After the Flood. Kassandra montag
I knew how important learning and books were to her. How much it had pained her when her school closed and her students scattered across the country. I knew also of her lover who had been killed on his fishing boat three years before by a raiding tribe. She had been scared of the water even before that, and she cloaked this fear as a love for land.
“Little bit of good in everything,” Beatrice said.
I thought of the raider on the coast talking about new nations and the need to organize people. I’d heard that argument before in saloons and trading posts. That the raiders’ wealth could rebuild society faster. Forcing people to go without would get us back to where we were sooner.
I described what a library looked like to Pearl. “Do you want to go to a place like that?” I asked her.
“Why would I?” she asked, trying to wrap the snake around her wrist as he resisted her.
“You could learn,” I said.
She frowned, trying to imagine a library. “In there?”
I came up against this again and again with Pearl. She didn’t even want what I so sorely missed, had no conception of it to desire it.
It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought. Or maybe it’s how she was born. Maybe she couldn’t want something like that after being born in a world like this.
Beatrice didn’t say anything more, and after we finished making lures I went into her tent to pack. I packed our grain in a linen sack, tucking it in the bottom of a bucket. I set the tomato plant in a basket and tucked a blanket around it, a gift from Beatrice. I thought of Row, imagined her wrists cinched together with rope, her cries silenced or ignored. I shuddered.
Beatrice handed me the rolled-up map. “I don’t even have a compass to give you.”
“You’ve given me more than I hoped for,” I said.
“One more thing.” Beatrice pulled a photo from her pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a photo of Jacob and Row, taken a year before she’d screamed my name in that boat as it sped away. Grandfather and I gave it to Beatrice so she could ask traders in Apple Falls if they’d been seen. In the photo Jacob’s auburn hair had a gold sheen from the sunlight. His cleft chin and crooked nose, caused by a childhood schoolyard fight, made his face look angular. Row looked delicate with her small sloping shoulders and shining gray-blue eyes. They were my eyes, almond shaped, hooded. Eyes that looked like the color of the sea. She had a scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, curving over an eyebrow and across a temple. When she was two she had fallen and cut her face on a metal toolbox.
I rubbed Row’s face with my thumb. I wondered if Jacob had built them a house at the Valley. That’s what he always said he wanted to do for me, years ago. Jacob worked as a carpenter like Grandfather. They began building our boat together, but after a while it was only Grandfather working on the boat. I had listened to their yelling and arguing for weeks and then suddenly it was quiet. That was two months before Jacob left with Row.
Beatrice reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. “Come back,” she whispered in my ear, the phrase she whispered in my ear each time I visited. I could feel in how her embrace lingered that she didn’t think I would.
PEARL AND I set sail to the south, following the broken coast. It was rumored there was more wood for building boats down south in Harjo, a trading post in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’d use my credit at Harjo for wood and trade my fishing skills for help in building a bigger boat. My little boat would never handle the tumultuous seas in the north. But even if I could build a bigger boat, would I be able to navigate and sail it? Desperate people could always be found to join a ship’s crew, but I couldn’t stand the thought of traveling with other people, people I might not be able to trust.
I strung a line through a hook and knotted it and did it again for another pole. Pearl and I would fish over the side of the boat later in the evening, maybe even try some slow trolling for salmon. Pearl sat next to me, organizing the tackle and bait, dividing the hooks by size and dropping them in separate compartments.
“Who’s in this photo?” Pearl asked, pointing to the photo of Row and Jacob sitting on top of a basket filled with rope.
“A family friend,” I said. Years ago, when she’d asked about her father, I told her he had died before she was born.
“Why’d you ask that man about my father?”
“What man?” I asked.
“The one you killed.”
My hands froze over the bucket of bait. “I was testing him,” I said. “Seeing if he was lying.”
The sky to the east darkened and clouds tumbled toward us. Miles away a haze of rain clouded the horizon. The wind picked up, filling our sail and tilting the boat. I jumped up to adjust the sail. It was midafternoon and the day had begun clear, with an easy, straight wind, and I thought we’d be able to sail south for miles without making adjustments.
At the mast I started reefing the sails so we’d bleed wind. Around the coast to the west, waves rose several feet, the crashing white water swirling under the dark sky. We’d faced squalls before, been tossed in the wind, almost capsized. But this one was driving straight west, pushing us away from the coast. A rag on deck whipped up into the air, almost smacking me as it flew past and disappeared.
The storm approached like the roar of a train, slowly getting louder and louder until I knew we’d be shaking inside of it. Pearl climbed over the deck cover and stood by me. I could tell she was resisting the urge to throw her arms around me. “It’s getting bad,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Nothing else scared Pearl like storms; she was a sailor afraid of the sea. Afraid, she’d told me before, of shipwreck. Of having no harbor.
“Take the gear under the deck cover,” I told her, the wind catching my words and flattening them. “And bolt it down.”
I tried to ease the tension of the sail’s rigging, loosening the sheet, but the block was rusty and kept catching. When I finally got it loose, the wind picked up, knocking me backward against the mast, the rope flying through the block, sending the halyard soaring in the wind. I held on to the mast as Bird leaned left, waves rising and water spraying across the deck.
“Stay under!” I shouted to Pearl, but my words were lost in the wind. I climbed across the side of the deck cover, running toward the stern, but I slipped and slid into the gunwale. I scrambled to my feet and began tightening the rope holding the rudder, winding it around the spool, turning the rudder so we’d sail into the wind.
Thunder roared, so loud I felt it in my spine, my brain vibrating in my skull. Lightning flashed and a wave crashed over Bird, and I grabbed the tiller to steady myself. I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambled toward the deck cover, and ducked inside as another wave hit us, foaming overboard.
I wrapped myself around Pearl, tucking her under me, clutching her with one arm and holding on to a metal bar drilled into the deck with my other hand. Bird rocked violently, water pouring under the deck cover, our bodies jostling like shaken beads in a jar. I prayed the hull wouldn’t break.
Pearl curled in a tight ball and I could feel her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings against my arm. The wind was blowing straight west, pushing us out of coastal waters and deeper into the Pacific. If we were pushed any farther offshore, I didn’t know how we’d make it back to a trading post.
Some dark feeling washed over me that felt like rage or fear or grief, something all sharp corners in my gut, like I’d swallowed glass. Row and Pearl rippled through my mind like shadows. The same question kept rising in me: To save one child, would I have to sacrifice another?
THE DAY MY mother died I had been at the upstairs window, four