Marching As to War: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (13 page)

It was strange waking up for the first time in my old bed,
in the room I had shared with my brother back when we were boys, back when he
was alive.

There was a lot of sunlight in the room. That meant my
parents had let me sleep well into the morning. I had arrived late the night
before, and both of them had stayed up making a fuss over me and feeding me.
But I knew they had been up since dawn, working. That was their way. Tomorrow,
I would be up at dawn too.

Sitting up and putting my feet on the old wood floor, I
looked around. I had been too tired for that last night. The things of my
boyhood lay about, dusty and half-forgotten: A collection of rocks and rusting
machine parts that I had found. The claw of a black bear my father had killed.
My Bible, a dictionary, and a few other books.

Tacked up on the wall was a picture cut from an old
magazine. Curling at the edges and fading, the picture showed the Earth, the
whole thing, hanging like a blue and white ball in the blackness of space. The
picture had been made when my grandfather was young, when men had traveled out
to the moon.

I sat there for a while, my feet getting cold, looking at my
things. I tried to recall who I had been before the dust had settled on
everything. I couldn’t do it. Whoever I had been was like a person in a made-up
story that I didn’t remember well.

I got up and began putting on my clothes. As I buttoned my
shirt, I looked across the room at my brother’s bed. My mother kept it neater
than my brother ever had. Little trace of him remained in the room. I tried to
picture him sitting on the edge of the bed, playing that beat-up old harmonica
he had found, but I couldn’t get his face clear in my mind. I hadn’t seen him
for a long time, since before I had gone to the militia.

While I was away, he married Maggie, and they moved into a
little cabin just up the road.
The cabin where he was buried.
It would be my cabin when I married her.
If I married her.

I would have to visit Maggie.
Soon.
The thought of it made me nervous. It didn’t help, of course, that I had never
been with a woman.

I had come close once.
Sort of.
Well, not really. A few months before I went to the militia, there had been
this one time with a girl at Saturday night dance. Even though folks kept an
eye on the boys and girls our age, we each managed to slip out into the woods.
We kissed, and she rubbed up against me, pressing against my thing until I was
near crazy. But then she pushed me away and ran off, laughing, back into the
dance. I guess it was a kind of game to her. I couldn’t follow, of course, not
the way I was sticking out just then. It took me a while to calm down, and by
then it was about time to go home. When I saw the girl in church the next
morning, she acted like nothing had happened.

So that was my experience with women, with girls anyway.
That and the confused daydreaming I had done about this one and that one,
including Jane. Of course, I knew what men and women did when they were
married. When you grow up on a farm, breeding animals, how babies get made is
no great mystery. But knowing what’s done is one thing and doing it is another.
And doing it with your brother’s widow is yet another.

I looked up at the picture I had tacked to the wall and
wished I could be that far away from this old world.

The harvest was already in, but there was plenty to do to
get ready for winter. Mostly, I chopped and hauled wood. As I worked, I couldn’t
help thinking about the things I had seen, about Jane and Riley. It was strange
not being able to turn to Riley and say what was on my mind. For all I knew,
Jane or Riley could be dead now. I thought some about the blue-eyed man too,
even though I tried not to. The old dream of him still hadn’t come back, but
somehow I felt him close by, waiting for me.

My parents only asked about the war in a general way, not
what I had done, or about Jane. I’m sure they had heard things and wanted to
know. They figured I would talk about all that when I needed to, when I was
ready. And if I was never ready, then that was how it would be. It wasn’t their
way to push me about the past, only the future.

After two days at home, my clothes were clean and patched up
nice, and I had made a good pile of firewood. At dinner, my mother asked when I
was going to see Maggie. And my brother’s grave. I tried to put it off, talking
about all the things to be done before the winter. All of that was true enough,
but my mother was no fool.

“Nonsense,” she said, pushing back from the table and
standing up. She looked down at me. “You’ll go tomorrow.” Then she started
clearing the table.

My mother was a reasonable woman. She tended to hear folks
out before making up her mind. But when she got that certain tone in her voice,
you knew she had drawn a line, and you had best toe it.

It was strange to find myself back in my old seat at the
kitchen table, getting scolded. It made me angry. I sat forward and put my fists
on the table. “I’m not a boy anymore,” I said.

“Then don’t act like one,” she said, her back to me as she
cleared off the dishes into the slop bucket.

This made me even angrier, but the fight went out of me when
I looked over at my father. As he loaded up his pipe, he just gave me a wink.

I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my
chest. The matter was settled. I would go tomorrow.

When Maggie opened the door, she said, “You expecting
trouble?”

I was puzzled. Then she pointed to the rifle in my right
hand. Carrying it had become as much a habit as wearing my britches. But Maggie
wasn’t used to such things.

“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed.

“Come on then. You can leave it by the door.”

I came inside, leaned my rifle against the wall, and took
off my hat. She shut the door behind me and then walked across the room to the
fireplace. She stood facing the fire with her arms crossed and head down.

I looked around the room. There wasn’t much, but it was well
kept. Pots and other kitchen things were by the fireplace. A table and chairs
sat in the middle of the room. A tall cabinet for clothes stood in a corner
next to a back door. A set of shelves on one wall held odds and ends, and a few
books. My brother’s harmonica sat at the end of one shelf. I wanted to pick it
up, but thought better of it. In a corner of the room was the bed. For a
moment, I pictured Maggie and my brother, lying there together, naked. It was
hard to imagine me in his place.

Not knowing what else to do, I went and stood at the fire
with her, a good yard of space between us. I looked into the fire and waited,
saying nothing, fumbling nervously with my hat, my heart beating fast. The fire
was small and didn’t begin to warm the room. I wasn’t surprised by that. From
what I had seen as I walked up, she didn’t have much firewood to spare.

“You’ll want to see your brother’s grave.” She didn’t wait
for me to answer, but just turned and headed for the back door. She opened the
cabinet and pulled out a big coat, which I recognized as my brother’s. She put
on the coat and went out, leaving the door open for me.

We walked slowly across a field without speaking. Still hard
from the first frost of the season, the ground crunched beneath our boots.

I felt strange. I was going to my brother’s grave. His death
had never been real to me. I had only gotten word of it long after they had put
him in the ground. I was going to that grave with his widow, the woman I was
supposed to marry, a woman who didn’t appear to have much use for me.

And I felt frightened without my rifle.

My brother was buried in the woods beyond the field. It was
a nice place, a small clearing a little higher than the surrounding ground. I
could see the cabin through the bare branches of the trees and bushes. My
parents had told me as he was dying he had asked to be buried there. It
would’ve been easier on Maggie, on me, on everybody if was at the church or on
our land. But that’s what he had wanted.

His name had been carved into the marker, a heavy piece of
plank stuck into the ground. A bed of stones lay atop the grave to keep animals
from digging him up. But I knew there was nothing but bones down there now.

I took off my hat and stared at the marker. My brother’s
face, how he had looked when he smiled and laughed, flickered and jumped in my
mind like a candle in a drafty place. I tried to hold the image. Then it was
gone. My eyes felt a little wet and I wiped them with the sleeve of my coat.

When I looked up, I saw Maggie was looking right at me, not
down at the marker or the stones. Her eyes were dry, clear. Honest.

“Do you want this?” she said.

“Well . . . I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

“If you don’t want to try, I’d best head home before winter.
And I don’t want that.”

“Why not?”

She glanced at the marker as if considering whether she
would say what was on her mind in its presence.
In his
presence.
She let out a breath and looked at me.

“I don’t take much to pity, and that’s what waiting for me
there. Besides, my folks didn’t want me marrying your brother. They didn’t
think he was . . . steady. And they’ll think his dying somehow proves them
right. I just don’t care to be around that.”

“You and my brother chose one another.”

She looked back at the marker. “We did.”

I didn’t bother to ask why. They were both the kind most
folks are drawn to, full of life and handsome enough to turn heads. I knew
because I wasn’t like that at all.

She kept looking at the marker. “He made me laugh. O Lord,
how I laughed with him. And you know how he loved music and dancing. That’s
what I’d thought it would be, laughter and music and dancing.
That, and getting in bed and making babies.”

When she said this last thing, she looked up at me. Maybe
she was trying to see how I would take that kind of talk. Maybe she was just
being honest. I felt myself flush, something in me stirring, but still uneasy
about feeling that way.

She turned back to the marker. “But it wasn’t. Laughter and
music don’t chop wood, patch the roof, or get a new privy dug. And what’s done
in bed, well, that don’t amount to much if there’s no baby.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I do miss him,” she continued. “But every day, I miss him a
little less because it was a mistake. If he’d lived, we both would’ve seen that
soon enough.”

She turned back to me. “Everyone tells me you’re the serious
one.
The steady one.”

“And what if I am? Is that enough?
Enough
to make you forget?”

“No. There’s no forgetting. Not for me. Not for you. But we
could try to find something.
Something of our own.”

“I’ll only be here a few weeks.”

“I know.”

“And when I leave, I might never be back.”

She nodded, gave the marker one last glance, and began to walk
back to the cabin. I walked by her side.
Boots crunching the
cold clods.

“You’re low on firewood,” I said, “If you got an ax, I could
chop some.”

“I’ve got one,” she said, smiling. “And it’s sharp.”

I smiled back.

After my chores at home, I would go to Maggie’s place and
chop wood or do other heavy work until it was near dark. All our talk was
practical, about little things, and not like our talk at my brother’s grave. On
Sunday, we would sit together in church. That was strange because everyone
watched us, curious about how we were getting along.

So that’s how we began, edging toward one another.
Slow and careful.
We had stopped being strangers, but we
didn’t have a word for what we were becoming. Of course, hanging over
everything was my leaving. And God only knew what would happen then.

Two days before I was planning to leave, Maggie cooked me a
real sit-down dinner. I was so nervous that I could barely taste the food, even
though I kept saying it was real good.

I don’t think she was as nervous as me, but she didn’t say
much either. Mostly, she watched me. Maybe she was waiting to see if I was
ready for something.

She was standing, cleaning off the plates when she said,
“Tell me what happened to you in the militia.”

I was so surprised I almost dropped my cup.

“Tell me,” she said.

Everything I tried not to think about came up inside me like
a rush of vomit. I didn’t dare say a word. I would let it all out. And if I
did, she would never want me. No one would.

Maggie waited, motionless, still holding a plate.

Looking away, I shook my head. It was all I could manage.

She sat down at the table, laying the plate aside. “You
don’t have to tell me.
Ever.
But I want you to know
that you can. It’s up to you.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. I was grateful. But it
wasn’t because she was willing to listen. That would come later. I was grateful
for not having to say anything.

“But there’s something else,” she said.

“What?”

“Tell me about this girl, Jane Darcy.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Folks say God works through her. That true?”

There it was. The question I had never been able to answer.

“Sometimes I thought she was,” I said. “Other times I had to
wonder about her.
Or about God.”

Maggie looked surprised. So I told her about Waynesville.

“If God wanted that,” I said, “we should wonder about Him.”

I could tell Maggie didn’t want to go questioning God. Most
folks with any sense didn’t. Everything could unravel if you start doing that.
And what good could come from it? I didn’t want to doubt God either, but Jane
had driven me there.

“Folks say if it weren’t for her, the Government would’ve
beaten us by now,” Maggie said. “They say she’s more important than Charles
Winslow will ever be. You think that’s true?”