I go on, “But here at Amarna the weather was ideal, the garden flourished, and I’d become very fond of goat’s milk and learned to look a rabbit in the eye and slit its throat—and gut, skin, and dismember it. Isaac, don’t laugh. That was a real accomplishment for a city girl.”
Of course, he does laugh, then he asks, “Who was a city girl? What does that mean?”
“I was a city girl. I came from a city, and I was—loosely speaking—a girl.” His smile is edged with uncertainty at that. No doubt he can’t imagine me as a girl. “Yes, I was young then, but the world was still falling apart. We could close our window to it, but one day it came crashing through our front door. Not literally, Isaac. That’s just a way of saying something… terrible happened.”
Stephen’s breath catches, and Isaac looks up at him, blue eyes wide. Stephen asks, “Was it Armageddon?”
He persists in calling it that because he hears the adults use that term. Yet our Elder, the arbiter of all things religious and moral here, declares that the true Armageddon, the one prophesied in such lurid detail by Saint John, is yet to come. Jerry denies the End as Armageddon because his father denied it. Finally.
“No, Stephen, not Armageddon. Rovers.”
“What’s a Rover?” Isaac asks.
“They were road gangs, Isaac. Groups of people—most of them young and into heavy drugs—who lived along the highways and attacked cars, trucks, or buses. They usually killed the people in them.”
Isaac stares at me, aghast. “Why did they do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because they were insane. Insanity is one of the symptoms of too many. Anyway, the gang that attacked my bus stayed in the area all spring. The Apies sent reinforcements, and that kept them under control, but by late June the extra Apies were needed elsewhere, and the Rovers came out of hiding.” I look down at the diary, turn the pages back to June, but I’m not really seeing the writing that on these pages has become so cramped, nearly illegible.
“It was the day before the summer solstice. A grocery day. Food deliveries had been erratic for months, but usually a Safeway convoy came in Thursday night, and everyone in Shiloh did their shopping on Friday. Rachel and I always drove down to the mall with Connie and Jim, but that Friday morning Jim phoned and said there’d be no grocery run. The night before, the Rovers hit the supermarket just as the convoy arrived. There was a small, bloody battle—Jim rather bitterly called it the battle of the mall—and a lot of people were killed or hurt, including four of Captain Berden’s officers. The Rovers blew up all three trucks. That was typical of them with cars or trucks. They just kept shooting until the gas tanks exploded. We didn’t see Jim and Connie that day. They were both busy at the clinic with the casualties. Rachel and I worked in the garden and walked on the beach, just like any other day. That night Jim called and said everything was under control in Shiloh, and another Safeway convoy would arrive Monday. So we went to bed.”
And slept the peaceful sleep of the muscle-weary, slept in the bliss of ignorance.
Chapter 8
As befitted the first day of summer, the sky was clear, the sun hot, and it was on this day that Josie Pearl, the white-and-tan Nubian doe, chose to go into labor. But Rachel didn’t discover that fact until noon.
Mary had called Connie and Jim after breakfast and gotten a busy signal. There was an implied assurance in that, and she and Rachel went about the morning’s work, feeding and watering the animals, weeding the garden, cleaning the chicken house, and collecting eggs. The hens were producing extravagantly with the long summer days. It was when Rachel went to the barn to get fresh straw for the nests that she discovered Josie Pearl’s plight.
And again Mary found herself an assistant midwife.
The impending nativity attracted an audience. Rachel always left the barn door open during the day so the goats could come into its shade. Now they all gathered, drawn by the insatiable curiosity of their kind. Pan—black as night, silky beard bearing stars of dandelion seeds, the noble, fecund lord of this small harem—loudly demanded a rail position, but Rachel asked Mary to take him to his shed north of the barn. When she returned, Rachel had Josie inside the stall in the corner of the barn, while Persephone, her kid, and the three remaining does peered through the slats.
Persephone’s delivery had been so easy, but Josie was having a hard time of it, since she had, with typical perversity, initiated herself into motherhood with twins. Once the necessary preparations were made, Rachel and Mary settled into the stall, Rachel constantly talking to Josie, stroking her head, giving her something to brace against when the contractions came. Josie, between contractions, crooned softly, talking to her kids.
The alternating contractions and crooning continued for over an hour before the front hooves of one of the kids appeared in the vulva, then retreated, while Josie stood panting, gray tongue hanging. As the afternoon stretched on, the kid made its teasing appearance, only to retreat, again and again, and as inexperienced as Mary was as a midwife, she knew Josie was weakening, her kids’ chance at life dwindling. At length Rachel had to offer more than reassurance.
“Mary, hold her head for me. Just keep talking to her.”
Mary knelt in front of Josie, stroking her rough coat, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she murmured reassurances. Rachel moved around to the doe’s hindquarters, and when Josie began straining with another contraction, Rachel said, “I can see the head!” She grasped the protruding legs with one hand, worked the other slowly, gently into the birth canal, while Josie panted and heaved, and finally on the surge of a last contraction, Rachel pulled the kid out.
A double handful of wet hair slicked in the remains of its embryonic sac, and Mary’s pent breath came out in a sigh of relief. Rachel shouted, “Give me a towel, Mary—hurry!” And when Mary brought a terrycloth towel from the shelf on the wall, Rachel cleared the kid’s throat and nose with her finger and toweled it vigorously, smiling at its outraged bleating. Then she laid the kid under Josie’s nose, and the doe began licking it. It was a black buck, so small and shaky Mary couldn’t believe it might survive. Yet second by second it drew strength from its mother’s tongue, and soon it was staggering to its feet. Rachel cleared Josie’s teat with a few pulls, then squeezed the first drops of thick colostrum into the kid’s mouth.
The second kid, a doe, came with relative ease, and Mary was ready with a clean towel. Rachel surrendered the kid to her, and Mary rubbed it, laughing at the novel sensation of this new life warm and vital in her hands. It was entirely perfect, black like its sibling, its exotic, horizontal-pupiled eyes bright and strangely knowing. Almost reluctantly, Mary offered the kid to its mother.
A few minutes later Josie rid herself of the placentas, and Rachel wrapped the pink-gray masses in newspaper and took them outside to bury them. Mary stayed in the stall, watched Josie licking, nudging, crooning to her newborn, while they wobbled about on fragile legs. So natural and inevitable, this age-old cycle of birth, and Mary knew she must one day take part in it. These infant animals were exquisitely beautiful in some sense that transcended aesthetics, and her yearning for that beauty was at this moment intense and undeniable.