The Wrecked House

I have written around this chapter for three drafts now. It is the center of the thing I know, and everything in it is true, and I am going to write it as plainly as I can and then leave it behind me on the page.

Pastor Lonnie Voss kept me alive for eleven days, and I kept him alive for eight, and then I did not, and I have the court's finding of self-defense and the church's finding of nothing-to-say and my own finding, which I keep in a drawer with Okafor's notebook, and none of the three findings agrees with the others, and I suspect that is what findings are.

He had taken the vestry of the Methodist church at Two Rivers and made of it a kind of fortress of lamps: kerosene, candle, carbide, a shrine of small lights against the big dark outside, and for the first two days it was almost a comfort, the light and the psalms and the tinned peaches he hoarded like a man guarding the actual gates of heaven. He was not a fool. He had been a wheat farmer before the collar and he knew weather and death and prices, and when I told him what I had seen on the flats and the crossroads he took it in like a man reading an auction report, and only asked me twice whether I had actually seen the faces of the delegation before the light, and I said no one had, and he said, that is what I told them, that is what I told them, and I did not learn until later what that meant.

The house was his sister's, three streets from the church, and we moved to it on the third day because the walkers had begun to come up the rail line past the churchyard, close, their feet in the gardens. It was a stately old house, brick, two stories, built by some wheat baron in the days when Two Rivers mattered, and a walker had already stoved in one corner of it, an offhand injury, one step on its way somewhere else, the staircase hanging into the sky like a removed tooth. We lived on the ground floor of the surviving half with the boards over the windows and the red weed growing in through the coal chute.

Through the boards I saw them, and this is what I was put on this earth to write down. On the fourth day, a handling-machine came up the street.

The walkers got all the film and all the terror, but the machines we came to know longest were the handling-machines, and no one has ever filmed one well, because they moved only in the occupied country, among the empty places. It was perhaps thirty feet high, many-legged, a spider of articulated arms, and it moved with a smooth mechanical thoughtfulness, and it was, in the plain sense, a farm implement. It went along the street stripping the red weed from the fences and houses, gathering it into itself, processing it somewhere in its drum, seeding the growths further on. It paused at our house. Its arms came through the gap where the corner had been and touched, delicately, one by one, the hanging staircase, the wallpaper, the piano of Voss's sister, and whatever survey it was running, it ran it without haste, and then it went on, and Voss and I crouched behind the piano on the floor with our arms around our knees like a pair of boys, and after it had gone, Voss began, very quietly, to laugh, and then to pray, and then to laugh, and both were the same sound, and the record should say so.

On the sixth day, from the upstairs of the surviving half, through a gap in the boards, I saw the pit.

There is a fairground east of Two Rivers, and the cylinder that had come down in the broken country had been moved there, or had been followed there, and the walkers ringed it, and around it the handling-machines had built, over days, an arrangement of machinery I cannot better than to call a stockyard. And into the stockyard, on the sixth day, they brought people. Live ones. Out of some cellar or holdout camp in the hills, a dozen at a time, carried in the braided arms, and set down in the pit behind a fence of the red weed grown into a hedge, and my mind, which had been refusing pictures for a week, made every picture at once and made them permanent.

I did not see the feeding. I have read the physicians' report and I am not going to put it in this book; the hearings have it; the word the report uses is parenteral, which is the most cowardly word in the language. What I saw was this: a walker bent its hood over the pit at dusk, and the syringe sound came, and the sound the people made, and I came down the stairs and told Voss there was a way out along the riverbank and we had to take it tonight, and Voss looked at me from his knees, and his face was the face of a man re-reading a contract he had signed in a language he had thought he knew.

"They are not demons," he said. "That is what I cannot get past, Elias. I could preach demons. Demons would be a shape of hope." He was turning his wedding ring, around and around. "A demon can be cast out. A wolf can be shot. But that thing out there is a farmer, and we are what is farmed, and there is no verse for being livestock. I have looked. I have looked all week."

I said the verses did not matter now, we had to move, and he said, "That is what I told them," again, and would not say what he meant, and we did not move, because that night the rain began, the long iron rain of the following week, and the riverbanks became mud that swallowed legs, and we were sealed in with each other and the dwindling peaches, and the pit at the fairground stood in our heads like a second moon.

He went the way he went on the eleventh day, and I will write it in its place. What I ask the reader to carry out of this chapter is only this: he was a good man in a country that had stopped having a shape, and the shape was the thing that killed him, not the dark. He had spent his life in a world with a floor. The floor went. Everything else we lost was furniture.