When We Were Civil
by Anna Villegas
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Clement is worrying the fire in the wood burner. I like to fool myself that I can feel the heat warming our kitchen, but the truth is the cabin will take hours to warm even after we light the woodstove. Yesterday’s air was still and clear; today storm winds have followed the traveler to our door. Even though we are going to get more snow, we are niggardly with the logs which cost us so much. Neither of us has yet decided our visitor warrants the cost of the woodstove’s warmth.
It is my husband’s habit when he is nervous or off-balance to clutch at the spot on his chest where his pocket would be were he wearing a dress shirt. He’s reaching for his Camels, forsaken way back when forty became the new thirty. If only the vice police could see us now, our diets trimmed to naked calories, our exercise the necessary means to our survival.
Seeing my husband’s uneasiness conveyed by gesture, I swear I would buy him a carton of cigarettes if our world allowed it. I would bring him his slippers — slippers! — shake him an ice-cold Martini, and light him a string of cigarettes.
Clement puts a last handful of tinder into the wood burner. He sits across the table from our house guest, whose eyes have followed my husband as closely as River’s might have done. In the clearing beyond the cabin, the high-legged steps of a big doe catch my eye. Were the traveler not with us, we would follow our routine of necessity.
Clement would rise and sidle to the wall where the Winchester rests in its cavity secreted beneath the window sill. I would step backwards from the table to retrieve the shells from their hidey-hole in the cut glass iris vase on the top of the hutch. Our hands would meet.
If we were lucky, we would not startle the doe before Clement moved to the front door, which I would have opened in slow motion, and raised the rifle. Without our visitor, we could not afford to leave the doe untouched, nosing the flower beds where, come summer, the red day lilies will send up a centerpiece for our table as if they didn’t know any better.
“Can you eat...” I wait for the traveler to speak his name. I will not have a man at my table who doesn’t give me his name. I will not serve him a cold potato on a plate of China if he doesn’t identify himself.
“I’m Travis.” He knits his hands around the mug of leaves as if it already holds hot water. Even with the peppermint, our morning drink is barely more than boiled water, but what we name things seems to matter more now than when we could throw dollars down on a counter and choose from fifteen different syrupy lattes.
“Travis,” he repeats.
“Will you eat something, Travis?”
“I can.” He unchains his hands from the mug and presses them down on his skinny thighs as if the strain of our conversation will cause him to rise and leave us. “Please.”
“Can you tell us anything?” Clement asks, pushing a fork toward Travis’s place. “What have you seen?”
Behind Travis’s back, I work at our kitchen counter. I slice a boiled potato into quarters and fan it on a plate. Clement catches my eye. He raises two fingers. I slice a second potato and set the full plate in front of our guest, who is rustling deep into his jacket pockets. He places a shaker of salt on the table, a heavy glass and silver shaker of salt like those that used to sit on the tables of Mary’s Café in town.
“Take it,” Travis says. His grin offers the black holes of his missing teeth. I’m thinking the traveler is even younger than our Ross. Rode hard and put up wet, but beneath the soiled clothes is the body of a young man.
“I believe I’ll have one of those potatoes, too, El, if you don’t mind,” Clement says, his cue that I am to sit down and glean what information I can from Travis. I am now to play the proper hostess, it appears.
We cannot break bread with the stranger in our midst, but we can share our cold potatoes, layered with the salt we haven’t tasted in over a year. My husband shakes salt onto his plate and gives me a piece of potato. Standing behind Clement, my arms on his shoulders, I savor the salted potato on my tongue. How much we took for granted for so long.
“Where have you come from, Travis?” I ask him.
Travis doesn’t swallow before he speaks. He answers through a mouthful: “I’ve been walking due east.”
“How long?” I put a third potato on Travis’s plate, seconds on Clement’s. The salt has turned our breakfast into a holiday.
“Mebbe six, seven days.”
“You carrying your food?” Clement gestures toward the Osprey, settled on the floor an arm’s reach away from Travis. “You find food...you find people along the way?”
Travis lowers his eyes. “Carried some... didn’t find anybody, nobody to speak of...”
“Seven days and nobody.... alive?”
For all Clement and I know, Ed and Mayra could be gone. But seven days of travel without—
“Now that’s not true.” Travis flashes his grin. “I told you a lie. I seen a man, two or three days out.”
Clement and I wait for the story to extend. My husband and I are at least forty years older than our guest. We are not quite malnourished, and we sleep warm, but we are neither spry nor strong. What we have saved on our mountain is more than most have saved. Clearly more than Travis has.
“He was moving, too. Moving south, he said.” Travis rocks back on his chair.
I could never stop our son from rocking the chairs. Be polite, I would chide Ross to spare my fancy furniture. Be civilized.
I will not ask the same of Travis. Instead I ask him his purpose. “What kept you heading east?”
The kettle is not boiling, but it’s hot enough to steep peppermint. Clement slides the cups to the table’s edge. He wraps his arm around my hips as I pour.
“Don’t really know.”
I’m sure Travis has followed his answer with a grin. I don’t want to witness it. Clement squeezes me to him, then drops his arm.
“Coming from or going to?” Clement says, pushing a mug across to Travis as if he is making an elegant move in a game of chess.
Clement and I lock eyes, hopeful. We’ll help with the going to. We’ll fill the Osprey with what little we have and wish Travis well, once the storm passes.
“I’m looking.”
“You’re welcome to sleep here, wait out the storm,” I say. “Clement and I — I’m Ellen — can put you up. Through the storm.”
I have surprised Clement with what he mistakes for matronly generosity. But I’m being less than charitable. I offer our home to the traveler because something in the turn of his head, the dark, vigilant eyes following my husband’s slow movements, tells me I don’t have a choice, that what we offer or withhold makes no difference to the man sitting at our table eating our food in the feeble warmth of our house.
* * *
By mid-afternoon, Travis is sleeping soundly on the couch in front of the heated woodstove, one outstretched hand, its fingernails black and torn, resting on his backpack. He cannot know we don’t covet what’s in it; his age and circumstance make it impossible for him to imagine we don’t want to learn its contents.
I cover him with a wool blanket when his whistling snores persist, snores I have determined to be undisturbed by the cracking thunder overhead. The blanket is Tartan. Against the dark plaid, the festive ribbon tied into Travis’s hair makes me think, again, of Christmas.
Clement is outside, wrapped in a rain slicker, standing downhill from the cabin beneath the dying oak whose fallen branches become our firewood. After we encouraged Travis to lie down, after we were certain he was sleeping, Clement slipped into his slicker and went to hunt, as he calls it.
Neither of us spoke to the foolishness of waiting for our doe to return to him in the sleet hammering us from the west. Neither of us reminded the other of the unknown disposition of the stranger in our midst. Clement was careful when he took the Winchester from its hideaway, even more careful when he took two shells from theirs. A gun without load is a harmless thing.
In the fall, Clement dropped a big doe almost on our doorstep. We’d smoked the meat for three days in the hot September, torn between the danger of setting the forest afire and the certainty we’d be hungrier through the winter if we failed to preserve the venison. The smoked meat is almost gone; we intend to send what little remains with Travis when the storm breaks.
Alone, tonight’s dinner would have been potatoes with dried apples, but Clement insists that we should make more of an effort. Not only in sharing, but also in hosting. “You’ll set the table, El,” he whispered to me in the bedroom. “You’ll set the table the way you always do.”
I slide through the front door as quietly as I can. On the porch, I slip into my poncho. From outside the cabin, through the front window, I confirm that our guest remains sleeping. Beneath the tree, Clement turns his hooded head toward me. I raise the measuring cup in my hand to point at our storehouse. Almost all of our beans are gone, but we have about six inches of rice left in one of our drums. I imagine a soup with rice and venison, salted by our visitor’s gift.
I have not felt anticipation since we’d heard, wrongly, that our Ross had been seen soon after the collapse, outside the city, heading our way. There were so many false sightings then, so many sunken hopes, that we learned not to listen when word came our way about our lost son. It is not anticipation I feel now, but something less, some drag into the future anchored by the visitor sleeping in our home.
When we built our cinder-block storehouse, a cement truck pulled onto our patio and pumped the concrete into neat form boards outlining the foundation. Back then, we didn’t even choose to mix our own cement. Once the foundation set, Ed and Clement and two of Mary’s sons put up the block walls in a single day. Ed told us if we didn’t want to mess with the bears — or the bears messing with us — we needed such a bunker.
In those days, we had our barn raisings, our community efforts appreciating the properties we held outright, gloating over having outwitted the mortgage industry. Our work days were followed by long, late dinners of barbecue and beer and cantaloupe we’d grown in our own flush gardens. We thought we’d found a better way to become old when we made the cabin our only home. We thought we were so wise — we knew we were better! — to have declined the focused waste of our earlier lives.
Standing in our dark storeroom, listening to the rain wash off the tin roof in sheets, I shut my eyes and lean against a barrel. I smell the forest and the rain and the faintest drift of mold that overtook our last flour. I indulge myself by revisiting the supermarkets of an earlier world. Rice? I wanted rice? What kinds of rice could I have? A gluttony of choices faced me: long grain, medium grain, short grain, brown or white or wild, basmati or jasmine or Arborio.
Often, when I hide my selfish daydreams from Clement, it comes to me that we — my husband and I and thousands of others — have been punished for our excesses. Because the truth is, even as we proudly claimed right living and gave away the weighty gear of our foolish days, we were as pampered and spoiled as any beings on the planet. Even more spoiled because we had the mountain and its sincere beauty to ourselves. Now, in a dank cement hut smelling of mold and memories, I scrabble for old rice at the bottom of a fifty-gallon drum so that we can offer a pathetically festive dinner to a person with whom, in the world before the collapse, we would never, ever have shared space.
Copyright © 2023 by Anna Villegas
