Do Unto Others - Chapters 1 & 2
The Messenger put his head down and watched his feet. A splash of sand here, a curl of smoke there, movement seemed like something he had only imagined. The wind cut curlicue dens into the low sandbanks siding the road, hiding from the sky.
The top of his shoes, if they could be called shoes, flaps of canvas he’d torn from a potato sack, were pinned with needles into squares of old rubber tires that he’d fashioned into soles. If shoes, they were ugly shoes, no doubt about it, but their thickness kept the heat of the asphalt from scorching the palms of his feet, and the canvas, light and breathable, kept the sun from nibbling at the tops of his toes.
He was sick of the stillness through which he traveled, so he watched his feet. Raise one foot. The canvas shoe flapped. Lower it down. The canvas settled. Don’t look up.
Movement. Water for the mind.
Never. Never. Never stop moving.
This part of the desert had died. More than died. Desiccated. It was a word he wanted to forget. Desiccated. Why did he even know that word? The sun, already streaking orange brushstrokes against the horizon, would soon rise high to say, ‘Good morning. Soon you’ll be desiccated.’
The button in his mouth clicked against the ramparts of his backmost teeth, then slid beneath his tongue and lodged there in the leftover spittle like a frog wiggling into soft mud. He resisted the urge to rake his teeth over his cracked lips to coax out more saliva. That would only break his scabs, make them sore. Doing that, he’d learned, was a bad idea. He’d never leave it alone if he did, and force his focus onto his body instead of on the road ahead.
Sucking on the button kept a sheen of saliva coating the inside of his mouth, an old trick he saw in a movie once. But he needed water or it wouldn’t matter how many buttons he had. Soon, without water, his walking days would be over. Ended on the same page as Lot’s wife. Turn around to face the way he came. The taste of too much salt. And crumble.
Usually, even the driest lands can boast of some small vitality, cactuses storing moisture from out of the air, lizards feeding on insects, tiny mice, but this place was outside of life, a waiting grave.
This place is the taste of salt.
The blood of small animals, mostly lizards, had been keeping him alive lately, but not for four days had there been tracks by the side of the path, or brush thick enough for shade, or even the chirrup of beetles in the evenings. All the land was dead and soon he’d be dead within it, and his message dead within him. Fallen in the middle of that golden painting, his meat tough and chewy. Stopping would be the easiest thing to do. Stopping would make his feet happy. No shame in stopping. Stopping only for a minute. The easiest thing to do.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Why not stop?
Finally he gave in and raked his teeth across his lips, felt that sweet tang, heard the creak of enamel against his lips, a noise in the world that he’d made. He’d give into that minor urge to quiet the larger temptation. Damn the sand and the heat and the emptiness. It couldn’t have him. No place could have him until he found where he was meant to go.
His foot in the air, the canvas billowed. Set it down again. The canvas settled.
A stroke of wind blowing across the road briefly stripped the path down to the black, flashing with a stripe of yellow. The Messenger withered a glance over the sifting sand, looking for the telltale fan trail of a salamander’s swishing tail. His lips had begun to bleed again and he tasted copper.
You know what would be great right now? A pear! Mmm. I know you were never a big pear guy; you didn’t like the gritty texture of their rinds, but oh man, remember how juicy they were? How they’d squirt juice down over your lips, juice to your chin.... Juice you’d have to wipe away. Remember how that annoyed you then?
No sign of life, the Messenger raked his eyes around the shifting patterns the wind had made, searching for a story to save him.
Mmm. Remember when Molly would bring home fresh watermelon from the market, and you’d sit by the open window, spitting seeds out. Ten floors below....
He hefted his metal and plastic parasol higher, leaning it against his shoulder. It had grown progressively heavier the past few days. Raising his eyes further afield, towards the horizon, he hoped to see mountains. By the light of the moon the last few nights he’d seen their silhouettes, their tips making a jagged line of the horizon. That’s how he’d known them for mountains, their icicle edges; only at night could he see them; during the day the air was haze.
Maybe it was to those mountains that he’d wanted to go? It was certainly where the road was going. Only, those mountains were days away yet, and his road was now measured in hours, not miles. He’d never live so long. Days.
It was looking towards where he hoped to see mountains that he saw what he hadn’t thought to see ever again: shadow, slanted into an arrow, an aberration in the golden flat. Strange to see a shadow that was not his own. He blinked, and shifted his hat on his head for better light. The shadow remained out there in the sand, not simply a dark spot of desire in his eyes.
For a moment he nearly decided not to go. Danger hid in shadows. Snakes liked the shade. Men with guns made shadows; their guns cast shadows too, though he’d left men with guns, and men in general, behind long ago. The Messenger twirled his parasol in thought. The sun was rising. His arm was wavering. What choices there were to make had already been made for him. Stepping off the road, he kicked sand ahead of him as he went, reluctantly leaving the road, the security of purpose.
~*~
In the end it was a day of rarities.
He found an old shed buried in the sand, and that was rare. It was rare that there were no snakes inside to hiss at him as he tumbled through a window; snakes sought the shade as much as men. It was a rarity of relative coolness in there, and rare that he caught a scrawny lizard living inside the shed for his supper, like him already half mash from dehydration, despair, and hunger. And rare that, despite how sun-shrivelled he felt, he’d had a hard time falling to sleep, shaking with laughter. How long since he’d laughed last he couldn’t even remember, and that too was somehow funny, a rarity in humour.
It wasn’t his luck in finding the shed that set him to chuckling. Or the dead lawnmower that he found inside, or the patio umbrella sheathed into a carrying sack on the floor, or the rake, or the hoe, or the spilled bags of dried dirt. It was the green garden hose coiled up on the wall. The green garden hose, cracked like the hard pan.
Never hold water like that, he thought. And the laughter had come.
The Messenger fell asleep and dreamed of hourglasses. The next day he gave thanks to the little lizard that had sustained him, and set out walking again. Plants were growing in the lee shade of the shed. Further down the road, brush poked out of the roadside. Eventually he came upon a green sign that read,
Scanlon 22 kilometres
He rested in its shade for a spell, then he carried on.
2
The Messenger awoke to bolts of pressure above his ears pinching the thinnest part of his skull. He shut his eyes tightly and clenched his teeth. If he could push some of the pain down into his lower jaw, maybe swallow it... he could bear it.
An unfamiliar nattering noise filled the air. His waking brain singled it out for him, and he said what it was aloud. “Birds.” Underused, his throat didn’t work as he wanted. ‘Birds’ came out as a ‘B’ and a dying croak. Birds! He’d nearly forgotten that birds existed. In his most recent mind they were fantasy creatures, occupying the air. Little birds, that sang, with little bodies and fast wings. And Soap. He smelled soap, a scent buried so deep in his nose that he could never forget it. How long had it been since he’d last smelled soap?
For a moment he suffered the amnesia of the traveler. The room spun about him, trying to show him its linchpin to memory. He had no idea where he was. The light hurt his eyes. He barred them again, discovering the soft pillow under his head, the weight of a sheet over his body, trapping his feet. Finally, he saw the gray ceiling over his head.
The smell of sand was in the air, but not in his nose.
It was then, upon fully slipping into position behind his eyes, that he noticed the discomfort in his belly too, waking with him, a rough boil of nausea leeching up into his throat. Growing all the while that he slept, it was the bubble floating him to wakefulness. He coughed, making a rasp like that of a mummy stirring in its sarcophagus. Now that he was awake, he could point to his pain and call it a headache; could look into his stomach and call it nausea. He sensed how dulled his senses had been, how muddled his thoughts. He remembered. The boy!
You were so damned fired to see if the town was still there.
He remembered how the dead sands had relaxed with single scrub bushes, how brush rising on either side caught the wind and kept the highway clean. Tracks appeared in the roadside as if by magic, and not just tracks of lizards and other half-mouthfuls of creatures, but mice, rabbits, maybe even a cat.
Either the desert’s faltering or Noah’s ark landed somewhere near here.
Behind their white veil, the mountains had peeped out at him. For a while he’d been scared they had simply been a trick of the night, or his lash to keep himself steady onward. Then there they were, like gods on the horizon, watching, judging.
A sign said:
Scanlon 11
And he pushed on.
A sign said:
Scanlon 7
And he pushed on.
The sun awoke and made an oven of all the land, heat a brand to the soles of his feet, heat a hand down his shirt, heat a plug in his ears, heat he could nearly chew between his teeth.
And he pushed on.
The red skeletons of dead machinery rose out of the land; a glimpse of a falling-down fence with the spikes arrayed in a half circle like a jawbone’s decaying teeth, even that a welcome.
The boy playing in the dust with toy cars, bent over strangely because of some metal contraption strapped to his legs.... No more than ten years old, a stolid boy using the wide slats of a sheet metal fence as the highway for his toy cars. Struts were attached to his legs. Gleaming metal and oily leather.
“Who are you? I don’t know you,” said the boy when the Messenger was standing before his gate. “Where did you come from?”
The Messenger’s voice had been the groan of a storm, but he’d told the boy about his message somehow. He hardly knew what he was saying, and by god he’d nearly told the boy the message itself, so glad was he to be... a place, at a dot on the map and not a line in the in-between.
He remembered falling, his nose pressed to fragrant ground. The last thing he saw before he shuttered his eyes was a bare, slender foot. All the way back to an ankle. With it, a woman’s voice. And the mottled glitter of the dirt blending into black.
~*~
Inexplicably came the blessing of birds and soap, the bosom of a soft pillow. The Messenger checked on the message he was carrying, bringing it forward from the back of his mind, which he did from time to time. Not having it near the fore was best, in case he colour the message with his own thoughts. Fishing it forward occasionally reassured him it was still there.
Immediately he felt stupid.
As if they could steal it from your head like shaking the last penny out of the piggy bank. Like scraping the bottom of the mayonnaise jar with the tip of the butter knife. Like sucking the last speck of moisture out of a sponge. Like....
The Messenger covered his eyes with his arm and swung a foot out of the bed. Saved, he may have been, but he didn’t know by who, or for what reason. Beneath the sheet, he saw, he was naked. From outside the door he heard a board thump. A reflex, the messenger dropped his arm from his eyes, recoiling from the brightness, and a woman swung around the door into the room. Quickly but quietly she closed the door the last inch until she heard it click. The Messenger squinted sideways at the woman. Pretty, and around thirty years old, she looked concerned. His headache mushroomed in his head, pounding like a heartbeat. He pulled his naked foot back into the bed.
“They’re here to see you,” said the lady. “The Priest and his brother.” Her voice was high and would be good for singing nonsense songs. “Everett told them you needed your rest, but they’re coming up anyway.”
The Messenger didn’t say anything.
“Goodness,” she said, straightening and rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. “You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. Wait. Do you speak English? Can you understand me?”
The topography of the Messenger’s throat pushed up when he tried to swallow, dry and barren, with lopsided hills and crags. He didn’t think he could speak if he tried. He answered her with a nod.
If the lady was a little plain, with a knob of a chin and a wide nose, the Messenger didn’t notice. With such a bright face and kindly expression he could only believe her a fiction of cleanliness, creamy skin, good intention, of curly hair. Her white dress was printed with a pattern of tiny wild flowers, hanging down to her knees, cinched loosely at her waist, tight across broad shoulders and neck. Her feet were bare; cheeks, red; her eyes, alive. Full of interest, her expression seemed so wrong. He hadn’t seen concern in a person’s eyes in so long.
He thought, What if I haven’t been rescued? What if I’m really still lying in the dirt outside that boy’s gate? What if the boy too is a mirage? It was all too possible. He stared at the woman in front of him and he wanted her to be real.
She remind you of somebody? No. Not Jane Russell.
A lock of hair fell into the woman’s face and she tucked it behind an ear where it loosened and dangled again. Excited and worried, she flickered like a candle’s flame with the strange alteration to her day, a strange man in her house. “Okay,” she said, unsure what to do with her hands, “they’ll be here in just a minute. Hopefully they won’t stay long. I’m sorry I haven’t finished your washing. Jamie called me away. It sounded urgent, but I think he just wanted to know more about you. He’s very curious about you. We all are.”
She waited. The Messenger nodded to her again.
“Okay,” she said, satisfied with that nod, “I hear Everett. Okay. I’ll be back.”
She opened the door and the Messenger watched as she swung around it gently again. The fluttering of her dress about her calves, the cling of the dress around her hips.
The Messenger looked around. The bed could barely keep his feet from poking over the edge. It had to be a child’s bed. Probably that boy’s. And he was in a child’s room as well, fifteen foot square, with white walls, a wooden floor, a bureau by the door, toys kicked to one side of the room, by a closet.
The woman had said washing. The Messenger lifted the sheet and, yes, he hadn’t noticed; he was clean. He could smell himself, sweat and dust mingled with soap. Thinner than he remembered, the jut of his hips brought to mind the rusted machinery surfacing in the sands. He was pale beneath the sheet, and sunken, and hairier than he thought he should be, with no round or smooth places. The greed of the desert had taken from him.
He leaned over the side of the bed. A basin sat on the floor next to the bed, the washcloth that the woman had been using, muddied with the dirt that had come off his body, draped over the rim. He did not hesitate. The water sloshed as he grabbed the basin, sat up, and drank from the big bowl, spilling water down the sides of his mouth, channelling into his beard and down over his chest, staining the sheets brown where it touched.
God, it was so good. Moisture in his throat, he thought he’d never feel it again. Hell, he had thought he was dead. Walking the waste during the day was death. He’d hoped he would carry on and survive; nobody strolls to suicide cheerily; only, at heart he’d known he was lying to himself. At heart he’d had no hope. He’d carried on outwardly for pride, for inertia.
Alive. This is what alive feels like. I’ll be alive tomorrow.
He stopped drinking before the basin was empty. A pang of propriety still lived within him. He eyed the murky disc of water in the bottom, wanting it, so glad for water, finally. That disc was richness, wealth. Nothing else mattered. Even spilled down his chest it had made him a man again, and that was gold, that was titanium, silver, rubies. But he saw the brown mark on the sheets and felt a brief flare of shame. He rubbed it away the best he could and left that disc of water in the bottom of the basin. A man’s not supposed to drink his bathwater.
He could hear footsteps coming up the stairs and low voices coming with them. He squeezed the rag free of its juices and put the basin back down on the floor, smelling the moisture on his fingers, rubbing his fingers across his lips, feeling a silky grit on his teeth. He looked around the room again. Where are my clothes?
The door cracked and a man who was bald back to his crown, and chubby, stuck his head in with a smile. “Hello,” he said cheerily, as if he was poking into a child’s bedroom. “May we come in?’
Without waiting for an answer, the man swung the door wide. Two men and a woman entered. The Messenger was out of date, out of style, and out of his element, no longer able to judge, but if the balding man’s size hadn’t rounded the fit of his suit, the lines would have been straight, and his clothes pressed. His collar was open to show his suffocating neck, unseemly behind the hang of his shoestring tie, but there was a fullness of presence about the man. He was more substantial than most men, and the Messenger marked his every movement almost against his will.
The second man was a priest, younger, thinner, and thinning, bearing a stark resemblance to the first man, however with a narrower head and wide cheeks. Whereas the fat man had come with his face bulldozing in front of him, the Priest’s expression was open and watchful and sly, as if he thought he couldn’t be seen behind the greeting of his brother. The Messenger watched him slink in and the priest, too engaged in studying him in turn, hardly seemed to notice.
The woman who came behind them entered slowly as if she doubted her presence there. Demurely dressed in gray, her angular face made a distinct contrast to the supple lines and broad textures of the woman who had bathed him. Collar high to her neck, she looked to be slipping slightly past her blossom. Maybe she was in her mid-thirties, maybe she was younger and just looked that way. She had an intelligent stance, but did not stand knowledgeably. She was companion to the party, but not the sharp end of it.
Why are you comparing her to things that she’s not?
The room was too small for three adults and a bed. The men looked about, eyeing the toys and the clutter as if they’d never been boys themselves. The priest nudged a block with his toe.
The fat man sent his smile out in front of him. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you. When we heard you were awake we couldn’t wait. I’m Mayor Clergue, and this is my brother, Father Clergue – that could get confusing, couldn’t it? And this is Ms. Jonah, our schoolteacher.”
Politely, feeling uneasy, the Messenger looked to each of them in turn, and caught Ms. Jonah looking at his near-empty wash basin. She looked up, caught his eye, and nodded blankly with the mention of her name. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
“But you may call me Pierre,” said the priest with a smile. His face had wholly changed to a more holy expression since he’d entered. His professional mask.
“And me, I’m Bernard,” said the mayor, who reminded the Messenger of a capable Elmer Fudd.
A pause. They waited for the Messenger to announce himself, and when he didn’t they hardly missed a beat. They were used to talking and the pause didn’t matter.
“You must have traveled a long way,” said Pierre.
Bernard jumped in.“Please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. It’s our pleasure. It’s been so long....”
“Water,” interrupted the Messenger. “Water.” It hurt to talk, his voice smaller than he would have liked, but the opportunity couldn’t be wasted.
All three dropped their eyes to the empty wash basin now. The priest recovered his smile first. “Why, of course. You must be dry as sandpaper.” He turned to the lady. “Why, Ms. Jonah would be happy to get you a glass of water, wouldn’t you, Julie?”
Ms. Jonah lifted the corners of her mouth in a reasonable facsimile of a smile. “Of course,” she said automatically. “I’ll be right back.” Ms. Jonah left the room and the priest watched her go, all the way out the door, all the way down the hall, turn to go down the stairs.
The mayor laid his hands on his broad belly and cleared his throat. “On behalf of the people of Scanlon, we’d like to welcome you to our town. It’s been so long since we’ve had any visitors from out east. How are things out that way?”
The Messenger wasn’t ready for questions. He dug into his skull for answers and hardly knew where to start. To look behind him was to turn and face the empty wastes of years across which nothing could travel unchanged. Nothing but the desert and the sere clefts of his skin mattered to him anymore. He could give no good answer and he stared back at the men, wanting to speak of gratitude, about the burden of time and the sweet emergencies of the immediate moment, but it was too big for one man’s mouth to speak, and so he said nothing, feeling neither foolish nor proud for it. It was better to say nothing and keep the meat of his meaning intact than speak and mar the wholeness.
“You must have come a long way,” prompted the Mayor.
The Messenger nodded. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d shared a room with two other people. He wanted to stand up and see them face to face, maybe to touch them, better to believe they were truly in the room with him.
If only he had clothes. Where are my clothes?
The mayor and his brother shared a look when the Messenger on the bed didn’t reply, instead glancing around the room aimlessly. Obviously the man was ruined by the wastes.
They’re gonna think your brains are baked. Scalded your senses. Sand in your soul. Your London Bridge has fallen. Your fuzzy wuzzy is fuzzy bare.
“It was... a long way,” managed the Messenger. He didn’t like being thought of as simple, but his mind was accustomed to parrying with whatever it wanted, and he found it hard to give these men his whole attention.
Fuzzy bare as the day you were born. If you were born. Don’t remember much. What is it you don’t remember?
The mayor and priest lit up to have gleaned a reply from the battered man on the bed.
“That’s wonderful,” said the mayor with a clap of his hands. “I mean to say, not wonderful, but we’re glad to see how you’re recovering. We were most worried about you, sir.”
The priest said, “Yes, how is it out east?”
The mayor scowled at him. “You’ll have to excuse my brother, sir. He’s been calling down hellfires on the people of the east going on ages now. He’s afraid you’re here to tell us you’ve established God’s utopia on earth out there. That would call into question the veracity of most of his sermonizing.”
“Praise be to the lord.”
“Mostly he’s hoping for new hellfires.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of hellfires right here,” said the priest, looking at his brother. “Right Bern? Sorry, Mayor Clergue. Bern.”
The brothers grinned falsely at one another. The men had a jocularity between them yet much of it was an act. In what regard the Messenger couldn’t tell, but they wanted something from him, he knew that. They were playing for his sake, for his ease, imparting a talking distance before they put their hands out. The Messenger suspected that when the time came, those hands would be meaty and unclean, and eager.
He had only one thing of value. The message. He brought it forward again to check on it. Was it for these men that he had the Message? He tucked it away safely. The brothers were looking at him again. Were these men his end?
“So how is it, sir?” asked the priest again. “We’ve had no news... ages.” All pretence of jocularity was gone from the man’s face. If the priest could have eaten him through his eyes, he’d have had forks in his hands. Beside him, his brother would be waiting to ask what it tasted like.
The Messenger could tell they still thought he might be simple. It took a few seconds to swallow painfully. “East? I don’t know. I... I don’t know.”
His efforts sounded like ‘E’s. I doan ‘o.’
And I shall hug him and squeeze him and call him George. That’s what they think of you, chum. Hey, tell them you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. See what they think of that.
“Has there been war?” asked the Mayor. “Is that why there’s been no word? Or some other calamity?”
The priest sounded hopeful, “The end of days?”
Is it for these men that I’m carrying my message? The Messenger dug into his head again and the sands swirled and fell in there. These were the only men he’d seen in years. Years! He should have turned to dust in the desert, been erased like a pencil drawing and blown away. All reason said that. Here a chance: validation. Here a chance to make meaning of his strife....
Itchy all down his legs and in the cleft of his rear, the Messenger shifted uncomfortably. Despite the tide of time pulling at him, urging his reward, all he truly wanted was to relax in the respite of the pillows, glad to be able to lay on his back and face the sky unfalteringly. To be safe, comfortable. To close his eyes and swim through all the black sleep he’d stored behind them.
The brothers shared a heavy look between themselves. “Sir...” said the Mayor.
The door knocked open where it had swung half closed and Ms. Jonah entered carrying two tin cups of water. She came cheerfully, “Jane didn’t have any big glasses so I filled these two. I hope it’s okay.”
“Oh, just fine, Ms. Jonah,” piped Mayor Clergue, boisterous again. “Just fine. Thank you, Julia. Most kind. We were just talking about the situation out east with our new friend.”
“Julie,” she said to the Mayor, holding out the tin cups for the Messenger.
See that, friiiiend, she couldn’t stop herself from making a face at the stink of you.
The Messenger could smell the water. Gratefully he downed the first tin cup. Blessedly cold, it hurt his throat. The second he held close to his chest, took one sip, and held himself back, determined to relish the rest. Perhaps he wouldn’t drink it. Perhaps he’d just hold it there forever, never be without again.
Standing near enough that their arms were touching, the priest put his hand to the small of Ms. Jonah’s back and her face softened. Mayor Clergue leaned in. “Sir,” he repeated softly, I have a confession to make to you. My brother and I, and Ms. Jonah, we represent the people of Scanlon, heart and soul. Tough times have fallen on our town, sir. We don’t know how much longer we can hold back the desert. If not for our well, the town would have already dried up and blown away.”
“The tenacity of our hearts keep us together,” said the priest.
“We don’t have much hope. We hold on, day to day, and try not to think about what may come. There’s been no word from out east for so long. We don’t know what fate befell them, how long ago it happened, or if there was truly a fate at all. Word has simply been passed down from our fathers, and probably their fathers before them, bless them all.”
“Amen,” said the priest.
“Amen,” said Ms. Jonah.
Mayor Clergue had hit his stride, pulling himself to his full height, expanding inwardly to express the completeness of his person.
That’s who these men are, thought the Messenger. These men are explainers.
“All we know are stories,” said the Mayor, “and we’re not sure we even know those anymore, if you follow me.”
“These are days of dust and ruin, my friend,” said the priest. “Dust and ruin, in our hearts as well as in our lands.”
“We’re short on hope, sir,” said the Mayor.
“High in grace,” said his brother.
“Amen,” said Ms. Jonah.
Come on, say it. Say, Hey, Mac, which way to Albuquerque? I want to see what they’d do. Please. Why doncha’ say it just once?
“The people of this town need something to keep their spirits high. They need hope of the outside world. We’ve been encouraging their spirits so long now, telling them that the world has fallen into wrack and ruin while they haven’t. It’s starting to sound old. They can see the dust encroaching. Every year the crops taste a little more like ash in their mouths.”
“Ash,” said Ms. Jonah.
The Messenger’s attention shifted to Ms. Jonah as she spoke. If these men are explainers, what is she? Humbly planted, listening to the mayor’s diatribe, nodding her head at the pertinent points... but she wasn’t part of those words, as if hearing them for the first time. These men were explainers, and they’d explained to her why she was to come along – that was it – and she had agreed. As explainers, the Clergues were top notch.
The Messenger drank every one of the mayor’s words greedily, hungry for the hum and bluster of the human voice. In the end, when these men were done, and he filled with the lustre of their voices, would he want what they were explaining?
“Everybody has heard about you,” said the priest. “The Abram boy told a friend that you had come with a message. And that friend has told his mother, and his mother has a mouth like a siren.... You’re like the angel Jacob met going go Canaan. You’ve appeared out of nowhere. And with a message from out of the east.”
“People are excited,” said Ms. Jonah.
“Perhaps a little too excited,” said the Mayor.
Ms. Jonah nodded dutifully.
The priest bobbled on his toes and for a moment seemed to mimic a large crow hovering over a carcass. “What we’re trying to say, sir... well I’ll just come out and say it, shall I? Sir, we’re concerned about this message you have.”
The mayor joined in, “It’s too important to let information bandy about willy-nilly, ear to ear. It could only be chaos, true meaning lost in the gabble and gobbledegook that clogs the heads of most people.”
The priest came out with it, “What is the message you came all this way to tell us?”
The Messenger sipped from the cool tin cup. He looked to the explainers, and to Ms. Jonah. He wasn’t ready yet. He wasn’t sure yet. He shook his head.
The brothers exchanged another glance. The mayor cleared his throat. The priest patted Ms. Jonah in the small of the back again. “Share your burden, brother,” he said. “If you have a warning to give us from people back east, we’re the very people to share it with. Let us be the conduit through which to reach as many ears as possible.”
“If it’s sensitive,” said the mayor, “we can judge the proper course of action.”
Left turn at Walla Walla. Should have taken the left turn....
The Messenger sipped from his tin cup. Never, ever, would he tire of its clean coldness making channels down his throat. He said, “I....” He stopped there. “N...no,” he said.
The mayor was shifting warily. His hands no longer seemed plump accessories to his explanations. They’d taken on the shadow of stranglers, of squeezers, of throttlers, attached to his meaty arms.
The priest, with his hand still on the small of Ms. Jonah’s back, leaned in to whisper to her. Ms. Jonah’s mouth dropped open, and the priest took her by the arm and guided her to the side where they turned their backs.
The mayor stepped closer to the bed. The Messenger felt penned in by the big man. More than ever he wished for his clothes. He overheard Ms. Jonah say, “Pierre....”
“Sir,” said the mayor, “You’ve come too far to hold your tongue. We’re the only town, the only people. We’re sure of it. What is it you know, sir? You can’t withhold it from us. We couldn’t allow that.”
The priest and Ms. Jonah joined them, and the mayor’s jocular face popped back into place. He said, “But your trek must have tired you out mightily, sir. We’ll leave you to rest.”
“You must have quite the tale to tell,” suggested the priest.
“In the meantime, Ms. Jonah has volunteered to stay with you a while. If you need anything, or have anything you want to tell us, she’s our eyes and ears. Pierre tells me she’s a darling hand at healing too.”
Ms. Jonah tried a weak smile. The lines of her dress no longer seemed as trim and straight.
Mayor Clergue offered his hand, the size of a small saucer, strong and meaty. Grasping it the Messenger was very aware of the dried bones in his own hand. The priest merely offered a bow before the two exited grimly, leaving Ms. Jonah behind in a room that suddenly seemed very large, strange, and quiet.
The priest could be heard from the hallway. “Bern, the only prophet we’ve seen this day is from our farms.”
A laugh. Footsteps receded down the stairs. Ms. Jonah swayed before the bed. Her eyes wandered from toys to small shoes to drawings on the wall. Finally her eyes fell on the basin of water by the bedside. She stepped in closer and wrung the wet rag.
Exhausted, feeling hollow, the Messenger watched her warily, wondering what it was she had to say to him.
“Come here,” she said. Her eyes were sad, and against the stern backdrop of the rest of her, somehow that made her prettier. “Lie down,” she said.
The Messenger opened his mouth to speak, and decided he would give up on speech for a while. He sipped the top level of water from his tin cup so the water wouldn’t slosh when he shifted, and pushed himself closer.
“Why is it you’ve come all this way?” she asked, looking down on him, not untenderly. “Where have you come from?”
She wet the rag in what was left of the disc of water in the bottom of the basin and slapped the cool cloth against his chest, finishing the wash that the other lady had started. He felt strange and vulnerable, naked under his sheet, with her hovering over him, though the desert had stripped him of most of his modesty, and much more besides.
Her eyes entreated him. Speak. Speak. And he wanted to. She seemed a nice lady. If he told her what she wanted, she would be happy for a while to hear it, able to pass that information along to Pierre the priest. Speak.
Ms. Jonah wet the rag again and ran it over his chest. Ms. Jonah’s fingers were taut and cold as ice despite the warm weather. Ms. Jonah made sure that he was clean in places he’d nearly forgotten with his erasure of sand, and when Ms. Jonah was done – and he had to admit that she’d done a wonderful job – he was relaxed and at ease, and felt as clean as he could ever remember, on the inside as well as on the out.
The top of his shoes, if they could be called shoes, flaps of canvas he’d torn from a potato sack, were pinned with needles into squares of old rubber tires that he’d fashioned into soles. If shoes, they were ugly shoes, no doubt about it, but their thickness kept the heat of the asphalt from scorching the palms of his feet, and the canvas, light and breathable, kept the sun from nibbling at the tops of his toes.
He was sick of the stillness through which he traveled, so he watched his feet. Raise one foot. The canvas shoe flapped. Lower it down. The canvas settled. Don’t look up.
Movement. Water for the mind.
Never. Never. Never stop moving.
This part of the desert had died. More than died. Desiccated. It was a word he wanted to forget. Desiccated. Why did he even know that word? The sun, already streaking orange brushstrokes against the horizon, would soon rise high to say, ‘Good morning. Soon you’ll be desiccated.’
The button in his mouth clicked against the ramparts of his backmost teeth, then slid beneath his tongue and lodged there in the leftover spittle like a frog wiggling into soft mud. He resisted the urge to rake his teeth over his cracked lips to coax out more saliva. That would only break his scabs, make them sore. Doing that, he’d learned, was a bad idea. He’d never leave it alone if he did, and force his focus onto his body instead of on the road ahead.
Sucking on the button kept a sheen of saliva coating the inside of his mouth, an old trick he saw in a movie once. But he needed water or it wouldn’t matter how many buttons he had. Soon, without water, his walking days would be over. Ended on the same page as Lot’s wife. Turn around to face the way he came. The taste of too much salt. And crumble.
Usually, even the driest lands can boast of some small vitality, cactuses storing moisture from out of the air, lizards feeding on insects, tiny mice, but this place was outside of life, a waiting grave.
This place is the taste of salt.
The blood of small animals, mostly lizards, had been keeping him alive lately, but not for four days had there been tracks by the side of the path, or brush thick enough for shade, or even the chirrup of beetles in the evenings. All the land was dead and soon he’d be dead within it, and his message dead within him. Fallen in the middle of that golden painting, his meat tough and chewy. Stopping would be the easiest thing to do. Stopping would make his feet happy. No shame in stopping. Stopping only for a minute. The easiest thing to do.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Why not stop?
Finally he gave in and raked his teeth across his lips, felt that sweet tang, heard the creak of enamel against his lips, a noise in the world that he’d made. He’d give into that minor urge to quiet the larger temptation. Damn the sand and the heat and the emptiness. It couldn’t have him. No place could have him until he found where he was meant to go.
His foot in the air, the canvas billowed. Set it down again. The canvas settled.
A stroke of wind blowing across the road briefly stripped the path down to the black, flashing with a stripe of yellow. The Messenger withered a glance over the sifting sand, looking for the telltale fan trail of a salamander’s swishing tail. His lips had begun to bleed again and he tasted copper.
You know what would be great right now? A pear! Mmm. I know you were never a big pear guy; you didn’t like the gritty texture of their rinds, but oh man, remember how juicy they were? How they’d squirt juice down over your lips, juice to your chin.... Juice you’d have to wipe away. Remember how that annoyed you then?
No sign of life, the Messenger raked his eyes around the shifting patterns the wind had made, searching for a story to save him.
Mmm. Remember when Molly would bring home fresh watermelon from the market, and you’d sit by the open window, spitting seeds out. Ten floors below....
He hefted his metal and plastic parasol higher, leaning it against his shoulder. It had grown progressively heavier the past few days. Raising his eyes further afield, towards the horizon, he hoped to see mountains. By the light of the moon the last few nights he’d seen their silhouettes, their tips making a jagged line of the horizon. That’s how he’d known them for mountains, their icicle edges; only at night could he see them; during the day the air was haze.
Maybe it was to those mountains that he’d wanted to go? It was certainly where the road was going. Only, those mountains were days away yet, and his road was now measured in hours, not miles. He’d never live so long. Days.
It was looking towards where he hoped to see mountains that he saw what he hadn’t thought to see ever again: shadow, slanted into an arrow, an aberration in the golden flat. Strange to see a shadow that was not his own. He blinked, and shifted his hat on his head for better light. The shadow remained out there in the sand, not simply a dark spot of desire in his eyes.
For a moment he nearly decided not to go. Danger hid in shadows. Snakes liked the shade. Men with guns made shadows; their guns cast shadows too, though he’d left men with guns, and men in general, behind long ago. The Messenger twirled his parasol in thought. The sun was rising. His arm was wavering. What choices there were to make had already been made for him. Stepping off the road, he kicked sand ahead of him as he went, reluctantly leaving the road, the security of purpose.
~*~
In the end it was a day of rarities.
He found an old shed buried in the sand, and that was rare. It was rare that there were no snakes inside to hiss at him as he tumbled through a window; snakes sought the shade as much as men. It was a rarity of relative coolness in there, and rare that he caught a scrawny lizard living inside the shed for his supper, like him already half mash from dehydration, despair, and hunger. And rare that, despite how sun-shrivelled he felt, he’d had a hard time falling to sleep, shaking with laughter. How long since he’d laughed last he couldn’t even remember, and that too was somehow funny, a rarity in humour.
It wasn’t his luck in finding the shed that set him to chuckling. Or the dead lawnmower that he found inside, or the patio umbrella sheathed into a carrying sack on the floor, or the rake, or the hoe, or the spilled bags of dried dirt. It was the green garden hose coiled up on the wall. The green garden hose, cracked like the hard pan.
Never hold water like that, he thought. And the laughter had come.
The Messenger fell asleep and dreamed of hourglasses. The next day he gave thanks to the little lizard that had sustained him, and set out walking again. Plants were growing in the lee shade of the shed. Further down the road, brush poked out of the roadside. Eventually he came upon a green sign that read,
Scanlon 22 kilometres
He rested in its shade for a spell, then he carried on.
2
The Messenger awoke to bolts of pressure above his ears pinching the thinnest part of his skull. He shut his eyes tightly and clenched his teeth. If he could push some of the pain down into his lower jaw, maybe swallow it... he could bear it.
An unfamiliar nattering noise filled the air. His waking brain singled it out for him, and he said what it was aloud. “Birds.” Underused, his throat didn’t work as he wanted. ‘Birds’ came out as a ‘B’ and a dying croak. Birds! He’d nearly forgotten that birds existed. In his most recent mind they were fantasy creatures, occupying the air. Little birds, that sang, with little bodies and fast wings. And Soap. He smelled soap, a scent buried so deep in his nose that he could never forget it. How long had it been since he’d last smelled soap?
For a moment he suffered the amnesia of the traveler. The room spun about him, trying to show him its linchpin to memory. He had no idea where he was. The light hurt his eyes. He barred them again, discovering the soft pillow under his head, the weight of a sheet over his body, trapping his feet. Finally, he saw the gray ceiling over his head.
The smell of sand was in the air, but not in his nose.
It was then, upon fully slipping into position behind his eyes, that he noticed the discomfort in his belly too, waking with him, a rough boil of nausea leeching up into his throat. Growing all the while that he slept, it was the bubble floating him to wakefulness. He coughed, making a rasp like that of a mummy stirring in its sarcophagus. Now that he was awake, he could point to his pain and call it a headache; could look into his stomach and call it nausea. He sensed how dulled his senses had been, how muddled his thoughts. He remembered. The boy!
You were so damned fired to see if the town was still there.
He remembered how the dead sands had relaxed with single scrub bushes, how brush rising on either side caught the wind and kept the highway clean. Tracks appeared in the roadside as if by magic, and not just tracks of lizards and other half-mouthfuls of creatures, but mice, rabbits, maybe even a cat.
Either the desert’s faltering or Noah’s ark landed somewhere near here.
Behind their white veil, the mountains had peeped out at him. For a while he’d been scared they had simply been a trick of the night, or his lash to keep himself steady onward. Then there they were, like gods on the horizon, watching, judging.
A sign said:
Scanlon 11
And he pushed on.
A sign said:
Scanlon 7
And he pushed on.
The sun awoke and made an oven of all the land, heat a brand to the soles of his feet, heat a hand down his shirt, heat a plug in his ears, heat he could nearly chew between his teeth.
And he pushed on.
The red skeletons of dead machinery rose out of the land; a glimpse of a falling-down fence with the spikes arrayed in a half circle like a jawbone’s decaying teeth, even that a welcome.
The boy playing in the dust with toy cars, bent over strangely because of some metal contraption strapped to his legs.... No more than ten years old, a stolid boy using the wide slats of a sheet metal fence as the highway for his toy cars. Struts were attached to his legs. Gleaming metal and oily leather.
“Who are you? I don’t know you,” said the boy when the Messenger was standing before his gate. “Where did you come from?”
The Messenger’s voice had been the groan of a storm, but he’d told the boy about his message somehow. He hardly knew what he was saying, and by god he’d nearly told the boy the message itself, so glad was he to be... a place, at a dot on the map and not a line in the in-between.
He remembered falling, his nose pressed to fragrant ground. The last thing he saw before he shuttered his eyes was a bare, slender foot. All the way back to an ankle. With it, a woman’s voice. And the mottled glitter of the dirt blending into black.
~*~
Inexplicably came the blessing of birds and soap, the bosom of a soft pillow. The Messenger checked on the message he was carrying, bringing it forward from the back of his mind, which he did from time to time. Not having it near the fore was best, in case he colour the message with his own thoughts. Fishing it forward occasionally reassured him it was still there.
Immediately he felt stupid.
As if they could steal it from your head like shaking the last penny out of the piggy bank. Like scraping the bottom of the mayonnaise jar with the tip of the butter knife. Like sucking the last speck of moisture out of a sponge. Like....
The Messenger covered his eyes with his arm and swung a foot out of the bed. Saved, he may have been, but he didn’t know by who, or for what reason. Beneath the sheet, he saw, he was naked. From outside the door he heard a board thump. A reflex, the messenger dropped his arm from his eyes, recoiling from the brightness, and a woman swung around the door into the room. Quickly but quietly she closed the door the last inch until she heard it click. The Messenger squinted sideways at the woman. Pretty, and around thirty years old, she looked concerned. His headache mushroomed in his head, pounding like a heartbeat. He pulled his naked foot back into the bed.
“They’re here to see you,” said the lady. “The Priest and his brother.” Her voice was high and would be good for singing nonsense songs. “Everett told them you needed your rest, but they’re coming up anyway.”
The Messenger didn’t say anything.
“Goodness,” she said, straightening and rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. “You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. Wait. Do you speak English? Can you understand me?”
The topography of the Messenger’s throat pushed up when he tried to swallow, dry and barren, with lopsided hills and crags. He didn’t think he could speak if he tried. He answered her with a nod.
If the lady was a little plain, with a knob of a chin and a wide nose, the Messenger didn’t notice. With such a bright face and kindly expression he could only believe her a fiction of cleanliness, creamy skin, good intention, of curly hair. Her white dress was printed with a pattern of tiny wild flowers, hanging down to her knees, cinched loosely at her waist, tight across broad shoulders and neck. Her feet were bare; cheeks, red; her eyes, alive. Full of interest, her expression seemed so wrong. He hadn’t seen concern in a person’s eyes in so long.
He thought, What if I haven’t been rescued? What if I’m really still lying in the dirt outside that boy’s gate? What if the boy too is a mirage? It was all too possible. He stared at the woman in front of him and he wanted her to be real.
She remind you of somebody? No. Not Jane Russell.
A lock of hair fell into the woman’s face and she tucked it behind an ear where it loosened and dangled again. Excited and worried, she flickered like a candle’s flame with the strange alteration to her day, a strange man in her house. “Okay,” she said, unsure what to do with her hands, “they’ll be here in just a minute. Hopefully they won’t stay long. I’m sorry I haven’t finished your washing. Jamie called me away. It sounded urgent, but I think he just wanted to know more about you. He’s very curious about you. We all are.”
She waited. The Messenger nodded to her again.
“Okay,” she said, satisfied with that nod, “I hear Everett. Okay. I’ll be back.”
She opened the door and the Messenger watched as she swung around it gently again. The fluttering of her dress about her calves, the cling of the dress around her hips.
The Messenger looked around. The bed could barely keep his feet from poking over the edge. It had to be a child’s bed. Probably that boy’s. And he was in a child’s room as well, fifteen foot square, with white walls, a wooden floor, a bureau by the door, toys kicked to one side of the room, by a closet.
The woman had said washing. The Messenger lifted the sheet and, yes, he hadn’t noticed; he was clean. He could smell himself, sweat and dust mingled with soap. Thinner than he remembered, the jut of his hips brought to mind the rusted machinery surfacing in the sands. He was pale beneath the sheet, and sunken, and hairier than he thought he should be, with no round or smooth places. The greed of the desert had taken from him.
He leaned over the side of the bed. A basin sat on the floor next to the bed, the washcloth that the woman had been using, muddied with the dirt that had come off his body, draped over the rim. He did not hesitate. The water sloshed as he grabbed the basin, sat up, and drank from the big bowl, spilling water down the sides of his mouth, channelling into his beard and down over his chest, staining the sheets brown where it touched.
God, it was so good. Moisture in his throat, he thought he’d never feel it again. Hell, he had thought he was dead. Walking the waste during the day was death. He’d hoped he would carry on and survive; nobody strolls to suicide cheerily; only, at heart he’d known he was lying to himself. At heart he’d had no hope. He’d carried on outwardly for pride, for inertia.
Alive. This is what alive feels like. I’ll be alive tomorrow.
He stopped drinking before the basin was empty. A pang of propriety still lived within him. He eyed the murky disc of water in the bottom, wanting it, so glad for water, finally. That disc was richness, wealth. Nothing else mattered. Even spilled down his chest it had made him a man again, and that was gold, that was titanium, silver, rubies. But he saw the brown mark on the sheets and felt a brief flare of shame. He rubbed it away the best he could and left that disc of water in the bottom of the basin. A man’s not supposed to drink his bathwater.
He could hear footsteps coming up the stairs and low voices coming with them. He squeezed the rag free of its juices and put the basin back down on the floor, smelling the moisture on his fingers, rubbing his fingers across his lips, feeling a silky grit on his teeth. He looked around the room again. Where are my clothes?
The door cracked and a man who was bald back to his crown, and chubby, stuck his head in with a smile. “Hello,” he said cheerily, as if he was poking into a child’s bedroom. “May we come in?’
Without waiting for an answer, the man swung the door wide. Two men and a woman entered. The Messenger was out of date, out of style, and out of his element, no longer able to judge, but if the balding man’s size hadn’t rounded the fit of his suit, the lines would have been straight, and his clothes pressed. His collar was open to show his suffocating neck, unseemly behind the hang of his shoestring tie, but there was a fullness of presence about the man. He was more substantial than most men, and the Messenger marked his every movement almost against his will.
The second man was a priest, younger, thinner, and thinning, bearing a stark resemblance to the first man, however with a narrower head and wide cheeks. Whereas the fat man had come with his face bulldozing in front of him, the Priest’s expression was open and watchful and sly, as if he thought he couldn’t be seen behind the greeting of his brother. The Messenger watched him slink in and the priest, too engaged in studying him in turn, hardly seemed to notice.
The woman who came behind them entered slowly as if she doubted her presence there. Demurely dressed in gray, her angular face made a distinct contrast to the supple lines and broad textures of the woman who had bathed him. Collar high to her neck, she looked to be slipping slightly past her blossom. Maybe she was in her mid-thirties, maybe she was younger and just looked that way. She had an intelligent stance, but did not stand knowledgeably. She was companion to the party, but not the sharp end of it.
Why are you comparing her to things that she’s not?
The room was too small for three adults and a bed. The men looked about, eyeing the toys and the clutter as if they’d never been boys themselves. The priest nudged a block with his toe.
The fat man sent his smile out in front of him. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you. When we heard you were awake we couldn’t wait. I’m Mayor Clergue, and this is my brother, Father Clergue – that could get confusing, couldn’t it? And this is Ms. Jonah, our schoolteacher.”
Politely, feeling uneasy, the Messenger looked to each of them in turn, and caught Ms. Jonah looking at his near-empty wash basin. She looked up, caught his eye, and nodded blankly with the mention of her name. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
“But you may call me Pierre,” said the priest with a smile. His face had wholly changed to a more holy expression since he’d entered. His professional mask.
“And me, I’m Bernard,” said the mayor, who reminded the Messenger of a capable Elmer Fudd.
A pause. They waited for the Messenger to announce himself, and when he didn’t they hardly missed a beat. They were used to talking and the pause didn’t matter.
“You must have traveled a long way,” said Pierre.
Bernard jumped in.“Please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. It’s our pleasure. It’s been so long....”
“Water,” interrupted the Messenger. “Water.” It hurt to talk, his voice smaller than he would have liked, but the opportunity couldn’t be wasted.
All three dropped their eyes to the empty wash basin now. The priest recovered his smile first. “Why, of course. You must be dry as sandpaper.” He turned to the lady. “Why, Ms. Jonah would be happy to get you a glass of water, wouldn’t you, Julie?”
Ms. Jonah lifted the corners of her mouth in a reasonable facsimile of a smile. “Of course,” she said automatically. “I’ll be right back.” Ms. Jonah left the room and the priest watched her go, all the way out the door, all the way down the hall, turn to go down the stairs.
The mayor laid his hands on his broad belly and cleared his throat. “On behalf of the people of Scanlon, we’d like to welcome you to our town. It’s been so long since we’ve had any visitors from out east. How are things out that way?”
The Messenger wasn’t ready for questions. He dug into his skull for answers and hardly knew where to start. To look behind him was to turn and face the empty wastes of years across which nothing could travel unchanged. Nothing but the desert and the sere clefts of his skin mattered to him anymore. He could give no good answer and he stared back at the men, wanting to speak of gratitude, about the burden of time and the sweet emergencies of the immediate moment, but it was too big for one man’s mouth to speak, and so he said nothing, feeling neither foolish nor proud for it. It was better to say nothing and keep the meat of his meaning intact than speak and mar the wholeness.
“You must have come a long way,” prompted the Mayor.
The Messenger nodded. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d shared a room with two other people. He wanted to stand up and see them face to face, maybe to touch them, better to believe they were truly in the room with him.
If only he had clothes. Where are my clothes?
The mayor and his brother shared a look when the Messenger on the bed didn’t reply, instead glancing around the room aimlessly. Obviously the man was ruined by the wastes.
They’re gonna think your brains are baked. Scalded your senses. Sand in your soul. Your London Bridge has fallen. Your fuzzy wuzzy is fuzzy bare.
“It was... a long way,” managed the Messenger. He didn’t like being thought of as simple, but his mind was accustomed to parrying with whatever it wanted, and he found it hard to give these men his whole attention.
Fuzzy bare as the day you were born. If you were born. Don’t remember much. What is it you don’t remember?
The mayor and priest lit up to have gleaned a reply from the battered man on the bed.
“That’s wonderful,” said the mayor with a clap of his hands. “I mean to say, not wonderful, but we’re glad to see how you’re recovering. We were most worried about you, sir.”
The priest said, “Yes, how is it out east?”
The mayor scowled at him. “You’ll have to excuse my brother, sir. He’s been calling down hellfires on the people of the east going on ages now. He’s afraid you’re here to tell us you’ve established God’s utopia on earth out there. That would call into question the veracity of most of his sermonizing.”
“Praise be to the lord.”
“Mostly he’s hoping for new hellfires.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of hellfires right here,” said the priest, looking at his brother. “Right Bern? Sorry, Mayor Clergue. Bern.”
The brothers grinned falsely at one another. The men had a jocularity between them yet much of it was an act. In what regard the Messenger couldn’t tell, but they wanted something from him, he knew that. They were playing for his sake, for his ease, imparting a talking distance before they put their hands out. The Messenger suspected that when the time came, those hands would be meaty and unclean, and eager.
He had only one thing of value. The message. He brought it forward again to check on it. Was it for these men that he had the Message? He tucked it away safely. The brothers were looking at him again. Were these men his end?
“So how is it, sir?” asked the priest again. “We’ve had no news... ages.” All pretence of jocularity was gone from the man’s face. If the priest could have eaten him through his eyes, he’d have had forks in his hands. Beside him, his brother would be waiting to ask what it tasted like.
The Messenger could tell they still thought he might be simple. It took a few seconds to swallow painfully. “East? I don’t know. I... I don’t know.”
His efforts sounded like ‘E’s. I doan ‘o.’
And I shall hug him and squeeze him and call him George. That’s what they think of you, chum. Hey, tell them you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. See what they think of that.
“Has there been war?” asked the Mayor. “Is that why there’s been no word? Or some other calamity?”
The priest sounded hopeful, “The end of days?”
Is it for these men that I’m carrying my message? The Messenger dug into his head again and the sands swirled and fell in there. These were the only men he’d seen in years. Years! He should have turned to dust in the desert, been erased like a pencil drawing and blown away. All reason said that. Here a chance: validation. Here a chance to make meaning of his strife....
Itchy all down his legs and in the cleft of his rear, the Messenger shifted uncomfortably. Despite the tide of time pulling at him, urging his reward, all he truly wanted was to relax in the respite of the pillows, glad to be able to lay on his back and face the sky unfalteringly. To be safe, comfortable. To close his eyes and swim through all the black sleep he’d stored behind them.
The brothers shared a heavy look between themselves. “Sir...” said the Mayor.
The door knocked open where it had swung half closed and Ms. Jonah entered carrying two tin cups of water. She came cheerfully, “Jane didn’t have any big glasses so I filled these two. I hope it’s okay.”
“Oh, just fine, Ms. Jonah,” piped Mayor Clergue, boisterous again. “Just fine. Thank you, Julia. Most kind. We were just talking about the situation out east with our new friend.”
“Julie,” she said to the Mayor, holding out the tin cups for the Messenger.
See that, friiiiend, she couldn’t stop herself from making a face at the stink of you.
The Messenger could smell the water. Gratefully he downed the first tin cup. Blessedly cold, it hurt his throat. The second he held close to his chest, took one sip, and held himself back, determined to relish the rest. Perhaps he wouldn’t drink it. Perhaps he’d just hold it there forever, never be without again.
Standing near enough that their arms were touching, the priest put his hand to the small of Ms. Jonah’s back and her face softened. Mayor Clergue leaned in. “Sir,” he repeated softly, I have a confession to make to you. My brother and I, and Ms. Jonah, we represent the people of Scanlon, heart and soul. Tough times have fallen on our town, sir. We don’t know how much longer we can hold back the desert. If not for our well, the town would have already dried up and blown away.”
“The tenacity of our hearts keep us together,” said the priest.
“We don’t have much hope. We hold on, day to day, and try not to think about what may come. There’s been no word from out east for so long. We don’t know what fate befell them, how long ago it happened, or if there was truly a fate at all. Word has simply been passed down from our fathers, and probably their fathers before them, bless them all.”
“Amen,” said the priest.
“Amen,” said Ms. Jonah.
Mayor Clergue had hit his stride, pulling himself to his full height, expanding inwardly to express the completeness of his person.
That’s who these men are, thought the Messenger. These men are explainers.
“All we know are stories,” said the Mayor, “and we’re not sure we even know those anymore, if you follow me.”
“These are days of dust and ruin, my friend,” said the priest. “Dust and ruin, in our hearts as well as in our lands.”
“We’re short on hope, sir,” said the Mayor.
“High in grace,” said his brother.
“Amen,” said Ms. Jonah.
Come on, say it. Say, Hey, Mac, which way to Albuquerque? I want to see what they’d do. Please. Why doncha’ say it just once?
“The people of this town need something to keep their spirits high. They need hope of the outside world. We’ve been encouraging their spirits so long now, telling them that the world has fallen into wrack and ruin while they haven’t. It’s starting to sound old. They can see the dust encroaching. Every year the crops taste a little more like ash in their mouths.”
“Ash,” said Ms. Jonah.
The Messenger’s attention shifted to Ms. Jonah as she spoke. If these men are explainers, what is she? Humbly planted, listening to the mayor’s diatribe, nodding her head at the pertinent points... but she wasn’t part of those words, as if hearing them for the first time. These men were explainers, and they’d explained to her why she was to come along – that was it – and she had agreed. As explainers, the Clergues were top notch.
The Messenger drank every one of the mayor’s words greedily, hungry for the hum and bluster of the human voice. In the end, when these men were done, and he filled with the lustre of their voices, would he want what they were explaining?
“Everybody has heard about you,” said the priest. “The Abram boy told a friend that you had come with a message. And that friend has told his mother, and his mother has a mouth like a siren.... You’re like the angel Jacob met going go Canaan. You’ve appeared out of nowhere. And with a message from out of the east.”
“People are excited,” said Ms. Jonah.
“Perhaps a little too excited,” said the Mayor.
Ms. Jonah nodded dutifully.
The priest bobbled on his toes and for a moment seemed to mimic a large crow hovering over a carcass. “What we’re trying to say, sir... well I’ll just come out and say it, shall I? Sir, we’re concerned about this message you have.”
The mayor joined in, “It’s too important to let information bandy about willy-nilly, ear to ear. It could only be chaos, true meaning lost in the gabble and gobbledegook that clogs the heads of most people.”
The priest came out with it, “What is the message you came all this way to tell us?”
The Messenger sipped from the cool tin cup. He looked to the explainers, and to Ms. Jonah. He wasn’t ready yet. He wasn’t sure yet. He shook his head.
The brothers exchanged another glance. The mayor cleared his throat. The priest patted Ms. Jonah in the small of the back again. “Share your burden, brother,” he said. “If you have a warning to give us from people back east, we’re the very people to share it with. Let us be the conduit through which to reach as many ears as possible.”
“If it’s sensitive,” said the mayor, “we can judge the proper course of action.”
Left turn at Walla Walla. Should have taken the left turn....
The Messenger sipped from his tin cup. Never, ever, would he tire of its clean coldness making channels down his throat. He said, “I....” He stopped there. “N...no,” he said.
The mayor was shifting warily. His hands no longer seemed plump accessories to his explanations. They’d taken on the shadow of stranglers, of squeezers, of throttlers, attached to his meaty arms.
The priest, with his hand still on the small of Ms. Jonah’s back, leaned in to whisper to her. Ms. Jonah’s mouth dropped open, and the priest took her by the arm and guided her to the side where they turned their backs.
The mayor stepped closer to the bed. The Messenger felt penned in by the big man. More than ever he wished for his clothes. He overheard Ms. Jonah say, “Pierre....”
“Sir,” said the mayor, “You’ve come too far to hold your tongue. We’re the only town, the only people. We’re sure of it. What is it you know, sir? You can’t withhold it from us. We couldn’t allow that.”
The priest and Ms. Jonah joined them, and the mayor’s jocular face popped back into place. He said, “But your trek must have tired you out mightily, sir. We’ll leave you to rest.”
“You must have quite the tale to tell,” suggested the priest.
“In the meantime, Ms. Jonah has volunteered to stay with you a while. If you need anything, or have anything you want to tell us, she’s our eyes and ears. Pierre tells me she’s a darling hand at healing too.”
Ms. Jonah tried a weak smile. The lines of her dress no longer seemed as trim and straight.
Mayor Clergue offered his hand, the size of a small saucer, strong and meaty. Grasping it the Messenger was very aware of the dried bones in his own hand. The priest merely offered a bow before the two exited grimly, leaving Ms. Jonah behind in a room that suddenly seemed very large, strange, and quiet.
The priest could be heard from the hallway. “Bern, the only prophet we’ve seen this day is from our farms.”
A laugh. Footsteps receded down the stairs. Ms. Jonah swayed before the bed. Her eyes wandered from toys to small shoes to drawings on the wall. Finally her eyes fell on the basin of water by the bedside. She stepped in closer and wrung the wet rag.
Exhausted, feeling hollow, the Messenger watched her warily, wondering what it was she had to say to him.
“Come here,” she said. Her eyes were sad, and against the stern backdrop of the rest of her, somehow that made her prettier. “Lie down,” she said.
The Messenger opened his mouth to speak, and decided he would give up on speech for a while. He sipped the top level of water from his tin cup so the water wouldn’t slosh when he shifted, and pushed himself closer.
“Why is it you’ve come all this way?” she asked, looking down on him, not untenderly. “Where have you come from?”
She wet the rag in what was left of the disc of water in the bottom of the basin and slapped the cool cloth against his chest, finishing the wash that the other lady had started. He felt strange and vulnerable, naked under his sheet, with her hovering over him, though the desert had stripped him of most of his modesty, and much more besides.
Her eyes entreated him. Speak. Speak. And he wanted to. She seemed a nice lady. If he told her what she wanted, she would be happy for a while to hear it, able to pass that information along to Pierre the priest. Speak.
Ms. Jonah wet the rag again and ran it over his chest. Ms. Jonah’s fingers were taut and cold as ice despite the warm weather. Ms. Jonah made sure that he was clean in places he’d nearly forgotten with his erasure of sand, and when Ms. Jonah was done – and he had to admit that she’d done a wonderful job – he was relaxed and at ease, and felt as clean as he could ever remember, on the inside as well as on the out.
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