Jeff Hirsch
THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE
To Gretchen.
You never stop changing my world for the better.
PART ONE
ONE
I was sitting at the edge of the clearing, trying not to stare at the body on the ground in front of me. Dad had said we’d be done before dark, but it had been hours since the sun went down and he was still only waist deep in the hole, throwing shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder.
Even though it was covered in the burlap shroud I could see how wasted Grandpa’s body was. He’d always been thin, but the infection had taken another ten pounds off him before he went. His hand fell out from a tear in the burlap. Shadowed from the moonlight, it was a desert plain, the tracks of the veins like dry riverbeds winding up the crags of his knuckles. A gold Marine Corps ring sat on one finger, but it barely fit anymore.
Dad’s shovel chewed through rocks and clay with an awful scrape. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and escaped into the thicket of trees that surrounded us, stumbling through the darkness until I came to the edge of the hill we were camped on.
Far below were the slouching ruins of an old mall. Rows of cars, rusting in the moist air, sat in the parking lot, still waiting for the doors to open. Beyond the mall, the arches of a McDonald’s sign hovered like a ghost.
I remembered seeing it for the first time, ten years ago. I was five and then the sign had towered in its red and gold plastic. It seemed gigantic and beautiful. One trillion served. Now fingers of vines crept up its base, slowly consuming more and more of the rusty metal.
I wondered how long it would be until they made it to the top and the whole thing finally collapsed. Ten years? Twenty? Would I be Dad’s age? Grandpa’s?
I took a breath of the cool air, but the image of Grandpa’s hand lying there on the ground loomed in the back of my mind. How could it be so still?
Grandpa’s hand only made sense in motion, rearing back, the gold ring flashing as it crashed into my cheek. He had so many rules. I could never remember them all. The simple act of setting up camp was a minefield of mistakes, and Dad and I both seemed to trip over every one. I could still feel the sting of the metal and the rasp of his calloused skin.
But that’s over, I told myself. We’re on our own now. Grandpa’s fist was just another bit of wreckage we were leaving behind.
“Stephen!”
My chest tightened. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but I didn’t want to go back with nothing to do so I collected an armful of wood and brush on the way. I dropped it all between our sleeping bags, then leaned over the tinder, scraping the two pieces of my fire starter together until a spark caught. Once I had a proper campfire, I sat back on my heels to watch it burn.
“Think it’s deep enough yet?”
Dad was leaning against the wall of the grave, his body slick with sweat and dirt. I nodded.
“Come on, then. Bring the ropes.”
Once I helped Dad out of the hole, we knelt on either side of Grandpa’s body and drew lengths of rope under his knees and back. Dad started to lift him, but I didn’t move. Grandpa’s hand, one finger crowned with gold, was only inches from me.
“What about his ring?”
The ends of the ropes went limp in Dad’s hands. The ring glinted in the firelight. I knew he stung from it just like I did.
“There’s gotta be a half ounce of solid gold there,” I said. “If not more.”
“Let’s just do this.”
“But don’t we have to —?”
“Stephen, now,” Dad snapped.
We lowered Grandpa into the grave and then, before I could even pull the ropes out, Dad began filling it in again. I knew I should stop him. We could have traded Grandpa’s ring for food, new clothes, even bullets. Dad knew that as well as I did.
When the grave was filled, the shovel slipped from Dad’s hands and he fell to his knees, doubling over with his arms around his stomach. His body seized with small tremors.
Oh God. Don’t let him be sick too.
I reached out to him. “Dad?”
When he turned, the light caught tears cutting channels through the dirt on his face. I turned toward the woods as he sobbed, giving him what privacy I could, a knot twisting tighter and tighter inside me. When he was done I laid his favorite flannel shirt over his shoulders. Dad drew it around him with a shaky breath, then searched the stars through red, swollen eyes.
“I swear,” he exhaled. “That man was a purebred son of a bitch.”
“Maybe we should put that on his tombstone.”
Dad surprised me with a short, explosive laugh. I sat beside him, edging my body alongside the steady in and out of his breath. He draped his arm, exhausted, over my shoulder. It felt good, but still the knot in my stomach refused to unravel.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, Steve?”
“We’ll be okay, won’t we? Without him?” When Dad said nothing I moved out from under his arm and looked up at him.
“I mean… nothing’s going to change. Right?”
Dad fixed his eyes past me and onto the dark trail we would start down the next morning.
“No,” he said, his words rising up like ghosts, thin and pale and empty. “Nothing’s ever going to change.”
TWO
We clawed our way out of our sleeping bags just before sunrise, greeted each other with sleepy-eyed grumbles, and got to work.
I dealt with Dad’s backpack first, making sure the waterproof bag inside was intact before loading in our first-aid kit and the few matches we had left. I did it carefully, still half expecting to hear Grandpa’s voice explode behind me as he wrenched the bag out of my hand and showed me how to do it right. I paused. Breathed. He’s gone, I told myself. I reached back in and felt for our one photograph, making sure it was still there, like I did every morning, and then moved on.
As I arranged the clothes in my pack, my hand hit the spine of one of my books. The Lord of the Rings. I had found it years before in a Walmart, buried underneath a pile of torn baby clothes and the dry leaves that had blown in when the walls had fallen. I’d read it start to finish six times, always waiting until after Grandpa went to sleep. He’d said the only thing books were good for was kindling.
I flipped through the book’s crinkled pages and placed it at the very top of the bag so it would be the first thing my fingers touched when I reached inside. Doing this gave me a rebel thrill. I didn’t have to worry about Grandpa finding it now.
When I went to water our donkey, Paolo, I found Dad staring down at something in the back of the wagon — Grandpa’s hunting rifle. It was lying right where he’d left it two days earlier, when he’d become too weak to lift it anymore.
Dad reached down and ran the tips of his fingers along the rifle’s scarred body.
“So… this is mine now.”
He lifted the rifle into his arms and slid the bolt back. One silver round lay there, sleek and deadly. “Guess so,” I said.
Dad forced a little smile as he hung the rifle from his shoulder. “I’ll have to figure out how to work it, then, huh?” he joked, a dim twinkle in his eye. “Come on, pal. Let’s get out of here.”
As Dad started down the trail, I turned for a last look at Grandpa’s grave. How many such mounds had we seen as we walked from one end of the country to the other, year after year? Sometimes it was one or two at a time, scattered like things misplaced. Sometimes there were clusters of hundreds, even thousands, littering the outskirts of dead cities.