Scarecrow

Garnet woke me at a quarter to five.

She was standing beside the big bed in the dark in her coat, with her boots on the wrong feet and her hair in a wild cloud, holding the hairbrush out to me with both hands.

”It’s today,” she said.

The filter hadn’t even woken yet. I lay there and looked at her.

”The bakery,” said Garnet, as if I might have forgotten. ”Six o’clock. You leave at eight. That’s two hours. That’s enough.”

I’d said I would take her. Last night, on the rug, with her head on my knees. I’d forgotten I’d said it by the time I fell asleep.

She hadn’t.

I sat up. At five, in the corner of the room, the filter woke, and began to hum. Garnet turned and looked at it, and smiled, the way you’d smile at an old dog.

Then I brushed her hair. Ends first. Then up.

Miss Pell was in the kitchen when we came through. Already dressed, in her gray, with her gray hair pinned, as if she never slept at all. She was standing in front of Father’s wall with a cup of tea, looking at it.

She looked at us. At Garnet’s boots.

”Wrong feet,” she said.

Garnet looked down, and went red, and sat on the floor to change them.

”Where are you going?” said Miss Pell. To me.

”The ring street,” I said. ”The bakery. Term number—” I couldn’t remember.

”Page two,” said Miss Pell. ”I’ve read them.” She put down her cup. ”I’ll come.”

I looked at her.

”You’re leaving at eight,” said Miss Pell. ”She’ll need someone to walk her home. And you’ll want to know whether I’m the sort of person who’d report this to the Director.” She took her coat off the hook by the door. ”I’m not. But I’d like you to see that for yourself.”

The ring street at half past five was a different street.

The shops were dark. The pavements were empty. The lamps along the curve of it were still lit, gold, and the light from them lay in long pools on the pale stone. Overhead, the dome was going from black to gray, very slowly. Somewhere a cart was being pulled, and the sound of its wheels came round the curve a long time before it did.

We walked. The three of us. Garnet holding my hand, half running to keep up. Miss Pell on her other side, straight and silent, her heels clicking on the stone.

I kept looking at the street. At the curve of the wall to our left, the great gray inside of the dome, rising up into the dark. At the doors set into it, every few hundred yards. All of them shut.

We passed one that was bigger than the others. Enormous. As tall as ten houses, streaked with rust.

Garnet slowed.

”Those are the east locks,” said Miss Pell quietly.

We stopped. Garnet looked up at them for a long time.

This was where they’d stood. Fifty of them, at six in the morning, with their bags and the soldiers on either side with their rifles across their chests. A girl of twenty with a half-knitted sock in her pocket.

”Was it like this?” said Garnet. ”When Mama left? Empty?”

”I don’t know,” said Miss Pell. ”I wasn’t here.” A pause. ”I’d left the dome by then. I was working at an outpost in the north. I heard about it a week later, on the radio.” She looked at the doors. ”I’m sorry, Garnet. I don’t know.”

Garnet nodded slowly. She looked at the doors a little longer.

Then she turned around, and looked back the other way, across the street.

And there it was.

The light was on.

The shutter was up. The dark green door was shut, but there was a light behind the wide front window, warm and yellow, and someone was moving in it. Back and forth, past the glass.

We crossed the street.

The window was empty still. Just bare wooden shelves, scrubbed clean. But through the glass, at the back of the shop, there was a doorway, and through the doorway there was a room full of light and heat, and someone in it was pulling something out of a great black oven with a long wooden paddle.

The smell came out under the door.

Garnet stood in front of the window with her nose almost touching the glass. She didn’t say anything. She breathed it in. She closed her eyes.

The clock on the wall inside said five to six.

We waited.

At six o’clock exactly, a woman came out of the back room carrying a tray. She was older than Mother. Fifty, maybe, round and solid, with flour to the elbows and her hair tied up in a cloth. She set the tray down and began to put the loaves in the window, one at a time, with her hands. Round. Golden-brown. Cracked across the top.

The steam came up off them and fogged the glass.

Garnet made a very small sound.

The woman in the window looked up.

She saw Garnet first. A little girl in a coat, with her nose an inch from the glass and her hair brushed and her eyes enormous, standing in the empty street at six in the morning looking at the bread.

The woman smiled.

Then she saw me, standing behind Garnet, and the smile stopped.

I watched her know me. The way the people on the street knew me. She’d seen the crater. Everyone had. And I was the size I was, and I looked the way I looked, and there was nobody else in the dome it could be. Her hands went still on the tray.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

I thought she’d turn around. I thought she’d go back through the doorway into the hot bright room and pull the shutter down. I’d half expected it since the moment I said yes on the rug last night. I didn’t blame her. The whole dome was afraid of me. I’d started to count on it, like the floor.

She looked at me. Then she looked down at Garnet again.

Garnet waved.

The woman stood there for one more moment, with a loaf in each hand.

Then she put them down, and wiped her hands on her apron, and came to the door, and opened it.

A bell rang over the door. A small brass one, on a curl of iron. The sound went out into the empty street.

The woman stood in the doorway with flour on her arms, and looked at Garnet, and then up at me, and then at Miss Pell.

”We don’t open till half past,” she said. Her voice was low and careful. ”But you’d better come in. You’ll catch your death out there.”

There was no death to catch on the ring street. The air was the same warm clean air as everywhere in the dome. I think she knew that. I think it was just the thing you said.

We went in.

It was small inside. Smaller than our kitchen at home. A wooden counter, worn pale in the middle where a hundred thousand hands had rested on it. Shelves behind it, empty still. The doorway to the back, and the heat coming through it like breath, and the smell. It filled the whole shop. It filled my whole head. Warm and alive and brown, like the inside of a loaf of bread, which is what it was.

Garnet stood in the middle of the floor and turned slowly round, breathing it.

”I’m Margaret Thorne,” said the woman. ”Meg.” She wiped her hands again, though they were already clean. ”You’re the Dask boy.”

”Lucas.”

”Lucas,” she said. She looked at me a moment longer. Then she looked at Garnet. ”And who’s this?”

”Garnet,” said Garnet. ”Dask. It’s a stone. A red one.” She pointed at the window. ”My mama used to look at your bread. When she was a girl. In a line, holding hands. She said the steam came up on the glass.”

Meg Thorne went very still.

”Your mother,” she said.

”Dorothy,” said Garnet. ”She was in the orphan hall. She was on the posters. She held up a tank.”

The woman’s hand had found the edge of the counter. She held on to it.

From the back room, past the doorway with the heat in it, an old voice said, ”Meg? Who is it?”

He was sitting in a chair by the big black oven, where it was warmest. A very old man. Small and bent, with thin white hair and a blanket over his knees, and hands that lay on top of the blanket all knotted and spotted and still. His eyes were pale and clouded. He turned his face toward the doorway, toward the sound of us, but I could see he couldn’t make us out.

”Dad,” said Meg Thorne. She’d gone to him and put her hand on his shoulder. Her voice was very careful. ”It’s the Dasks. Trevor and Dorothy’s children.”

The old man didn’t say anything.

His face didn’t change. It was too old to change quickly. But his hands, on the blanket, began to move. Slowly. Closing. As if he were holding on to something.

”Dorothy’s,” he said.

”Yes,” said Meg.

”Dorothy Ash. From the hall. With the medals.”

”Yes, Dad.”

The old man sat very still in his chair by the oven.

”I closed the door,” he said.

Nobody in the room moved.

”I closed the door,” said the old man again. His voice was thin and cracked, like paper. ”The morning they put them out. I was at the window with the bread. Six o’clock. And they were standing in the street, fifty of them, with their bags. And the soldiers. And she looked at me. Dorothy. She was the one who used to stand at the front of the line with the little ones and point at the loaves. And she looked straight at me, through the glass.” His hands were knotted together on the blanket. ”And I went inside and closed the door.”

Meg Thorne had her hand over her mouth.

”Every morning,” said the old man. ”Nineteen years. Every morning at six I put the bread in the window, and I see her standing there. Every single morning.” His clouded eyes were wet. ”I was frightened. They said she could tear a man in half with her mind. And the soldiers were there. And I had Meg, and Meg’s mother. And I was frightened.”

He was quiet for a moment.

”That’s all,” he said. ”That’s all it was. I was frightened, and I closed the door.”

I’d thought about this man.

More than I’d ever told anyone. Since the day Mother told me the story, with the photograph on the blanket and the yellow socks in my hand. He went back inside. And he closed the door. I’d thought about him on the flats with the hill coming apart in front of me, and the line of glass running toward the dome. I’d thought, an old man who closed his door, and something hot had come up in me, and I’d wanted—

I didn’t know what I’d wanted.

Not this. Not a man with clouded eyes and knotted hands in a chair by an oven, who’d put bread in the window every morning for nineteen years and seen her standing there.

There are children in that city now. And an old man who makes bread, who was frightened, and closed his door. That’s all he did.

Mother had known. She’d known, sitting in her bed by the stove, with the files spread across the blanket. She’d known exactly what he was.

Garnet let go of my hand.

She walked across the hot little back room, past the oven and the long wooden paddle and the trays of loaves, to the old man in his chair. She stood beside him for a moment. Then she reached out and put her hand on top of his knotted ones on the blanket.

He startled at the touch. His clouded eyes went down toward her, not finding her.

”She’s alive,” said Garnet.

The old man went very still.

”Mama’s alive,” said Garnet. ”She was nearly dead, but she’s not. She’s in the Halcyon Tower on the sixtieth floor. She has a wheelchair. She hates it.” She paused. ”She said the first time should be mine. Coming here. But she’s coming next time. I’ll bring her.”

The old man’s mouth worked. Nothing came out.

”And I came to say thank you,” said Garnet.

”Thank you,” he repeated. He didn’t understand.

”For the bread,” said Garnet. ”She looked at it every month when she was a little girl. In the line. She told us about it. It was the best thing she remembered about being little. The steam on the glass.” She squeezed his hands. ”So thank you. For making it. She said it looked so good.”

The old man sat in his chair by the oven, with a little girl’s hand on his, and cried.

Not loud. He was too old for loud. Just tears, running down into the lines of his face. Meg Thorne knelt down beside the chair and put her arms around him, and she was crying too. Miss Pell, in the doorway behind me, had turned her face away toward the empty shelves.

Garnet didn’t cry. She stood there and held his hands, and waited, very patiently, the way Mother had taught Genny to wait, the way Father had taught me. Until he was done.

We left at a quarter to seven, with a loaf of bread wrapped in brown paper in Garnet’s arms. Meg Thorne wouldn’t take any money. Not that I had any.

”Come back,” she said, at the door, with the little brass bell ringing over her head. She was looking at Garnet. ”Six o’clock. Any morning. The first loaf out of the oven’s yours.”

”Every morning?” said Garnet.

”Every morning,” said Meg Thorne. ”For as long as there’s a Thorne in this shop.”

Garnet looked at her very seriously. Then she nodded, once, the way Genny did when something had been settled.

We walked back along the ring street. The shops were opening. People were coming out onto the pavements. They stopped when they saw me. A woman pulled her little boy behind her skirt.

Garnet didn’t wave this time. She was holding the bread in both arms, against her chest, with her face buried in the top of it, breathing.

Miss Pell walked beside me in silence for a long time. Then she said, without looking at me, ”She’s very like your mother.”

Dr. Halloway had said it too, in the hospital. And Mother, about Genny. Everyone in this dome seemed to see her in one of us.

”Everyone says that,” I said.

”Everyone is right,” said Miss Pell. ”I didn’t report this, by the way.” She glanced at me sidelong. ”I thought you’d like to know.”

I looked down at Garnet, walking between us, with the bread.

The first loaf out of the oven. Every morning. For as long as there was a Thorne in the shop.

In an hour and a quarter, a car would come for me.

I held Garnet’s free hand all the way home, and didn’t let go of it until the lift doors opened on the sixtieth floor and Mother was there, waiting in her chair, and Garnet ran to her with the bread.