She wants to feel normal again and happy, giddy.
“All clear,” Shelton announces. “So far, so good.”
Kim peeps around his side, taking in the dim, airless room with black and white bed-ticking cots along two unpainted un-ceiled walls, an old-timey pine chest and four splay-legged chairs at a small foldable table and nothing else. “Hey, it even has furniture.”
“Kinda dusty but we’re used to that.”
A loud roll of thunder from the west is followed by sudden rain like gravel tapping on tin.
“Shelton it’s raining.” The green smell of rain drifts on the air through the open door. A cool breeze lifting and mingling with dust.
He reaches around for her, pulling her in front of him and breathing into her neck. “It’s raining, Kim.”
He leads her over to the cot along the east wall, pats the thin mattress down and flips it over, then lies with one knee up and pulls her to him.
It’s raining.
Chapter 21
The rain lets up the next day, with swirling gray clouds promising more rain, not enough to get the Swamp back in balance, but enough to give Kim and Shelton a worry-break.
They are like eager campers trudging the dampened dirt from the car to the house to bring in bedding and clothing; Adam and the dog trail up and down the doorsteps in their muddy tracks. All food and drinking water stay in the car in case they have to leave in a hurry. Sis’ Shirley stays inside out of the “damp,” spreading sheets on the cots and tucking them in smooth as iced cakes, then stacking boxes along the walls.
When she woke up in the car yesterday and it raining, she’d assumed they would be taking her home, but Shelton had convinced her to stay, saying rain is drawn to rain and that’s why there are deserts. Besides, he added, he and Kim need her to help out with Adam and protect them from people on the other side like that man yesterday.
Adam doesn’t seem spooked by their new cabin in the midst of other like cabins. Even the shrill whistle-like chirruping of the frogs and the bellowing of gators don’t faze him. Once in a while Kim will notice him sucking his thumb with his wide blue eyes focused inward, and she feels sure he is remembering and worrying.
While Sis’ Shirley gets the house swept out and in order, Kim and Shelton walk the grounds checking for signs of other people having been there. Out of some no-longer-applicable teachings about not trespassing, and an instilled sense of uneasy gratitude about not paying their way, they don’t go inside the other cabins, just along the lanes between them and up to the ruins of the commissary. The trees are mostly orange, mirrored on the water, but at least they look wet, not dusty. Across the woods, like at the Suwannee River Bridge, blackened snags point up to the gray sky.
***Inside the store, they find scattered stained books and brochures and tiny plastic gator souvenirs and what looks like raccoon bones in the midst. There’s a strong smell of mildew and rot from the spongy wood flooring.
“We’ve become hunters and gatherers,” Kim says. “It’s like we’ve moved backward in time, isn’t it?”
Shelton pins her with his eyes. “You’re right.”
In one corner, near the back, they find cane poles and later a pack of plastic grape worms for bait.
Shelton grins at Kim. “What you think Sis’ Shirley would say about a mess of brim for supper?”
“She’d say halleluiah, praise the Lord. Me too.”
“I think she’d say halleluiah, praise Abdul Selah.”
“Maybe,” Kim says, looking around at the mess of paper and other trash. “But don’t you think it’s strange that she never got the microchip or the tattoo?”
“Well, yeah, that’s a point. Except she probably thinks that law doesn’t apply to her, since she’s like his own mama.” Shelton steps over a pile of pink fiberglass insulation mixed with chunks of sheetrock, then poses with hands on hips like Sis’ Shirley. “That boy shore done good for hisself,” he says, mocking her. “He sneak right in and take over the US of A, then next thing you know he be the ruler of the European Union. Next thing he be running nigh the whole wide world, and he ain’t done yet. Say, he going after...”
Laughing, Kim spreads one hand before his face to signal him to stop. “Okay, okay. But I’m still glad she came with us.” She knows he’s of the same mindset, recalling what happened yesterday, when he says, “Me too,” and soberly walks off.
Going out to the deck over the channel, to find a hole with enough water for fishing, Shelton says, “Last time I went fishing everything had to be just so: best tackle, finest reel, weather perfect.” He holds out a hand to test the drizzle of rain. His narrow brown eyes beam in the neon brightness of the trees.
“Was with my daddy,” he continues, walking on with Kim by his side. “I was walking in a hurry from the truck to the boat at Lake Okeechobee landing. Done hauling all my gear and heading back to help Daddy with his.” Shelton slings his head, laughing. “He came around that truck and grabbed me by the arm as I was reaching over in back to pull out his old re-worked reel. He leaned up against the truck, facing me and said, ‘Now, you slow down. When you were little I didn’t out-walk you, did I?’”
He looks up at the rainy sky. “I wonder if he’s still around.”
“I hope not.”
“I should have called while I had the chance.”
“I have a few regrets along those lines too.”
“Your folks?”
“Oh, yeah.” She has more recent regrets. She starts to tell him about being stopped by the police officer—all of it. But then he walks off toward the side of the building to get their cane poles and the moment passes and anyway what would telling change?
***When they get back to the cabin, they have seven muddy catfish strung through the gullets on a palmetto stalk.
The smoke has almost cleared except for a light haze out over the woods.
Adam has never seen a fish and at first he keeps backing away. Finally, he steps up and touches one of the overlapped fish, laughing, till he gets finned, then he cries for half an hour.
Shelton takes him out to the fire pit, a ring of granite stones, and lets him stay with him while he clears out the clotted smut and ashes and dirt with a spade he had found.
Earlier, Shelton had convinced Kim that the bare dirt around the pit is damp enough to contain the fire inside. And that it is light enough out with the fire-toned trees to not be seen by anybody driving by on the main road.
At a shelf along the edge of the porch, overlooking the pit, Sis’ Shirley and Kim strip the hides from the stubby bodies of the fish and place them in a gallon bucket of water brought from the channel.
When the oak fire has burned down to live coals and ash, Shelton places an iron skillet from the cabin over the coals and pours a coating of rancid oil from John’s store inside to heat up.
Seated on a bench along the edge of the porch, Kim nurses Adam while the fish fry. She is starving. It’s been so long since she’s smelled food cooking. Something she used to take for granted. Other things she’s taken for granted, but never Shelton, never Adam with his nest of silken ringlets. She thinks about denying Jesus to save her child. Has she committed the unpardonable sin?
Inside the house, kerosene lamps are lit—Kim expects there are more in the other cabins and, manners aside, tomorrow she will search for them. Already Shelton has found another cot for Adam and slid it up to join with the one already there, like a full-size bed, so he can sleep in the middle, between them.
Full and satisfied, Shelton, Adam and Sis’ Shirley fall asleep to the sound of rain tapping on the tin roof.
Kim rises from the cot and walks to an overturned five-gallon bucket near the window overlooking the other cabins and sits. The room is dark but there’s a faint glow, and yet she cannot see her hand before her face. She doesn’t want to miss the rain; she loves the sound. Though she cannot see through the dark she stares out anyway.
“Lord forgive me,” she prays softly. But she
no longer feels the cleansing warmth and peace she used to feel while praying. Probably because she doesn’t really mean it, she thinks. She’s done what she had to do and if that’s a sin, it’s a sin and she will have to pay for it. The unfairness of it all makes her feel angry and spiteful.
Then a terrifying heat fills her and makes her heart quicken. She stands, placing a hand on the dark window pane, seeing nothing, but continuing to stare. What if she doesn’t make it to heaven again, this time with her second husband and child? She doesn’t remember what comes next, after Christ’s second coming and the War of Armageddon, but she seems to recall Sis’ Shirley saying that the Kingdom of God will be established in Jerusalem for His people. If Kim’s not one of them, will she start over with another child, another husband, and go through the same bitter joys and bright agonies she’s going through now?
***The next morning, while Shelton is out scouting the swamp and woods, Kim leaves Adam asleep with Sis’ Shirley and goes out the back door to the cabin behind the one they are staying in to search for another lantern, or maybe two. She has to put aside all qualms about trespassing; this is survival of the fittest and the same rules just don’t apply anymore.
Other than some high smoke, maybe from a lightening fire, the air is cleaner and cooler. But the gray clouds have taken on a brown tint, moving east. Dead pine needles drift down to the porch as the wind picks up, leaving more of the tall trees bare overhead and a flat mat of straw on the seasoned wood floor.
Inside is identical to her own cabin, except that there is no kerosene lamp on the square fold-up table in the kitchen area and the windows are broken, all four, letting in the dust and blowing leaves and pine straw.
She goes out the open back door and on to the cabin behind it—same condition at the first, except for a hardened bag of sugar on a shelf in the kitchen area. She leaves it.
Going out the back door of this cabin she decides to scout out the row of cabins running north to south. Surely one of them will have a lamp or maybe some oil and wicks at least.
In the fourth cabin of the row, Kim shoves open the vertical wood door, expecting to see a near-naked room like the others. Instead she finds scattered trash and rags and empty food cans. Something smells moldy, filthy, and she has to pull the neck of her shirt up over her nose when she goes deeper into the room. Cots placed like the others but with dingy bedding and clothes heaped on the mattresses.
Near the back door she can see a kerosene lamp on the table in the kitchen area. She’ll just take it and go, she thinks, wading through the trash and rags, past one cot and then the other, the smell of filth growing stronger. But when she reaches the table and picks up the lamp she sees that the wick has burned down into the bowl and the kerosene has been used up. The glass globe is smutty; she’ll have to clean that.
She reaches for an old green flannel shirt on the nearest cot to take with her to clean the globe and her fingertips touch something warm and squirmy. She jerks back, bringing the shirt with her, and stands staring at a nest of mice in a cavity of what looks like a brown leather pouch. The mice scatter beneath the bedding and old clothes toward the head of the cot and then she sees a claw-like human hand next to the pouch.
Wanting to run, but unable to move, she stands, breathing hard, and letting her eyes wander to the pillow where a head might be, but there is only a bump under the cover with dark matted hair fanned out on the pillow.
She drops the lamp in the bed of rags on the floor and it rolls beneath the table and stops at the wall. A horrifying racket in the closed room. Running for the front door, she clamps a hand over her mouth to keep from vomiting, to keep from screaming. She has to be careful not to wake Adam or let Sis’ Shirley know something is wrong; she has to find Shelton and tell him that just because there are no automobiles in the park, this cabin is not empty and possibly some of the others are inhabited by the dead.
Chapter 22
The weather is almost normal, cool with drifting leaves—a pretend fall. Kim loves to get out in the park with Adam and Dixie, just to walk and pretend too that there is no end to this period of relief. But according to Sis’ Shirley, there are more persecutions to be—just a biblical fact.
When she’d taken Shelton to the cabin to show him the dried corpse where the mice had been nesting in its caved abdomen, she had expected him to say they would bury him or her. Her, they guessed, because of the long black hair. But he’d only guided Kim out the door and closed it and stood beside her on the porch layered in pine straw.
“What, Shelton?”
“Let’s leave it. Think of the cabin as a sealed coffin and as for the others what we don’t know won’t bother us.”
“You mean, don’t go into any of the other cabins.”
“Not unless we have to.”
What would we have to for? She hadn’t asked that, because she knew he meant to search for food or blankets or clothes. Already it was getting colder.
Kim is always looking for smoke across the woods, but the sky is mostly floating thick brown clouds. She knows from listening to news on the car radio—something they seldom do anymore—that the brown is caused by clouds of pollution, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass, drifting across continents within days and reducing sunlight to the earth. This is not new news; only the deepening of darkness is new to Kim.
At least when the sky was gray, they could pretend that it might rain, but brown is the color of filth, the color of want.
***This afternoon Adam is wearing khaki corduroy overalls, holding Kim’s hand and toddling alongside. As always, Baby Jesus is dangling by one arm. Kim lets the dog run ahead to locate snakes; she feels guilty for endangering Dixie but...
A large black and white striped butterfly flitting tree-trunk to tree-trunk catches her eye, but she doesn’t say anything to Adam, just stops walking to let him find it on his own.
He stands still, looking up at her with those wide blue eyes, then out to where she is looking. When he sees the butterfly he steps forward, tugging her along.
“Butterfly,” she says. “It’s a butterfly.”
“Butter.”
“No, not butter.” She laughs low—this is his first sighting of a butterfly.
Closer, but not too close, she takes one of his hands and shows him how to hold out his finger for the butterfly to light on. Uncertain, at first, his stubby pointer finger reflexively folds into his fist.
“Hold out your finger,” she whispers, “and the butterfly will light on it.” Actually she doubts they can get that close, but they creep closer, finger up in the air now, as high as Adam can reach with Kim’s help.
Very close, within feet, while the butterfly lights on a low dead branch of a pine tree, pumping its wings, Kim slowly, tenderly, guides Adam forward, till his finger touches the end of the branch, sliding nearer the butterfly. Then beneath the butterfly. Adam can’t help it, he laughs. In less than a second it flies up and away to another section of trees.
“Did it tickle?”
“Tickle Adam.”
“You want to try again?”
“No.” He catches her hand with the butterfly finger wiggling. “Go home.”
Chapter 23
Their days and weeks are unnamed, unnumbered. They know what period of the tribulation they are going through by worsening weather and Sis’ Shirley’s interpretations of Scripture. No more rain, only wind, lots of wind and the roaring thunder of dry storms. Elsewhere, all over the world, according to radio news, there are earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, avalanches, twenty-pound hailstones and meteorite storms. They figure approximately how much time has passed by Adam’s growth and Sis’ Shirley’s lessening. Sis’ Shirley has lost so much weight, Kim worries she may be sick. Her glasses overpower her small frame. She is glasses and rhinestones and bones.
She’s still quarrelsome, a grumbler, but Kim and Shelton have learned to let her get it all out. Otherwise it goes on and on for days: sometimes she wants to go h
ome to the settlement, other times she tells them what she would like to tell her neighbors—Kiss where I can’t. She goes on and on about “her boy, Selah.” He’s done more for her and the rest of his people that the Lord God has ever done. That’s when Shelton has to call her down and mercifully she retreats to her cot to pout.
Their days are spent mostly inside the cabin to keep from breathing in the fowl brown air. Kim still nurses Adam, to keep her milk in case they run out of food.
Once in a while they hear an automobile along the road leading into the park and even human voices, but they stay hidden except when Kim and Shelton put on their knee-high black rubber boots and go fishing at the channel.
Thanks to John, they have enough packaged and canned food to last for awhile, but they’ve had to start boiling their drinking water. It’s always a Russian-roulette risk when opening the relabeled, re-dated foods. Kim or Shelton eat first and wait before letting Adam eat. Then Sis’ Shirley takes a turn and lies on her cot waiting to die before popping up and going about her routine of tidying the cabin and watching out for Adam and spouting out interpretations of the Bible. In other words, while blaspheming, she still believes what she’s always believed.
Kim knows her son has a birthday, somewhere in the lost dates; she knows it’s in the spring, May, but the seasons have blurred into the sameness of cold drifting brown.
They hadn’t anticipated the cold. All they’d brought was summer clothing and light weight jackets, because the weather had seemed as if it would always be hot. Now Kim’s beginning to think about all the clothes and bedding piled in the cabin with the corpse.
Following another light rain, during the long brown spell, four people in an old white van park in front of the closest cabin to the channel and end of the main road.
Nursing Adam, to keep him quiet, Kim sits on the overturned five-gallon can with Adam’s lengthening legs draped almost the length of her own. She watches with Shelton through the window as the group roll out of the van: two teenage girls, in blue jeans and dark jackets, who look enough alike to be twins, except that one appears to be pregnant, and an older woman and man.