John Adams - Wastelands 2

“Grandma!” Hope cries, suddenly awake. “It’s raining outside!”

Joy, laughter, dancing. The whole village gathers at the altar under the trees. Bill carries me there, half running, and I smell his strong male sweat mingled with the sweet rain. Hope dances in her drenched wrap like some wild thing and chases after the other children.

Then Gloria strides into the Grove, grabs Hope, and throws her onto the altar. “You’ve sinned! My own daughter!”

Immediately everyone falls silent. The village, shocked, looks from Gloria to Hope, back to Gloria. Gloria’s face is twisted with fury. From a fold of her wrap she pulls out Alice in Wonderland .

“This was in the chicken coop! This! A sin, trees destroyed … you had this in our very house!” Gloria’s voice rises to a shriek.

Hope shrinks against the wide flat stone and she puts her hands over her face. Rain streams down on her, flattening her hair against her small skull. The book in Gloria’s hand sheds droplets off its skin cover. Gloria tears out pages and throws them to the ground, where they go sodden and pulpy as maggots.

“Because of you, God might not have sent any rains at all this year! We’re just lucky that in His infinite mercy—you risked—you—”

Gloria drops the mutilated book, pulls back her arm, and with all her force strikes Hope on the shoulder. Hope screams and draws into a ball, covering her head and neck. Gloria lashes out again, a sickening thud of hand on tender flesh. I cry, “Stop! No, Gloria, stop—Bill—let me go!”

He doesn’t. No one else moves to help Hope, either. I can feel Bill’s anguish, but he chokes out, “It’s right, Mama.” And then, invoking the most sacred scripture of all, he whispers, “We will never forget.”

I cry out again, but nothing can keep Hope from justice, not even when I scream that it is my fault, my book, my sin. They know I couldn’t have found this pre-Crash sin alone. They know that, but no one except me knows when Gloria passes beyond beating Hope for justice, for Godly retribution, into beating her from Gloria’s own fury, her withered fig tree, her sin. No one sees but me. And I, an old woman, can do nothing.

Hope lies on her cot, moaning. I crouch beside her in her alcove, its small window unshuttered to the rain. Bill bound her broken arm with the unfinished cloth off my loom, then went into the storm in search of his wife.

“Hope… dear heart…”

She moans again.

If I could, I would kill Gloria with my own hands.

A sudden lone crack of lightning brightens the alcove. Already the skin on Hope’s wet arms and swollen face has started to darken. One eye swells.

Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a—

“Grandma…”

“Don’t talk, Hope.”

“Water,” Hope gasps and I hold the glass for her. Another flash of lightning and for a moment Gloria stands framed in the window. We stare at each other. With a kind of horror I feel my lips slide back, baring my teeth. Gloria sees, and cold slides down my spine.

Then the lightning is gone, and I lay my hand on Hope’s battered body.

The rain lasts no more than a few hours. It’s replaced by day after day of black clouds that thunder and roil but shed no water. Day after day. Gloria and Bill let half the field die in their attempt to save the other half. The rest of the village does much the same.

Hope heals quickly; the young are resilient. I sit beside her, weaving, until she can work again. Her bruises turn all the colors of the angry earth: black and dun and dead-algae green. Gloria never looks at or speaks to her daughter. My son smiles weakly at us all, and brings Hope her meal, and follows Gloria out the door to the fields.

“Grandma, we sinned.”

Did we? I don’t know any more. To cut down trees in order to make a book… my gorge rises at just the thought. Yes, that’s wrong, as wrong as anything could ever be. Trees are the life of the Earth, are God’s gift to us. Even my father’s generation, still so selfish and sinful, said so. Trees absorb the see-oh-too, clean the air, hold the soil, cool the world. Yes.

But, against that, the look of rapture on Hope’s face as Alice chased the White Rabbit, the pictures of Birds of India and Asia , Jane Eyre battling Mrs. Reed… Hope and I destroyed nothing ourselves. Is it so wrong, then, to enjoy another’s sin?

“We sinned,” Hope repeats, mourning, and it is her tone that hardens my heart. “No, child. We didn’t.”

“We didn’t?” Her eyes, one still swollen, grow wide.

“We didn’t make the books. They already were . We just read them. Reading isn’t sinful.”

“Nooooo,” she says reluctantly. “Not reading the altar scriptures. But Alice is—”

Gloria enters the house. She says to me, “Services tonight.”

I say, “I’m not going.”

Gloria stops dead halfway to the wash bucket, her field hat suspended in her hand. For the briefest moment I see something like panic on her face, before it vanishes into her usual anger. “Not going? To services?”

“No.”

Hope, frightened, looks from her mother to me. Bill comes in.

Gloria snaps, with distinct emphasis, “ Your mother says she’s not going to services tonight.”

Bill says, “Mama?”

“No,” I say, and watch his face go from puzzlement to the dread of a weak man who will do anything to avoid argument. I hobble to my alcove and close the door. Later, from my window, I watch them leave for the Grove, Hope holding her father’s hand.

Gloria must have given him silent permission to do that.

My son.

Painfully I lower myself to the floor, reach under my cot, and pull out the white plastic bubble. For a while I gaze at the pictures of the gorgeous birds of India and Asia. Then I read Jane Eyre . When my family returns at dusk, I keep reading as long as the light holds, not bothering to hide any of the books, knowing that no one will come in.

One heavy afternoon, when the clouds steadily darken and I can no longer see enough to make out words, a huge bolt of lightning shrieks through the sky— crack! For a long moment my head vibrates. Then silence, followed by a shout: “Fire!”

I haul myself to my knees and grasp the bottom of the window. The lightning hit one of the trees in the Grove. As I watch, numb, the fire leaps on the ceaseless wind to a second tree.

People scream and run, throwing buckets of muddy water from the spring. I can see that it will do no good—too much dry timber, too much wind. A third tree catches, a fourth, and then the grass too is on fire. Smoke and ash rise into the sky.

I sink back onto my cot. I planted one of those trees, nursed it as I’d once nursed Bill. But there is nothing I can do. Nothing.

By the light of the terrible flames I pick up Jane Eyre and, desperately, I read.

And then Hope bursts in, smeared with ash, sweat and tears on her face.

“Hope—no! Don’t!”

“Give it to me!”

“No!”

We struggle, but she is stronger. Hope yanks Jane Eyre out of my hands and hurls it to the floor. She drops on top of it and crawls under my cot. Frantically I try to press down the sagging ropes so that she can’t get past them, but I don’t weigh enough. Hope backs out with the other books in their plastic bubble. She scrambles to her feet.

“We did this! You and me! Our sin made God burn the trees!”

“No! Hope—”

“Yes! We did this, just like the people before the Crash!”

We will never forget.

I reach for her, for the books, for everything I’ve lost or am about to lose. But Hope is already gone. From my window I see her silhouetted against the flames, running toward the grass. The village beats the grass with water-soaked cloths. I let go of the sill and fall back onto the cot before I can see Hope throw the books onto the fire.