Page 177 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Benjamin, if you’d just—”

“I said don’t tell me what to think.” He took the bucket over to an empty glass pitcher on the counter and poured the water from the bucket into it. “Quit trying to needle around in my head.”

“That’s not what I’m doing. I’m just thinking of the baby. That’s all.”

She watched his gaze tick down to the subtle swell of her abdomen. When she’d first told him she was pregnant, he’d argued that it wasn’t his—that it could belong to any of the men in Calvary, including Clyde Pelham, Benjamin’s drinking buddy and all-around lout. Because Benjamin possessed such little comprehension of human biology, he had claimed the differences in their age—she was nineteen, he was thirty-seven—only added to the improbability. Zarah had sworn that she hadn’t been with anyone but him—and this was true—butBenjamin hadn’t wanted to hear it. Like some obstinate child, he’d fled the house and stayed gone for several days. Not even Pelham knew where he’d gone (or if he did, he hadn’t said). Zarah cried about it the entire time, but then, just as she grew determined to not shed another tear on old Benjamin Lewis, he had returned. Yes, reeking of alcohol, but proffering a bouquet of freshly picked wildflowers, and with something akin to an apology on his lips.

“You know how concerned I’ve been,” she said, running a hand along the slight protrusion of her abdomen. “With everything we’ve seen this past year.” And she turned and glanced back out the window.

“You want to believe in some voodoo witchcraft magic nonsense, that’s on you.” He dragged the bucket off the counter so that it made an unpleasant scraping sound. “But that fella coming here tonight, he’s just a man, regular as me.”

“Will you at least meet with us? Hear him speak?”

He carried the bucket back across the room, his heavy boots thudding mutely on the hardwood floor. The spilled droplets of water, to Zarah, looked like some celestial constellation. Or maybe a coded message for her to decipher.

“I won’t be part of it,” he said, and a moment later, he was out of the house.

Zarah drifted back toward the window in time to see him moving down the road with his bucket. He walked with his head down, as if he needed to keep an eye on his feet to make sure they took him where he needed to go. Did she love Benjamin Lewis? She thought she had, back when they’d started. Or maybe it was just a lack of available men in Calvary that had made him seem so appealing at the time. But love or not, his presence in her life—as cursory as it could be sometimes—would make raising a baby easier.

Ifthe baby comes, she thought, and her gaze drifted from the road to the field behind the house.

To the rows upon rows of tiny wooden crosses.

2

They had come for him like cowboys in an old Western: on horseback, carrying long guns, and with some half-assed Conestoga wagon hitched to a pair of piebald thoroughbreds. Jacob Cree stood from the railway station bench where he’d been sitting for over an hour and raised a hand above his head in a wave. The horses and wagon drew to a stop, and a couple of men dropped down from their steeds and ambled over to greet him.

Jacob shook both their hands.

“Good to meet you, Mr. Cree.”

“Please, call me Jacob.”

“Well, I’m Ted Lomm,” said the fellow with the large, white, push-broom mustache. He jerked a thumb at his companion, a scarecrow-thin gentleman with bloodshot eyes and a bad complexion. “This here’s Mitchell Detroit.”

An odd name, Jacob mused. He had heard of people changing their surnames to reflect where they’d once come from, but also, he knew, in an effort to obfuscate who they’d once been. These men both had long guns propped on their shoulders.

“Those are some beautiful horses,” Jacob said, looking past the guns.

Ted glanced over his shoulder at the horses, as if just noticing them for the first time, then turned back to Jacob. “We got cars, of course, but we’re stingy with the gasoline.”

“We got power, too,” Mitchell said, and not without a boastful tone to his voice. “Hooked into a local substation, and we’re fortunate to have folks who know how to make it work.”

“Wonderful,” Jacob said, smiling at the men.

“Anyway,” said Ted, “I’m sorry about the wait. Few of the fellas ate some bad egg salad or something and caught a case of the oopsies, if you know what I mean.”

Mitchell hung his head, giving himself up as one of the unfortunates.

Ted pointed to the suitcase at Jacob’s feet—a simple black clamshell covered in scuffs and scratches. “That all you’re taking?”

“I travel light,” said Jacob.

Ted reached down to pick up the suitcase for him, but Jacob quickly said, “That won’t be necessary,” and snatched up the suitcase by its handle before the man could touch it.

They helped him up into the wagon, and then they were off, traveling first through a sodden field, then an expanse of blacktop, where the horses’ hooves clopped sharply on the asphalt, then finally across a rutted dirt roadway that ran parallel to a large body of water, which Jacob understood to be the Chesapeake Bay.

Jacob’s only companion in the back of the wagon during this journey was a very large man with the smooth, hairless face of a child. He was seated on a bench opposite Jacob. His age was indeterminable, and when he spoke, it was in a volume just barely above a whisper.