Fallen Land (29 page)

“Would you like to take a shower?” the mother asks. I’ve managed to wash each night with water heated on the fire, keep my clothes clean, and have never been a smelly body. My hair, though, it must be a horror show, twisting into a copse of cliff-dwelling trees.

“No, that’s very nice of you, thank you, but no. I should be going.”

“Where will you go? Do you have a car?” the man asks.

“I had to sell it. If you could call me a cab.” I don’t know how much money I have in my purse, and little idea where I might go. I grip at my seams but feel them beginning to give under the strain. I am an only child in old age, an adult orphan, a widow, my own child so distant I might as well be childless. I am the last tree standing on a clear-cut slope, the saws all pointed at my feet.

“If you’ll excuse me,” the woman says, “I have to get ready. I have an early appointment.” As the mother goes upstairs the man and the child sit staring at me.

“Sorry to take up your time,” I say to the man. “Thank you for what you’ve done. I think they would have arrested me and then I’d never have heard the end of it from my daughter.”

The man offers me the phone and something to eat, says I must be hungry, and when I decline he insists, takes me through to the kitchen, sits me down at the counter and makes toast with nice bread. There’s a jar of jam, an expensive brand, and then the man starts asking questions: how old my daughter is, what she does, where she lives in California. Asks me if I’ve ever lived anywhere else, or if I’ve always lived here.

“I was born in that house, grew up in it, lived in it with my husband and my parents until they passed away. I raised my daughter in that house and lived there with her and my husband until she grew up and moved out and then until my husband died. In the years since Donald’s passing I’ve lived there on my own. I was supposed to be out a few months ago but I refused to leave. I fought it for a long time.”

“Were you a farmer?”

“My late husband was the farmer, but I did a fair amount of the work. I was a schoolteacher for almost forty-five years until I retired. If they’ll let me I think it’s time to go back to it, now I’ve got nothing else to think about. Besides which I’ve just about spent myself down to zero fighting the city. I have Social Security and a small pension and that’s about the sum of it. I suppose I’ll have to phone my daughter, and go live with her. I went to California once. Didn’t like it much.”

I can see the man thinking and then he excuses himself, goes upstairs, and I sit with the boy, eating toast and drinking coffee. He pours a glass of milk, makes himself a bowl of cereal, asks me if I want any. Good manners, tidy habits, dream of a child. These people don’t know what they have in such a boy.

The man comes back, asks me if I’d like more toast, tells the boy to go upstairs and get ready for school. Strange to be sitting here, in this house I have abhorred, eating and drinking, being looked after by people I do not know, my belongings damp and dripping just inside their front door. When the man clears his throat I think: here it comes: a quick shock, time to leave. Extend the hand of hospitality so far, then yank it back when the burden curls into strain.

“Louise, I don’t know how to say this the right way.”

“No need. You’ve been very kind. I’ll be going now.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. Sit down,” he says, refilling my cup. He seems to be searching his head for the right words, how to tell me to stay another ten minutes but no more. “Would—” he begins, stops, stalling out. I look at him and can’t imagine what he wants to ask. “This is going to come out the wrong way. You’re going to misinterpret it. Please don’t. Just—” And then he says it in such simple words: “I wondered if you’d like a job.”

He sees someone in need and wants to offer a handout that isn’t one, imagines me capable of scrubbing and vacuuming, cooking and washing, ironing and bed-making. Not a chance, not for anything, not for living here and eating free, no way will I play the maid he wants to make me.

“I don’t know what you might be thinking, but I’m no cleaning lady.”

“No, no,” he blushes, hands slicing back and forth over the counter. “Oh God, I’m doing this really badly. What—I mean, my wife and I wondered if you would be interested in working as a tutor, a . . . caregiver, too, something a little old-fashioned, like a governess, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure, I know what you mean. I’ve read the books. But my umbrella does not fly, and if there’s a madwoman in your attic or ghosts to battle you can count me out.” The man looks confused, as though he is already thinking twice about his offer. “Jokes,” I say, “just jokes.”

“No, that’s fine. My wife and I don’t mind jokes.”

“So it doesn’t matter if I can’t fly?” I say, unsure whether I feel as though I’m joking or not. I can hear the noise of my home’s destruction, feel the loss of the only place I have ever truly been myself, and this man wants me to think about a
job
looking after his son. They could hire anyone. Maybe he thinks he can get me cheap.

“Flying, no, indeed, that’s not a requirement.”

“And there aren’t any crazy people hidden in this house?”

I think I see him hesitate for an instant, but he shakes his head, “No, no, no. No crazy people.”

“And no ghosts of former servants haunting your son.”

“We’ve never had anyone work for us, and besides, who believes in ghosts?”

“Well, that’s okay then, isn’t it?”

“You mean you’ll do it?”

“I’m still thinking on it,” I say, for this is the truth. My mind is more than a little divided: the better part of me hovers down the hill, examining the ruins of my world. “Tell me more. Convince me I should work for you.”

“Right, uh-huh—well, I guess it’s clear to my wife and me that Copley likes you, and that for whatever reason he already feels very attached to you, and that’s—you have to understand how unusual that is for him. He is a deeply shy little boy, and the move has been hard on him. He’s having a difficult time adjusting to his new school, and since you were a teacher, it seems like it could be a mutually beneficial arrangement. And you would be welcome to live here.”

“In truth, Mr. Noailles, I don’t know whether to be insulted or dumbstruck.”

“How’s that?”

“Just tell me what kind of man offers a total stranger a job looking after his child?”

“I—”

“This is not what I imagined when I thought of returning to teaching.”

“No, I guess not.”

“But let me get this straight. You’re looking for someone to do a little looking after and a little educating as well. Some kind of private tutor with bells on. A nanny with knowledge.”

“Yes, that’s about right. And you’d have days mostly free while Copley’s in school. It’s just around the corner really. Since we moved here my wife’s been leaving work early every day, but that can’t continue. Weekends would be entirely yours and we could even arrange for you to have use of a car.”

“All this because you’re in a
bind
,” I say, seeing it’s a little more complicated than charity. “So I’d be doing you a favor while you were doing me a favor.”

“How would I be doing you a favor?” the man asks.

“By giving me a job I need as well as a way to stay on this land.”

“I see,” he says, “yes, I can understand that.”

I have not even seen the rest of the house, the cupboard where they might wish to keep me hidden from their glossy friends and colleagues, the way I might be made to disappear when company arrived, left to usher the child up to his nursery, to feed him bread and milk and read him stories while his parents play. I want to know terms, money, rights, responsibilities, have a clear understanding of what I might be accepting, the regime to which I would be succumbing. I’m not even sure I could sleep in this white house, knowing what I do about the man who built it, the meanness of his ways, how his machines rolled over and ruined the land. And yet, there remains the promise of the woods, a renewal of my stewardship, a way to look over and watch out for the dark spot in the lawn, where trees and the dead lie waiting. Perhaps this offer is a reminder of the obligation I bear, the story remembered, the responsibility to tell it, to teach. If the student presents himself, is it not the duty of the teacher to answer?

We talk money, hours, references, look up the numbers of past colleagues. He phones them and then makes other calls as well. “You’re giving my name. To whom are you giving it?” I ask, as he waits on the line.

“My company,” he says, “there’s a department. Preliminary background checks.”

So I accept his offer, with conditions: I will provide further character and professional references; they will order a comprehensive records check to prove there is nothing about me to fear; I will undertake no housework except preparing meals for the child and doing my own laundry; I will expect a clear and written statement of their expectations of me and rules for the child; I do not believe in corporal punishment (neither do they); I will enter into the proposition for a two-month trial period, at the end of which we will all decide together, the child included, whether it is a workable situation. If it is, then the terms will be reassessed every six months thereafter and either party can end the relationship with two months’ notice.

The man listens while I speak, nodding. “All of that sounds reasonable,” he says.

“You don’t want to discuss it with your wife?”

“I’ll discuss it with her in detail tonight. For now, though, do you want to come with me to take Copley to school, so you can see where it is? And I’d like to pay you an advance on the first month.”

“That would be very kind,” I say, wondering just what I think I’m doing, throwing in my lot with these strange people in the monument to everything I have lost.

T
HE WOMAN LEAVES FIRST,
SAYING,
when she hears the tentative agreement, how pleased she is that I will be “joining” them, as if they were a church or a cult. I wait in the kitchen while the man and boy get themselves ready and then we all tumble out of the house, the father setting an alarm and locking the back door. The car smells of newness and control. Little eyes watch me from the backseat.

“You know there’s a shorter way to get to school through River Ranch, or whatever they call it now. It’s close enough to walk. I can easily pick him up each day on foot.”

“That would be wonderful,” the man says. “It would be such a help. We’re still a little lost here.”

I take note of the careful phrasing: I am “helping” them, doing them a “favor,” “joining” them, everything to make them feel less uncomfortable with the idea of employing me. I never thought I would work for white people, not like this, not putting myself into their service. This is not the same as classroom teaching, working for the state, for the good of all people, instead of the
few
, the
rich
, the
privileged
. I never thought I would go into service on land that used to be mine, a
mammy
, my brain spits up the word, wet with bile, a
mammy
back on the land my people inherited, land I looked after all those years, a
mammy
with more than a little
obstinacy about her
. What an undoing, what a hard, sharp unraveling of all my people built.

The child’s school is a carousel blocked out in rainbow colors with a tower at its center and a skirt of concrete all around but without any horses or carriages to ride, nowhere to hold on, no trees either. While the man walks the boy to the door, I wait in the car knowing I cannot continue thinking of them as the “man” and the “boy.” They are people with names: Nathaniel and Copley. To name is to acknowledge something more than presence, to know them as people with worries of their own, fears and regrets and desires. Nathaniel and Copley and Julia. No, that sequence of names seems wrong. Copley, Julia, Nathaniel: that is the true order of their private parade, the child leading us toward whatever fate will become of us all.

PART II

BURROW

H
e sees it over and over, the boy asleep, still as a corpse. To be sure, to know if it was Carson or not, he felt he had to take apart that small form, to see whether the roots might have been blond, the eyes the same color as his own, the fingernails chewed down as his son’s always were. But the child did not seem to be Carson, or perhaps Paul could not see clearly enough in the dark to be sure. And then came the scream, the flight, the boy approaching the hatch, crouching down and crawling to his hidden entrance. Though he can’t be sure, he thinks he closed the containment door in time, an instant before the child could see the corridor of the bunker laid out beyond the pantry. The scream rings in his head, the shriek of a child that could flay skin from a man, a cry less human than animal. He will be haunted by the memory of that face: a mask distorted, stretched tight, the body cold, stone-hard, rigid in sleep, not at all like any child he has known, an offspring of some unholy union. Even in the midst of that scream, which seemed to last for hours, unrolling around the room, echoing down the deepest tunnels of Paul’s head, the parents did not wake. If that is not unnatural, nothing is.

Now that the boy has seen the hatch he may lead others to its location. Something else must be done to safeguard the bunker from any possibility of penetration. The answer is to construct a kind of baffle at the pantry end, comprised of a three-dimensional series of false walls and dead ends that no one else will be able to navigate, so complex that anyone attempting it will lose themselves in its tight turnings before they even know they are stepping into a field of deception: it must be protection as well as trap. In the bunker’s extra bedroom, the one intended for Carson and Ajax, there is leftover lumber and other supplies: nails, screws, the parts of the now dismantled bunk beds, and his remaining tools—a bandsaw, drills and hammers, everything needed to build a barrier over a length of twenty feet from the containment door, reaching from floor to ceiling: an obstacle that will require climbing and descent to navigate. It will have to be mapped during construction or he might risk getting lost and spending days trying to find a way out. Plans! First the plans: design his warren and keep the plans hidden once the project is complete, secreted in the opening of the ventilation shaft, behind the grate, pasted flush with the curves of the pipe, where no one would ever think to look.

In the hours after shutting himself inside, fancying he can still feel the flesh-freezing breath of the boy on his hands, he sketches a rough design: there will be only one way to get through and all other openings will lead to side alleys that stop after a short distance; a trap door will drop a man eight feet to the floor; a section of crawlspace will be studded with shards of glass cemented against the wood. All of it must be dark, unlit. With the plans finished, he gathers his materials, takes measurements, draws chalk lines in the hallway, leaving enough room for the containment door to swing wide open.

After hearing the thump of two cars the next morning, listening for the rumble of each one reversing down the driveway, and sensing no more sound or movement in the world above and around his burrow, Paul begins with the sawing and drilling, the masonry bit chewing through sheetrock and then, deeper, into the cinder-block walls, the struts sliding into their places. By the end of the first day he has the frame skeleton in place. Another night, the thump of two cars arriving, farther apart in time than during the morning departure, the garage door opening and closing twice, and then the long night of sitting alone in his kitchen, eating his ration of rice and beans, listening to music on the portable stereo that is his only entertainment. He wishes he had thought of running an antenna for a radio out through the ventilation shaft, but this now seems like nothing more than a distraction from the important business at hand. The only music he has are albums from his childhood on old tapes whose sound is warped and disks that skip and jump, catching themselves in jarring repetition:
I-I-I-I-I-I-I dream-eam-eam-eam-eam-eam
. Such songs return him to high school dances, throwing him down the long hole of his recollection to years when he could walk anywhere feeling as though the world watched him with awe instead of suspicion.

On the second day, working with a headlamp, he cuts and lays sheets of plywood to form the walls and passageways in his obstacle course. He is a beast in a burrow. Not a rabbit in a warren, but something fiercer, with victims of his own: a badger in his sett, with long claws and a hard snout, an old male never seen outside in daylight, lurking and stealthy and clever. By the end of the second day the obstacle is finished and he collapses on the couch across from the kitchen before forcing himself to eat. Eating means standing, preparation and attention. It demands thinking about the body, the needs of stomach and bowel. An ideal body would have no needs, would simply be born, grow, flourish, and function, fueled by nothing but sunlight. His waist is getting narrower, the excess pad of fat around his body disappearing, returning him to an image of his younger self. As he stands stirring his ration of beans and rice, he suddenly thinks he hears a scratching noise. Turning off the burner he drops the wooden spoon into the pot and listens but hears nothing other than his own breath, the strike of his heart, and the sound of his fingernails scratching across the counter.

It is illogical to fear a child: this maze is just a matter of common sense, guarding against the possibility of further discovery. The trips to the boy’s bedroom were folly, a risk of his liberty and life. It was a momentary failure in his vigilance, although part of him suspects that vigilance is an illusion, his guard always slipping, imperfect, failing to see the weakness in his designs, the way he has left certain approaches unprotected. Blind spots proliferate: there are ever more numerous ways for people to surprise him. A hobo or hunter could stumble upon the cellar doors in the woods with their flimsy lock, break it open, descend the stone stairs, and discover the rear containment door. None of it is as well camouflaged as it might be. What he needs is a second obstacle at the back, but then that would eliminate the possibility of an easy escape if the entrance from the house were breached and the bunker invaded. As he eats, the smell of the woods comes into the kitchen, sucked down the ventilation shaft, the warm dry damp of cool dead leaves. He inhales the scent, seeing himself with his father in the woods, rifles on their shoulders in unmoving pursuit, finding those sleek brown bodies even when the creatures thought they were safe and alone, hidden in a tangle of trees.

“Carson? Son? Is that you?” he speaks down the phone. Through the white noise of static he hears a cry and then words.

“Dad?”

“Is that you, son?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“How you doing, buddy?”

“Okay. Do you wanna talk to mom?”

“No, king, I want to talk to you. How’s Florida?”

“Hmm.”

“How’s the new house?”

“We’re not in Florida.”

“What do you mean you’re not in Florida? Where are you?”

“I think we’re dead, dad. We’re all dead.”

The phone is dead. There is no reception underground, no dial tone, no sound whatsoever. He dials numbers but nothing happens, and yet the voice keeps coming back to him. It is not the first time he has heard his son speak when technology has failed.

He wakes in the kitchen chair, the pot crusted dry before him, grains of cooked rice turned to hard shrunken bullets. His watch tells him he has slept through at least one night. When he goes to examine his maze he realizes the obstacle is inadequate, its puzzle too simple. Straightaway he begins disassembling the boards and joists, spends the rest of the day taking apart the skeleton, and then without pausing to worry whether he might be heard by the people in the house above he starts rebuilding a more complex structure based on the pattern of a double helix, with only one of the two strands penetrating the heart of the bunker, the other doubling back on itself and returning to the point of origin. In the process of building this new structure, so much more complex than the first, he gets lost for an hour and a half, bumping his head against boards and beams until he becomes aware of blood smeared on his hands and clothes. But this must be a good sign. If blood has come, if he can lose and injure himself in a plan of his own creation, then this must prove he has crafted a puzzle that only the most determined and most intelligent, perhaps even the luckiest—luck would have to play a part in any successful breach—invader might ever solve. Still, something is lacking: from the entrance to the pantry anyone can see his maze is a man-made structure. He crawls back through it, emerging into the open space of the bunker, and exits through the rear containment door, propelling himself through the old stone storm cellar and up the steps into the cool night. Moonlight is everywhere above him. He drops to his knees, puts his palms on the soft wet earth, and on all fours he collects branches, twigs, moss, dried leaves, everything he thinks he needs, carrying it all back into the cellar in great armfuls. Lying on the floor of the bunker, his materials look inadequate, and so throughout the night he ferries in buckets of soil, leaves, and rocks, pushing the loads on all fours up and down through his obstacle and depositing everything at the far end where he stamps it into place, thumping with his fists until his hands are raw, and then embellishing the dirt with rocks and branches, twigs, moss, and leaves, to suggest an underground cavity of natural design—if not a creation of the earth itself, then something made by one of its less human inhabitants. He stops only when, coming out into the woods once again, he finds the eastern sky turning red. Anyone who might investigate the pantry hatch, who managed to overcome the containment door, would see that beyond it there lies nothing but dark territories of earth.

Leaving his muddy clothes in the hallway he stands for an hour under the shower, his body slender and hardened by walking the city, by the poverty and monotony of his diet. When he is clean and dry the pain surfaces. In the mirror he sees the damage to his forehead and scalp, the places where the flesh has opened. The bleeding has stopped but when he leaves the bathroom he finds the chaos of his frenzy: blood and soil and leaves, gravel and stones and tree roots littering the hallway, the living space, the doorways and throughways. He is too exhausted to clean and instead stumbles into his bedroom, to the double mattress that almost fills the space, where he once imagined holding Amanda through the apocalypse he believes is still imminent, perhaps already in the first hours of its unfolding. If we are not in the final chapters of our history then we are at the end of a particular volume, unable to predict how further installments may unfold. What is certain, he thinks, is that the future will not be one of societies and unions, but of individuals, small family units, fighting to protect their own interests, in the last hours before the ultimate end.

On his bed he sleeps rolled up in down comforters. Waking only to piss, he is careless of his excretions. Sticky and cold he rolls to a place of dryness and warmth. Hours and minutes dissolve and recombine into new units whose quantities mean little to him. With no radio reception underground, days pass uncounted, if, indeed, days are passing at all. Days are secondhours, hours are minuteyears. A moment is millennia. I am the beast of time, circling my track, caught in my own dead ends.

Emerging from his stupor there is a new and terrible clarity. Hunger hollows his stomach, and climbing from his stained bed he discovers the filth and chaos again surrounding him. He puts clothes into the washing machine, begins sweeping up the largest pieces of refuse, carries buckets of it out to the woods. With his garbage cleared and dispersed through the trees, he vacuums and dusts, scrubs the floors of the bunker, sponges the kidney-colored walls, and begins to reorganize the kitchen. After taking a new census of his stores, he discovers there is only enough food remaining for a month if he is careful. He never would have been able to provide for his family, but it seems impossible that his calculations could have been so flawed! Again he counts the cans and boxes, mistrusts his totals, counts again and again, and only after he has counted everything more than a dozen times does he know just how short his supply remains. He reduces his ration by half, although hunger is acute and he fears it may already be affecting his thinking.

He needs a job, he needs money, but he needs a house,
his
house, he needs to regain it first, but first he needs a job, he has to have the house in his possession to prove his ability to build other houses, he needs money to reacquire the house, needs the house to acquire money, needs the money and the house to fight for the return of his family. Without the house he has no address. Without an address he will never be able to have a house. The house comes first, the house above all is the greatest of his immediate needs, the house and then the money to acquire it, the money and then the house, the house, the house always, first and last, the house to win back his sons. Count the cans and boxes of food: twenty times, forty times, again, again, spend days counting and eating as little as possible, barely sleeping, mistrusting the accuracy of those sums. Each time, only a month of food remains, and only then if the appetite is kept in check. What seemed an outrageous quantity of supplies when first acquired now seems pathetically meager. He knows he must eat. To eat he must go in search of more food.