This Census-Taker

11

I’ve said that the day I came running down the hill, trying to say how one of my parents had killed someone — the other perhaps — the children with their own parents were held by them to watch me. And that Samma was there too, and Drobe, and their friends, scattered throughout the crowd and watching from behind the metal guards around yards and like birds on ledges. One bridge boy hooted while I cried and tried to speak and Drobe threw a stone so hard that when it hit him on the side of his face it knocked him to the ground.

Drobe and Samma pushed through to reach me. They took hold of me and they clutched me as if I might get away.

There were no permanent police in the town. Every few weeks a uniformed delegation would arrive from the coastal city to deal with whatever disputes the hill people had stored up, to process what paperwork the occasionals, the volunteer officers, had incurred, the prisoners they’d incarcerated in our little jail. Until those agents arrived, the officers investigating my gasped allegation would be an anxious window-cleaner and a hunter wearing the temporary sashes that granted them authority. It would be a young schoolteacher with a faintly scarred face who would interpret the books of law.

The window-cleaner was a rangy bald man who gripped me hard and shook me. “From the beginning,” he said, too loud, “tell us what happened from the beginning,” and I didn’t know what the beginning was. With which death should I start, which animal? Or with the look my father sometimes wore, as if he’d replaced his own eyes with clear or clouded glass ones?

The crowd listened as I corrected myself, wailed that no, it was someone else who was dead, my father who’d killed her, killed my mother in the attic.

The hunter came down to my level. “The attic?” he said.

He was old and brown- and gray-bearded and very big. He put his hand on my shoulder and the weight of his arm was astonishing. His belt was a rattling bandolier. He wore a shotgun on his shoulder. He squinted up the path, his eyes bright between wrinkles.

“Wait,” said the window-cleaner.

“Fuck ‘wait,’ ” the hunter said. “Who’s looking after you?” he asked me. I blinked and looked at Drobe and Samma and they looked at me. Samma extended her arm, not hugging me but encircling me without quite touching, and Drobe moved around her to stand on my other side. Thus they claimed me.

The schoolteacher and the cleaner weren’t paying full attention but were remonstrating with the hunter as he walked away from them, his thumbs on that belt of cartridges.

“You don’t know what happened,” the teacher said to him but he shook his head and raised his voice to say to her, “Look at the boy!” He hesitated and took in Samma and the gang who’d climbed down from their vantages and come quietly to join us, the gang that now included me. “You be careful,” he said to us.

He whispered to Samma and put something in her hand, then started up the hill with the other sashed man and the schoolteacher running after him, he complaining, she lifting her heavy skirt to climb. After moments of hesitation a few others went to follow them, fetching metal bars and hefting garden tools, checking the firing bolts of old weapons, watching me where I waited in this new situation.

Everything, even the dirt, was poised.

Samma stared until, blinking, I met her eyes.

“Are you hungry?” Drobe said.

But I had no sense of that. Above us at the town’s edge I could see the teacher with the hunter and his new posse, close to the outmost buildings, the teacher looking over her shoulder back at us. Samma shook me gently so I looked at her again.

“What did the man say to you?” I said.

“He told me not to steal your supper. He gave me money.”

She bought meat and grain and we stewed it on a fire in the last of those empty houses that the children claimed as their territory and we all ate there on the body of the bridge. In a big empty attic room with late sunlight coming in, that made me cry again, in a way that was new to me.