“What happened to them?”
“Some were killed in the fires and road gang attacks immediately after the End. Some died of the cold. And some of those who lived through the first weeks joined in groups in the hope that they could better survive together, like at the Greenly farm. It was about five miles up the Coho River. Rachel used to trade rabbits and honey for Aldo Greenly’s hay. She said if anyone could survive, it would be Aldo Greenly. He’d made a career of hardy subsistence.”
Stephen asks hesitantly, “But he… didn’t survive?”
“No.” I shake my head slowly. “Nor his wife, his two sons, and their wives and children. Nor the other two families that had moved in with them. One of them brought Lassa to the farm.”
“It really was a plague, wasn’t it?”
“Well, it certainly was here. Maybe there were places it hadn’t reached before the End. I don’t know. I’ll never know. There’s so much I’ll never know.”
“Maybe someday…” But he seems to recognize the unlikelihood of such a someday. “When did you and Rachel go to the Greenly farm?”
“Not until November. I wanted to go before that. I was sure we’d find survivors there, but a trek of ten miles round-trip had become an expedition. The weather was so hellish. The storms that came in off the ocean were vicious, half hurricanes, half blizzards. Some days we couldn’t even get to the barn, not until we rigged guide ropes. Between storms, we went scavenging, but even on one of those trips, we nearly got lost when a storm came up suddenly. Both of us had frostbite.”
“I think you and Rachel were brave to leave Amarna at all.”
I shrug. “I guess we didn’t think we had much choice. We were afraid the food and clothing, even the metal tools that would rust, might be ruined before we found them. And… we had to get out of that cave when we could, or we’d have gone insane.”
He nods, although I doubt he understands how close we were to insanity then. “Did you have a hard time getting to the Greenly farm?”
“No. We were lucky with the weather that day. I mean, we weren’t overtaken by a blizzard. But when we reached the farm… well, we found two bodies in the house and a graveyard near the barn. Twenty wooden markers with names painted on them.” I close my eyes, remembering that little graveyard, remembering my tears. Someone had cared for the people buried under those snowy mounds, and one by one, day by day—all the markers had dates—there were fewer to care for the living or the dead. And I knew then that the world was full of such graveyards, where love and hope were buried in relentless grief until the last griever died.
I open my eyes to the gentle, gray rain. “We owe Aldo Greenly a great deal. We found a root cellar full of home-canned food. And three Saanen goats, some Plymouth Rock chickens, two sows, and a boar. Aldo raised quarter horses, too, but we didn’t find any of them that first trip. But we found tack and saddles and tools—we’re still using some of them—and seed and chicken feed. And hay. The loft of the barn was full. And the two-wheeled utility cart. It was designed to be pulled by a tractor, but we adjusted it for Silver. Oh—we found three half-starved kittens. Anyway, the first Greenly expedition was… well, I can’t call it a success, not when I remember that graveyard.”
I pause, look at Stephen, who listens sympathetically. Yet there is nothing in his experience that would make it possible for him to imagine the despair that haunted us in our search for other survivors, nor that perverse mix of hope and fear we felt when we approached a place where we thought we might find survivors: hope that we’d find people alive, that they might have some contact with the rest of the human race; fear that they might be less than benevolent or sane, that they might kill first and wonder about us later. We had a horse, wagon, guns; throughout history, people have been murdered for less.
And Stephen can’t imagine the loneliness that accumulated around us every time our hopes were dashed. We didn’t believe we were the only survivors in the world. If we had survived, others would. Somewhere. But not here, and we began to wonder if we’d ever see another living human being. That kind of loneliness is beyond imagining, and it seemed then beyond enduring.
Stephen says earnestly, “It’s sad to have to live off other people’s misfortune, but you and Rachel never harmed anybody.”
I look into his guileless face, the color of bronze, smooth and unlined. “No, Stephen, but we didn’t hesitate to take advantage of their misfortune. We had pledged ourselves to survive. But in the weeks that followed, the year turned to winter, and that only made that unnatural winter worse. We were always cold, always exhausted. Just keeping warm took hours every day, not only tending the fires, but sawing and splitting wood. After we used all our seasoned wood, we had to go out in that foul, dark cold and cut trees. At least, we still had chain saws that worked. And most of the time, we had water in the house, but only trickles. Bathing and laundry became almost too difficult to consider, but as long as we kept fires in the kitchen and bathroom and cleared the ice off the reservoir every day, we managed to keep the plumbing intact. And, as Rachel said, we could be grateful no one ever got around to making toilets electronic.”
Stephen smiles at that, but it fades as I go on. “It was a terrible time, and I always had the feeling that the darkness was the shadow of death. Every night I dreamed of death, dreams that woke me up, left me shaking. I think we might’ve given up if we’d only had ourselves to consider. But we had the animals. We lost two goats and more chickens and rabbits, although we did get a wood stove set up in the garage. And we lost Cyrano, one of our male kittens, but the animals that lived depended on us.”
“And you depended on each other,” he says quietly.
“Yes, that above all. Neither of us could’ve survived alone, and that brought us together in a way I don’t think anyone could understand unless they’d been through a similar ordeal. And finally, we had some hope.”
His lips part expectantly. “What was it?”
“Well, it came on the winter solstice, which seemed fitting. I went out that night with the dogs so they could relieve themselves. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, and the wind was screaming out of the east. I looked up into the sky, expecting to see the same thing I’d seen every night for nearly a hundred nights: absolute darkness. But on that night I saw… the moon.” I smile, remembering the wonder of it. “A full moon, Stephen. It was veiled in dirty clouds, but I could see it. I called Rachel to come out, and we wept and shouted and danced in the snow. Nothing I’ve ever seen in my life was as beautiful as that amber moon.”
“It was like the rainbow, wasn’t it? The rainbow God sent to Noah after the Flood.”
I feel my smile fade. The god that sent the rainbow to Noah, according to the writers of the Pentateuch, sent it as a covenant that the world—their world which was little larger than mine is now—would never again be destroyed by flood. That god did not, it seems, make any promises about not destroying the world by nuclear fire and ice.
“Stephen, what the moon on the winter solstice meant was simply that hope was no longer unreasonable.” I open the diary, and his eyes fix on it avidly. “The first entry in this diary is dated January first of the new year. It begins: ‘Another blizzard today. We haven’t seen the moon again nor even a break in the clouds since the winter solstice.’”
His shoulders slump, and I add: “There was no promise in the moon on the winter solstice. The Long Winter didn’t end then. More of our animals died, including nearly all the hens. Of course, the hens that survived weren’t laying; it was too dark. We were just lucky Josie kept giving milk through the worst of the winter. But it wasn’t until March, I think…” I turn a few pages in the diary. “Here it is. March first. We saw the sun. Briefly and dimly. About the same time we saw a few gulls and crows. I don’t know where they went during the winter, those that lived. South, maybe. I have great respect for crows—even if I’ve cursed them over the years for eating the seeds right out of our garden—but seeing the gulls gave me real hope. I suppose I’m biased toward gulls because they’re so beautiful. The essence of freedom and grace.” Then I smile at Stephen. “That’s rank romanticism. Gulls are hardheaded and birdbrained. But it wasn’t their beauty that made them so welcome to us. The fact that they survived suggested that not all the birds in this part of the world had been destroyed. We lost the sandpipers, you know.”