Lost Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

consumed by fire or water, a long ragged band of orange light raging above the broken seawalls, the drowned streets, a mist of steam. Her aunt back there somewhere. On the barge with her, a small horde of survivors huddled under canvases, prone on the metal deck. A woman shaking with quiet sobs. A man sedated out of his head, still groaning on every pull of the saw that was taking off his right leg above the knee. A banjo and mandolin, two voices high and loose, their throats too smoky to get it quite right.
    Oh Katy dear, go ask your mama
    If you can be a bride of mine.
    If she says yes, come back and tell me.
    If she says no, we’ll run away.
    She was a glass jar dropped from a great height, then. No putting back together the past that had scattered from her head. Her life began again in that minute on the Chesapeake Bay, in ash and strained song. But her life before is back there somewhere, in the miles of her childhood before the war. Picnic tables rough from winter after winter. A biting insect clinging to a tree. Ankle-deep in a creek in early spring, her toes frozen already. A friend standing there with her, grimacing. You get out first. No, you. It all matters, it has to, even if she cannot remember it.
    She became a guerrilla as soon as she could. Ascended through the ranks of the resistance until she was a field commander, ever in the calm land a mile or two ahead of the front. She learned to smell it, feel it, as animals sense weather, when it wavered and flexed. Spared some towns and destroyed others. She was ahead of it all through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Knew what it meant when she got the orders to march to Harrisburg and settle in. They were going to be there a while, she thought, anyone could have guessed it. But she could even see it, in the way the city sat on the riverbank. The steps to the water. The bridges thrown across it, the stone arcades of their arches. A fortress already. The war would be fought in alleys. Window by window. Entire battles hinged on the turn of a staircase.
    She met Aline a month before Harrisburg, after hearing about her two months before. The battle of Cumberland. Horses on fire, screaming, their manes trailing stripes of smoke. The resistance could never have turned the army back—it was ten to one—but they made them bleed for every brick of that old city in the steep valley, left them a smaller thing. The wounded lying under open sky in the shadow of the clock tower. Masonry cracked by concussion. Nothing to show for all that death.
    “Somehow I thought you’d be taller,” Aline said.
    “Funny. I thought the same about you.”
    They both laughed, as if they were twins. Except that Grendel never knew what to do with Sunny Jim, that wraith of a man. Their son under his arm, straining to run, the father refusing to set him free. It’s not you, it’s this, he said to his boy. All this. When the war is over, as soon as it’s done, I’ll let you go.
    Sunny Jim turned the envelope over in his hand, eyed the stain running along its back. The folded paper inside pushing lines into its skin. As if Grendel Jones always knew it would come to this, the day they met.
    “Why didn’t you ever fight?” Grendel said.
    “I didn’t believe in it.”
    “Fighting.”
    “No. Just this war.”
    “Well, believe it. Because where you’re going? It’s going to get worse.”
    He knew that. He could feel it sometimes, in the dark. The front’s gigantic edge, its claws, rusty and broken, tearing up the hide of the world. He had heard how it was along the highway from Wilkes-Barre to Scranton. Seen the debris in the Susquehanna. Tatters of clothes. A pair of eyeglasses. There were days that the river had changed color—bright orange, luminous purple—and he had thought of his boy and Merry, alone in the family house, almost two hundred miles upriver. The front howling behind the horizon to the south. And then the Big One coming in. When they were children, he remembered, his