The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (15 page)

Chapter Five

Two days later she walked out into a light flurry of snow, headed back to town the way she had come. The day before, she had busily piled dry firewood into a wheelbarrow she found in a shed and trucked it to her assumed home, making piles inside and on the porch. The second day she set out for town. The constant motion of the snow made her nervous, and her eyes tracked movement everywhere, her heart racing and slowing. She forced herself to get calm but she had to put her hand on her gun to do it. She thought to herself of the way babies soothe just being near the breast, just having the pacifier to comfort them. A gun certainly pacifies.

The street turned on to the main drag of the little town. Flat storefronts faced the road like the set in a Western. She kept close to one side, glancing up to the windows every few steps. Nothing stirred. The unnatural calm and ringing silence of snow pleased her somewhat. She would hear something moving near her, she was sure of that.

She saw the general store, and a small specialty shop that seemed to sell honey and bee-themed tchotchkes of the kind that would delight tourists.
 
She found the post office, useless and littered with papers. She passed a drug store without a thought. She was over-prepared for medical emergency. She did not run into any store she thought would sell cold-weather gear. She doubled back to the post office to see if there was a map of town.

There was a map, but it couldn’t be removed from the wall. For a moment habit took over and she fished out the cellphone that hadn’t made a sound in over a year and went to take a picture of the map. She laughed softly when she caught herself. She put the phone back gently in her pocket.

Studying the map on the wall, she made a note of the street where her little house stood at the end, separated from the main road and other houses by a considerable gap. She nodded at that gap. She loved it and believed in it. Space. Looking back up, she saw where she was and that there was a feed store a little less than a mile away. They might have farm equipment and items she could use. One more long look at the map and she was out the door.

The feed store had recently had a fire. On one side of the building, hay was scattered around the blackened brick façade. It had obviously been put out before it had spread, but not cleaned up. She stood in the road, staring at that a long time. She knew hay was pretty flammable. She thought back to the fires and evidence of fires she had seen. In the cities, mishaps had turned to disaster and there was no fire department to put things out. All of Oakland had burned down, it seemed. Duke had said the same thing about Detroit.

But this place hadn’t burned down.

Someone must have put it out.

She went in through the huge open door. It was dark inside, with the only light coming through the open door. The windows were black with smoke on one side and the others showed only the steel-grey sky that gave up snow. On the counter she saw what looked like a hurricane lamp. She pulled the chimney off, wound the wick upward, and lit it. It flamed high and fast, and she put the glass back on it. The smell was kerosene, but she wasn’t familiar enough with that odor to recognize it. She left the lamp on the desk and moved around carefully. She walked up and down the rows, reading labels for chicken feed, pig feed, medicines for horse’s hooves and long-rotted fifty pound bags of carrots. Rolls of chicken wire stood up in a bay and she thought about bringing some back to reinforce the house. She’d need to get a car running to carry it, but the roads in Eden were remarkably clear. She saw quickly that this was not the kind of place that would sell snowshoes or anything she needed. She went back for the hurricane lamp and picked it up gingerly, found the staircase that led up to the office.

The office was a little messy, with a thousand notes tacked up on the walls and the dead computer. She found map books marked with delivery routes for hay and feed, and stuffed two into her bag. The rest of the mess was invoices and phone numbers, nothing she could use. She headed back down.

She sat on the counter and ate some sardines she had packed for the trip. She flipped pages in the map book until she found where she was. Scanning the grid, she looked for any town big enough to have a shopping mall, a camping goods store, anything. She thought Huntsville, about six miles away, looked promising. When she had finished and looked long and hard at the route, she carried the lamp outside with her. She blew a few times before she managed to put it out. She thought she should take it with her. She did not think to pick up kerosene.

Around the back side of the store, a few cars sat parked. She knew cars that hadn’t been driven in a year or so didn’t start. One of these sat on clearly flat tires. Another had been a hay truck before, with tall guards on all sides to hold bales in. It looked too big to maneuver, and she decided against it. Parked closest to the wall was a little Honda. It was old, with manual locks and window cranks. She opened the passenger door and was stunned to see the keys in the ignition. She came around and let herself inside, setting the lamp carefully on the floor.

For a minute, she just breathed it in. The car smelled stale, like it hadn’t been opened in all this time. In that stale smell was a lost world. Cologne and sneaked hamburgers and the plasticky aroma of car upholstery that has sat in the sun for a few years. The rubbery smell of the dashboard and the dirt and crumbs embedded in the carpet. Scent is the key to the door of memory. For a minute, she let herself live in it. The minute ended when the smell of the kerosene lamp made itself known. An intruder from the new world. She opened her eyes and looked around. Keys in the ignition, windows not broken.

Cautious hope began to spread in her chest. She reached for the keys and turned them slowly through the clicks. On the third, a set of needles jumped in the dash. Her heart jumped with them.

She cranked it all the way and the engine slugged and woke slowly, groaning. She backed off and did it again, it complaining nyeah nyeah nyeah as it tried to shake the cold and inaction of the last year. The battery wasn’t dead. She knew that would sound like a dry click and nothing more. Nothing would light up or move. Cranked it again and this time stomped on the gas while doing it. The engine coughed, choked, caught, and then died. She waited one second before doing it again. It sputtered and guttered and then roared to life, her foot pouring gas into the injector.

She pounded the wheel triumphantly with her palms. The gas gauge read half full. She backed it up slowly and drove out onto the road. Fresh snow was all over everything, and she knew she’d have to go slowly. She wondered about the tires but did not get out to check. Rolling at a creeping pace, she eased out on the road in the direction of Huntsville.

It wasn’t long before the noises set in. Knocking and whining, the car started to let her know that this couldn’t last. The engine coughed and kicked, but she pushed on. If it was going to die, she wanted to ride it until it quit. She had gone nearly five miles when it stopped and wouldn’t start again. She cursed at it a little, then got halfway out, put it in neutral, and rolled it to the side of the road. After it stopped moving, she looked at it and wondered why she had bothered. She looked up and down the snowy road, seeing black and white nothingness. No lines of cars honked behind her, no courteous country gentlemen hopped out of pickup trucks to offer assistance to the little lady. She could have left the car in the dead center of the road with all the doors open for all it mattered.

She thought for a minute about whether to grab the kerosene lantern from the floor of the car. She decided not to carry it, but that she would take this same road back, hopefully in another car or on a bike, and take it back home. She began to walk the last mile or so into Huntsville.

As soon as she got near town, she knew something was different here. At the outskirts, she began to see cows fenced in on suburban lawns in twos and threes, drinking out of kiddie pools and old bathtubs full of water. Each of the lawns had a shelter or a windbreak full of clean hay for the animals to escape the cold. For the most part, they seemed woolly for the winter and unbothered by the snow. In one yard, she heard the unmistakable gabbling of a chicken coop. She immediately knew that people were keeping these animals, probably a large group of them. She looked around, peering into the windows of the houses. She looked up and down each street for more signs of habitation. She listened hard through the snowy silence. Nothing.

She followed the road toward the center of town and the main drag. She knew there would be people there. She stopped at a bay window in the front of a tiny pink house and checked herself. She looked good, bundled up. She hadn’t bothered to dirty her jaw in a few days, but she wasn’t very clean, either. She touched the buttons of her coat and drew her scarf up, fluffing it to completely conceal her neck and part of her chin. She reached back and touched the butt of her gun. Calmed, she pulled the hem of her coat down over it. She turned back and kept walking into town.

When she reached Main Street, she saw the hub of activity. There was a tall church, with a steeple that had a lightning rod or a spike on the top. Beside it, a greenhouse had been built on top of what used to be the church parking lot. Dozens of men moved in and out through the door, talking with one another, gesturing. She couldn’t hear them. The store she wanted was on the far end of the street. She could double back and come around the block behind it to avoid being seen. She stood motionless, deciding. It was too risky to meet them, she thought. She turned around to go back and wait until after dark to raid the store.

When she turned, she found herself almost face to face with a young man who had a blond beard and a generous smile.

“Welcome, brother!” He strode toward her, holding out his hand. “Where did you come from? We haven’t had a refugee in months!”

Frozen for a moment, she was not sure what to do. She couldn’t shoot this guy in the middle of town. She knew she was outnumbered. He wasn’t threatening at all, and he had called her ‘brother’ and ‘refugee.’ Those were terms she could deal with.

Cautiously she put out her right hand. “Hi. I just came in from Eden.”

“Eden? Heck, I’m from Eden, and I sure don’t know you.”

“Well, I just got to Eden. I’m from San Francisco.”

“Wowie, that’s a long trip. How’d you get all this way? Oh, never mind all the long story. Where are my manners? Are you hungry or hurt? Do you need anything?”

She studied his face carefully. He seemed totally sincere, right down to his fake swears. The moment felt surreal to her, like Disneyland tour guides showing up to lead her out of hell. “I’m ok. I need to get back to Eden, is all. My car broke down and-“

“Well, shoot, I’m sure someone could take you back to Eden, but why would you go back there? It’s pretty deserted.”

“I… I have all my gear there. I sort of set up camp.”

“Hey, I’ll let the elders talk to you about it, but I expect you’ll want to stay here. We haven’t had a new face in a long time. Why don’t you let me walk you to the stake center and introduce you. Oh, what’s your name, brother?”

“Dusty. I’m Dusty Jones.”

He had held her hand this whole time, and now he pumped it enthusiastically up and down.

“Welcome to Huntsville, Brother Dusty. I’m Frank Olsen. I hope you’ll at least stay for dinner. Come on, let me show you off to everybody.”

He let go of her hand, but he put his on her shoulder instead. His hands were wide and square, with blond hair sprouting out of the back. His eyes were baby blue and as round as could be. The walk over to the church building he had called the ‘stake center’ was far too short for her liking.

Her heart was beating a little too fast and she breathed deep, trying to remember to talk low and slowly, like a man would. They reached the door where an older man stood like a cheerful guard.

“Hello there, Frank! Who’s this young man?” The old man had eyebrows that seemed to reach all over his face, up and down in long bristles. They worked as he squinted to see her clearly.