Читать книгу After the Flood - Kassandra montag - Страница 14

PEARL AND I set sail to the south, following the broken coast. It was rumored there was more wood for building boats down south in Harjo, a trading post in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’d use my credit at Harjo for wood and trade my fishing skills for help in building a bigger boat. My little boat would never handle the tumultuous seas in the north. But even if I could build a bigger boat, would I be able to navigate and sail it? Desperate people could always be found to join a ship’s crew, but I couldn’t stand the thought of traveling with other people, people I might not be able to trust.

I strung a line through a hook and knotted it and did it again for another pole. Pearl and I would fish over the side of the boat later in the evening, maybe even try some slow trolling for salmon. Pearl sat next to me, organizing the tackle and bait, dividing the hooks by size and dropping them in separate compartments.

“Who’s in this photo?” Pearl asked, pointing to the photo of Row and Jacob sitting on top of a basket filled with rope.

“A family friend,” I said. Years ago, when she’d asked about her father, I told her he had died before she was born.

“Why’d you ask that man about my father?”

“What man?” I asked.

“The one you killed.”

My hands froze over the bucket of bait. “I was testing him,” I said. “Seeing if he was lying.”

The sky to the east darkened and clouds tumbled toward us. Miles away a haze of rain clouded the horizon. The wind picked up, filling our sail and tilting the boat. I jumped up to adjust the sail. It was midafternoon and the day had begun clear, with an easy, straight wind, and I thought we’d be able to sail south for miles without making adjustments.

At the mast I started reefing the sails so we’d bleed wind. Around the coast to the west, waves rose several feet, the crashing white water swirling under the dark sky. We’d faced squalls before, been tossed in the wind, almost capsized. But this one was driving straight west, pushing us away from the coast. A rag on deck whipped up into the air, almost smacking me as it flew past and disappeared.

The storm approached like the roar of a train, slowly getting louder and louder until I knew we’d be shaking inside of it. Pearl climbed over the deck cover and stood by me. I could tell she was resisting the urge to throw her arms around me. “It’s getting bad,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Nothing else scared Pearl like storms; she was a sailor afraid of the sea. Afraid, she’d told me before, of shipwreck. Of having no harbor.

“Take the gear under the deck cover,” I told her, the wind catching my words and flattening them. “And bolt it down.”

I tried to ease the tension of the sail’s rigging, loosening the sheet, but the block was rusty and kept catching. When I finally got it loose, the wind picked up, knocking me backward against the mast, the rope flying through the block, sending the halyard soaring in the wind. I held on to the mast as Bird leaned left, waves rising and water spraying across the deck.

“Stay under!” I shouted to Pearl, but my words were lost in the wind. I climbed across the side of the deck cover, running toward the stern, but I slipped and slid into the gunwale. I scrambled to my feet and began tightening the rope holding the rudder, winding it around the spool, turning the rudder so we’d sail into the wind.

Thunder roared, so loud I felt it in my spine, my brain vibrating in my skull. Lightning flashed and a wave crashed over Bird, and I grabbed the tiller to steady myself. I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambled toward the deck cover, and ducked inside as another wave hit us, foaming overboard.

I wrapped myself around Pearl, tucking her under me, clutching her with one arm and holding on to a metal bar drilled into the deck with my other hand. Bird rocked violently, water pouring under the deck cover, our bodies jostling like shaken beads in a jar. I prayed the hull wouldn’t break.

Pearl curled in a tight ball and I could feel her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings against my arm. The wind was blowing straight west, pushing us out of coastal waters and deeper into the Pacific. If we were pushed any farther offshore, I didn’t know how we’d make it back to a trading post.

Some dark feeling washed over me that felt like rage or fear or grief, something all sharp corners in my gut, like I’d swallowed glass. Row and Pearl rippled through my mind like shadows. The same question kept rising in me: To save one child, would I have to sacrifice another?

THE DAY MY mother died I had been at the upstairs window, four months pregnant with Pearl, hand on my belly, thinking of preeclampsia, placenta abruption, a breech baby, all the things I’d thought about when I was pregnant with Row. But now, with no hospitals, not even makeshift ones run out of abandoned buildings, they seemed like certain death. I knew my mother would help me deliver Pearl like she’d helped with Row, but I was still more nervous about this birth.

We had lost Internet and electricity for good the month before and we watched the horizon daily, fearing the water would arrive before Grandfather finished the boat.

In the block behind our house, a neighbor’s front yard held an apple tree. Mother had to stretch to pick them, a basket hooked over her arm, her hair shining in the sunlight. The yellow and orange leaves and red apples looked so bright, almost foreign, as though I already was thinking of them as lost things, things I’d rarely see again.

Behind her I saw a gray wall building, rising upward toward the sky. I was perplexed at first, my mind too shocked to comply, even though this was what we’d been waiting for. The water wasn’t supposed to be here yet. We were supposed to have another month or two. That’s what everyone on the streets had been saying. All the neighbors, all the people pushing grocery carts full of belongings as they migrated west toward the Rockies.

I didn’t understand how it was so quiet, but then I realized we were in the middle of a roar, a deafening crashing, the collision of uprooted trees, upended sheds, lifted cars. It was as if I couldn’t hear or feel anything, all I could do was watch that wave, the water mesmerizing me, obliterating my other senses.

I think I screamed. Hands pressed on glass. Grandfather, Jacob, and Row ran upstairs to see where the commotion came from. We stood together at the window, frozen in shock, waiting for it to come. The water rose as if the earth wanted vengeance, the water creeping across the plains like a single warrior. Row climbed into my arms and I held her as I had when she was a toddler, her head on my shoulder, her legs wrapped around my waist.

Mother looked up at the water and dropped the basket of apples. She ran toward our house, crossing the street, passing a house and almost reaching our backyard when the wave crashed around her. The wave dipped over her, its white spray falling around her.

I couldn’t see her anymore and the water thundered around our house. We held our breath as the water rose around the house, climbing up the siding, breaking the windows and flowing inside. It filled up the house like a silo full of corn. The house shuddered and shook and I was certain it’d splinter into pieces, that our hands would be ripped from one another. The water rose, climbing each stair toward the attic.

I looked back out the window, praying I’d see my mother reappear, surface for a breath of air. After the water settled, the surface was still and my mother did not come up to break it.

The water settled a few feet below our upstairs window. We waded and swam through the water for weeks afterward but could never find her body. We later found out the dam had broken half a mile from our house. Everyone had said it would hold.

After Mother was gone I kept wanting to tell her about how things were changing, in me and around me, Pearl’s first kicks, the water covering all the prairie as far as the eye could see. I’d turn to speak to her and be reminded she was gone. This is how people go crazy, I thought.

It was only a month later that Jacob would take Row. Only Grandfather and I were left in that house, sitting in the attic, that empty room the length of our house, as the boat slowly filled it.

A month after Jacob left we took the attic wall out with a sledgehammer and pushed the boat out of the house and onto the water. The boat was fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and looked like a large canoe with a small deck cover at the back and a single sail in the middle. We loaded the boat with supplies we’d been hoarding for the past year—bottles of water, cans of food, medical supplies, bags of extra clothing and shoes.

We sailed west, toward the Rocky Mountains. At first, the air was thin and felt hard to breathe, as if my lungs kept clutching for something more. Three months later I awoke with birthing pains. The wind was so strong it rocked the boat like a cradle and I rolled back and forth under the deck cover, gritting my teeth, clutching the blankets around my body, crying in the lulls between contractions.

When Pearl came she was glistening and pale and silent. Her skin looked like water. As if she’d risen out of the depths to meet me. I held her to my chest and rubbed her cheek with my thumb and she broke into a wail.

A few hours later, when the sun rose and she was suckling at my breast, I heard gulls above us. Holding Pearl at my breast was both like and unlike when I held Row at my breast. I tried to hold the feeling of both of them in myself but couldn’t; one kept sliding away and replacing the other. Deep down, I had known that one couldn’t replace the other, though I now discovered I had been hoping Pearl could replace Row. I placed my nose on Pearl’s forehead, smelling her newness, her freshness. I mourned the loss of it, the loss I felt before it happened.

In Grandfather’s last days he began speaking nonsense more and more. Sometimes talking to the air, addressing people he’d known in the past. Sometimes speaking in a dream language that I would have found beautiful if I wasn’t so tired.

“Now, you tell my girl that a feather can hold a house,” Grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if by “my girl” he meant my mother, myself, Row, or Pearl. He’d call all of us “his girls.”

“Who do you want me to tell?”

“Rowena.”

“She isn’t here.”

“Yes, she is, yes she is.”

This irritated me. Most of the people he spoke to were dead. “Row isn’t dead,” I said.

Grandfather turned to me, shock on his face, his eyes wide and innocent. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s around the corner.”

A week later Grandfather died sometime in the night. I had just finished nursing Pearl and had laid her in a small wooden box Grandfather had made for her. I crawled over to where Grandfather slept, my fingers outstretched to shake him awake. When I touched him, he was cold. His skin not yet ashen, only slightly pale, the blood having settled. He otherwise looked the same as he always did when he slept: eyes closed, mouth slightly agape.

I leaned back on my heels, staring at him. That he could pass with so little ceremony stunned me. I had never expected sleep to take him, of all things. Pearl whimpered and I crawled back to her.

We were alone, I kept thinking. I had no one left I could trust, except this baby that depended on me for everything. Panic pressed around me. I looked at the anchor lying a few feet away. I’d heard of people leaping from their boats tied to their anchors. But this wasn’t a possibility for me. It was as impossible as the water receding from the land and people standing up again where they’d fallen. Instead I took Pearl in my arms and climbed out from under the tarp into the morning sun.

I would carry him with me; he would still guide me. Grandfather was the person who taught me how to live; I wouldn’t fail him now. I wouldn’t fail Pearl, I told myself.

When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.