Marta Mitchell's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Marta pulled Finn down behind a shelf of rock as the voices grew louder. The quillwing snorted again, closer. Finn's hand found her wrist. He pointed past her shoulder at a weathered wooden post sunk into the sand, its crossbar carved with rows of small notches. "My father cut those," he whispered. "One for every run through here. There's a well thirty paces east. Stone. Brass fittings. They don't know it." Marta stared at him. After the well house, after the chain on her ankle, she did not know what his words were worth. But the notches were real, and the scavengers were close. "Prove it," she said. He unhooked a soft leather pouch from his belt. The lining was dark with damp. He pressed it into her palm. "Filled it this morning. From the well I'm telling you about. Taste it." She did. The water was cold and clean, nothing like the brackish stuff she had rationed for days. She handed the pouch back. "Move," she said. They crawled east along the rock until the ground dipped, and there it stood, half sunk in a hollow: an old stone well ringed with green brass, a tiled roof above the shaft. Finn dropped behind the wall and pulled a grenade from his vest. Marta drew the dead shooter's knife. The first scavenger came over the rise leading the quillwing on a short lead. Finn pulled the pin and threw. The blast took the man and the animal together. Two more came running. Marta caught the first low in the thigh with the knife and rode him down. Finn shot the second through the chest with a pistol she had not seen him draw. The desert went quiet except for Finn's breathing and the drip of water inside the well. They climbed all afternoon, slow because of his ankle, until they reached a low peak above the hollow. The sun sat fat and orange on the rim of the Kalaharireach. Marta took the old man's watch from her shirt and held it in her open hand. She thought of the soup bowl on the table, the empty chair, the bootprints that the wind had erased. She understood, sitting there with Finn's shoulder against hers, that the old man had walked north to die, and that he had left her everything she would need to live. She closed the watch in her fist. Finn turned his face to her. She kissed him on the mouth. His lips were dry and warm. He kissed her back. Eight years passed. The desert kept its dead and gave up no more answers. Marta stopped looking. She and Finn drifted south out of the Kalaharireach into green country, took work where they could, slept under roofs that did not leak. She kept the old man's watch wound. Some nights she set it on the table between them and they ate without speaking of it, the small ticking enough. They married in a white chapel at the edge of a town neither of them had been born in. It had a steep slate roof, a round stained-glass window, lanterns by the doors, and red flowers in pots along the path. Marta wore a plain dress. Finn wore a borrowed jacket over the scar on his ankle. There was no family on either side of the aisle. A few friends from the work years sat in the front pews. The man at the altar asked the questions and they answered them. After, Marta stood on the chapel steps with the watch in her pocket and Finn's hand in hers. She had not found the old man. She had found out who she was without him, which was the only thing he had ever wanted her to learn. She looked at Finn and squeezed his fingers, and they walked down the path through the red flowers together.