Mary felt an uncertain tension, standing in the near darkness with Luke. She was sharply aware of the difference in his smell and hers or Rachel’s. She had long ago learned to accept the natural odors of their bodies, and she didn’t find Luke’s offensive. Only different.
She turned and lighted two more candles, handed him one. “Here, you’ll need some light.”
“Thanks. Mary, I know I’m sleeping in your room. Let me sleep here on the couch tonight. I’m well enough now.”
She smiled, but shook her head. “You still need another good night’s sleep. Go on, now.”
He shrugged, started to walk away, then looked back at her. The words came hesitantly: “Do you understand why I’m here? I mean, what I left the Ark to search for?”
She did, although it was only at this moment that she recognized it, and she chose not to acknowledge it. There were potentials there she couldn’t deal with yet. “It’s late, Luke. We’ll talk about it another time.”
He nodded, moved away in a circle of golden candlelight. “Good night, Mary Hope.”
“Good night, Luke Jason. Sleep well.”
When she heard the bedroom door close, Mary stood motionless in the dim silence, feeling the beat of her pulse, and again she wanted to cry and didn’t know why. Changes. She was only now beginning to sense their dimensions.
She went to the greenhouse door and saw the light behind the glass door that opened into Rachel’s room. She crossed the greenhouse in the silver-blue moonlight and slid the door open, saw Rachel in her narrow bed, propped up with pillows, a book open in her lap, an oil light burning on the table. Shadow lay beside her.
Mary sat down on the end of the bed. “That was quite a story.”
Rachel nodded. “The stuff of epics. Think how quickly we’ve sunk back to a time when a journey of a thousand miles is an epic.”
“Sometimes I wonder…”
“What, Mary?”
Mary shrugged, not sure what she was trying to say. “A thousand miles, and the only human beings he found were a few survivalists and a handful of dying victims.” Luke called them all crazy, and she could accept that of the survivalists. But the others… They weren’t crazy. They were only hopeless. Without hope. Without children.
Rachel said, “That thousand miles covered a very small fraction of the world.”
“But that fraction is our world now. The rest is terra incognita for us and always will be.”
Except for the Ark.
Mary felt her mind full of cobwebs, squeezed her eyes shut to look for a way through them. Finally she said, “Rachel, I know what Luke’s mission is. The Ark is dying; not enough women are capable of bearing children, so he went out to find women like me—potentially fertile.” She opened her eyes, but couldn’t look at Rachel. “That’s his mission, and he’s made it… mine. He’s made it possible….” But the words got tangled in the cobwebs. She hadn’t had time to think out the implications for her in the Ark, in fifty-three people living in a community.
She had recognized that she had an obligation, now that Luke made it possible, to bear children. Yet until he told them about the Ark, she hadn’t faced the fact that to bear a child here at Amama would be futile. Here that child would grow up in solitude, condemned to live a life of savage loneliness, to die leaving nothing behind but its bones.
If that child were to become something other than a sterile end in itself, it must have a community. Community was a concept integral to civilization and humanity. Whatever her doubts about the Ark, it was a community, and now she knew beyond a hope that it was the only one she would ever encounter.
Her throat ached with the words: “Rachel, if I go to the Ark, will you go with me?”
Rachel answered without hesitation. “No. Not until I’ve finished with the books. That’s my part in humankind’s future, Mary.”
Mary saw the equivocal sadness behind Rachel’s fragile smile and shivered as if a chill wind had brushed the skin at the back of her neck.
“Mary, the decision is yours,” Rachel said. “I can’t help you with it.”
Yes, it was hers, and it had already been made. Yet it didn’t seem a decision. There was no choice in it.
She watched the wavering candle flame. “Strange, isn’t it? A man who insists Armageddon has already happened, that the second coming of Jesus—the end of life in this world for all good Christians—is about to happen, yet he worries about begetting a new generation. I don’t think he really believes that Armageddon nonsense.”
“The problem is, he thinks he should believe it.”
Mary wasn’t sure what Rachel meant by that, but she didn’t want to talk about it now. What Luke believed, or thought he should, didn’t matter. She had no choice.
She rose, leaned down to kiss Rachel’s cheek. “Past our bedtime. By the way, that was a clever ploy, conning Luke into writing his memoirs. You’ll make an author of him, and I’ve never met an author who didn’t have a great respect for books.”
“Well, it did occur to me that the act of writing might change his attitude a bit. And you’re the one who should help him with it. You’re the writer here.”
Mary thought about that, tried to remember when she’d had that sure sense of herself as a writer. She couldn’t recapture it. “Good night, Rachel.” She crossed to the sliding door, opened it, and looked back to see Rachel in the amber light, and in Mary’s eyes she suddenly seemed small and vulnerable.
“Good night, Mary.”
No. Rachel was too resourceful ever to be lonely.
Chapter 17
“And that spring, Luke courted me.”
Stephen looks at me curiously. All he knows of courtship is garnered from books he’s read. On this clear April afternoon, we’re outside on the deck, a limber-limbed boy sitting with his legs drawn up, arms wrapped around one knee, and an old woman absorbing the warmth of the sun on ever-aching joints and talking about her youth, about courtship.
Such an ancient ceremony, courtship. Homo sapiens was born with the rituals encoded in its genes, rituals as old as bisexual reproduction. I laugh, imagining trilobites wooing their mates with skittering minuets in the deeps of the sea; brontosauri circling one another in ponderous sarabands; smiladon yowling arias to show off his scimitar fangs.
Stephen asks, “What did Luke do to court you?”
I study him, wondering if his generation won’t invent some sort of courtship rituals, even if their pairings are determined by necessity.
“Luke produced prodigies of labor that spring, Stephen. He looked at the pigpen and said, ‘You and Rachel built this.’” And I try to imitate his indulgent tone. Stephen laughs, probably because to him I sound like Jerry. “I admitted as much, and Luke said, ‘I’ll build you a new one.’ And so he did. The saws and axes needed sharpening? Our plow and harness needed repair? The roof of the barn was leaking? The gateposts had rotted? The apple trees needed pruning? And our smokehouse… had we also built that? He would take care of it. And so he did.”
Still laughing, Stephen asks, “What did you do?”
“What could I do but… love him?”
In that halcyon spring Luke was easy to love. He was as powerful and graceful as a rutting buck, as solicitous as a bowerbird. He was easy to love because he tried in every way to please me. He couldn’t, not in every way, not a man of his philosophical mold. But he tried. And he tried to please Rachel. He had to please her in order to please me, and he understood that. But he wanted to please Rachel, as a child wants to please its parents, a student its teacher, an acolyte its master.