Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

I followed the road up toward the white stone wall that seemed to glow in the moonlight. Luckily the gates had been left slightly open so I was able to slip past, avoiding the rusty creak that I was sure would have carried across the entire town. Once through, I headed for the woods on the other side of the grass plain.

It took me more than an hour to cross through the forest. When I stepped down onto the cracked remnant of the highway on the other side, my boots were caked in mud and my arms were raked with scratches from the thornbushes woven through the trees.

The land across the road was dark as slate. It seemed to stretch westward nearly forever, dotted with scattered families of trees, until it ran up against low mountains that loomed far off in the distance. Off to the north there were the remains of a casino called the Golden Acorn and a Starbucks. Their billboards stretched into the sky.

I made my way up the hill until I found an old lightning-struck tree. It was split down the middle with the very first showings of sprouts growing out of its charred interior. I stepped back into the cover of the woods behind it before I pulled the gauze-wrapped package from my coat pocket and opened it.

Two glass medicine bottles and a few stainless steel instruments, priceless at any trade gathering, glittered in my hand. A sharp stitch of guilt knotted in my chest. I’m no thief, I thought again. But the fact was that we were broke. No wagon. No supplies. Nothing to trade. I couldn’t let that happen. With no one else around, it was my responsibility and mine alone.

I found a sharp, flat rock, pushed aside the leaves, and started digging into the soft ground until I had a wide hole cut about two feet deep into the earth. I set the gauze-wrapped medicines, along with the pencil and old nickel, carefully into the bottom. The way the gauze lay over the medicine bottles made them look like two bodies wrapped in a shroud.

I pushed the dirt over them quickly and sat back on the hill, leaning on my elbows, pulling in the cool air that tasted of wood smoke and decaying leaves. That pang of guilt hit me again. My hand moved around to my pocket and I laid Mom’s picture out in a patch of moonlight.

Hours after we’d taken the picture and made it back to camp, I’d slipped into Mom and Dad’s tent, squirming in between them. Mom lit a candle, opened one of our few books, and laid her arm across my back while Dad turned the pages. Mom would read a passage out loud and then I would read the next one, both of us quiet as could be, so as not to wake Grandpa.

I’d liked how, when I stumbled on words I didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce, Mom would reach for our battered dictionary and we’d go over the definition and sound it out, over and over until I had it down. It always felt to me like trudging up a tough and rocky hill, sweating and pushing until finally I made it up over the top to land that was flat and bright.

We made it through Sounder, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Great Expectations that way, the words rolling from Mom’s mouth in her high, clear voice that was like a bird’s or a bell’s. We’d read until my eyes drooped and the steady in and out of Mom’s and Dad’s breathing on either side would rock me to sleep.

Grandpa thought the idea of my learning to read was a waste of time, and in a way I’d agreed with him. I was going to be a trader like him and my dad — what use would reading really be?

Mom had said that maybe the world wouldn’t always be like it was now. But even if it was, she said, sometimes it was important to do things there was no real use for. Like reading books and taking pictures.

She’d said we had to be more than what the world would make us.

A branch snapped and leaves rustled down to my left. I scanned the woods with my hand on the hilt of the knife, but everything was blurry, swirling like the forest was underwater. I reached my hand up to my eyes and it came back wet. I had been crying and didn’t even realize it.

Stupid baby. I wiped the tears away with my dirty coat sleeve but still didn’t see anything. Probably nothing anyway. A deer. Maybe a stray dog.

I swept leaves over the disturbed ground so it blended into the hillside, then marked the place by half burying the rock at the head of the hole. It didn’t matter what Mom would have thought. Like Grandpa, she was gone, and I was here.

I surveyed the highway and the land beyond, all flat plains of black and gray. The stars, straining through the thick canopy above my head, shone like bits of broken glass.

As soon as Dad was better, all we’d have to do is stop here on the way out of town. Then we could trade for whatever supplies we needed. Everything would be back the way it was.

The only question was, what would I do until then?

“So what do they do down there?”

I was lingering by the window over Dad’s bed a few days later, full from a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread that Marcus had cooked and insisted I join them for. The sun was spread across the asphalt where it dipped into the woods a few houses down. Soon that road would be stocked with kids jostling and laughing on their way down to the school.

“Usual stuff. Math. English. Why? You want to—”

“No,” I said quickly. “I was curious. I’ll help you and Sam in the fields again.”

“I bet we could do without you for a day or two.”

Violet had changed Dad into a pair of Marcus’s old pajamas that had white and blue stripes and a neat little collar. His face and beard were clean. There were shadows all along the white sheet that covered him. Dips and peaks. It was like he was buried under a drift of snow.

“What are you two talking about?” Violet appeared in the doorway behind us, drying her hands after doing the dishes in a wash bucket out on the porch.

“Stephen going to school this morning.”

Violet glanced down at Dad and then fixed me with a no-nonsense gaze, her hands on her hips. “There’s nothing you can do for your dad that I can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’m sure he would want you to go to school if you could. Don’t you think?”

“I—”

“Jackson,” she called back into the kitchen. “You have some notebooks and things to give Stephen if he wanted to come to school with you?”

“On my desk!”

“Upstairs to the left,” Violet said to me, turning back toward the kitchen. “Better get moving. Don’t want you two to be late.”

I was about to argue, to insist that I would stay behind with Dad, but there was something about the swift sureness of Violet’s command that had me falling into place behind her and following her through the kitchen. Besides, I had to admit I was curious.

The kitchen was wide and open with tall windows all along the back looking out onto a porch. Jackson was sitting at the end of the long table with a big book that said AMERICAN HISTORY on the spine. He peeked over it as I came in, then away again as soon as I caught him.

“Next to the bed,” he said. “Take a couple pencils too.”

I nodded and looked up the length of the dark staircase that sat behind him. I took the rail and climbed slowly, feeling a strange leg-shaking vertigo. Once I reached the landing at the top of the stairs I saw his open door, went through, and was instantly struck dumb. To my left there was a bed, an actual bed, neatly situated under a curtained window with a little nightstand next to it. The bed was crisply made with a bright red blanket and two pillows.

Standing there, I felt the same eerie sense as when I saw the pictures of their long-gone families. Everything they had was left over from the last inhabitants of the town. After they had died, the Greens and the others swept in, tidied up, and took their places. Slept in their beds. Cooked in their kitchens. Started their lives all over again.