The People

"Supper first," said Mark as he fumbled with the padlock on the cabin door. He glanced, startled, back over his shoulder at Meris. "It's broken," he said. "Wrenched open-" He flung the door open hastily, and froze on the doorstep. Meris pushed forward to look beyond him.
Snow had fallen in the room-snow covered everything-a smudged, crumpled snow of paper, flour, sugar, and detergent. Every inch of the cabin was covered by the tattered, soaked, torn, crumpled snow of Mark's manuscript! Mark stooped slowly, like an old man, and took up one page. Mingled detergent and maple syrup clung, clotted, and slithered off the edge of one of the diagrams that had taken two days to complete. He let the page fall and shuffled forward, ankle-deep in the obscene, incredible chaos. Meris hardly recognized the face he turned to her.
"I've lost our child again," he said tightly. "This-" he gestured at the mess about them "-this was my weeping and my substitute for despair. My creation to answer death." He backhanded a clutter of papers off the bunk and slumped down until he lay, face to the wall, motionless.
Mark said not a word nor turned around in the hours that followed. Meris thought perhaps he slept at times, but she said nothing to him as she cautiously scrabbled through the mess in the cabin. She found, miraculously undamaged, a chapter and a half of pages under the cupboard. With careful hands she salvaged another sheaf of papers from where they had sprayed across the top of the cupboard. All the time she searched and sorted through the mess in the cabin, Lala sat, unnaturally well behaved and solemn, and watched her, getting down only once to salvage Deeko from a mound of sugar and detergent, clucking unhappily as she dusted the doll off.
It was late and cold when Meris put the last ruined sheet in the big cardboard box they had carried groceries home in, and the last salvageable sheet on the desk. She looked silently at the clutter in the box and the slender sheaf on the desk, shivered and turned to build up the dying fire in the stove. Her mouth tightened and the sullen flicker of charring, wadded paper in the stove painted age and pain upon her face. She stirred the embers
with the lid-lifter and rebuilt the fire. She prepared supper, fed Lala, and put her to bed. Then she sat on the edge of the lower bunk by Mark's rigid back and touched him gently.
"Supper's ready," she said. "Then I'll need some help in scrubbing up-the floor, the walls, the furniture." She choked on a sound that was half laughter and half sob. "There's plenty of detergent around already. We may bubble ourselves out of house and home."
For a sick moment she was afraid he wouldn't respond. Just like l was, she thought achingly. Just like l was! Then he sat up slowly, brushed his arm back across his expressionless face and his rumpled hair, and stood up.
When they finally threw out the last bucket of scrub water and hung out the last scrub rag, Meris rubbed her water-wrinkled hands down her weary sides and said, "Tomorrow we'll start on the manuscript again."
"No," said Mark. "That's all finished. The boys got carbon-copy and all. It would take weeks for me to do a rewrite if I could ever do it. We don't have weeks. My leave of absence is over, and the deadline for the manuscript is this next week. We'll just have to chalk this up as lost. Let the dead past bury the dead."
He went to bed, his face turned again from the light. Meris, through the blur of her slow tears, gathered up the crumpled pages that had pulled out with the blankets from the back of the bunk, smoothed them onto the salvage pile, and went to bed, too.
For the next couple of days Mark was like an old man. He sat against the cabin wall in the sun, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands dangling from limp wrists, looking at the nothing that the senile and finished find on the ground. He moved slowly and reluctantly to the table to push his food around, to bed to lie, hardly breathing, but wide-eyed in the dark, to whatever task Meris set him, forgetting in the middle of it what be was doing.
Lala followed him at first, chattering un-English at her usual great rate, leaning against him when he sat, peering into his indifferent face. Then she stopped talking to him and followed him only with her eyes. Then the third day she came crying into Meris's arms and wept heartbrokenly against her shoulder.
Then her tears stopped, glistened on her cheeks a moment, and were gone. She squirmed out of Meris's embrace and trotted to the window. She pushed a chair up close to the wall, climbed up on it, pressed her forehead to the chilly glass and stared out into the late afternoon.
Tad came over on his bike, bubbling over with the new idea of old cars.
"Why, there's parts of a whole bunch of these cars all over around here-" he cried, fluttering the tattered magazine at Mark. "And have you seen how much they're asking for some of them! Why I could put myself through college on used parts out of our old dumps! And some of these vintage jobs are still running around here! Kiltie has a model A-you've seen it! He shines it like a new shoe every week! And there's an old Overland touring car out in back of our barn, just sitting there, falling apart-"
Mark's silence got through to him then, and he asked, troubled, "What's wrong? Are you mad at me for something?"
Meris spoke into Mark's silence. "No, Tad, it's nothing you've done-" She took him outside, ostensibly to help bring in wood to fill the woodbox and frilled him in on the events. When they returned, loaded down with firewood, he dumped his armload into the box and looked at Mark.
"Gee, whiz, Mr. Edwards. Uh-uh-gee whiz!" He gathered up his magazine and his hat and, shuffling his feet for a moment said, "Well, 'bye now," and left, grimacing back at Meris, wordless. Lala was still staring out the window. She hadn't moved or made a sound while Tad was there. Meris was frightened.
"Mark!" She shook his arm gently. "Look at Lala. She's been like that for almost an hour. She pays no attention to me at all. Mark!"
Mark's attention came slowly back to the cabin and to Meris.
"Thank goodness!" she cried. "I was beginning to feel that I was the one that was missing!"
At that moment, Lala plopped down from the chair and trotted off to the bathroom, a round red spot marking her forehead where she had leaned so long.
"Well!" Meris was pleased. "It must be suppertime. Every one's gathering around again." And she began the bustle of supper-getting. Lala trotted around with her, getting in the way, hindering with her help.
"No, Lala!" said Meris, "I told you once already. Only three plates. Here, put the other one over there." Lala took the plate, waited patiently until Meris turned to the stove, then, lifting both feet from the floor, put the plate back on the table. The soft click of the flatware as she patterned it around the plate, caught Meris's attention. "Oh, Lala!" she cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated. "Well, all right. If you can't count, okay. Four it will be." She started convulsively and dropped a fork as a knock at the door roused even Mark. "Hungry guest coming," she laughed nervously as she picked up the fork. "Well, stew stretches."
She started for the door, fear, bred of senseless violence, crisping along her spine, but Lala was ahead of her, fluttering like a bird, with excited bird cries against the door panels, her hands fumbling at the knob and the night chain Meris had insisted on installing. Meris unfastened and unlocked and opened the door.
It was Johannan, anxious-eyed and worried, who slipped in and gathered up a shrieking Lala. When he had finally un-Englished her to a quiet, contented clinging, he turned to Meris. "Lala called me back," he said. "I've found my Group. She told me Mark was sick-that bad things had happened."
"Yes," said Meris, stirring the stew and moving it to the back of the stove. "The boys came while we were gone and ruined Mark's manuscript beyond salvage. And Mark-Mark is crushed. He lost all those months of labor through sense less, vindictive-" She turned away from Johannan's questioning face and stirred the stew again, blindly. "But," protested Johannan, "if once it was written, he has it still. He can do it again."