Earthbound

16

We had talked a couple of times about whether it was better to lose a loved one suddenly, without warning and with no emotional preparation, or go through the agony of watching them slip away slowly.

For yourself you want it to be sudden and unexpected. But perhaps for the ones you love, you want time to say good-bye.

I still had no clear answer. If the biker gang had killed Paul there by the underpass, I wouldn’t have had the hours of talking, or trying to talk, while he slipped away. And he would have been spared the agony of a lingering death. Physical and emotional.

I had stopped crying, and started digging, by the time they came back. Cursing the blunt entrenching tool and the coarse network of roots that resisted it. I only had a small hole when Dustin and Elza came up the slope, along with two men from Funny Farm, Wham-O and one who introduced himself as Judd when he took the entrenching tool from me with quiet insistence.

“I’m sorry,” Elza said. “How many years?”

“Actual? I was eighteen when we met and a few weeks older when we fell in love, or I did. Twenty-one real years?”

“Not enough.”

“No.” How many would be enough? We had moved back to the cart, and I stared down at him, at his body. I wanted to touch him, and I didn’t want to.

Judd had followed me up, holding the small shovel like a toy in his large hand.

“Ma’am, I’ll do whatever you say, but wouldn’t it be best if we buried him in the graveyard up at the farm? You’re part of the family now.”

“Of course,” I said, and did a bad imitation of smiling. “I wasn’t, I’m not thinking straight.”

The three men had no trouble convincing Jerry to back and fill and come back down to the path with them. As we made our way along, they told me what had happened.

The gunfire we’d heard had evidently been in the nature of a probe: two or three people with automatic weapons staged an attack on the stockade’s front entrance. They killed the man who was standing guard there.

The “farmers” responded with fire from two of the guardhouses on the corners of the stockade, but worried they might have used up too much ammunition in a show of force.

When Dustin and Namir came to their aid, giving flanking fire from the east, the attackers withdrew fast, leaving a blood trail but no bodies.

Other than that first casualty, none of the good guys was injured, but it was a prudent assumption that they hadn’t seen the end of it. And they wanted us inside the stockade as soon as possible.

I thanked them for coming to our rescue so quickly. Dustin pointed out that it wasn’t exactly charity. Out there, I could be captured and held hostage. Even if they weren’t smart enough to do that, weapons and ammunition and a vehicle that ran on grass were beyond price.

A phrase with no meaning. When would things have prices again?

It wasn’t just Dustin and Namir and Judd in the rescue party. They said that Namir had wanted to come up with the horse, but the farmers already had a squad organized and on alert, which was how they were able to come back so fast. I never saw more than two of them at a time, but there were eleven others along with Judd, moving through the woods alongside of us, ahead and behind.

We moved along at a pretty good rate, and after about twenty minutes turned up into the road that cuts through the wheat field to the stockade. Judd shouted an order and then stayed back in the woods with his scattered squad.

Jerry stopped for a moment when he saw the building, and then all but trotted toward it. The double door swung open, and Namir came out on horseback to meet us.

He looked in the cart and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Not unexpected,” I had to say, but my voice cracked.

He dismounted and walked alongside me. “You were with him,” he said.

“Yes and no. I went off to check on a noise—a dog or a wolf. When I came back he was, he was gone.”

“Hard on you.”

Yes and no, I thought. That chest wound would not have healed without surgery. Even if he had been sheltered and comfortable, he wouldn’t have lasted very long. He probably knew that as well as I did. When we could talk, we talked of other things.

Gunfire to our right, two single shots. The horse and mule both realized it was time for speed, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with them on the way to the door. It slammed shut behind me, but they eased it back open a few inches, a guard watching through the crack.

Not a job anyone would want, sniper bait.

The place didn’t seem much changed from before except that some people carried weapons. And there were more of them. Judd confirmed that they had taken in a few neighboring families, who brought food and munitions with them.

Did they turn away people who came empty-handed? I could ask later. There were other horses and mules inside the compound, in a corral improvised from scraps of old lumber. A couple of men held it open for the horse and unhitched Jerry. They both went straight for the pile of hay, and I had a sudden vision of how hard that was to come by now. Harvesting under armed guard, quickly. The same with the orchards and other crops, and nobody would be lazily fishing out of the stream. There were chickens underfoot everywhere, which I supposed had been cute for an hour.

When would it be safe to go back to normal living conditions? Would it ever be?

Namir and Dustin and Elza helped me carry our gear to the small cabin we were sharing with two other couples. Then we went to the rear of the place, to the cemetery garden just beyond the back door.

Four living people were keeping guard in foxholes while a burial party of four others worked fast with pick and shovel. A body lay beside them under a dirty sheet stained with new blood. The man who’d been shot at the beginning of the attack I’d heard from back in the woods.

They passed us the pick, and we started breaking ground for Paul’s grave. I did a short turn, the pick much more efficient than our entrenching tool, but almost too heavy for me to swing. After a long and heavy day.

When they finished burying the other man, we stopped digging. Roz came out with two women and two children, and they each said some words, the children crying though the women had finished.

I thought I was done with crying, too, but it started again when the four of us carried Paul’s body from the cart, using a blanket as a stretcher. We lowered him into the waist-deep hole and took the blanket out; no winding sheets when cloth was getting rare. I used Namir’s knife to cut a square of cloth off my shirt, to cover Paul’s face before the dirt fell.

I cried then, and so did Dustin and Elza. Perhaps Namir would have if he could. The only humans on this planet who had been to the stars. Come back to Earth to die.

He would not have wanted a prayer any more than I would. But I tried to remember something he had said to me about how marvelously complex man was in spite of his cosmic insignificance. A shifting assemblage of atoms, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, come together to “mimic and define” purpose in its beautiful stagger from cradle to grave.

He had been a beautiful man, full of humor and courage and love. I said that, too, after Dustin and Elza gave their farewells, and Namir said something in Hebrew. Then we each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and Elza led me away while Namir and Dustin did the heavy work.