This Census-Taker (5 page)

T
wo other times as I played in the dustblown slopes I saw my father heading to the dump-hole with the body of something he’d beaten to death. Both times I stayed very still to watch him. Sometimes in my mind when I think back to that he has my mother’s face, or he wears a face that I can’t bring clear, that goes between his and hers. But I’m sure it was my father. Once he had a small rockrabbit; once an animal so ruined I couldn’t identify it.

Months passed between those times. If he did for other things, he did it when I didn’t see him.

I had never seen my father kill a person, which I’m sure is what I saw, before the time I ran, but I think that was at least the third he had.

A young man came to our house. He was tall and fervent and young and well dressed, one of the richer of the downhillers, I supposed. He was in a terrible temper when I opened the door.

“Where’s the key-maker?” he said, jabbing his fingers at me. “Come on, where’s the fucking key-maker?”

My father came and banished me so I sat outside on the cold ground below his window and tried to listen to what passed between them. It was on its way to summer again and the earth around the house was garish with weeds, though the blooms I’d found and planted never grew.

I could hear the client telling my father his needs. He spoke in such a low quick voice I couldn’t make much out. My father seemed to be trying to calm him. It didn’t work and his own voice began to grow louder.

“Make the fucking key,” the young man said. That I heard.

My father made a brief response.

“You want a silver flower?” the young man said. “Want me to give you a flower, councilman? Oh, I need it all! I need it all!”

There was nothing for some minutes then a grating sound and a regular methodical thudding began. I was still, hunched there, too afraid to rise, hearing the beat, feeling percussions through the house.

I don’t know what name I’d give to the feeling I had—it was mostly fear, of course, but it had in it something of certainty too, the excitement of being not surprised, seeing myself there as if I was my own watcher, of discerning ineluctability.

The rhythm went on. I was blinking and quaking and I looked up into a sky now warm and heavy with clouds, and I saw my mother knelt with her skirt rucked to her knees, her feet parted in runnels of earth between growing marrows. Scabs of dirt dropped from her hands.

I looked at her and she up at me and we listened.

When my mother gave a sort of shudder and held out her hand I found out I was crying. She didn’t sweep me up or whisper to me but she rose and stumbled urgently toward me through the ankle-traps of her vegetables and reached for me and I came to her with my own arms wide and she took both my hands in one of hers and walk-dragged me as fast as she could out of sight of the house, out of earshot of the impacts.

“Now,” she muttered. “This way.” She kept making little noises. “You, wait,” she said, seemingly to herself. “Quickly now.”

She took me down the slope. We slid through the hill dust to a place only minutes away where I’d not been before, a fact that seemed impossible, but even quivering as I was I looked very carefully and really I don’t think I’d ever seen that configuration of trunks and branches, that crack in the huge rock slab below us out of which burst an explosion of whiskered creepers.

A rock and forest animal, something quick and furred, bundled past close enough to show teeth. My mother leaned back on a tree. She still held my hands at the end of her stiff arm, so I could go no further from nor get any closer to her.

“It’s like in the water,” I said finally. I pointed.

She looked along my finger and back at me.

“Like in the tank,” I said.

I was pointing at those reaching vines hooked and angled like insect legs or like the limbs of sea animals.

After a moment she said, “Oh yes. The starfish. Yes, I suppose it is a bit.”

I shook my hands free. I climbed the ledges onto the rock to sit so my head was at the same level as hers.

“The water in that tank was salty,” she said. “Like the sea is. You remember I told you what the sea is?”

She’d never told me. It had been in a book she’d shown me, though. I nodded. I was shy to look at her.

“There are fish under the sea bigger than our house,” she said. She narrowed her eyes into the wind. “There might be starfish that big,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Are there people?” I said.

“I can’t say. There are people on the other side of the sea, so maybe there are under it too.” She rubbed her hands together and whispered into them, “Imagine what they must be like. Imagine.”

“What’s a silver flower?” I said. “What’s it for?”

“It isn’t
for
anything,” she said. “You want a silver flower, do you?” She said it nastily but saw me wrap my arms around myself and sighed and in a quieter voice said, “It’s something you give someone for running away.”

I climbed down and reached into the breach out of which those vines boiled and pulled out a tiny speckled egg. Within the crack a shadowed nest remained, and still within that were the remains of other shells, broken from within. The one I’d taken was dead and whole.

“When will we go back?” I said.

“In two hours,” my mother said.

I climbed down the steep side of the rock. It took me several attempts, but I held those rooted creepers and clambered down. I looked up at last from a shelf of moss and my mother was leaning over and watching me. She smiled at me and waved.

When the clouds got darker I put down the egg and came back up and we climbed the footpaths and returned to the house. As we approached I started to cry again and did so more when we saw the door was open, but my father stayed in his workroom, and he stayed quiet. My mother put me to bed and he didn’t emerge.

Perhaps half a year after that, my mother came running up the stairs where I explored the great blank space of the upper floor. She half-led half-pushed me out of the house, took me on another of those quick purposeful walks in directions that I’d never before taken.

That time I didn’t see my father. I didn’t find him particularly subdued or melancholy when we returned. But I suspect from my mother’s rush that this was another occasion when he killed a person.

The thought of my father in his calm-faced mood raised dread in me again but, again, not only dread: that time came something like a kind of muted happiness of which I’m not ashamed. In that moment, my mother took me.

I
’ve said that the day I came running down the hill, trying to say how one of my parents had killed someone—the other perhaps—the children with their own parents were held by them to watch me. And that Samma was there too, and Drobe, and their friends, scattered throughout the crowd and watching from behind the metal guards around yards and like birds on ledges. One bridge boy hooted while I cried and tried to speak and Drobe threw a stone so hard that when it hit him on the side of his face it knocked him to the ground.

Drobe and Samma pushed through to reach me. They took hold of me and they clutched me as if I might get away.

There were no permanent police in the town. Every few weeks a uniformed delegation would arrive from the coastal city to deal with whatever disputes the hill people had stored up, to process what paperwork the occasionals, the volunteer officers, had incurred, the prisoners they’d incarcerated in our little jail. Until those agents arrived, the officers investigating my gasped allegation would be an anxious window-cleaner and a hunter wearing the temporary sashes that granted them authority. It would be a young schoolteacher with a faintly scarred face who would interpret the books of law.

The window-cleaner was a rangy bald man who gripped me hard and shook me. “From the beginning,” he said, too loud, “tell us what happened from the beginning,” and I didn’t know what the beginning was. With which death should I start, which animal? Or with the look my father sometimes wore, as if he’d replaced his own eyes with clear or clouded glass ones?

The crowd listened as I corrected myself, wailed that no, it was someone else who was dead, my father who’d killed her, killed my mother in the attic.

The hunter came down to my level. “The attic?” he said.

He was old and brown- and gray-bearded and very big. He put his hand on my shoulder and the weight of his arm was astonishing. His belt was a rattling bandolier. He wore a shotgun on his shoulder. He squinted up the path, his eyes bright between wrinkles.

“Wait,” said the window-cleaner.

“Fuck ‘wait,’ ” the hunter said. “Who’s looking after you?” he asked me. I blinked and looked at Drobe and Samma and they looked at me. Samma extended her arm, not hugging me but encircling me without quite touching, and Drobe moved around her to stand on my other side. Thus they claimed me.

The schoolteacher and the cleaner weren’t paying full attention but were remonstrating with the hunter as he walked away from them, his thumbs on that belt of cartridges.

“You don’t know what happened,” the teacher said to him but he shook his head and raised his voice to say to her, “Look at the boy!” He hesitated and took in Samma and the gang who’d climbed down from their vantages and come quietly to join us, the gang that now included me. “You be careful,” he said to us.

He whispered to Samma and put something in her hand, then started up the hill with the other sashed man and the schoolteacher running after him, he complaining, she lifting her heavy skirt to climb. After moments of hesitation a few others went to follow them, fetching metal bars and hefting garden tools, checking the firing bolts of old weapons, watching me where I waited in this new situation.

Everything, even the dirt, was poised.

Samma stared until, blinking, I met her eyes.

“Are you hungry?” Drobe said.

But I had no sense of that. Above us at the town’s edge I could see the teacher with the hunter and his new posse, close to the outmost buildings, the teacher looking over her shoulder back at us. Samma shook me gently so I looked at her again.

“What did the man say to you?” I said.

“He told me not to steal your supper. He gave me money.”

She bought meat and grain and we stewed it on a fire in the last of those empty houses that the children claimed as their territory and we all ate there on the body of the bridge. In a big empty attic room with late sunlight coming in, that made me cry again, in a way that was new to me.

T
ake accounts, keep estimates, realize interests.

You can count a city in a room, in your head. You can be taught that, and if you are you might learn that you already knew how to do it, and if you do you’ll have to learn to accommodate a new purpose, to encompass and itemize for a goal, to make it yours. With such intent, everything will be more concrete, the boundaries of the counted city circumscribed more precisely, and you may be more or less lost, or as lost as before. Were you lost? You don’t have to know: you can go along with things.

I’m writing by hand now. The wasp is dead or sleeping. There’s nothing for which my guards can listen.

Ultimately my manager would come to give me instructions, and I was glad to take them. And, unsanctioned, I was given advice too, by his previous assistant, informed or warned by her of gossip among colleagues, a line, a letter at a time, demanding attention.

Something started in that new attic, as I spent my first night ever out of the uphill.

I
watched the room with what light came in from the bridge. The house was full of the skeletons of furniture, around and through which the gang-members picked and played in complicated chases and which they gave new work to do. I was silent. They eyed me carefully and when they did I’d wait in alarm but none came to ask me questions about what I’d seen. Samma had told them not to.

At last a tiny crooked boy younger than most did approach me, so I grew tense again, but what he said, shyly, was “Did you ever see that cockerel?”

Among themselves they said there was a cockerel made of smoke and embers that scorched its way up and down the slopes. They’d populated the uphill—where most of them had never been—with monsters. They asked me about them all—that bird, a scaly worm, a ranting spider—and all I could offer were the snarls of big cats. They listened as if they weren’t disappointed with my gabbled stories, and the more I tried to say, to describe not only the animal sounds I’d heard on the hill but the beasts of which I was thinking, the more a guarded alarm showed on their faces with their tiredness, until every girl and boy gave up for the day and lay down on blankets or cardboard in cubbies throughout the building, window holes where windows had been bricked up, inset shelves that had held things.

I whimpered to think of the new stains on the old wall of my home, the glimpse of my father’s closed eyes, or my mother’s, their arms, those of the one stood over the other with something raised, some part of a body held. It wasn’t my father who had died: he’d done the killing. It came back at me and I kept my new gangmates awake with screams.

No one punished me for the noise. At a certain point I stood up from the rag bundle where I’d been placed and recited one extended howl into the staring face of an imagined dead woman. Samma and Drobe rose and came to me and she picked me up and carried me outside. She was not so big but I recall no hesitation or effort on her part.

The air blew through me. I’d never before been in the town so late, though I’d looked down on it untold times. Previously I’d only ever seen streetlamps either unlit or in their initial fitful waking or lit from far enough away that they were glimmers like the arses of phosphorescent bugs. Now Samma set me on my feet and I ran to stand beneath the closest and gaped wet-eyed up at its filament like a visitor to a shrine.

In the generating zone on the other hill the unseen turbines spun fast to make this light that replaced the moon, against which the drop was so dark. The houses to one side of me and the railings by that obscured void to the other converged before me on the second hill, in the dimmer quarter that had once cradled my mother.

“Moth boy,” Samma said. She sounded fond. “If you could fly you’d get right up there and touch the wire and die.”

“You know what happens when you die?” Drobe said. “Do you know church?” he said.

I ran forward again, hearing nothing of my own steps. Samma grabbed me, held me as tight as a harness, but I still felt as if I was running for those southern parts, or then as if the night itself had stopped to pause my investigation.

Did my mother walk ahead of me? Even when she told stories of her earlier life she never seemed nostalgic, and I could think of no reason that death alone would change that. If she took that revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she
had
to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography.

It wasn’t all collapse. Neither side of the town was ever only flyblown or air-bleached plastic or runoff and the slippage of industry but those were the castles she’d sought to live in, a cruder form, and it was by them that I considered her.

Someone would come to find strangers and those born of strangers, Drobe said, repeating things he’d heard. People had been sent out to perform such tasks, he said, to take number, and now someone was coming. I didn’t understand him. It seemed I’d spoken of the trash head in my ruminations, and that mention had provoked him to interrupt me with his garbled information.

“From the same place is what I’m saying,” he said. “I know that head. In the dump-house? That’s from when there was a time—where the counters come from—they were scared of all the engines and they smashed them all up. The ones that looked like that.”

Before we were born, rumors of distant insurrection had meant the ordering of destruction, the gleeless dismembering of all such geared constructed figures. One of a sequence of imbricated catastrophes our town had imported from the little coast city, which had itself succumbed to the anxiety, as we all did with so many, as a contagion from a vast other country.

Later I would come to understand that the doll’s head I’d given my dead mother must have been left as a sole remnant of the moving statue bodies, a disavowable memorial to molder on the tip while every other memento was broken and gone.

“First that,” Drobe said. He tried to make me look at him while he told me these stories. “With the mechanicals. Then they had problems on the trains. And there was a war. Two wars! One inside, one out.” Samma looked at him, guarded. Who had been telling him this? “Years ago. And it all ends up with people sent to take stock, to count foreigners. Like your father,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

I only just listened. I’m surprised now by how much of what he said I remember. I wouldn’t think of the murderer then; it was the murderee who had my attention. I was trying to hold her gone hand.

“Your mum’s in heaven now,” Drobe said.

I looked down at the cobbles. He said it to be kind.

For breakfast we scooped clean our pot with tough folded leaves. While I was eating the last of our cold stew the officials found me.

The hunter came into the room. He walked slowly through the dust and the struts of light toward me in my corner. He picked a way heavily through upended furniture frames and children staring at him, mouths frozen open. The schoolteacher waited at the doorway, her face set.

“So,” the man said. He held up his empty hands as if to show me something, as I’d done when I ran down the hill. “We went to your father.”

My blood went fast. The man knelt gently. “Are you sure you saw what you saw?”

“Hey,” said Drobe.

He was in the rafters. Drobe would eat his breakfast half-standing in a high corner, hunched under the roof and looking down like a minor household god.

“You saying he’s a liar?” Drobe said.

The hunter cocked his head and pursed his lips.

“Here’s how it is,” he said carefully. Everyone listened. “We went up to your father’s house. Now, he told us that nothing you said happened happened. Hold on now, boy, hold on.” I hadn’t said anything and I don’t think my face had moved: Samma, though, was hissing.

“No one’s angry with you,” the man said. “What your father told us is you came when your mother and him were having an argument. He saw you but you’d already seen them going at it and then you ran away and so he went to try to find you in case you were scared. Anyway. What happened was your mother said she’d had enough of it all and when he came back from looking for you she’d gone. She went away, boy. Took a long way maybe so as not to come through the town.” That idea startled me. “I don’t know. That’s the fact of it, is what he says.”

He watched me closely.

I said, “He killed her in the top room.”

The teacher shook her head.

“We looked,” the hunter said. “There’s no blood there, boy. You know she went away before, your mother?”

“To that port,” I said, “by the sea,” and in my head I saw the cracked and dirty window above a door and a glimpse of the white walls of a communal hall. “That was before—”

“She wrote a letter,” the teacher interrupted. “She said goodbye.”

I could only stare at her, her marked, expressionless face.

“How’s your reading?” the hunter said. “Your dad found a letter on the table, he says. We have it. It’s not for him. It’s for you.”