This Census-Taker

  “Don’t say that,” he said. He whispered it to me through the window. He put his hands to his cheek and his trembling mouth. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  I wondered what would happen when we ran out of food. We had sacks of pulses and several loaves of the bitter bread of that town, which lasts for weeks and won’t go bad. There were dry stores in the pantry, a tiny room in which I would sometimes stand and close the door to be surrounded on three sides by rising shelves of jars, of desiccated things, of salted bits, and, more every week, of cobwebs and the husks of spiders’ meals and the bodies of the spiders themselves that my father would not sweep away except accidentally as he reached for food. So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be finished soon, leaving us with those items of which we had a surplus, like dried mushrooms, which would far outlast anything else. I wondered if my father would simply refuse to address this. If he would make meals or have me make them with fewer and fewer ingredients so our diets would continue a while as they were but grow daily and weekly more thin, more flavorless, until for the months until the last jar ran completely out we would be dining on mushrooms, mushrooms for breakfast, soaked in water and salt, mushrooms crushed for lunch, fried in oil until the oil ran out and then simply seared and blackened in a pan over the fire for our suppers, or gnawed raw, until even they went and we would die, one after the other, the taste of mushrooms in our mouths. I couldn’t decide whether I, being smaller and eating less, would die more quickly than he in this mushroomless state or more slowly. I couldn’t decide which would be better or worse. If he went before me, of course, then I would be able at last—I can’t parse or explain this logic—to descend to the town, and ask for food, not mushrooms, and to live. But then I decided that I would be so weak I’d be past moving and would die after all too, looking at dead him all the while, in that circumstance.

  We did not die. One warm morning I entered the parlor and blinked to see that a large jar at my head-height had been cack-handedly refilled, leaving lentils spilled across the dusty shelves. That there were new pickles, and stacks of flatbread.

  I don’t know when or how my father was ordering food, which merchants were providing it or when they were delivering, but here in his hilltop house he was clearly not so shunned as he had been. Whatever money he had was good again.

  Days after the appearance of the pulses, a young grocer walked into my view up the hill, in each hand a bag bearing the sign of her shop. She saw me in my spying place on a promontory. She hesitated, then sped up to make her sale.

  Weeks after my return as I sat on the low branches of a tree watching my house, I heard stone knocking on the wood and I looked up to glimpse a boy wave at me from behind a rock. He let go of a handful of pebbles.

  “Drobe,” I whispered with a great rush of hope, but immediately knew I was wrong.

  I recognized him from the bridge house but I’d never known his name, and I didn’t ask now. He was a slight boy between my age and Samma’s, and he watched me with a sharp and agitated face, staying behind a rise, out of sight of the house in case my father was at his window. I climbed the stone behind which the boy sat and spoke without looking at him, for the same reason.

  He looked around, unendingly astonished at the landscape. It was the first time he’d been out of the town.

  “We’ve got plans,” he said. “We’re going to get you away. Samma said to tell you. We’re working on plans.”

  He gave me hard sweets they must have stolen.

  “That’s from Samma,” he said.

  “Will she come?”

  He blinked at me in guarded surprise.

  “She won’t come?” I said.

  I had by then some sense of how we’re all curbed by scends directed at us and by our own compulsions, even something of Samma’s own, but you must remember I was very young. Perhaps I thought my want would obviate them.

  “She give me a message for you,” he said. “Listen. ‘Some of them say they’ll never take your dad’s money.’ ” He concentrated and repeated it singsong, as she must have drilled him. Some of them say, they’ll never tay, kyore dad’s mon-ay.

  “ ‘That your ma’s not forgot,’ ” he said. “ ‘That they think of you.’ ”

  “What do they think of me?”

  “Don’t, I lost my place. Wait. ‘That your ma’s not forgot. That they think of you. Help’s on the way, we know what to do.’ We heard there’s officers coming,” he said. I could hear when he went off-script.

  “Officers have already come,” I said. “They wouldn’t help me.”

  “Proper ones. Not the sash-danglers.”

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “They already came.”

  He paused and looked worried at his memories. “Wait,” he said. “All right, it ain’t them, then. Someone’s coming, to help, I think. Samma knows. We can tell them about what your dad done and they can do something so you’ll be able to come down to our house.” He brightened.

  “Who is it coming?” I said. “Do you mean…Drobe said someone was sent from way away, come to check on things—”

  “Drobe…” The boy shook his head and looked away. “I mean maybe that’s it. I don’t know who it is he’s talking about. The thing is with Drobe…” A moment passed and he shrugged.

  “I just heard there’s officials come to the town,” he said uncomprehendingly. “And I’m telling you we’ve got plans for your dad. Samma said. We ain’t going to let him keep you here. But Samma, she says we have to wait a bit, because if we just bring you back now they’ll find you again like before. They’ll be watching now, and then we’ll be in bad trouble and then we can’t help you, can we?”

  He didn’t look at me.

  I wandered uphill. He followed me by hidden ways.

  We threw stones at a stump. His aim was much better than mine. He broke off a twig with his first attempt and made himself laugh because now, he said, it looked like a fat and angry bird.

  “Where is Drobe?” I said.

  The boy wouldn’t look at me.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “Gone.”

  “What?”

  “He’s gone. He left. He’s gone.”

  I stopped myself crying out. “Where?” I said. “Where’s he gone?” I had to say it through my teeth. I wondered if my father had found him.

  “I don’t know. One day he just wasn’t there. He’d been spending time with someone, then one day his friend was gone, and that was it.” I thought for a second he meant me but he didn’t. I could hear suspicion when he said friend. “He said there was nothing he wanted here any more. And one night he went. So now he’s nowhere.”

  “He’s somewhere,” I said. I wanted to say more but neither of us knew what so we shared a sad silence.

  When he looked into the sky at last and I could see him prepare to leave, the boy told me, “Samma’s been saying. You hear people talking about your dad.” I didn’t move. “They’re all angry with what he done. What you said. Then after a bit you hear them talking about the keys he did for them. What they do. Like…” He cast about for an example. “Like it changes the weather, one woman says.” He inclined his head eagerly. “Samma said we might take it from her—the key I mean—and see if it does.

  “I mean I wouldn’t buy it,” he said quickly, “I wouldn’t give him any money for anything now, but if we could get a key like that…Well, I mean, changing the weather. Or anything.” He looked at me cautiously and shrugged as if surely I must see. “I mean, that’s something?”

  I’d never used any of my father’s keys.

  The boy waited but I wouldn’t speak. I didn’t suggest he stay out of sight while I crept inside to see what I could find or that I’d leave the workroom window unlocked for him that night to climb in through. I wouldn’t look at him. I said nothing about the keys at all. Eventually he
went.

  Sometimes when my father walked on the hills I’d stand in the entrance to his workroom and smell metal dust and oil and see some half-finished shape in his vise.

  I don’t know when his customers started to come back. At first I didn’t see them, only heard voices in his room. First a man, then later a woman, explaining what they needed the metal to do. Then I’d hear the rasp of my father working.

  We acquired two goats. One cold morning I woke to their urgent bleating. They were chained by the front door frantically eating gorse and butting each other. My father smiled at me and said, “These are yours.”

  They were young she-goats, frenetic and boisterous, and I loved them utterly and was terrified for them. I’d follow their famished, curious investigations of the slopes, the fervor with which they went for weeds, nosed aside a few fallen scarers my parents had made. I tried to keep them away from the dying garden with which I still struggled, a custodian of its decline. Whenever my father looked at them, I felt sick.

  “What are they called?” he said to me.

  I shrugged.

  “Why won’t you name them?” He was sad.

  I did name them, but with fleeting, random syllables, which I changed every two or three days, and which I never told him, as if that might keep them safe.

  They ate dead leaves; they ate gnarly barky bushes. They grazed on bedraggled refuse I pulled up from the vegetable patches, and on clots of moss in the corners of our walls.

  —

  On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I’ve since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most. What we used was an inheritance, I think, a throwback from somewhere more changeable. It did grow colder in the top room. It was weeks after I’d run away, after the goats came, but I don’t know exactly how long, before my father killed again, unless he hid other such killings from me.

  I stood in the remnants of the garden on an evening full of sunlight lingering on the slopes, and below the raucous goat complaining I became aware of another growing beat. My insides clenched.

  My father’s window glowed against the creeping dark. He huddled within, bent by the sill. He was the color of the dirt on the window. His hand was rising and falling in that deadening drumming, and I saw something limp and flailing snapping back and forth in his grip. There was no more killing purpose to his continued pounding.

  I don’t know what it was. He held the animal by the ears and punched it again and again into the ruined floor and made its body a sack of blood. I was sluiced through with a sort of bilious terror but I wasn’t surprised.

  Nor did I hide. I just stood by the glass and watched and whimpered.

  When he was done breaking the animal (I don’t know how he’d caught it, I don’t know what it had done, I don’t know why he took it back into the house to do it or if it was dead when he did) my father stood, holding the dripping skin. It was properly dark now and he stood in front of his window with the light behind him so he was a black form to me, a shadow man, and I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew which one it was.

  He certainly saw me but he looked at me no longer than he did at anything else before he left the room and I heard the front door open and I ran to keep the house between us and he went to fill the hole in the hill alone.

  —

  Once during the goats’ vigorous evening meal my father leaned out and looked at me and said calmly, “Quiet them, please. Will you take them somewhere else, please?”

  Whenever he spoke directly to me I was pinned in place. I made myself stumble forward pulling at the goats’ leads and they complained and went stiff-legged so I had to lean against them while my father watched. I strained. I saw past him to a man in his room.

  Maybe I recognized him from the town, though it was weeks since I’d been there. I thought maybe he’d been at a pump, or hauling sacks of stone across the bridge, for workshops. For an instant, looking at the bulk of him, I thought he was the hunter, but he wasn’t. He waited for my father to return to their conversation. On the table between them was a half-finished drawing of a key.

  —

  Are the keys waiting for you? I didn’t want to ask my father but I wanted him to tell me. Do you make them out of nothing or do you find their edges?

  He used scrap. He used beaten-flat metal panels, which he’d heat and into which he’d sometimes hammer fetish scobs. He used the blackened bottoms of saucepans: those he liked because they were flat and thin already.

  So was there a key waiting for him to cut it out of un-key metal? I liked the thought of it but I never did trust my own hankerings.

  When I saw them from that time on, some of his customers wore ugly expressions or put them on when they saw me, to illustrate how much they disapproved of my father, how much distaste they had for him.

  —

  One hazy cold morning he told me to play and to be safe and to wait. He put empty bags over his shoulders and I heard the coins in his hands and he set out to the town again, for the first time since he had come to fetch me from the police.

  “If anyone comes while I’m gone,” he called back, “tell them to wait outside. Or tell them to go away.”

  If he girded himself to face the town that still despised him, though it would feed him again and used his cutting services again, he hid the fact as well as he hid many things.

  I ran up the stairs to the top floor to watch him from its dirty windows. When he was gone there came a lonely calm and my chest loosened.

  —

  That was my first day alone uphill. I took the goats downslope a bit and they screamed at each other and I screamed too to see what it was like. They ravenously tore up what looked to me like nothing. I was close enough to our house to hear when, at noon, someone shouted at the door.

  She was a thickset red-haired woman with a suspicious stare who watched me with her arms folded. When I approached and told her the key-maker wasn’t there she cursed filthily and threw something hard against the step, shouting, “What am I supposed to do with this now?”

  It bounced away. I waited while she stormed away and when she’d left I got onto all fours and found what she’d discarded. It was a bit of some engine. It looked like a heart, I remember that. I put it on the kitchen table. When, hours later, my father returned, he put down his heavy bags at the sight of it.

  “A woman brought it,” I said. He picked it up and turned it over. “She threw it away and went.”

  “Whatever this came from,” he said, “what she wants is a key to make it start again.”

  “Can’t she just put it back in?” I said.

  Outside the goats howled. My father’s eyes flicked momentarily in their direction.

  “She might,” he said. “She wants a key to help her. I could make her a key from this.”

  I watched him sort his awls and files, his flat metal and vise.

  He went down to town again, not many days later, taking the remains, and soon such a trip was nothing to remark on, and sometimes more people came up, as the woman had, while he was gone. And I’d tell them when to return. I couldn’t leave, still, and I knew it, though not quite why. I could only go so far down.

  —

  One evening I found only one goat, though I’d tethered the two together, as was usual. I knew them apart: it was the more adventurous and argumentative which was gone. I could have told you what her name was at that time.

  I picked up her chain. At its end was her leather collar. It had been cut through.

  Her comrade seemed untroubled. She rushed up to me in case I’d brought anything new or unusual to eat from the cupboard, as I was not supposed to do but occasionally did. She eyed and shoved me.

  I whispered, “Where’s your sister?”

  Of course I thought my father had taken her but even then in the waning light, my throat stopped up with fear for the animal, it didn’t feel as if he would have done
this. I couldn’t imagine him taking a knife to leather that way, not with his face as I’d seen it.

  Still I could barely speak as I returned to the house. I told him. His reaction both reassured and terrified me. His fury made me certain he wasn’t responsible; it made me even more afraid because he was furious, though not with me.

  He slammed his hand repeatedly on the table and I made myself as still and small as possible while he raged at thieves. For the only time I remember he shifted briefly to his first language, in which I now write, which then I didn’t know at all. He cursed and glared.

  I saw him swallow and keep his voice quiet when he spoke to me directly.

  With no gun he took some bladed tools from his workroom and went striding out into the twilight. A strong wind had come up and it shoved dust into the room before I got the door closed. I watched him through the window, flashlight in one hand, some nasty spike in the other, hauling over the rocks in the face of all the blown grit in the world, baying his ugly gibberish language into the hill.

  I closed my eyes and imagined my house without him, without me, now that my mother was gone. Empty again, the house would grow more and more sensitive to weather, in the absence of noise, of human noise. My house had always known what the weather would do.

  After I don’t know how long, while I stood ready for something, I heard a single cracking shot, not far from the house.

  Many possibilities occurred to me, with emotions for which I have no name. But my father returned shortly after that, still scowling, and the darkness became complete.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “I didn’t find it. You heard. Whoever took it is gone, and eating chevon tonight.”

  He went to cut metal.

  Long after midnight, with the grinding of his work still audible through his closed door, I came down and set out alone into the black toward the bridgetown for a third and last time.