Stories From the Plague Years (33 page)

“Who wanted what?” I asked, with a small fear that I wouldn’t fully grasp what he’d say with his grave boy-from-a-storybook authority.

“People who lived in this house,” he said. “People from Before. They
wanted
what we deal with. I think they thought it’d be fun. Like school letting out for the whole world.”

I considered what he said, digging plaque from the back of my mouth and fearing that the soreness behind my molars heralded wisdom teeth I couldn’t afford to have cut from my jaw, and that I might instead have to hire a blacksmith or iceman to pull my back teeth to prevent infection. I realized I envied another skill of Allen’s—the ability to think of Before as a time like any other, and not an ideal that we only knew through dim childhood memory and the burning of its remnants to keep warm.

“Let me see it,” I said. He tossed me the book. The pages smelled of the naked pine shelving that had kept it from turning to mulch . . . the shelving that we saved for the hearth should the boxes of old files, bank statements, letters and utility bills run out.

The book cover was in the garish melding of the photographic and the painted favoured by publishers when my father had been young. I knew the style from the crates of books from his boyhood we’d packed for library donation before we made our exodus from the dying fringes to the center of town. The youths on the cover had the vapid idealized beauty from a time when surgery and hospital space could be spendthrift’ed on the sculpting of faces and the reshaping of flesh. (True, those who lived on the outlying estates made quilts of their flesh, yet for this they used private surgeons, whom they treated a bit better than cooks and stable boys: court jesters with scalpels and needles full of lotus to soothe their masters’ anguish of being cosseted.) The beauty of the youths was the inverse of the beauty of the faces on old coins and medallions. The youths were posed in a stance of triumph that echoed the propaganda of dead tyrannies; the only triumph I’d known amid such rubble had been when all of us from the wards had marched with borrowed shovels to stove the rats that fled the piles we’d drenched with fuel and set alight.

“I’d like to give it to them. Right in their faces,” Allen said, as if he held his staccato anger in check for the sake of one of those teacup-fragile kids born after the Dying.

“What?”

“The shit we eat that they thought’d be so cool.”

Looking back, I know why Allen and Jim never got along; Allen punched through the past that Jim so treasured.

I wish I’d torn off and saved the book cover and shown it to others from the neighbourhood and the ward, even though it affected me in a way that made me feel as if I’d already shared it with one or two others. Instead, I threw the book on the fire, along with scores of books like it that had belonged to the last owners of this house now deeded to the squirrels that scurried in the upper floors. If we were better trappers, at least one squirrel would now be turning on a makeshift spit, dripping fat. We didn’t dare talk about this; if we did, our hunger would make us stupid enough to try to flush and catch a squirrel in the dark, rotting upper storeys. Instead, Allen and I read aloud a few pages from each of the books before conscripting them to the drying of our socks; in draping whimsy over the days Allen and I endured, all the books voiced an ulcerating need to forsake, in the name of edgy “authenticity,” comforts for which Allen and I would have given much . . . had we anything to give. I put away the blood-spotted licorice root, and was about to say something—probably about girls we knew—when Allen’s stomach growled, loud as the grunt of a small dog, through his wool sweaters and the thickness of his duct-tape-patched sleeping bag.

“I guess this means we’re cool,” he said. And in our giddy hunger, the crack seemed worthy of the laughter we gave it.

Our breakfast was coffee stirred from crystals and melted snow in our electric pot. Rust from the pot made my tongue rough and dry for hours. We trudged along the highway that took us away from Boston, the choking city where there was no work, and few goods anyone could afford in the markets. No checks had come from my father, nor had any mail from past the Rockies reached anyone I knew for a month, fueling rumours of closed airports and cut lines of communication, though wire reports still came from past Denver. Even if checks from my father had gotten through, it was doubtful that banks would convert them to cash we could use. Friends who’d returned from trading had told us that Manhattan was worse off, and Providence had closed all points of entry. Boston starved—as it had previous winters, yet those lean and brutal times had ended after a few weeks . . . broken by the coming of vegetables and citrus from ports as far away as South Africa, and by the sing-songs of butchers walking the streets with their obsidian knives, offering to slaughter and dress backyard livestock in exchange for a few dollars or a shank. Fresh pork, stringy old geese, oranges, rosen kale, and greens tough as parchment even after being boiled in vinegar had ended those famines before winter stores became too meagre and bodies became too ruined to fight infection. This year Boston had felt dangerous as a mastiff gone feral. Each piss-reeking corner was heavy with violence—the maybe-innocent shuffle of footsteps behind you became threatening as the sound of a mercyheart drawn from its sheath. Hunger, and the rat-gnawing worry that the rough times might not end, made walking from one house to another feel the same as did drifting into a provincial bar and knowing that you are the only unarmed man there.

Before I’d taken to the road with Allen—with our sled weighted with the gear we’d need to husk work outside the city, helping farmers and scavengers clear what had been suburban lawns for spring ploughing—Justine’s Aunt Louise (whom I’ve called
my
aunt, but only, it seemed, as a gift granted by Justine) had taken my face in her cool, dry hands. “Child” was the one word she said, as if to acknowledge I was a child no longer. “Child”. . . a
word
? Or a
name
she gave me, to carry as a shield, or an inner-lamp to fill the dark places I’d travel? In Florence, I met a man who’d been named “Fool” by his grandmother, so that he, the youngest of his family, would find fortune when at fourteen he’d struck out on his own. Is “Child” a name, a title, I still bear in the folds of all that I am?

Justine had leaned on the railing of our porch as Allen, pulling the sled a half-block down the street, offered us the gift of a good-bye alone. We stood among blood-rubies flecked on snow—with the disappearance of scraps and cat food, Crispin had foraged for mice and had scattered the innards he couldn’t eat in front of the window we left cracked open for him. With so little fuel that winter, no soot dusted the snow. Tiny red spleens gleamed against untainted whiteness. “Come back to me,” she whispered, close to the nape of my neck, as she had the times before when I’d left to search for food and money during times less dire.

“I promise.”

“Don’t promise,
do it
.” She gripped my coat by the lapels, and, unmoving, we stepped into one of the timeless moments we shared, when the span of a heartbeat seemed the whole of an evening. The feel, not the sound, of aged seams tearing brought us out of that moment, as her grasp inflicted the first of what would be many small rips in the coat we’d pulled from the charity bin two winters before.

“I’ll come back to you,” I vowed to her and to the God who in His mercy had brought us together. I held her and breathed the new scents her skin bloomed now that she was becoming a woman, scents I could only taste for what they were now that I was becoming a man. I lifted her palm and kissed it. We looked at our hands as lovers would at a rose the perfume of which they’ve just shared. My hands were corpse-white, flecked with dried skin, cracked from the winds that had scoured them as I did what work I could find that winter. Justine’s hands weren’t as dry as mine . . . she hoarded near-empty bottles of lotions she scavenged for the small vanity she had for her skin. Our hands seemed two types of earth intertwined, like those near riverbeds when rich silt is left behind by spring floods. Her sister Janice’s tread on the snowy porch behind us didn’t pull us from the moment. Janice forsook her good-bye to me so Justine and I could whisper our farewell. Janice’s silence was a presence— it touched her sister as only a bond of blood can allow. Through Justine, it touched me as well . . . the way that beauty can touch the face of a blind man.

I’ll always ache that I didn’t say a true good-bye to Janice as I felt her watching us, the same way you can feel when someone you love watches you sleep. The neglect I showed her when she’d given Justine and me a quiet time of farewell is one of the small crimes that doesn’t mark my soul, but stains its core. Sins of inaction leave the deepest scars, because the keen of
nothingness
never dulls. With the warmth of Justine’s cheek on my neck, I was aware of my memory cupping the tableau in which we stood, aware of those whom we loved looking away. And I was aware of the unseeing gaze of her father’s telescope above us, a dented thing pulled from a university dump, in the far window to my right. On our narrow street, the telescope had only a sliver of sky to search. Knowing now that its gaze has since been further clouded by the sky-borne ash of the daughter of the man who owned it is a thorn in my heart. Not saying good-bye to Janice that day—as opposed to the day that I last saw her, when the smoke of her rushed cremation and of all the others who died that day painted the dusk with the colors we would wear to mourn her— is a very small sin. Yet it is a sin that has been rewritten within me, the way a simple cell can be rewritten as cancer. That moment of good-bye with Justine was the last moment that I had, without reservation, liked myself. To have shared that moment with Janice as well would maybe atone for what I’d become before I returned, when I’d begin a walk toward a loss that through frostbite might leave my body as lame as my soul.

I began the trek away from what and who I’d been at that moment of good-bye—marking distance in spirit, not miles—when Allen and I left the house in which we’d read the books that had painted our lives and times with the paschal-egg colors of Romantic fantasy.

We waylaid farmers and bargemen uninterested in selling us goods for which they’d get much better prices in the city, and who had no work for two boys sallow with malnutrition. It was past noon before we earned salted fish that we hoped came from waters not too near treatment plants, and winter apples soft and almost brown that had the mustiness of a root cellar clinging to them. Late afternoon, we earned a single potato. By night, we squatted another house marked with door scratchings that told us there was a working fireplace within. A cache of old phone books, the only paper left in the house, and the pine shelving from the last house we’d squatted (which we’d chopped and stacked on our sled) fueled our fire that night. We wrapped the potato in already twice-used foil and placed it in the fire. When we’d eaten it, we used the ugly paste boiled out of marshmallow root to pack our guts with the illusion of a full meal. I fell away from my own unfed sides, a hollow man, of whom famine was making a wilderness in which I’d wander and die.

Allen pulled stalks of willow wand from his pack; boiled into tea, they’d stave off fever. “Should we?” he asked. And if I weren’t so cold and tired, I would have found small joy that the boy who seemed ever-wise was now asking me what was wise.

“Shouldn’t risk it,” I said, thinking of the rot willow wand had caused within kids who’d drunk it while malnourished . . . we’d filled our bellies with a lying food that, even as it bloated us, would let us starve if we ate it too long.

“We’re still going to risk fever.”

“Maybe we need to risk fever,” I said. In my mind, I tasted the death-stink of a girl named Susan in our ward whose liver had dissolved because of willow wand she drank during the mild famine of three winters before. Her body pooled ammonia. She convulsed so violently, the nurses restrained her with belts and strapped a helmet to her. I saw the fountain-marks on the walls by her bed, like those on stable walls when a steer’s throat has been slit, after she’d gouted blood from her nose and mouth during the fit that had killed her. Jeremy, her friend, had no Dusk Colors with which to mourn her the day she was buried. As if lifting the sins of his fathers, he took up the Before mourning color of black, which made him look paler than he truly was. In my memory, the kicked-dog hurt in his eyes will always be joined with the poisoned breath that infused the ward long after Susan had been lifted away and her mattress burned.

I know Allen and I spoke of other things after he put away the willow wand. What they were is muffled by the hunger I knew as I was transfixed by my hands. I’d last truly seen them while saying goodbye to Justine. They were forms unknown to me, grafted to my arms. The veins at the backs of my hands stood out as they never had before. I’d once read in a rotting book with no cover that it’s when these veins stand out that you’ve truly become a man. Yet did they stand out because I was no longer a boy, or because famine had burned away tissue that had been between the veins and skin? What man would I be? Could I be a strong, decent man if my adulthood was midwifed by starvation? How would the man I’d be unfold himself, should I meet him on the road?

I hope the young man whom we did meet the next day still lives . . . that in this world made so brutally small, I can find him and make amends . . . both with him, and the self I lost in meeting him. I hope my hunger during our meeting was an alien thing, a possessing spirit, like those I’ve seen blamed for the fits of epileptics in the outlands near Chicago. Allen had his own spectre to carry, woven into his flesh. By shirking that burden, he too changed. I choose not to endure the thought that maybe he changed because his burden had shirked him.

When we met the young man, our feet were lead-heavy and numb, our hands throbbed in our wool gloves. The rot of our skin slicked oily on our clothes. It had been afternoon before we found work, heaving salvaged pipe and wire onto the cart of a scrap dealer who paid us in bills so old and greasy they smelled of the horses that pulled his cart and looked as if they’d melt if we balled them in our naked hands . . . a thing we’d not do, for our palms were crisscrossed from handling the copper razor-strands of cable that had once streamed data to houses now infested with creatures that dulled their teeth on wire insulation. Our work gloves, good for pulling bramble, were too thin to turn frayed metal threads. We thought to buy a pot recast from melted cables from the merchant but didn’t, knowing that the desire to own the pot was born of our hunger to imagine food in it.