They all stood there a moment, not speaking, not looking at one another. Then Ice made a slight gesture with her chin, and except for Noor and Robson they filed into the church.
Noor leaned against Robson as they walked very slowly toward the street. At the cart they faced each other and stood holding both hands. He said “I got nothin’ to say. I thought I would but I don’t.” He held her to him. She heaved with quiet sobs. He said “I know. I know.” Finally she stepped back and wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand.
He said “It’s made all the difference to me. You comin’. I get lonely. Even 101 don’t get lonely like me. I said I’m a Town boy. It ain’t true. I’m just a man. The only difference is, I’m lonelier than most.”
She laid a hand against his deep chest, the dazzling embroidery of his waistcoat. The end of the green and gold necktie that was wrapped once around his head hung down over the red and green and blue threads. Behind him the stained glass of the windows echoed the colours, but weakly. Nor was the building’s empty entrance as dark as his eyes and his wild hair.
She sniffed, said “You don’t have to be lonely.”
“I know. I’m thinkin’ on it.”
“You know where I live.”
He nodded. He slid his waistcoat off and held it for her. She slipped her arms through the armholes and stood there smiling and crying. They hugged again. She took two strides and vaulted up onto Beauty’s back. Robson handed her up her spear and her sword.
He said “Merry Christmas.”
She said “Happy times” and clucked, and tapped beauty with her heels, and Beauty leaned into the slight weight of her load, and they started off along the street.
The dead towers loomed above, excluding even the poor light of the day. She looked straight ahead, down the long, deserted, uneven, bush-grown street, refusing to acknowledge the silent ruins of the buildings. But soon she turned, looked back. The Church Gang were all there at the end of the walk, waving, shouting their goodbyes. In the silence that followed, the sound of a flute floated between the echoing walls like the call of a lost bird.
34
Fundy’s house was low — two storeys — but long. The earthquake had cracked it in half. The two sections stood a yard and a half apart, at a slight angle. The north half ended at a wall from which the drywall had long been rotted away, leaving rusted steel studs with sheets of plastic on the interior side. The south half of the house terminated in a room with no end wall, cluttered with rusted wheelbarrows, shovels, a blade from a plough, a car wheel that had lost its rubber, innumerable garbage bags and a scattering of decomposing potatoes.
The crevasse that had split the house ran for a ways toward the road but was now no more than a shallow dip. Yet it was a hazard for those carrying the dead and the wounded toward the main room of Fundy’s house.
Grace passed Newton and Richmond as they stepped carefully through the depression. She looked down at the man they were carrying. The face was white. The blue eyes were half open, unblinking. She stopped, looked away toward the river for a few seconds, took a long breath, continued, passing Newton and Richmond again, who had now negotiated the hollow. She said “Don’t bring him in.” The two men stood looking at each other for a few seconds, holding the drooping body by the knees and underarms. Then they walked sideways toward the house and lowered the body to the ground next to the wall, where there was less mud.
Grace stood for a moment facing the sheets of heavy plastic that covered the doorway. She set her black bag on the ground. She heard the moaning and the prolonged cries of men and women. She heard sobbing, wild shrieking. She closed her eyes, felt the rain falling on her head.
She looked back the way she had come. Newton and Richmond were returning to the potato field. The body of the man lay on its back alongside the house. Other men were coming with more bodies. Jessica and Salmon were hurrying toward the house. Grace started when the plastic over the doorway was torn aside. Frost stood there, tall, gaunt, stricken. For a second he stared at Grace. He seemed not to recognize her. But then he reached and took her bag and turned back into the room, and she followed.
The room was about twenty feet square, lit only by the doorway and a small window, which was also covered with plastic. Against the exterior wall squatted a small square fireplace of mortared building blocks, but the fire had not been lit. The bottom stairs of a staircase were visible through a doorway. The room swarmed with the same women who had watched the slaughter from the overpass. They sat or lay on the floor, keening over the dead men sprawled from wall to wall. Or they stood among the corpses, weeping and trying to comfort one another. Near the far wall was one old man, the only upright man in the room besides Frost. He was barefoot, long haired, stubble-faced, and he wore the matching jacket and trousers of a patched dark grey suit. The man turned in a slow circle, then turned again, unable apparently to make sense of any of it. He held in one hand a black-covered book.
There was a brown couch, a Hide-a-Bed, which had been folded out. Here lay the man with the damaged leg, whom Frost had seen emerge from under the bridge. There was a blue sheet on the bed, patched with other colours. The area of the sheet around the wound was stained dark with blood. The boy from the field sat beside the man, holding his hand and crying. Fundy’s field boss lay on the other side of the man, moaning weakly, and a woman sat on the edge of the bed, stroking his hair. Among the dead and dying on the floor was a thin plastic-covered mattress. On this lay a woman. Her faint cries were heard only in gaps in the din of lamentation and pain.
Grace stood in the middle of the room. A trance seemed to have settled on her, making it impossible to move any farther. But then behind her the plastic sheets over the doorway rattled. Two women came in. They were carrying the body of the dead man who had been left outside. Grace stepped out of the way and looked down at the floor. The floor was white tile, mostly worn down to the concrete beneath. She saw the prints of her sandals in a film of blood. The women laid the body where she had been standing.
When Grace looked up, Frost was waiting beside the old man, who was now staring blankly. She saw that the man was not much older than Frost. She heard Frost ask clearly “Which one first?”
Jessica and Salmon came through the doorway.
Grace took another lengthy breath, made a slight motion of her hand toward the man with the shattered leg. Frost left the black bag and went to the bed and helped the man to sit up and swivel, and he helped the man lift the damaged leg over the edge of the bed as the man cried out. Jessica pushed through the women, and she and Frost stood the man up on his good foot. He wrapped his arms around their shoulders. They were both taller than him. They shuffled carefully through a door into a smaller room.
Frost and Jessica and Grace and Salmon laid the man on a narrow cloth-covered mattress that was dirty and ripped. The boy held the man’s leg free until the man was down. Then Grace helped to place the leg also on the mattress as the man again cried out. Six inches below the knee the shattered, blood-smeared end of the tibia seemed to glow in the poor light.
Salmon went out and got Grace’s black bag. She set it down and with her left hand, her only hand, she took out the orange plastic basin and set it on the floor, for there was no table in the room. In the basin she placed a folded pink rag, a roll of faded yellow cotton bandage that was printed with abstract slashes of other colours. She also put in a darning needle, a coil of yellow nylon thread and another of blue, the needle-nose pliers, the eight-inch knife, the hacksaw. She took out two one-litre bottles of alcohol, one full, the other half full. These she set on the floor, for she had no way to open them with her single hand. Beside them she set the half-litre bottle of skag-in-water, half full.