Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (11 page)

       He wrote: "Separation from our brothers and sisters has been harder on all of us than we expected. Suggest future parties send pairs of likes whenever possible."

       If Thomas became ill, he thought, then what? Even back in the hospital they had no provisions for caring for the mentally ill. Insanity was a community threat, a threat to the brothers and sisters who suffered as much as the affected one. Early on, the family had decided that no community threat could be allowed to survive. If any brother or sister became mentally ill, his or her presence was not to be tolerated. And that, Ben told himself sharply, was the law. Their small group could not afford to lose a pair of hands, though, and that was the reality. And when reality and law clashed, then what?

       After a glance at Molly, Ben added another note: "Suggest parties be made up equally of males and females." She had been more lonely than any of them, he knew. He had watched her fill page after page of her sketchbook, and wondered if that had substituted in some way for the absence of her sisters. Perhaps when Thomas was confronted with his real work he would no longer stare for long periods and start when anyone touched him or called his name.

       "We'll have to change our food-rationing schedule," Lewis said. "We counted on five days only for this leg of the trip, and it's been eight. You want to do the food count, Ben?"

       Ben nodded. "Tomorrow when we tie up I'll make an inventory. We might have to cut down." They shouldn't, he knew. He made another note. "Suggest double caloric needs."

       Molly's hand slipped out from under her cheek and dangled over the side of her bunk. Ben had intended to lie with her that night, but it didn't matter. They were all too tired even for the comfort of sex. Ben sighed and put his notebook down. The last light was fading from the sky. There was only the soft slap of wavelets against the side of the boat and the sound of deep breathing from the rear section. There was a touch of chill in the air. Ben waited until Thomas was asleep, then he lay down.

       Molly dreamed of turning over in the boat, of being unable to get out from under it, of searching for a place to surface where the boat would not cut her off from the air above. The water was pale gold, it was turning her skin golden, and she knew that if she let herself remain still for even one moment she would become a golden statue on the bottom of the river forever. She swam harder, desperate to breathe, aching, flailing, yielding to terror. Then hands reached for her, her own hands, as white as snow, and she tried to grasp them. The hands, dozens of them now, closed on nothing, opened, closed. They missed her again and again, and finally she screamed, "Here I am!" And the water rushed to fill her. She started to sink, frozen, only her mind churning with fear, forming over and over the scream of protest her lips were unable to utter.

       "Molly, hush. It's all right." A quiet voice in her ear penetrated finally, and she jerked awake from the dream. "It's all right, Molly. You're all right."

       It was very dark. "Ben?" Molly whispered.

       "Yes. You were dreaming."

       She shuddered and moved over so he could lie beside her. She was shivering; the night air had become very cool since they had turned in to the Potomac. Ben was warm, his arm tight about her, and his other hand warm and gentle as he caressed her cold body.

       They made no sound to awaken the others as their bodies united in the sexual embrace, and afterward Molly slept again, hard and tight against him.

       All the next day the signs of great devastation grew: houses had burned, others had been toppled by storms. The suburbs were being overgrown with shrubs and trees. Debris made the trip harder; sunken boats and collapsed bridges turned the river into a maze where their progress was measured in feet and inches. Again they had found it impossible to use the sail.

       Lewis and Molly were together in the prow of the boat, alert for submerged dangers, sometimes calling out in unison, sometimes singly, warning against hazards, neither of them silent for more than a minute or two at a time.

       Suddenly Molly pointed and cried, "Fish! There are fish!"

       They stared at the school of fish in wonder, and the boat drifted until Lewis shouted, "Obstacle! Eleven o'clock, ten yards!" They pulled the oars hard and the school of fish vanished, but the gloom had lifted. While they rowed, they talked of ways of netting fish for dinner, of drying fish for the return trip, of the excitement in the valley when they learned that fish had survived after all.

       None of the ruins they had seen from the river prepared them for the scene of desolation they came upon on the outskirts of Washington. Molly had seen photographs in books of bombed-out cities—Dresden, Hiroshima—and the destruction here seemed every bit as total. The streets were buried under rubble, here and there vines covered the heaps of concrete, and trees had taken root high above the ground, binding the piles of bricks and blocks and marble together. They stayed on the river until it became impassable, and this time the rapids were created by man-made obstacles: old rusting automobiles, a demolished bridge, a graveyard of buses . . .

       "It was worthless," Thomas muttered. "All of this. Worthless."

       "Maybe not," Lewis said. "There have to be vaults, basements, fireproof storage rooms . . . Maybe not."

       "Worthless," Thomas said again.

       "Let's tie up and try to figure out just where we are," Ben said. It was nearly dusk; they couldn't do anything until morning. "I'll start dinner. Molly, can you make out anything from the maps?"

       She shook her head, her eyes fixed, staring at the nightmare scene before them. Who had done this? Why? It was as if the people had converged here to destroy this place that had failed them in the end so completely.

       "Molly!" Ben's voice sharpened. "There are still a few landmarks, aren't there?"

       She stirred and abruptly turned away from the city. Ben looked at Thomas, and from him to Harvey, who was studying the river ahead.

       "They did it on purpose," Harvey said. "In the end they must have all been mad, obsessed with the idea of destruction."

       Lewis said, "If we can locate ourselves, we'll find the vaults. All this"—he waved his hand—"was done by savages. It's all surface damage. The vaults will be intact."

       Molly was turning slowly, examining the landscape in a panoramic survey. She said, "There should be two more bridges, and that will put us at the foot of Capitol Hill, I think. Another two or three miles."

       "Good," Ben said quietly. "Good. Maybe it isn't this bad in the center. Thomas, give me a hand, will you?"

       Throughout the night the boat moved this way and that as different people, tired but unable to sleep, crept about restlessly, seeking solace from one another.

       Before dawn they were all up. They ate quickly and by the first light were on their way over the rubble toward the center of Washington. It appeared the destruction of the inner city was in fact less than on the fringes. Then they realized that here the buildings had been spaced farther apart; open land gave the illusion of less complete ruin. Also, it was obvious that someone had tried to clear away some of the debris.

       "Let's split into pairs here," Lewis said, taking command once more. "Meet back here at noon. Molly and Jed, over there. Ben and Thomas, that way. Harvey and I will start over there." He pointed as he spoke, and the others nodded. Molly had identified the locations for them: the Senate Office Building was up there; the Post Office Building; the General Services Building . . .

       "We were naïve," Thomas said suddenly as he and Ben approached the ruined Post Office Building. "We thought there would be a few buildings standing with open doors. All we had to do was walk in, pull out a drawer or two, and get everything we wanted. Be heroes when we got home. Stupid, wasn't it?"

       "We've already found out a lot," Ben said quietly.

       "What we've learned is that this isn't the way," Thomas said sharply. "We aren't going to accomplish anything."

       They circled the building. The front of it was blocked; around the side, one wall was down almost completely; the insides were charred and gutted.

       The fourth building they tried to enter had burned also, but only parts of it had been destroyed. Here they found offices, desks, files. "Small business records!" Thomas said suddenly, whirling

away from the files to look at Ben excitedly.

Ben shook his head. "So?"

       "We came through a room with telephone directories! Where was it?" Again Ben looked mystified, and Thomas laughed. "Telephone directories! They'll list warehouses! Factories! Storage depots!"

       They found the room where several directories lay in a pile on the floor, and Thomas began to examine one intently. Ben picked up another of the books and started to open it.

       "Careful!" Thomas said sharply. "That paper's brittle. Let's get out of here."

       "Will that help?" Ben asked, pointing to the directory Thomas carried.

       "Yes, but we need the central office of the telephone company. Maybe Molly can find it."

       That afternoon, the next day, and the next the search for useful information continued. Molly updated her Washington map, locating the buildings that contained anything of use, noting the dangerous buildings, the flooded sections—many of the basements were filled with evil-smelling water. She drew many of the skeletons they kept stumbling over. She sketched them as dispassionately as she did the buildings and streets.

       On the fourth day they found the central telephone offices, and Thomas stationed himself in one of the rooms and began to go through the directories of the eastern cities, carefully lifting out pages they could use. Ben stopped worrying about him.

       On the fifth, and sixth days it rained, a steady gray rain that flooded the low-lying areas and brought water above the basement level in some of the buildings. If the rain kept up very long, the whole city would flood, as it evidently had done over and over in the past. Then the skies cleared and the wind shifted and drove in from the north, and they shivered and continued the search.

       As she drew, Molly thought: millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, all gone. She drew the ruined Washington Monument, the broken statue of Lincoln and the words of the inscription that remained on the pedestal:
One nation indi
. . . She drew the skeletal frame of the Supreme Court Building . . .

       They didn't move camp to the city, but slept aboard the boat every night. They were amassing too much material to take back with them; every evening when they left the city they took back loads of records, books, maps, charts, and after the evening meal each of them went over his own stack of material and tried to sort it. They made extensive notes about the condition of the buildings they explored, the contents, the usefulness of the material in them. The next expedition would be able to go straight to work.

       There were the skeletons, some of them on top of the rubble, some half buried, others in the buildings. How easily they could ignore them, Ben mused. Another species, extinct now, a pity. Pass on.

       On the ninth evening they made the final choices of what to pack in the boat. They found an intact room in a partially destroyed building and stored the surplus material there for the next group.

       On the tenth day they started for home, this time rowing against the current, with a fresh breeze blowing from the northeast, puffing the large single sail they had not been able to use until now. Lewis attached the tiller, and the wind drove them up the river.

       Fly, fly! Molly silently urged the boat. She stood in the prow and sang out the hazards, some of them almost before they came into sight. There was a tree stump there, she remembered; and again, a train engine; a sand bar . . . In the afternoon the wind shifted and blew in from due north, and they had to take down the sail or risk being driven onto shore. Gradually the excitement they had all felt earlier gave way to dogged determination, and finally to mindless patience, and when they stopped for the night they all knew they had traveled little more than half the distance they had traveled on this leg of their journey toward the city.

       That night Molly dreamed of dancing figures. Joyously she ran toward them, arms outstretched, her feet not touching the ground at all as she raced to join them. Then the air thickened and shimmered and the figures were distorted, and when one of them looked at her, the outline of her face was all wrong, her features wrong, one eye too high, her mouth bent out of shape. Molly stopped, staring at the grotesque face. She was drawn toward it relentlessly through the thick air that changed everything. She struggled and tried to hang back, but her feet moved, her body followed, and she could feel the resisting air close about her suffocatingly. The caricature of her own face grimaced, and the figure raised snake-like arms toward her. Molly came wide awake suddenly, and for several moments didn't know where she was. Someone was shouting.

       It was Thomas, she realized, and Ben and Lewis were struggling with him, getting him out of his bunk, toward the bow of the boat, the canopied section. Harvey moved to the rear and gradually quiet returned, but it was a long time before Molly could go back to sleep.

       By the third day the return trip had turned into a nightmare. The wind became gusty, more dangerous than helpful, and they no longer tried to use the sail. The current was swifter, the water muddy. It must have rained much more inland than it had in Washington. Also, the air had a chill that persisted until midday, when the sun became too hot for the warm clothing they had put on earlier. By sundown it was too cool for the lighter garments they had changed into at the lunch break. They were always too hot or too cold.