The City of Ash

The dead city received me as a church receives a stranger, with its doors open and its awful quiet, and I walked into St. Anselm because it lay between me and the mountains, and because, though I did not admit it to myself at the time, I had to see it before it was gone. Cities die as languages die, all at once and then slowly for years, and I was in time for the all at once.

There is no fighting to describe in this chapter. The war was over; what I walked through was the aftermath of the peace, which is worse, because the peace is ours to account for. The Marlin's channel was still choked with the wrecks of the walkers, three months of river traffic gone around them by ferry. The Sable Street bridge stood in the river in its final shape, a steel question mark. Ash lay over the west districts in drifts against the curbs, and the red weed hung dead and brown over Delmar Street, and my brother's mother's maples stood over it all, alive, untouched, impatient, putting out the ordinary leaves of an ordinary October, and I stood under those trees for a long time because they were Frank's and I could not get to Frank. I got to him three weeks later, or he got to me: he walked into the pass camp with a litter of survivors off the river road, and the reunion was exactly like him, because he took my pulse before he embraced me.

I was not a well man by then, and the account should say it plainly, because the official version of us survivors, the ones who walked and wrote and buried and went on, became in the rebuilding a kind of stoic uniform, and the uniform is a lie. I had Voss's ring in my pocket and no address for Ada Voss. I had Okafor's notebook and no journal to put it in. I had talked aloud to empty streets for eleven days, working out loud, a tic of the occupied country, and in the city the habit became a conversation, because the city was full of the dead and I was the only correspondent they had, and I stood at the foot of the Sable Street bridge and delivered the news of the bacteria to the drowned district at large, and a woman with a cart and a dog came up the embankment and looked at me, and I thought, here it is, the men in white, the end of the road, and the woman said, "You going east? There's a passel of us at the rail yard going east at first light. You can carry if you want."

That is the whole of my reception in the dead city. You can carry if you want. The woman's name was Dell, the dog was called Proctor, and at the rail yard at first light there were forty of us, and we were the first eastbound out of the city since the third week, and the walk out of St. Anselm took four days through a country I am not going to describe town by town because the towns were all the same as griefs are all the same, particular to their owners and identical from the road.

I went up the pass road through country that had been my wife's country, the wheat side of the divide, and on the third day I turned off at Danner to the farmhouse of her sister, following a memory of a place I had been twice, a porch, a windbreak of poplars. The house stood. The poplars stood. On the kitchen table, under a jar to weight it against the wind through the broken window, was a note, and I will print it entire because it is the finest sentence my wife ever wrote, and she wrote it to no one, and it has no one's name on it, which is the mercy of how she wrote it: Gone to the camp at the pass. If this is who I think it is, sit down and eat something first. There is a pie that will keep.

I will tell the part that matters, and then I will let this account end where it ought to, at the end of my war.

The relief camp was at the pass, on the eastern slope, a tent city of nine thousand run by the county and the churches and, in fact, by a retired school lunch manager named Mrs. Ochoa whose word was the actual law of the camp and whose line for the chronically insufficient hot water was the truest institution of the restored United States. I came in with Dell and Proctor on a Thursday. There was a board at the gate, plywood, and on the board, in columns, in fence paint, the register of the camps, names sought and names found, and I read it as I have read nothing else in my life, and I will spare the reader my columns and say only that the living do not appear in the lists under their own names half so often as they appear in the margin, in pencil, in other people's handwriting, and it was in the margin, in pencil, in a hand I had read on a thousand graded essays, that I found the words: E. MARSH is somewhere. I am at the lunch tent. Ask for the tall one's wife. She meant me. The tall one was me; she had spent a month describing me to strangers.

Then the board, and I will give the board its paragraph, because the board was the country. Fence paint and grease pencil, nine thousand names in a hand that changed by the column, and the columns had been copied and recopied from other boards at other gates, and the copying was the work of volunteers who had set up tables with lamps, and the spelling of the volunteers was imperfect and the mercy of the volunteers was infinite, and you could trace whole families through three counties by the successive pencils, a son's name struck and rewritten at a different camp, a grandmother's name corrected by a stranger with a straightedge. There were names on that board that were not names, initials, guesses, descriptions: the tall one's wife. The man in the green coat. Whoever owns the brown horse at the fairgrounds, he is here. Priya Sault, north counties, whole, looking for a writer she met on a gravel bar. And in the occupied-country column, the tile yard at Calder, whole, looking for nothing. A whole nation described by its outlines, looking for its own interiors, and the pencil never once stopped moving while I read. I wrote back under her line with my own pencil, in the only register a survivor has: found, and the gravel bar held.

The lunch tent held four hundred people and the steam of four hundred bowls, and I am a man who once crossed an occupied country in eleven days without making a sound, and what I did at the door of that tent, I did in front of all of them, and none of them looked up, because half of them had done it or were going to. She was at the far side with a ladle. She had lost weight and she had a coat with someone else's buttons and her hair was gone gray at the temples where it had been auburn in July, and she saw me over the heads of the four hundred as you see weather coming, and she said my name once, quietly, into the steam, testing it, as one tests ice.

What we said to each other is ours. The account will not get it. What I will put down is the last thing, the thing she said an hour later, sitting on a log with a bowl neither of us ate from, when I had told her the whole of it, the flats, the smoke, the cleaver I never swung, the pit, the keening, the flies. She listened as she listened to her eighth graders, without interrupting, with her whole face. And when I was done she was quiet for a time, and she said:

"You know what I did all September? I taught school. In a tent, to eleven children whose schools are gone. Fractions." She looked at the bowl in her hands. "The whole world came apart and I could not stop teaching fractions, and one day a little girl said, why do we need these, we're never going to need these, and I told her, because the future is the thing you keep doing. And then October came, and the news came up the pass about the weed dying, and every soul in this camp has asked me since, why us, what saved us, and I keep wanting to say, the same thing that was always going to save us. Somebody kept doing it. That's all. Somebody kept doing it."

Nora has never read this account. She is a schoolteacher and she has a war to teach, and she has made me promise it will be exact, which is the one word Okafor and Nora and the federal record would agree on if they ever sat down, and accuracy, it turns out, is what remains when everything else is carried east. The country is rebuilding over the machines; you can see the cranes of the capital district from the pass on a clear day. The pits are under guard, the hoods are under glass, and the questions the walkers left us, of patience, of tenancy, of what walks in the universe that we have not yet met, are not mine to settle and never were.

Mine was the details. Ada Voss found us in the spring, by way of the county clerk and the board at the pass, and the ring went home to her in June, and in May a county crew clearing the corner found the board with OURS still legible on it and gave it into her keeping, and the ledger and the promise settled their difference. The science writer who came up to the ridge that July was me, and the book she deserved is unwritten, and this account is what became of it, and the notebook she left on the car seat is in my safe, and this account, all of it, the flats and the flag and the smoke and the river boat and the farmer and the sergeant and the flies, is what I know that she would have wanted kept. That August introduced us to the universe, and the introduction was conducted in the oldest language there is. A ladle of soup, a white cloth, a horn held down on a levee, one man with his arms wide in an empty street saying the only word that survived the war without a scratch.

You are welcome, he said. And the earth said nothing, and the earth went on, and in the spring the maples on Delmar Street came into leaf, and I sat down at the table in the town where my wife teaches fractions, and I kept doing it.