The Cleaver

The peaches ran out on the ninth day, and hunger rearranged the house.

I had come into the occupied country with a duffel bag of canned food and it had seemed a fortune at the time; two people eat a fortune in ten days. We tried the red weed, because a fiber chemist on the radio in the first week had speculated, before the radios died, that it was organic in our sense of the word, and we boiled it and it swelled and went gray and tasted like a wet bandage, and Voss ate his portion of that experiment with the thoroughness of penance and I could not finish mine. There was a jar of pickled eggs in the cellar, an old man's jar, dusty, of a vintage with no date. We split it. We ate the last of it on the tenth day, and the reason I date the tenth day is that the tenth day was when Voss stopped sleeping.

He sat by the boarded window with the carbide lamp and watched the light of the walkers move on the ceiling through the gap, and he talked. Not to me, exactly, after midnight. He talked as men talk on watch, to keep the watch company, and the things he said were the things he had been not saying for a week. He said he had been at the flats the first evening, before the delegation, and had stood at the rope with a county officer and told him the thing in the pit was of elsewhere, of nowhere in any scripture, and that the county should fall back and pray at a distance, and the officer had said the flag was going down anyway, and Voss had said, that is what I told them. He said it fifty times in the night. That is what I told them. And at some hour without a name he began to say that the flag had been the sin. The ray and the walker and the machine of the sky he might have preached; the sin was the flag. We had offered peace to something without a word for it, he said, and the offer had been accepted in the only currency the offerers had, which was us, and the rest of the night he developed this, quietly, syntactically, a sermon for a church of two, and it was as close to theology as I ever want to come again.

On the eleventh morning the handling-machines came down our street with their baskets, and I understood, watching through the gap, that they were harvesting. Not the weed. The houses were coming down along the block, methodically, arm by arm, brick by sorted brick, materials separated into piles by some taxonomy of theirs, and they were working toward us as weather works toward you, and I said, Voss, today, we go today, and he said, "There is no today out there, son. There is only their today." And he sat back down by the window and would not look at the boards.

What he did at noon, the eleventh day, I saw the aftermath of and heard all of. He went out.

He opened the front door of the wrecked house and walked out into the street in his collar with his arms wide, out from the boards and the dark and the peaches, straight toward the handling-machine working thirty yards up the block, and he called out to it. I was at the gap. I heard every word and I have never repeated them and I am not going to repeat them now, except the first three, which were, "You are welcome," and which break something in me every time I say them, because they were true, they were the truest words spoken in that street in the whole of the war. He welcomed them. That was his entire broken theology, rebuilt in one sentence at the point of a machine's lens: they were the weather of a larger world, and weather cannot be cast out, and a man could die of it standing up.

The handling-machine stopped its work. An arm came down, and for one moment I believed, I actually believed, that the machine would pass him by as it had passed the staircase and the piano, because we were furniture, we were below the level at which they bothered. The arm did not pass him by. There was a hiss, and a low cabinet in the machine's body opened like a breadbox, and the arm put him in it. It was quick, and it happened without a word. Voss went into the machine the way a letter goes into a mailbox, and he went in alive, and the machine finished the house across the street and moved on up the block with its harvest, and I stood at the gap in the boards with my hands over my mouth until dark.

I am going to write the next part with the court's record beside me, because it matters to me that the account match the record exactly.

The machine did not leave the neighborhood. It worked north, and near dusk it came back down the cross street, and as it crossed behind our house, its cabinets opened, all along its flank, the breadbox doors, venting, and what they vented was not Voss, Voss was nowhere in what they vented, but they vented, into my yard and against the boards of my refuge, the remainder of the day's harvest. Some of it was still moving. I know what the physicians say about the nerve agents in the atmosphere of the cylinder, about the states some of the taken were in when the cabinets opened. I know what I saw. Both are true, and the record has room for both, and so do I, on the days when I let the drawer stay closed.

I did not think. That is the finding of the court and it is my finding too, the only sentence we ever agreed on. There was a fire axe from the cellar door and there was the yard and there was the pile, and the thing that had been the neighborhood's harvest lay in the weeds against my wall, and among it, intact, face down in the red weed with his collar still on and his ring hand over his heart like a man mid-oath, was the pastor of two flocks. And the machine was coming back down the cross street with its cabinets still open, and I was standing in my own yard in view of its lenses, and the last of the taken was reaching at my ankle with a hand that no longer had an owner.

The court calls what I did for the next four minutes action under immediate mortal threat, and the record is generous and I will not quarrel with it here. I got the remains of the neighbors into the coal chute with the shovel and the fire axe, working in the dark, working without stopping, because the machine's lenses swept the yard every forty seconds, and a man in the yard was a thing the yard was for, and every second I stood there the sentence was being written. Then I took from Voss's body the one thing I could not leave for the lenses, his ring, because somewhere in the occupied country was a woman named Ada Voss and the ring was a telegram the occupiers could not intercept. Then I went back inside and bolted the door and sat down on the floor beside the piano, and the carbide lamp was still burning, and I looked at it, and the looking took a long time.

The cleaver was on the kitchen counter where I had left it on the ninth day, after the last of the peaches, because a man alone in an occupied country keeps a cleaver by his hand as other men keep cigarettes. I did not use it on anyone. That goes in the record too, the plain dumb fact: the weapon I armed myself with against the end of the world was a kitchen tool, and it cut nothing that week but the seal of a jar of peaches, and Voss went into the machine under the open sky with his arms wide, and no one in that house lifted iron against a living soul. The court's phrasing differs. The court was not at the window.

I stayed four more days. The food was gone entirely and the water was rainwater off the tarp and the machines completed the street and the next street, and on the fifteenth day of my acquaintance with the house on the hill, the brick house with the corner gone, the walkers that ringed the fairground all turned at once, all three of them, and walked west, and did not come back, and the silence they left behind them in Two Rivers was the loudest thing I heard in the whole of the war.

Before I left the house I did one thing more, and the account needs it, because the account is where I keep it. I buried Ada Voss's telegram where the occupiers could not censor it and the weather could not read it: I nailed a board over the coal chute from the inside, and on the board, in grease pencil, I wrote the pastor's name and the county and MINE, meaning the ring, meaning found, meaning someone will come for this, and then I thought about the word I had chosen, mine, and changed it to OURS, because it had never been mine, the grief or the ring or the street, and a man who writes for a living should know the difference between a ledger and a promise. The house has fallen since. The board is under it. I am done apologizing for what I could not carry.