The Second History Read online

  Taking a final look around the shelter he made for them, he remembers how he and Judy first arrived here.

  His mother had died three days after Judy’s father, and neither of them wanted to remain in the place where they had buried the last of their families. They agreed to search out a new place, a place just for them. They travelled for weeks to find it, through the rain that had finally come and now fell without seeming like it would ever stop.

  Eban had in mind a place higher in the hills, farther from the route the peddlers took. But, stopped one day for a drink at a brook that rilled between the trees, Judy suddenly looked up at him, her face alight.

  “Look, Eban.”

  He looked with confusion into her eyes, where he saw happiness for the first time since her father’s death.

  “Can you see it?”

  He couldn’t, and shook his head.

  “There’s water here. Flat ground. These big trees that can’t have been cut in a century, for shelter and shade. We passed an old dump not long ago. But we’re a good distance from the route.”

  He turned his face up at the trees blotting out the sky above them. It was October and the last leaves of a fled season rattled on the branch. “You think here?”

  “Just the night. Let’s stay the night. Maybe a few days. See what you think.”

  “But you like it?” he persisted. “You think we could live here?” He tasted the word in his mouth before he spoke it. “Together?”

  She turned her head so she could see him only from the corner of her eye, teasing him with her silence.

  They decided not to eat. They decided not to even build the tent. The night was unusually warm and they sat with their feet in the brook till the moon came out. And then it was so yellow and bright that they rejoiced in its light and decided to follow the brook, climbing higher and higher, until they found a mountain pool. The water was cold and the air was warm, and they swam like dreamers slipping between worlds.

  She called his name and he came to her, paddling furiously to stay afloat while she bobbed lightly and easily in the water. He was still shy then with Judy, but believed they would grow to be at ease with each other. That they would talk and touch freely, like family.

  His teeth shook in his head. Maybe it was colder than he thought. But he was giddy, wild, and felt truth spilling over him, things he wanted to tell her and ask.

  Moonlight made the water luminous, but where the stones that edged the brook cast their shadows, the water was dark and deep. It frightened him, but he dove into it, searching for the bottom, and then for her. He felt the water ripple around her kicking legs, felt eddies of water run over him like the stroke of a hand. Impulsively, he grasped one of her feet and felt her kick suddenly away from him. But he wouldn’t release her. He pulled her under the water, and she wrapped her arms and legs around him, pressed her lips to his, and he opened his mouth and choked. Buoyed like bubbles, they burst to the surface, and she laughed so hard the night rang with the sound of their joy.

  He was deeply relieved to find a breach in her grief, and in his own, and terrified of undoing it. And so he spoke without thinking, as he never did, his words clumsy and hurried.

  “I never thought this,” he told her. “I never imagined anything like this. Like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t think a lot about the future. But I didn’t think we’d ever leave where we were. I thought it would always be just me and my brother. I never thought I’d know anyone else this way.”

  Judy paddled a few inches closer, and he felt the heat of her nearness, the weight of her gaze. In the night there was only the sound of water parting and dashing against itself, stirred by their hands. “Eban, what happened to your brother? I don’t even know his name or how he died. Will you tell me about him?”

  He waited a long time for the words to arrive to answer her, and when they didn’t, he shook his head, like they were both dreaming and needed to be roused. “Maybe we should get out of here,” he said, and meant with the softness of his voice to tell her he was sorry. “It’s so cold.”

  She looked so sadly at him then that he knew he must say something more.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I just can’t. I can’t talk about that.”

  She pulled herself up onto the rocks, huddling with her knees held to her chest. “I guess I don’t know what that’s like. I never had a brother. Or a sister. I only had my fathers.”

  He knew enough not to reach for her or touch her then. “We should make camp,” he whispered.

  “Can we sleep like this?”

  “Here, you mean?”

  “By this pool, just as we are. The water was cold but the air is warm and we’ll soon dry. Can we sleep right here, under the moon?”

  “All right,” he said, glad for this small way to please her.

  “And maybe we’ll stay a few nights, like we said, and see if we could live here.”

  “I’ll get the blankets,” he said, already on his feet, heading to the place where they had left their packs.

  She said they’d stay the night. They’d stay the night and then they’d see. They stayed four years.

  * * *

  —

  Now a pale daylight spills into the room as Judy yanks open the door. “Done in here?”

  He nods, heaving the sack of bedding over his shoulder and extinguishing the candles. “I guess there’s nothing else we can fit now.”

  “Nothing else we need.” Judy stalks back out, leaving the door open behind her.

  After a moment’s thought, he peels one of his drawings from the wall and rolls it up, tucks it into his fist. Most of the drawings are of her, but this is the only one she posed for. The others catch her accidentally in stillness, reading or writing or with her chin between her fists, thinking something out. But in this one, she sat in the afternoon light for as long as she could stand it, holding his gaze every time he looked at her, and then, for a moment, she grinned at him, so suddenly and briefly—he erased the mouth and eyes he’d drawn, to try to catch that expression. He missed it—the curve of her lips is more of a sneer than a smile, but her eyes are full of him. Just that, he will take.

  After he fits the sleeping things into his pack, slipping the drawing into the side pocket where he normally keeps his eel jig, he stands awkwardly before her. “What else?”

  She shakes her head. And all of a sudden she smiles. Her crooked teeth he loves. The gap between the ones at the front. “We’re ready.”

  “The tent?”

  “In my pack.”

  “The medicine bag.”

  “In yours.”

  “Matches,” he murmurs, even as he slides his hand into his pocket and feels a box there.

  “We’ve got enough. We can get more. There will be people out there. Peddlers. Someone.”

  Under the weight of the pack, she looks delicate. Her strong shoulders and back catch its burden as she stoops forward slightly, giving her upturned face the inquiring, timorous look of a bird. Her black hair is twisted into a knot at her neck, and her brown, freckled cheeks are flushed. It occurs to him that she looks happy. Over her shoulder, the barrel of the shotgun rises from the top of the pack, where she’s strapped it.

  He never wanted to leave this place, and never would have, not for any reason except her insistence. This dirt, these trees, the paths they know, the brook that has never yet run dry…it was a world, and it was theirs. In the years they lived here they never starved or thirsted or were visited by anyone who wished them harm.

  And now they leave it to chase a mirage, a lie that he put in her head to slow her departure from him. But it has only carried her away, and all he can do now is stumble after.

  The sun is rising, casting watery yellow light through the trees. The snow that fell during the night has settled in white bea
rds over the firs. Between them, the snow bristles with the bare, mauve branches of dead scrub. But the path from the camp will be easy to travel, brush and snow worn thin. He doesn’t know how far they’ll get today. Maybe to the second river. Maybe farther.

  “The map,” he says softly, but she’s already pulling it out of her coat. She made it the same summer he built their shelter. It traces all their usual routes from the camp, sites where they buried any kill they couldn’t eat, locations of edible vegetation or medicinal herbs. It’s badly drawn and so inexact as to be useless, but they know everything it attempts to depict anyway. And in two days, they’ll be beyond its reach.

  “We’ll do what we said. Follow the lower path till we get past the boneyard, and then travel along the ridge from there.”

  He waits, not wanting to be the one to start. The map still in her hand, she begins walking, quickly, so that Beau has to trot to keep at her heels. She doesn’t look back. But he does.

  He thinks of having a child, as he once believed they would. Back then, he wondered if it would change the way Judy looked at him, to have made something of themselves together. He guessed, like Beau, the child would love her better, prefer her moods and warmth to his steady hand and efforts. He thinks now of how it would cry, and want to be fed, and need countless things, difficult to give or determine; how he would guess at its wants and never be sure—not even when the child was at last able to talk and demand or beg or make faces, to say one thing in a tone that meant another—what it was that he should give it. What to do.

  He has never held a baby. When his brother was born, he was only three, and though he remembers begging to hold him, his mother forbade it. “You’ll drop him,” she said. “You don’t realize how heavy even something so small can be. If you don’t hold his head just so, you might break his neck.”

  She told him babies were born with softness in their heads, the bones not yet fused, so that if you weren’t careful, if you were insufficiently gentle or did something else wrong, you might damage that thin tissue, bruise the tiny, growing brain it contained. He would stare in awe, then, at his brother, sleeping in his crib. He’d look at the soft bald flesh, its fur of golden hair. At his own hands, too rough, too strong, not to be trusted.

  They didn’t know then what was wrong with his brother. After they knew, they left that house. Came away, into the hills. Somewhere the house was still there, perhaps. The cradle, packed away in a closet. His brother, damaged, though Eban had kept his hands to himself.

  As they trudge on through the drifts of snow, he can see the trees closing behind him, hiding the small clearing where they lived. For a moment, looking back over his shoulder, he thinks again that he chose the site well. They might never have been found.

  Then he continues, walking in the half-buried tracks of other trips he has taken down this path, following Judy, her disappearing shape, the blazing colour of her red coat against the white forest.

  And when he gets to the place where his tracks turn away, following another, more familiar path, he steps out of them and continues, walking side by side with the prints of her boots in the snow, shuffling on, trudging through the untouched field of snow.

  II

  Light sinks across the hills as the moon lifts into the sky. For the last several miles, they have walked beside each other. Beau kept at their heels until he tired, and since then Eban has carried the dog in his arms. After the second river, the path widened and rose steeply, ascending higher and higher before them, and after that, the path was gone. They haven’t eaten since they left.

  The white wood is luminous and alien under the moon; he can see everything, but imperfectly. The altered, spectral trees and their long blue shadows. An altered, spectral Judy. There is no sound but their boots crushing the snow.

  Back at the river, Judy refused to let him stop to melt a slab of ice in the sun or over a fire, so he scooped snow into his canteen and tucked it under his coat. He drinks it a few drops at a time as it slowly turns to water, and every few miles he sets the dog on the ground and pours him a little. Each time he offers the canteen to Judy, she shakes her head, though he has seen her snatch handfuls of snow from the ground in her mitten and lift them to her mouth when she thinks he isn’t looking. He watches her for any sign the end has already begun, another pregnancy extinguished. A loss of colour from her cheeks. Her mouth pinched in that terrible way he remembers. But stealing glances at her, as they walk, he sees only expectation in her face. Expectation and something more. A private, almost insolent gladness.

  He is a student of Judy’s moods—he studies her every tone and gesture like a diviner casting the ground for what might lie beneath. The way he watched his brother in the first months of his infancy, with the sense of peering at someone who didn’t belong to the world in the same way he does. A visitor.

  He remembers back then studying his brother, restive as he always was in their mother’s arms, filled with an urgent physical determination but no discernible objective—all darting eyes and thrust limbs and crying that never stopped.

  Their mother dwelt at the outer edge of her patience for those endless months, and Eban feared her. And feared his brother even as he feared for him.

  One night, the baby had cried so long and late that his mother at last threw open the door to Eban’s own room, carrying the baby in a drawer. She shoved it onto the floor, where he lay bawling, and left the room without a word, her face white and frightening. Eban crept to the end of his bed to stare at the wild creature abruptly put into his care. He understood it was his brother’s fault that his mother had become a threat to them both.

  “Stop it,” he told his brother’s howling, shuddering body. “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.” He repeated the word until it became senseless and the howls slowly dissolved into gulps and gasps. At last, when light began to show through the shutters, the baby slept and Eban watched him still.

  Judy, at times, seems as unknowable now as his brother did to him then.

  * * *

  —

  They reach the edge of a frozen lake, and Judy steps out onto the ice without hesitating. Snow squeaks under her boots as she circles the centre of the lake, peering down. And then, with a whoop of triumph, she points to the ground. “Look, Eban! I can see those little sinkholes they make.”

  He frowns. “Eels, you mean.”

  She nods. “Maybe they got trapped by the freeze and just burrowed into the mud like another winter had come. We can smoke them to carry with us.”

  He lowers one boot onto the ice. Feeling the lake take his weight, he steps out with the other foot and makes his way to her. Is it so late in winter already? Have the eel already begun their run upriver from the sea?

  She sets Beau down and pulls her spear from her bag. Without thinking, Eban’s hand goes to the side pocket of his pack, before he remembers the drawing he took from the wall. “I don’t have the eel jig,” he tells her. “I left it.”

  She stares at him. “Well,” she says at last. “Get the axe.”

  Obediently he finds the axe and begins to cut away at the ice. He makes three holes and then she slides the spear through the first, digging at the lakebed. It is blind, uncertain work.

  Eban has never enjoyed eating eel, but Judy loves the meat, or pretends to. Each time they fish for eel, she tells him again that some of the yellowy adolescents they’ve glimpsed in their passage upstream will live to be centenarians. Judy claims they travel a thousand miles from a distant, southern ocean to arrive at these hills, and will return there again. Because she loves to, he lets her tell this story over and over, and the one about the time her father Daniel was taking specimens from the river and caught sight of an elver slinking along the mud. It had been decades since he’d seen an eel, and he’d believed them to be extinct. Without them, there were disturbances in the aquatic insect populations, too many of the wrong things, and other details Eban di
dn’t understand and Judy only partly remembered. Dan was overjoyed at the discovery, and Judy seems to recover that moment of shared happiness with her father each time they fish the eel, which are now consistent summer traffic in the rivers and pools of the hills.

  But as she jams the spear through the ice, again and again, rooting through the mud, the eagerness slips from Judy’s face. At her feet, Beau turns in circles, restless. Eban begins to worry for her again.

  After an hour, Judy throws the spear to the ground. “I’ll do the fire,” she says, as he bends to pick it up.

  He prods at the mud, the spear handle slipping in his gloved hand, and at last he removes the glove so he can push the spear deeper. He thinks she must have been mistaken. It usually takes only a short while to pull an eel or two from a lake where they’ve nested in the silt.

  And then, just as Judy emerges from the trees, a load of wood in her arms, he feels the spear pierce what feels like a bundle of wet blankets. In wonder, he withdraws it into the icy night air, producing an enormous, shining eel. “Judy,” he whispers, turning toward her, the eel waving like a flag from the stick in his hands. But she already sees. She is watching as she drops the wood to the ground, smiles, and turns her back.