Scarecrow

Mother made a list.

Of course she did. She wrote it the night after Crane signed the terms, on the back of one of her four pages, and gave it to Genny, not to me.

The knitting basket. The scarf. Garnet has to finish it.

Your father’s coat, the other one, from the hook in the cellar.

The cards.

The yellow socks, if Genny didn’t take the box. She did. Good.

The wall.

She’d underlined that one.

”You can’t bring a wall,” said Genny.

”Your brother made a lake on the moon,” said Mother. ”He can bring a wall.”

She looked at me.

”I used to sit at the kitchen table with my tea and watch him paint it,” she said. ”At night. He held his breath on the straight lines.” Her voice didn’t change. ”I’d like to have it where I can see it.”

Genny and I went back alone.

Garnet wanted to come. She cried when we said no. But someone had to stay with Mother, and she knew it, and in the end she sat on the end of Mother’s bed with her arms folded and her chin up, exactly like Genny, and said, ”Fine. But bring me a handful of dirt from the field. In a twist of cloth. And give the scarecrow a hug from me.”

Then she reached into her pocket and pressed something small into Genny’s palm.

”For the stone,” she said. ”Father’s. Plant it in front.”

It was a strawberry seed. One of hers, made from a pebble.

”It might not grow,” she said. ”Mine aren’t always right inside.”

”It’ll grow,” said Genny.

The craft that took us was the broad flat kind, with a ramp at the back wide enough for a truck. The pilot was a young woman in gray who looked at Genny and me as we walked up the ramp, and took a very small step backward, and caught herself.

She didn’t say anything for the whole flight. Neither did we.

We came over the ridge in the middle of the afternoon.

And there it was.

The small square of green at the bottom of the valley. The house. The tree. The wheat, gold and moving in the wind.

And in the middle of the field where the rows crossed, a figure with its arms out, in Father’s coat, with a blue scarf wound twice around its neck, the ends lifting.

Genny was at the window. She didn’t say anything. Her hand found mine on the seat between us and held on.

The pilot brought the craft down slowly onto the ash at the edge of the field. A yard short of the green. Exactly at the line.

Somebody had told her.

I heard it as soon as the ramp came down.

I stood at the top of it and listened, and for a second I didn’t understand what I was hearing. A low hum. Steady. Coming from the house.

The filter.

Nobody had turned it off. I’d left it running the morning we ran, ten minutes to pack seventeen years, and I’d stood in the kitchen and heard it humming in the walls behind me and walked out anyway.

It had been running for nine days. Waking at five every morning to clean the air in an empty house.

Genny heard it too. She looked at me.

Neither of us said anything. We walked up through the wheat to the house.

The front door was open. We’d left it open. Dust had blown in across the boards, and a few dry leaves. The bed was still by the stove, the blankets twisted where they’d lifted her off it. The lamp beside it had burned down to nothing and gone out on its own.

The filter hummed in the walls, steady, catching, climbing, settling, the same as it always had.

Genny went and stood by the bed for a long time.

Then she knelt and started straightening the blankets.

I went into the kitchen. The wall was there, all of it, a hundred and eighteen faded boxes in the afternoon light. Everything alive. Respect this one.No.

I sat down at the table in front of it.

I’d have to do it slowly. The paint was only a skin on the plaster, thinner than a fingernail, and Father’s brushstrokes were in it, every one, and the places where he’d held his breath on the straight lines. I didn’t want to lose a single one.

So I wouldn’t take the paint off the wall. I’d take the wall out from behind the paint.

I started at the top corner, by hydrogen.

It took all night.

Column by column. Box by box. I turned the plaster behind the paint into glass, clear glass, as thin as I could make it while still holding together, and kept every stroke of the paint exactly where it was, sealed into the surface. When I got to the oatmeal smear across the noble gases, I kept that too. When I got to uranium, I kept No.

Genny brought me tea at midnight, made in the kettle with her hands, the slow way. She didn’t say anything. She sat at the other end of the table and read notebook fourteen by the lamp until she fell asleep with her head on it.

When the sky over the ridge started to go gray, the wall was a single pane of glass the size of a door, still standing in its place, with the whole periodic table floating inside it. Light from the window came through the faded gray and blue and orange and threw the colors across the floor.

Genny woke up and looked at it for a long time.

Then she got up and lifted it out of the wall, the whole pane at once, very gently, and wrapped it in every blanket in the house.

The kitchen looked wrong without it. A bare patch of rough stone behind where it had been, pale and clean, the shape of a door.

We didn’t look at it again.

At a quarter to five I went out to the shed and sat on the floor beside the filter, in the dark, and waited.

At five, it woke.

It had already been running. It had been running for nine days. But at five the cycle turned over, the way Father had built it to, and the hum came up from under my hands, deeper, through the boards and into the walls. Catching. Climbing. Settling. I sat and listened to all of it, start to finish, until it was running steady.

Then I turned it off.

The silence was enormous. The whole house seemed to go still around it, like a held breath let out at last.

I unbolted it from the floor. I disconnected the ducts and the pipes, one at a time, the way Father’s yellowed diagrams on the inside of the shed door showed. I took out the controller I’d fitted after the highway. The one Genny had floated home for six miles.

The dome had air. Better air than any burned-out truck could make. I didn’t need it.

I took it anyway.

It had woken at five every morning for seventeen years. It had woken the morning Mother stopped breathing, and it had woken the moment she started again. I wasn’t going to leave it in an empty shed for the dust.

We went to the stone last.

The sun was up. It came through the leaves of the tree and lay across Father’s stone, gray, with its leaning letters and its big k. There was nothing beside it. Just grass. A space.

Genny knelt in front of it and put her hand flat on the ground and changed the earth there, within her foot, slowly, until there was a patch of soil darker than the rest, rich and black. Then she took Garnet’s seed out of her pocket and pressed it in with her thumb.

”It’ll grow,” she said, to nobody. Then she got up and walked round the tree and stood with her back to me, looking at the ridge.

I stayed.

I didn’t know what to say. I’d come here every week for seven years and talked to him, and now I had something to say, and I didn’t know how.

”You lied to her,” I said finally.

The stone didn’t say anything. It was a good listener that way.

”You walked eighty miles and struck her name off a list, so she’d never have to choose between herself and me. And then you walked home and told her a story. For eleven years.” I looked at the leaning letters. ”She knows now. Crane told her.”

The wind moved the leaves overhead.

”She’s alive,” I said. ”Did you know that? She’s alive, and she’s angry with you, and she says you were right. Both things.” I swallowed. ”I’m going to Avalon. For her. And the girls. He’s got all of us now, Father. He didn’t even have to wait. He just had to be there with a doctor when the windows rattled.”

I was quiet for a long time.

”I’d have done the same thing,” I said. ”What you did. Lied to her. If I could have. If it would have kept her out of it.” I put my hand on the top of the stone. It was warm from the sun. ”But she made me promise not to. She made me promise to tell the girls everything. And I did.”

I stood up.

”Thank you,” I said. ”For the list.”

Then I went to find Genny.

We walked down through the field together, with the crates floating ahead of us in a long line toward the craft. The knitting basket. Father’s other coat. The cards. The filter in its sacking. And last, wrapped in every blanket in the house, a pane of glass the size of a door with the whole universe inside it.

Genny stopped at the scarecrow.

She stood in front of it in the middle of the path, looking up at its faded, disappointed face. The blue scarf was still wound twice around its neck, over the collar of Father’s coat, in the loose knot Garnet had tied. The wind had pulled it a little crooked.

Genny reached up and straightened it. Then she knelt and took a handful of the soil at the scarecrow’s feet, and twisted it into a square of cloth, and put it in her pocket.

Then she stood up and put her arms around the scarecrow’s middle, the way Garnet did every morning, stiffly, as though she’d never done it before and wasn’t sure how.

”That’s from Garnet,” she said into its coat.

She held on for a second longer than she needed to.

Then she let go and walked on down the path without looking back, with her jaw set.

I stopped at the scarecrow too.

The coat had pulled crooked in the night. It always did. I fixed it. Tugged the collar up. Smoothed the scarf.

”I’ll come back,” I told it.

It received this news with its usual faint disappointment.

The craft lifted.

Genny had the window. I leaned over her and we watched the valley fall away. The house with its door shut. The empty shed. The tree, and the gray stone under it, with a patch of dark earth in front where something might grow. The bright scar of glass running northwest across the flats toward the crater.

And in the middle of the field, a figure with its arms out, in Father’s coat and Mother’s blue scarf.

It got smaller. And smaller. The ridge came between us, and it was gone.

Ahead of us, through the front of the craft, a soap bubble the size of a mountain caught the morning sun.

I looked at it.

Nothing happened.

I kept looking.