M. Wren: A Gift Upon the Shore

Jerry stuffs his hands in his pockets, frowns over that for a moment, then shakes his head. “Not on purpose, anyway.”

“When you were his age, didn’t you ever ask that sort of question?”

“Not in church .”

“But didn’t you wonder about some of the inconsistencies in the Bible?”

Finally, he meets my eye and nearly smiles. “Yes, I wondered, and I sometimes asked my father questions like that.”

“How did he answer them?”

“He told me the Bible is full of puzzles, and he didn’t know what some of them meant.” Jerry shakes his head, almost angrily. “I still don’t know. I’ve prayed for guidance, but I still don’t know .”

He isn’t satisfied with his ignorance, but I am. That vacuum might be filled with something other than dogma. And it means he hasn’t entirely embraced Miriam’s dogmatism.

The danger is that he’s blind to it.

Through breakfast, through the morning’s activities and school, through the midday meal, the atmosphere is strained, and Stephen is subdued, but nothing is said about his so-called blasphemy. Nothing will be said about it, not in Jerry’s or Miriam’s presence.

I take a deep breath of sun-warm air, turn my face up to the sky. I’m standing at the top of the Knob, the wind tugging at my berry-dyed wool skirt, while Shadow lies in the grass at my feet. I look out at scudding cumulus clouds that cast lavender shadows on the turquoise sea, and the blue of the sky is nearly the deep, transparent hue I remember from Before. The sun eases the pain out of my arthritic joints, and I bask in it like an old, gray tabby. In my youth I never cared whether the sun shone or not and even relished the recurrent rains of western Oregon, but now I dread the rain and cherish the sun.

I stand on this dome of solid basalt veneered in earth and grass, but only a step away is a sheer drop of three hundred feet. I lean on my cane and look down at the ocean smashing at the rocks, while they dissolve each attacking surge into swirls of foam. The flowing locks of bull kelp sway back and forth with the progress of the battle, and the surf murmurs: I am here … I am always here …. That was the song the sea sang to me in my childhood, sings still, and the colors and patterns I see call to mind a painting that hangs in my room, one of Rachel’s encaustics. Yet I know the point of departure for that painting was a piece of jasper she found on the beach.

And I think about the Chronicle, Rachel’s story.

It must be written. And Stephen must take part in that. He must understand.

I gaze down into the caldron of battle between sea and land, and I know my battles aren’t over—as I had once believed and hoped. Miriam made that acidly clear this morning. I must relive the old battles and gird my loins for a new one. My last, probably.

I turn and face south where the beach stretches, smooth as suede, a mile and more past the vine-shrouded ruins of Shiloh Beach and on into blued distance. But my old eyes seek nearer distances. There, perhaps two thousand feet down the beach, my gaze moves landward, past the eroded slope of the bank, the dark glades of spruce above it, and I survey the domain that was so long mine alone and was always Rachel’s. Amarna, she called her fifteen-acre subsistence farm, and she named the two creeks bordering it Styx and Lethe.

Rachel enjoyed her little ironies.

The house is only twenty feet back from the bank. To the northeast, on the Styx, is the round, slab-sided water reservoir. East of the reservoir, the garden, with its high, sturdy deer fence, and farther east, the orchard. South of the orchard, the barn. The house is gray with weathered cedar shingles, and from this distance, the geometry of its hipped roofs is cleanly evident. It was built in a symmetrical U, the open side facing the sea. There was once a patio within the U, but Rachel had it roofed with angled glass panels and the open west end closed in with more glass to make a solar greenhouse.

From this vantage point Amarna looks much as it did when I first saw it forty years ago. The most profound change, the conversion of the garage into a church, isn’t obvious from here. The only obvious change is the one that disrupted the geometric symmetry of the house: the addition that doubled the width of the north wing. Most of the new section is a storeroom, the remainder a room that Enid, Bernadette, and Grace share. That’s the wing Jerry plans to enlarge this summer. Miriam and Esther are complaining that the basement—the half of it they’ve converted into an apartment—is too crowded with the six children, which will be seven when Esther’s baby is born this summer. I’ve heard Miriam’s complaints, seen her cold looks at me. I occupy the larger of the two bedrooms in the south wing. Alone. Yet I’m not inclined to give it up. They’ll have it in due time.

The orchard is in flamboyant bloom, but I can only see patches of pink and white through the jack pines that provide a windbreak at the old fence line. That fence once marked the north boundary of Rachel’s property, but after the End we appropriated the adjoining meadow where sheep, goats, cows, and horses graze now. There are six new lambs, and I smile as I watch them trying their spring-coiled legs. Only one calf this spring. The goats have done better: there are three kids. No colts yet, but Scheherazade is pregnant.

Thirty feet below me on the steep slope of the Knob is a stonewalled structure ten feet wide and twelve feet long. The vault. The vault, the crypt—treasure or tomb. It is set back into the slope, the front wall facing southeast, and from this point I look down on the peaked roof and upper part of the back wall. The rest of the wall is buried in the hillside. I start down the slope, bracing myself with my cane at every step, while Shadow runs headlong through the grass. She pauses at the vault, as she knows I will. I make my way to the thick, cedar door, touch the brass hasp and stainless steel padlock. Both metals have suffered with the years. And I wonder if these stone walls, this hasp and lock, will be enough to safeguard—

But such speculation is futile. The Chronicle and Stephen. I must focus my energies there. Is he old enough to understand? Perhaps I’m asking too much of a child.

But he’s not a child. Again, I remind myself of that. He’s thirteen, and the exigencies of life in this new Stone Age preclude a protracted childhood. And he’ll understand. There are qualities in him that are in this place and time unique. I have no choice but to make Stephen heir to this legacy.

As my apprentice.

Yesterday was the sabbath, and we ended the day, as we do every sabbath, with the family meeting, the seven adults gathered around the long table in the dining room. Last night we discussed expanding the north pasture, adding a room to the new wing, whether the old buck goat should be slaughtered so that one of the younger bucks can take his place, and the advisability of planting com in the old quarry this year. Then I broached the subject of taking Stephen on as my apprentice. Jerry thought it odd, the idea of an apprentice at teaching. I pointed out that Enid has Little Mary as her apprentice at weaving, that Bernadette has Deborah as her apprentice at herbal medicine, that Jonathan is in fact Jerry’s apprentice. Jonathan is Jerry’s oldest son and will inevitably be his successor as Elder.

It was a question of time, really. I asked for two hours every afternoon to spend with Stephen in private tutoring. That would be time taken away from his assigned tasks, and he needed the blessing of the family for that. At least Jerry’s blessing; this is not a democracy. He finally agreed that Stephen and I could have the time between the midday meal and the afternoon break every day—other than the sabbath, of course—and no one raised any objections. Except Miriam.