The road (17 page)

He found candles in a kitchen drawer and lit two
of them and then melted wax onto the counter and stood them in the wax. He went
outside and brought in more wood and piled it beside the hearth. The boy had
not moved. There were pots and pans in the kitchen and he wiped one out and
stood it on the counter and then he tried to open one of the jars but he could
not. He carried ajar of green beans and one of potatoes to the front door and
by the light of a candle standing in a glass he knelt and placed the first jar
sideways in the space between the door and the jamb and pulled the door against
it. Then he squatted in the foyer floor and hooked his foot over the outside
edge of the door and pulled it against the lid and twisted the jar in his
hands. The knurled lid turned in the wood grinding the paint. He took a fresh
grip on the glass and pulled the door tighter and tried again. The lid slipped
in the wood, then it held. He turned the jar slowly in his hands, then took it
from the jamb and turned off the ring of the lid and set it in the floor. Then
he opened the second jar and rose and carried them back into the kitchen,
holding the glass in his other hand with the candle rolling about and
sputtering. He tried to push the lids up off the jars with his thumbs but they
were on too tight. He thought that was a good sign. He set the edge of the lid
on the counter and punched the top of the jar with his fist and the lid snapped
off and fell in the floor and he raised the jar and sniffed at it. It smelled
delicious. He poured the potatoes and the beans into a pot and carried the pot
into the diningroom and set it in the fire.

They ate slowly out of bone china bowls, sitting
at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The
pistol lying to hand like another dining implement. The warming house creaked
and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation. The boy nodded
over his bowl and his spoon clattered to the floor. The man rose and came
around and carried him to the hearth and put him down in the sheets and covered
him with the blankets. He must have gone back to the table because he woke in
the night lying there with his face in his crossed arms. It was cold in the
room and outside the wind was blowing. The windows rattled softly in their
frames. The candle had burned out and the fire was down to coals. He rose and
built back the fire and sat beside the boy and pulled the blankets over him and
brushed back his filthy hair. I think maybe they are watching, he said. They
are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it
they will turn away from us and they will not come back.

The boy didnt want him to go upstairs. He tried to
reason with him. There could be blankets up there, he said. We need to take a
look. I dont want you to go up there. There's no one here. There could be.
There's no one here. Dont you think they'd have come down by now? Maybe they're
scared. I'll tell them we wont hurt them. Maybe they're dead. Then they wont
mind if we take a few things. Look, whatever is up there it's better to know
about it than to not know. Why?

Why. Well, because we dont like surprises.
Surprises are scary. And we dont like to be scared. And there could be things
up there that we need. We have to take a look. Okay.

Okay? Just like that? Well. You're not going to
listen to me. I have been listening to you. Not very hard. There's no one here.
There has been no one here for years. There are no tracks in the ash. Nothing
disturbed. No furniture burned in the fireplace. There's food here. Tracks dont
stay in the ash. You said so yourself. The wind blows them away. I'm going up.

They stayed at the house for four days eating and
sleeping. He'd found more blankets upstairs and they dragged in great piles of
wood and stacked the wood in the corner of the room to dry. He found an antique
bucksaw of wood and wire that he used to saw the dead trees to length. The
teeth were rusty and dull and he sat in front of the fire with a rattail file
and tried to sharpen them but to little purpose. There was a creek some hundred
yards from the house and he hauled endless pails of water across the stubble
fields and the mud and they heated water and bathed in a tub off the back
bedroom on the lower floor and he cut their hair and shaved his beard. They had
clothes and blankets and pillows from the upstairs rooms and they fitted
themselves out in new attire, the boy's trousers cut to length with his knife.
He made a nesting place in front of the hearth, turning over a tallboy chest to
use as a headboard for their bed and to hold the heat. All the while it
continued to rain. He set pails under the downspouts at the housecorners to
catch fresh water off the old standing-seam metal roof and at night he could
hear the rain drumming in the upper rooms and dripping through the house.

They rummaged through the outbuildings for
anything of use. He found a wheelbarrow and pulled it out and tipped it over
and turned the wheel slowly, examining the tire. The rubber was glazed and
cracked but he thought it might hold air and he looked through old boxes and
jumbles of tools and found a bicycle pump and screwed the end of the hose to
the valvestem of the tire and began to pump. The air leaked out around the rim
but he turned the wheel and had the boy hold down the tire until it caught and
he got it pumped up. He unscrewed the hose and turned the wheelbarrow over and
trundled it across the floor and back. Then he pushed it outside for the rain
to clean. When they left two days later the weather had cleared and they set
out down the muddy road pushing the wheelbarrow with their new blankets and the
jars of canned goods wrapped in their extra clothes. He'd found a pair of workshoes
and the boy was wearing blue tennis shoes with rags stuffed into the toes and
they had fresh sheeting for face masks. When they got to the blacktop they had
to turn back along the road to fetch the cart but it was less than a mile. The
boy walked alongside with one hand on the wheelbarrow. We did good, didnt we
Papa? he said. Yes we did.

They ate well but they were still a long way from
the coast. He knew that he was placing hopes where he'd no reason to. He hoped
it would be brighter where for all he knew the world grew darker daily. He'd
once found a lightmeter in a camera store that he thought he might use to
average out readings for a few months and he carried it around with him for a
long time thinking he might find some batteries for it but he never did. At
night when he woke coughing he'd sit up with his hand pushed over his head
against the blackness. Like a man waking in a grave. Like those disinterred
dead from his childhood that had been relocated to accommodate a highway. Many
had died in a cholera epidemic and they'd been buried in haste in wooden boxes
and the boxes were rotting and falling open. The dead came to light lying on
their sides with their legs drawn up and some lay on their stomachs. The dull
green antique coppers spilled from out the tills of their eyesockets onto the
stained and rotted coffin floors.

They stood in a grocery store in a small town
where a mounted deerhead hung from the wall. The boy stood looking at it a long
time. There was broken glass in the floor and the man made him wait at the door
while he kicked through the trash in his workshoes but he found nothing. There
were two gas pumps outside and they sat on the concrete apron and lowered a
small tin can on a string into the underground tank and hauled it up and poured
the cupful of gasoline it held into a plastic jug and lowered it again. They'd
tied a small length of pipe to the can to sink it and they crouched over the
tank like apes fishing with sticks in an anthill for the better part of an hour
until the jug was full. Then they screwed on the cap and set the jug in the
bottom rack of the cart and went on.

Long days. Open country with the ash blowing over
the road. The boy sat by the fire at night with the pieces of the map across
his knees. He had the names of towns and rivers by heart and he measured their
progress daily.

They ate more sparingly. They'd almost nothing
left. The boy stood in the road holding the map. They listened but they could
hear nothing. Still he could see open country to the east and the air was
different. Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and
stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where they'd lowered the hoods
of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers
rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of
some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal
flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and
shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall
line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face.
I'm sorry it's not blue, he said. That's okay, said the boy.

An hour later they were sitting on the beach and
staring out at the wall of smog across the horizon. They sat with their heels
dug into the sand and watched the bleak sea wash up at their feet. Cold.
Desolate. Birdless. He'd left the cart in the bracken beyond the dunes and
they'd taken blankets with them and sat wrapped in them in the wind-shade of a
great driftwood log. They sat there for a long time. Along the shore of the
cove below them windrows of small bones in the wrack. Further down the
saltbleached ribcages of what may have been cattle. Gray salt rime on the rocks.
The wind blew and dry seedpods scampered down the sands and stopped and then
went on again.

Do you think there could be ships out there? I
dont think so. They wouldnt be able to see very far. No. They wouldnt. What's
on the other side? Nothing.

There must be something. Maybe there's a father
and his little boy and they're sitting on the beach. That would be okay. Yes.
That would be okay. And they could be carrying the fire too? They could be.
Yes. But we dont know. We dont know. So we have to be vigilant. We have to be
vigilant. Yes. How long can we stay here? I dont know. We dont have much to
eat. I know. You like it. Yeah.

Me too. Can I go swimming? Swimming?

Yes. You'll freeze your tokus off. I know. It will
be really cold. Worse than you think. That's okay. I dont want to have to come
in after you. You dont think I should go. You can go. But you dont think I
should. No. I think you should. Really?

Yes. Really. Okay.

He rose and let the blanket fall to the sand and
then stripped out of his coat and out of his shoes and clothes. He stood naked,
clutching himself and dancing. Then he went running down the beach. So white.
Knobby spinebones. The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.
Running naked and leaping and screaming into the slow roll of the surf.

By the time he came out he was blue with cold and
his teeth were chattering. He walked down to meet him and wrapped him
shuddering in the blanket and held him until he stopped gasping. But when he
looked the boy was crying. What is it? he said. Nothing. No, tell me. Nothing.
It's nothing.

With dark they built a fire against the log and
ate plates of okra and beans and the last of the canned potatoes. The fruit was
long gone. They drank tea and sat by the fire and they slept in the sand and
listened to the roll of the surf in the bay. The long shudder and fall of it.
He got up in the night and walked out and stood on the beach wrapped in his
blankets. Too black to see. Taste of salt on his lips. Waiting. Waiting. Then
the slow boom falling downshore. The seething hiss of it washing over the beach
and drawing away again. He thought there could be deathships out there yet,
drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid
propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling
past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded
swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept
but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood
in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

He remembered waking once on such a night to the
clatter of crabs in the pan where he'd left steakbones from the night before.
Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under
such a myriad of stars. The sea's black horizon. He rose and walked out and
stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore
and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and
smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made
the world just so and no different.

When he got back the boy was awake and he was
scared. He'd been calling out but not loud enough that he could hear him. The man
put his arms around him. I couldnt hear you, he said. I couldnt hear you for
the surf. He put wood on the fire and fanned it to life and they lay in their
blankets watching the flames twist in the wind and then they slept.

In the morning he rekindled the fire and they ate
and watched the shore. The cold and rainy look of it not so different from
seascapes in the northern world. No gulls or shorebirds. Charred and senseless
artifacts strewn down the shoreline or rolling in the surf. They gathered driftwood
and stacked it and covered it with the tarp and then set off down the beach.
We're beachcombers, he said. What is that? It's people who walk along the beach
looking for things of value that might have washed up. What kind of things? Any
kind of things. Anything that you might be able to use. Do you think we'll find
anything? I dont know. We'll take a look. Take a look, the boy said.