Girl in Landscape (21 page)

The body of the Archbuilder was gone. Pella wondered if Raymond or David or Martha or Morris even understood that it had been there.

She knew Bruce understood, from the way he avoided her gaze.

It was Bruce who led the attack on the skeleton of the house. He kicked in the door frame, so the wall around it began to buckle. Then he found the place where the wall sections met and began kicking. Scuffs of black soot covered his sneakers instantly. The others joined him. This time even Pella. Without fear for their safety they swarmed the ruins, tearing the walls apart with their hands and feet. The house was flimsy, like a set for a play. The front fell to Bruce’s attack almost instantly. The families might as well have been sleeping outside like Archbuilders as in this joke, this wisp of a house. It deserved wrecking. Pushing together like a team of dray horses, the children brought down the whole rear wall, splaying the back of the house open, revealing the spread of broken spires on the horizon. Then they wrenched down the last of the side walls, too. The wall groaned a minor protest, then fell. Puffs of newly fallen pollen drifted out of corners where it had lodged. The floor was strewn with shards of blackened wood and the rubble of ruined items, paintbrushes, kitchenware, a few books. Ashes. The children stopped and regarded their work. The house was done. It was garbage. It belonged to the Planet now. It begged to be
covered with vines. That would be mercy. The only thing standing was the sink, a feeble echo of a ruined tower.

Now they stood gathered at what had been the front door, gazing at the valley through the space of the wrecked house.

“Look,” said Martha.

“What?” said Bruce.

Martha pointed out to the left. “There.”

“What?” said Bruce. “There’s nothing there.”

“No, look,” said Raymond. “She’s right. Some people or something.”

They all strained to see.

They wended around the flattened ruins of the burned house and down a short slope, where for a moment the distant figures were out of sight. Pella thought for a moment they’d imagined them. Then up the other side, and the figures reappeared, nearer, but still not near enough. The children walked forward, magnetized.

“Up here,” said Bruce. He pointed to a rise on their left. “They won’t see us.”

The group scrambled after him. Pella too. She said to herself,
Spying, lying, spying, lying
. Spiers and liars.

It was three Archbuilders and Efram Nugent. They were building a sculpture in the sun. Pella recognized Hiding Kneel, Gelatinous Stand, and Lonely Dumptruck. Hiding Kneel was using a shovel to load buckets of black mud from deep under the hard floor of the valley, and the other three were packing it onto the form
under construction, a figure about the size of an Archbuilder, a rough statue. Efram was working as diligently as the others, not leading them, not following. As the mud figure dried it turned the color of the rock and dust.

Then Pella saw the shoulder of the statue, where fur had been slicked down with moisture from the mud, but not covered. It was a real Archbuilder they were packing in mud. The shapes at the top were its collapsed tendrils.

“What are they doing?” said David.

“Archbuilder funeral,” whispered Bruce. “Ben Barth told me about this once.”

“How’s it a funeral?” said Raymond.

“Like burying someone aboveground,” said Bruce, not taking his eyes away. “They build the dead Archbuilder into a monument, with sticks and wire so it stands up. Sort of like, be your own tombstone.”

“But what’s
Efram
doing there?” said Morris.

No one had an answer for this. They stood behind Bruce on the bluff and watched as the burial party patiently slathered mud onto the still body.

Ash, fire, mud, fur, thought Pella.

“Be your own, be your own,
tomb
-stone,” chanted Martha under her breath, bringing out the rhyme.

They returned to the house. Clement was gone. They were all three numbed and hungry. Pella made more sandwiches and they ate without waiting for Clement, as darkness fell.

Afterward they cleaned up the table in silence. The long day was supposed to be over now.

“Where is he?” said David at last.

“Be quiet,” said Pella.

“But where is he?”

“I’ll go find him. Get ready for bed.”

Pella was halfway to Diana Eastling’s house when she met Clement. He’d mastered this one route, at least. He could walk one path through the valley in the dark with his head down.

“Hey,” said Pella, stopping him before he practically walked over her.

“Pella,” said Clement, his eyes brightening momentarily, then falling.

“Where have you been?”

“Saying goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye to who?”

“Diana’s leaving,” said Clement. His voice was flat and dead. He trudged ahead, letting Pella fall into place beside him.

“Leaving for where?” said Pella. “Southport? Earth?”

He waved his hand carelessly behind him. The night was all around them now, the distance pressing in. “Out there. Exploring, visiting her sites. Her Archbuilder friends.”

“She does that all the time.”

“This is different,” he said. “A long trip. She asked Raymond to watch her place for her.”

“So?”

“She’s getting away from me. From the town.”

Pella looked over her shoulder, as though Diana Eastling might at that moment be seen skulking across the landscape. Pella had wished her away, but now she felt doomed by the loss. Diana Eastling was a thread of sanity, of control.

“Why?” said Pella.

“I tried to make her understand what Efram did, but she doesn’t believe me. She says it’s a grudge …” He broke off.

Pella decided then she’d never even seen the burning. Perhaps some household deer might have. It was likely, since household deer were everywhere. Too bad they had no voice. Too bad they had nothing to do with Pella.

“She says I’m not over Caitlin’s death,” Clement said. “That I’m still in love with her.”

He spoke this as though the words had nothing to do with Pella, enclosing himself in the shell of his own pain, refusing the meaning of their family the way his neighbors had refused him the meaning of the town this morning.

I hope he is still in love with her, Pella thought savagely. He should be. He deserves to be.

In the days after the fire the valley fell into a pensive, watchful silence. The settlement, the might-be-town, was shrinking instead of growing. The spaces between things were growing instead. The silences. Diana Eastling was gone. Hugh Merrow was already forgotten, the singed scraps of his house scavenged for fuel, the ashes blown away over the wastes. New vines sprouted up everywhere out of the rubble, leaves seeking the sun, potatoes underneath, hidden, swelling in the mud. Two days after the burning Ben Barth walked into Wa’s and said he was going to Southport, to work for the window maker. Alliances might be shifting, coming apart. No one asked, no one learned more. Ben Barth packed his few belongings into his battered truck and was gone by nightfall.

The Archbuilder corpse baked and rotted in the sun, untended, a desolate sculpture. Raymond began spending nights at Diana Eastling’s house.

Doug Grant skulked outside Wa’s.

The girl sensed something coming, some arrival or departure still unannounced. A figure on the horizon, a change in the weather. A shift or eclipse. Her family was no help. Like the not-quite-town, it was unspooled, all gaps and missed connections. The girl avoided her father, the other children, Wa’s shop. She tried not to think of Efram at all. She took the pills she had stashed under her bed, two in the morning, two at night, and didn’t dream, didn’t wander or spy. Instead she walked out into the valley in her human body, alone, to wonder if the figure she felt moving toward her on the lonely horizon might somehow be her mother.

“I buy flour and yeast at Wa’s,” explained Ellen Kincaid. “Wa gets it from Southport. I buy it on my credit. Then I get eggs from Ben Barth’s chickens. Same thing—I trade for finished loaves. The rest is cake and tea potatoes.”

Pella and David were helping Ellen and Martha Kincaid make bread, Pella and David stirring mixtures in large bowls, while Martha was rubbing a split half tea potato around the inside of a set of pans.

A pair of household deer pottered woozily under the counter.

“Then you sell it back to Wa,” said Martha.

“Just for credit,” said Ellen. “No money changes hands. So we get our other groceries from him on the credit for the loaves. And other people get bread.”

As Ellen Kincaid spoke her eyes grew distant, and
her voice dimmed. Why talk of
other people getting bread
, when they all felt the settlement withering?

“Also we eat a lot of potatoes,” said Martha to David and Pella. “They don’t cost anything.”

“We eat a lot of potatoes too,” said David cheerily. “And Clement buys your mom’s bread.”

Pella went on stirring, mashing the lumps of cake potato into the egg-and-water mixture. Ellen Kincaid poked at the charcoal through a door in the base of the oven, bunching the hot coals. A first batch of dough had risen and been distributed into six loaf pans, and now Ellen Kincaid loaded them into the upper space of the oven.

“Who’s going to take care of Ben Barth’s chickens now?” said Martha.

Pella whisked a handful of flour off the tabletop, in the direction of the two household deer, coating one like a powdered doughnut. It shook and ran in a circle.

“Doug Grant, I bet,” said David.

“What about Doug Grant?” said Pella.

“He’s helping Efram, instead of Ben,” said David. “Morris told me.”

Ellen Kincaid frowned. “I’m surprised Ben didn’t take his chickens with him,” she said. “Efram ought to take care of his own farm. If he wants chickens out there he ought to take care of them himself.”

“You can’t put chickens in a truck!” said Martha, delighted. “They fly away!”

“Doug Grant
wants
to live out at Efram’s farm,” said David. “He hates his dad.”

“Shut up about Doug Grant,” said Pella.

“Morris told me, that’s all,” said David.

Ellen Kincaid turned to the sink. “Bring that here, Pella. It needs more water.” She scrubbed egg scum out of a bowl fretfully. “David, you too.”

Ellen Kincaid doled out portions for each of them to knead. Pella knew they were being gently patronized. Martha’s mother didn’t need their help. Pella watched her knead dough, leaning into it as her hands briskly folded the stretched surfaces. David and Martha and even Pella, by comparison, were useless, mucking around, smearing bits of dough into the joints of their fingers and onto the floor. But the bread making was a little version of the town, Pella thought. The town that was supposed to be but never was. The four of them pounding and folding together Wa’s flour and Efram’s eggs and Archbuilder cake potatoes. It was the closest anyone had come.

“It feels like penis,” said Martha. She tittered.

“Shut up,” said David.

“Martha,” said Ellen Kincaid.

“Penis pie, with penis butter,” said Martha.

“Quit!” said David, reddening.

Martha giggled.

Ellen Kincaid stepped over and tilted Martha’s head up with her hand, leaving a thumb smudge of flour on her forehead. “Whose penis?” she said, in a voice that was quiet, but focused like a beam of light.

Pella held her breath, waiting for Martha to answer. She felt Ellen Kincaid’s fierce protective attention. This is what a mother does, Pella thought.

“David’s!” shrieked Martha, and laughed harder.

“Be quiet!” said David.

“That’s enough, Martha,” said Ellen Kincaid, loudly and easily now, the moment past. “We’re trying to make bread here. Take the funny stuff outside.”

“But I’m
helping
. I don’t want to—”

“Go.”

Slumping her head from shoulder to shoulder, Martha went to the front door and out onto the porch. Daylight flooded the damp yeasty kitchen.

Ellen Kincaid put her powdery hand on David’s head now. “Don’t let Martha upset you.”

“Sometimes I hate her,” said David ruthlessly, his eyes slitted. He went on kneading his portion of dough.

Ellen Kincaid looked at Pella, her smile wry and tired and nervous at once.

Martha edged back inside while the new loaves went into the oven. The two deer danced out as she came in, one still dusted with white. Ellen Kincaid slipped the first batch of loaves out of the pans and onto cooling racks, then cut one into fat, steamy slices and slathered the slices with potato jam. David and Martha and Pella ate silently, reduced to grateful, gnawing cubs by the hot, achingly sweet bread. Ellen Kincaid watched them eat.

Afterward they bagged the loaves in plastic, and twisted the bags closed. “Here,” said Ellen Kincaid, giving David and Pella each a loaf. “Take these home to your father.”

“We can buy them at Wa’s,” said Pella, confused.

“No, take them,” said Ellen, smiling sadly. “Please.”

•   •   •

Clement was watering under his bed when they came in. He hadn’t secured the window to his bedroom on the day of the pollen storm. Just as Efram had warned, the potato vines were sprouting indoors, under his bed. So Clement watered them. For the past few days he’d been obsessed with gardening, fastidiously nurturing his tiny struggling plants, both inside and outside the house.

“Why not?” he’d said to Pella when she first found him tending the sprouts. “Everyone else can go hacking them out of the ground, and we’ll have our own supply right here. It’s perfectly reasonable. We’ll show Efram Nugent that everything doesn’t have to be done his way.” As if Efram would ever bother to look under Clement’s bed, or be impressed to find potatoes growing there if he did. But Pella hadn’t said anything then, and she didn’t say anything now. Water trailed out along the floorboards toward her feet, trickling into cracks where already tiny new shoots of potato vine were inching into the house. Soon Clement’s indoor farm would expand from under the bed. He’d have a whole potato room. Pella and David set the loaves of bread on the table, and David said, “Where’s Raymond?”