Michael Flynn: Cargo

Jace yields the bone with ill grace. The boys of Moren’s Run will be playing stick-and-ball against the fisher boys of Glennen come midspring day, and every bit of practice helps.

Gramper used to pry skulls from the soil and pretend that he had known them in the Old Days. Alas, poor York, he would say. I knew him . And then the old man would laugh. Nob thought now that his grandfather had been more than a little touched in the head.

It’s remembering will do it, Nobby. If you don’t remember, you’ll never miss it.

Jace has climbed atop a rusted and broken gaspum . “Is that the Old Day village?” he gasps. “It’s so huge! It goes on forever!”

“At least two days’ brisk walking, gramper told me, from east to west.”

“That’s inner proprit. No wonder their huts all fell down and Mama Earth ate their bones.”

“Likely so. But gramper said…” Nob snaps his mouth shut. It would not do to repeat such stories to a chatterbox like Jace. His grandfather had been stoned for telling them. And, later, his mother. Sometimes he imagines what it must have felt like when the rocks struck.

“What did your gramper say, Uncle?”

Nob crouches and shakes Jace by the shoulders. “Listen to me, boy. They were all lies. Gramper was a crazy old coot. What he said about the Fall of the Cities, it weren’t true. He was just a boy your age when it happened. How would he have known?”

“Maybe his mama told him? Then he told your mama, and your mama told…”

“Stop right there. Yes, mama told me, but I don’t believe ‘em, and neither should you. Flying through the air? Talking through the air? Boxes that think? An’ no one dying of the red measles or the hacking cough? Fables outta books! I think half his stories, they never happened to him. He read them outta books until he thought they did, and how can you trust what’s written in a book? How you know a story’s true if’n you can’t look a man in the eye when he tells it?”

Jace frowns with almost comical concern. “Your mama had books.”

The old man nods absently. “Yes. That’s why they stoned her. They belonged to gramper’s parents and they brought ‘em along when they came out to the countryside. The village burned them, of course, in the fighting right after the Fall; but gramper—or maybe his mama—hid some. And later… And later… They caught my mama with ‘em.”

The rain begins again. No thunder this time, only a steady shower. Nob releases Jace, stands and looks around the little clearing, back toward Moren’s Run, eastward toward Seederville. No one is abroad in such weather. Only little Jace and himself—and Will and his two friends. That fool boy! What is he to do about him? That Jace will keep silent is beyond credit. It will be the stoning ground for all three.

No, maybe not for Kenn and Shairn, he thinks. Not for a first offense, and not if they turn witness against Will. But Will has been chastised with the rods twice already, and this offense will violate the ancient tradition of Three Strikes.

“Let’s get outta the rain,” he says, and leads Jace to the shelter formed by two corners and fragment of roof of the old brick building. They huddle there while the water pours around them, while it drums the roof and drips through the cracks and splits.

There is less of the building now than there had been when gramper had showed it to him… When? The year the wolves came? The year the river froze? How many summers have passed since he was Jace’s age? No one remains alive now that he knew back then. Nob studies the great stone building off to the north and, through the curtain of rain, realizes that one of its two towers has fallen since he last saw it. A building so solid looking should last forever. Perhaps it is only a trick of the rain.

Nob sighs. How much of this will remain should Jace live to be an old man? Will he remember what it was like today? He glances at the boy, who gives him a grin of shared secrets, but shows no interest in the ruins on the valley floor below them. Something gramper once said comes back to him. It ain’t when we forget how we done something, Nobby, the old man had said, wagging a blunt forefinger in his face, it’s when we forget we ever done it.

Nob hurls the thighbone from him and it spins away into the brush. Not for many years has he come back to this place; and he has never dared to venture into the Big Village down in the broad river valley. The spirits of the elder folk haunted the ruins.

I ain’t a-feared of no old huts, he remembers Will saying many years later—when the roles had shifted and Nob had played gramper to Will’s Little Nobby. When he had told Will the stories his mama had entrusted to him.

“I made a terrible mistake,” he whispers.

“What’s that?” asks Jace. “What mistake?”

Nob shakes his head. When he closes his eyes, he sees his mama tied to the stake in the stoning yard; hears the thud of the rocks as they strike her; hears his mama’s curses turn to screams, then to sobs, then to silence. She has come to him since then in the night, in his dreams. Keep the faith, Nobby, her spook whispers. Never forget.

But he does forget. He drinks so that he can. He wishes he had his jug with him now. It would warm him nicely and take the chill off his bones.

Gramper maintained a grim defiance, crying out only once to say, “I seen it myself. Which of you can say that?” Now, when Nob spies his reflection in the pool where Moren’s Run settles before her final rush to the river, it is gramper he sees staring back. And the villagers keep an eye on him, lest he fall into his mama’s ways. There has not been a stoning in many years, but the stake is still in place.

And so he has kept the faith, but what has it gained him but that Will now faces stoning in his turn? It was a mistake ever to pass the stories on, whatever his mama’s spook might say, whatever gramper might think. But Will had been so eager… And few enough were the children of Moren’s Run who showed eagerness for anything at all.

“The storm’s a-breaking up, Uncle…” Little Jace has stepped out from their little shelter and is searching the western skies. Patches of blue have appeared among the wrack of clouds. Golden rays streak through them, caressing the hills and the ruins and—for just a moment—it seems to Nob that the ruins live, that the walls and houses are whole and the roofs unbroken. But it is only an illusion of sun and shadow.

He pushes himself to his feet. “Come on, Jace. Time to be a-getting back.”

“What will happen to Will?” Jace asks. “Will they cane him again?”

Nob closes his eyes. “No, Jace. Not this time. Not the third time.”

Jace says very quietly, “We gotta tell, don’t we?”

Nob sees that the boy has begun to realize how serious things are. Impulsively, he throws his arm around the boy’s shoulders and hugs him to himself. “That’s the Law,” he says. “‘He who knows of heresy but speaks not up is as guilty as the heretic.’ But it don’t bind children your age.”

Little Jace could no more keep quiet than a magpie. The village would hear. And they would know if Nob had kept quiet. As guilty as the heretic . As bad as his mother, they would say. And the old man before that. Bad blood in the whole family. And it would be “a time to gather stones together.”

He studies the old time village—the city —conscious now that he is seeing it for the last time. He will never dare come here again.

Was it really that they ran out of cargo, the way the village often ran out of stored food during Great Hunger Month in the early spring? Or was it like gramper said: that they wouldn’t let themselves go out and look for cargo, that they wouldn’t let themselves dig or drill or build those big workshops anymore? And after a while no one could keep things running or even knew how to do it. That’s what Mom always said… gramper would tell him.