Z for Zachariah

Chapter Sixteen

June 24th

In these few days my uneasiness has grown worse.

At Mr Loomis’s urging, I planted wheat and beets. I put the beets, two long rows of them, in the same field with the corn, next to the soy beans. If the crop is good, that will be more beets than we can eat; but the object is to harvest the seed. If I do that each year then some day, when we need them for sugar, we will have them. I admit that is a sensible idea.

There was not room for the wheat in that field, so I planted it—about a half-acre—in the far field beyond the pond. That means there will be a little less pasture, but that does not matter, since after I cut what I need for seed—a few bushels should be enough—the cows can eat the rest. The chickens can eat it, too, though they like corn better.

I explained to Mr Loomis why I had not planned to grow wheat—that is, that I had no way to mill it for flour.

“That’s not important,” he said. “When I get well enough, when I can walk further, we can learn how to mill it. The important thing is not to let the species die out.”

None of that had anything to do with my feeling uneasy. It was caused by something else.

As I had said I would, I put a chair out for him on the front porch—a small upholstered armchair I got from my parents’ bedroom. It also has a matching footstool, and I brought that down, too, along with a pillow and a blanket. It is really quite comfortable, and is shaded by the porch roof.

As he requested, I also put a chair on the back porch; there is not enough room there for a footstool, so it is not quite as nice. However, yesterday morning when I asked him he said that was where he would like to sit.

It was the first time since his sickness that he had ventured so far, but he did quite well. I remembered, searched for and found in the front coat cupboard something I had forgotten: a cane my father once used when he had a sprained ankle. With that, plus leaning heavily on my shoulder, he made it to the porch and into the chair. His knees still buckle under him, and he cannot lift his feet properly, but tends to drag them and then thump them forward.

He sat there all morning—rather like an overseer—watching while I ploughed, harrowed and then planted the two rows of beets. At lunch time I turned the tractor off, leaving it in the field to save petrol, and walked back up to the house.

After lunch he slept in his room while I started on the wheat field. When the sun began moving over the hill I came back to the house; he was awake and wanted to go out again, this time to the front porch. I helped him to the chair, got his feet on the footstool, and covered him with the blanket. Then I went inside to open up the stove and start the dinner.

What happened after that is, I suppose, partly my own fault. Having put the food in the oven and the kettle on to boil, I got a chair from the dining-room, took it out on the porch and sat down beside him. The sun was just setting, and again we watched the light turning from yellow to red as it went down.

I had a reason for doing this, besides just wanting to rest a few minutes. It was a feeling that had been growing on me, and bothering me more each day since he first began to recover. And that was the fact that I did not know him at all. When he had first come I had been so excited and apprehensive about the presence of any other person that I did not think too much about who Mr Loomis was; he had seemed attractive and friendly. But lately I felt I did not understand him at all.

He had told me only the barest account of how he went to work in the laboratory on the plastic and the safe-suit, and about the trip he had made to the underground Air Force headquarters. I had learned from his nightmares about his fight with Edward. But that was all I knew. He never talked about himself at all except his plans for a generator and a little about planting. Nor did he seem to have any curiosity or interest in me, except once he seemed to like my playing the piano.

I even had a theory about it. I thought the murder of Edward, the months alone in the laboratory, the long desperate walks, also alone, through the dead countryside—all that had been so horrible and deadening it had blotted out everything else in his mind. When he thought back, that was what popped up, so he did not think back, nor talk about the past. After all this time, he still seemed like a stranger.

I did not want to discuss the thing about Edward (I decided probably not ever) nor the laboratory, but wanted to get him talking about the times before that. I sat down beside him but I did not know how to do it. In books and films they say, let’s talk about you, or, tell me all about yourself—but that is when they first meet, and seems trite anyway.

Remembering that he liked my playing music, I asked:

“When you were young, did somebody in your family play the piano?”

He said: “No. We didn’t have a piano.”

“Were you poor?”

“Yes. I had a cousin I used to visit. They had a piano, and his mother played it. I liked to listen to that.”

“Where was that?”

“A town in New York. Nyack.”

He did not elaborate, and the conversation lagged since I knew nothing about Nyack, New York.

I tried again.

“Before you went to Cornell what did you do?”

“What everybody does. Went to school, high school, college, worked in the summers.”

He seemed determined to be uninteresting and untalka-tive. I said: “Is that all?”

“After college, four years in the Navy.”

That seemed to open a door.

“On a ship? Where did you sail?”

“In a naval ordnance laboratory in Bristol, New Jersey. I was a chemistry major in college. The navy needed chemists. That’s where I got started in plastics. They used more plastics than anybody, and kept testing new kinds. For ship fittings, gun covers, frogman suits, even hulls. Plastics that wouldn’t chip, freeze, crack, corrode or leak.”

“I see.” I saw the conversation steering into a circle.

“And when I finished there, I applied at Cornell graduate school.” End of circle.

It seemed hopeless, and I should have given up, but I did not. Instead I said:

“But were you ever—did you ever—get married?”

He looked at me in a queer way. He said: “I thought you were coming to that.”

And then it happened. To my absolute astonishment, he did not even smile, but reached over and took my hand. “Grabbed” would be a better word. He took it very quickly and hard, pulled it to his chair, jerking me towards him so that I almost fell over. He held my hand between both of his.

He said: “No, I never got married. Why did you ask that?”

I was so startled that for a minute I just sat and stared at him. All I could think of at first was that somehow he had misunderstood something I had said.

After that I felt embarrassed, and awkward, and afraid, in that order. Embarrassed for a quite unimportant reason

—because my hand was hard and his were soft, mine from work, his I suppose, from wearing those plastic gloves so long; awkward because the way he had pulled me I could not sit right in my chair, but was leaning off balance. And afraid, finally, because when I tried to pull away he just tightened his grip. There was nothing gentle about the way he held my hand, and no expression at all in his face. He just looked at me as he had at The Farm Mechanic.

He said again: “Why did you ask that?”

I said: “Please let go.”

He said: “Not until you answer.”

I said: “I asked because I was interested.” I felt myself beginning to tremble. I was really frightened.

He said: “Interested in what?” And instead of letting go he tightened his grip, pulling me further off balance.

I could not help what happened next. I felt myself falling from the chair, falling towards him, and quite instinctively I threw my right hand up (he was holding the left one) to catch myself. It hit him in the face, not very hard, on or near his left eye. In that moment he pulled back and relaxed his grip. I snatched my hand away and sprang back.

In a very quiet voice he said: “You should not have done that.”

Why should I have apologized? I do not know what would have been right, but that is what I did.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. I was falling.” In my confusion I may even have tried to smile; I cannot remember clearly. Then I left the porch and went back to the kitchen. As I left he said:

“You held my hand once before.”

In the kitchen I was shaking so hard that at first I could not continue the cooking; I could not think clearly. I thought I was even going to cry, something I seldom do, but I managed to hold back. I sat on the kitchen stool and tried to calm down. I told myself it was not really so important. It was what the girls at school used to call a “pass”; they used to talk about it and laugh after they had had a date. But that was when they were in a car, after a film, and on their way home to their parents. It is different when there is no one else present, no one to turn to or tell about it. And I found myself doing what I have long since banned myself from doing—that is, imagining my parents were coming back, with David and Joseph, and wishing they were. I put the thought out of my head, as I have learned to do. I felt some what calmer then, and was able to continue with the dinner.

He walked back to the bedroom by himself. I was still cooking when I heard the sound of his cane and the dragging thump of his feet; he was holding himself up by leaning against the wall. Eventually I heard the bed creak as he reached it, and when I carried in his food he was sitting there surrounded by his diagrams. He took the tray calmly, as if nothing had happened. I ate in my usual place at the card table, but we did not talk.

It was true what he had said about my holding his hand. On the night when he was sickest, when his pulse was almost gone and his breathing only a flutter, when I thought he was dying, I sat by his side and held his hand. I am not sure how long; I think several hours. I did not think he would remember it; as with the music and the reading I was trying to let him know, wherever he was, that I was still there.

But it was not the same at all. There is a telepathy that goes with such things. When he was holding my hand I could tell that he was just taking charge, or possession—I do not know how to put it. Just as he had, in his way, of the planting, the use of the petrol, the tractor, and even of my going to church. And of the suit, and, in the end, of Edward.

For that reason his walking back to the bed without help, which should have been something to celebrate, instead makes me uneasy.