All of us were waiting for nothing. Smaolach never said so, but I knew he was not looking to make the change. And he hatched no plans to steal another child. Perhaps he thought our number too few for the complex preparations, or perhaps he sensed the world itself was changing. In Igel’s day, the subject came up all the time with a certain relentless energy, but less so under Béka, and never under Smaolach. No reconnaissance missions into town, no searching out the lonesome, neglected, or forgotten. No face-pulling, no contortions, no reports. As if resigned, we went about our eternal business, sanguine that another disaster or abandonment awaited.
I did not care. A certain fearlessness filled me, and I would not hesitate to run into town alone, if only to swipe a carton of cigarettes for Luchóg or a bag of sweets for Chavisory. I stole unnecessary things: a flashlight and batteries, a drawing pad and charcoals, a baseball and six fishing hooks, and once, at Christmas, a delicious cake in the shape of a firelog. In the confines of the forest, I fiddled with idle tasks—whittling a fierce bat atop a hickory cane, laying a stone ring around the circumference of our camp, searching for old turtle shells and crafting the shards into a necklace. I went up alone to the slag hillside and the abandoned mine, which lay undisturbed, as we had left it, and placed the tortoiseshell necklace where Ragno and Zanzara lay buried. My dreams did not wake me up in the middle of the night, but only because life had become a somnambulant nightmare. A handful of seasons had passed when a chance encounter finally made me realize that Speck was beyond forgetting.
We were tending to delicate seedlings planted on a sun-drenched slope a few hundred yards from camp. Onions had stolen new seeds, and within weeks up came the first tender shoots—snap peas, carrots, scallions, a watermelon vine, and a row of beans. Chavisory, Onions, Luchóg, and I were weeding in the garden on that spring morning, when the sound of approaching feet caused us to rise like whitetail, to sniff the wind, ready to flee or hide. The intruders were lost hikers, off the trail and headed in our direction. Since the housing development had risen, we had a rare traveler pass our way, but our cultivated patch might look a bit peculiar to these strangers out in the middle of nowhere. We disguised the garden under pine brush and hid ourselves beneath a skirt of trees.
Two young men and a young woman, caps upon their heads, huge backpacks strapped at the shoulders, walked on, cheerful and oblivious. They strolled past the rows of plants and us. The first man had his eye on the world ahead. The second person—the girl—had her eye on him, and the third man had his eye on her backside. Though lost, he seemed intent on the one thing. We followed safely behind, and they eventually settled down a hill away to drink their bottled water, unwrap their candy bars, and lighten their loads. The first man took out a book and read something from it to the girl, while the third hiker went off behind the trees to relieve himself. He was gone a long time, for the man with the book had the chance not only to finish his poem but to kiss the girl, as well. When their small interlude ended, the threesome strapped on their gear and marched away. We waited a decent spell before running to the spot they had vacated.
Two empty water bottles littered the ground, and Luchóg snatched them up and found the caps nearby. They had discarded the cellophane wrappers from their snacks, and the boy had left his slim volume of poems lying on the grass. Chavisory gave it to me. The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan. I leafed through a few pages and stopped at the phrase That more things move/Than blood in the heart.
“Speck,” I said to myself. I had not said her name aloud in ages, in centuries.
“What is it, Aniday?” Chavisory asked.
“I am trying to remember.”
The four of us walked back to the garden. I turned to see if my comrades were following the same path, only to discover Luchóg and Chavisory, walking step by ginger step, holding hands. My thoughts flooded with Speck. I felt an urgency to find her again, if only to understand why she had gone. To tell her how the private conversations of my mind were still with her. I should have asked her not to go, found the right words to convince her, confessed all that moved in my heart. And ever hopeful that it was not too late, I resolved to begin again.
? CHAPTER 31 ?