He kept a room at the back the jail. For ten years, since the night he couldn’t make himself return to the house, that was where he’d slept. He’d always considered himself the sort of man who could pick himself up and get on with things, and it wasn’t as if he was the first person whose luck had turned bad. But something had gone out of him and never come back, and so this was where he lived, in a cinder-block box with nothing but a bed and a sink and a chair to sit in and a toilet down the hall, nobody but drunks sleeping it off for company.
Outside the sun was rising in a halfhearted, March-in-Iowa way. He heated a kettle on the stove and carried it to the basin with his straight razor and soap. His face looked back in the old cracked mirror. Well, wasn’t that a pretty sight. Half his front teeth gone, left ear shot off to a pink nub, one eye clouded and useless: he looked like something in a children’s story, the mean old ogre under the bridge. He shaved, splashed water on his face and under his arms, and dried himself off. All he had on hand for breakfast were some leftover biscuits, hard as rocks. Sitting at the table, he worked them over with his back teeth and washed them down with a shot of corn liquor from the jug beneath the sink. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he liked one in the morning, especially this morning of all mornings, the morning of March 24.
He put on his hat and coat and stepped outside. The last of the snow had melted, turning the earth to mud. The jailhouse was one of the few buildings in the old downtown that anybody still used; most had been empty for years. Blowing on his hands, he made his way past the ruins of the Dome—nothing left of it now but a pile of rocks and a few charred timbers—and down the hill into the area that everybody still called the Flatland, though the old workers’ lodges had long since been dismantled and used as firewood. Some folks still lived down here, but not many; the memories were too bad. The ones who did were generally younger, born after the days of the redeyes, or else very old and unable to break the psychological chains of the old regime. It was a squalid dump of shacks without running water, miasmatic rivers of sewage running in the streets, and a roughly equivalent number of dirty children and skinny dogs picking through the trash. Eustace’s heart broke every time he saw it.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He’d had plans, hopes. Sure, a lot people had accepted the offer to evacuate to Texas in those first years; Eustace had expected that. Fine, he’d thought, let them go. The ones who remained would be the hearty souls, the true believers who viewed the end of the redeyes not merely as a liberation from bondage but something more: the chance to right a wrong, start over, build a new life from the bottom up.
But as he’d watched the population drain away, he’d begun to worry. The people who stayed behind weren’t the builders, the dreamers. Many were simply too weak to travel; some were too afraid; others so accustomed to having everything decided for them that they were incapable of doing much of anything at all. Eustace had made a run at it, but nobody had the slightest idea how to make a city work. They had no engineers, no plumbers, no electricians, no doctors. They could operate the machines the redeyes left behind, but nobody knew how to fix them when they broke. The power plant had failed within three years, water and sanitation within five; a decade later, almost nothing functioned. Schooling the children proved impossible. Few of the adults could read, and most didn’t see the sense of it. The winters were brutal—people froze to death in their own houses—and the summers were almost as bad, drought one year and drenching rains the next. The river was foul, but people filled their buckets anyway; the disease that everyone called “river fever” killed scores. Half the cattle had died, most of the horses and sheep, and all of the pigs.
The redeyes had left behind all the tools to build a functioning society but one: the will to actually do it.
The road through the Flatland joined the river and took him east to the stadium. Just beyond it was the cemetery. Eustace made his way through the rows of headstones. A number were decorated—guttered candles, children’s toys, the long-desiccated sprigs of wildflowers exposed by the retreating snow. The arrangement was orderly; the one thing people were good at was digging graves. He came to the one he was looking for and crouched beside it.
NINA VORHEES EUSTACE
SIMON TIFTY EUSTACE
BELOVED WIFE, BELOVED SON.