Scavengers
The girl showed up in early March, the rainy season, a baby tucked under her arm like a picnic basket. Hanna, just finished mucking out the pig stalls, was checking the seedlings in the greenhouse. In the watery, indecisive light that passed for spring these days, the little shoots looked depressed and anorexic. Outside, the sky hovered gunmetal gray, a cocktail of ash and cloud. The girl wore a bulky blue-gray sweater that blended with the environs, and dark dirty jeans. Her hair in a braid down her back. She carried the baby in a reusable supermarket bag, head poking out between the handles. All this Hanna divined without making eye contact. The farm saw a regular stream of people leaving the city, seeking food and shelter with varying degrees of entitlement, and Hanna had learned it was best not to welcome people you planned to turn away. Now she was peripherally conscious of the girl’s figure in the driveway, still as a tree, focused on something in the distance. Not the greenhouse, not Hanna. She was watching a man come over the hill from the chicken coop, his uneven gait—bad left hip, osteoarthritis—as familiar to Hanna as her own pulse. Judd. The baby shifted in its bag and the girl hoisted it higher and the sky dumped rain.
Leaving the plants, Hanna beckoned her inside the main house. Up close she wasn’t as young as she’d seemed, maybe early twenties, skinny in a way that was hard to look at. Her eyes brown-black, steady on Hanna as she made tea in the kitchen. When she took off her sweater Hanna saw a golden fuzz of hair all over her body, like a baby chick. Hanna spread a blanket on the floor for the baby, then handed it a wooden spoon to play with, resisting the urge to say, as her own mother would have, Babies don’t need fancy toys.
She served the tea, into which the girl poured three spoonfuls of sugar, and buttered some toast, listening for the creak of the back door and Judd’s footsteps. The girl, too, seemed to be waiting for these things; meanwhile, she inventoried the kitchen, glancing in a grid formation. What she could eat. What she could use. Hanna’s strength relative to her own. After she’d finished the toast, she reached into the supermarket bag and shook up some formula in a bottle that didn’t look any too clean. The baby sucked it down regardless. When Hanna asked her where she was headed, she didn’t answer. Her face was long and angular, all cheekbones and nose, and in another time and place she might have been thought beautiful.
“Can we sleep here tonight?” Straight to the point, which Hanna respected. She didn’t offer payment or other inducements. The baby looked healthy enough, neither of them carrying disease. Maybe the girl could help her with a few tasks around the farm. These were the calculations that ran through Hanna’s mind, all of them laughable later. The baby’s small fingers curled into fists, as if preparing to fight a world only just met—this was how she made up her mind.
“One night,” she said, and the girl breathed out. Her spine collapsed and her body shivered in a miniature earthquake, loosening all the effort of keeping herself together. Then she straightened up and lowered her shoulders and if Hanna had turned away at that particular second she wouldn’t have seen it at all.
When they first bought the farm, Judd was still teaching history at the community college, and later on he’d decide it was his knowledge of the past, his broad and sweeping perspective on the world, that informed their purchase. This wasn’t true, but like so many other things, it also wasn’t worth arguing about. It was Hanna who’d had enough of her job coding invoices at the hospital, of billing software and compliance reviews, who took the crowded, unreliable bus every day after work to visit a community garden plot where she grew skinny squashes and tomatoes that shriveled on the vine. Sometimes she just sat among the plants, breathing chlorophyll and dirt. Avoiding her own home, and Judd’s avid face as he perused conspiracy theories on the internet. When her mother died, Hanna inherited enough money to buy the farm, and she told Judd, “You can be a gentleman farmer on the weekends, like you’ve always wanted.” He’d never said he wanted this, but often with Judd if you presented him with an idea he’d claim it for his own. His intelligence made him suggestible; his mind was hungry for thoughts from any source.
She planted kale and potatoes. She bought chickens and goats. She built a small greenhouse and learned to make cheese. She baked bread in a horno behind the house. On the weekends Judd came out from the city with the car full of prepper supplies he read about on doomsday forums. Medical supplies. Batteries. Mylar blankets and freeze-dried food. An axe, a skin stapler, water purification tablets. She asked him what he was prepping for, exactly, and he said, pronouncing it as if it were a real word or the incantation for a spell, “TEOTWAWKI.” Zombie apocalypse. Societal breakdown. He was so busy with all these preparations that he never helped with planting or weeding or the animals. Each of them found the other’s activities fantastical and extremist, then gradually discovered their utility. Their food supply was close to self-sustaining. She stapled her palm after tearing it on the wiring of the chicken coop, rather than waiting days to see a doctor; Judd took the antibiotics when MRSA inflated his left eye to the size of an orange. They hand cranked the radio every month or so, whenever storms knocked out their power, though lately she found the broadcast of little use. No zombie attack came and society continued to exist. There were still banks and tv shows and restaurants. There was no end of the world—just a slow drip of mundanely terrible events that increasingly left people to survive on their own.
“What’s this, then?” Judd said in the kitchen, his tone oddly neutral. Usually he was even less friendly than Hanna to the strangers who stopped by their place. He smelled like gasoline; he’d been working on the generator that kept the coop warm.
“This is Ember,” the girl said—Hanna couldn’t stop thinking of her as a girl—“I’m Phoebe.”
“Phoebe,” Judd repeated, as if it were a name he’d never heard before in his life.
The baby squirmed out of Phoebe’s lap and Hanna picked her up before she fell to the floor. An instinct she was surprised to discover in herself. Phoebe reached out to take her back but Hanna held on. The baby’s skin next to her own was a marvel, as if from a different species altogether. Her own hands furrowed and leathery. A burn scar from the horno streaked up her wrist like the flame that had caused it. The baby had the sour, yeasty smell of milk turning bad.
Light brown splotches, some kind of fungus, capped her little head. Blue veins wormed beneath her translucent cheeks. Her fingers clutched Hanna’s with sharp, tiny nails.
“Both of you, wash up,” Hanna said. “Phoebe, help yourself to anything clean you can find in the dresser in the hallway. Judd, take her clothes.”
The girl obeyed without protest, and so did Judd. A thing about Judd was that he liked to be bossed around. When he quit his job at the college, citing the constant shooter threats and viral outbreaks, she knew he was relieved to abdicate his responsibility. He’d never liked standing at the front of a room; he’d always been more comfortable as a student, submitting his assignments on time. Now he carried Phoebe’s clothes downstairs and worked them in the wringer on the back porch, then hung them on the drying rack. Hanna made dinner one-handed, with the baby on her hip. Astonishing how natural it could feel to have this extra weight and heat against her body. Long ago they’d chosen not to have children and Hanna didn’t regret it. But she was having some kind of reaction to this baby, like an allergy but its opposite—a flush on her skin, a skip to her breath. She couldn’t put the child down. She warmed soup, set out bread and cheese. Tall glasses of lemonade from concentrate Judd got at Costco. Might as well use it; you couldn’t save everything for a future that wasn’t guaranteed to pass.
Outside, the rain shifted and the sky cleared; the sun lowered into pink-and-orange radiance amplified by the particulate from the cement factory down the road. She almost said to the baby, as her mother would have said to her, Would you look at the sky?
Phoebe came into the kitchen wearing a sweatshirt from Hanna’s old job that said: Complex problems, sustainable solutions. Waxy sections of scalp were visible between strands of her wet hair. She reached for the baby, but Hanna pretended not to see it and gestured for her to sit at the table.
“You know her,” she said to Judd, who had appeared in the doorway. They’d both lost weight since moving to the farm, but only for Judd had it been flattering; his silver helmet of hair, his trimmed beard. Her own face was sunken and jowly, gravity-dragged.
He swallowed before he spoke. “Phoebe was enrolled in Debates of American History. That was the course, wasn’t it?” His voice plummy with artifice. “As I recall, you were an indifferent student.” As I recall. Indifferent. Words from his work life, nothing he ever used with her. She wondered if the baby could be his. The timing didn’t seem right; he’d quit teaching two years ago, but he still made trips to the city, people came by, she didn’t police his days. She was busy running the farm. Recently in bed she’d reached for him and after they finished he said, “I’m like a tool you use when you need it,” and she didn’t deny the accusation or see why it would be a problem.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked the girl, who looked back at her, her expression flat. She was so skeletal, it was hard to picture her pregnant, having housed a whole other life. “Ember and me need a safe place,” the girl said, and Judd said, “Ember and I,” and Phoebe gave Hanna a vexed look that made her laugh. At the sound the baby woke up, startled, and sharply unhappy she cried for her mother. Hanna, with regret, handed her over.
Judd said, “I need to check the animals,” even though that was Hanna’s job.
Hanna sighed in annoyance. “You might as well eat,” she said to the girl, who nodded and ate both Judd’s bowl and her own.
They didn’t have a spare bedroom but there were blankets for the couch and a cardboard box for the baby to sleep in, thin pillow on the bottom as a mattress. In Finland they gave all newborn babies a cardboard box to sleep in, or they used to. She’d read this somewhere. If Phoebe was unhappy with the arrangements she didn’t show it. She lowered the baby into the box, lay down on the couch beside it, and fell asleep instantly, the way people do when they’ve been going for days. When they’ve been guarding themselves and at last found safety. It wasn’t Judd who’d provided this feeling of safety—it was Hanna. She saw this.
In the bedroom, Judd was reading about the Revolutionary War. He was supposedly descended from Hessian soldiers who deserted the British side. The Hessians were known as brutal mercenaries, he’d told Hanna, plunderers who took what they could find, but in reality they were farmers and conscripts, sent by their rulers to fight a foreign war that didn’t concern them. They were just trying to survive. She climbed in next to him, laid her body against his. “The baby,” she said. She didn’t know how to speak about it, what had happened to her body when she held it. Their life was set up to husband themselves and nobody else.
“Ember is a ridiculous name,” he said.
“Maybe she was born during a fire,” Hanna said. If he knew anything about the circumstances of her birth, his face didn’t show it. He turned off the light and lay on his side, on his good hip.
“Be careful,” he said in the dark. “That girl is likely a thief.”
She considered their home and its reserves, the sacks of flour and rice, the animals, the first aid supplies. The girl was sapling-thin yet gave the impression of coiled, clever strength. If there were something she wanted to steal, Hanna thought, she would have taken it already.
Night descended quiet and clear for the first few hours and then the wind shifted again and Hanna woke to the sound of splintering glass. It was the kitchen window, which had already had a crack in it; now a storm was rising from the west, and the floor was puddled with rain. The house smelled of ozone and sulfur. She shook Phoebe by the shoulder, and it took the girl a surprisingly long time to wake. “Take the baby to the basement and stay there,” she said. Outside, westerlies attacked the buildings, tore at shingles and nails. But it was the rain you had to worry about, its toxicity for which there was no remedy. As the wet stung her skin, she gathered the chickens into crates. The goats, who were smart, followed her. The piglets—you weren’t supposed to name them; she’d named them anyway—she couldn’t get to. Back inside the house, she took her poncho off in the mudroom, she scrubbed herself as best she could, she carried the crates of chickens down to the basement. The goats she left upstairs. They’d eat the house to pieces but she’d worry about that in the morning.
In the murky light of Judd’s lantern he and the girl looked green. The baby was murmuring warnings in baby language, and the chickens, too, were sounding alarms. She welcomed the noise, which distracted her from the sound of the wind prying the house apart. She didn’t believe in personifying weather, but it was impossible not to feel the malevolence of a storm. The goats scuffled upstairs. Probably they were nosing through the kitchen. Probably they were eating the couch. Goats would eat anything; they were survivors, brutal and rapacious, like Hessians.
An earlier version of herself had stocked the basement with jigsaw puzzles and books, as if time spent down here would feel like leisure. In previous storms she’d learned that time felt thick as a jungle. You had to hack through it with a machete of your own thoughts. It took all your concentration to make the seconds tick past.
The baby, gurgling, offered a foul smell to the group. Hanna rubbed her temples. “I don’t have diapers down here,” she said.
“She’ll get a rash,” Judd said. “Use a cloth or something.”
“What do you know about rashes?” Phoebe asked him. Her voice was scornful, but Hanna couldn’t tell if it was specific to him or general scorn.
“Everybody knows about diaper rash,” he said. To Hanna’s surprise he opened a plastic bin in the corner and took out cleaning rags, hand wipes. He took off his sweater and laid the baby down on it, making faces that kept the baby’s attention while he cleaned her, knotted a rag around her hips in some kind of arrangement, then bundled the dirty diapers and wipes into a trash bag. She could not have predicted the level of betrayal she felt upon seeing this behavior, which she had never known to be inside of him. Phoebe took the child back and retreated, in so far as she could, to a different corner of the basement, next to a case of canned beans. It didn’t seem to occur to her to be grateful, for anything they’d provided. Judd crossed his arms and stared stonily at the ground, and Hanna, shrugging, curled herself into a corner on top of a blanket and fell asleep. Somehow she’d become a person who could fall asleep anywhere.
You might think the air would be clearer after a storm, but it never was. It was only drier and colder, which was not the same thing. After boiling water for tea, she took inventory. The goats had indeed ravaged the house; they’d spared the couch but eaten the baby’s cardboard box, and once she chased them out into their pen, she began cleaning. She sent Judd to check the coop and repatriate the chickens, and set the girl to work at the wringer.
The greenhouse had made it through, and her mood lifted, only to fall again when she came across the injured body of Smattering, one of the piglets, on the far side of the structure. The sounds coming from the animal were quiet but unholy—she wasn’t religious but that was the word that came to her mind. She knelt beside it and touched its rough and nubbly head, but it didn’t want any comfort from her. Its back legs were skewed and twisted away from the rest of its body, as if they’d tried to run off in a different direction. She and Judd had argued about a gun, which he’d felt was a necessary item and she’d refused to have in the house. Now she thought she should have listened, though she didn’t plan to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. In the greenhouse she kept burlap sacks to protect roots and deter weeds. She returned to the piglet, whose eyes were clouded in pain. She laid the sack over its head and pressed down until its body, in its last moments convulsive with life, stopped shuddering. Her face was wet.
Of the other piglet, Smidgen, there was no sign. She’d named them with irony that now seemed stupid and cruel, anticipating how big they’d grow. When she came around the corner of the greenhouse, wiping her cheeks, she saw Judd walking up the back steps of the house. Phoebe was there, at the top step, her face angled to the sun like a plant. As Hanna watched, Judd fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her legs, pressing his face against her knees. The girl remained impassive as he held himself at her feet. Debased, devoted. A supplicant.
When Hanna’s mother died, the end was long. She couldn’t bear to leave her life though she’d done nothing but complain about it for years. She lived alone in a small high-rise apartment overlooking a lake that had once been as large and blue as the sea. Now the beach extended for miles of white sand which sparkled with startling, metallic beauty. Every time Hanna came to visit, her mother showed her the view with astonishment. Can you believe it? she’d say. There used to be water there.
Her own body shrank by degrees until she was curled into herself like a fossil into a rock.
Her scalp pearlescent and vaguely purple. Her knuckles thick with arthritis, she held Hanna’s hands, buried her head in Hanna’s lap like a child who believed that if she hid from death, maybe death would hide from her. She too was a supplicant; she too was desperate for love. Hanna’s father had left when she was young and for years it was just the two of them, knitted together.
When she died Hanna bathed her body, weeping over the knobs of her spine, her blue-bruised skin. She would have crawled back inside it if she could have: this precious house, this everything body, this mother. No other disaster could compare.
Now on the farm a raccoon nosed around the fecund trash by the greenhouse, pawing at the corpse of the piglet. Out of instinct she yelled at it, threw a plank of wood at it, missed. The raccoon straightened up and bared its teeth in her direction, then went back to the piglet. Then there was a sharp cracking sound, like a tree felled by lightning, and the raccoon slumped against the greenhouse wall. Hanna’s ears rang, and for a minute she couldn’t hear anything at all. By the time she recovered herself Phoebe was standing next to her, clicking the safety catch back on a pistol.
“We should bury it if you don’t want animals going for it like that,” she said.
“Where’s the baby?” Hanna said.
“Judd has her,” the girl said. She cocked her head, indicating the house. Together they surveyed the scene by the greenhouse. It looked like the end of a mobster movie: dead bodies, blood spatter, the evidence of crimes.
“We could also, not to be insensitive, cook it,” the girl said.
Hanna pictured it: a suckling pig roasted on a spit. She believed herself sensible and was opposed to waste. But in the end she shook her head. “Not healthy since it’s been soaking in the rain all night.”
Phoebe shrugged. She was standing very close, and Hanna was conscious of her body, the acrid, burning smell of the gun, the smell of her own shampoo in the girl’s hair. There was a dynamic quality to her stance, like a rubber band stretched wide—it could snap in any direction. Once again her eyes took inventory, this time of Hanna. Her body in quadrants: the lined face, gnarled hands wrapped around the shovel, muscles of her arms, of her legs. Searching. It wasn’t desire but some relative of it, an attention rife with need. It had been so long since anyone looked at her closely that Hanna flinched.
“Who taught you to shoot?” she asked.
The girl looked offended. “I taught myself,” she said.
Behind the greenhouse was a spot of earth that Hanna had first tilled for planting before realizing poor drainage made it too swampy. She found a plastic crate and wrapped the piglet in a blue pinstriped dress she used to wear to work. The crate was purely to discourage animals from digging at the ground but in the end it did look like a coffin and the dress like a ceremonial shroud. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to avoid the look and feel of things. Together she and Phoebe shoveled out a decent-size hole, the wind plastering their hair against their faces so that they pushed it aside, leaving grime marks behind.
After the hole was dug they paused for a rest. Hanna leaned against her shovel. The girl stood with her face against the wind. She seemed to want to be next to her, to close any distance between them. Finally she said, “It’s not what you think.” It was a statement of fact, without pleading behind it. Hanna waited. The words came quickly then, the girl wanting to get it over with. “She’s my sister’s, not mine. Ember.”
“Where’s your sister?”
Phoebe composed herself, her dark eyes looking into Hanna’s. Inside them a story she wasn’t prepared to tell. “I don’t know,” she said.
“And Judd? The two of you?”
A breath escaped her, so small yet full of disdain. “He used to write me notes. Keep me after class. Used to tell me about this place, how you were out here while he was in the city. He said he was in love with me. I filed a complaint at school but it didn’t go anywhere. Then he quit or got fired, whatever it was.”
Hanna remembered Judd coming home from campus, carrying a box of books from his office, which he dumped in the living room and never opened. If he acted differently at that time, she couldn’t remember it; she was building the greenhouse and researching beekeeping, which she’d ultimately decided against. When she thought of that summer, what stuck in her mind was the satisfaction of the greenhouse roof being fitted, how she’d felt when she saw the plants laid out in rows, the unmistakable smell of tomato vines. When she stepped inside, the sharp abatement of wind.
“But you came to find him,” Hanna said now.
The girl put her hands on her hips. Her gaze intent and purposeful. “No,” she said.
As they lowered the crate into the ground a seagull stalked around the hole as if hoping to tear it apart. Hanna shooed it in the direction of the raccoon and it squawked with excitement upon discovering the corpse. They rained clods of dirt back onto the crate, filling in the hole.
Without being asked the girl stomped around the earth to pack it. She was wearing a pair of Judd’s rain boots, so big on her they came up over her knees, and the gun was holstered at her hip. She looked like a child sheriff. Hanna wondered where she’d hidden the gun earlier and under what circumstances she’d procured it in the first place. The wind picked up further, a bad smell to it, harbinger of more and worse weather to come. From the house she could hear the thin wail of the baby. She wiped her mouth and tasted dirt, its tang of copper and sewage. She swallowed it anyway. The sky, already dark, grew darker. She and the girl went back inside and took turns washing off the dirt while Judd repaired some fencing. When Hanna came downstairs, she wasn’t surprised to find that Phoebe was gone; they’d agreed on one night, and she seemed like a person who kept to promises. In the kitchen, in another cardboard box she must have scavenged somewhere, the baby remained.
