When had night come?
Mary Hope tried to remember. Minutes ago? Hours? How much time had passed, and what time was it now?
Mary’s hand stirred abortively under the comforter. She didn’t make the error—again—of looking at her watch. It had stopped, its minuscule circuits burned out in one silent millisecond. In that same millisecond it seemed the circuits of her mind had been destroyed, grids of perception and comprehension charred to inert threads of ash.
Rachel’s old mechanical watch would still be working. They could be grateful for that.
Why?
What difference did it make what time it was now?
This was the end. Time didn’t matter. Or perhaps it was only the beginning.
What is it when there is no time?
No, that was ridiculous, to say something didn’t exist because the means to measure it had ceased to exist….
For all the time Mary couldn’t now measure—a few hours; it couldn’t be more—her mind had functioned erratically on two levels she couldn’t integrate. Neither the events of the last hours nor her thought sequences had imprinted themselves coherently in memory.
What am I doing here?
Did she ask that aloud? No. It only seemed like a question that should be asked aloud.
She knew the answer. One part of her mind knew it. The other part couldn’t make sense of it.
The lithium-cell emergency light glowed atop a stack of cartons. Foolish to leave it on. They should save the batteries. At the foot of the basement stairs, like the debris of an avalanche, bedding, clothing, food, tools lay in shadowed mounds. Something pathetic about the light falling on a ceiling of cobwebbed floor joists; on pocked, concrete walls where the peeling whitewash made blighted patterns; on the yellow, sawed ends of stacked firewood; on the cast-iron Franklin stove; on shelves jumbled with dusty tools and scraps of lumber and pipes and loops of electrical wire and rusted paint cans wearing their colors in serrated collars of old drips—the detritus that basements collect over the years, the kinds of odds and ends that Rachel never threw away.
What were you keeping it for, Rachel?
At least the old mattress and springs had proved useful. Mary made herself aware of herself, of exactly where she was, and knew that was what she’d been avoiding all these hours, wherever she was and whatever she was doing. She listened for her own heartbeat, for the sound of her own breath, and she thought, I am alive, I am here, this is now, and it is real.
Images flickered in the nether reaches of her mind: fire and blinding white caldrons of light, black bones of girders, towering monoliths warping, splintering, disintegrating.
She was alive, but her mother was dead. Everyone she had known in Portland was dead. The city was dead, and how many cities with it?
But she was alive.
At this moment, in this place, she was huddled with Rachel on the old mattress, buried under a down comforter, propped with pillows between them and the concrete wall. Rachel’s right arm was free of the comforter so she could stroke Shadow’s head, while Shadow panted her fear, ears back. Sparky lay at the foot of the bed, outwardly calmer, yet his eyes shifted constantly from Mary to Rachel. Beneath one of the small, high windows, sealed with boards except for the taped hole for the intake hose, Jim Acres’s filter pump thrummed like an insensate pulse. The air seemed heavy, turgid with the smell of dust and mold.
And beyond the window, the night raged. It had its own pulse.
Mary had to think about that sound, and she found it acidly ironic that it was only the howling, lashing roar of the storm that had swept in from the horizon where it lurked this afternoon.
It was only the storm.
At this moment she had no proof that anything worse than a sou’wester had occurred beyond the sealed windows.
No proof except a watch that had stopped—along with every electrical appliance in the house—and the fact that Jim’s radio, the one that had been stored in the basement in its lead-sheathed box, had offered nothing but stuttering hisses of static.
And the fear and despair that finally came into focus in her mind shook her body, choked off her breath while she strained to stop a cry.
Why?
That was the word she wanted to shriek against the hammering of the storm. But she held it back, because she felt Rachel trembling, too. They clung to each other as if each were paradoxically both the drowning victim and the rescuer. And Rachel said in a sibilant whisper, “Those ignorant, arrogant bastards!”
Mary didn’t attempt a response to that. She knew that anything she tried to say would come out in a scream of rage and chagrin.
It would be a long night, and she wondered how they would know when it was over.
Chapter 11
And yet, hope pursues me; encircles me, bites me; like a dying wolf tightening his grip for the last time.
Like all our meals, breakfast is served at the long cedar table in the dining room. There are thirteen of us at the table; enough for a coven. Today we are treated to eggs scrambled with goat cheese, and I am treated to a duet by Little Mary and Deborah, since I missed their debut as a vocal duo at morning service. They sing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” with enthusiasm and an attempt at harmony on Mary’s part. I respond with applause and words of praise. I’m always glad to hear the children make music, whatever the message in the lyrics. And I like to believe they respond to the music more than the message.
Miriam, of course, values the message above the music, and while the girls sing, she watches me as if to be sure I get that point. I smile and after the duet tell her how sweetly the girls’ voices blend.
An hour later the same table serves for another activity: school. Six days a week, three hours a day, the time determined by the Seth Thomas, the only timepiece that still works. I’m not sure how accurate it is by now.
I have the children for these three hours because I once made a bargain with Jerry.
So, again I sit at the table with my children waiting. My children. At least, when it comes to their education, their humanization, they’re mine. I look at them and think how beautiful they are, as simple and as accessible as the iridescent skin of a soap bubble, and as fragile.
I sit at the west end of the table with the blackboard on one of Rachel’s easels behind me, and in my hand is a precious stump of chalk. There’s one box of pastels left, but I’m always trying pieces of soft stone as a substitute. None I’ve found so far have worked. Nor have I found substitutes for paper and pencils for the children’s use. What little paper is left I hoard like a Scrooge. Enid and Bernadette are allotted a share of the precious sheets, but only the machine-made notebook or typing paper. Still, that suffices for Enid’s garden and livestock breeding records, and for Bernadette’s formulas for her herbal medicines. The pencils are long gone, but there’s still some of Rachel’s India ink, and we make a passable ink from twinberries.
Instead of paper, the children use slates of sorts—small rectangles of untempered Masonite that Rachel had prepared for encaustics. The smooth, white gesso ground takes well the marks of the vine maple charcoal sticks I make, for which Enid knits minuscule sleeves to keep the children’s fingers clean. Enid considers cleanliness next to godliness, but the children blithely smear their hands and even their faces with charcoal every day. But it’s easily removed, godly cleanliness restored.