Shadow won’t leave me, paws at me, whining, and it’s too late for her now. I press my face into her satiny fur, remember the night I lay in Rachel’s arms while she died. “I’m sorry….”
And I wait. Listen to the sputter of the fuse. Such a small sound, yet it drowns out every other sound. Until it stops.
It simply stops.
I wait.
But there is no explosion. The sounds of the night—the frogs in the pasture, the murmur of the surf, the plaintive cry of an owl— softly fill the vacuum of silence in my mind.
The dynamite didn’t explode.
Maybe Miriam didn’t attach the blasting cap properly. Maybe the dynamite or the fuse were too old, stored too long in a damp climate.
It doesn’t matter.
I begin to laugh. I shift, put my back against the door, hug Shadow to me, and I laugh. I laugh with relief, I laugh because I’m alive, I laugh at the sheer absurdity of this little drama, I laugh at the thought of Miriam playing with the technology of destruction bom in an age she can’t begin to understand, I laugh at myself for believing an artifact of that age would in her hands be a real threat, I laugh at the irony of Miriam witnessing the wretched failure of her act of god. I laugh until I cry, and the constriction in my chest seems only part of the laughter, the electric pain in my left arm only inevitable after the abuse it’s had in the grip of the handcuffs.
The other witnesses to this failed act of god have drawn nearer, but now they stand transfixed. There’s Jerry, with Jonathan and Stephen flanking him. Esther, her hand on Isaac’s shoulder. Enid and Bernadette. Someone had the sense to keep the other children out of this. Grace must be with them.
These people aren’t laughing with me, and I’m vaguely surprised. It’s all so ludicrous….
They’re staring at Miriam.
And my laughter and tears cease when Miriam lifts her white-sleeved arms to form a ghostly crucifix, and the moonlight flashes on the knife still in her right hand, when she throws her head back, and from her throat emerges a single syllable stretched into a shivering cry of anger and anguish. “No!”
And I hear in that word other words unspoken: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
But Miriam hasn’t forsaken her god.
She faces me, then moves suddenly, runs at me with the knife raised, and I gaze at the translucent light shining through her gown, remember a picture I once saw of a snowy owl sweeping down on its prey, and it was as beautiful and terrifying as Miriam is in this instant of time that I recognize as my last.
“Mary!”
A blur of motion rushing at me from one side, an abrupt, crushing weight—something, someone falls on top of me, comes between me and the downward arc of the knife. Stephen. And Miriam staggers off balance as Shadow hurtles against her, teeth ripping into her forearm. Miriam shouts in pain, kicks at Shadow, sends her tumbling, yelping, and Jerry and Jonathan and Isaac close in. Isaac, his small face tormented with bewilderment, reaches out to her, wailing her name. But she doesn’t hear. Like a hunted, cornered animal, she strikes out blindly, and the knife is still in her hand.
A dark fountain in the white light, and Miriam’s gown is dappled with blood, and it still spills out as Isaac sinks into his mother’s arms, as she sinks to her knees under his weight, and Isaac lies with his head canted back, Miriam’s hand pressed to his throat to stem that hideous fountain, and blood pulses dark from between her fingers.
I cling to Stephen with my free arm as he clings to me, and Isaac’s beautiful face is still, and if it weren’t for that deluge of blood, I might think Miriam is only singing her son to sleep, but her lullaby is a broken whimpering rife with anguish, and her son will never wake again. The pressure in my chest has become adamant pain as if something unseen were trying to squeeze the lifeblood out of my heart as Isaac’s has poured out. So willing, it seems, that outpouring, as if the sacrifice were embraced in ecstasy.
But the dark fountain has stopped.
None of us has moved through those endless seconds while Isaac died. We all watched stupefied, none of us believing one drop of that child’s blood, none of us understanding it.
Now Jerry moves. Like a man transformed into stone, he moves ponderously toward Miriam and Isaac. He speaks, and his voice is the crack of boulders falling. “What have you done?”
I think he might have killed her, crushed her like an avalanche, but it is then that Miriam looks up, and he stops.
Her face is in full light, alabaster white. She doesn’t see Jerry. Her eyes are dead with a fathomless despair that echoes in her voice as she cries out her son’s name in a keening ululation that vibrates within me as if I were a tuning fork for that one terrible note.
Miriam understands everything at this moment.
When that cry dies into silence, her head falls forward, but that is her only movement.
Jerry leans down and takes Isaac’s frail body out of her arms. He looks at me, finally forces the words out, and perhaps the questions are addressed to me.
“Who will forgive her? Who will forgive me?”
There is no answer to that. He knows there is no answer. He turns, carries Isaac away, down the long, moon-silvered slope. Jonathan follows him, his face nearly as lifeless as his brother’s.
And I hear someone weeping. Stephen’s head rests on my shoulder as if he were a sleepy child, but these aren’t the easy tears of childhood. These are the labored tears of an adult. I press my cheek against his thick, curling hair, remember a day when I asked him if he’d do the same for me.
And he answered: Yes, I’d do it for you, Mary.
Esther and Bernadette come to help me find the lost key, help me free myself from my self-imposed bondage, help me make my way down from the Knob; I can’t walk without their support. Stephen follows us, carrying Shadow. When we’re halfway down the slope, I ask them to stop.
I look back, look for Miriam.
She had not once moved since her final cry of despair. Like Lot’s wife, she seemed fixed in that one place, kneeling in the grass in her white gown blackened with blood.
But now, as I look back, I can’t see her.
Stephen asks, “Where is she?”
The weight of the pain has made it too difficult to breathe. I can’t answer that, even if I knew the answer.
Chapter 26
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
The sun is moving south now as the summer wanes. Another August almost gone, another summer. At my age each season vanished is something precious lost.
Yet today I feel almost youthful with the golden seed heads of the grass rising around me, enveloping me in their piquant, dusty scents. I can forget, as I sit with my legs stretched out, one arm back to prop me, face turned up to the sun, that I will have to ask Jeremiah to help me when I decide to rise. But he’ll offer his strong hand. He’d carry me if I asked. I won’t. I’m still quite capable of walking with no other assistance than my cane, and I walk every day. It keeps me strong. But it’s gratifying to know I can depend on Jeremiah. I have at times no choice but to depend on him and the family since that night on the Knob, since Bernadette told me I had suffered a heart attack.
Jeremiah sits a few feet away near a mound of earth sparsely covered with grass. We are in the cemetery east of the orchard. Before May we didn’t think of it as a cemetery. It was simply the place where Rebecca was buried. Now there are two graves, two wooden markers with names and dates carved on them. They remind me of all the poignant little cemeteries Rachel and I found after the End.