Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

I go through the whole soup making process again, using the last of the deer meat and bread. Tomorrow, I will have to find something else to feed him. Fish soup, I guess. I can boil the fish heads and bones to make a nice base, I think as I cut up the deer and bread. Finally I have a nice soup and go to the barn.

When I open his stall, I see that Eric is standing in the corner, tangled up in his rope. His face is pressed into the wall of the barn. I put down the mug of soup carefully.

“Why do you do this?” I ask him as I carefully try to free him from the rope. “I don’t understand why you press your face into things. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Unh,” Eric says as he turns around. He moves to step forward, but I block him.

“Stay still,” I say. “This’ll be easier.” I untie the rope from him and then unwind it. When I see that it’s even around his neck, I shiver thinking that he could have hanged himself if he tripped. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” I scold him.

“Unh,” he says.

“Yeah, well,” I respond. “I wish you’d just lie down, okay? Just rest.”

Then I tug him down into a sitting position, which isn’t as difficult as it was the day before. Eric just sits there while I wipe his mouth. I try not to notice the wriggling white worms in the blackness of his mouth. Or the smell of death that surrounds him. As I feed him the best I can, I have to steady him with one hand. The only time he’s really animated is when there’s water around, and I have to be careful he doesn’t scratch me or bite me accidentally. By the time I’m finished, I’m exhausted. Eric sits there with his legs spread out in front of him, covered in slobbered soup.

“Unh,” he says.

“You just, just be quiet,” I say, a little out of breath. And more than a little grossed out, to be honest. My dinner is rumbling inside me, and I breathe in deeply to keep it down. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to Eric’s smell.

After a second of rest, I get the newly-cleaned drooly towel filthy again immediately, wiping Eric’s face clean. I look at the blindfold around his eyes, which is now so dark that I can hardly remember it was originally red. I think about taking it off and washing it, but I can’t bear to think about looking at his eyes. They were blue once. Now I imagine dark holes writhing with worms. I can’t deal with that.

When I’m done cleaning him, I shut the stall carefully and use the rope to lock it up tight. After what I saw, I’m too afraid to tie him down in the stall. I don’t know what I’d do if Eric hung himself because of some stupid mistake I made. Then I decide to go back to the fire, but I can’t move. I mean, I can, but I don’t. I just stand there, looking over the stall door at the shadow that is Eric. It breaks my heart to leave him. I don’t know how long I stand there, watching him.

I remember when we first lived on the island. It was so cold that first winter. We didn’t have anything to eat except canned beans, which Eric had found in a nearby house, like four whole cardboard boxes full of canned beans. It was too cold to leave the little shack that Lucia and Eric built. We just huddled together all day and all night. It was such a long winter. At night, Eric would light a candle. We had those for a few years after the end, bright, wax candles, not like the bees wax candles we make now. He sat and read to us every night. I loved those stories. Back then, I didn’t think much of it. I was just excited about the stories, who would live, who would die, who would fall in love, and who would be left alone. But now, when I think of it, I know that Eric did it so that we would survive. He made life bearable. He gave us something to think about other than the gnawing cold, the biting hunger, the numbing boredom of another can of beans. He gave us the prospect of living and enjoying it. We suffered, but we suffered much less than we might have. It makes me tear up a little, thinking of it like this. I’ve never thought of those nights, not like this.

I open up the stall and go back in. He doesn’t look much like Eric, he doesn’t smell like him, or sound like him. But it’s Eric. My Eric.

“Come on,” I tell him and tug him to his feet.

“Unh,” he says as he rises.

I take him by the hand and lead him back to the fire. It’s almost completely dark out now. Eric is walking strangely, bringing his knees too far up. He looks like he’s marching. It’s kind of funny, so I laugh a little.

“Calm down there, soldier,” I tell him as I stop him by the fire. Then I stand behind him and push the back of his knees with my own knees. It’s something us kids used to do to each other as a joke, especially the boys. I don’t know why I just thought of it. It makes Eric slump down and then I guide him as gently as I can into a sitting position. I have to drag him back a little when his boots almost end up in the fire.

“Unh,” Eric says. His jaw yawns open and he lifts one shoulder like he’s going to shrug but the shoulder just stays up in the air. “Unh,” he says again.

Then I get the book from the backpack , the book that Eric was reading, The Left Hand of Darkness. The one I took without knowing why. Now I think I know why. I flip through the pages and come to the bookmark where Eric had stopped reading, a good fifty pages in. This is where he stopped reading. I’m suddenly overcome with emotion. If he dies, he’ll never finish his book. It kills me. I take a deep breath.

“How about we start at the beginning?” I ask.

“Unh,” Eric says.

I turn to the opening page, and, by firelight, in a low voice, I begin to read.

Our second day at the farm is even better than the first. I wake up late in the morning and have a breakfast of fried fish and cold fiddleheads. Even though I still ache for a handful of salt, the breakfast is delicious. I boil a kettle of water and then pour it over the fish bones and trout heads. I boil it for a while and then pour out the broth into the aluminum mug. I add some mashed fiddleheads and stir it up. It doesn’t look too appetizing. Looks like fish guts to me, but there’s not much I can do about that. Besides, Eric doesn’t care.

I get Eric from the stall and bring him to the fire. Then, as the sun gets hotter around us, I feed him three mugs of the fish/fiddleheads soup stuff. I wonder how much of it actually gets in his stomach, he makes such a mess, but I don’t have much control over that. After I wipe him down with his drooly towel, I let him sit out in the sun to dry off. I try not to look at him too much, but I can’t ignore that he isn’t looking good. His face is hardly recognizable, all sharp angles and bones and beard. His whole body looks skeletal, and his clothes hang from him like rags. He attracts a constant cloud of flies. But I try to ignore all that. I read him a few pages from his book before I put him back into the stall and head down to the brook to fish.

The fishing is just as good. Today I have even more time, so I leisurely fish up and down the brook until I have eight, fine brook trout. I’m feeling so rich with luxuries that I throw back a ninth, just because it’s a little too small. I watch its sinuous black body vanish back into the brook. Watching it, I can’t help but get a little sentimental. We’re a lot alike, after all, both survivors. Then I go around a tree and, with my jackknife, I clean the fish who weren’t quite as lucky today.

When I get back to the farmhouse, I decide to bring Bandit down to the brook to drink and get him out of the sun. After checking on Eric, who is sitting stone still in his stall, I grab our backpack and head back to the brook, leading Bandit. When we get there, I watch Bandit drink greedily and feel a little guilty for not bringing him down here sooner. “I’m doing the best I can,” I tell the horse. Bandit ignores me and keeps drinking. Watching him drink the unboiled water, I hope horses can’t get the Worm.