29. Epilogue
Epilogue
Eliza
The last winter in the new world, I counted eleven cans alone in a failing ranger station and called it wealth because it was one more than ten.
I thought about that on the morning of the feast, standing at the top of the pass in a warm wind with my hair loose and long enough now to catch in it.
It grew out past my collar over the months, because I stopped cutting it short, because short hair was for a woman who might have to be gone by morning and I wasn't that woman anymore.
Below me the mountain was green. Green, after months of seeing it white and murderous.
The Ganty draw ran clear and loud with snowmelt down a country the dead passed through and left, and the burn scar was already furring over with fireweed, and down in the bowl below the old resort the whole of my impossible life was setting up tables.
I couldn't have counted the food if I tried.
That was the thought that undid me a little, up there in the wind.
Once I counted eleven cans and it was everything I owned in the world.
Now there was more laid out on those tables than I could take in with my eyes, and it wasn't even mine, and it wasn't even the point. The point was who was coming to eat it.
They came up the pass all morning. From the reservoir, from the eastern benches, from the flats where the old rail ran, from the valley that somehow kept the most children alive through the worst of it.
Every settlement on the range that held its stretch of the river the winter the flood came down—coming now, in summer, to break bread on the mountain that had turned it.
And coming up the low road behind them, in a rattling line of salvaged trucks with a junkyard plow rig at the head of it, the raiders.
Rourke's hard people, who a year ago I would have run from, came to a feast.
Nobody survives alone. Beckett said it into a raider's face with his hands empty, and it cost him five years of walls to mean it, and here was the whole mountain proving it true in the sunshine.
I went down to meet them.
I want to tell you about them, the people who came, because they're the whole of what we won and I may not get to tell you again.
Hudson came first, because Hudson always moved like a man who would rather arrive early and stand quiet than be waited on—a big slow careful man with a laugh you had to earn.
Brook was beside him with their new baby on her hip and a wooden case of tinctures under her other arm, because Brook could no more come to a gathering without bringing medicine than she could stop breathing.
She'd been training two of Dimitri's youngest all spring, riding up the pass every fortnight to do it.
"She'd deliver a baby at her own funeral," Hudson said, watching her go straight to Dimitri to argue about willow bark before she even set the case down.
The way he said it, you understood it was the thing he loved most about her in the world.
Isaac and Amber came with a seed-cart, because of course they did.
Amber sharp and quick and already three sentences into a trade before she got both feet on the ground.
Isaac steady at her shoulder letting her run because he knew, the way the good ones know, that his woman closing a deal was a thing to stand back and admire.
It was Amber's crew that pinched the Blackfork feed the winter of the flood and cost the herd a fifth of its mass before it ever reached my fork.
I never met her before that day. She hugged me like a sister anyway.
"The fork girl," she said, holding me at arm's length.
"You're the one who drew the fork. Half the range knows that story now.
You know that? They tell it at every fire from here to the flats.
" I did not know what to do with that, so I did what I've learned to do with the good things.
I let it in and let it hurt and let it be mine.
Lennon and Madison came with what looked like half a school.
Their valley kept more little ones alive than any settlement on the mountain.
Madison turned that luck into a calling.
Lennon had taught high school English before the world ended, and once she got the school going, he spent his evenings teaching her everything he knew about teaching—how to hold a room of restless kids, how to make a lesson stick.
She started the first real school the high country had seen since the collapse; one room, a wood stove, and every child anyone could ferry to her.
Now she was here to talk Beckett into building a second one at The Hollow before the summer was out.
She won that argument. She already won it; she just liked to watch him fold.
Their own two ran wild with Nessa the whole day, and near dusk I saw all three of them asleep in a pile under a table like puppies.
I had to go stand by myself for a minute over that.
Children. Sleeping in a heap in the open air on a dead mountain, safe.
There's no counting the size of that. I'd have traded every one of my eleven cans, every mile of my careful five years, for one guaranteed sight of it, and here it was for free.
Galvin and Kennedy came late and loud and forgiven for both the second Kennedy laughed.
Her laugh could reset a room. Galvin was a builder, and he heard the Hollow was expanding, and he spent the entire feast walking our new dig with Maddox and sketching load-bearing arches on a plank with a burnt stick, happy as a man gets.
It was Galvin's timber that framed the two new family rooms we opened that fall.
He wouldn't take a thing for it. "You turned the river off all our doors," he said, when Beckett tried to pay him.
"I'll frame your rooms till I die and call us square, and we still won't be. "
And Nash and Abbie came up the old rail.
That was the thing that got the loudest cheer, when word ran through the feast. Nash and Abbie had gotten a stretch of the old rail line running again—hand-cranked, patched together, barely holding—but running.
It was the first moving rail in the territory since the end of the world.
They brought a whole car of trade up and left it at the foot of the pass.
Former enemies trade regularly now. That flat sentence covers a miracle.
A year ago the raiders robbed the rail; this summer the raiders helped Nash lay a new tie under it.
Abbie stood on the running board of that patched-together car with her fist in the air and the whole feast roared for her.
Nash looked up at his wife like she personally reinvented the wheel, and maybe she had.
Rourke, I saved for last, because Rourke was the hardest to look at without my throat closing.
He came up out of his plow truck stiff and scarred and scowling at the sunshine like it owed him money.
His hard people came behind him wary as cats in a new house, and for a moment the two halves of the mountain stood looking at each other across the grass—the settlers who'd been robbed and the raiders who robbed them—and nobody moved.
I felt the whole peace teeter. Then Mara, sixty years old and afraid of nothing on this earth, walked straight across that grass to Rourke with a plate in her hands and said, "You pulled our fool leader out of a slide, so you eat first, and you eat till I say stop," and she put the plate in the hands of the most feared man on the range and dared him to argue.
He didn't argue. I saw him look down at that plate and I saw something go through his face that years of holding a junction with a rifle had never once let out.
He said, gruff, "Yes, ma'am," and the whole mountain breathed again.
Later I watched Rourke sit in the grass and let Nessa braid a dandelion into his beard because she decided he needed one.
He held perfectly, terribly still for it, this man who would have gutted me a year ago.
I had to go find Beckett and put my face on his shoulder for a minute, because some things are too big to hold up alone even when they're good. Especially when they're good.
We set a table for those gone.
Beckett did it every gathering now. An empty table off to the side, a single lit lamp on it even in daylight, no words said over it because the words were the point of not saying them.
Everyone who came up that pass had somebody to sit at it.
Lennon and Madison placed a flower on one of the settings.
I set my mother there, whom I kept packed away with my name for five years and could finally, now, take out and grieve in the open.
And I watched Beckett stand for a long moment at that table near the end of the evening, alone, his hand flat on the wood, and I knew who he was seating there.
I didn’t go to him, because a man is allowed his ghosts.
When he came back to me his eyes were wet and he didn't hide it, which he never would have done a year ago.
"She'd have liked you," he said. The third time he said it to me—his mother on a fence line, Beth in the dark of the deep room, and now here, in the summer, whole.
"All of them would have. That's the whole company of my heart, Eliza, and every last one of them is glad you're in it.
" He wasn't sad, saying it. That was the thing that finally opened me all the way up.
He wasn't grieving me a place among his dead.
He was giving me one among his living, with the dead's blessing.
"Come on. I want to show you something before the light goes. "
I went with him. I always went. I, who spent years never following anybody anywhere.
He took me up top, up through the seam to the roof of the world, the same dead resort where I once stood alone in the dark with an infected arm inches from my face and saved us all without a sound.