A cash register, Nob remembers the name his gramper had used years ago. Although what a register is, and what makes it cash, has remained ever since a delicious mystery. You put “money” in it, gramper had said, and that lets you take some of the food. But of course that had only deepened the mystery. What was money? And why would people not share the food, anyway? Gramper had once seen such things with his own eyes, but he had seen it with a child’s understanding.
It will be our little secret, Nobby, the old man had said.
Nob’s big hand clamps down on Jace’s mouth, and he drags the boy away from the thicket. Not until they have emerged from the woods and reached the old roadbed does he release the boy.
“Why’d you do that?” Jace asks; but he asks in a whisper, for he understands the message of the hand.
“Quiet, boy. I have to think.”
“That was a store, wasn’t it?”
Nob’s long, dour face bends toward him. “Where’d you hear about stores?”
Faint rumbles drift from the east, where the storm now waters the Jersey lands. The western skies are still dark, promising more rain to come. Jace toes the ground and his forefinger augers his cheek. “I dunno.”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. This is important.” Nob lifts a hand, as if to strike, and Jace cowers. But the hand descends slowly, the promised blow withheld. “It’s important,” the old man says again. “‘Specially now you shown me.”
“I heard Bro Will talk about it.”
“He’s talked about it?” Nob’s dismay curls his features.
“Just with Kenn and Shairn. They didn’t know I was in the loft. Uncle Nob, how did they make those shelfs?”
“They didn’t make them. They must have pried them from the ruins.”
“But… that’s a sin! It’s inner proprit!” Then, the boy drops his gaze and toes the dirt once more. “I’m sorry, Uncle Nob. I shouldn’t of said that. Not to you.”
“No need, boy. It is a sin.”
“But your mama…”
“…was inappropriate. I know, Jace. I know. But that was a long time ago. I was no older than you are now. She told stories from her father, my gramper.”
Jace’s eyes grow round. “She knew her father? But… how would she? Everyone takes turns so we can save our jennickdy versday.”
“Genetic diversity.” Nob helps him with the pronunciation. “Maybe she was mistaken. But everyone remarked a resemblance in their features.”
“Like folks say Bro Will favors you?”
Nob falls silent. “Yes,” he says finally. “Like that.”
“Did you know your gramper before they…? You know.”
“Before they stoned him? Yes. He was an angry, bitter, old man. He frightened me. I never cottoned to him. You see…” Nob hesitates a long time before continuing. Above, a cooper hawk circles hopefully just below the cloud deck; but all sensible mice are in their burrows and he soon gives it up. “You see, my gramper was a boy your age when the Crush came, and he…”
“He lived in the Old Days?” Jace’s mouth forms an O of astonishment. “Did he tell you stories? What was it like?”
“Walk with me.” Uncle Nob sets his long legs moving and Jace scampers to keep up.
“What’s Bro Will doing?”
“It’s an ancient prophecy. ‘If you build it, they will come.’ He figures if he builds a supermarket, someone will come stock it.”
Jace skips beside him, swinging his arms. “A sooper… A what?”
Nob does not look at him. “I don’t really know. Words my gramper used. A market is when farmers bring all their produce to the same place to trade…”
“Like when we meet with the fishermen from Glennen?”
The old man’s head bobs. “Yes. And a store is a place where you keep things like food to use later.”
“Like the grain pits.”
“Yes, like the grain pits, and the corn cribs.” He quickens his pace and Jace scampers to catch up. “Story is, the people of the elder days will return with trucks. And these trucks will carry wonderful cargo. Breads and cheeses and cuts of meat; sweets keener nor any honey; big, red, juicy apples; potatoes and beans and… Oh, well, everything. And they’d last a long, long time before the mold and rot took them. No one in them days had to sweat in the field with his hoe or sickle. And kids like you didn’t have to sit out in the fields all day and scare off birds. No one had to grind her own corn or bake her own bread.”
“It sounds… wonderful.”
Nob smiles a little, but only a little. “So it probably ain’t true. Remember I told you that. They’re only stories. There was more: fruits that we don’t have no more because they came from so far away it was sinful to eat them. Bananas. Oranges. Grapefruit.”
“What are they?”
The old man shrugs. “Gramper said he ate ‘em when he was a boy, before they all ran out and no more came. I figure grapefruits was like the grapes that grow over in Brown’s Valley. But the rest…” He waves his arm. “Ach… It don’t matter no more.” He falls silent, thinking of Will and the store he has set up in a hidden dell.
“Will, Will, Will,” he says. “What am I gonna do?”
A little ways farther on, past the Long White Wall, the trail bends and ahead on the left is a jumble of the red, rectangular rocks that gramper had called brick. It is overgrown and a sugar maple has taken possession of the site, undermining everything with her roots. Nob steps closer and peers into the rubble, but Jace, when he finally catches up, stops at the edge, where the brush tears up the asphalt.
It is as he had feared. The shelfs are gone. And the cash register.
“What you looking for?” asks Jace with a quaver in his voice.
“Nothing.” Nob remembers how gramper and he used to play store, a long time ago. But it was all coming apart even then, the old man had said. Dad told me the shelfs were fuller once.
The past is always more golden, Nob thinks. We remember our youth, not the world.
Nob clambers up on the unsteady pile and grips hold of a steel post that had once held the wall in place. From here, the ruins in the Great Valley can be seen, peeking through the forest.
Directly below, two broad pathways run in parallel from horizon to horizon, each wide enough for a dozen people to walk abreast. Grass and brush shroud them and the forest crowds close enough that, in places, roots have broken and lifted the stone beneath the sod. The High Way, gramper had called it. And, indeed, parts of it ran on bridges high above gullies and rivers.
Beyond, the skeletons of buildings lurk among maples and beeches and pines: huts of brick and stone and wood, some of them two or three levels high, sagging roofs of shingle or slate. All broken up now; all tumbling down, seized by vines and uprooted by trees, rusted by rain, flexed by wind. In the middle distance stands a great stone building, and beyond it, the edge of the cliffs that drop down to the Eastbound River. Lesser pathways cut the woodland into unnatural rectangles and triangles enclosing weedfields where the white of Queen Anne’s Lace quivers amidst the timothy and the wild lawn-grasses. To the northeast, a thin pall of smoke rises above the cliffs where the Eastbound tumbles into the Southbound River.