The Alliance (18 page)

I begin studying the man’s features. Something about him looked familiar, and now I start to suspect why. Same prominent cheekbones, dark hair, and eyes.

“How many kids?” He looks at me like I’m crazy. I lift the gun. “Answer the question!”

“What’s wrong with you?
Three
kids. Two girls and a boy.”

Taking a breath, I say, “About three weeks ago, my plane crashed in a field in the Mt. Hebron community. The family who took me in told me that two years ago their father disappeared.” The man’s astonishment confirms my hunch. “
You’re
Luke Ebersole—the man who disappeared—aren’t you?”

He hesitates, looking down at the bottle, and then nods.

“Why don’t you go to your family? Let them know you’re alive?”

Luke pockets the bottle and plucks at his threadbare shirt. Wrists protrude like branches from the sleeves. “Believe me, nobody wants me showing up like this.”

“Maybe not. But I think it’s worse not showing up at all.”

He kicks at a Coke can lying near his feet, sending it rolling across the floor. “Why you think I’m sticking round while everybody else’s left? It’s not simple, getting clean. I’ve tried.”

I think of his eldest daughter, perpetually waiting for a man with no intentions of ever coming home. I think of myself, waiting for my own father to come back, and
whenever he did, trying to be his little soldier so he would want to stay. “Then you gotta try harder.”

He folds his arms. “I got no time to try. Word has it another gang’s coming this way that’s going to—”

“Which way?” I cut him short.

“Supposedly from the north. That’s why town’s so deserted. Nobody’s stopping here anymore because they know what’s on their heels.”

Now I understand why the number of people walking past our perimeter has increased over the past few days. Everyone’s trying to get out while they can. I recall the items spread along the sides of the highway, like a mutant Hansel and Gretel trail leading out of Liberty. These were not people merely weary of their burdens; these were people running for their lives.

“Will you tell my wife and kids about what’s coming?” he asks.

This backhanded consideration makes me sick. “Your wife’s dead, Luke.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“’Fraid not.” I don’t care if I rip his heart out. He deserves it.

Luke’s knees buckle like an easel. One second, they’re propping his body; the next second, he’s down. Peering up at me through his scum of hair, he rasps, “When?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think it was around a year
after you left. Your oldest daughter’s been taking care of Anna and Seth on her own.”

He pauses, processing. “And my
mudder
?”

“Leora’s been taking care of her too.” I stare down at him, his arms dangling over his legs, the bald patch on his crown shining in the light. “You should be ashamed,” I spit.

He lowers his head and sobs. “I am. I am.”

My courage falters when I see Leora and her sister sitting on the front porch steps. Anna’s making a necklace by stringing the buttons pooled in her lap; Leora’s mending one of the dresses that I recognize as hers because she was wearing it the day I crashed, when everything both ended and began.

Overhead, the rising crescent moon winks like one of the buttons glittering in Anna’s lap. Anna passes another button to Leora, and she sews it onto the dress, which seems odd since I’ve never noticed buttons on any of the Mennonite women’s dresses before. Leora glances up as I approach. “Hello,” she says.

“Hey,” I respond, yet my thoughts are consumed by the man I met in the center, an abstract sketch of the fully fleshed father and husband he had been. And I wonder if news of his proximity would be a burden or a gift.

Anna’s pale eyes dart between me and her sister. An
intelligence is there I haven’t noticed due to the impediment of her speech . . . if she ever speaks at all.

I straighten my back. “Okay to talk in front of your sister?”

“Depends.” Leora doesn’t look up. “What do you have to say?”

“It’s about something I heard in town.”

“Go ahead. I’m not letting Anna out of my sight.”

Leora’s curtness makes me realize I came here with information I have no clue how to give. I decide not to tell her about her father but about the drifter I met in town. For now, just like I told Jabil, she doesn’t need to know they’re one and the same.

“Is it true?” she asks, once I’m finished conveying Luke’s news.

“The person who said it seemed to know what he was talking about.”

She sets the dress down and looks up, gripping a button in her palm. “So what are you going to do about it? Use the Suburban to scout the area?”

“Believe me, if a massive gang saw a vehicle coming up the road toward them, they’d kill the driver and hijack it without a second thought. No, I’m wondering if there’s somewhere I can go that’s up high and offers a long-range view down the main road? I am talking like way out of
their
long-range view. If there’s something like that, maybe
I could take Charlie’s spotting scope and see what’s coming miles before it gets here.”

She pauses, fingering the button. “If any large group is coming from the north, they’d be coming down Highway 87. And if I’m remembering right, you can see up that road for miles from the fire tower. I wouldn’t completely trust it, though. It hasn’t been maintained in ages. It’s been years since I’ve been up there myself.”

“And it
might
be occupied.”

“A fire tower occupied?” she asks. “By whom?”

“By any random person looking to take advantage of a remote structure. Especially one with a vantage point like that. But it’s worth checking out. Could you show me on a map?”

She shakes her head and picks up the needle again. “I’ve only been there a handful of times. It’s the same trail that takes you down by Glacier Falls.”

“Where’s that?”

Leora sighs. “I guess I should take you.”

“No way. I want you safe.”

Face half-concealed in shadow, her thoughts are hard to read. She glances over at her sister. “I don’t think there’s any safe place anymore. I’m in as much danger walking in my own yard,” she says, spearing the fabric of the dress, “as I would be walking in the woods with you.”

Leora

I
RETURN
to the community cemetery at two in the morning, alone. The lamp swings from my hand, revealing the bouquet of Indian paintbrush on my
mamm
’s grave that has lost its vibrancy and on the new graves, still bare. Soon enough, though, grass will begin pushing up through the mounded dirt, to remind us that those boys are not dead, for life does not end with death. Our souls are merely indwelling our bodies until our bodies are returned to dust and life awakens anew.

I walk past the graves, and my lamp reveals Moses leaning against the fencerow where I stood to watch the albino buck, the day after the two boys’ temporal deaths. With a magician’s flourish, he pulls a tea towel from the water bottle pocket of his backpack. “I imagine it’s a long walk,” he explains, “and we’re going to get hungry. I packed breakfast.”

“Jabil’s
mudder
didn’t mind you in her kitchen?”

“She didn’t even know I was there.”

“She
will
know once she sees some of her food is gone.” The mention of Jabil dissolves the flirtation building between us. “You ready to go?” I ask, my tone guarded.

Moses nods. I set my lamp on the fence post and scale the wire squares before hoisting my body over the fence and jumping down. Moses stands on the other side,
shaking his head, before climbing the fence and jumping as well. “You could put a GI to shame,” he says while I gather the lamp.

“What’s that?”

He grins. “Never mind.” His headlong stride retains traces of a limp, though he attempts to conceal it whenever he notices anyone watching him.

“I saw an albino buck when I was out here visiting the graves the other day,” I murmur, to cover up the fact that I’m watching him now. “He was the most exquisite animal I’ve ever seen. After the game reserve was turned into national forest, a few of the animals that were brought to this area—like the albino buck—were never rounded up because they belonged here.” I stop walking. “He doesn’t stand much of a chance, though, does he?”

Moses stops walking too. The swishing sound our footsteps were making in the fallen pine needles ceases. “People are getting desperate, Leora. If somebody spots your buck, they won’t see a rare albino; they’ll see meat that can feed their family.”

I nod, for of course I understand and cannot blame the person who will eventually slay the white deer. Yet somehow, in this world where so much is becoming ugly, I want to preserve the one thing that appears just as beautiful as it was before any of this happened.

I tuck myself deeper into my shawl and look up at the
conifers soaring high above our heads. The absence of Liberty’s peach-colored light pollution has become almost normal to me since the EMP reverted nighttime to its original dark. We continue traveling in a stillness that feels as natural as the movement of our feet. I contemplate asking Moses to tell me more about his life before he crashed in our field, but I sense that, like me, he is glad to leave behind some aspects of his past.

Something suddenly bursts forth. Pulse thudding, I hold out my lamp in an attempt to see farther than its ten-foot radius of illumination. Moses, beside me, grabs the flashlight from the side pocket of the backpack and directs the beam toward the underbrush. We see the silver haunches and tail of an animal loping off into the trees. Then it stops as abruptly as it appeared and turns toward us, eyes gleaming like candles from the reflection of the light.

“A coyote?” he asks.

“Looks more like a wolf,” I whisper. “There are a few around here.”

If it
is
a wolf, I know it is more scared of us than we are of it. But I find myself sidestepping closer to Moses as we continue up the trail. My legs begin to burn against the strain of the incline, and—rubbed raw by my boots—the skin scrapes away from the backs of my heels. If Moses’s ankle is bothering him, he doesn’t mention it. But I doubt he would mention it even if it was. After another half mile,
when my tights are glued to my heels with blood, I detect the sound of water breaking over rocks.

Moses lifts his head. “Those the falls?”

“
Jah.
You should see them in the light.”

We keep trudging on, making our way toward the thunderous roar in the darkness. I extend the lamp again, and the weak beam reveals the slick facades of the boulders that have been worn away by the water’s continuous motion. Despite my sore feet, I maneuver around the rocks effortlessly, placing my boots at angles so they are not trapped and then picking my way through the thick tree roots that have wormed through crevices.

“You said you haven’t been here in a while?” Moses asks.

“That’s right,” I reply, keeping my voice neutral. “Not in years.”

I remember our picnics here and how my
vadder
and I tried once, for hours, to teach Anna to swim in the falls’ shallow end: spray clinging to his black beard, her floral chore apron floating in the froth as we held her body between us, and the
Englischer
tourists gaping at us from the hanging bridge, like we were on display the same as the mountainous terrain.

“Would you like to see him again, if you could?”

Startled, I glance at Moses. “Who?”

“Your dad. Was he the one who brought you here?”

I exhale hard. “I’ve given up on a reunion. I’ve all but given up hope that he’s alive.”

“But what if he
is
?”

“I’m not sure I’d have the strength to welcome someone back who abandoned us.”

“Can you at least tell me a little bit about what happened?”

This question comes across forced, purposefully attentive, as if—in Moses’s mind—he is jotting everything down. I don’t respond right away, trying to decide if there’s any harm in relating our family’s saga to this man, who is no longer a stranger and yet not quite a friend. “Two years ago, a driver picked my
vadder
up for his daily commute to Sandpoint. He had a booth there, displaying handcrafted furniture—tables, cradles, rocking chairs, clocks. But that night, the driver did not bring him home.
Mamm
used Field to Table’s phone to call the driver, but he said my
vadder
gave no clue as to where he was going or why he was going there.”

He simply cleared out his booth and left.

We’d been relying on my
vadder
’s furniture profits for years. But, subtracting expenses, there had never been enough income left over to place into savings. After his disappearance, the community tried taking care of us by finding him. When that proved futile, they brought wagonloads of split wood, venison jerky, and produce from their gardens. But my
mamm
soon became embarrassed by these gifts, which—from her biased perspective—seemed to confirm her parents’ belief that erratic Luke Ebersole
would never be able to provide for her. So kindly, yet firmly, she started refusing these gifts and working with my brother at Field to Table.

Moses takes a seat on a boulder, his expression grave. “We found a body the first time we went to the civic center. When we returned to bury him, your dad had already done it for us.
He’s
the drifter who warned me about the gang. He’s why we’re here.”

I struggle to comprehend Moses’s words. Gripping the lamp, I pivot away from him and face the trees. “What makes you think it was my
vadder
?”

“Leora.” I hear him stand. I flinch as he touches my back. “Look. It was him. I’m sorry for not telling you earlier. I wasn’t sure you’d want to know.”

Tears blister my eyes. How has my
vadder
been this close the entire time? How has he become a drifter? And yet, don’t I know the answers to these questions before they’re even asked? Didn’t I hear the arguments between my parents when they thought my sister and I were sleeping? Didn’t I, upon waking, so often notice my
vadder
’s mottled eyes and shaking hands?

Toward the end, before his disappearance, work seemed to overtake his life. But my
vadder
remained frantic about conjuring up more business and more money. My
mamm
would often be sitting at the kitchen table beside him, begging him to stop. To stop working so hard, to spend more
time with our family . . . to get the help he needed and we deserved. I thought she meant help running his business. But it is clear now.
Everything
is clear now.

I close my eyes, letting my rapid thoughts be swept under by the falls behind us. I know I am not ready to face the man whose abandonment decimated my
mudder
’s will to live and therefore rendered us orphans in experience, if not in fact. It does not matter that our world has changed and everything is at risk. He thought of no risks when he left us. So I will not give him the courtesy of my love, which turns out to be as conditional as his.

“I’m going to need time,” I whisper, not sure if I’m heard over the water and thankful if I’m not. Swallowing hard, I say, “Please don’t tell my brother about this . . . not yet, anyway.”

“Of course,” Moses replies. “Whatever you need.”

The two of us are quiet for some time. Then I hear the tinny clang of metal. I turn and am astonished to see him dumping items from his jeans onto a cradle in the rock, more than likely carved by the Kutenai, who came here eons before we did. He has a pocketknife, a watch with a broken band, and a few quarters, nickels, and dimes that are obsolete since the EMP. I set my lamp on the boulder and watch him take his holster off, pull his belt out through the loops, coil the leather, and set the gun and holster beside it.

“You’re going swimming?” I ask, but of course he is.

“With all this water, can’t resist the chance.”

“Couldn’t you just stick your feet in? We’ve got a long climb ahead.”

His laughter is muffled as he pulls off his shirt. “If you’ve been sweating like me, you’d know that I need to stick in a little more than my feet. But I’ll be quick. Promise.”

I avert my eyes and sit on the rock beside his last worldly possessions. I am more than a little irritated that he would reveal such life-altering information and then go for a casual swim, as if every day daughters discover that their estranged fathers are alive. Angling my head, I watch the pale, inverted triangle of Moses’s torso as he picks his way down to the shoreline and submerges his legs and waist. He stands motionless for a second before diving in, fully embracing the water’s cold.

When he resurfaces, whipping back his hair, he grins and waves. “Come on! It’s great!”

I shake my head and sit on the rock with my knees drawn up to my chest and my arms wrapped around them. All the while, I can see myself as I was three . . . four years ago, before adulthood prematurely descended and my future prospects changed. I recall feeling weightless as my arms pulled my body through the water, despite my sodden cape dress’s vain attempt to weigh me down. Oftentimes, just our family came to Glacier Falls with a picnic basket and an old quilt my
mamm
didn’t mind spreading across the
ground. But if other members from Mt. Hebron came to enjoy the sun and water, they were taken aback that my
vadder
 allowed me—even
encouraged
me—to swim. Yet I think perhaps watching me, his eldest daughter, gliding through the shallows with the ease of a fish gave him hope that he too could fight against the current of his addictions that were slowly pulling him under, and us right along with him.

I unspool my shawl and unlace my boots—not in celebration of my
vadder
’s survival, but perhaps in memory of that bearded man who used to toss me, laughing, into the pond in Millersburg, Ohio, believing in me enough to let me rise on my own and swim. I take off my chore apron, fold it, and place it on top of my boots with the solemnity of a ritual. I wasn’t wearing my
kapp
three or four years ago when I would come here so unfettered by life’s cares and woes; therefore I never had to worry about the water ruining the delicate fabric. But to take it off now—in the presence of a man who is not my husband, no less—would be drawing close to a precipice whence I can never return. However, have I not already leapt over a precipice, as I abandoned my pacifist ideals for the sake of revenge?

I pull the bobby pins from my
kapp
and drop them, plinking, into my shoes. I let my taut bun loosen and cascade down my back. I take off my glasses and tuck them into my apron pocket. Then I take mincing steps down
to the water. The wind whips my hair into a damp cloud. I take hold of the thousand errant pieces and fold my arms behind me, out of guilt and out of habit, preparing to wrap them into a single plait.

Moses calls to me over the roar of the falls. I glance up and see him bobbing in the current. He cups hands around his mouth and repeats, “Let it down.” I watch him and my face burns. But I keep my arms bowed behind my neck—my hair held in place—like the last parapet of my inhibitions. I have no idea how long he has observed my transformation from obedient Mennonite girl to . . . what, exactly? Someone who sheds her prayer covering at the slightest provocation? Was Moses Hughes sent here to tempt me in every weakened area of my life, as Christ was tempted in the desert? Or is he simply an impetuous man who wants a self-conscious former schoolteacher to have a good time? I am not sure if I will ever know the truth; I am not sure I will ever know who he is . . . or even who I really am.