Cargo
by Michael F. Flynn
Early morn, and the sun is up, though the proof would be hard to come by, for the clouds are low and the color of old dishwater. Bright threads of white flash through them like the shuttle of a loom, and distant rumbles follow soon after. A sudden rush of wind rolls through the snug Moren Valley, tousling the grass and whipping the tall, thin trees.
Little Jace runs through the woods as fast as he can, though the brush grows close and thick and there is no trail. He trips on a stone and sprawls into the ancient leaves and cast-off bark that litter the woodland floor. But he is a small boy and resilient and aside from abrasions on his palms and knees he feels no pain. The urgency of his mission propels him to his feet, and shortly he breaks into the open ground at the edge of the village. “Uncle Nob!” he cries. “Uncle Nob!”
In the village of Moren’s Run, any man is Uncle, and might be father.
No one answers him. They are busy lashing up the shutters on their huts against the coming rain, hauling laundry from lines, gathering rust-threatened sickles and hoes under shelter. Dogs yelp. Boys hustle thunder-spooked sheep toward their pens. Amidst the bustle, one more rushing, shouting boy goes unnoticed.
Jace spies Teffny, the priestess, bending into the wind, holding her gowns against herself. She has been out ensuring the fertility of the spring fields with the Chosen Man and has been chased from her duties by the sudden squall. “Ma Teffny!” cries Jace. “Ma Teffny! Have you seen Old Nob?”
Teffny grabs her poke bonnet before the wind can deprive her of it, and her skirts whip up around her knees. “Over there,” she says, trying to point without releasing the various holds on her clothing. “By the cornfield.”
Jace hurries past the huts and down onto the low ground from which a knot of men is trotting uphill with hoes shouldered like spears. He searches the faces, but Uncle Nob is not among them; so he runs through the newly planted corn, past the corpse of the Chosen Man, until he spies Old Nob standing at the edge of the field and watching the approaching storm clouds.
Nob is thin and tall, very much like the sapling beeches, and like them he sways, though whether from the wind, as they do, or from drink, Jace does not guess. Nob’s long, white hair flutters in streamers off the side of his head.
“Uncle Nob!” the boy calls over the bluster of the wind. Lightning zigzags through the approaching clouds like a mouse through the fields.
“Holy Franklin,” the old man says. “Holy Franklin…”
“Uncle Nob!” Jace calls again.
This time, the old man hears him. He turns and his eternal sadness is broken for an instant by a smile. Uncle Nob’s face is much like the lowering clouds overhead. Seldom does the sun pierce it. More often, it rains. “Jace!” he says. “Where have you come from?” Then, toward the flickering sky: “Holy Franklin!”
Maxwell unleashes his daemons and the clouds crackle like dry autumn leaves underfoot. Lightnings flash, one after the other. The sky booms.
Jace tugs at his sleeve. “Come quick, Uncle Nob. Come quick! Bro Will is in awful trouble.”
“Oh, what now?” Uncle Nob bends over, close enough that Jace can smell the liquor on his breath. “What has that delinquent…? Ay-yi! Such thunder!” He makes fending motions, but even as he does, Franklin summons a bolt to stab the cliffs across the river.
Jace pulls again at his sleeve. “You must come-see!”
“Oh-ho! Must I? Just past sunrise, and already…? I swear: If’n a boy could get in trouble while sleeping, Will would find a way to do it.” Uncle Nob laughs a little. “Well, come along, lad. Where is he?”
Nob is already striding out of the cornfield, his long legs stepping high and storklike, pausing only for a bow of respect toward the Chosen Man, on whom he throws a token clod.
No one marks their passage through the village. The rain and lightning have herded everyone inside their huts, as the boys had earlier herded the sheep into their pen. The village now huddles snug against spring fires, dry so long as the rain does not find the chinks among the wattles.
The wind dies while Nob and Jace are still only partway to the woods. A few big drops strike the path and raise craters in the dirt, then more drops patter the nearby leaves, and then it is sluicing down upon them. “Ho-ho!” Nob laughs as his long hair is plastered against him. “A good soaking for us, Jace! And it’ll be good for the corn.” He holds his arms out to the side and dances a few twirls until he staggers. Jace steadies him.
“Mama says you drink too much,” he tells the old man.
Nob smiles conspiratorially and bends close to the lad’s ear. “You know why she complains? ‘Cause that leaves less for them. Ha-ha!”
The air turns bright as daylight, throwing everything for an instant into black and white. The thunder follows close on its heels, loud as all the drums of Midsummer Night. Jace yelps and Old Nob takes him by the shoulder. “Steady, boy,” he says. “Franklin ain’t a-hunting you personally.”
The rain has turned the dirt track to a thick, syrupy mud that threatens to pull their moccasins from their feet. Old man and boy step onto the berm, where they must fight the tall grass, but where the footing is better. Here and there, past rains have scoured the dirt from the underlying asphalt.
The rain subsides into a steady drizzle and the lightning passes over them toward the east. They seek shelter under the trees, but the gusty wind shivers the branches, and the leaves dump their portions of water on them, so that it seems to rain even under the canopy. “Where is Bro Will? What’s he gotten into now?”
“This way.” Jace scampers through the underbrush that crowds the wide pathway while Nob struggles to keep up. Passing the Great Pylon, he pauses long enough to rap it for luck, listens to the hollow echo, then swings across a fallen pole on one of the cables that still dangle from it.
“Slower,” Nob grumbles. “I ain’t no deer.”
The path horseshoes across the shoulder of the Hill. The rise is steep and here the clay has nearly sloughed off, leaving the old road exposed. Only where the hawthorn and mulberry and sawgrass have grown through the asphalt has the soil remained stubbornly in place. Nob grows uneasy.
“You know you ain’t supposed to come up here,” he cautions the boy.
Jace pauses and looks around. “I was a-following Bro Will.”
“He ain’t supposed to come up here, either.”
Jace leads him off the old road and into the woods, through soaring birches and maples and circles wide ‘round a thickly woven stand of stickerbushes. Animals huddle miserably in burrow or nest, their usual cacophony silent. Limestone boulders, decked in moss, jut from the soil. A crick bubbles between an old foundation and a rotting stump. Jace jumps atop the stump and leaps the crick.
“How much farther?” Nob complains.
“Hush now, Uncle. See yonder? There he is.” Jace has brought him at last to a hazel thicket overlooking a small, hidden dell. Nob remembers the dell, from long ago, and wishes for a jug of the potato liquor, because his head is beginning to throb like the recently passed storm. He sees that Will and two of his friends have set up shelfs. He begins to shiver, and it is not entirely from the soaking he has gotten from the rain.
The shelfs have been fastened to a row of saplings, resting in the crotches of branches, held fast by vines. On them lie crabapples, wild strawberries and blackberries, acorns, scallions, and the like. On them, too, sit a few rusted old cans, and wickedly incorruptible plastic bottles. Beside each item a square of birch bark has been affixed, bearing sigils scrawled in charcoal. The rain has washed much of this away, and so Will and Kenn labor to restore them while Shairn weaves branches into an overhead roof. Off to one side, a cracked and corroded device sits upon a stump.