Afterlands Read Online Free PDF

the funeral of a child who shared our suffering and all but died with us. And I have no amends to make.
    As they walk in silence on this road even the tiniest stone has its shadow. For a moment, their stride rhythms merging, they’re in step.
    Still, Tyson says softly, the weather is a true mercy. It’s a harder thing to watch a body laid in frozen sod.
    Ah, poor Punnie! Kruger exclaims.
    That’s it for a while. At last Tyson ventures, I do recall how you would often play with her and the other children on the ship. … German games, were they not?
    Children’s games are children’s games. Leave your borders and uniforms out of it.
    Tyson bolts a look at him and then down at his own moving, side-striped trousers. You think a life without uniforms is possible, Kruger? How naïve that is of you. Who would protect our settlers under threat in the West? Who kept this country together, North and South, and emancipated the slaves?
    I didn’t suppose you would come, says Kruger.
    I shared their snowhut, Kruger.
    Yes, and expressed disgust over Tukulito’s housekeeping in your book. Also her habits. I didn’t suppose you would dare coming. You disgraced her too. Disgraced everyone but yourself.
    You retain a special concern for her, I see.
    Ah, and you not? Kruger’s smile is chilling. You can go to hell.
    Tyson holds his composure. Slowly and earnestly self-educated, he feels awkward around the Educated, easily outmanoeuvred, an elephant trying to stamp on a panther. In fact Kruger has little more real schooling than Tyson—who as an orphan went to work in a Newark foundry, then escaped to sea—but Kruger is from a once-bourgeois family with bookish leanings, and his manner on the ice provoked Tyson sorely. But he had to harden himself to insolence out there, where at first the foreign crewmen were armed and he was not, and he desperately hoped to avoid mutiny and get the lot of them home.
    The book was a journal, Kruger. We were all of us fighting to survive. Surely you felt moments of disgust with the men of your snowhut?
    You said that your journal was lost—there in your prologue it said so, that you had to re-complete it from a few notes. You scarcely took any time at it, either. There were as many stories as there were castaways but you fed yours to the public first. They ate their fill, then they left the mess-hall. You received my letter?
    You could hardly have expected a reply. You seemed to be hoping for pistols at dawn, in Central Park.
    Kruger actually laughs. Damn lucky for you there was none of that. I seem to be increasingly unkillable. The polar seas couldn’t manage it and last week also the East River failed.
    I’ve no idea at all what you’re saying.
    But you ought to, you above all! On the ice I kept you alive. Count Meyer wanted a war. There was that time also, the one night when you were about—
    Tyson stops, stamps his foot on the road and cries, God damn it, man, have you really come to the funeral of this poor child just to chastise me? I kept you alive. I was your ranking officer. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten our last weeks out there!
    Kruger stares from under his hat-brim, arms stiff at his sides. For a moment it seems he is trying to nerve himself to draw a weapon from his packed pockets. Well, he says finally, I shall be leaving here—then looks down at his scuffed but polished boots, dusty now, and turns and walks up the road. It takes Tyson a moment to realize that he means he will be leaving the area, perhaps the country, not merely the spot where he was standing.
    Tyson walks the rest of the way behind Kruger, who gradually pulls ahead. They pass a grey farmhouse set back in a stubble field. A clutch of crows peers up in silence from a furrow where something intriguing lies out of sight. In a woodlot there’s a teetering rank of headstones, like a frozen demonstration of the force of gravity; Tyson’s sharp eye distinguishes a date brought out by the sun’s last rays, maybe