This Census-Taker

10

Two 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.