The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [119]
All of them will age, and all of them will have to leave, and then my town, my house, will be free of their kind, the easy-speaking ones. I cannot fathom another outcome.
Now the little gate opens and out they come, dazed and already ill. No doubt they will not live long, unless they can quickly adapt to the laws of the speechless world.
Hide yourself away, is one of these laws.
And, If you see someone, goes another one, exercise the necessary evasions.
The laws apply because I am not the only person hidden in these hills watching the exits. I am not the only one with an interest in these young people.
There are others like me, but they are not really like me. Escorts, predators, parents. So many different words might apply to them.
I’ve seen them rush to meet the exiles, using a mixed weaponry of kindness and cruelty. A gracious welcome, the offer of a blanket, a comfortable ride in a cart. Or instead a quick capture, a stifling, the enclosure of rope, an abduction. From my distance these transactions play out slowly, without feeling. They suffer from problems of believability.
The rescuers move alone or in groups, faces covered, and most often their lure is food, which our little speakers have had trouble securing. The exiles hardly ever resist. They get so hungry! They are still children, really, and they are sick, but now they are alone. So when the welcome wagon comes, they climb in.
Off they go with their new families to a life without words somewhere west of here. That is how they compass, usually, west, then south. Probably they go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville. I’ve been too bored to follow them beyond Albert Farm. They almost never drag back this way, into the salt, where nothing is good for anything and nobody would ever think to set up a life.
Perhaps the mute, gazeless family life in underground berms, where even eye contact must be kept in check for its lurches into nuance and meaning, is more pleasant in the sunshine of our warmer towns. Perhaps the salt is finer there, easier to sweep away.
Now that Esther has come to me, or I to her, as the case was, fighting off some rescuer waving sugary hunks of bread at her, then dragging her by spoiled light through the marsh, over the river, and up to the hut, I have little reason to keep watch of the town gate. I’ve gotten what I came for. My daughter is back in my custody. But sometimes I sit under cover in any case, hills away, watching these exits through binoculars. It’s a habit of years.
Over time people either gave up on the children harbored within, or the children came out of their own accord, contrite and quiet. If the parents were lucky, they got to them before anyone else did. But what they did next, where they went and what happened after they arrived, what those people actually did with their days when silence was enforced by the speech fever, that information is not available to me. I refuse to make up stories about such people. To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
Too many nights, hiding in the brush, I’ve lost track of time during my observational work and found it too dark to return to the hut. I’ve spent sunless hours dug in against some low hillside, forcing from myself an artificial laughter to keep warm. You’ve heard of laughter in the hills. This is all it is. It’s no mystery and nothing is funny. Just a person like me, pulsing sound and breath through his body, trying to stay warm.
I’ve lived these winters before, speechless, waiting. They bring one too close to the doings of one’s own mind, some of which—I finally believe this—must remain unheard, must have their meaning amputated until they’re reduced to babble. A careful listener to such interior speech