This River Awakens

  He wished he’d gone out like the Dane. Something as deliberate, something that was itself a statement, an heroic embrace. Instead, here he was, huddled under the blankets, cowering as she cracked through the black sky somewhere overhead.

  Earth’s own blanket. I should’ve heeded the Dane’s decision, the boldly inscribed reasons that took him, step by step, so measured and certain, into that end. And the old woman, writ as she was in the flesh, both glory and decay, she made fire her final blanket, the smoke gathering under the roof, settling black over more ancient smears and smudges, her own layer, her own continuing of the story – I’ve seen caves just as dark, the walls an eternal folding of lives, one over the other, that spoke of ages and ages. She did the same, there in that house in a forgotten corner of an ancient city. The Dane and her – they’d made themselves part of their own history, gestures without choice, so very fated and seamless and inevitable, so … perfect.

  But Gribbs had no such luxury. The tradition that called to him rolled unseen in depths thousands of miles away. Pilgrimage. I’d forgotten, I’ve rejected my own temple, squandered all these years. Denying the signs. Ignoring the call. And now it’s too late.

  Outside, the wind thrummed through branches, trees creaking and swaying. Howls, distant howls, sounded like horns, proclaiming the beginning of something. What? Can I pretend to be that blind? Can I keep turning away as if, as if unmindful? Too old for that game. Still, the end of a life doesn’t necessarily mean a final acceptance, a coming to terms. Dying doesn’t insist on a last few minutes of peace. There’s no rules, none, none at all.

  V

  The smell of cooking filled the house. Jennifer paused just inside the entranceway. Not porridge, not soup. Roast chicken. She kicked off her sneakers, peeled the sodden socks from her feet, which were wrinkled and white.

  The tap in the kitchen went on, water drumming into the sink. She hesitated, then walked towards the sounds. Her mother was making supper, the way she used to do. Potatoes, greens, chicken, bread rolls. Her father sat at the table, his forearms flat on the red Formica, a glass of beer positioned in the gap between the hands. He looked up blearily as Jennifer entered.

  ‘Decided to talk, Mom?’ she asked. ‘Come on. The wires are out. Roulston says you can talk. Are you going to say something?’

  Her mother shrugged.

  The wind battered the sides of the house, the rain rattling like hail. Thunder rolled in from all sides, and the dogs kept howling.

  ‘I’m getting changed,’ Jennifer said.

  Her father spoke as she turned to go. ‘Got a goddamned nother call from your teacher. Goddamned calls us every other fucking day.’

  ‘Should be used to it by now, Daddy.’

  ‘Fuck that. You want us to get in trouble, again? Fucking smarten up, girl.’

  Jennifer cocked her head, pretending to think. ‘Hmmm,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll call Roulston, or the witch. Daddy’s drunk, I’ll say. Right here in the kitchen, he’s threatening me. Please help us. Please please please!’

  ‘You ain’t learned your lesson,’ her father growled, his expression dark and ugly.

  Her mother turned from the sink, a pot in her hand, her eyes on her husband.

  ‘Your lessons, I mean. That’s what the teacher said.’

  Jennifer left the room. She headed up the stairs. Even drunk, he thinks fast. Got to hand it to him. Mom should’ve brained him anyway. Self-defence, in anticipation of, or whatever. Splashed his brain all over the wall. Tile and Formica’s easy to clean. Easy.

  In her room, she stripped out of her wet clothes and lay down naked on the bed. She’d lost her appetite. There was a hit of acid left from her cache. She’d be taking a risk – with the storm outside and the monster prowling motionless under her floor. But there was a lock on her door now. She’d put it there herself, a sliding bolt, and with it in place she felt secure. The flashes of lightning would add to things, provided she was in the right state of mind.

  She thought of the hard crunch under her knuckles when she’d punched Lynk. That felt good. Satisfying. Lynk won’t tell. I won’t either. I wish Owen would just beat him up and get it over with. Lynk won’t start it, though. He’ll keep finding other ways. He’ll keep using Rhide, and anyone else he can think of. He’s scared of Owen. They’ve got a secret. And he’s jealous, too. Owen doesn’t know that, but I do, now I do. I won’t tell.

  She rose and put on an album, then returned to the bed. Now for the acid.

  * * *

  The wind broke down the walls, sweeping in not wet but dry and hot, lifting straw and ashes into the air, biting, tearing, stinging on the flesh.

  Somewhere outside, beyond the smoke, beyond the trees that now stalked forward, slick and glistening with frost – beyond all this, a fire raged unseen. An inferno, a sea of flame rising higher, getting closer with every moment.

  Ghosts swept through the smoke, their fingertips trailing thick threads of blood, their pale heads swept back as they wailed soundlessly at the sky.

  The wind rattled the world, twisted the black clouds overhead, drove them down into columns that spun out vapours that clawed the throat, seared the lungs. Thunder pounded, a slow drum that shook the ground.

  All at once, the flames were visible through the curtain of smoke, and new sounds, a faint creaking of spars and wind thudding sailcloth. From out of the smoke small, wiry black figures appeared, shedding moss and smouldering earth from their broad, gnarled shoulders. Some crawled on the broken ground. Some danced. Some wallowed and flopped about – every limb broken, their spines twisted.

  Pain. Pain in the body now, so much pain, rockets firing inside, along each vein, each artery. A skull ready to burst, but the eyes kept seeing, the eyes couldn’t turn away.

  Someone was pounding on the door.

  The creaking came nearer, a shape grey and silver cut a swath through the roiling smoke.

  Lightning, the flashes coming quicker and ever quicker, matching the cavorting pain, the lightning exploding in sheets like a sail above the ship. The smoke parted, tumbled away to reveal a hull of bones, armoured in blood-smeared nails – so implausible, so ghastly. Nails, pared from the fingers of the dead.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  He stood at the ship’s prow, glowing bright, framed there in the doorway. A boy. A man. His eyes were fire inside black circles, and he was smiling, his face streaming with rain. He held broken chains that dangled from his small hands. Wolves fanned out in his wake, furred black and oily, their eyes flashing in the incessant lightning.

  The drums pounded on.

  Pain everywhere, in each visible face, in each twisting, dancing body, pain in the tortured air and in the stalking, stumbling trees.

  He stood in the doorway, shining so very bright. He reached out a hand, let the chain in it slip through, rattle heavily to the floor.

  Gribbs screamed as the lightning cracked out, throwing the earth upward, driving the air down. The pain in him flashed in answer, then was gone, and he saw in the growing darkness a huge wheel all afire, geared, mechanistic, tumbling, rolling and bounding down a hill, down and away, its fire getting more distant, falling away, then winking out.

  * * *

  Someone pounded on the door. Jennifer spun on her bed. She remembered a devastating crash, a sound and feeling that shook everything, and now the world hummed in the aftermath, reverberating with the explosive shock.

  ‘Come on, you bitch!’ her father roared drunkenly through the door.

  Naked, Jennifer curled up on the bed, her eyes on the sliding bolt that shook and rattled as her father hammered repeatedly with his fist on the door.

  The rain spat lightly at the window. The wind falling off. From the highway came the wail of sirens.

  Lightning strike. Something’s been hit.

  ‘Your mother and me!’ her father yelled. ‘Are you dead? What was that screaming, girl? Open this fucking door or I’ll take a goddamned fucking sledgehammer to it!’
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  Imps clambered along the walls. Jennifer hissed, ‘Go away!’ Max? Where are you? Please, help! ‘Go away!’ she screamed.

  The imps flung themselves into every crack and corner, disappeared back into the walls, under the floor, into the roof.

  Her father fell silent. Another sound was out there, outside the door. Weeping. Her mother.

  Jennifer giggled, then fought it down. ‘I’m fine,’ she said loudly. ‘I had a bad, uh, a bad dream. That’s all.’

  ‘Open the door, girl,’ her father said.

  ‘No. I’ll come down in a few minutes.’

  ‘The fucking lock goes,’ he growled.

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll tell Roulston! If it goes I’ll tell him everything!’

  She heard him move away, down the hall, his footsteps uneven.

  ‘It’s all right, Mom.’

  A moment later Jennifer heard her leave as well.

  Fuck!

  The bed crackled under her as if the mattress was filled with straw. Her throat was as dry as dust. Things kept shifting in front of her, then settling back. She smelled clover, then cinnamon, then roast chicken.

  More sirens on the highway reached her. She uncurled herself, reached for her cigarettes. Poison in, poison out, that delicious numbing spike, down, down into the chest.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ she hissed. She’d broken a nail.

  VI

  Saturday morning broke grey and cold. Roland called with the news. I ate a hurried breakfast, pulled on my jean jacket and quickly left the house.

  On my way to the highway, I saw Carl up ahead. He’d run a few steps, then walk a few, then run again. I recalled how he’d been in gym class, hopeless at everything, running flat-footed, unable to handle a basketball, hit a volleyball, clumsy and pathetic, picked last on every team.

  He got poor grades, too, but I didn’t count that against him. Maybe, like me, he wasn’t trying, didn’t care, had better things to do – like dreaming about primeval jungles and lost cities, and growing up outside humankind, outside civilisation’s dulling, ignoble prison. Maybe he too dreamed about freedom.

  He had reached the highway by the time I came to the top of the hill. It started to rain again, a light spattering that felt cold against my face. As I passed opposite the overgrown lot I saw that a tree had blown down, its trunk and broken limbs crossing the old driveway. The dust from its rotted core was visible on the mud.

  As soon as I reached the highway I could see the damage. Roland, Lynk, Barb and Carl were already there. The candle factory’s top floor had been shattered near the front. A savage black streak traced a jagged path down the front of the building, cutting right across the giant geared wheel. Black timbers jutted from the broken corner, and soot stains from the smoke flared up above the second floor’s broken windows.

  I crossed the highway.

  Roland grinned at me. ‘Almost went up,’ he said. ‘But the firemen got here in time. And the rain kept it down, too.’

  ‘Lightning,’ Lynk said.

  I saw that his shiner had spread to under both eyes now. Boy, Roland must have hit him hard. ‘No kidding,’ I replied.

  Roland pointed. ‘That’s its scar – I heard the lightning turned the stone to glass.’

  ‘Really? Holy shit.’

  The fire trucks had rutted the ground in front of the building, leaving behind deep puddles that glistened with soot.

  ‘Here comes Jennifer,’ Barb said.

  I turned, watched her approach. My heart always sped up whenever I studied her, the way she moved, the shifting of her hips. She had a much better body than my sister, and best of all, she knew just how good it looked.

  She came up and wrapped her arms around me, surprising me with a long, deep kiss.

  ‘Whoo!’ Barb sang out behind us.

  Jennifer pulled back slightly, smiled at me, then stepped to one side, pulling me around with one arm along the small of my back.

  We faced the factory again.

  Jennifer said, ‘I almost hit the ceiling when I heard it.’

  ‘We lost a whole set of china,’ Roland said. ‘We thought we’d been hit ourselves.’

  Jennifer let go of me to take out her cigarettes. She pulled two out and handed one to Barb. After they got them lit, Jennifer settled back against me.

  I felt wonderful. I felt owned.

  ‘Wish the whole fucking thing burned,’ Lynk said, spitting into a puddle.

  Jennifer’s laugh seemed to sting him, because he swung his back to us.

  I looked up at the building. The lightning streak gleamed dully in the pale light.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I

  Sten’s pride.

  The dogs needed to run. They needed open fields, the ground a blur under them. They needed to run the way a fire needs to burn.

  Elouise studied them as she stood at the edge of her garden. The dogs eyed her in turn, tails wagging fitfully, ears cocked, waiting and – more than anything else – wanting.

  Wanting to be free. Simple words that should carry more than they did, that shouldn’t roll so lightly in her thoughts. The garden was lost. Nothing to harvest, and the air promised an early winter.

  Roulston had come by earlier, his usual Sunday morning visit. Too regular, too easy to plan for. Sten stayed in bed, anyway, pretending to be asleep. Anne’s follow-up report had been inconclusive – the social worker just wasn’t sure. She was concerned, especially on Jennifer’s behalf. Possible drug use, trouble at school – a deliberate bad influence on other children … and she has a boyfriend. Her first real one – they’ve been together all summer. I’ve never even met him. Were they taking drugs together? Had he done that to her or was it the other way around? The school had an opinion. Miss Rhide, who’d become a part of the family the same way Roulston and Anne had, had invaded them with phone calls, letters, notes sent home with Jennifer.

  ‘There’s no reason for this silence,’ Roulston had said. ‘Not physically, I mean. I understand that it’s proved useful, that it’s a way of avoiding things, of keeping yourself withdrawn. Tell me, how long will you let others speak for you, Elouise?’

  For ever. You don’t know my life, Doctor. You don’t know anything about me. My grandfather died in the First World War. My father died of cancer when I was ten. My only brother, just a kid, died at Dieppe. My mother’s grief killed her from the inside out, as if she’d taken into herself the world’s nightmare. I was young and the future was laid out in front of me. Nobody talked about choices. Find a man, a hard-working, decent man. A veteran, if at all possible, one who wouldn’t talk of what he’d been through, but one who’d know the difference between right and wrong. A solid, silent man. Then bring forth children. The world needs children, more now than ever. And a mother at home, and new dish soap and minor crises of cleanliness to cope with between the soap operas on television. The world needs women on diets, women with the morning coffee on a tray for their hard-working men. The woman needs to rely on him, just as he relies on her. A partnership in the producing and raising of children and bettering their future.

  Money at hand, the struggles now over – together and independent, they would create the next generation, each in their modern homes, with their two cars and the endless highways of opportunity and adventure.

  No choice. Expectation was everything. Even though the optimism rang false, the search for the ideal was desperate enough to achieve something like it. The false security of surfaces, of appearances, the pressure – the horrible, driving pressure, to be as we seemed to be.

  The lie destroyed them. It was only natural for the young people today to reject everything they’d done. The hypocrisy was impossible to ignore.

  Jennifer won’t be fooled. She won’t follow me in life. She’s living for herself. She’s learned to indulge, she’s learned what being young is all about. But … but where can she go? The choices are narrowing down, the expectation pushing her from all sides. She’s only thirteen. How can she withstand
them, how can she keep from buckling?

  ‘Jennifer is the main concern for Family Services,’ Roulston had said. ‘We have her future to think about. What’s happening now will affect the rest of her life. She’s in great danger of slipping into the abusive cycle. It’s familiar to her, and familiarity is a magnet. She can cope with what she knows – she’ll go looking for the same patterns in adult life.’

  Elouise could see that. She could see the genuine concern in the young doctor’s face. His words made her frightened for Jennifer, and yet a part of her answered him, bitter and sly. From one cycle into another. The first one we can all agree is terrible, tragic. The second one – where she breaks away from her family’s history – is where you want her. Where she can pretend to be happy, well adjusted to the perfect world of twenty years ago. A solid, dependable husband, a solid, dependable Hoover in hand in woman’s war against dust-balls. The preferred cycle, keeping us at home and helpless. She doesn’t deserve either, Doctor. What else can you offer?

  I saw on the news. Women were burning bras. It was silly, but I cried.

  The dogs pawed at the mud alongside the chain-link wall. Kaja – the mother who’d lost a son – one step from showing just how savage she can be. She dreamed of the chance to rewrite the past, to defeat the helpless despair of watching Max die under a wheel – with the cage wire wall between her and him. She was muscle and bone and teeth and in her body was the memory of pain – the fire’s white-hot core.

  Caesar strutted. He always did, these days. When his mother was in heat and penned up in the separate run, he wanted her desperately, but had to settle for Shane instead. The normal, natural horrors of living in a cage.

  The back porch door opened and Sten stepped out. He went down the steps, moving loosely, sloppily, and tossed an empty beer bottle under the porch. He straightened and grinned at her.