5
THE LOSS
When Darius’s parents didn’t arrive on Labour Day, his child’s mind swelled with the fear that they weren’t ever coming. His aunt and uncle tried to make light of their absence. “They’re fine, just busy.” “I talked to your dad yesterday. He sends you his love and says that he and your mom will be here soon.” “Your mom and dad want you to stay here for a while. But it won’t be for long.” “I talked to your dad. He and your mom love you, and they’ll see you as soon as they can get here.” All lies. Darius could see the way his aunt and uncle looked at one another, their faces forcing smiles that didn’t reach their eyes, the occasional tears when they didn’t know he was watching. And he knew none of this was true. His parents weren’t okay. They weren’t coming. Maybe they did love him, but what did that matter? He was being abandoned.
That autumn, he rode with his uncle in the tractor that dwarfed them both, gathering in wheat from the endless rows that seemed to stretch to the horizon. When the winter closed in, they would play card games or battle one another over a cribbage board. Friends would visit from nearby farms, and in the evening when his aunt sent him off to bed, he would creep out to listen to the adult conversation, hoping for news about his parents. But all he heard was the fear in their voices. He didn’t understand what was happening, but it had something to do with shortages of fuel and grain rotting in silos. He would return to bed and stare at the ceiling, unwilling to fall asleep lest the forces that had so shaken his aunt and uncle and their friends came for him in the bleakness of the night.
The following spring and summer, he worked again with his uncle tilling, seeding, fertilizing, and watching the stalks of grain push up from the soil, reach for the sun, and ripen. He was experiencing what men and women had known for centuries: that a focus on work could distract the mind from worry and fear. So even though his parents were a landmark in his thoughts, the demands of farming, of maintaining equipment, of sampling crops, muted his loss.
He was six now. His aunt told him that in the fall, he would go to school. That was a few miles away, but there was a school bus that stopped near the farm. The thought of school excited Darius. Learning would be fun. But school started after Labour Day, a date that would forever be seared in his mind as the time he lost his parents. As the day approached, the grief of their absence began to overwhelm his anticipation. His aunt Helena tried to distract him with talk of what he would learn, of the friends he would make, of the new clothes she would get him, of the school supplies they would buy.
Usually when they went into town, they went to the supermarket, but what he needed was in the department store. This was the first time he had been into it since he had arrived at the farm a year ago, and it was not something he recognized. His eyes widened at the rows of shelves, empty of stock. His aunt, tears forming in her eyes, fumbled through the few things stuffed into wire mesh bins, and he knew that whatever his aunt and uncle feared was real and was happening now.
He never went to school. His aunt told him the school board cancelled the bus service because they didn’t have fuel for the buses. She was cheerful. They would study together. She would be his teacher. They would have fun. Besides, this was far better than some dreary school room. Wasn’t it?
The following year, there was no more fuel, and the electricity went out. His uncle and aunt had seen this coming. His aunt suggested to his uncle, asked him, pleaded with him to move to town. “You can’t farm if you can’t run the tractor,” she would say. He growled back that farming was all he knew. He was damned if he would give up his family farm. People farmed long before tractors were invented. He bought a couple of plow horses, yokes, and an old manual plow. At the end of the day, having tilled a piece of land that the tractor could have handled in less than half an hour, his uncle would collapse into his worn easy chair while his aunt stoked up the wood stove, and in the light of candles, they would devour their meals and fall into bed before the next day’s dawn started the cycle again.
He never knew what he had missed, so he never missed it. Yes, he missed his parents. Sometimes at night, he would cry himself to sleep at the thought of them and at the images he had seen on the television screen. Each day, he would keep an eye on the driveway, clutching the belief that they would someday arrive and embrace him and love him. But his memories of his life in the city were fading, any sense of loss evaporating.
By the time Darius was eight, Uncle Rolf and his farming friends were venting about something they called the Collapse. When he asked what it was, his uncle said that it had been coming for a long time, but nobody had the brains to do anything to stop it. His uncle met his questions with annoyance until Darius asked his uncle why it should have been stopped. What was wrong with it? His uncle studied him for a minute. “Helena, let’s go on a picnic tomorrow. You pack the food. I’ll get the wagon ready.”
The next day, the three of them jouncing in the wagon, his uncle said, “Darius, what do you remember of your life in the city?”
“I dunno. Stuff.”
“Did you ever go hunting deer?”
“No. My dad never went hunting.”
“Where did your mom and dad get food?”
Darius frowned. “From the supermarket.”
“Did they make candles?”
“Sometimes they had candles. At dinner.”
“Was that how they got light at night?”
“Course not. They just turned on the lights.”
“What did you do in the evening?”
“Watched TV. Went to a movie sometimes.”
“So you had supermarkets and electric lights and television and movies. Do we have any of those?”
“Uh-uh.” He frowned. “How come we don’t?”
“We lost them. The Collapse took them away. You asked why it should have been stopped. That’s one reason.”
“Why? What was the Collapse?”
His uncle looked up. “See there?”
Darius glanced at an arrow of white stretching across the sky. “I seen that before.”
His aunt said, “I saw that before.”
“Okay, I saw it before.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Uh-uh.”
“It’s called a contrail. It’s from an airplane. Probably carrying a couple of hundred people.”
Darius gaped. “A couple of hundred people? How? Why doesn’t it fall out of the sky? Where are these people going? Where did they come from?”
“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that at one time, people in this country flew on airplanes like that one, operated them, even built them. The Collapse ended all that.”
“How? What happened”
His uncle’s face was taut. “That’s enough for now. Just enjoy the view and the sun.”
An hour or so later, his uncle pulled the wagon up a hill and stopped at the summit. “Look over there.”
Darius could see the towers creating the skyline of the city, the one he left so many years earlier. For the first five years of his life, he had grown up amid them, a constant presence in his background. But now, they seemed alien. Anomalies in a dirt farm world. And he wondered. How were they possible? How could such thin columns stand and not fall down? A lump formed in his throat. The towers meant something to him. He couldn’t say what that was, but he knew that it was lost to him.
His uncle said, “There’s almost nobody there now, but those buildings were full of people working.”
“Working on what? They couldn’t have been farming or raising cattle.”
“Whatever they were working on, it kept them busy.”
Darius counted the towers. About twenty of them of about forty floors each. Not to mention other smaller buildings. He recalled an arithmetic lesson from his aunt and ran the numbers in his head.