Into the Forest by Hegland Jean

Author:Hegland, Jean [Hegland, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Published: 2009-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

The next afternoon Eli and I were again lying together inside the stump. We had just finished making love and were lolling in that languorous afterwards, dozing and teasing, and smiling vaguely past the charred walls to the breeze-blown sky. I had my head on his chest and was listening to the sure, firm pumping of his heart.

But at some point my lethargy vanished like mist in the morning sun, and I sat up to face him, to watch him tell me that all our waiting was finally over. Because back East, he said—around Boston—things have started up again. He said they have electricity back there. The phones work. People have jobs. There’s food in the stores.

“How do you know?” I asked, teetering between delight and disbelief.

“A friend of my uncle’s told us.” “He’s been back there?”

“He’s been to Sacramento. He just came back last week.”

“But how—”

“When he was on his way home, he met a man, and they walked most of the way together. This guy had family up by Grantsville somewhere. Anyway, he must have liked Charlie because just before they got to Redwood, he told him all about it, said he was on his way home to get his family and take them back to Boston before next winter.”

The man from Grantsville had said that for a while things were awful back East, even worse than they ever got here. The rioting was horrible, and it seemed that gangs were providing the only order there was. Many, many people died from starvation or exposure or disease. But Eli said that has all run its course by now. He said the people who are left are living like kings.

They’re rebuilding Boston. They’ve established a temporary government and set up a system to allow people to file claims on the deserted buildings if they will agree to repair and occupy them. Boston is a boomtown. But those who are already there are trying to keep it all quiet. Eli said, “If the whole country heard about it, Boston would be mobbed. That’s why Charlie walked a hundred miles with this guy before he said a word because everyone who hears is bound to pack up and head east.”

“It’s the Gold Rush in reverse!” I said, leaping up. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

He grinned, elbowed himself to his feet. “I had to find out who you were first.”

“What do you mean? Who am I?”

“The woman I want to go with me.”

Even standing naked in front of him, with the leavings of our love beginning to drip from me onto the forest humus, it came as a shock to hear him call me a woman.

“What do you mean?” I repeated.

“I want you to come with me.”

At those words some flat, empty thing inside me inflated like a new lung. I wanted him to stop, to luxuriate in that, to celebrate—with me—what he had just said. But he raced on.

“We’ve got to start soon,” he said, “so we don’t end up spending the winter someplace in South Dakota.

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