Gideon, is it our fault? It can’t be your fault. You never harmed a living soul.
But I am the fault, you know. The fault in my soul and yours, the fault itself. The line on which the ground moves. So the earthquake comes, and the people die, the little puzzled children, and the young men with guns, and the women pausing shopping bag in hand in the dissolving supermarket, and the old people who crouch down and reach out with wrinkled fingers to the faltering earth. I have betrayed them all. I did not give them enough food to eat.
How could you have? You’re not God!
Oh yes I am. We are.
We are?
Yes, we are. Indeed we are. If I weren’t God how should I be dying now? God is what dies. God is bereavement. We all die for each other.
If I am God I am the Woman-God, and I shall be reborn. Out of my own body I shall bear my birth.
Surely you will, but only if I die; and I am you. Or do you deny me, at the grave’s edge, after fifty years?
No, no, no. I don’t deny you, though I’ve often wanted to. But that’s not a grave’s edge, my young darkness, my terror, my little brother soul. It’s only a lakeshore, see?
There is no other shore.
There must be.
No; all seas have one shore only. How could they have more?
Well, there’s only one way to find out.
I’m cold. It’s cold, the water’s cold.
Look: there they are. So many of them, so many. The children float because they’re hollow, swollen up with air. The older people swim, for a while. Look how that old man holds a clod of earth in his hand, the piece of the world he held to when the earthquake came. A little island, not quite big enough. Look how she holds her baby up above the water. I must help her, I must go to her!
If I touch one, they will take hold of me. They will clutch me with the grip of the drowning and drag me down with them. I’m not that good a swimmer. If I touch them, I’ll drown.
Look there, I know that face. Isn’t that Hansen? He’s holding onto a rock, poor soul, a plank would serve him better.
There’s Kate. There’s Kate’s ex-husband. And there’s Lin. Lin’s a good swimmer, always was, I’m not worried about Lin. But Kate’s in trouble. She needs help. Kate! Don’t wear yourself out, honey, don’t kick so hard. The water’s very wide. Save your strength, swim slowly, sweetheart, Kate my child!
There’s young Chew. And look there, there’s the doctor, in right over his head. And the receptionist. And the old woman with the doll. But there are so many more, so many. If I reach out my hand to one, a hundred will reach for it, a thousand, a thousand million, and pull me down and drown me. I can’t save one child, one single child. I can’t save myself.
Then let it be so. Take my hand, child! stranger in the darkness, in the deep waters, take my hand. Swim with me, while we can. Let us be drowned together, for it’s certain we shall not be saved alone.
It’s silent, out here in the deep waters. I can’t see the faces any more.
Dorothea, there’s someone following us. Don’t look back.
I’m not Lot’s wife, Louis, I’m Gideon’s wife. I can look back, and still not turn to salt. Besides, my blood was never salt enough. It’s you who shouldn’t look back.
Do you take me for Orpheus? I was a good pianist, but not that good. But I admit, it scares me to look back. I don’t really want to.
I just did. There’s two of them. A woman and a man.
I was afraid of that.
Do you think it’s them?
Who else would follow us?
Yes, it’s them, our husband and our wife. Go back! Go back! This is no place for you!
This is the place for everyone, Dorothea.
Yes, but not yet, not yet. O Gideon, go back! He doesn’t hear me. I can’t speak clearly any more. Louis, you call to them.
Go back! Don’t follow us! They can’t hear us, Dorothea. Look how they come, as if the sand were water. Don’t they know there’s no water here?
I don’t know what they know, Louis. I have forgotten. Gideon, O Gideon, take my hand!
Anna, take my hand!
Can they hear us? Can they touch us?
I don’t know. I have forgotten.
It’s cold, I’m cold. It’s too deep, too far to go. I have reached out my hand, and reached out my hand into the darkness, but I couldn’t tell what good it did; if I held up some child for a while, or if some shadow hand reached back to me, I don’t know. I can’t tell the way. Back on the dry land they were right. They told me not to grieve. They told me not to look. They told me to forget. They told me eat my lunch and take my pills that end in zil and ine. And they were right. They told me to be quiet, not to shout, not to cry out aloud. Be quiet now, be good. And they were right. What’s the good in shouting? What’s the good in shouting Help me, help, I’m drowning! when all the rest of them are drowning too? I heard them crying Help me, help me, please. But now I hear nothing. I hear the sound of the deep waters only. O take my hand, my love, I’m cold, cold, cold.
There is, oh, there is another shore! Look at the light, the light of morning on the rocks, the light on the shores of morning. I am light. The weight’s gone. I am light.
But it is the same shore, Gideanna.
Then we have come home. We rowed all night in darkness, in the cold, and we came home: the home where we have never been before, the home we never left. Take my hand, and step ashore with me, my sister life, my brother death. Look: it is the beginning place. Here we begin, here by the flood that parts us.
South
The Wife’s Tale
He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle. If you’d have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn’t any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother, over near Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn’t got any game at all, not so much as a field mouse, but he wasn’t cast down about it. He was just larking along enjoying the morning air. That’s one of the things I first loved about him. He didn’t take things hard, he didn’t grouch and whine when things didn’t go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things moved right dong after that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister said—see, my parents had moved out the year before and gone south, leaving us the place—my sister said, kind of teasing but serious, “Well! If he’s going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn’t room for me!” And she moved out—just down the way. We’ve always been real close, her and me. That’s the sort of thing doesn’t ever change. I couldn’t ever have got through this bad time without my sis.