The noises had been keeping all of the children up, the hollow moans coming from the old man’s bedroom and lasting through the night. They were muffled by the floor, but still none of them were able to sleep. They had been eating infrequently, as infrequently as the old man’s bouts of lucidity.
Sabine gave Marc the apple. He turned it over in his hand. No wormhole. His sister’s face was unmoved. He bit the apple and it tasted sweet. Marc took a second bite and handed it to Sabine. She took shallow bites until the skin was gone, and the apple was only a bloated white core. Then she threw it into the grass. Marc picked it up, wiped it on the breast of his jumpsuit, and ate the rest of the flesh. Sabine was squatting over an uneven row of stalks protruding from the dirt. Some were bright green, long with small filaments, and others were a darker green with purple-red streaks on their oblong leaves. Sabine took hold of one of the longer stalks and pulled upwards. The strangled sound of snapping roots could be heard inside the soil as the carrot slid from the earth and Sabine’s eyes widened as she fixed upon the orange tuber with clumps of dirt still pressed to it, through which thin orange tendrils reached. Marc walked over to his sister and wrapped his hand around the stalks of several beets. Some snapped, but most unearthed the short round tubers from which they had sprouted. Sabine had already pulled out another carrot and she stood holding both in her outstretched hands, looking at Marc. He thought he could see a smile behind the pallid mask she wore. He laid the beets next to the carrots in her arms and continued pulling tubers. She stood watching him, enjoying the sound they made. He placed each of the beets and carrots in her arms. Soon a pile had amassed. Here had been the food all along, hidden beneath the soil in the place they feared the most. They would feed their children at last, and everything would resume due order. Of course the wild child and the stupid girl would not join them at the dinner table. They would have to find their sustenance elsewhere.
Marc’s stomach was empty but his head was filled with a painful clatter of thoughts. His sister wandered towards the farmhouse, arms full of their bounty. That is when Marc noticed the old man framed in the bathroom window as he fixed on Sabine. Marc crouched and watched the scene unfold. His sister stumbling slightly as she made her way towards the path. The old man opening the door, the sound causing Sabine to swing around, eyes uncomprehending, a carrot falling from her arms, and then the rest of what she carried tumbling to the ground, and the old man upon her.
What did I tell you about the garden, he screamed. What did I tell you.
The old man held Sabine by the ankle and reached for a handful of beets. Holding them by the stalks, he swung repeatedly at her wriggling body, rapping her belly and breasts and arms, some of the beets smashing to bits where they struck bone, and the old man finally focusing on the face of the rule-breakers, the niggers and the arabs with their tongues pressed to the floor and searching under the locked door, the men who came, the ones who stole from the store, the sharks buying up the land, the causers of the great sweep, the furious disorder he would never control and from which he could never protect her, and all of his powerlessness in its ugly face, until Sabine’s nose had been broken and her face bruised terribly and she had stopped struggling as Marc looked from his crouched position in the dirt and Sabine squealed like a rusted hinge being moved slightly with every blow, not even raising her hands to protect herself.
When Christophe was finished he staggered towards the farmhouse and sat pressed to the wall, in the grass, catching his breath, eyes jittering wildly and muttering unformed words. Marc stayed pressed to the ground among the remaining stalks, saw the old man sweating and rasping and still clutching beets now covered in blood and dirt, the unpredictable animal. He would never underestimate him again. He was more dangerous than before.
Sabine did not move. Nose clogged with blood she elected to breathe through her open mouth instead. Once it filled with blood, she pursed her lips and let the crimson liquid ooze from the sides of her mouth and onto the lobes of her ear and down her neck and into her hair and onto the grass. Her pain was like a disparate constellation of stars strewn across the great black sky. A lot of airless space. Marc stayed pressed to the ground also, and eventually he did not even look but only smelled the dirt and the crushed grass and lay there with his fear among the weeds.
There was the first body in the street, thought the old man. It was a chinese body with a face like a skinned tomato, lying on its back and drawing attention because a chinese woman was chicken-dancing around it, unwilling to touch, but looking at the disappeared face before she resumed her screaming and circling. The body and its family, which they found crammed in a tiny apartment, dead also, were the first of many bodies. I drove Isabela’s body south, keeping off the nationales when possible, small roads when possible, and mostly at night. It was before things got too bad anyways. Many people still maintained hope that everything would return to normal. But I knew better. I had seen the hole where Isabela used to smile. Fire hides everywhere. I drove down into the Berri through the sleeping towns, looking for a place that might do. I found the ancient farmhouse with the date still painted on the vertical beam supporting the roof. 1919. Mud and wood and red shingles and nobody around. The farmer probably bought the place with the surrounding fields and never bothered to make any use of it. Left the antiquated equipment right where it stood, focused on revenue instead. No excess resources in agriculture. Perhaps the family with the goat farm. Perhaps the larger-scale operation to the north. After I buried Isabela in the middle of the courtyard, beneath the grass so that it might cover her resting place, a very long time passed before I bothered investigating the area. I ate apples and gooseberries until I was ill. I ate whatever I could find nearby. I withered to nothing. I was a body with no use for a body.
It remained that way for months. Only when the green sapling first protruded from the earth at the center of the courtyard, from Isabela’s fallow womb, did my body resume function. From it children and vegetables grew. I have protected both. I have smashed the face of the offender to protect these creatures. Some of us are born liquid. Some of us are born vegetables in the moist earth. We cannot change the sap-thirsty mouth of god with its blue-ocean gums and cliff-sharp teeth. It spits blood from Sabine’s mouth onto the grass to be taken back by the earth. Having harmed the child, I sit against the farmhouse, thought the old man, unable to move my body. This part exists disconnected from the body. Having harmed the child.
After hours of waiting and watching the old man, who remained unmoving and expressionless, Marc began crawling towards Sabine. He kept an eye on Christophe, and every time the old man blinked, Marc would stop for a moment to scrutinize his catatonic face.
Sabine was no longer crying when Marc crawled up to her. Her eyes were bloodshot and Marc could see two teeth in the grass, the blood spilling less profusely now, and Sabine no longer spitting as frequently. She breathed through her mouth. Already the swelling had begun around her eyes. The sockets were purple and red where the vessels had burst. Marc helped her stand. They staggered towards the farmhouse, leaving the vegetables broken and scattered, and the old man sitting against the wall. Marc led Sabine through the bathroom. He sat her on a chair in the dining room, standing for a moment to make sure she would not slump and fall. Then he went back into the bathroom and retrieved a towel, which he used to wipe the blood from her face. When he was done she reached for the towel and pressed it to her face and blew blood from her nostrils in one long snort, wiped her nose with the towel, and handed it back to Marc. A strand of blood still hung from one of her nostrils. Marc tried to wipe it away but she would not let him. She would not make eye contact with her brother either. She was a closed chamber of blood, filling with blood, pouring blood, blood in the face and blood in the mouth, missing two teeth, and smelling nothing. Sight narrowing from the swelling. Marc looked at her for a time. Then he walked down the stairs into the kitchen and retrieved a glass from the counter. He filled it with water from the sink, which he could now reach quite easily, and brought it back to Sabine. She did not look at him, but drank from the glass. When she had emptied it her fingers loosened and the glass fell to the ground and shattered on the tile. Glass skittered across the room in all directions. Marc walked back into the kitchen and retrieved the dustpan. He used it to sweep up the glass as he had seen the old man do. Then, not knowing what to do with the glass-filled dustpan, he left it where he had found it beneath the sink. Marc returned to the dining room and sat on a chair near Sabine and watched her until the sun made the room turn gold and red and finally blue with only the moonlight pouring subtly through the window.