This Census-Taker

I knew I wouldn’t reach it. I didn’t expect to be gone far or long. This time I didn’t even put on extra clothes, though I knew how cold it was. And though my face burned with it, and though my breath was fog, I felt almost too hot, or not too hot but too something, as if there was no boundary between the air and me. I was dissolving, both sweaty and shivering. I went without hesitation. I could see enough of the path to descend.

  There’d been so many of these descents; there are so many ways to go down a hill. I remembered the last but one time, when I ran alone, a weeping mess with death behind me. That earlier me was a stranger child for whom I had care and with whom my patience was strained.

  I froze. And after an instant a jackal yelled, as if it had been waiting for me to stand still. It was close. I tried to understand why I’d stopped.

  A coil of mist moved in front of me. I tried to think about why I didn’t continue down. I raised a foot experimentally and put it back again, slowly, just where it had been.

  The mist beckoned me and pushed me back at the same time. It thickened and seemed to fill with watchers, or with a single fleeting man. I couldn’t continue.

  Is it his keys? I thought in the rising wind. My legs trembled.

  It’s his keys, I thought. Had my father cut a key to hold me?

  I saw deeper shadow in that cloud and felt cold because there was certainly someone there, someone looming out of it, carrying a burden. I was sure it was whomever I’d seen, or thought I had, the night I’d last taken the path. I heard footsteps and quick animal breathing and the jackal howled again.

  The mist seemed to move aside and be replaced and who came wasn’t the dim watcher I remembered but someone smaller, a woman shape or a girl shape. She raised an arm.

  Here was Samma.

  I gasped and put up my hands and cried out a wordless greeting like an animal, and the animal watching us whimpered.

  Samma carrying a bag on her shoulder come up so high, come out of the town I’d come to understand she would or could not leave, standing on the hill path ready for me, knowing I’d be there.

  She looked taller and underfed and much older to me. She looked drawn so far from the bridge. But she smiled, and it was not too wary, and she waved me down to where she waited.

  I thought of the jackal slinking away from our reunion. But I still couldn’t move my feet further down the hill, so I raised my arms and, deciding she could overcome herself, beckoned her urgently in turn to come up a little more.

  —

  Another twenty steps for her and she struggled as if there wasn’t enough air.

  I whispered, “See?”

  When she reached me, first she shook my hand as if we were adults, and I liked that. Then she hugged me in a rough way, hesitated and did it again, so hard I let out sounds.

  “You’re here!” I said into her clothes. “How did you know to find me?”

  “I heard something,” she said. Her voice was sluggish. “There was a shot. Right near here. I thought that might mean something. I got thinking you might come down.”

  She was lying. She must have been here when the shot came to know it had been close, which meant she’d been there a long time. I suspected then that she’d been up night after night, as far as, according to the constraints she’d laid, she was able, to wait and hope to find me. I’d come at last.

  She shivered on the rocks and spread a blanket on the dirt for us and sat me down beside her. She had food for me. Sugary brittle. Vegetables you could eat raw. I gnawed them.

  Eventually I said, “That boy said Drobe was gone.”

  We stopped eating. She didn’t look stricken. She didn’t look anything except calm and unhappy. “People go,” she said.

  “Why did he go?” I said. “He’d never just go.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t come by you? I thought he’d come for you. What if he did, though? Maybe he tried.”

  I heard sniffing: our hungry watcher had come back with a companion, it sounded like. We weren’t frightened.

  “You know,” Samma said. “Maybe he did. Maybe he just went.”

  Boys and girls might become more solitary thieves. They might find a way or a person with whom to become some sort of adult. They might antagonize the wrong someone and disappear.

  “Maybe it was the police,” she said. “He kept telling them to take your father. Maybe they took him instead.”

  “What about his friend?” I said. “He was waiting for someone in the picture-house. Not just you, I mean. Someone not from the town.”

  She inclined her head.

  “When we went back to that hall,” she said, “when your father took you, someone had been there and took everything away except what Drobe had.” I remembered him holding that sealed packet we couldn’t read.

  “You know everyone in the bridgetown,” I said. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw Drobe’s friend, either, the girl he told you about.” She paused. “Whoever it is has come to town now, they find you, you can’t find them—.” Her voice was low.

  She looked away from me. “I can’t come back for a bit,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. Just watched her and tried not to let my lips quiver.

  She told me she had the others to think of too, especially now. “It ain’t like I could keep coming back,” she said as if I was arguing with her. “And it ain’t like Drobe’s coming back.”

  She gave me a knife with a blade that folded into its handle. “If he comes for you,” she said. She stabbed the air to show me.

  She told me a few quick stories.

  “I wanted to give you those papers,” she said at last. “The ones Drobe found.”

  “Why?”

  “You can read, can’t you? But if he still had them he must have took them with him.”

  She hesitated. She eyed me and I persuaded her to say whatever it was that I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to say.

  “There was a woman,” she told me. “Or a girl.”

  Days after Drobe had gone, days since she’d seen him. Late in the evening, Samma standing looking out of the window of her second-favorite bridge-top house as if to discern where he’d gone. She’d fallen back in shock as a face swooped in to stare at her from the dark.

  “She was like shadow herself,” Samma said. “She whispered something. It was hard to understand her. She had a young voice. I think she wasn’t older than me, or not by much.”

  “Was it a ghost?” I said. Samma shrugged.

  “What did she say?” I said.

  “Like I say, it was hard to tell. I don’t even think she was looking at me.” In turn Samma did not look at me; her eyes were fixed in recollection. “Like she was looking behind me into the room for someone else. None of the others saw her. She sounded proper upset. I think she said, ‘Where is Drobe? Where’s the repeal?’ Then she was gone and I don’t even know,” she said.

  Samma took a big bottle from her bag. She gave it to me. I could barely lift its green glass.

  “He left that,” she said. “Drobe went to get it then left it. I think it’s for you.”

  In the bottom of the bottle was a scaly scrap and discolored and broken animal bones.

  Samma gave me a fast and surly hug without looking at me. I wanted to say anything to her, anything so she’d stay longer. I felt sorry for her as well as for me and, all over again, I didn’t want to be alone on the hill with my father. But I couldn’t stop her.

  “I’ll come when I can,” she said and went quickly back to the path. She tried not to let me see her relief as she descended.

  You wanted to put your foot down after her, but you didn’t, maybe couldn’t. You watched her go.

  That was the last time you saw her. The cold return, the lights of your father’s room, the dark formlessness of the house waited.

  A man came.

  My father had gone downhill. I was upstairs, drawing on the walls, to repopulate them at last. The animals I drew looked diff
erent now. I added faces and stood them upright. The new arrivals eyed the streets where their predecessors had been and I whispered to them all. I could feel the house buck in the gusts, and through the windows I saw trees hurled around.

  Someone knocked and I started so violently I hurt my neck. But I knew it wasn’t my father so I ran down the stairs and opened the door.

  Strips of leaf and twigs rushed into the kitchen. I braced. The sky was all flat cloud but bright. I was looking into a silhouette. I blinked to clear the wind from my eyes.

  “The key-maker’s not here,” I said. “You can wait outside. I don’t know how long he’ll be. Or you can go back to the town and he’ll be here again tomorrow.”

  “I’m not here for the key-maker,” the visitor said.

  I could see his outlines now. A man who held something in his hands.

  His skin was deeply lined, but I don’t think he was much older than my father. He was bald but for an island of short gray hair at the front of his forehead and a rim of it at the back of his head. He was tall, not as rangy as my father but thin and tough looking. He wore glasses. The reflections on their lenses hid his eyes. He had on a dark gray suit with a white shirt. All his clothes were dusty. The bridgetown people didn’t wear ties and I was bewildered by the stripe of black-blue cloth crisscrossed with a simple design.

  He carried a big rifle over his shoulder, a box in his left hand, a clipboard in his right.

  The man reared back his head and I saw that his spectacles were made of shifting planes. I’d never seen such machines as bifocals. He looked at me through the magnifying facets.

  “He isn’t here,” I repeated.

  “I’m not here to speak to him,” the man said. He spoke with a kind of singsong enthusiasm. He used my language well but I could tell it wasn’t his own. “That is, I am, eventually,” he said. “I will. He’ll be back. It’s very much my job to speak to him. But I came here now because he isn’t here.”

  His accent was familiar to me.

  He said, “I came to speak to you.”

  —

  I didn’t let him into the house and he didn’t ask to enter. He put down the leather box-suitcase. He held his papers flat against his body. Below us on the slope I could see a swirl of dark frozen air, a hillside squall throwing one of the brief year-round bursts of snow that characterizes that region. It sounded like voices.

  “So, I am here to speak to your father,” the visitor said. “But not yet. I have to do a job. I will be asking him questions. I’ve been working in the town, and I’ve kept hearing about things that I need to follow up. That I need to know more about.” He looked at me carefully until I lowered my eyes.

  A guffaw shocked me.

  “My mule,” the man said. He pointed down the hill to where my own unseen goat was answering his animal.

  “I have to make a record,” he said. “I’m here because I need information from certain people in town. Your father’s one of them, because of where he was born. So I need to know things. Like what he does.”

  “We’re not in town,” I mumbled.

  “This counts as town.”

  “I can tell you what he does,” I said.

  “What money he makes,” he continued. “How long he’s been here. Where he was born I know. Which is the point.”

  I shifted.

  “What he did back there. At different times, good, and not good. People in town have told me a lot about this and that’s all very well but I do need to know from him. He’s the last subject here, but one. This is the last household. I need to know about his family.” He tilted his head. “Which means I have to know about his children, and I’m going to ask him about them. Which means you. Yes.

  “And,” he said, “I have to ask him about his wife.”

  “You know,” I said instantly.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know.” I dredged it out. “They said. Down there. They told you. About my mother.”

  “Below?” He didn’t look away from me. “They did.” I strained to hear. “They did tell me things but I do need to know for certain. I need to hear from the key-maker himself. And his family.”

  “You know she’s gone.”

  I stretched up on tiptoe and looked past him down the rocks. The tiny storm was done. They last only seconds, and if you’re caught in them their snowflakes are so minuscule and dry they feel like cold dust.

  The man’s weapon had two barrels and they were not the same. One was thick enough that I could have put two of my fingers into it, the other perhaps half that bore.

  “This?” he said. He took it from his shoulder and held it for me to see. “It’s a combination gun. Look, two triggers. This”—he tapped the broad-gauge tube—“a shotgun. It spreads possibilities.” He made an extending cone with his hands. “And this?” The other. “This rifle’s a long-range single shot.”

  He showed me how he’d aim with it.

  “You can shoot one, the other, or both. The rifle shoots right down the very center of the spread. Like an average. A range and its mean. This is an averaging gun.”

  He shouldered it carefully again.

  “They said your father’s wife is gone, yes, that’s what they said to me,” the man said. He held his pen above his clipboard. “We can get started,” he said. “We can save time. You tell me about it.”

  —

  And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I’d grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading. The foreign man would have to work on me.

  He waited with his pen ready. He said to me, “What I do is I count people. I count people and things.

  “Not everyone. If you counted everyone you’d never stop, would you? I’m putting things in sets. My job’s to count just the people who were born where I was, or whose parents or grandparents were. Then I write down what I’ve counted. That’s my job. I started years ago, when we decided we had to take stock of things. After troubles. We needed to know where we were. Where we all were. So I go all over counting people from my home. I’ll show you where I put it all. There are books.

  “Your father came here a long time ago and he’s my responsibility. I have to mark his details, you see. I know you were born here. If I’m marking down about him that means I have to mark down something about you. And something about your mother. I have to get the details right. There aren’t many in this town who come from where I do, but there are a few. One’s a poultry farmer. She told me there was one more person of my polity up here. On this job, yours is the last family I have to account for.”

  —

  I told him what my father had done.

  I told him what he’d done not only to my mother but to the others, to the people and the animals. I told the man as he stood on my front step in the leaf-dust, disallowed from the house because my father had forbidden me to let anyone in.

  The visitor listened. I couldn’t see what he wrote down.

  I don’t know if my voice shifted up and down with hope and desperation. I didn’t know when my father would come home. I wouldn’t look in the direction he’d taken, nor would I step forward to see the path, with him perhaps rising on it now. I told it all again.

  It must have been confused and it must have taken a while. I sat cross-legged in the threshold and kept talking. The man stood and wrote. Twice his mule called for him and he ignored it.

  I didn’t tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help. I told the man because he asked me to, because that was what he said he wanted. For his notes.

  “Where was she from?” he said.

  I shook my head. I was crying a bit by then, without noise.

  “From here,” I said. “But she went to live by the sea. That’s where they met. I have somet
hing she wrote. But I don’t think she wrote it. D’you want to see?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  “You told all this to the people in the town,” he said.

  “They said they can’t do anything because of no proof.”

  He looked up and said, “Do you know why your father ran here in the first place? I know. Where do you think your mother is?” He said that quietly and didn’t lower his clipboard.

  My voice caught and it took several attempts to answer.

  “In the hole,” I said.

  “In the hole. Maybe you can show me the hole.”

  I did nothing and he regarded me.

  “You remember the job I have to do?” he said. “You remember I need to write down everything I can about your mother? So I should see what there is to see so I can get all my details right.

  “Show me.”

  —

  I took him to the rubbish hole.

  We went around the house and up onto the rough ground between thorns and dock bushes and a few meters beyond the closest trees I passed by where I’d buried the bottle with the skeleton still inside.

  Looking back I saw the roan mule on the path. A big animal laden under packs. It looked up as we came into its sightline and put back its ears and huffed at us as we ascended.

  I stood at the cave mouth’s rocky stockade and gestured within.

  The man entered. He walked in and stopped where the crack split the darkness of the cave with a darker cut. He leaned carefully over as the hunter and the schoolteacher and my mother and father had done.

  He got onto his hands and knees and gripped the edge and lowered his head into the rift. I watched him with my hands held tightly to my chest.

  I said, “It goes on down.”

  “It does,” he said. He didn’t turn to me and his voice was faint. He was speaking into the dark.

  “No one can see inside,” I said. “No one can see down there.”

  “Well,” he said. He rose. He turned and came back into the day brushing dirt off his knees and the palms of his hands. “I have to be sure, that’s part of my job. So let me see.”

  When he left me there I was too surprised to be afraid as he walked briskly back the way we had come. I didn’t know if I was wanted so I waited and he quickly returned carrying a satchel.