Dawn was having trouble with her sewing. Not the actual mechanics of it, she’d been sewing for so many years now she could do it with her eyes closed-once she got going. Once she could thread the damned needle. A memory of Mr. Jay suddenly warmed her. He’d grumbled many times about his failing eyesight, spitting and cursing good-naturedly every time he had to put his glasses on to read up close. The faces he made!
“Jay!” she scolded, looking over her work, catching a glimpse of her grandson rolling off the old giant’s massive ribcage. “You be careful now. Arthur’s not a hill made of sand and twigs!” She shook her head.
The circus giant winked gleefully at her, giggled and kicked his legs up as the boy climbed onto him again. The six-year-old howled like a warrior, brandishing a kill-flower he had made out of sticks. He charged into Arthur’s arms. Dawn’s warning would go unheeded again.
“Lord!” she hissed, a smile appearing on her face as the thread finally slipped through the eye. Under her breath she said, “Foolish old and young you men.”
A pang settled on her heart a moment but was soothed by young Jay’s laughter. Her Jeremy had been just such a fool. Then a blush struck her features. “A romantic fool,” she chuckled, remembering their early courtship and eventual union. They’d had five kids together before the radiation sickness killed him. Arthur and the other workers had warned the people to stay clear of the lands to the south, and the salvage party had. One worker, an old fellow named Marcus, said the wind might have been playing inland that day. Must have carried dust or worse. And there were places that hadn’t been looked at yet, or mapped, where some of the foreign bombs might have fallen.
But Jeremy and the rest of the salvage party had got the radiation poison bad, and they died none too gently-some of them with their skin peeling off like a leper’s.
Dawn’s heart sank momentarily before being cheered out of the darkness by the boy and the giant. They were singing now, where they lay in the grass with the sun beaming down.
Still, life at the new start was hard, and radiation wasn’t the only thing ready to make an early death of you. There were sicknesses aplenty, and infections. Not to mention the rigors of childbirth.
She was no stranger to it. Indeed, Dawn had turned out to be the First-mother. When life started again and the forever kids got growing, it was just a matter of time before the babies started, and it took a lot of time. Dawn even beat the older girls, but once the first one came, it was a downpour for all. Sadly, she counted many of her friends lost or badly injured in that unwelcome process. And there was only so much the workers could teach, and only so much that they knew. There weren’t enough to go around and serve and warn and protect all the people.
Dawn herself was forty-five years in the new counting. That was, the counting when she started growing up again, like all the other kids did. And she was doing what she could to pass on the knowledge she’d got from all the others. That’s what old Arthur had told them, and the other workers too.
They weren’t going to be around forever, so the young ones would have to take their places and teach the next generations and beyond. It was clear to all the people that the workers were worried about “backsliding” as Arthur called it.
“Can’t have you survive and then lose everything,” he’d told her one evening over a cup of mint tea. “Of course, that’s not so bad in some cases. There’s things I’m sure we could leave behind.” Then he’d gotten solemn, “Not to suggest I’m in agreement with old Solomon.”
Solomon was a worker who wasn’t happy with the old ways and disagreed with the other workers teaching the people how to live and to remember the days of old. Solomon thought the world was given a new start, now that the old gods were dead, and the best thing the people could do was to forget what was past. He was so worked up about it that he convinced other workers and caused quite a rift at Nurserywood. Finally, he led a good third of the people away-those that agreed, and he said they were going to go to the north and west and build lives based on the world not on the mind.
Since then, little word came of Solomon or those who followed him. Salvage groups and hunters said they saw people on the path ahead from time to time but there was no one there when they arrived.
Arthur thought the whole thing was stupid. “Going back to nature just leaves you standing there with your ass hanging out,” he’d said with humor. “And I’m an Indian, I should know. The way of people is progress. If you ain’t there. God help you when those who are come.” He’d always end his tirade with the same thing: “It’s a free country!” He’d shrug. “I just wish they hadn’t stole my native history books.”
Of course, he was none too happy about some of the other teaching either. One of the workers started using a book of Bible stories to teach the people how to read. That was innocent enough, but some among them were religious or had become so during their years of hiding, and they got great comfort out of reading the books and talking about the stories. It wasn’t long before some of the people were meeting to read the books and to talk about their meaning.
“We don’t need any missionaries either,” Arthur had puffed on more than one occasion. “And I’m an Indian, I should know. Religion’s the last thing you people need-goes over you like a freight train.”
Dawn was never entirely sure of all of Arthur’s references, and she’d been so busy learning about the ways of going forward, that there was little time to focus on anybody else’s past.
Thinking about Arthur’s talk usually got her thinking about Mr. Jay. A strange feeling went through her then, or it was a friendly warmth heated up with loss. A heaviness clutched her features momentarily, but passed into a smile. No one ever saw Mr. Jay again. The last glimpse Dawn ever got was of him riding across the burning plains caught in desperate conflict with the pale rider.
And never after their travel north to Nurserywood, or in the first years as the aging started.
They’d never seen him again.
She and Old Arthur talked about Mr. Jay a lot and wondered what had become of him. The giant had always liked him. He said he’d first met the magician at Nurserywood not long after he’d arrived with the treasure. “He was circus folk if I ever met one,” Arthur had laughed. “Through and through a performer.”
And Dawn remembered him and missed him every day of her life. Lots when she first got back to Nurserywood, and even more when she realized she was starting to grow up. More and more she missed him when she grew in size and then lots again when her body changed into a woman’s. And when she hooked up with Jeremy, and she’d missed Mr. Jay so much when she’d had her first baby, a boy she named “Jay.” And she’d missed him, really missed him like hope and dreams and life when the little fellow died of a lung infection his first winter. And she missed her old friend like warmth and fire as she knelt in the snow, or on the earth, staring sadly at her little baby’s grave.
But something in his memory kept her going, and kept her trying. He had a way of turning things upward, of calling attention to brighter days ahead. And so she missed him when her kids Eliza, Boone, Thorn and Jeannie were born. And missed him some every day as they grew and enjoyed success and weathered storms, and started having kids of their own. And now Dawn only missed Mr. Jay a little bit every day, but she missed him.
And she hoped that he was safe. Or that if something took him that it had happened quick and with little pain. And if that was the case, she hoped he was getting lots of rest in the world beyond. Because she hoped that’s what waited there for her.
But most of all, when she was up to watch the sunrise, or getting kids settled in as it set, she hoped he’d come back some day.