He put the box of
gifts he’d brought on the table: large cloth bags of salt and
flour, two jars of honey, three large rounds of goat cheese, a slab
of pork fat, and a large glass jar of cider vinegar.
Santa and Jelly
immediately thanked the Constable. Jelly was thinking of the
tinctures and marinades she could make with the vinegar; Santa
hefted the slab thinking of tomorrow’s breakfast, frying in pork
fat. Narrow opened one of the jars of honey and dipped his finger
in then passed it around. Santa dipped in hers and brought it to
Mixer’s mouth. His eyelids were beginning to droop but he accepted
her finger and sucked on the sweetness.
All evening he’d
flitted from one sibling’s thoughts to another but in the jumble of
mixed conversations and the sleepiness brought on by a busy day and
too much food he wasn’t able to separate things out.
While the rest of
them cleaned up, Porkchop took PC Pierre on a tour of the farm.
"It’s going to be
a lot of work," said the Constable as he surveyed the fields.
Porkchop
nodded.
"Forest says
there’s some winter left but we’re ready for an early spring
planting. We’ve done just fine up to now."
PC Pierre looked
at his feet.
"I’m sorry I
didn’t come. I checked on you from the lookout post at the cabin a
couple of times. I didn’t see any cause for worry."
Porkchop thought
that she would have done the same thing if she had been in his
shoes.
"But there is
something I need to tell you. It’s about Pater."
"I thought that
wasn’t your place."
The Constable
blushed.
"This isn’t just
about him. You said he was sick this winter and if something were
to happen to him, well this would concern the farm and me. But it’s
more complicated now that you’re here."
Porkchop stopped
at the far end of the field and looked expectantly at him.
"A few years ago,
long before you came here, Pater got sick. It sounds like what he
had this time, fever, delirious. He probably would have died if I
hadn’t shown up. I stayed with him for three days. One night he
started screaming and screaming and he wouldn’t calm down. He kept
saying that he didn’t want his boy to have his farm if he
died."
"You mean Pa?"
"Uh huh. On the
day that his fever broke he got angry at me, accused me of knowing
his secrets. Wanted to know everything he’d said to me so I told
him what he’d said about the farm and your Pa. I also told him that
if he wanted someone else to get his land, he could write a
will."
"What’s a
will?"
"It’s a form that
says who gets your property when you die."
Porkchop walked
ahead of him along the edge of the field. The creek was running
high with the thaw and PC Pierre had to raise his voice to be heard
over the rushing water.
"I know the law. I
know what can happen after someone dies."
"What? What
happens?"
"If you don't have
a will, anyone of age who’s on the property at the time
automatically gets the farm," he told her. "Your grandfather didn’t
want the farm to go to your Pa but he also didn’t want squatters
taking over, so he made me the heir. I wrote it down, gave him a
copy and filed the original with the court in New Key."
"So if Pater died
tomorrow you’d get the farm? What about us?"
"I wouldn’t make
you leave, you know that."
Porkchop
nodded.
"Look, I only told
you this because he got sick again. This is only if something
happens. He’s a tough old man. Besides, a will can be changed."
Wills can be
changed, Mixer mused as he slid from his sister’s thoughts.
___
The man had been
working for Rank for three months now. He'd grown strong lugging
sacks of produce through the streets of Andrastyne.
He'd told Rank
that his name was Hap but not much else. The name had leapt into
his mind so quickly that he'd briefly hoped that his memory was
starting to return.
For his part, Rank
stopped asking him personal questions after a day or two. He
assumed that this man, Hap, if that was his name, was wanted
somewhere. That could be of benefit to him. He watched him closely
and casually asked around town about him. He found out nothing.
The thaw meant
that fishermen could once more go out on to the sea and that trade
could start again. It also meant that the labourers Rank ordered
for his spring auction had arrived early.
Hap was on a
delivery and Rank was rooting through a sack of beets when someone
hammered on his door.
"Rank! You ol'
sonofabitch, you in there?"
Gaines, ship
captain and human smuggler, was Rank's labour connection. Gaines
would snap up people along his travels and sell them to the highest
bidder. These free labourers were told that if they could pay for
their passage by the time they arrived, they would go free, but
Gaines and his crew stole anything of value from them the moment
they came on board.
Rank had always
given him a fair price and always stood him some maple whiskey.
Over glasses of it Rank asked him why he was so early.
"Had a bit of
trouble with one of them, so I skipped a lot of my usual places and
came straight here."
"But my customers
aren't coming for another four days! What am I supposed to do with
them? How'm I supposed to feed 'em?"
Gaines looked
around at the sacks of food.
"Seems you've got
plenty here."
"That's rations.
Not mine."
"Sure, sure. And
ol' Rank's not taking a bit off the top? Right. Look, you want 'em
or not? I got others interested."
"How many?"
"Five. Four
men."
"Don't get many
women."
"Yeah, she was the
trouble. Think she might be a defective."
"Yeah? Haven't
heard of one of them for a long time. What's her problem?"
Outcasts always
found their way into the biggest cities so Rank had come across his
fair share of defectives in his lifetime. The first ones he could
remember had been run out of Andrastyne when Rank was six years
old. A healer and a painter, and their young daughter, he recalled.
It was the healer they really didn't trust; she had tried to
convince the council that taking a little bit of what ailed you was
good for you in certain circumstances.
"Hard to say,"
Gaines shrugged. "But I don't mind saying, she gave all the boys
the creeps. Best get rid of her quickly."
Rank paid Gaines
and they both had another shot of whiskey. Together, they went to
collect the labourers from the ship. Rank lodged the four men at
the police station, bribing the duty officer with extra potatoes
and onions, but the officer refused to take the woman.
Rank took a good
look at her. She was tall, taller than he was, with light gray
eyes. She looked strong. Still, she was just a woman, Rank thought,
never mind what Gaines said. How bad could she be? Even if she is a
defective, it's only for a few days.
He brought her
back to the house and locked her in a wire storage locker in the
cellar where Hap slept. He left her a bucket and two wormy
apples.
___
PC Pierre had left
the children the day after Bull and Jones had gotten the stag.
Porkchop insisted that he take some of the meat with him; Jones had
sliced off a hunk and Santa had wrapped it up in a cloth bag.
He spent a week at
the summer cabin, readying it for the season. He cleaned and aired
it out, oiled and set his traps, and chopped a month's worth of
firewood to add to the months of fuel he had stacked against one
wall of the cabin. He smoked the hunk of deer meat the children had
given him. Mostly, he revelled in the sounds of the woods. He got
reacquainted with his favourite spots and spotted familiar animals.
He ate and slept well.
From his library
at Baker's Yard, he had brought some of his great-grandfather's
reference books with him and spent his evenings reading. One was a
binder of essays written by his great aunt on his mother's side. He
had the police diaries of his father, grandfather and Pappy, but
the essays were the only link he had to his mother's family. At the
top of each page was her name, Adelaide Mars and, in red pen, a
letter. Most often the letter was a B but there were a few As and
one C.
One essay was
called The Three Theories of the Upheaval. The first theory was
that an explosion at a nuclear plant — PC Pierre still wasn't
completely sure what that was — caused a massive energy wave that
levelled half the planet. The second theory blamed the damage on an
earthquake, or a series of earthquakes. The third was that a meteor
hit set off a chain of explosions and upheavals across the whole
world.
"No matter what
the cause," she had written, "mountains collapsed, rivers caught
fire and more than half of the world's population died."
How could rivers
catch fire? None of his references explained this or provided
enough evidence to determine the exact cause. Everything he had was
anecdotal. So much human and natural history had been lost during
that period and so much more had been destroyed since. In the
absence of any detailed scientific records, certainty was
impossible. All he could surmise is that what was now Deloran
County must not have been in the direct path of the destruction. It
had suffered some — Spoon Valley attested to that — but roads and
tunnels and the remains of some bridges remained. In some places,
closer to New Key, he'd also seen metal tracks that had probably
been used for transport at one time.
In another essay,
Adelaide wrote about the infection. "The infection came after the
Great Upheaval and killed a lot more people. It came from the west
and it killed a lot of adults but not as many children. Some babies
were born with defects, like knowing how to talk and read. Others
could read minds or move things without touching them. It wasn't
just humans. The Pecant Roster reported that, in East Dullinge dogs
ran an inch above the ground and chickens laid fully cooked
eggs."
PC Pierre through
it might be nice to have a chicken that could do that. It would
certainly be a time saver.
Over the years,
the Constable had tried to assemble his library in chronological
order but other than the police records, which were always dated
many of his resources were not. His best guess was that whatever
had occurred happened six or seven hundred years ago; the infection
that followed had been virulent and almost always fatal for at
least three hundred years. If the police records, which included
all known registered deaths, were accurate, and he had no reason to
suspect they weren't, fatalities had already begun to decline
during his great-grandfather's generation.
Other texts
suggested that the infection could lay dormant for decades at a
time then resurface with the birth of a single baby. The
documentation for those periods was grim with many people killed on
suspicion of being defective.
"The defect was
never that bad. It would have even been quite helpful in some
cases," his grandfather had written in his personal diary. "Imagine
a lumberman able to lift an entire tree or a messenger who could
run to New Key and back in less than day!"
It had boggled the
young Pierre's mind at some of the things Pappy told him defectives
could do and he'd told his Pappy he wished he had one.
"Listen to me,"
Pappy said, gripping Pierre by the arm, not hard enough to hurt but
with enough quiet force that Pierre knew his great-grandfather was
serious. "People with the defect have it hard. There are a lot of
ignorant people out there. They're afraid of what they don't
understand. You ever meet someone with a real defect, you treat
them well. Help them where you can. They need the luck."
It wasn't just the
ones with the true defect who were at risk; many regular folk who
had a natural affinity for something — music or carpentry or
farming — were killed out of fear that this masked a greater
defect. In Pappy's police records were plenty of reports of
ordinary farmers murdered because they'd been overheard singing to
their goats.
It was part of the
reason why the Deloran County law had been enacted. The pure
anarchy that fell upon the population every few decades was
eventually too much to bear. All known or suspected defectives were
exiled and their property and belongings taken from them. Their
property was then sold with the proviso that the land be worked,
producing a benefit to the community. It was a ruthless solution
but it kept the small population alive and able to fend for
itself.
"Eventually," his
Pappy had told him, and many of the reference books confirmed it,
"people became isolated and drifted away from each other. They'd
interact in town, for business but nothing else. The law hasn't
changed that much since then. The law's only mission is to make
sure that enough people stay alive to produce enough food for
everyone. Everything's tied to property."
When he asked him
what happened to the people who were exiled his Pappy had shaken
his head.
"A lot of 'em died
in the bush I suspect. I'm sure a few survived. A lot of 'em
weren't defectives at all, not true defectives."
PC Pierre read
late into the night. It started to rain at one point but as always
happened when he delved deep into history, he was too engrossed to
hear it.
The equinox passed.
Despite some snow that still lay in small clumps near the wooded
areas around the farm, temperatures began to climb. The summer,
Forest said, would be difficult. Hot, with lots of rain at the
beginning, but bone dry by the end of the season.
Porkchop decided
that the loft should have an exit so they'd taken down the hay
bales and opened one side of the double doors. They propped it open
with the ladder that leaned against the back of the barn. On the
open side of the door frame Santa nailed long strips of fabric to
keep out mosquitoes and flies.