101 reached inside his shirt and slid out a length of white plastic pipe with a few evenly spaced holes. He covered the holes with his fingertips and placed the end of the pipe to his lips and closed his eyes. The melody that he fashioned was both heartbreaking and whimsical, both dance and dirge. It was offered back as echo by the stone walls and by the looming darkness of the church.
Ice and Hollyburn rose. They joined hands. Facing each other they swayed and dipped. They took small, shuffling but graceful steps. They moved away from the fire to the border of the darkness. Powell stood and helped Spring, who struggled out of her chair with a grunt and a laugh. They waited a few seconds, hands joined, swaying, and then the same restless but sensual movements carried them away from the light.
Noor rose and joined hands with Robson. She looked into the black moist depth of his eyes. She was dizzy from the wine. She laughed and let the circling, off-kilter sounds of the flute instruct her feet.
From behind the fireplace a chubby young boy emerged in a man’s brown cardigan that hung to his feet. He had pale hair that was cut like a helmet. He stood there for a minute, rubbing his eyes and observing the dancers. Then he knelt and leaned his chin on 101’s knee, watching him make his music.
Robson and Noor stepped and dipped and swayed to the edge of the light and then farther, into the darkness at the end of the church, slipping without effort among the treasures piled there, and then farther, toward a quiet room waiting beyond the altar.
30
Frost said “It’s no use. I’ll have to let the smoke out.” He tied back the sheet of plastic that covered old Joshua’s doorway, and smoke began to slide swiftly out of the room. It was dawn. In the hallway, in the weak light near the doorway, he saw old Ryan and Brittany and Jessica. They watched him without expression. He nodded to them. Then he went to the fire bucket and flicked the embers aside, but they continued to give off thin streams of smoke. He said “I didn’t know his stovepipe was in such bad shape.”
Grace said “Never mind. The fire doesn’t matter. He’s too hot already from the fever. Or he was too hot. He’s past that now.”
Old Joshua lay on his back on a mat of rabbit skins. He was covered up to his chest with the sheet from the clinic, which was twisted and limp from his night of thrashing. But now he lay still and straight. His only struggles were the heaving of his narrow white-haired chest and the desperate gasps of his breathing. His eyes were open, slightly clouded, unfocussed. Slowly his breathing became less laboured. He made a sound, a kind of brief humming, as if he were trying out his voice or setting the pitch for a song. Then he said “…two-sailin’ wait for Schwartz Bay…”
Frost turned away and sighed and rubbed his forehead. He said “Joshua was a real-estate salesman. He and his wife arrived pulling their two kids in a wagon. She had lovely blond hair.” He stood in front of the fogged plastic of the window, as if outside in the rain and the dim light he could see that scene from the past. He said “You don’t have to stay, Grace. It’s Christmas day.”
“I’ll stay. But you should go and rest.” She was sitting sideways on the mat, beside the dying man.
“Yes, I know. Thanks to staying up with Joshua I might be able to sleep through the day. I hope so.” Without turning from the window, he cleared his throat slightly and said “I was looking for you. Two days ago. I couldn’t find you.”
As Grace hesitated, he stiffened. She said in her halting way “What did you want?”
Frost went to the door of the room. He said evenly to Ryan and Brittany and Jessica “I need you to go away for a while. We’ll call you if… if there’s a change.” Ryan and Brittany hesitated, but Jessica urged them down the dark hallway.
Frost stood above the still-smoking fire bucket and looked down at Grace and said “There’s only so many places you could be.”
Grace said, looking nervously up at him “I was a lot of places. You must have just missed me.” She looked haggard.
“You’re not sick, are you?”
She shook her head, looked away.
“Nobody else saw you either. I needed to talk to you. Noor had just taken off and…” He looked back to the window’s frail light. “I saw Brandon. He said I didn’t know what was going on. He said I wasn’t the only game in town.”
“What does that mean? Was he talkin’ about me?”
“I don’t know. Was he?”
Joshua said again “…two-sailin’ wait…” He was bald, with his white fringe of hair and his beard trimmed close. He did not look afraid. In spite of his struggle to breathe he looked calm and trustworthy, as if he were still selling real-estate. He muttered a string of incoherent syllables.
“Grampa.”
Frost turned, stared in surprise for a second. Will was standing in the doorway in his dripping poncho. “Will, not now.”
“Grampa, there’s a bunch of people. They want to live here.”
Frost went down. A dozen people stood in the rain in front of the entrance to the domicile. Twice that number stood at the top of the front steps, still disheveled from sleep, silently observing the newcomers. Beyond the new arrivals stood Tyrell, leaning on his spear, shaking his head in disgust.
Frost hurried out the entrance. He stopped and exhaled sharply, as if to expel not only the smoke, the stuffy air and the human reek that had accumulated in the domicile through the winter, but his own heavy thoughts. He closed his eyes, drew a long breath and stepped carefully forward through the crowd of residents. He touched Salmon on the stump of her cut-off arm, and she moved aside. He caught her look of pity for the refugees. He saw her nod to him, a gesture not of affirmation but of pleading. Her daughter, Cloud, plucked at his poncho. He had heard the hysterical screams of this girl as he tried to carry her up the stairwell that day of the amputation, and he had heard her carousing with the other children on the riverbank that day he had gone looking for Grace, but he heard now her first words. “Please let them stay, Frost.” She meant the children.
Frost knew the two girls. Today they wore long filthy shifts made from a multitude of rags. The last time he had seen them they had been naked, walking hand in hand with their father away from the ruin of a building where Frost had laid their mother’s almost lifeless head on a bed made from a car seat. Today they held their father’s hands as well, and the three of them, thin and soaked, looked as miserable as they had that other day. A black garbage bag of their possessions rested at the father’s feet.
There was no spokesman for the arrivals. There was not even any unity. Town-dwellers formed their own group on the left, three men and two women, each holding a bag, watching Frost. One of these women Frost had last seen at the market, under the bridge, grasping a dead rat. Twenty feet away on the right were the man and his girls.
Between them and back a little two men stood separate and alone. One was old Christopher, from south of the farm. The other man crouched slightly, leaning on a knee as if he were in pain. He wore a rabbit-skin hat, a rabbit-skin poncho and the square-toed leather shoes that had once belonged to Frost, tied with double loops.
In front, as if they were on display, stood a man and a woman in ragged kilts of layered plastic. They had only scraps of hair. Their ribs pressed like blades against grey skin. They shivered and hugged themselves against the cold. They looked at the ground and would not meet the eyes of the other newcomers or Frost or most of the other residents. But every few seconds their eyes darted to Granville, who stood on the top step in a wool poncho and sandals, milky skinned, well fleshed, his hair like a thick red cap.
Frost went down the steps. He stopped beside the two addicts and waited for them to look at him. They would not. He walked past them and turned and stood between Christopher and the hunched man whose burgundy-rimmed glasses Frost was wearing. He looked up at his people spread on the porch and steps of the domicile. He said “Jessica, there are no more empty rooms, are there?”