Rebirth

Cass’s questions with noncommittal grunts and never once met her eyes. Ruthie had been afraid of her.

“She loved him,” Cass concluded. Once, Gloria had loved. That would have to be enough. Cass had said all she knew-all that was important, anyway. Gloria never told her anything but his name; if he’d been a lover, a husband, a childhood friend, it didn’t matter.

She bent to the earth, the rectangle of dirt raked carefully one way and then the other, crosshatched from the tines. She dug her fingers in and took a handful, then stood up and slowly sifted the earth back over the length of the grave.

She stood back as the others filed around the perimeter of the grave. They knelt and scooped their own handfuls of dirt, even Ruthie. The knees of her tights were smudged with dirt-another stain Cass would not be able to get out. She sighed. Each person shook their dirt back down onto the grave, and Cass wondered what words they said in their minds. Hers was goodbye-maybe everyone said goodbye.

The dirt was sprinkled and still they ringed the grave, waiting. Randall dug in his pocket. “Cass, perhaps you’d like to…”

He held out a plastic bag, gapping open; inside were dried kaysev beans, dull and brown. Cass looked at him sharply, but for once Randall stared back with a hint of challenge in his expression. Smoke squeezed her hand, shook his head. Smoke stayed far clear of Randall’s Sunday-morning services. He had little to do with believers. He even did his occasional drinking at Rocket’s-not German’s, where believers tended to congregate.

Cass didn’t want to take the beans. The funeral practice of sprinkling the grave with kaysev seed-it was based in the Bible, the passage in Matthew about the sower. It was a common practice, almost secular by now; a whole new culture of loss, its habits and practices as ingrained as if generations of ancestors had practiced them. It had only been eight months since the Air Force had rained kaysev down from the skies on their last flights, but eight months had been long enough to create new rituals. The plant was meant to feed the population; it had begun to feed their imaginations, as well.

Smoke saw everything through the filter of ideology and he was resolute, and Cass was inclined to agree with him, at least on this. Terrible memories of the Convent were too fresh, the mark its zealotry had left on Ruthie too deep.

God had not taken up residence across the street in the stadium-of that Cass was sure.

But unlike Smoke, she was not ready to declare Him absent. Still, He was an elusive, crafty cipher to Cass, and for now she meant to keep Him distant.

When Cass did not take the plastic bag from Randall’s outstretched hand, the frowning man narrowed his eyes and upended it himself, the beans falling to the earth and rolling into the crevices and fissures in the earth. “He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word,” he intoned, his gaze never leaving Cass’s face.

Then he stepped back from the grave, jamming the empty bag back into his pocket and brushing his hands together fastidiously. Everyone else followed him, retreating to the cleared area where the service had begun, shuffling slowly.

“And now we conclude our service for Gloria,” Randall murmured, the wind snatching at his words and carrying them away, so that everyone leaned in closer to hear. Everyone, that is, but Cass, who picked up Ruthie and edged to the back of the small gathering while Randall raised his hands for a final benediction.

“Man, you are dust,” he said, closing his eyes. “And to dust you shall return.”

Not for the first time Cass considered that Randall was a fraud, cobbling together bits and pieces of faiths to suit himself.

What did it matter, though? Dead was still dead, and the rest of them were still here.

02

CASS GLANCED BACK OVER HER SHOULDER AS THEY trailed the others back to the Box. The streets looked clear; there had been no Beater sightings for a couple of days. Randall moved among the graves, straightening the crosses and pulling weeds.

It wasn’t much of a graveyard-the plot of land had once been a tiny park wedged between residential streets two blocks from the Box, but the trees that shaded it had died early enough in the Siege that someone had actually taken the trouble to cut them down to stumps and haul them away. Some of the graves were marked with crosses carved from wood, nailed together, finished to varying degrees. One small one was painted white, with tiny shells glued along the edges. Most of the crosses were raw, hastily made, not even sanded.

Some graves, like Gloria’s, had no marker at all. For now, the dug and piled dirt marked its location, but it would not be long before the dirt would sink and level and no one would remember where she lay.

Had it been up to Cass, she would have left the few plants that sprouted this time of year. To her mind the reappearance of each plant Aftertime was a miracle in itself, and her garden in the Box had a small square marked out with stakes and twine for each native species she found on her walks. Firethorn, pepperweed, crupina. Each of them once assumed gone forever. Each-through what combination of God’s will and hardiness and luck she had no idea-returned, pushing through the wasted crust of the forsaken earth.

Greg, Rae, Paul-once through the gates, they slipped off in different directions, not bothering with a goodbye, not even for Ruthie. Cass wasn’t sure how much longer she could stay here in the Box, where gloom had settled and quashed her hopes that it was a place fit for raising her little girl. Before, people made an effort for a child, even one as silent and strange as Ruthie was now. Under the hat, her hair was as short as a boy’s; in the Convent they had shaved all the children bald. But by spring Ruthie should have enough for a little pixie cut, something more girlie. Cass was self-conscious of her self-consciousness: surely survival was enough of a parlor trick; should children really have to do anything more?

There were no fat Gerber babies Aftertime. There were few babies at all. Starvation and the fever had taken so many, early on; the Beaters claimed many more. Cass knew firsthand how hard it was to look upon a child when your own was gone. But she had been given a second chance; she had gotten Ruthie back, and now she meant to cherish her. She would dress her in the prettiest things she could find. She would give her everything that the battered world could provide.

Ruthie’s red coat was a gift from a quiet boy named Sam, who’d lost an eye in Yemen in the Rice Wars. He stopped by Cass and Smoke’s tent after a raid and pulled it from his backpack, a soft, finely made woolen coat with carved shell buttons. He wouldn’t trade for it, but he had accepted a cup of peppermint tea brewed from the last of Cass’s herb garden before a hard freeze took all but the thyme and chervil. Sam wasn’t a talker, but he loved Ruthie. He airplaned her squealing through the air, carried her around on his shoulders and let her crawl all over his long lanky legs. Cass suspected Sam had once had a little brother or sister, or perhaps a niece or nephew. Whoever the child was, they were long gone, leaving Sam with a few good moves and, perhaps, an empty place in his heart.

Underneath the coat, Ruthie wore a blue corduroy jumper and a pair of white tights. Her shoes were too small; she was growing fast these days. All the raiders knew to keep an eye out-size seven, twenty-four European-but you never knew what you’d find, and the only sure thing-the mall at the far edge of town-was still infested with Beaters.

It had been more than a month since Ruthie’s things had been washed. Sometimes one of the Box merchants had detergent for trade, but it was expensive, and besides, Cass and Smoke had agreed they were going to try to switch to homegrown wherever possible. That meant using the oily kaysev soap made from the fat rendered from the beans. It wasn’t terrible for washing one’s body or hair, but it wasn’t great for clothes. It didn’t take stains all the way out and it didn’t do much for the lingering odors of sweat and smoke.

It wasn’t like anyone else cared. Smoke was always saying Cass should just let Ruthie wear sweatpants and T-shirts like Feo, the only other child in the Box. But Feo was practically feral, a sharp-toothed, long-haired boy of eight or nine who slipped quick-footed and cagey among the tents and merchant stands, stealing and boxing with his own shadow. Dor let Feo stay only because he’d become a sort of a mascot for the guards, who’d found him squatting with an unkempt, semiconscious old woman in a farmhouse past the edge of town back in October.

Cass felt protective of Feo, especially after the woman, his grandmother, died during her first night in the Box. But she didn’t want her Ruthie becoming like him.