Читать книгу Sharp and Dangerous Virtues - Martha Moody - Страница 11

what sharis knew

SHE MAY NOT have gone to college, but Sharis knew things. Here was knowledge she kept to herself: deprivation and the threat of danger made her feel alive. Weeding, stirring, chopping, always planning. Every day was not the same. Basic things mattered.

Food mattered. Food mattered tremendously, and Sharis’s parents each summer, as part of their survivalist ethos, had planted an enormous garden. Sharis knew how to start lettuces, the best way to post tomatoes, the mixture of soap and water to spray on Swiss chard. All her married life (which was all her adult life) she had not planted anything, but this spring, with Cleveland being taken over and the whole world, it seemed, turned against America, she’d said to Chad, her husband, Sweetness, we should plant things this year. Chad had tilled a large rectangle in the sunniest and flattest portion of their yard. This happened to be in their front yard, which a year ago would not have been acceptable, but neighborhood standards had changed.

Now, by mid-July, they had … Well, anyone could guess what they had, because Sharis was an industrious woman and the weather was good and even the Grid, which critics said raped the soil, exhausted resources, used too many chemicals, etc, was projected to have a record year.

Chad and Sharis lived south of Dayton in the suburbs, on a private lane off Far Hills, the main road from downtown. Chad and Sharis’s street wound down a hill through trees, and then curled up a hill to a sunnier area. Chad’s drawing of their street would make it a snake. Its tail would touch the main road, the cul-de-sac where Chad’s and Sharis’s house sat would show up as the snake’s open mouth.

Chad and Sharis lived in a nineties home built with a two-story great room. Like most of those homes, theirs had been modified during the Short Times with new, lowered ceilings. Sharis liked the puddles of light that formed below the ceiling cans. She liked the overstuffed chair in the corner, the beautifully grained wooden bowl, the hanging clock decorated with hand-painted flowers. Sharis had grown up in a dark house; for her father, closed curtains were a moral imperative. In contrast, now Sharis had drapes only in the bedrooms. Sometimes, lying on the couch in the great room, looking out the wide front window, Sharis imagined the empty space above the ceiling as a hidden room: if the troops swept down from Cleveland, she and Chad and the boys would have a place to hide. What an adventure that would be, something for the boys to remember forever—the aim of an adventure, always, being the exhilaration of survival.

There was one cabbage in her garden that Sharis had watched for a month, getting bigger and bigger and not precisely rounder but vaster. When the cabbage was as big as it reasonably could get, Sharis cut it and carried it into the house. She and Chad made a sort of party of it.

“Ten pounds,” Sharis guessed. She set the cabbage on the bathroom floor and peered at her weight on the scale. “Hand it to me, honey.” If she was editing their family, this was a moment she’d leave in. Of course, she took on only respectable clients, not people with cameras in their bathrooms or even bedrooms. Chad picked up the cabbage, its dark outer leaves studded with slugs and wormholes, and handed it to his wife. “Eleven,” Sharis said firmly. Her voice rose in its girlish way: “Char, as Howard would say.”

“What’s char?” Howard asked breathlessly, arriving at the top of the stairs. Even a trip up the stairs made him pant.

“The average war lasts seven months,” Derk said from the blue table in the kitchen. Derk had been a history minor and, after Dayton: The Roots of Midwestern, one of Chad’s most enthusiastic students. He worked at American Motors running a paint machine for tanks. Derk lived with his parents. He’d tried to enlist in the military, but a childhood infection had left him with a bad heart. “Your husband taught me that,” Derk added.

“I did?” Chad said.

Derk’s shirt was off because of the heat, and the thumping of his defective heart twitched the few hairs on his chest. Chad hoped that Sharis didn’t notice this; it was the sort of thing she might comment on.

It was fun then, it really was. Sharis was slicing her huge cabbage in the kitchen: a quarter for cabbage rolls, a quarter for coleslaw, and a half for sweet-and-sour soup. Her massive knife flashed and gleamed. She thought of a cabbage seed, sun, water, something-from-nothing. How could anyone doubt the existence of God in a world with eleven-pound cabbages? She wasn’t a religious maniac like her parents (never), or a dopey optimist like Chad, but a cabbage like this gave you hope.

“How you doing with the Calmadol, Derk?” she asked.

His wife didn’t realize, Chad thought, that she intimidated people. She was small—“petite,” people said, “like a little ballet dancer.” When she turned, her dark brown hair spread out shining over her shoulders, and when she was busy or impatient, she would grab the whole great hank of it, twist it around her hand and drop it to the left of her neck. Her lips were full and pink; her brown eyes heavily lashed and often narrowed.

Derk’s mouth jerked, and Chad, thinking of his friend’s wispy father, his impossible mother, gave Derk a smile and a roll of his eyes. Chad was six foot four and two hundred eighty pounds, but he scared no one. “Make yourself small,” Chad’s mother used to say, marshalling her sons through the crowded aisles of the grocery.

“I’m fine. I’m on the lowest dose,” Derk said, his eyes fixed on the blue table.

“They passed it out up north the day they did the Gridding,” Chad said in a companionable way. “Didn’t give people a choice. Just woke people up, lined them up in the streets, and squirted it in their mouths.” He glanced at Sharis as he spoke, invoking her complicity. She had watched this from a stand of trees twenty feet from her parents’ house, a fact known only to herself and Chad.

“What was wrong with those people?” Derk said. “Why’d they stand there like sheep and take it?”

“Maybe they were stunned, Derk,” Sharis said, her voice rising. “Maybe it was like a dream for them.” Chad shifted in his seat, wondering how much she was going to give away. “Plus, if you wouldn’t open your mouth for the Calmadol, they gave you a shot. Those shots knocked people out.”

“Gridding was the stupidest thing the government ever did,” Derk said. “They wouldn’t be dropping bombs on Shaker Heights if the government hadn’t done that.”

“No one’s dropping bombs on Shaker Heights,” Chad soothed, relieved Derk hadn’t noticed the immediacy of Sharis’s words. “From what I’ve heard, the Cleveland takeover’s been remarkably peaceable. I think the Alliance will be sorry they did it.”

“You may think the Grid’s stupid, but we’re eating,” Sharis said. “For thirteen years we’ve been eating. We’re still eating.” She was parroting Chad’s words, and Chad felt suddenly—uncomfortably—as if she were his child, spouting his ideas in a speech contest.

“Those Africans and the Suds, they don’t eat hardly anything,” Derk said, his animation returning. “That’s how they can run such a big military. I mean, they practically feed all their troops off what they draw from Canada.”

“Canada has a rich agricultural heritage,” Chad agreed. “No one’s going to starve when they’ve got Canada.”

“I hate Canada,” Sharis burst out. “Don’t talk to me about Canada.”

Chad smiled apologetically at Derk. Whenever he and Sharis had visitors, Chad found himself missing his mother. His mother who kept a pot of soup on the stovetop, who believed, forty-plus years too late, in counterculture, who forbade video games and even resisted a computer in the house until Chad reached middle school and the gifted program made it a requirement. Chad’s brother had it easier, being younger: he even got a cell phone.

It wasn’t until college that Chad had recognized how sparely his family lived. At his parents’ house the plates didn’t match the bowls, guests drank from decorated plastic cups passed out at ballgames, and the bathroom off their kitchen was a tiled cube with no fan and a door that incompletely closed. Any of these things could have been changed—money was not, was never, the issue—and it struck Chad as he reached adulthood that his mother was indeed a resister. The unmatched dishes were a choice. And Chad’s clothes from Meijer’s and Walmart: a choice again.

Chad’s mother was a tall blonde with watery eyes. In contrast to Chad’s father, who called himself a “nothing,” she called herself a tikkun olam—a heal-the-world—Jew, and drove Chad and his brother to Hebrew school twice a week and made sure they got through their Bar Mitzvahs. Unlike all the other women in their synagogue, even the fat ones, she had very protuberant teeth. “Didn’t they have braces when you were young?” Chad’s little brother had asked.

“My teeth work fine,” Chad’s mother said, baring them and chomping. “Like a horse’s.”

No other Jewish mother Chad knew would compare her own teeth to a horse’s; no other Jewish mother would call the Torah “just a bunch of stories about rescues”; no other mother of any stripe wore shoes patched together with duct tape. His own mother, Chad supposed, had prepared him for the oddness that was Sharis.

“Zucchini brownie?” Chad said, holding out a plate to Derk. His mother’s recipe, Sharis’s garden.

HERE WERE SOME Ohio casualties of the Grid:

Wapakoneta, birthplace of the first man on the moon, where General Theodore Marshall, on the day of the flattening, was observed outside the former Neil Armstrong Heritage Museum lifting his sleeve repeatedly to his eyes.

West Liberty, with its downtown restaurant famous for pies and potato salad, although the family-owned cave outside town with the white (calcite) formations, Ohio Caverns, was left unbombed and was outfitted, according to rumor, as a shelter for the Gridians in case of armed invasion.

St. Henry’s, once noted for turkeys shipped as far away as Tel Aviv, Saint Petersburg, and Damascus, was replaced by soybean fields that would be rotated (as were the majority of the Grid fields) with wheat and corn. No one knew what had happened to the turkeys. There were stories of a lavish dinner held in the army tents, the scent of roasting meat overpowering the odor of bombs and burning, although everyone in the battalion denied it.

Tipp City was leveled, as was Lima (pronounced like the bean, despite the town being named for the city in Peru), Versailles (rhymed with fur tails), and Milan (long i, accent on the first syllable).

Three people had shot themselves during the reclamation of Utica, leading to a brief (it lasted minutes) armed rebellion and the composition of a song:

The ghosts of Utica Just wanted to be free To live their simple lives The way it used to be.

The towns of northern Indiana and Illinois and southern Michigan all had similar stories; the big cities—Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Chicago—were spared.

The Ohio Historical Society had a goal of interviewing every person from Ohio who’d been Gridded. They were making a database. They were proving someone cared.

IF YOU TOOK a five-pointed star and tilted it slightly to the right, as if it were racing, and centered it over the shield shape of Ohio, the star’s center would be the city of Columbus, the state capital, and Cleveland would sit at the star’s uppermost tip. Dayton would be in the star’s bottom left arm. Dayton’s origin was similarly modest: it had been founded as an investment. At the University of Dayton, where Chad as a tenured history professor taught every third year a two-semester course on Dayton history, the investment angle was always the first thing that he mentioned.

It was true that in 1749 the French declared, by means of mounted plaques, possession of the Ohio River and “all streams that fall into it.” The land that later become Dayton was on one of those contributing streams, so technically one could say that the French first claimed the land that would be Dayton. But the French were hunters and fur trappers, not settlers. No one threatened the natives or the wilderness until transplants from Pennsylvania, baby citizens of a baby country, started canoeing up the Miami River from the Ohio, looking for places to land and stay.

A number of Indian raids and settler counterraids resulted, culminating in a famous battle where white men’s scalped heads dotted a field like pumpkins. Then a military man known as Mad Anthony Wayne brought up a punishing brigade from Louisville, stunning twelve Indian tribes into submission. The 1795 Greenville Treaty between the Indians and the United States of America effectively ended Native American life in the area. A generation before, few Indians had seen a white man.

The tribes scattered. Seventeen days after the Greenville Treaty, the parcel of land on which Dayton was built was sold to four investors. The seller was a man named John Symmes, who by some wishful connivance had declared himself the land’s owner. The buyers knew a village would drive up the value of their investment, and announced that their land was available for settlement. A hypothetical village was named Dayton after one of the four investors, General Jonathan Dayton, who never set foot in the area but who had been, nineteen years earlier, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Maybe his name carried some status. The other three investors gave their names to three blazed trees.

North to south, the Stillwater River empties into the Miami River. Then the Mad River comes in, the three rivers together forming the Great Miami, a river which takes a meandering course to the Ohio River fifty miles south. The Miami River was named for a tribe of Indians; the Stillwater and the Mad, for the qualities of their flow. The surveyors who worked for Dayton and his partners marked their trees at the confluence of the Miami and the Mad. It was a rare settlement that didn’t owe its existence to water.

Dayton’s first settlers used poles to push their low-sided boats upriver from the Ohio. Rivers then were uncontrolled, wide in places and narrow in others. They had whirlpools and shallows and enough shoreline trees to sometimes meet and make a tunnel. The nineteen men and assorted women and children who made the journey to Dayton were dismayed to find, instead of the rough buildings they expected, nothing but three marked trees.

“What do you think?” Chad would bellow, his big-man tie swinging. He always wore a tie for this course, sensing that it added to the drama. He rehearsed his speeches, filling them with unexpected or irreverent facts that woke students up; his colleague Ramsey had acidly suggested Chad re-name the course “Dayton: A Celebration.” But Chad couldn’t help himself. “Would you have obeyed those three spots of paint? Would you have left your boat? What do you think of the people who did—were they determined? Docile?” Slight pause. “Where they desperate?”

You shouldn’t stay here, said the local Indians. Maybe the settlers didn’t want to believe this; maybe they thought that the Indians were up to their usual tricks. In fact, the Indians told the truth. This place won’t be good for you. It floods.

GENTIA, ONE OF the Gribbles’ neighbors, was telling Sharis about a day years before when she had met her husband’s boss. George was his own boss now: he owned a business that installed and serviced home alarm systems containing small generators. In case Consort crapped out—in case, say, the Dayton nuclear plant was bombed—not only would George’s alarm still function, but people’s electricity would function, too. A perfect product for uncertain times, Gentia said.

Gentia and Sharis were in the kitchen of Sharis’s house; Gentia sat, like Derk had, in the guest seat at the end of the blue table. Their kitchen was like an airport, Sharis often thought, visitors passing through.

“And I was so nervous,” Gentia said breathlessly, “because I’d never met anyone important, and I was hurrying along in my high-heeled shoes, and you know what George said to me? ‘You’re walking like a fat cow.’”

“You’re kidding,” Sharis said. George was not small himself.

“That’s what he said. And that was years ago, when I had a figure.”

Fat cow. Sharis would never repeat that line. But Gentia, Sharis noticed, repeated it gleefully, a fresh salvo of shots aimed at her husband. Gentia and George had been married for thirty years (Chad and Sharis had been at the anniversary party); they had two grown children, both unmarried.

“And you wonder why I want to put cyanide in his coffee. I bet Chad’s never like that, is he? Oh no.” Gentia’s voice was suddenly mocking, “Chad’s a gentleman. But you work. You bring in some cash. And back then I was nothing but a frau. I said to him once: ‘George, you’ve got to treat me with respect.’ You know what he said? ‘Gentia, respect is something you earn.’” Gentia smirked. “So now I’m earning it.”

Sharis sighed. Thirty years. She looked at George in the backyard helping Leon tie his shoelaces, and tried to imagine him saying such horrible things. Squatting as he was, George was the shape of an egg. Of course, you didn’t know what Gentia had said back, or said before. You never really knew what went on in a family. Belatedly, Gentia’s last comment sunk in. “You’re earning it?” Sharis asked.

“I’m bringing in the big bucks, baby. I’m selling alarms! You know me, aren’t I a natural salesperson? Everybody wants a system. You know who thought up that antibomb guarantee?” Gentia pointed elaborately to herself. “I know what people want. I do.”

Sharis nodded. There was something spookily compelling about Gentia, with her sureness and big jewelry and her happy wallowing in the muddy puddle of her marriage. She threw lots of parties, inviting Sharis and Chad as the young people.

“Listen, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. This conflict is a gold mine for us. I tell George every night: I love the threat of war.”

CHAD WAS SCHEDULED for his Dayton course again this fall. He was adding some information on geography: explaining the three glaciations that, pushing down from Ohio’s northwest corner, had moved like snowplows across the state, flattening the ground and pushing ahead ridges of gravel and stone. The final glaciation, the Wisconsin, occurred some fourteen thousand years ago. The ridges of stone that had been the glaciers’ leading edge were now western Ohio’s modest version of hills. The northwest corner of Ohio had been pressed flat. The glacial melt on its surface formed an ur–Great Lake that stretched a hundred miles west of Lake Erie’s current border, and remains of this lake lived on for thousands of years as the Great Black Swamp. The Great Black Swamp was drained in the late 1800s to provide land for farming. The glacial melt that sank into the earth became the aquifer. Thanks to the glaciers’ heavy scraping, no caves of significance opened to the surface of western Ohio; there were, however, huge caverns filled with water far underground.

Chad toyed with the idea, that year, of having Dayton speak in the first person. If Dayton could talk—if any loke could talk—what would it say? A novel point of view to pique his students’ interest. Hi, I’m Dayton. I’m glad you’re studying me this year!

Maybe not. Ramsey would have a field day.

But words came to Chad unbidden, late one night when he was standing in the kitchen eating ice cream straight from the container. Later he couldn’t fall asleep for hours, because he’d thought he was a Grid supporter. I’ll test it on Sharis, he thought. Because she was from one of the reclaimed towns. Because she’d been there at the Gridding. But for years she hadn’t spoken about that time, and Chad wavered, worried that his words would stir up some silt or sludge inside her.

Still, he needed her opinion. Sharis didn’t have Chad’s education (Chad had earned his doctorate), but he never doubted that Sharis was as smart as he was. Maybe smarter. Everything she saw or heard, she remembered. The next day he presented his class in the basement, Sharis sitting in the big red leather chair Chad had moved from his parents’ house, Chad pacing in front of her. They’d done tests of Chad’s lectures before. Almost always, Sharis said “Very good!” or “I get it, but …” and produced some minor suggestion.

Chad said: “I can’t tell you how the Grid has affected me. All my fellow lokes just north of me—Piqua, St. Mary’s, Troy—they went away. I heard about them all the time, their fairs, their factories, their nature centers, their disasters, and then they were simply gone. They were, then they were not. I never dreamed such a thing. It’s as if my celebrated aquifer were shrinking, as if every day, no matter how clear and luminous, runs the risk of cold and clouds. It’s as if a new wide vein has been slipped under my ground, a vein not of chalk or limestone, but of fear. Any day now, people will poke in the ground and hit it. For a loke, what one dreads isn’t change or age or even decrepitude. A loke is like a person: it fears death.”

Chad raised his eyebrows and looked hopefully at Sharis. She shook her head and blinked and looked away. It works, Chad thought, delighted.