C.R.A.G.
I’m 24, a strong, healthy male with thick blond hair and stubborn pragmatism inherited from my father; hazel eyes and optimistic curiosity from my mother. I recently completed a graduate degree in sociology with an environmental concentration. My mother and I are cut from the same cloth, holding a rare faith in the good of mankind and a compelling need to nurture and harvest that faith. Soon we’ll collaborate on a research project with global implications. It will lead to a PhD for me, and hopefully, someday, a better world for everyone.
My real life is about to begin. - Journal entry, June 2012
It’s the end of September, still warm, the mid-Atlantic sun lingering. Later many people will wish they had gathered and stored the acorns that snap and crumble under foot. Now they are a nuisance, covering the driveways, littering patios, drifting into crevices in the concrete and staining surfaces an ugly, tobacco brown wherever the nuts are crushed. I sweep them off our back patio daily, marginally aware of the distant hum of traffic on I-40. Months ago, the university announced on its agricultural website that 2013 would be a bad year for acorns. Wrong. We’re inundated with the small, hard nuggets and even the squirrels seem overwhelmed with the task at hand. My mother, a government biologist and plant specialist, follows such events with rare passion. In not so many months, the ghosts of discarded subsistence will haunt us.
*
The exact moment it happened never does become clear, although we try at first to pin it down to a week, a day, an hour in our formerly comfortable lives. We discuss it over a candlelit dinner. We’re eating fish and potatoes and not understanding the importance of that. When did the first subtle warning appear? My older brother says it was the day our electricity went off, and on, and then off again. I say no, it was the morning we first heard on the television that all news channels were converting to one. My mother laughs ruefully and says it happened much earlier, even before the election. But when the helicopters – gaudy yellow dragonflies sporting black, menacing letters – become a daily occurrence, by that time, it’s already too late; too late to remember an exact moment, too late to backtrack. All we can do is hide during the day – curtains closed, no movement in the yard – and hope that today there will be electricity. Some days there is, others not. It’s all part of their plan, I believe, to keep us frantic and confused. At night we gather what wood we can find close by: broken branches from windy days, the odds and ends of carpentry projects abandoned in the back shed. Eventually we take the shelves and parts of rafters and studs in the shed, until our minds move the concept of firewood into the house, and we start to burn our furniture. We still have not burned any books. My mother says we never will, that someday some of us will be able to move forward. I don’t know.
“They would do anything, anything to survive.” My mother tells us this one night in November as we sit around the kitchen table, eating steamed millet and wild onions gathered in the back yard. My father is still with us, but already he has begun to look ill and withdrawn. Darwin sits close by my chair, his tail wagging but his serious brown eyes puzzled by this new, charged dinner atmosphere.
My mother loves history as much or more than science, and she tells me often that without keeping our history in mind, advances in technology and science are like grain without water. We cannot digest a science that hasn’t been soaked in the test of history, she says. The Jews of the Holocaust are one of her favorite subjects.
“They would hide in sealed rooms and eventually be forced to eat the wallpaper – for the paste, you know – even though it was dry and brittle, it held a tiny bit of nourishment. Sons would betray fathers, fathers their sons, for a bowl of weak broth.”
“Surely not everyone,” I say. “Surely some would just give up.”
“Yes, some would,” she answers, her eyes mirrors of sorrow. Or disapproval. I can’t tell which.
*
We haven’t had the Internet since two months after the election, and by December of this year Christian Nation News, the new CNN, is the only channel we can get besides Nickelodeon, the Food Network, and twenty-nine religious channels that are all right wing, all evangelical. We decide that Nickelodeon is to keep the children pacified, a faint and condescending concession, and The Food Network is to taunt us. The religious channels are to make us wish we had paid attention, my mother says. The Government Investigators, GI’s as they smugly call themselves, have come to our street three times to take what they please – first cars, then gas, radios, batteries, any guns and ammunition –leaving just enough to make us think there is a chance. Pairs of them in righteous, gray uniforms still walk through our neighborhoods several times a week. They are always heavily armed.
My mother and I seldom talk about our research anymore, the funding having been pulled out from under the project immediately after the election. For months she talked about it endlessly, making notes late into the night, buoying me with her enthusiasm and hope that the government would be overthrown, that the new, maniacal “God-chosen” queen bee and her court were not as invincible as she purported, that the religious masses were not as populous and ignorant of what was happening as we feared. Now my mother’s attention is captured daily by more urgent needs.
In January, my father has his first grand mal seizure while sitting on the sofa. We can’t risk taking him to a doctor, so we try to medicate him at home with aspirin and Vitamin C, for whatever good this will do. It’s all we have, and prescriptions can no longer be filled for those of us who are noncompliant. His Dilantin ran out weeks ago. His limbs jerk and his eyes roll back. I pull the small end table away from his head, remove a cup of coffee, let his spastic body run its course.
I suddenly remember, after the seizure is over. We have him cleaned up and calm again, covered with a blanket, the scent of urine still hanging in the air. Darwin cuddles next to him, short legs tucked out of sight, elongated Corgi body curved around my father’s hip. I recall how my mother started bringing home bottles of vitamin C long ago, before the election. I joked with her then, asking if she had some weird vitamin fetish. She laughed and said she liked to buy vitamins in bulk; it was cheaper that way, and they didn’t go bad if you stored the containers carefully. Along with gallons and gallons of filtered water, vitamin C gradually filled our large kitchen pantry. A short while after that, she started with unprocessed whole grains – millet, quinoa, wheat berries, spelt, amaranth, bulgur – and she bought a kitchen grain mill that cranked by hand. She converted my older brother’s empty room into a grain pantry, buying sacks of the whole grains on web sites, along with large cans of olive oil, gallons of honey, cartons of sea salt. She kept the house as cool as possible, the curtains drawn in the hot weather, open in the cold. That was before all mail halted and the only information we received came through Christian Nation News. Before the stores closed except for the Central Government Markets, where one cannot shop without a government-issued ID card. Just in time, she would say afterward.
*
It is July 4, 2014. At the dinner table we eat quinoa, soaked in a little water from our dwindling store. It has been weeks since we’ve had bread; we try to conserve the stack of firewood lining the living room wall. We ate too heartily in the beginning, thinking this would not last. Thinking someone with more resources would step forward, that the European countries, at least, would come to save us instead of falling into an economic and political morass and finally conceding under a carefully planned invasion manned by Special Forces. Our own, and those the military secretly trained on every continent. At least that’s what Christian Nation News tells us, and we have no information to say otherwise.
My older brother, who has moved in with us along with his wife and their ill planned eighteen-month-old baby, leans his elbows on the rounded edges of the dining room table and listens as my mother says what she wishes. She wishes she had filled a cellar to its rafters with canned foods, grains, and bottled water. And acorns. We should have saved all the acorns, she tells us. They can be made digestible. They can be soaked and made into flour. A cellar with a hidden entrance in the floorboards, she adds.
My brother laughs – a sharp, angry sound. “But we don’t have a cellar!”
My father, weak and propped in his chair with pillows, rouses slightly to give my brother a warning look.
My mother bursts into tears, the first time I have seen her cry since everything began to change. An image floods into my brain of me asking her long ago why she bought tuna packed in oil, instead of the tuna packed in spring water she had always favored. She answered, rather carelessly I thought, that it was good to keep a few high-caloric items around just in case someone got sick. We now have four cans of tuna left in the kitchen pantry. I wonder how long they will last.
My brother sighs and touches her arm gently.
“There are people, across the street, who may still have food. More than we have. I saw them carrying a basket of food into their house a week or two ago. We could borrow some, maybe late at night.”
My mother catches his meaning instantly and shakes her head, tears already drying on her pale cheeks.
“No. We don’t take anything from anyone else. We have grain left, and a little canned food.” My mother has always harbored a strong spiritual side despite being a rational scientist. She believes in karma.
“But you gave them most of what they have,” my brother says. “You gave away too much. All that bread and water, canned beans…Fuck!” He almost spits the last word.
“We can’t lose ourselves, our best selves.” Her voice is level and calm, as though he had never interrupted. “We mustn’t lose our humanness. Who knows what might happen next? After all, they’ve never physically attacked us. They’ve never stopped us from making a fire. They’ve not taken away everything yet.” But in her eyes, even though her lips form an entreating smile, I see deep sadness and doubt. She reaches for my father’s hand.
*
The black and yellow helicopters are droning over the neighborhood again. This intrusion is now daily, and the black letters C.R.A.G. – Christian Right Assembly of Governors – stand out against the yellow backgrounds like bold trespassers. At night the copters use spotlights and sweep our yards intermittently to watch for movement. Many of the houses are empty, residents having left to try their luck in other towns, moving in with reluctant relatives who can’t see how sharing food will improve anyone’s lot. We hear of these things through the community grapevine: a furtive word exchanged with a neighbor after dark, a note found jammed into a space between bricks by the back door.
Today, something new. There is an announcement blaring from the craft hovering over the yard two houses west of ours. A looping message distorted by the speaker from which it blares, but clear enough:
THE TIME IS NEAR. THE NEXT GATHERING IS SATURDAY. MEET AT THE GOVERNMENT MARKET NEAREST YOUR HOUSE. YOU MUST BRING THE ID CARD YOU HAVE BEEN ISSUED. THE TIME IS NEAR…
When Saturday comes, we will stay in our house with the curtains drawn. We will resist. We don’t know how many of us are left.
*
On the day my father dies, we don’t find his body until after the sun goes down. He spends his last days lying in the bedroom farthest from the kitchen-living room area, where the rest of us while away endless blocks of time playing mancala and chess, and reading. My brother, his wife, and I sometimes sleep by the living room fireplace in sleeping bags, even though it’s not cold yet. There’s some small comfort in being near each other. The baby sleeps beside my mother at night, back in the bedroom where my mother sleeps beside my father. We go to my father several times in the mornings and afternoons, to bring him a sip of water or a spoonful of soup made from the last packets of bouillon. I read to him and sing the old songs he sang to me when I was a child. He seems to listen occasionally, but his heart is no longer with us. In truth, he gave up long ago, shortly after the election when he remarked that this was long in coming, well planned, and that we couldn’t fight it. My mother had reacted angrily, and he answered her by saying, Remember Nixon. You don’t know your history, not really. Think about Nixon. We’ve all been stupid, inattentive. My father is always patient with my mother, even when she is upset and disagrees with him. For both of them, though, their intentions are born out of love.
At dusk, his body lies curled in on itself when my mother goes to him. His mouth is open, slack. His eyes are closed, which she later mentions with simple gratitude. He does not appear to have died seizing, but rather to have simply turned on his side, closed his eyes, and slipped away. I help her cover his face with the blanket; her shoulders shake with the grief of losing this man who she’s loved more than any other human being. I hold her close to me after we finally shut the bedroom door behind us. She sobs into my chest for long moments, and then pulls away.
“We have to figure what to do… what to do with his body. The neighborhood dogs will…”
I pull her back to me and hug her fiercely. “Later,” I say. “We’ll talk about it later.”
*
Two days later we find Darwin’s limp body on the kitchen floor in the early morning, his tail straight and joyless. It seems fitting, though sad. He was my father’s shadow. The following day, we hold a simple ceremony at two in the morning. We dig and dig behind the shed in half-moonlight until we have a rectangle roughly six feet deep. It takes my brother and me a long time – we must dig quietly, not an easy task. We’ve moved a pile of junk nearby: a broken wheelbarrow, rakes, a fertilizer spreader, empty gasoline cans, and metal sawhorses. Large oak trees hide our project from the sky.
In the midst of the digging, my mother, watching us, says in a flat voice that she is so hungry she can’t grieve properly. I glance at the small canine body on the grass next to my father’s. I think the unthinkable – we could eat Darwin. We could skin him and slice strips of flesh from his haunches. We could roast the meat in the fireplace. I try to feel the force of these thoughts, the wrongness of them, but nothing comes. I clench my jaws against the saliva that gathers, and I glance up at my brother’s face. Our eyes meet, but we say nothing. When we are finished digging, we gently lay the two bodies side by side. We shovel the loose dirt back in the grave and place all the junk carefully back in the same order, on top of the fresh dirt. Camouflage and weight to protect our dead. We do not sing or pray. Tears course down my mother’s cheeks in the silvered dark.
I whisper, “No.” The others don’t hear me.
As we go into the house, I notice an empty basket by the back door. It occurs to me it’s sometimes there and sometimes not there, and something is significant about that. My tired brain can’t remember why.
*
The September rains have begun, and we collect water any way possible. I place thin layers of rags inside empty cans to muffle the ping of the drops hitting metal. After a week, we have enough to soak four cups of grain and store some for drinking. All of us are thin now. My older brother’s former beer belly has become a cave. The baby’s cheeks have lost their fat nursing pouches, and her mother’s breasts are flat and empty. There are few acorns this year. We don’t know if it’s nature’s will, or if the weekly spraying done by the C.R.A.G. helicopters, aimed to thwart gardening attempts, also damages the oak trees.
The baby is crying in the middle of the night – wailing, really. A thin, pitiful sound. My sister-in-law has said it is good that she cries, that maybe the sound will penetrate the walls and drift to the neighbors’ ears, whatever neighbors are left. That maybe the neighbors will bring us food for the baby, who no longer shows much interest in walking. There was a time when she entertained us with her wobbly, lurching steps, a time when she seemed a large part of our hope. My brother doesn’t believe the neighbors will bring us anything; he believes they’ll loot our tiny supply of food if they get any chance.
We take turns guarding our house every night. Tonight it’s my turn, and I’m so tired I can hardly stay awake.
I wake sometime later, maybe near morning although there is no sign of dawn through the heavy curtains. I must have fallen into a deep sleep on my watch, and I was dreaming about Darwin. In the dream, he ran around and around my legs, happy and barking in excitement, and I held a basket of vegetables from the garden over one arm, and a tomato in the other hand, a bite missing and its rich red juice running between my fingers.
I listen now, sharply awake. There’s a slight sound somewhere in the house. I strain to hear more than my own breathing and the light drumming of rain on the roof. Then there is the muted click of a door opening, a rustle, and a faint pop followed by the sound of thin, scraping metal. I can’t wake the others, not yet. If the baby cries…
I silently rise to my feet, and I reach in the dark for the thick wooden baseball bat leaning against the fireplace. Someone has become desperate and careless enough to break in. I try not to think about which neighbors had guns and might somehow have hidden one from the GI’s. I think instead of my brother’s baby, of my mother becoming frail and resigned, of my father in the poorly-dug grave under an oak tree behind the shed. I make a mental note of what is left in the pantry as I inch toward the kitchen. Water, a gallon container half full of the grain we ration each day, and one remaining can of tuna fish that my mother is saving for the baby. I slide my free hand lightly, cautiously, along the wall to keep my bearings as I move forward. The tile floor, thankfully, cannot creak, does not betray me. I find now, as I round the corner, that morning is almost here. The oblong of night in the kitchen window is fading to gray, casting just enough new light to outline the floor where our table and chairs used to be before they fed our fires. Tipped on its side, the baby’s jack-in-the-box shines faintly in front of the useless stove. I stop, letting my eyes continue to adjust, and see that the pantry door is partway open, a rectangle of white painted wood and its brass knob shielding whatever is waiting for me on the other side. I listen and raise the baseball bat above my right shoulder, gripping it hard with both hands as I sidle around the edge of the door, my breathing fast, my heart racing and sick with the knowledge of what I’m about to do.
I face the opening squarely, legs planted, the wood of the bat throbbing in my hands. My lips let go a wretched “uhh…,” a syllable laden with disbelief and more, and my grip loosens. There she is, bare legs splayed on the pantry floor, the can of tuna held under her chin to catch any drops of the rich oil it’s packed in. She does not speak. Daylight has snaked its way farther into the kitchen, illuminating the face that now turns on me and locks stares with mine. She is licking her lips and chewing slowly, temples pulsing with each thrust of her jaws. My mother’s eyes glitter in the half dark, glitter with some new and fearsome quality. I know it is not shame.
Bio: Cathy Kodra, a native New Yorker, now lives, writes, and edits in Knoxville, TN. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are pending publication in Tar Wolf Review, Main Channel Voices, Birmingham Arts Journal, New Millennium Writings, Roanoke Review, The Common Ground Review, The Medulla Review, Still Crazy and others. Cathy is a contributing editor for New Millennium Writings. When not reading, writing, gardening, or cooking, she teaches adult education.