When the knock came at the front door Father stopped and Mother stopped but neither made a move to open it. Sonny and Missy stopped too. Little One awoke in the crib but didn’t make a peep. Father had been sharpening his ax in his rocker and Mother had been reading a romance in her chair by the fireplace. Sonny and Missy had been constructing a puzzle they’d already put together countless times. Now everyone stared at the door waiting for who- or whatever was on the other side of it to go away.
The knock came again, heavy, insistent, in slow methodical thuds. Still no one moved.
Then a voice. “I know you’re there.” It was a man’s voice. “Let me in,” it commanded. “I’m with the Resistance. I need shelter. I need food.”
Father remained seated in the rocker, watching the door. Mother and the children followed his example.
“Look,” came the man’s voice again. “If you don’t let me in now. If you make me go someplace else, I’ll be back later and trust me, you don’t want that. Things’ll go a lot easier for you if you just let me in.”
Father lay the ax on the floor beside the rocker and went to the door. He unlatched and opened it on a young man wearing canvas fatigues and a military cap. Outside snow descended in large flakes like feathers. Snowfall was regular for this time of year, two or three times a week, sticking and piling up and not warming enough to melt off for months. The young man was coated with white. His hands and face were raw from exposure and he wore a facial scruff from neglect. In his hand he held a pistol pointed at Father’s belly. He backed Father into the house, huffing steam and stomping his boots.
“Sit down,” the stranger commanded, indicating the rocker Father had just vacated. “And kick that ax to the side, if you don’t mind.” Father did as he was told. No one else moved or spoke. The young man removed his cap and shook it out, sending sprays of white grit to the floor that dissolved instantaneously into a design of shattered dew drops. He nodded at Mother, sent his eyes over the children. “I apologize for the gun,” he said. “But you have to be careful. These are dangerous times. You never know from one moment to the next.”
“Yes,” said Father. “I understand. It’s a terrible thing.”
The stranger returned his attention to Father. “Is this your place?” he asked. “This is your family?”
“Of course. My wife, the children.” Mother nodded to the man. Missy and Junior stared at him and his gun alternately. Little One cooed.
The stranger looked around the cottage. Took in the fireplace, the hobo stove with kettle on top, the wash basin in the corner draped with burlap towels.
“Take me to your meat stores,” he said.
“There is none.” Father’s gaze was bland, unflinching, steady.
“Take me. I’ll see for myself.”
Father gave Mother a grave look. “Outside,” he said to the stranger, nodding toward the door. The stranger stood aside for Father to pass. Again Father did as he was bid and led the stranger out the door and around back of the house to the root cellar.
The village’s basic utilities had been knocked out for over a year: water, sewer, electricity. During these cold months it was common for people to store perishables in cellars or sheds where the freezing temperatures would keep them from turning. Father released the padlock and unlatched the trap doors.
“You first,” said the stranger, directing Father down the steps.
At the bottom Father lit a lamp hanging from a joist with a match from a box nearby. Then he walked to the far end of the cellar and waited. The stranger descended the ladder and looked around. Aside from tools and farm implements, the room was almost bare. Dirt floor, a few benches and shelves. Some naked meat hooks dangled in space from a crossbeam. Part of a cheese round was on a shelf and a small tub of butter. Potatoes, carrots, turnips, and onions were spread out on the benches.
“So no meat but this’ll do,” said the stranger, tucking the cheese and butter under an arm. “Why don’t you grab some of that other, have the missus cook us up a soup.”
Father gathered some of the vegetables in his shirt. He nodded at the stranger to go up the ladder, then he blew out the lamp and followed.
Once inside, Father deposited the vegetables on the sideboard and returned to his rocker, not acknowledging the stranger’s indication that he do so, yet doing it just the same. The stranger set the cheese and butter on the table. He turned to Mother. “Is there bread?” he asked.
Mother opened a cupboard and removed a round of bread, handed it to him. He took a large cup from the sideboard and dipped it into the water pail then went to the table where he lay the pistol down. He sat and removed a hunting knife from a pocket and started to work at the bread and the cheese.
The stranger wolfed down the cheese and bread in formidable hunks, washing them down with earnest draughts of water that missed his mouth by half and flooded his shirtfront.
Mother, having intuited her purpose, chopped up the vegetables and put them into the kettle with some water. When she was finished she returned the kettle to the stove. The hobo stove was banged together out of sheet metal scavenged from derelict cars and it stood on a base of tiles to prevent the flames from imperiling the wood floor boards. It was too big to be an actual hobo stove, but the principle was the same: metal body with ventilation holes punched around the top and a trap door for fuel. Mother opened the trap door, stuffed it with small branches and set them alight with a twig she’d lit in the hearth.
The stranger watched her movements while he ate. When Mother finished, she stood aside, awaiting further instruction. The stranger waved her away, saying, “Go ahead. You can go back to your reading or whatever.” So Mother sat again in her chair, but she didn’t pick up her romance. Instead she watched the children, who continued to eye the stranger and the pistol on the table.
The stranger finished eating and gave out a long satisfied breath.
“Those kids sure do give me a queer look. Tell them to knock it off,” he said.
“They’re just kids. They’re not giving you any kind of look,” breathed Mother. Then, to the children, “Come on you two, get back to your puzzle.”
“At least the baby’s got some manners,” said the stranger, smiling at his own wit. Little One lay in the crib staring at the ceiling, one tiny hand flaring and wriggling in space.
Mother stood up and said, “It’s time for the baby’s feeding.” She removed the child from the crib and started to walk toward the back bedroom, but the stranger said, “Whoa now. Where are you going?”
“To feed the baby, like I said.”
“You can do it out here. I can’t have you leaving the room.”
Mother lowered her head and took the bundled child back to her chair where she sat and tucked the baby into her breast, doing her best to cover herself with the wrappings.
The hearth fire had dwindled to embers. Beside it stood a small stack of logs. Father asked the stranger, “Do you mind if I put some more wood on the fire?” During these months, fire was as crucial as food and water, and almost as tough to come by. Due to lack of fuel, vehicles had been out of commission for a long time, so to gather firewood men would go in teams to the nearby forest, cut down trees, and haul them in by hand. They’d go off with their axes, fell a tree, de-limb it, then pull it with ropes straining against shoulders and waists. Once back in the village, the trunk would be divided and dispersed in equal shares among the families. It was a matter that required constant vigilance.
“Please do,” said the stranger. “But stay away from that ax.”
“I have no intention of using the ax on you,” said Father.
“That’s good to hear. Good to know where your sympathies lie. Plus I’d hate to have to put a bullet in a fellow countryman.” The stranger watched Father put a couple logs on the fire, stoke them with the poker. “You seem to be surviving,” he opined. “Must be hard with the little ones.”
“You have no idea,” said Father. “Our meat ran out two weeks ago. There are supposed to be rations, international aid. But the army keeps most for themselves. I’ve heard they’ll trade for sex or other favors, but the meat they give in exchange is spoiled and the rice and oats have weevils. Or worms.”
The stranger pounded his fist on the table, causing the pistol to jump. “That’s why we fight,” he barked. “The bastards. They justify taking out the power stations and infrastructure, saying when things get miserable enough the people will stop harboring terrorists. They think they own that word, ‘terrorist,’ and decide where it gets applied. But we know who the real terrorists are. Meanwhile they sit down there fat and happy on their base. Shit if you can even call it that. More like a full-blown city with their shopping centers and movie houses. Supermarkets. Electronics super stores and fast food restaurants. Hotels for diplomats and ‘barracks,’ which is really just another name for military condominiums. They got your running water and electricity, right down there. They kick back in their cozy condos watching sitcoms and eating microwave dinners when they’re not out protecting us from ourselves in shifts. Fuckers.”
At the end of his disquisition the stranger looked about as if expecting some form of affirmation from his new companions, but neither Father nor Mother responded. Mother continued to nurse Little One silently and Father returned to his rocker to wait. The stranger became quiet and brooding. He squinted at his hands, at the gun, subtly shaking and jerking his head as if having an internal argument with himself. Occasionally his tongue would dart out to grope along his chapped lips, and tears leaked along the creases of his windburned face against the sting of exposure.
The stranger’s aspect was something of a wretch. Gaunt, grimy, exhausted. The food, having begun to digest, had taken the surplus of his energy, and he slumped in his chair. But he was wary and his beady eyes dodged about over the family.
Hours passed while the soup cooked. In that time the stranger barely uttered a word. Nor did the members of the family around him. Mother buttoned her blouse and returned Little One to the crib. Briefly, the stranger attempted to engage the children in conversation, starting with asking them their names, but they held their tongues. “Do you like puzzles?” he asked Missy. Nothing. He made silly faces at them in turn. They simply stared. Eventually he gave up and sat, waiting for the soup.
When the soup was finally deemed ready to eat, the stranger’s demeanor shifted to a kind of expansive, familial magnanimity, like that of a long lost cousin returned from years of sojourn abroad. “Come. Sit at the table,” he beckoned, playing host. “Everybody. Come eat!”
Mother ladled soup into bowls and set them around the table. But there were only four chairs, so she stood at the counter while Sonny, Missy, Father, and the stranger gathered to dinner like a family.
“Should we make a prayer?” asked the stranger, beaming. No one offered a blessing, so he proceeded, clasping his hands together, “How about ‘Another day we’ve made the journey. Another day the sun has risen and set, and we still have hope, that tomorrow will come and be the beginning of a better future. The beginning of… a beginning.’” None of them closed their eyes during his statement, including him, and at the end no one assented.
They ate in silence, the stranger taking the lion’s share, helping himself to seconds, thirds. When he’d satisfied himself, he lit a cigarette, turning to Father and exhaling. “How’ve you been faring?” he asked.
“On what you see here. Roots mostly, saved up from before the ground froze. And plant stuff we scavenge from the forest. We know what to look for. For water, just step outside, scoop it, melt it. Other times of year we carry it from the stream. Building a well only brings sabotage for the effort. We have a small stockpile of rice, and flour for bread. Corn. That’s the one thing they don’t seem to have any hesitation about distributing: corn. It comes in sacks and has to be soaked for hours before it’s suitable. Tastes like shit. You have to pound or grind it up to get any use out of it for soup or porridge.”
“It’d probably taste like Heaven to me.”
“If Heaven tastes like shit to you,” Father grumbled.
On hearing his tone, Sonny and Missy scooted their chairs away from the table and crossed the room to again stand by Mother. Any affect of solidarity the stranger had managed to assume in light of common misfortune drained from his features.
Father had a question. “So if you’re with the militia, where are the others?”
“Dead. Ambushed. I’m the only one made it out alive and I’ve been on the run for two days.”
“So you’ve been starving, freezing in this storm for two days. It’s amazing you survived. What will you do?”
“Right now I’m waiting on backup so we can go at the bastards again. I put a call in on the walkie before it went dead, telling them where I was headed. Don’t worry about yourselves, I intend to put a mark on your house so they know how you helped the cause.”
Father nodded at this remark, let it go. He pushed himself back from the table and stood. “You sound like a man of strong principle,” he said. “Fully committed. Impressive.” Father headed toward an ancient highboy against the far wall. “I bet you’d like a drink. I still have a little corn whiskey for rare occasions. Warm the spirits.”
“Yes. That’d be real good.” The stranger paused, taking a couple drags from his smoke. Now that he’d eaten, the fierce light in his eyes had softened to a mild glow. His features had settled into a semblance of thoughtful deliberation. Father returned with a jar and two shot glasses. He filled each of the glasses with the colorless fluid, and gulped one down.
“You know why I joined the Resistance?” asked the stranger, downing his own drink. Father didn’t answer. “I’ll tell you anyway, thanks for asking.” The stranger pointed his cigarette at Father. “The army murdered my brother. For nothing. Just because he was a student.” Father stood across the table from the stranger, eyeing him intently. He gave no sign of apprehending what had just been said. He refilled the stranger’s glass, then his own.
The stranger went on, “After the agitation started, the protests against the president, the police started taking people.” He gulped the second shot, exhaled dramatically, and clunked the glass down. “When you hear this, you might not understand at first. Your mind will balk at the truth because it’s unreal—how these things were in the cities, in the neighborhoods, the heart of civilization. There are so many ways to hear the words. Some part of your mind may try to make it reasonable. About how maybe you didn’t really know your neighbors. You might say to yourself, Maybe So-And-So was a traitor or a spy, or This-One-Here was running drugs, or That-One-There was running guns. Maybe you never really knew this friend or that friend, their dark secrets, their criminal intentions and perverse natures.” He cut a wrathful eye at everyone in turn: Mother, Sonny, Missy, Father. “But that’s not how it happened. There was no official protocol. People were taken, simply. This house. That house. That brown one over there, that white one up the street. They claimed to be taking ‘necessary precautions’ to stem a possible uprising, but that’s bullshit. These were just your regular folks.”
The stranger was correct about his story in some ways—that it shouldn’t be true. That reality as it had been broadly understood, the reality in which people functioned with self-assuredness, respect, and compassion, had been turned inside out. Now, it seemed, conditions of daily existence made everything and everyone suspect. The reality which had once been accepted as truth was now an artifact of the imagination. The stranger elaborated, “What it really came down to was who was talking and worse: who might start talking. Rabble-rousing, you know. People speaking out against the president’s policies. Even if it was just neighbors remarking on the state of things. So, the army was dispatched to supposedly weed out dissidents, people trying to undermine the government. They started with professors and other professionals with university diplomas.”
Father said, “Unfortunately that’s not unheard of. Before it came to our own homes. It has long-standing roots. In other times, other places, not far removed. The purging of unpredictable elements.”
“Exactly. Where better to start than the educated, right? People with ideas. So they went to university towns and hunted down the students. My brother was one of them. A student. My sister happened to be there when they caught him coming home. He was about to enter the house. They took him into the back yard and pushed him to his knees. Accused him of being a member of some underground movement. Of supplying ‘intelligence.’ Of what? My brother was an agronomist for fuck’s sake. Agricultural science.
“First they took his nose. Then they took his ears, his lips, his eyes, and finally his tongue when he had no answers for them. They went slow, making a show for the neighborhood of his suffering.”
Mother interrupted the story to order the children out of the room. Her eyes radiated a deep-abiding contempt for the stranger, as if his presence constituted an obscenity amidst her tidy, modest possessions. Amidst her family.
“No!” said the stranger. “They stay. No one leaves this room. Besides, they need to know the truth. People need to learn this shit.”
Mother beckoned Sonny and Missy to her side and held them against her skirts as she stood at the counter. She cupped their cheeks in her palms. The stranger continued, “My sister witnessed them take his nose from her bedroom window. Then she hid in her closet, listening to his screams, his protests, the soldiers’ laughter. It was stupid of her to hide in the closet but she wasn’t thinking. Lucky for her they never came inside. They just left Xavier in a pile in the back yard, mutilated and bayoneted multiple times in the chest. That’s how she found her brother. Our brother.” The stranger stubbed his cigarette out in his empty bowl. “They’d pissed on his body.” He fumed with disgust, which, along with fear and distrust, had become one of the most commonplace of human emotions. If he expected any exclamations of shock, he was disappointed. Brutality had become notoriously widespread, in rumor and in deed. The only one of them who hadn’t born witness to the decline of civilization was Little One.
Father poured the stranger another shot. He shook his head. “What they did to your brother is unimaginable,” he said.
“Unimaginable, yet they did it. So, what does it mean?”
“Yes, what? It makes you wonder, are they even people? Do they have families of their own? Villages? Or were they raised by wolves, savages with nothing in their hearts but bloodlust?”
They looked at each other with shared incredulity. The stranger raised his shot, tossed it back with a wince, and licked his lips. He put the glass down and covered it with his hand as Father made to pour another. “That’s enough for me,” he breathed.
Father set the jar on the table and sat. He said, “Our story is different, but it has similar turns.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the tabletop and giving the stranger a deep stare. The stranger straightened up in a posture of attention, nodding his go-ahead.
“When the army first began to settle in the valley, they came around to the local villages to gather recon on the people and the layouts,” said Father. He let his gaze drift toward the window, remembering. “There hadn’t been any bombings yet. Life was pretty much business as usual. The army had chosen the valley as their best strategic defensive position. I don’t know why, probably the river, the high mountains on two sides making it difficult for enemies to get through. And it’s remote, so they can fly their computerized planes and missiles into the action with limited exposure to enemy fire. Anyway, they wanted to see what they were up against as far as enemies within the hill towns. So they came up and scouted around. They found nothing, naturally. There was nothing to find. Our worst agitators were local drunks. Villages like these are fairly well insulated from politics.” Father’s eyes contained a distant aspect, of time travel, of witnessing a territory between what was known and what has become.
“For about a month everything was fine,” he said. “Then one morning they bombed the village. They knocked out our power stations—which put a stop to everything else.” He returned his gaze to the stranger. “You can’t have water without pumps to bring it up the hillside. They also knocked out our communications and bombed the gas stations to keep enemy traffic at bay. As it turned out, their base had been hit by Resistance rocket fire during the previous night, so as far as the army was concerned, they were hitting back. Hard. They figured the Resistance was holed up in the handful of hill towns.”
The stranger stabbed his finger into the tabletop. “Who knows if that’s even true,” he said. “Probably just an excuse. They probably just bombed to create new jobs for their cronies. Somebody’s got to rebuild eventually, brother. During wartime money flows. You wouldn’t believe the shit they pull in the name of defense.”
Father continued without acknowledging the stranger’s rebuke, “The army came back. This time they sent in strike forces. Raiding homes, arresting people. Young men usually. They rounded everyone up and took them to the town square, demanding to know where the ‘terrorists’ as they called them were hiding. The truth was we hadn’t seen any Resistance fighters. So nobody had any answers for them. They separated three young men from the group. The sergeant walked up to the first boy and turned to the townspeople. ‘We have methods to stimulate the imagination,’ he said. And he shot the boy in the head, right there on the spot. Then he stepped aside and his troops shot the other two down with a volley.”
“Bastards,” muttered the stranger, his nostrils flaring with rage.
Father said, “So there was no taking of ears or eyes or noses or tongues that day. Maybe they didn’t have the time. But they sent their message, clear as daylight. When they left they took many of our young men with them, presumably to coax answers out of them by other means. We’ll probably never know. We haven’t seen or heard from them since.”
“Because the Regime is afraid!” howled the stranger. “Fuckers,” he seethed. Father’s story had apparently reawakened an already-exposed and tender nerve. “They know the Resistance is growing and their only answer is to kill everybody! There can be no opposition if everyone is dead. Soon they’ll start shooting each other, if they haven’t already.” He gestured toward the whiskey jar. “Pour me another, please,” he said, shaking his head again in disbelief of the world.
With the stranger’s outburst, Little One started to sputter and quickly launched into a full-throated wail. Mother gave Father an exhausted look, as if to say, It’s your turn to see what’s the matter, I’ve had enough this evening. Meanwhile the stranger downed his shot, still muttering to himself about the abominations of the powers-that-be.
Father scraped his chair back from the table and went to the crib. He leaned in and murmured a soft tune, giving the baby his finger to hold onto. After some moments of this communion between father and child, Little One calmed to a mild whimper, then quieted completely.
“What a wonderfully behaved baby,” announced the stranger. “Amazing how you do that.” His spirits seemed to have rebounded momentarily.
“Yes,” agreed Father. Then he straightened and swung around abruptly. In his hands was a deer rifle he’d retrieved from the folds of the crib mattress. He aimed it at the stranger’s face. “Now, I’d like you to stand up and move away from that pistol,” he said. “Move.”
The stranger’s eyes were full of betrayal. He looked at the pistol lying on the table and did as he was told, backing toward the door.
“See, I’ve had a feeling about this gun of yours for a while now,” said Father. “The heft of it in your hand, the sound it made when you put it down on the table.” He marched over, picked up the pistol, dropped it to the floor and stomped on it. It crunched under his boot. Plastic. “A toy,” he said. “Well this,” he said, indicating the deer rifle in his own hands, “is not a toy, I promise you.”
Fury leaked out of Father in caloric waves, his eyes pulsing embers.
“I… I’m sorry,” said the stranger, clearly terrified.
Father thrust the rifle in the air. “What are you?” he spat. “Some kind of vagabond? Some kind of shitheel? Were you ever even in the Resistance? Or are you just some drifter bastard taking advantage of what’s left of this doomed world?” Before the stranger could choke out an answer, Father said over his shoulder, “Kids, go with your mother. Mother, take the baby and go into the bedroom.” He and the stranger stared at each other as Mother, Sonny, and Missy did as they were told. He braced the deer rifle against his shoulder, keeping it on the stranger’s face. “I want you to take out that knife and put it on the floor, slowly. Then slide it over here with your boot.”
The stranger took his hunting knife out by the handle and crouched to the floor, his eyes on the end of Father’s rifle barrel. After placing the knife at his feet, he stood back up and kicked it across the floor toward Father, who covered it with his boot.
“Look, I’m not what you think,” stammered the stranger as the bedroom door closed behind Mother and the children. “I am in the Resistance. I was in the Resistance. Everything I told you was true. The army did kill my brother like I said. I’m on your side.”
“On my side.”
“Yes. I am. I fight for The People.”
“Then you should appreciate this,” said Father. “I have a story of my own.”
Now under the auspices of his own lethal threat, Father began to describe his troubles to the now-squirming stranger. He started with the store he’d owned. It had been a general store, dealing primarily in tools and hardware. “It wasn’t a big store,” said Father, “but it brought a steady income. After all, things are always in need of repair. But that was before all this shit happened. Now there is nothing. Just an empty, looted storefront.”
The stranger shook his head as if Father’s words confirmed his worst suspicions.
“And, like you, I also had a brother,” Father continued. “My brother had forty sheep and some goats just north of the village. He also had a milk cow, rabbits, and chickens. But now he’s dead and it’s all gone. His wife too. She killed herself after he was murdered. They didn’t have kids yet, thank God. They were young and newly married. But”—here he paused for dramatic effect—“my brother wasn’t murdered by the military, no.” Father let the stranger chew on that last bit of information a moment before launching into his account.
“You see, soon after the military raids, Resistance fighters showed up in town. They came to all the local hill towns. I know this because I had a cousin who lived in one of the towns to the east and he sent word that the townspeople had arrested the fighters who came to their village and made a present of them to the military as an example of patriotism. Soon after that, their village was visited by more of the Resistance. Only this time the village was attacked and burned to the ground. No one was spared. The women were raped before being murdered. Most villagers were killed with rifle butts to the head to save ammunition. Babies were battered against trees or buildings. The older children were subjected to rape, torture, or summary execution depending on the offender. This I know because I went to make a delivery of some backordered inventory and found the village in ashes, the corpses in ragged tangles. Bodies were everywhere, strewn about like flies in an abandoned spider web. All that was left of the townspeople were a handful of escapees barely alive and out of their minds. Hunger, fear, exhaustion, and the remembered suffering that had shattered them. I loaded the survivors into my truck and brought them back to our village where they have since found homes among the few kind souls willing to take them in.
“Our village fared comparatively lucky, when our turn came. Since we hadn’t turned anybody over to the army, the Resistance merely invaded our homes, ate our food, slept with our women, and took what they wanted. In my case, they came to my store and told me how they were fighting for The People. How this required certain donations to The Cause. It was a group of seven men with machine guns and a truck. I gave them coffee and fed them what I had. Jerky, cheese, chips, soda. They smoked cigarettes in my store and threw the butts on the tiles. They walked around my place taking mental inventory, opening various sales items, sniffing them, tasting them. Pocketing them. Finally they abandoned the pretense of being guests and simply took it all. They loaded everything they could into their truck. The next day they came back and took some more. They did this until everything was gone except for the wrappers and crumbs they left behind. They couldn’t have used all of my inventory for the movement, so I assume they sold what they didn’t need. Probably to get money for ammunition and liquor. None of them seemed particularly sober.
“In my brother’s case, they went to his place and demanded he give over his livestock. He told them they didn’t understand. This was how he made his living. If he gave his livestock over to them he would have nothing, no way to support himself and his wife. See, my brother was more of a believer than me. He bought all their lines about people fighting for The People. He thought he could appeal to their cause. But their commander was quick to explain that it was in fact he who didn’t understand. They were commandeering his livestock to feed the militias, to fight for his freedom, his basic human rights against the tyrannical dictator. ‘But what rights are you fighting for if I have nothing?’ he asked. And the commander just shook his head and shot him on the spot. The militia killed all the animals and heaped them onto trucks. The wife, my beautiful young sister-in-law, came to me with the story. Three days later, after refusing to eat, she drowned herself in the river. Tied stones to her ankles and threw herself off the bridge.”
Here Father let his words trail off. His rage seemed to ebb briefly, his features collapsing into an expression of poignant uncertainty, exhaustion. “I must confess that her death had a strange effect on me. In the time between then and now I have gone over her actions many times in my head. With so many people dying and disappearing in this war—or ‘revolution’ or ‘police action’ or whatever you prefer to call it—and with so many others struggling with everything they have just to survive, suicide didn’t seem to fit. It was like something from another world, another time—say, killing herself of a broken heart, the way Shakespeare might write it: people so delicate they topple like dominoes once the first one falls. Or even in the ancient stories, where bravery and self-sacrifice were the formal postures. But none of that chivalry business is real, it’s just storytelling, a way things might be if we were actors on a stage and if death served as a value lesson. Assuming an afterlife, where you tally your sins and mend your spirit.
“I have thought about her grief many times and stacked it against my own. You see, my brother’s murder at the hands of the Resistance is only part of it. There is also my eldest son. He worked beside me at my shop. He was only sixteen, barely a man. And he was the young man the sergeant shot down in the village square. I can tell you that kind of grief does not invite dramatic impulse. It’s just emptiness. Meaningless. Pointless. So, my question to you is this: did my brother’s wife kill herself of a broken heart, or did she kill herself because she suddenly realized that the world is nothing but shit coming at you from all sides?” Father’s gaze sharpened with a renewed ferocity. Determination. He said to the stranger, “This is your moment of truth. Think good and hard before you speak.”
“How can I answer that?” cried the stranger. Father continued to glare at him with a bland, menacing patience. “All I can tell you is it’s a terrible thing for someone to do.” The stranger’s hands came up in front of him in supplication. “I’m sorry for your losses. I’m sorry for everything. What can you possibly expect me to say?”
“Something miraculous. Something to change the world,” said Father. “And, truth be told, there’s likely nothing you can say that would change your fate. Now go on out that door.”
The stranger turned and opened the door with a ponderous command of his own limbs, bracing himself as the cold crashed in. Night had fallen and the snow was still coming down in lethargic wisps. Father bundled up in his outdoor gear and told the stranger to turn right and head along the thin lane running west to east. The stranger did so, with Father following close at his heels, the two of them crunching through a snow bank almost to their knees.
When they came in line with the first cottage, Father commanded the stranger to stop. Father walked to the door and tapped out a coded rhythm with his knuckles. After a few seconds an alternate code was tapped from within. Father answered with a final brief fillip and the door opened a crack, revealing the neighbor’s face. “I’ve got one,” said Father. “He’s alone. A drifter.” The neighbor eyed the stranger and nodded. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a lantern. Then from the rack beside the door, he took down his jacket, gloves, hat, and scarf and stepped outside. “Take the lantern,” said Father to the stranger, “and keep moving.” And they continued along the lane, the neighbor bundling himself as they walked, the stranger shivering in agony.
They continued along the lane, following the same protocol of rapping call-and-answer patterns on doors, collecting male villagers as they went, until they were a crowd of ten plus one.
To the tenth villager, Father said, “You’re the last. We have all we need.” Then he turned to the other men gathered. “Has any one of you seen this man before?” he asked. They all agreed that the man was indeed a stranger. “Okay then.” Father nudged the stranger with the barrel of the deer rifle and instructed him to proceed toward a thin path dividing a stand of trees to the north of the village. The moon shown dully through a thick braid of cumulus clouds, casting the treetops in silhouette. The stranger started his slow march.
As they approached the trees, the stranger could see a thin glow from within. He said to Father over his shoulder, “Look, I’m sorry if I scared you earlier. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. Obviously, with a toy gun. And I’m sorry for what the Resistance did to you. I had no idea.”
“We all have stories,” said Father. “Every man here, though none of our stories are quite the same. You might say they’re variations on a theme.”
“But I’m on your side. I swear.”
“That’s precisely what you don’t seem to understand. We have no side. We are in the middle. And here in this middle territory we have our own charter. We make our stand, right here. Our village is nobody’s battlefield.”
As the group approached the glow, the trees parted into a clearing, and the stranger could see that the glow was coming from a lighted lamp in the window of a tiny cabin.
“See, there’s something about you revolutionaries that stinks almost as bad as the army,” Father said. “Even for the true blue, righteous revolutionaries, like you claim to be. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s like a kind of religious short-sightedness, an ends-justify-the-means blind faith that doesn’t store any accountability among its baggage.”
“But you have to see,” contended the stranger, his voice half-pleading, half-indignant, “stopping the terror perpetrated by the government on its own people—people it’s sworn to protect—requires action. Bold action.”
“I agree. These are terrible times. And in terrible times you make choices. I can tell you, I will have to deal with my choices for the rest of my life. For example, take your case. I suppose you think your ‘cause’ is some form of cure for governmental missteps, paranoia, and greed. But if you could apprehend the gangrene of your own nature, maybe you’d see our mind. Here, in the middle territory: what if the cure invites the disease? And if so, does quashing the cure then avert the disease? Well, if you see things in just such a way, you’d be stupid not to act, don’t you think? To act ‘boldly,’ even. We don’t claim to have the answers, but we do have a will to live, a will to peace.”
“So do I! So do I!” the stranger implored, trudging more slowly now.
“I believe you,” said Father. “In fact, it may be that the fundamental reasons behind our ‘causes’ are similar. And perhaps different circumstances would even dictate an allegiance. But at the moment, present circumstances put us at odds. Maybe the true nature of our difference lies in who exercises restraint, and by what degrees. Know this: if you’d come to my home and asked for food, if you’d come to my home and asked for shelter, it would’ve been yours.”
They marched further into the clearing and rounded the cabin, entering a small graveyard. A heavy blanket of snow covered the ground but not enough to consume the headstones completely. Father instructed the stranger to keep moving, and beyond the formal graveyard they came to a patch of land littered with yet more graves, their improvised markers jutting from the snow like naked impotent fence posts keeping out nothing. The markers were made from debarked tree limbs, the ends of which were carved with shorthand dates, but no names. Over two graves the snow stood at a lower level than the rest of the yard. And beside those two, spaced about five feet apart, two more gaping rectangular holes awaited their cause.
The stranger saw the holes and fell to his knees. He looked toward the cabin where no one stirred, it’s faint light glowing within—the shelter of the night watchman. He saw the ten shovels propped against the outer cabin wall and began to wail toward the cabin for help. For a moment, one of the curtains in the window parted then fell slack.
The stranger managed to turn himself around on his knees and face them. Tears burned his raw cheeks, the snow still falling and clotting in his hair and eyelashes. He wailed, “Please, I was starving! I was freezing! I didn’t know what else to do!” But neither Father nor the other men had room in their thoughts, their homes, or their village for certain elements gone astray, be they human or not. They did it as their charter commanded: ten men to form a consensus, ten men to witness, ten men to partake. Ten men to bear the burden. Execution not as punishment. Nor as a deterrent. Just plain keeping house. Father lowered the deer rifle to the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger.
END