Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (22 page)

       At the house, he didn't pause. He opened the coal chute, concealed by a tangle of ivy, and slid down and landed lightly in the black basement. He felt about for his candle and sulfur matches, and then went upstairs, where he watched the weather through a chink in the boarded-up window in the top bedroom. The house was completely boarded up now, doors, windows, the chimney sealed. They had decided it was not good for him to spend time alone in the old building, but they hadn't known about the coal chute and what they had done actually was to provide him with a sanctuary where no one could follow.

       The storm roared through the valley and left as abruptly as it had started. The heavy rain became a spatter, then a drizzle; it stopped and presently the sun was shining again. Mark left the window. There was an oil lantern in the bedroom. He lighted the lamp and looked at his mother's paintings, as he had done many times in the years since she had taken him camping. She knew, he thought. Always that one person, in the fields, at the doorway, on the river or ocean. Always just one. She knew what it was like. Without warning he started to sob, and threw himself down on the floor and wept until he was weak. Then he slept.

       He dreamed the trees took him by the hand and led him to his mother and she held him close and sang and told him stories and they laughed together.

       "Is it working?" Bob asked. "Can they be trained to live in the wilderness?"

       Mark was in the corner of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forgotten by the doctors. He looked up from the book he was reading and waited for the answer.

       "I don't know," Barry said. "Not for a lifetime, I don't think. For short periods, yes. But they'll never be woodsmen, if that's what you mean."

       "Should we go ahead with the others next summer? Are they getting enough out of it to make a largescale attempt?"

       Bruce shrugged. "It's been a training program for us too," he said. "I know I don't want to keep going back into those dismal woods. I dread my days more and more."

       "Me too," Bob said. "That's why I brought this up now. Is there any real point to it?"

       "You're thinking about the camp-out next week, aren't you?" Barry asked.

       "Yes. I don't want to go. I know the boys are dreading it. You must be anxious about it."

       Barry nodded. "You and I are too aware of what happened to Ben and Molly. But what's going to happen to those children when they leave here and have to spend night after night in the woods? If preparation like this can ease it for them, we have to do it."

       Mark returned to his book, but he was not seeing it now. What happened to them? he wondered. Why were they all so afraid? There wasn't anything in the woods. No animals, nothing to hurt anyone. Maybe they heard the voices and that made them afraid, he thought. But then, if they heard the voices too, the voices had to be real. He felt his pulse racing suddenly. For several years he had believed the voices were only the leaves, that he was only pretending they were really voices. But if the brothers heard them too, that made them real. The brothers and sisters never made up anything. They didn't know how. He wanted to laugh with joy, but he didn't make a sound to attract attention. They would want to know what was funny, and he knew he could never tell them.

       The camp was a large clearing several miles from the valley. Twenty boys, ten girls, two doctors, and Mark sat about the campfire eating, and Mark remembered that other time he had sat eating popcorn at a campfire. He blinked rapidly and the feeling that came with the memory faded slowly. The clones were uneasy, but not really frightened. Their large number was reassuring, and the babble of their voices drowned out the noises of the woods.

       They sang, and one of them asked Mark to tell the woji story, but he shook his head. Barry asked lazily what a woji was, and the clones nudged each other and changed the subject. Barry let it drop. One of those things that all children know and adults never do, he thought. Mark told another story and they sang some more, and then it was time to unroll the blankets and sleep.

       Much later Mark sat up, listening. One of the boys was going to the latrine, he decided, and lay down again and was asleep almost instantly.

       The boy stumbled and clutched a tree to steady himself. The fire was dim now, no more than embers through the tree trunks. He took several more steps and abruptly the embers vanished. For a moment he hesitated, but his bladder urged him on, and he didn't yield to the temptation to relieve himself against a tree. Barry had made it clear they had to use the latrine in the interest of health. He knew the ditch was only twenty yards from the camp, only another few steps, but the distance seemed to grow rather than decrease and he had a sudden fear that he was lost.

       "If you get lost," Mark had said, "the first thing to do is sit down and think. Don't run. Calm down and think."

       But he couldn't sit down here. He could hear the voices all around him, and the woji laughing at him, and something coming closer and closer. He ran blindly, his hands over his ears trying to blot out the ever louder voices.

       Something clutched at him and he felt it ripping his side, felt the blood flowing, and he screamed a high wild shriek that he couldn't stop.

       In the camp his brothers sat up and looked about in terror.
Danny!

       "What was that?" Barry demanded.

       Mark was standing up listening, but now the brothers were calling out, "Danny! Danny!"

       "Tell them to shut up," Mark said. He strained to hear. "Make them stay here," he ordered, and trotted into the woods toward the latrine. He could hear the boy now, faintly, dashing madly into trees, bushes, stumbling, screaming. Abruptly the sounds stopped.

       Mark paused again to listen, but the woods were silent. There was pandemonium behind him in camp and ahead of him nothing.

       He didn't move for several minutes, listening. Danny might have fallen, winded himself. He might be unconscious. There was no way in the dark for Mark to follow him without sounds to lead him. Slowly he turned back to camp. They were all up now, standing in three groups, the two doctors also close to each other.

       "I can't find him in the dark," Mark said. "We'll have to wait for morning." No one moved. "Build up the fire," he said. "Maybe he'll see the glow and follow it back."

       One group of brothers started to throw wood on the embers, smothering it. Bob took charge, and presently they had a roaring fire again. Danny's brothers sat huddled together, all looking pinched and cold and very afraid. They could find him, Mark thought, but they were afraid to go after him in the black woods. One of them began to cry, and almost as if that had been the signal, they were all weeping. Mark turned from them and went again to the edge of the woods to listen.

       With the first faint light of dawn Mark started to follow the trail of the missing boy. He had dashed back and forth, zig-zagging, rebounding from tree to bush to tree, Here he had run forward for a hundred yards, only to crash into a boulder. There was blood. He had been scraped by a spruce branch. Here he had run again, faster this time. Up a rise . . . Mark paused looking at the rise, and he knew what he was going to find. He had been trotting easily, and now he slowed to a walk and followed the trail, not stepping on any of Danny's prints, but keeping to one side, reading what had happened.

       At the top of the rise there was a narrow ridge of limestone.

There were many such outcroppings in the woods, and almost always when there was a rise such as this, the other side was steep also, sometimes steeper, rockier. He stood on the ridge looking down the thirty feet of sparse growth and rocks, and twisted among them he could see the boy, his eyes open as if he were studying the pale, colorless sky. Mark didn't go down. He squatted several moments looking at the figure below, then turned and went back to camp, not rushing now.

       "He bled to death," Barry said after they brought the body back to camp.

       "They could have saved him," Mark said. He didn't look at Danny's brothers, who were all gray, waxy-looking, in shock. "They could have gone straight to him." He stood up. "Are we going down now?"

       Barry nodded. He and Bob carried the body on a litter made from thin tree branches tied together. Mark led them to the edge of the woods and turned. "I'll go make sure the fire's all the way out," he said. He didn't wait for permission, but vanished among the trees almost instantly.

       Barry put the surviving nine brothers in the hospital to be treated for shock. They never emerged, and no one ever asked about them.

       The following morning Barry arrived in the lecture room before the class had assembled. Mark was already in his place at the rear of the room. Barry nodded to him, opened his notes, straightened his desk, and looked up again to find Mark still regarding him. His eyes were as bright as twin blue lakes covered with a layer of ice, Barry thought.

       "Well?" he asked finally when it seemed the locked stare would be maintained indefinitely.

       Mark didn't look away. "There is no individual, there is only the community," he said clearly. "What is right for the community is right even unto death for the individual. There is no one, there is only the whole."

       "Where did you hear that?" Barry demanded.

       "I read it."

       "Where did you get that book?"

       "From your office. It's on one of the shelves."

       "You're forbidden to enter my office!"

       Late in September the boats reappeared on the river, and the people gathered at the dock to watch. It was a cold, rainy day; already frosts had turned the landscape bleak, and fog over the river obscured everything until the boats were very close. A meeting party set out to help bring in the exhausted people, and when they were all docked and the tally taken, the realization that nine people had been lost wreathed the homecoming in gloom.

       The following night they held the Ceremony for the Lost, and the survivors told their story haltingly. They had brought back five boats, one under tow most of the way. One boat had been swept away at the mouth of the Shenandoah; they had found it smashed and broken up, with no survivors, its load of surgical equipment lost to the river. The second damaged boat had been run aground by a sudden storm that overturned it and ruined its load of maps, directories, warehouse lists—bales and bales of papers that would have proven useful.

       The shelter at the falls had been started; the canal had proven disastrous, impossible to dig as proposed. The river flooded in from below and washed it out repeatedly, and all they had succeeded in doing was to make a swampy area that flooded in high water and was a muddy bog when the river fell. And the worst part, they agreed, had been the cold. As soon as they had reached the Potomac the cold had plagued them. There had been frosts; leaves had fallen prematurely, and the river was numbing. Much of the vegetation was dead; only the hardiest plants were surviving. The cold had persisted in Washington, had made the canal digging a hellish task.

       The snow came to the valley early that year, on the first of October. It remained on the ground for a week before the wind shifted and warm southerly breezes melted it. On the infrequent clear days when the sun shone brightly and no mist hid the tops of the surrounding hills and mountains, the snow could still be seen on the high ridges.

       Later Barry would be able to look back on that winter and know it had been crucial, but at the time it seemed just one more in the endless string of seasons.

       One day Bob called to him to come outside and look at something. No new snow had fallen for several days, and the sun was bright and gave the illusion of warmth. Barry pulled on a heavy cape and followed Bob out. There was a snow sculpture standing in the center of the courtyard between the new dorms. It was a male figure, eight feet tall, nude, its legs fused into a base that was also a pedestal. In one hand the figure carried a club, or perhaps a torch, and the other hand swung at its side. The feeling of motion, of life, had been captured. It was a man on his way to somewhere else, striding along, not to be stopped.

       "Mark?" Barry asked.

       "Who else?"

       Barry approached it slowly; there were others looking at it also, mostly children. A few adults were there, and others came out until there was a crowd about the statue. A small girl stared, then turned and began to roll a snowball. She threw it at the figure. Barry caught her arm before she could throw again.

       "Don't do that," he said.

       She looked at him blankly, looking at the figure even more blankly, and started to inch away. He released her, and she darted back through the people. Her sisters ran to her. They touched each other as if to reassure themselves that all was well.

       "What is it?" one of them asked, unable to see over the heads of the people between her and the statue.

       "Just snow," the little girl answered. "It's just snow."

       Barry stared at her. She was about seven, he thought. He caught her again, and this time lifted her so she could see. "Tell me what that is," he said.