Exit Kingdom

And so he drives and fills the space with uttered words and makes his way back into the mountains where the sun is cresting up over the horizon when he finds the place where the small path winds up into the woods. He climbs out of the car and listens to the morning birdsong and draws the icy cold deep into his lungs where it might purify him.

He climbs the path between the trees and sees the cabin ahead of him. It is dawn, and the light casts long shadows on the snow. He does not know what he will find in the cabin, whether he will find his brother alive or dead. Abraham said he could last it. It’s true – he said those words – but life can be a tricksy thing itself. Sometimes it just runs away from out between your grasping hands.

Moses does not know what he will find as the cabin comes into sight. But what he does not expect to see, sitting there on the collapsing front porch and drinking something from a steaming mug, is a man who is not his brother.

*

It’s the doctor, Peabody, from Fletcher’s caravan – the one they left tied to a tree.

Moses pulls a gun from his belt and advances on the man, his feet pounding thick and hard through the drifts of snow.

Where’s my brother? he says in a loud, hoarse voice. I’ll kill you if you—

Inside, the doctor says, dropping his mug and splashing hot brown liquid everywhere. Where it falls on the snow, the steam rises in sudden wisps. The doctor holds up his arms before his face, defending himself from the assault that is coming his way across the clearing.

Moses keeps the gun trained on the man’s head and advances onto the bowing porch. He grabs Peabody, gets an arm around his neck and presses the barrel of the gun against his temple. Then he spins and puts his back against the logs of the cabin and, having taken his hostage, waits for the assault of Fletcher’s men.

But that’s when the door of the cabin opens and Abraham emerges, squinting his sleepy eyes against the morning sun.

Abraham spots his brother and yawns, scratching his ass.

Hey, brother, he says. What’re you doin with the doc? You want some coffee? We found some grinds under the floor.

*

When Moses and the Vestal tied him to a tree they thought Fletcher’s men couldn’t fail to notice. But, instead, when Fletcher bolted in pursuit, they did not bother to count heads or look around even. Or perhaps they simply took the doctor’s life for forfeit, given up to the wilderness or the wildness of man. Peabody called out, but none could hear him over the revving of the engines and the cries of the caravaners to move.

Abraham found him later, coming down out of hiding in the woods when he heard the sound of motors die away in the distance. It had been unnecessary to hide – Fletcher was not interested in what might remain at the cabin once the Vestal was no longer there. He heard the doctor’s cries from down by the road. Peabody was calling crazy by then, quite sure he would freeze to death in a few hours, kissed on the lips and tied to a tree by a holy woman, abandoned without regard by his own travelling companions. No one, he was sure, would come for him. The guttural noise from his throat was a keening of grief and despair, hopeless, tuned to the pitches of nature and birdsong – a moribund bleating skyward.

Which is how Abraham found him.

I told him I’d kill him if he tried anything, Abraham says. And you know what the man did? The man laughed. I knew he was okay then. He’d gone past loyalties.

I brung you these, Moses says, giving Abraham the antibiotics. For your leg.

Look, Abraham says and shows Moses the wound in his thigh. It isn’t healed, but the swelling seems to have abated, and it is less burning red at the edges.

It’s gettin better, Moses says.

The doc made a poultice, Abraham says. Out of twigs and pine needles and garbage like that. It helps.

It just calms the wound, Peabody says and nods to the pills. Nothing compared to what a real antibiotic like that will do.

Moses turns to Peabody.

I apologize, he says. For the gun. For tyin you to a tree. We thought . . . Thank you greatly for helpin my brother.

Peabody shrugs it off.

It was a symbiotic relationship, he says. Fletcher kept me safe, I took care of his people. But he wasn’t a good man.

But you didn’t have to save Abraham’s leg. That was a righteous thing for you to do. If things’d gone a shade different, we might of killed you.

Again Peabody shrugs. He runs a hand across his balding pate. Wisps of grey hair fall down nearly to his shoulders. He must be ten or even twenty years older than Moses. Here is a man who lived a good solid chunk of life before the dead started coming back and everything changed. Here is a man with memories – a man who still holds faith that things might change back, because he can hardly help but remember vividly the world before. Perhaps he even believes he could reconstruct it out of the recollections and blueprints he carries in his own aging mind.

So he shrugs, and this is what he says:

Saving or killing. I’ve been a doctor so long – and the world gone topsy-turvy the way it is – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is called for. You have to do some of both if you would be a man in this world. And which end of the act you’re on is the luck of the moment. So no hard feelings.

The three men drink weak coffee made from water heated over the fire. Abraham takes two of the pills, and Peabody looks at his wound.

How’s it look, doc? Abraham asks.

It’s holding, Peabody says. But the jury’s still out. If there were facilities, we could do more about it.

I found a place, Moses says to Peabody. It has what you need. It’s a good place. We’ll drop you there.

Peabody looks first at one brother and then other. He nods and resumes his inspection of Abraham’s leg.

Later, out by the pond where the surface has mended itself in ice and there is no longer any face staring up from below, Moses talks with his brother alone.

You got there? Abraham asks.

I did.

The girl?

She’s there. They’re lookin at her. Trying to figure her. I told her I’d come back once I got you.

You did? How come?

Moses shrugs.

It ain’t exactly safety she feels bein there. She asked me to come back. I told her I would.

Is it safe?

I don’t know. I think so. It’s like a fortress there, Abe. Like the modern world again.

Abraham smiles.

Hot water?

Hot water.

Food?

Food.

They got something to plug this into?

Abraham tugs at the yewess bee around his neck.

I reckon they probably do.

Girls? Are there girls? I ain’t had a right fuck in ages it seems like. Not a right one at least.

Moses says nothing. He looks down at the seam where he chopped open the ice days before. Then he says:

It ain’t a place of brutishness, Abe.

The smile goes away from Abraham’s face. He looks mean in the eyes, like he would spit on something if there was something to spit on.

You reckon me to be a monster, don’t you, Mose?

Moses sighs heavily and strokes his beard. He looks away from Abraham.

Beyond bein my brother, he says, I don’t give a damn what you are.

It’s an ambiguous statement, but one that is just left to hang there between them. Abraham does not ask for more and Moses does not proffer it.

You know, Abraham says after a while. These two nights, I can’t say as I was sure you’d come back for me.

No? Moses says and rubs his eyes against the tiredness he finds there. Then you mistake me, brother. I’m the keeper and the caliper of your life, Abraham. Some- times it seems that’s the beginning and ending of what I am.

*

You are already wondering, the man Moses says, what became of him, this brother of mine. You see me, here in the dark. It’s my voice talkin the night through to all its corners. But it seems I’ve swapped travellin companions.

He points to where the large mute sleeps on the ground, the shape of the man like a desert stone.

Maury, he says, I picked him up later. A child of God, that one – and more trouble to haul around than you might think. But he’s a wonder at keepin his business to himself – which is more than I can say for most. No, he came later.

Moses scratches at his beard and brushes his hair out of his face, exposing, barely visible in the blackness, the pale lumen of his skin crossed diagonal by the eye patch and its strap.

You’re wonderin – is this the story that kills Abraham, that brings him his due which the universe in all its scaled balance, all its holy recompense, owes to him? Is this the story that finishes him and closes the book on the ledger of his accounts? Is that the holiness that drives this story crash bang to its God-spoke end? Or maybe it’s some other story that takes Abraham away from me? That’s what you’re wonderin, ain’t it?

He pauses.

There was a girl, he says. Not even a woman. A little girl. A warrior she was, and she knew about the balance of things. The order . . . What? The girl? She don’t belong here. This ain’t her story. Forget I said anything about her.

Moses picks something from his teeth, but his eyes look at no one – they never stray from the firelight, as though the elements of the earth themselves are his true audience. He speaks to the land, and the land is nourished by his breath.

One story or another, Moses says, it makes no difference. All men find their ends in stories told by firelight. My end, too, when it comes – it’ll be spoke by someone, and my death’ll persist a little while on the planet.

Then he looks again at the shape of his travelling companion.

Or, he says, it’ll just keep mute.

*

They are on the road. Moses has now travelled back and forth over this same length of highway more times than he has ever done just about anything in his singular life. The road begins to have an aspect of familiarity that makes him queasy in the pit of his stomach. As though time has stopped dead – as though the progress of the earth has wound down, entropy coming to bear all over, everything gone flaccid and spent. The rote repetition of days and action. He recalls it from the time before – when it was known simply as life. The things you might do were shoved to the side, he recalls, in favour of the things you could manage to do in the brief hiatuses between doing all the same things you did the day before and all the same things you would do again tomorrow.