This Census-Taker

23

I knew I wouldn’t reach it. I didn’t expect to be gone far or long. This time I didn’t even put on extra clothes, though I knew how cold it was. And though my face burned with it, and though my breath was fog, I felt almost too hot, or not too hot but too something, as if there was no boundary between the air and me. I was dissolving, both sweaty and shivering. I went without hesitation. I could see enough of the path to descend.

There’d been so many of these descents; there are so many ways to go down a hill. I remembered the last but one time, when I ran alone, a weeping mess with death behind me. That earlier me was a stranger child for whom I had care and with whom my patience was strained.

I froze. And after an instant a jackal yelled, as if it had been waiting for me to stand still. It was close. I tried to understand why I’d stopped.

A coil of mist moved in front of me. I tried to think about why I didn’t continue down. I raised a foot experimentally and put it back again, slowly, just where it had been.

The mist beckoned me and pushed me back at the same time. It thickened and seemed to fill with watchers, or with a single fleeting man. I couldn’t continue.

Is it his keys? I thought in the rising wind. My legs trembled.

It’s his keys, I thought. Had my father cut a key to hold me?

I saw deeper shadow in that cloud and felt cold because there was certainly someone there, someone looming out of it, carrying a burden. I was sure it was whomever I’d seen, or thought I had, the night I’d last taken the path. I heard footsteps and quick animal breathing and the jackal howled again.

The mist seemed to move aside and be replaced and who came wasn’t the dim watcher I remembered but someone smaller, a woman shape or a girl shape. She raised an arm.

Here was Samma.

I gasped and put up my hands and cried out a wordless greeting like an animal, and the animal watching us whimpered.

Samma carrying a bag on her shoulder come up so high, come out of the town I’d come to understand she would or could not leave, standing on the hill path ready for me, knowing I’d be there.

She looked taller and underfed and much older to me. She looked drawn so far from the bridge. But she smiled, and it was not too wary, and she waved me down to where she waited.

I thought of the jackal slinking away from our reunion. But I still couldn’t move my feet further down the hill, so I raised my arms and, deciding she could overcome herself, beckoned her urgently in turn to come up a little more.

—

Another twenty steps for her and she struggled as if there wasn’t enough air.

I whispered, “See?”

When she reached me, first she shook my hand as if we were adults, and I liked that. Then she hugged me in a rough way, hesitated and did it again, so hard I let out sounds.

“You’re here!” I said into her clothes. “How did you know to find me?”

“I heard something,” she said. Her voice was sluggish. “There was a shot. Right near here. I thought that might mean something. I got thinking you might come down.”

She was lying. She must have been here when the shot came to know it had been close, which meant she’d been there a long time. I suspected then that she’d been up night after night, as far as, according to the constraints she’d laid, she was able, to wait and hope to find me. I’d come at last.

She shivered on the rocks and spread a blanket on the dirt for us and sat me down beside her. She had food for me. Sugary brittle. Vegetables you could eat raw. I gnawed them.

Eventually I said, “That boy said Drobe was gone.”

We stopped eating. She didn’t look stricken. She didn’t look anything except calm and unhappy. “People go,” she said.

“Why did he go?” I said. “He’d never just go.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t come by you? I thought he’d come for you. What if he did, though? Maybe he tried.”

I heard sniffing: our hungry watcher had come back with a companion, it sounded like. We weren’t frightened.

“You know,” Samma said. “Maybe he did. Maybe he just went.”

Boys and girls might become more solitary thieves. They might find a way or a person with whom to become some sort of adult. They might antagonize the wrong someone and disappear.

“Maybe it was the police,” she said. “He kept telling them to take your father. Maybe they took him instead.”

“What about his friend?” I said. “He was waiting for someone in the picture-house. Not just you, I mean. Someone not from the town.”

She inclined her head.

“When we went back to that hall,” she said, “when your father took you, someone had been there and took everything away except what Drobe had.” I remembered him holding that sealed packet we couldn’t read.

“You know everyone in the bridgetown,” I said. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I never saw Drobe’s friend, either, the girl he told you about.” She paused. “Whoever it is has come to town now, they find you, you can’t find them—.” Her voice was low.

She looked away from me. “I can’t come back for a bit,” she said.

I didn’t answer. Just watched her and tried not to let my lips quiver.

She told me she had the others to think of too, especially now. “It ain’t like I could keep coming back,” she said as if I was arguing with her. “And it ain’t like Drobe’s coming back.”

She gave me a knife with a blade that folded into its handle. “If he comes for you,” she said. She stabbed the air to show me.

She told me a few quick stories.

“I wanted to give you those papers,” she said at last. “The ones Drobe found.”

“Why?”

“You can read, can’t you? But if he still had them he must have took them with him.”

She hesitated. She eyed me and I persuaded her to say whatever it was that I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to say.

“There was a woman,” she told me. “Or a girl.”

Days after Drobe had gone, days since she’d seen him. Late in the evening, Samma standing looking out of the window of her second-favorite bridge-top house as if to discern where he’d gone. She’d fallen back in shock as a face swooped in to stare at her from the dark.

“She was like shadow herself,” Samma said. “She whispered something. It was hard to understand her. She had a young voice. I think she wasn’t older than me, or not by much.”

“Was it a ghost?” I said. Samma shrugged.

“What did she say?” I said.

“Like I say, it was hard to tell. I don’t even think she was looking at me.” In turn Samma did not look at me; her eyes were fixed in recollection. “Like she was looking behind me into the room for someone else. None of the others saw her. She sounded proper upset. I think she said, ‘Where is Drobe? Where’s the repeal?’ Then she was gone and I don’t even know,” she said.

Samma took a big bottle from her bag. She gave it to me. I could barely lift its green glass.

“He left that,” she said. “Drobe went to get it then left it. I think it’s for you.”

In the bottom of the bottle was a scaly scrap and discolored and broken animal bones.

Samma gave me a fast and surly hug without looking at me. I wanted to say anything to her, anything so she’d stay longer. I felt sorry for her as well as for me and, all over again, I didn’t want to be alone on the hill with my father. But I couldn’t stop her.

“I’ll come when I can,” she said and went quickly back to the path. She tried not to let me see her relief as she descended.

You wanted to put your foot down after her, but you didn’t, maybe couldn’t. You watched her go.

That was the last time you saw her. The cold return, the lights of your father’s room, the dark formlessness of the house waited.