Читать книгу After the Flood - Kassandra montag - Страница 13

THE NEXT MORNING Beatrice and I sat in the grass outside her tent, making lures with thread she’d scavenged in an abandoned shack up the mountainside. I knotted the bright red thread around a hook, listening to Beatrice tell me about how things were before the old coasts disappeared. Born in San Francisco, she was a child when it flooded and her family fled inland. Sometimes when she talked, I could tell she was trying hard to remember how things were when she was young, before all the migrations started, but that she couldn’t really. Her stories felt like stories about a place that never really existed.

The neighbors to her right, who lived in a one-room sod house dug out from the side of the mountain, were bickering, their voices rising and railing against one another. Beatrice told me about the Lost Abbots and how they began. They were a Latin American tribe, mostly people from the Caribbean and Central and South America. They began as many raider tribes began: as a private military group employed by governments during the Six Year Flood, when civil wars continued to destroy countries. After all known countries fell, they developed into a kind of sailing settlement, a tribe trying to build a new nation.

“Just last week, Pearl and I saw a small boat taken over by raiders north of here,” I said. “It was a fishing family. I heard their screams and—” I squinted hard at my lure and bit the thread to cut it. “We sailed away.” I had felt a heaviness in my gut when I placed my hand on the tiller, turning us south, away from their screams. I felt hemmed in and trapped on the open sea, left with few choices.

“I didn’t feel bad,” I confessed to Beatrice. “I mean, I did. But not as much as I used to.” I wanted to go on and say: It’s like I’ve gone dull inside. Every surface of me is hardened and rubbed raw. Nothing left to feel.

At first Beatrice didn’t respond. Then she said, “Some say raiders will control the seas in coming years.”

I had heard this before, but I didn’t like hearing it from Beatrice, who was never one to deal in conspiracies and doomsday speculation. She went on to tell me news from a trading post to the south, how governments were trying to form to protect and distribute resources. How civil wars were breaking out over laws and resources.

Beatrice told me about how some new governments accepted help from raiders and willingly became colonies, controlled by raider captains. The raiders offered protection and gave extra resources to the burgeoning community—food, supplies the raiders had stolen or scavenged, animals they’d hunted or trapped. But the community was bound to pay back any help offered with interest. Extra grain from the new mill. The best vegetables from the gardens. Sometimes the community had to send a few of its own people to work as guards on breeding ships and colonies. The raiders’ ships circled between their colonies, picking up what they needed; their guards enforced rules while they were gone.

My conversations with Beatrice followed the same rhythm each time. She urged me to move onto land and I urged her to move onto water. But not this time.

Beatrice began telling me a story about something that had happened to her neighbors the previous week. She told me how in the middle of the day shouts and yelling had erupted, coming from the sod dugout. Two men stood outside the dugout, shouting and pointing at a girl who stood between her mother and father. The girl looked about nine or ten years old. One of the men stepped forward and grabbed the girl, holding her arms behind her back as she tried to run toward her mother.

The father charged forward toward his daughter, but the other man punched him in the stomach. The father doubled and the man kicked him to the ground.

“Please,” the father pleaded. “Please—I’ll pay up. I’ll pay.”

The man stomped on the father’s chest with the heel of his boot and the father curled in pain and rolled to his side, his hand shaking and stirring up small clouds of dust.

The girl screamed for her father and mother, her arms held taut and long behind her as she tried to run toward them. The man who’d stomped on her father smacked her hard across the face, wound rope around her wrists, and knotted them. The other man lifted her body over his shoulder and turned around.

She didn’t scream again, but Beatrice could hear her soft cries as the men carried her away.

An hour later the village had begun to swarm with people again, footsteps echoing on the dirt paths, bright children’s voices calling to one another. Beatrice’s neighbor across the road leaned out the open window of her shack to hang a dish towel on a peg. Everything had moved on as though a child hadn’t just been taken from her parents.

Beatrice shook her head. “It was probably a private affair. Maybe a private debt being collected and no one wanted to interfere. They don’t have control here—but still.”

Both of our hands had gone still, the hooks glinting in the sunlight in our laps. Beatrice cast about for words.

“Still, I worry,” she said. “A resistance is being organized here. You could join us. Help us.”

“I don’t join groups and I don’t care about resistance. I’m not staying on land, waiting for someone to take her,” I said, nodding at Pearl, who had caught a snake and was dropping it into one of our baskets. Pearl came and sat next to us, eyes on the grass, another snake still in her hands.

“They built a library, you know,” Beatrice said softly, with pain in her voice.

“Who?” I asked.

“Lost Abbots. At one of their bases in the Andes—Argali. They even put windows in. And shelves. Books salvaged from before and new ones being transcribed. People travel for miles to see it. Some friends told me they built it to show their commitment to the future. To culture.”

Beatrice’s mouth tightened. Before the floods, she’d been a teacher. I knew how important learning and books were to her. How much it had pained her when her school closed and her students scattered across the country. I knew also of her lover who had been killed on his fishing boat three years before by a raiding tribe. She had been scared of the water even before that, and she cloaked this fear as a love for land.

“Little bit of good in everything,” Beatrice said.

I thought of the raider on the coast talking about new nations and the need to organize people. I’d heard that argument before in saloons and trading posts. That the raiders’ wealth could rebuild society faster. Forcing people to go without would get us back to where we were sooner.

I described what a library looked like to Pearl. “Do you want to go to a place like that?” I asked her.

“Why would I?” she asked, trying to wrap the snake around her wrist as he resisted her.

“You could learn,” I said.

She frowned, trying to imagine a library. “In there?”

I came up against this again and again with Pearl. She didn’t even want what I so sorely missed, had no conception of it to desire it.

It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought. Or maybe it’s how she was born. Maybe she couldn’t want something like that after being born in a world like this.

Beatrice didn’t say anything more, and after we finished making lures I went into her tent to pack. I packed our grain in a linen sack, tucking it in the bottom of a bucket. I set the tomato plant in a basket and tucked a blanket around it, a gift from Beatrice. I thought of Row, imagined her wrists cinched together with rope, her cries silenced or ignored. I shuddered.

Beatrice handed me the rolled-up map. “I don’t even have a compass to give you.”

“You’ve given me more than I hoped for,” I said.

“One more thing.” Beatrice pulled a photo from her pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a photo of Jacob and Row, taken a year before she’d screamed my name in that boat as it sped away. Grandfather and I gave it to Beatrice so she could ask traders in Apple Falls if they’d been seen. In the photo Jacob’s auburn hair had a gold sheen from the sunlight. His cleft chin and crooked nose, caused by a childhood schoolyard fight, made his face look angular. Row looked delicate with her small sloping shoulders and shining gray-blue eyes. They were my eyes, almond shaped, hooded. Eyes that looked like the color of the sea. She had a scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, curving over an eyebrow and across a temple. When she was two she had fallen and cut her face on a metal toolbox.

I rubbed Row’s face with my thumb. I wondered if Jacob had built them a house at the Valley. That’s what he always said he wanted to do for me, years ago. Jacob worked as a carpenter like Grandfather. They began building our boat together, but after a while it was only Grandfather working on the boat. I had listened to their yelling and arguing for weeks and then suddenly it was quiet. That was two months before Jacob left with Row.

Beatrice reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. “Come back,” she whispered in my ear, the phrase she whispered in my ear each time I visited. I could feel in how her embrace lingered that she didn’t think I would.