This Census-Taker

17

That first night alone with my father I sat in the kitchen without hope.

He cooked, glancing at me as I waited speechless and deflated like an empty bag. I almost felt too empty to be afraid until the night came all the way on and I lay in my cubby room listening for the sound of my father coming up the stairs, imagining him at my door, between his and my mother’s empty room, looking at me as if I was something curious, looking at me and not at me at the same time. I stared at the ceiling that was the attic floor, growing dizzy. I imagined my father watching me as if I was something that he should make stop moving.

I don’t remember sleeping. The next day I was slow and twitchy. I didn’t know what to do or what was to happen.

My father would make keys. I?

“Are you going to play?” he said.

He fed me again. Put food in front of me as the gray light came up, that is, though I couldn’t eat it. “I’m working all day,” he said. “This is for you for later. Don’t go too far.”

While he cut metal I opened the door to my mother’s room.

There were no covers on the bed frame, no books on the shelves or surfaces, which had been swept, so there were no dust marks where any books had been.

I walked our home’s perimeter of earth. What do you do on a day like that?

I wanted to see the letter again, as if staring at it might help me, but I didn’t know where it was.

Several times that day my father shouted for me from the house’s front step. He didn’t do so angrily: just checking, making sure I was close. He would make me answer.

I drew marks on a rock with the end of a stick I burned for that purpose. At a certain point they became letters and then words. I can’t remember what I wrote, which seems strange to me now. I wrote whatever I wrote, and stood back and threw pebbles at the words, looking for a particular parabola, an exact curve.

If they hit them, I thought, it means I can go.

The first throws went wide. I kept trying. When one of my stones arced up to land right exactly on what I’d written I felt squeezed inside, as if it were the writing that pulled the stones in.

He called me when the sun went down. One day had passed. I watched as the dark spread and I listened to him and I felt cold all over again. I smeared away everything I’d put down on the rock before I obeyed him. I left my slate, the stone page the hill put out for me, unreadable.

He brought me a drink of sweet herby milk while I lay in bed and he stared at me until I drank it. I hoped it wasn’t poison. He watched me with desperate fondness.

—

I found the letter, folded behind a jar on a high shelf in the kitchen where it can’t have been a surprise that, tiptoed on a chair, I’d find it. I read it several times and learned nothing and put it back. Sometimes when my father was not in the house, I would look at it again.

There came to be noises on the hill that were new to me. I thought birds of a kind I didn’t know might have come to live there, birds that called with rapid percussive clicks or trod heavily and quickly over twigs or pecked them hard. I climbed higher than I’d ever gone to see if I could find them but the thin cold air and ugly trees and rock cuts diffused the snapping sound so I could never track it.

I ran and climbed as I wanted but every few hours my father would lean out and abruptly call my name until I responded, so I had to stay in earshot. On that hill, on the flint on which we lived, that was some distance.

Each time I entered it the room beside mine was less and less my mother’s. I had a few of her books, but they’d been mine too, at least to use, in my care, by the time she gave me them outright by leaving, so I never felt I was connecting with her when I opened them.

The days changed and the view from what had been her window became mine. I climbed into its frame as I had once in the attic that I didn’t want to enter again. When the wind made my house lean and creak at night, I’d look up and imagine that the sounds were made by my mother shaking the walls in the upper room, staring at where the blood had been, that my father had cleaned away. I still tried to keep her face from my mind, and sometimes I succeeded and she looked at me with my father’s face or the rotting doll’s.

Once as I sat at what had been her window in cold late light I heard two shots in fast succession. They came from somewhere on the stone slopes.

At the first I didn’t even move; I was used to the sound of shotguns. What followed it, though, was a sharper ugly echoing crack like the amplified snap of dry wood. It made me start and look wildly through the glass at the flocks of birds as spooked as I.

I waited, but nothing more came.

When my father shouted for me from the front door I still hadn’t left the house and I surprised him by descending from behind him, down the stairs. I was surprised in turn because two downhillers stood on our doorstep: a thin nervous man I didn’t recognize with one of the ribbons of temporary office on his shoulder and a revolving pistol in his hand, and the sour-looking teacher.

My father looked at them, past them to the horizon for long seconds, then faced me. He was angry.

“How are you?” the woman shouted at me.

I backed away from the door and nodded without speaking.

She came in while her companion fidgeted with his weapon. She looked in my eyes and mouth and asked me whether I was all right, whether anything had happened, while my father watched and listened.

When they left she said to him, “You be careful.”

He closed the door more slowly than usual, so as not to slam it.

When he ladled out supper my father said, “Did you hear the gun today? That loud shot?” I nodded. “Not heard that noise for a long time.” He frowned. “Could be there’s new hunting, maybe.” He opened the door and looked out while midges joined us. “I used to hear that all the time,” he said. “When I was in a war. In a city.” Not the nearest one, I knew.

The boy said, “Who won?”

“High town against low?” the boy’s father said at last. “Street against street? Who won?” He looked at his son without expression. “They won. That shot? That’s the kind of shot you use to kill a man.”

That night I ran away.