When We Were Civil
by Anna Villegas
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
How smart we thought we were: prescient and prepared, our freedom from delusion and aspiration insulating us against whatever the Furies could machinate. We had our booted feet planted so firmly in the hand-tilled soil of our homestead that we were more flora than fauna. No rocking or rolling was going to unseat us from our rustic thrones, turn us animal, thrust us into barbarism.
Oh, how smart we thought we were.
Just in case, we cached the guns.
River is dying. He leaves his blanket bed beside the woodstove to pee, but even that last duty he’s executing less and less. His head slides off his paws until his cockeyed muzzle rests against the slate floor, drool threaded from his silver jaws. Yesterday I witnessed his waning motor control in motion, so I’d shifted his head to cushion it against the folded blanket. Today I know better than to wake him from whatever dog dream of death seals his cloudy eyes. As I work an oversized log into the stove, he doesn’t stir. Often he tricks us into believing he’s already passed.
Not yet, his breathing tells me. Not yet.
River will be the last dog. We’ve said that before: no more dogs. After Pepper we said it. After Penny. Now the option is no longer ours to refuse. The dogs, all but River, are gone.
Some time after the oil imports ended and the high-end adventurers could no longer afford to dump their castoffs on our mountain, Linda appeared at our cabin door, curled tight in the summer sun as if she’d been ours to love since forever. I was up earlier than Clement to collect eggs — this was before the bears savaged the hen house — for one of our glorious breakfasts: potato omelet, rhubarb, toast and grape jelly, peppermint tea.
For years when we could still get gasoline on the underground market, we stockpiled our flour and sugar. We’d make a yearly pilgrimage to the valley and barter away whatever we’d decided we could live without, whatever relics of our former lives we’d ceased to cherish, for lentils and flour, beans and rice, sugar and salt. With our cinder-block larder holding fifty-gallon drums of staples, we couldn’t imagine we’d ever find ourselves, our smart, provident selves, in need. So we had eggs and bread and jelly for our five-star breakfasts as if the breakdown had never reached us.
Even without gasoline and the luxuries entitled by its rationed use, we practiced what we’d always done. We cherished the ritual of mealtime morning and night: the artful arrangement of our garden’s flowers, the shining China plate, the proper fork, the wine glass holding creek water and a sprig of spearmint.
Clement would sit down to our meals and compose an extemporaneous review, as though he were still writing for the Chronicle, as though people still cared to read about the elegance of food. The day Linda came to us, our table was set with cotton napkins cornered as sharply as any electric iron could have done. Flame-red daylilies crowded my mother’s Spode gravy boat. Their fiddlehead stamens had dusted the oak table with what seemed to be ebony ash. For that breakfast, our first with Linda, Clement had no words. He could only whistle. I repeated what I’d said before: we were merely a place-setting away from you-know-what.
I opened the door, Linda lifted her auburn head to my outstretched palm, and it never entered my mind to wake Clement for the .22, that we’d need to shoot her the way we’d had to shoot the packs of broad-chested gangster dogs, the pit bull and Doberman and Rottweiler mixes too many generations beyond rabies and distemper vaccinations.
The dog packs frightened me more than the bears because they had regressed, I explained to Clement. They had become what they had not previously been. He teased me then about the beast within, but his teasing didn’t abate my fear of the wild dogs. Clement and I fought about using the shells from our dwindling supply. I’ll scrape the hides, I promised. I’ll make the dead dogs useful.
We used our precious cartridges on them after I’d seen a matched pair, red highlights against coal-black coats, take down two of our goats for sheer pleasure, it seemed, in broad daylight. When the bleating stopped, the two hoodlum dogs sat amid the bloody mayhem and stared at me.
Their black coats are folded at the cabin door. We wipe our boots on them.
At least the bears don’t waste what they take from us.
Linda was our miracle girl, delivered to us pregnant by a conception we didn’t credit until her birthing time. When I stepped outside the cabin on that long-ago summer day and she lifted her head to my hand, I gave her a good scratch around the ears. She licked my palm. She still had manners, what so many two-legged creatures had lost by then, captivating us so that with her we freely shared what little we had. We fed her the scraps of grilled rabbit left over from our dinner, set out Penny’s old water bowl, and fashioned a bed next to the woodstove when her time came.
All the pups but River died, as if Nature knew the reign of the domestic dog had passed. Nature saved us having to drown them. We wouldn’t have had enough food to spare. I’d seen Clement suspending his arthritic hands in the heat rising off the wood burner, so I took the spade with the broken handle and buried the dead pups in the cemetery below the garden next to the others, all the animals large and small who have served us since we made our smart escape to the mountain. Please forgive me for wishing your death, I told the pups as I dug. I would rather bury you than drown you.
When we stepped off the grid and intended to live against the bone by choice, we revered survival of the fittest, natural adaptation, the supremacy of hybrid vigor. “Everybody’s gotta make a living,” Clement said when the mama bear went through the hot wire into the hen house.
Before the breakdown, we could be civilized, lavishly resilient. Before the breakdown, we could find a bigger battery and repair the damage to the hen house, replacing the slaughtered hens with chicks from one of our neighbors’ flocks. Finding what we needed to patch together our homestead certified our smartness, our right to survive.
Now the gasoline is gone and the batteries dead and the solar panels degrading and our water hand-carried and even visiting our old friends on the next ridge is out of the question. We both have days when moving beyond our cabin stoop seems impossible. After the dog packs killed Ed and Mayra’s last cow, we said no more. No more live and let live when we can’t replace what has been taken. No more.
Once River dies, on our mountain at least, there will be no more dogs.
* * *
Two weeks after we bury River in his stone-studded grave, the traveler arrives. An early-morning advent, like Linda’s, his coming startles us from sleep. Without our dog guardian, creatures two- and four-legged meaning us well or ill can approach without fanfare. Unless the jays let loose with their catcalls, we won’t know it until it’s too late to be inhospitable.
The traveler awakens us because Clement and I have taken to spooning under our down blankets long into the daylight hours. Wood-gathering, the labor it requires of us and the price we pay with our bones and muscles, makes heating the cabin through our mountain’s winter nights too luxurious. We hoard our piles of sticks and branches, all the more valuable to us for having been gleaned and dragged to our cabin, the way we hoard the warmth of sleep. We save the firewood for use when we are upright and alert.
In our livelier moods, we reprimand ourselves for having ever claimed energy independence. Energy independence is easy to claim when you have gasoline to power chain saws and splitters and pickup trucks. Off the grid, we used to declare so proudly. Off the grid with money and means to power our gas engines is what we were. When we are less lively, we look to our gas-powered past lives with whole-hearted yearning. For how it felt to be so secure. For how superior we thought we were.
In the early days of our deliberate mountain life, we relished the cutting and splitting and stacking of firewood. We often had six or seven cords stored ahead, two years worth of heat in tidy sixteen-inch logs of oak and pine, cedar and madrone. We were strong and able. The salt of our own sweat and the sweetness of the shavings the chainsaw left behind thrilled us. Just looking at our work made us rich. Wood warms you three times, our neighbor Ed used to crow at us: first when you cut it, second when you stack it, third when you burn it. Now we don’t cut or stack. Now, when we tire of handling the dulled bow saw to make proper logs, we drag and break. Burning is our only warmth.
When the forest turns black on a moonless night and the fire in the woodstove reduces to embers, we climb into our bower and don’t emerge, sometimes for twelve hours. We hold each other — I massage Clement’s knobby hands or warm them between my thighs — and we try to imagine how the rest of the world is faring.
Five years ago, we had ways of knowing. Ed and Mayra’s neighbors to the west had neighbors to the west and so on and so on all the way to what used to be the city. People could still move then. Some had gas for old motor bikes. We didn’t like to guess how they came by that gas so far into the collapse. Some had horses they could still manage to feed. Some were young and healthy enough to hike the mountains. Most who brought tidings from beyond were good folk, on their way to be closer to family or to put distance between themselves and those who weren’t. Most of them had stayed decent.
Clement’s arms tighten around me when the knocking starts. Tap-tap-tap. In our own house, unease forces us to whisper. In our own bed. Tap-tap-tap.
“They’re knocking,” Clement says.
“Better than not.”
“Let me go.”
“No. We go together.”
“Or you can go... and I can—”
“Clement.”
“Ever the optimist, you.” Clement kisses me as we haven’t kissed for months. “Ever the positivist.”
We sit beside each other on the bedside and pull on yesterday’s clothes. During our hard-hearted winters, doing laundry without pumped water is the prerogative of the fool. We layer on T-shirts and flannels and sweaters, our soiled jeans patched and patched again. Clement slides my boots across the floor to my feet. He works his feet into his own boots and leaves the laces undone. He knows I plan to light the wood burner in the kitchen stove, boil water, make tea. Clement knows his wife.
“How long has it been?” I ask my husband.
He answers me, no longer whispering: “Since the last visit?”
“Has it been a year?”
“Not a year. Could it?” Clement takes my face in his hands. I don’t want him to turn me loose. “Ellen. It’s all right.”
“Yes.” I layer my own hands on his and press. Then I let go of my husband and bend to pull on my socks. I stand.
The polite knocking ceases. In the unnatural quiet, I want to call for River, to conjure up his throaty growl. The traveler stands squarely behind the door, blocked from our sight. It could be simple courtesy, not wanting to be seen gawking into a stranger’s window. It could be something else, not wanting to be seen at all. My hip pains me, but I step across the slate floor without limping. When Clement is close behind me, I turn to flatten my palm against his chest, then unlatch the door and edge it open.
Our traveler is no taller than I. He’s younger by at least three decades, maybe four, though the long curly hair tied into a red and white striped ribbon is gray though and through. He is lean and weathered, but we all are by now. The collapse made each of us outdoorsmen, more so in the fallen cites. We heard about the skyscrapers turned towering morgues that even the raiders stopped looting when it was certain the grid would not be resurrected. Whatever those vessels of civilization offered was not worth the climb, the fetid air, the bodies. As we do, our traveler knows there is more to be had in the mountains.
The door swings open on him when he is bent, shedding his backpack. I recognize the pack. It’s an Osprey, exactly like the one Clement and I bought for our son to wear into another world in another lifetime. That I recognize the pack — that our Ross might be somewhere seeking shelter at a stranger’s door just as this traveler is — centers me.
“Welcome,” I tell him, my generosity driven by the image of my own beautiful boy, who disappeared from our lives like so many others. I extend my hand, the way business school taught us to use a strong grip to ambush an adversary, to bend him to our will. I want to usher our guest inside before every advantage of warmth held by our cabin walls is lost to the roiling air. The sun slices through the fast-moving thunderhead enveloping the mountain. Behind the traveler, like a tray of shattered glass, the litter of old snow on our meadow reflects the sunlight for one blinding moment.
He straightens from the backpack. His hands are empty.
“Good morning.” He accepts my handshake. A slight hesitation, then he gives us a smile. His hand is chilled, stiff as steel.
“I followed the highway, then the road, and it brought me here.” He twists his mouth into something between a grimace and a grin. The missing teeth make me wish he hadn’t.
Long after the collapse rendered them superfluous, we held to our social niceties. We’d inquire as to a newcomer’s name and profession, family and geography, anything about the old world to establish a context, a background, for the immediate exchange we needed to conduct. Often the degrees of separation we traced between our past lives would surprise us into lively conversation we followed late into a night of visiting. The familiar scripts reassured us; they provided a destination we could reach.
When our basic needs insisted, we learned to stop looking backward. Made Buddhist by necessity instead of style, we live in the moment completely. What we have to eat now, what we have to warm us now, how our ailments disable us now, who threatens our household now — the present is finally with us.
So Clement ushers the traveler into our cabin. A handful of sticks and pinecones is lit in the Glenwood, the traveler is motioned toward last night’s bowl of wash water and a towel, a kettle is filled and set on the wood burner. I will steep peppermint leaves for our breakfast tea when the water boils.
I study the stranger in our home. Washed, his face looks younger and wearier. The knotted ribbon holding his hair reminds me of Christmas wrapping, of how long it’s been since a gift has passed our threshold. A walking present, I think, but I don’t say it. Once we used to be playful with our makeshift household fixes. Now we know irony to be the luxury of plenty.
We seat the traveler at the table in front of a blue mug holding dried peppermint leaves. Until last year even, ours was a shoes-off house, the cue to infrequent guests the neatly aligned pairs outside our door where the bench seat — the one that Clement has worked from oak — is worn to comfort. Like the set table, a shoes-off house secured with every coming and going the small courtesies of our lives: making four forays up the mountain gathering tinder instead of the two which is our daily quota, hiking down to the stream with the water buckets before they are empty, leaving the last perfect plum on the breakfast plate.
Today we are shod, as is the visitor seated in our midst. He steps over the dog-hide mat, and Clement and I stand back from the door to let him pass. His shoes — maybe they are Reeboks beneath the red mud of our mountain — have soiled my slate floor, dirtied the silk rugs I still, on a fine day, hang in our clearing and beat into cleanliness.
Copyright © 2023 by Anna Villegas
