mary pulled in a deep breath, felt it astringent in her throat. “No, Rachel.
We
have to try.”

Two years ago, in the frigid shadow of the winter, they had made a choice to survive. Now they were making another choice in a silent, lightless wilderness.

A choice to live, not just survive; to live as human beings.

—PLATO (428–348 B.C.),
PHAEDO

T
he last lesson today was on geography. The globe on its wrought-iron stand is still by the table where the children were gathered around it a short while ago, naming continents and oceans. When we came to the end of our allotted time, and the other children made their hurried exits, Stephen stayed, studying the globe. “Mary, it looks like if you could cut out Africa and South America, they'd fit together.”

It was a startling observation for a thirteen-year-old whose education, despite my best efforts, is so limited. Now I sit in my usual chair at the head of the table, and he stands beside me, tense with concentration, his eyes fixed on the book open on the table. He's looking at a map of the megacontinent of Pangaea, a map of our world as it was 250 million years ago. For the last fifteen minutes, with the help of this historical geology text, I've been introducing him to plate tectonics.

He asks, “Is the land still moving, Mary?”

“Yes. That is, the continents are riding on top of the plates, and they're still moving. But very slowly. At best, a few inches a year.”

He smiles, the fire of wonder in his eyes. But I see it quenched at the same moment I hear a sound behind me. Someone has come out of the kitchen.

I choose not to show that I'm aware of her. “Stephen, you can take this book and look through it. If there's anything you don't understand, I'll help you with it.”

But he shakes his head, looking past me. “I've got to help Jonathan split wood.”

I don't try to stop him. I watch him as he hurries out the back door. Then I say, “Hello, Miriam.”

I hear a quick intake of breath.
Witch
, she is no doubt thinking. How did I know it was she standing behind me? She walks past me to the long side of the table, puts down a bowl and a basket of pea pods. I close the book, but only after she has given it an oblique scrutiny, and I see something in her eyes that surprises me.

Fear.

I've never seen Miriam afraid, not even for a fleeting moment as now. It is as unnerving as the opening of a door where I didn't know one existed. You can't hate someone who is capable of fear.

And do I
hate
her? I hadn't thought my feelings were so extreme. And they aren't. Not for Miriam. I don't hate her. I hate what she represents to me: the perpetuation and potential triumph of unreason. I hate her lack of fear, and above all, her lack of doubt.

Miriam has never in her life said, “I don't know.”

Her hands move quickly about the task of emptying the pods; the peas rattle and ricochet against the glazed sides of the bowl. But she pauses, tosses her bright hair back from her shoulders.

“Why are you staring at me?”

I am for a moment embarrassed. “I didn't mean to stare, Miriam. I was only thinking . . . how much you remind me of Luke.”

She resumes her work, facile hands moving ceaselessly. “I look more like my mother than Luke.”

There's a cast of antagonism in that, and I don't know if it's for me or Luke. “Well, you're certainly prettier than he was,” I reply lightly.

Her cheeks redden as she slits open a pod with her thumbnail and strips out the peas. “Beauty is only in the soul.”

“No doubt. But it's your hair that reminds me so much of Luke.”

Slit, strip, peas tumbling into the bowl. “Luke was only my physical father. My uncle, Brother Jonas, was my true father.”

I hear the antagonism again, and I'm sure now it's for Luke. I wait to see if she'll say more, and finally she does.

“Some said my uncle was a hard man.”

I respond cautiously, “Did they?”

“Well, maybe he was in some ways. Not like Luke. But Brother Jonas was a good man. He was a man of faith, and he loved God and always kept His Commandments. Always!”

And, of course, the children in that good man's household had no choice but to love Jonas's god and keep those patriarchal canons. For a while the only sounds are the cracks and rattles of her work. I remain silent, and finally Miriam stops, looks at me, then down at the book.

“What were you showing Stephen in that book?”

“I was telling him about plate tectonics.”

When I don't elaborate, she looks at the cover of the book, takes some time to read its title, which is also its subject. I see again, only because I'm looking for it, that hint of fear in her eyes, but it is immediately masked by righteous contempt.

She says, “That's one of those books that goes against the Bible.”

“Miriam, it has nothing to do with the Bible.”

“Nor
God!
”

“No. It's not a philosophical treatise. You're welcome to read it before you condemn it.” And I wince at my own words. That didn't need to be said. I know she won't read it. She
can't
read it. Her reading skills are minimal, and her voluminous quotes from the Bible at morning services come primarily from memory.

Her back is straight as steel. “I don't need to read it to know it's evil. It teaches our children to deny God!”

“No, Miriam, it does
not
.” Then before my temper gets out of control I add, “God moves in mysterious ways, and no mere human can know all those ways nor claim to understand the dimensions of God.”

“But God spoke to the prophets, and through them to me. I
know
God's Word and His Truth.”

I don't rise to the bait, and after a moment she adds: “My children will learn to listen to God, and I don't want them taught evil.”

I don't rise to that bait, either. All at once I'm weary of this, and I know it's a mistake to argue with her. It only feeds her conviction. And her willingness to argue with me feeds my anxiety. That willingness is due in part to the fact that we're alone, but it also suggests a burgeoning confidence in her. I hear a rush of rain on the roof. Just a squall; the light has gone gray.

“Miriam, I don't want to be your enemy. We can't let ourselves be enemies, not when our little community is so vulnerable to schism.”

For a long time she studies me as if I am something inanimate, or rather a phenomenon to be cautiously observed. And I look back at her, seeing her in the same way: a phenomenon like the smoldering embers in a lightning-struck tree that are the seeds of a conflagration.

Finally she shakes her head, smiles faintly. “No, Mary, you aren't my enemy. You are the
Lord's
enemy.”

I take a deep breath, let it out slowly.

Gird up your loins, old woman.

Yet what of that fleeting fear I read in her eyes when she looked at this book? Why would she feel anything but contempt for a book that describes the evolution of this planet as it occurred—not as it was written by the authors of the Pentateuch in an era when the world was still thought to be flat? Was she afraid of the truth in this book? Rather, the reality?

It finally comes home to me that Miriam fears this book as a body of arcane knowledge, magical knowledge: black magic. Here at Amarna, I am the possessor and fountainhead of that knowledge. A witch. And in the words of her god, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

In the same book of the Bible, her god prescribes ceremonies for animal sacrifices, decrees laws dealing with slavery, and advocates revenge in kind as a means of redressing wrongs.

I've been through all this before in another time, another generation. Generation unto generation . . .

The backdoor opens, and Esther, Grace, and Enid come in, wet and laughing with exhilaration from the rain. But Esther stops when she sees Miriam and me. “I'm sorry. Are we interrupting something?”

Miriam takes a pod out of the basket, slits it open. “No, Esther. I'm just getting these peas ready for midday meal.”

Grace sits down by Miriam. “Here—I'll help you. Oh, the rain just came in buckets, so we had to leave the garden work for now.”

I rise, take the book to the shelves on the south wall, then go into the living room to look out at the rain. There are streaks of blue sky in the west, but above Amarna clouds hang like shadows. I hear the children come in the backdoor, then Jeremiah, all creating a congenial cacophony. This small, fearfully isolated community is still united.

The squall drifts on within half an hour, and indoor work is put aside for outdoor. At this time of year the garden comes first. And the garden begins in the greenhouse.

I've always thought the greenhouse was one of the most agreeable rooms in the house. I suppose it's not precisely a room, although it's surrounded on three sides by the house, and I can never think of it as outside. The angled glass panels of the roof let me look up into the sky, but they stop the rain. The west wall is nearly all glass, even its door, and I can see the ocean, but I can't feel the sea wind. I walk on stone, but it must be swept with a broom like any inside floor. But half of this floor is earth, and that puts me outside again. So do the plants that grow in that earth: tomatoes, leaf lettuce, poppies, spinach, and, to distract whitefly from the others, nasturtiums. And for pleasure, sapphire blue lobelia.

The shelves along the walls are crowded with pots and trays filled with damp, dark earth in which green miracles are occurring. Year after year the miracles occur as they have for millions of years in different shapes and forms. The tart scent of the tomato plants, warmed by the sun, blends with Bernadette's herbs: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme—and how I wish I could remember all the words of that old song—chamomile, basil, borage, marjoram, peppermint, goldenseal, pennyroyal, hyssop, hepatica. And even a little cannabis.

This early in the year, the plants, except for the perennials, are miniatures of their once and future selves and charged with potential. But today many of the vegetable seedlings are leaving this sunny womb to survive—or not—in the true outside world in the garden. Bernadette is, aptly, midwife of this process.

Bernadette's hair—short and curly, entirely white now—flies wildly around her head. She has become even smaller with age, but she's still quick and impatient, still like an inquisitive squirrel with her sun-browned face, her gray, questing eyes, her small hands constantly busy. She is saying to Esther, “That flat there—yes, the cabbage. That goes. Then there's more broccoli and these two cauliflowers.”

I'm at the worktable on the north wall stacking the slitted tarpaper squares that will go around the cabbage seedlings to discourage cutworms. The squares are much the worse for wear, and I'm not sure we have more tar paper in the storeroom. I look up at Stephen, who waits to carry one of the flats with its precious cargo. Esther places it in his hands, tells him, “Now, just watch where you put your feet on the way.”

“Esther, I never have dropped one.” He seldom calls her Mother, nor do Miriam's children call her Mother.

I put a stack of tar-paper squares under my left arm and take up my cane. “I'll walk up with you, Stephen.”

He smiles at me, leads the way, then pauses while I open the sliding glass door. We walk past the deck and the north wing of the house, then up the gentle slope to the garden. The grass is starred with dandelions and tiny, white English daisies. Stephen concentrates on keeping his load balanced. He doesn't look up as he speaks. “Mary, I haven't finished
Treasure Island
yet.”

He's slated to report on that book in school. “There's no hurry, Stephen. Besides, I've given you quite a lot to read lately.”

His mouth tightens. “Miriam says I can't read at night. It wastes candles.”

I am jarred by sudden anger at that. There are
always
enough candles for reading. I try to keep the anger out of my voice. “Well, you'll just have to finish it when you can. Do you like it?”

He glances up at me, grinning. “Yes. It's really exciting.”

And what more can a teacher ask? Yet I wonder how much of the world of Jim Hawkins makes sense to Stephen, who would find the world that existed only thirty years before he was bom incomprehensible. But so would Jim Hawkins.

A cascade of laughter distracts me. Little Mary and Jonathan are running toward us on their way to the greenhouse. Jonathan shouts in passing, “Hurry up, Stephen. They're waiting for more seedlings.”

Stephen retorts, “I'll get there when I
get
there!”

When we reach the garden,
they
are indeed waiting; that is, Miriam, Grace, and Enid. Isaac has been detailed to hoe chopped kelp into the soil at the east end of the garden, and little Rachel is ostensibly helping him. She looks around at me and grins, and her small, fair face reminds me, as it always does, of Rebecca. But there's no pain in that reminder, perhaps because Rachel is so replete with life and laughter and the unaware innocence of all young things.

This end of the garden is—like the seedlings the women are planting in its plowed, hoed, fertilized, raked rows—beautiful in its potential, and already the carrots have put up lacy plumes, and the first umbrella leaves of squash are unfurled. Miriam stands near the gate. She gives Stephen a cold look as she takes the flat. “About time.”