With my cane probing ahead for anything unexpected in my path, I make my way through the greenhouse, then open the outside door cautiously. I’m not so much worried about waking the family now as alarming the dogs, and outside the door I’m met by all five of them, but they know me too well to bark at me. They have in my absence been summarily put out of the house. I put them back in—at least, in the greenhouse. I walk past the deck to the corner of the house. There’s no light in the windows of the new wing where Bernadette, Enid, and Grace are sleeping. I stand still for a while to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The moon hasn’t yet topped the hills to the east, but its light dims the stars. I hear nothing except the frogs in the pond in the pasture. And the murmur of the surf. Rachel used to say it sounded like a distant freight train; a train that has no end.
At length, I strike out north into a world of deep grays and blacks, sending my cane ahead of me at every step. I pass the gate into the north pasture, and the grass whispers with my passage, seed heads thrumming against my boots. The tart fragrance rises like a cloud around me, and there isn’t a breath of wind to blow it away. Ahead of me, above me, I see my objective: the Knob. The moonlight has already reached the top of it.
The light moves down the slope as I move up, and as the slope steepens, my panting is added to the night sounds. Rocks surface in the grass, and I must pick my way carefully. Now I’m in full moonlight, and I pause to look east. The moon is blurred in my eyes, yet I take pleasure in the resplendent white of it, remember that human beings, not so different from me, once set foot there. I’ve seen photographs of what they saw, the Earth rising, a lapis lazuli sphere in a fathomless night, over a lifeless ridge of ancient rock.
I told Jerry once about men walking on the moon, and he smiled tolerantly and said he had heard about that. But I know he didn’t believe it. Yet he believes there is a god that manages human affairs.
Finally I reach the vault. I stop there to catch my breath, then climb past it to the top of the Knob. I can’t see the horizon; the sea goes on infinitely. Beneath me, it chums up whorls of foam as it meets the rock bastions of the land in their age-old battle. The rock stands fast, even though its defeat is inevitable. It stands fast.
I go back to the vault, to the cedar door, run my fingers over it, feeling the grain etched by years of sun and storm. I tug at the padlock. It scrapes against the hasp, which doesn’t give a fraction of an inch. Luke fastened it with long screws that have by now rusted into solidity. I take the handcuffs out of my pocket, slip one loop into the hasp, close it with a ratcheting sound and a click. The other loop I leave open.
I stand for a while, leaning on my cane. The night is sweet as silk, and I’ve discovered a magic pocket of time and place here: I’ve never stood at the top of the Knob on a warm, windless May night under a full moon. The beauty of it brings tears to my eyes.
A fine night for dying.
I shiver, look down at the house. The moonlight lies frost white on the angles of its roof. In this new Stone Age I’m an old woman. My pulse whines in my ears, my chest is tight and aching. And if my heart doesn’t fail me, one good bout of pneumonia will kill me. Old women are indeed apt to die, yet I don’t want to die tonight.
But tonight that is a distinct possibility.
I turn, press my palms to the door, in my mind’s eye see the waxand-foil-wrapped bundles stacked in their thousands within these thick walls. Such a pitifully small remnant of the treasure of knowledge. Still, it’s all Rachel and I have to offer the future.
It’s worth an old woman’s life.
It occurs to me then that perhaps all my fear, all my mustering of courage, is in vain. Tonight at least. Miriam may not come tonight.
No. She’ll come. Miriam is not by nature patient. She won’t ignore this golden opportunity I’ve presented her.
Miriam will come.
I ease myself down onto the stone plinth, my back to the door, and contemplate the moon and the exquisite, indifferent night.
The moon is perhaps thirty degrees above the black contour of the hills when I see a yellow star of a light east of the house.
A lantern. It moves as if of its own volition toward the barn. I watch it as I might a natural phenomenon I can’t explain. The light winks out. Miriam has gone inside the barn. That, no doubt, is where she hid the dynamite. Within minutes the light reappears, bobs toward the fence, flickers behind the trees. A pause: the gate. The light twinkles across the pasture, then slows as it moves up the slope.
And finally I can see Miriam. At least, I can see a ghostly shape reflecting the moonlight. On this balmy night she wears nothing but her long, white nightgown. She carries the lantern in her right hand, and under her left arm is a dark bundle. Her hair glows like an amber halo in the moonlight.
She is still at least fifty yards away. I raise the shawl over my head to cover my white hair, then twist around to reach the handcuffs, slip my left hand through the open loop, and stop to wait out a wave of panic that leaves me panting. Then with my right hand, I close the loop around my wrist, hear the ratcheting click, and loose my breath in a sigh. Finally I bunch the shawl with my right hand to hold it up over the lower half of my face, at the same time grasping the whistle between my thumb and forefinger. Miriam is still moving through the moonlight like a mythical creature made whole of that mystic light.
I press back against the door, my hand hanging in the cold bracelet a little above the level of my head. I remain as still as the stones that protect this keep, this treasure house, this life of mine, of Rachel’s.
Miriam is only twenty yards away, but she hasn’t seen me yet. Faintly against the whisper of the surf, I hear her singing as she climbs the slope, singing like a child at play on a sunny afternoon— a child who thinks she is alone.
Now she stops, looks at me. She is less than thirty feet away.
And I begin blowing on the whistle as hard as I can, hearing nothing but its faint wheezing, wishing I could hear that high-frequency sound, wishing I could be sure—
“Who’s there?”
I almost laugh. As if she didn’t know. I keep blowing, and in the distance I hear—think I hear—the sound of barking.
Miriam stumbles toward me, the lantern drawing streaks in my eyes. Six feet away she stops again, puts her bundle down. It’s wrapped in dark cloth.
I’m still blowing on the whistle, and now I’m sure I hear barking. All the dogs are barking. But the family—certainly awake by now— will have to get out of their beds, will have to discover that Miriam is not in hers, nor I in mine, will have to, above all, let Shadow out of the house so she can lead them to me, and now, with Miriam looming over me, I understand that the plan was foolish. It can’t succeed.
She closes the distance between us, the lantern glaring in my face, hisses, “What are you doing here?”
I lower the shawl and whistle. “I’ve been waiting for you, Miriam.”
Her face in the light reflected from mine is so fixed, so masklike, I can’t believe it is capable of change even as I watch it wrench into a grimace of frustration.
“You unholy witch! You’re sick! You’re old and tired and sick!”
“But I’m here, Miriam! I’m here to defend what I hold sacred, and I’m willing to die for it, if you’re willing to kill for it.”
She doesn’t understand that yet. Her gaze shifts to my upraised arm, to the handcuffs. She pulls at the loop connected to the hasp, and I raise the shawl, blow desperately on the whistle. The distant barking gets louder, but there are no lights in the house.