But his legs couldn’t keep pace with the song. Again, he staggered, his knees buckled, and he toppled like a felled tree.
Yorick slipped out of her arms, ran barking toward the man, but he didn’t move. He’s dead, Mary thought—might even have said it aloud as she ran after Yorick.
The stranger lay sprawled on his belly, face half-buried in the sand. She turned him on his side, his head lolling. He was alive, and she nearly wept with relief. But she could turn him no further until she got the backpack off, and her hands were shaking so badly, it took an inordinate amount of time to unbuckle the straps, and all the while he was straining for breath. His skin was wan as alabaster, damp with sweat, the sand clinging like a rough second skin. Mary hesitated, her mouth dry. It occurred to her that his disease might be contagious.
But even if it were, what was she to do? Leave him here to die—the first living human being she’d seen in ten years?
Finally she got the pack off, and he slumped over onto his back. Her breath catching at the feel of his skin hot against hers, she brushed the sand away from his eyes and mouth. His long, narrow head seemed skull-like, with jutting cheekbones, deep eye sockets—a face that at first seemed old, yet she realized he was younger than she. His hat had fallen off, revealing a cloth band that restrained his long, tangled, copper red hair; words were embroidered on the band, but she didn’t try to read them. Where had he come from? How did he get here?
It didn’t matter. Not now. She ran for the ravine, Yorick barking at her heels. She was panting when she reached the top of the path, but she still had breath enough to shout for Rachel. All five dogs—even Shadow, limping with her arthritic joints—joined the cacophony, and Rachel came out of the greenhouse. “Mary, what’s wrong?”
Mary worked the words through panting gasps. “A man… there’s a man on the beach… he’s alive, Rachel!”
Whether he would remain alive was moot. Mary and Rachel carried him up the mud-slick path, and once they got him to the house, they put him in Mary’s bed and stripped off his clothes. They saw the scars then, the white weals across his back, and Rachel said tightly, “Man’s inhumanity to man hasn’t abated, I see.”
His fever registered 103 degrees on Rachel’s old mercury thermometer. Through the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, they alternately bathed him with wet cloths, then when the chills struck, covered him with layers of blankets, and in the rare moments when he roused to semiconsciousness, plied him with water and willow-bark tea. They couldn’t leave him alone at any time. In his fever he thrashed wildly, threw off the blankets, leaving him naked to the next chill.
But by late afternoon his fever had dropped two degrees, and he had quieted enough so that they could take turns with their ministrations and the chores that couldn’t be shirked. Rachel killed a chicken for supper, and while it baked, she simmered a pot of broth at the back of the stove. Finally, when they finished supper and the last of the evening chores, Rachel offered to take the first watch with the stranger. Mary went into Rachel’s room and settled in her bed with Shadow lying at her back, two of the cats at the foot of the bed.
Sleep was a long time coming, and she was surprised it did come, surprised when Rachel opened the door, lighting her way with a candle in a pewter holder, and told her it was two in the morning. Mary had been dreaming. One of the old death dreams. She got out of bed and began dressing. “How’s our patient?”
Rachel put the candle on the small table by the bed and sat down to rub Shadow’s back. “Well, he’s past the crisis. Fever’s down to ninety-nine, and he woke up long enough to talk to me.”
Mary sighed her relief as she pulled on a sweater. “What did he say?”
Rachel laughed. “That I was an angel of mercy. Maybe he thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. He definitely believes heaven is a possibility. Did you notice that headband he was wearing?”
“What about it?”
“The words embroidered on it. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.’”
Mary looked at Rachel, but her face was turned away from the light, and Mary couldn’t be sure of the edge she felt in those words. “He sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool good Christian. What else did he say?”
Rachel shrugged. “He asked me my name. I asked his. It’s Luke, by the way. No surname.” For a moment she seemed distracted, as if she had more to say, then she looked up at Mary and offered a smile. “You’d better go see to our good Christian. I’m going to get some sleep.”
When Mary entered her room, she felt a shiver of uncertainty that she blamed on the night chill. An oil lamp burned on the bedside table, and in its glow the stranger slept. She checked the fire in the blue-enameled stove, then sat down in the chair Rachel had drawn up by the bed. Rachel’s book was on the table. Loren Eiseley. Mary leaned back and looked on the face of this stranger, a man named Luke, and tried to sort out her thoughts.
The short span of sleep had put a little space between her and the clamor of emotions she had endured throughout the day: the shock of seeing another human being, the added shock of finding him so ill, the constant fear that this, the only survivor they’d met in all these years, might die before uttering a coherent word.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
And he had indeed walked through that valley, but he was out of it now. He would live. And Mary knew her life would inevitably be changed by that fact.
She and Rachel had walked their own valley and had climbed out of the shadow; they had a purpose in living, a purpose that provided them satisfaction and even pleasure. No more than a third of the books had been sealed, but they had decided that this summer they’d begin building a permanent shelter for the books, their gift to humankind and the future. But this stranger embodied the potential of a different kind of gift. At the moment she brushed the sand from his face on the beach, the possibility stirred to life, but she hadn’t put it into words then. Only now did she let the words shape the idea: this man can father my children.
She was thirty-four years old, and in all probability capable of bearing children. The clockwork regularity of her menstrual cycles had been a continuing source of annoyance. It had been so futile, her body’s monthly preparation for something that could never happen.
But it could happen now.
Before the End she had considered bringing a child into that world unkind at the least and certainly irresponsible. Was it any kinder, any more responsible, to bring a child into this world?
Yet did she really have a choice? In a world where the continued existence of the human species might be in doubt, could she choose not to bear children if she were capable of it?
She looked at the stranger’s face, his forehead, cheekbones, the aquiline prow of his nose etched in lamplight that glinted in his coppery hair and beard. The face that had on the beach struck her by its look of age, now seemed young, like a hungry child’s. His eyes were closed, but she had seen them, knew them to be the color of the sky on a clear, spring day. She wondered if this stranger was someone she could love.
Or someone who could be a lover?
She smiled, the muscles of her abdomen tensing against the sensations unleashed by that thought. Was that the real explanation for her desire for motherhood?