How I Live Now

21

We had plenty of opportunity to notice that poor old Jane McEvoy seemed to have lost a good number of her marbles already over the past few weeks and it was obvious that this was going to be the last straw by a pretty substantial margin.

Piper and I tried to occupy Alby while she crashed around the house wailing with grief and army wives kept arriving to console her like such a thing was possible and Alby, who didn’t get at all that his father was dead, kept playing his favorite game which consisted of Bashing Things and then Bashing More Things and then Bashing Anything That Was Left. After about six hours of Bashing he ran out of Things and started to grab on to his mother and howl which just made everything worse.

Major McEvoy’s friend and driver Corporal Francis, who everyone called Frankie, went with a couple of other guys to try to retrieve the bodies but they couldn’t get near the checkpoint due to warning shots being fired at anyone who approached. When he came to stay at the house that night I tried to talk to him about getting Mrs. M some sedatives but I never saw a person look tireder or more dispirited than him and I got the feeling he was already doing so much more than his best on so many fronts that digging up a prescription for Valium would be one job too many, and anyway he was the one who could’ve used a few hundred milligrams.

Piper and I scraped together something like an omelet with a few eggs and some of Alby’s milk and we cooked some beans from the farm and cut up some plums and we gave most of it to Frankie who didn’t eat much and Alby who did, and then we put Alby to bed and went to bed ourselves right afterwards leaving Frankie with Mrs. McEvoy and two of the army wives crying in the kitchen which by this time was almost totally dark.

That night was bad and Piper kept jerking awake wide-eyed and shaking and saying she kept seeing the face of the boy who got shot and then she started to sob and say she wanted her mother and I’d just get her calmed down and asleep and it would start all over again. When I thought about Joe I felt fairly bad that he got his head blown off but mostly furious that because of him being such a fool Major Mac had to die.

When I finally got to sleep I found Edmond and told him everything that happened, and he stayed with me for hours and whether I was dreaming or just borderline schizophrenic I didn’t know and didn’t care either.

At around 6 a.m. when everyone was still sleeping four soldiers came bursting into the house looking for Frankie and said we had to leave immediately, that a vigilante group had started up and they went in the night to ambush the checkpoint soldiers and now The Enemy was going house to house and killing anyone they didn’t like the look of.

All hell broke loose.

Mrs. M stayed frozen in one position like she didn’t understand English or even how to walk anymore but everyone else was shouting and running. I tried to talk her into getting Alby, but she didn’t even look at me and then Frankie took over and told me to get dressed and I grabbed some clothes and two warm blankets and told Piper to take one of Major M’s sweaters and save a place for me in the truck and then I stuffed a few useful things inside the blankets including a jar of olives from the pantry and a jar of strawberry jam which was just about all that was left in there and as I was looking around for anything else that might come in handy I saw a silver compass on a little plinth with Major McEvoy’s name on it and an inscription, and feeling like a grave robber I smashed it on the floor to pull it loose and the compass came off and I stuck it in my pocket along with the little knife I had from fruit picking.

I assumed Jet would just follow us into the truck, but when it came time to leave there was no sign of him, maybe because of all the noise. Piper looked stricken and whistled and called with her voice getting higher and more hysterical and much as everyone wanted to see a little girl reunited with her dog there was no way they were going to risk everyone’s lives waiting for it to happen so I pulled her in beside me and we drove off without him.

Piper didn’t even cry, but just sat there looking completely blank which was worse.

We all sat dazed and speechless in the truck, Alby quiet for once and Mrs. M still frozen, and we drove south according to my compass and only stopped once to pick up some of the army guys I recognized from Meadow Brook and who could just cram into the back with us.

Other people tried to flag us down as we drove along, the sound of a truck these days was enough to get people running out of their houses to see what was going on, and some of them tried to get us to stop by standing in the middle of the road or jumping onto the side of the truck but Frankie just said in a low voice to keep our heads down and he kept driving and didn’t even slow down.

Piper and I were hanging on to each other feeling stupefied with fear and loss and Mrs. McEvoy was holding on to Alby like a drowning person and Alby just sat there thrilled that he was going in a car and could see all the trees rushing past him and as the tears streamed down Mrs. McEvoy’s face faster and faster I thought Her husband’s dead and maybe her older son too and now she has to leave her house and all she’s got left is one drooling kid without any idea what’s going on and she didn’t even think to bring him some milk.

We drove for ages until we got to a big barn with lots of army trucks parked around it and everyone got out and Frankie said We’ll stay here for a while and we went inside and it was a huge hay barn filled with guns and sleeping bags and all the signs that the army was using it as a barracks and Piper and I found a corner of the loft that didn’t have anyone else’s stuff in it and put our things down and then sat down and waited to see what would happen.

Alby was having a fine old time running around looking at everything and the only thing we could do that was useful was to try to keep him away from the guns that were just lying around. I wasn’t about to have him blow himself to smithereens on account of it would clearly be the end for his poor old deranged mom.

As the day went on the army guys kept coming and going and they all seemed to have some sort of plan like ants in an anthill going about their business in a nice orderly fashion until a foot comes along and stamps on the whole structure.

Piper and I slept a little and we found some magazines hanging around and borrowed whichever ones didn’t feature extremely obscene pictures of naked women, which were few and far between. And eventually Piper said in an apologetic way that she was a little bit hungry and she went off to see what she could find and came back with half a loaf of bread which was about as easy to get hold of these days as a piece of the True Cross and she also had some cheesy stuff they called curd and it tasted pretty good.

Early in the evening the soldiers started coming back from patrolling The Locality in groups of three or four and some of them came over and told us what it was like out there which as far as we could tell wasn’t very nice what with all those laid-back enemy troops suddenly getting aggressive and diving into action which generally seemed to involve killing people like us whenever possible.

I obviously didn’t think this was a good thing, but it did coincide a whole lot more closely with my understanding of what a war was supposed to be.

Anyway, lots of them talked to us or recognized Piper from the farm and nobody said Where’s Jet? or What happened to Major Mac? because we were all catching on to the fact that some questions were better not asked.

Piper and I were thinking more or less the same thing, namely, first we were five plus Jet, Gin and Ding and then we were three with Jet and now we were Just Two.

If you haven’t been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is No time at all.