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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I am afraid.
Someone is coming.
That is, I think someone is coming, though I am not sure, and I pray that I am wrong. I went into the church and prayed the whole of this morning. I sprinkled water in front of the altar, and put some flowers on it, violets and dogwood.
But there is smoke. For three days there has been smoke, not like the time before. That time, last year, it rose in a great cloud a long way away, and stayed in the sky for two weeks. A forest fire in the dead woods, and it rained and the smoke stopped. But this time it is a thin column, like a pole, not very high.
I thought it was a cloud, except that it was too gray, the wrong color, and then I thought: there are no clouds anywhere else. I got the binoculars and saw that it was narrow and straight; it was smoke from a small fire. When we used to go in the truck, Claypole Ridge was fifteen miles, though it looks closer, and the smoke was coming from behind that.
Beyond Claypole Ridge there is Ogdentown, about ten miles farther. But there is no one left alive there.
I know this because after the war ended, and all the telephones went dead, my father, my brother Joseph and Cousin David went in the truck to find out what was happening, and the first place they went to was Ogdentown. They went early in the morning; Joseph and David were really excited, but Father looked serious.
When they came back, it was dark. Mother and I had been worrying, so we were glad to see the truck lights finally coming over Burden Hill, two miles away. They looked like beacons, producing a luminous glow that illuminated much of the road ahead. They were the only lights anywhere, except in the house-no other cars had come down all day. We knew it was the truck because one of the lights, the left one, always blinked when it went over a bump. It came up to the house, and they got out; the boys had lost their excitement. They looked frightened, and my father looked sick. Maybe he was beginning to be sick, but I thought he was distressed.
My mother looked up at him as he climbed down.
“What did you find?”
He said: “Bodies. They’re all dead.”
“All?”
We went inside the house where the lamps were lit, the two boys following silently. My father sat down. “Terrible,” he said, “terrible, terrible. We drove around, desperately looking for other survivors. We blew the horn. We rang the church bells; you could have heard it from five miles away. Then we waited for two hours…and nobody came. I went into some of the houses-the Johnsons’, the Peters’-they were all still in there. All dead.”
My brother Joseph began crying. He was fourteen. I think I had not heard him cry for the last six years…

written| 11:32 PM
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MUSIC!