This Census-Taker(31)

I knew who would climb first, who would be at the front of the mass, whose ruined fingers and nails it would be slapping onto the sharp flint at the edges of the crack, who would rise out of the under-hill to meet my eye, whose cold grave-stained face full of disappointment.





But it was the foreign man who came into my view like a fish below a boat. I saw him when he was already close to me. He turned his face up and I saw it paler than the shadow.

He gathered the cord and gripped the rock and found handholds. I couldn’t believe that he was returning.

The man hauled himself at last out of the ground, lying at the cut’s edge, panting and staring around him and blinking quickly. I could smell no miasma on him.

After a while he pulled a cloth from his pocket and wiped his hands very carefully, then his face. He took off his glasses and cleaned them again and wouldn’t look at me. His clothes were coated in dust from under the world.

He gathered himself and shrugged out of his harness. I couldn’t speak and he said nothing. His face was set. He worked his jaw.

“I heard what you said to me,” he said at last. “When I was on my way up. Your father will come home soon, I think.”

He put everything back in his sack.

“I think you shouldn’t go back to the house,” he said. He still didn’t look at me. “You know I have to do this job. I want to speak to your father now. I think it would be better if we could speak alone.”

—

“You can’t go in,” I whispered. “It’s not allowed.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll wait for him outside. I promise I’ll stay on the step.” He kept looking at the cave mouth. “I’ll wait for him and ask him if he’ll let me come inside. And if he won’t I’ll talk to him right there. But I want you to stay here, now. All right?”

He looked across the hole at the dark of the hollow beyond, and back at me at last, at my little limbs.

“Well,” he said. “Is there somewhere you can go? Quiet? Out of sight? Just to make sure your father doesn’t…” He put his finger to his lips. “I want you to stay quiet. Keep your ears open, I can call you after I’ve asked your father those questions.”

“I’ll find somewhere.” I was wondering about the crook of a tree, some bough.

“Where you can’t be seen?” he said. “Make sure it’s not too close.”

His insistence frightened me. I couldn’t sit anywhere in the dusk for my father to see me watching. “I don’t know,” I said. But he was distracted, so I said, “I’ll find a place.”

“Good.” He nodded. He picked up his pack and walked into the last of the afternoon. I followed, screwing up my eyes. But as I watched him stride out of sight down the hill I stopped, still within the cave mouth.

These felt very much like last moments. And I was very tired and I didn’t want the light on me.

Had I been in the house I would have gone into the parlor and closed the door. Or I would have wrapped old sheets around me in the base of a wardrobe. I couldn’t go back to the house.

The hole watched me, above its discards and the insides of the hill. Despite what it contained, I took a step back toward it.

It wasn’t my friend or my enemy. It was only a rip full of stone and old things. Even with a particular thing. I didn’t want it but I didn’t need to run from it, not then, and I was afraid of it but no more than I was afraid of everything. Just then, before the conversation between the stranger and my father, I was less afraid of it than of stepping out into the light.

I walked back toward the blackness. I whispered into it, in case my mother was listening.

If he came in here my father would see me and reach for me. I threw a stone across the wide split to the ridge beyond.

With as long a run-up as I could take I might be able to jump all the way across, but the floor was uneven and I might trip on my way and pitch forward, or reach the other side but tip back, and go down, into the dark to the other peak.

The cave wall had its handholds. Outside the sun was firing up the flanks of the hill and somewhere on them my father was coming back to the house, where by the front door the man in his dusty suit was waiting. I couldn’t climb into the pantry and there were no hollow trees nearby.

I took hold of the wall. It felt easier to hold myself there than it had before. I gripped. I sidled, trembling, and I kept going, and tried very hard not to think as I held tight on to the outcrops that I was now above the hole. I didn’t look behind me or down. I grabbed the extrusions and shuffled my poor feet like little animals into nooks and leaned on them to see if they’d take me, striving for the right pace, slow enough that I would not fall, quick enough that this would be over soon.

—

It was. I was there in the dark beyond the gap.

I pushed myself backward off the rock and landed in the rear part of the cave, the hollow beyond the pit, where I’d never been. I lay a long time gasping in the cold of the passage, trying to still my shaking limbs.

It was another country. I stared across at places I’d stood before. I was giddy and proud. I regarded the hole. I turned and went deeper into the hill, pausing to let my eyes adjust in shadows that were dense enough that I hallucinated, only a little, tiny points of light that weren’t there.

I thought of kingdoms and crystal caves and the tunnel continued a few meters and the walls narrowed and I was in a shaft, a wedge which then closed up altogether so I had stone against my chest and my back and I tried a moment to press on, luxuriating in the terror of it, the sense that the hill had paused and would at any moment flex and offhandedly crush me.