The Old Woman on the Hill
We all have secrets…
The lines in the woman’s face deepened with the strain of the lifting the basket. With two hands she handed it to her son, a young man only half her age in years but so much younger.
“Now here are the provisions for Ms. Englander, the vegetables I picked from our garden and here is some Manzanita wine from Yerda’s cellar. Don’t forget to wear your good clothes, don’t go up thar naked like a savage.”
“But Ma, I’ll sweat them up. I only got the one set,” her son replied while taking the sack from her hands. The young man usually wore no more than one of his two pairs of shorts in the small makeshift hamlet and nothing outside of it.
“Then carry them, Roy,” his mother said, hands on her hips, “but put them on before you get to har house. And on top is the dried salmon wrapped, don’t go shaking the basket or tossing it about. I don’t want all this mixed up before you get thar. “
”Yes, Ma. You say that every week. I don’t know why she is so special!” He turned to go.
She grabbed the arm of the basket. “Then don’t do it every week. And you show her respect, you know nothing.” She let go then picked up her son’s wide brimmed hat and said, “Now go on, and don’t forget this.”
His hat was woven from tule by a neighbor woman, everyone in the hamlet wore them. Round but pinched to form an ellipse with a droopy front and back, it marked them.
Roy, just fifteen, strode up the hill in his wrinkled shorts and left behind the driftwood shack in the little cluster of driftwood shacks that hugged the green grass hills over the small lagoon that let out to the ocean. He carried the basket and a bundle of rolled clothes in one hand and stuck his other out for balance as he danced up the brown dirt trail. He snaked with the trail in and out of red, yellow and white wildflowers that reached up to drink in the winter mist.
Roy emerged from the shade to the sun and his hat was back lit with the bright light that was burning away the morning fog to leave the ridges standing like bright islands above the grey cold arms of fog reaching in from the ocean.
The old woman he was visiting was not from the village but lived on the hill past the village in a plank house set next to a spring on a large shoulder in an otherwise steep section of the Pacific coast. The only access was the path he climbed from his fishing village. Roy had been doing this chore for as long as he could remember, each week delivering provisions to the old woman who lived on the hill. He had changed with each day from a gangly kid to a tall but still scrawny teenager. Acne had popped up on his face and he carried himself with the clumsiness of someone who woke up each day in a slightly different body.
After a mile and a half stepping quickly in hops up the trail that hugged the steep slope Roy stopped before a bend and put the basket down. He looked up from under his long billed hat at the ocean of blue water rippling with white caps. He then glanced indirectly at the bright sun heating his body in the cool breeze. He sniffed under his arm and curled his nose.
He took out the rolled clothes, a slightly wrinkled white shirt and a pair of rumpled khakis and put them on. He buttoned and tucked in the shirt, feeling all dressed up despite his bare brown feet thick with calluses. With one last glance at the heaving slopes of chapparal set against the wide blue sea, he picked up the basket.
He noticed and then pretended not to notice the drones hovering high above the hill like large buzzing insects. They were hidden mostly unless the sun glanced off their metal bodies and made them twinkle. He shrugged and rounded the bend to climb up the shoulder to the old woman’s house.
Reaching the unpainted wood door, the young man knocked.
“Ms. Englander? Your provisions are here.”
Roy in his straw hat, shirt and pants called out again while knocking on the plank door. He stood on the stoop of the cedar shingled shotgun house overlooking the ocean. A twisted live oak shaded the back half of the house, its bark and the cottage’s roof had grown together. He knocked again but for the first time he could remember there was no call to come in.
He pushed the door open and entered the cottage. The young man moved through the empty front sitting room to the kitchen where he placed the basket on the pine table. The table was set for four even though he knew she lived alone and the best Roy knew only he came here.
He called out “Ms Englander?” and turned to hear a groan from the back bedroom. He found a frail Ms. Englander on the ground in a tidy sprawl in the kitchen doorway to the bedroom. She moaned once and he stooped to her side and talked fast to reassure her.
“What happened Ms. Englander, now don’t talk let me help you up, where does it hurt? How long have you been down? Looks like a fall, we’ll get you on that sofa over there and then I’ll put on water for tea, some herbal tea that’s what you need? Any thing broken?” He trailed off.
Ms. Englander opened and fluttered her eyes with a slight breathy moan as he lifted her up. She woke up enough to shuffle with his help to the sofa in the front room and lie back. The boy pulled a cover from back of the blue grey sofa and spread it over the now supine old lady.
“Thank you,” she whispered before putting her head back and closing her eyes.
The boy looked at the old lady and nervously wondered what to do. When he saw her chest moving up and down in a slow steady rhythm, he relaxed a little. After watching her breathe for five or six minutes he went into the kitchen and started to unload the basket but stopped. He instead grabbed a tea kettle and checked to see if the the wood stove was lit. He filled the pot from the lone spigot with cold water and put the kettle on the wood stove to heat up.
He looked in once more on the sleeping old lady and then he finished unpacking the groceries, wondering if he should do more, but what? It would take a day to get a doctor here, he thought. He wondered if he should flag down a drone. But he didn’t know why they were always hovering high above this old lady on her hill.
“You should leave.” The old lady was awake and sitting up. He came in from the kitchen and handed her a cup of tea. Holding the tea cup with two hands she looked with alarm at the boy.
“I’m not going anywhere unless I know you are safe. Do you want me to get anyone? A doctor from inland?” Roy said, smiling to be in control.
“No, no one. It isn’t safe, it isn’t safe for you. How long have you been here?” The surface of the tea trembled.
“Long enough to see you resting after your fall. Do you hurt anywhere?”
“No, too long, not safe. You normally just drop off.” Talking was becoming more difficult for the old woman. She raised a hand and gestured toward a piece of electronic hardware on the floor. It was a red box with a handle, electronic meter and wand.
“What? you want this?” The boy picked up the instrument. He recognized it from the one in his village. “A geiger counter?”
The old lady nodded and then put down the teacup before reaching for the wand of the geiger counter. She waved the wand of the geiger counter back and forth over herself but nothing happened. The boy looked at the meter and then down the cord to the wand in the old lady’s grasp.
“Turn it on,” she croaked.
The boy gave a grin at his mistake and flipped the on switch. His embarassed grin slipped to open mouthed shock when the meter arm swung hard to the right in an explosion of clicks. The boy was frozen as the meter arm beat rapidly against the side of the meter.
“You’re radioactive,” he said.
“You have to leave. This is it for me, I know. You are in danger, the Randford process becomes unstable at death. Besides you’ve already been exposed to me for too long. You should leave,” Ms Englander trailed off, exhausted by the effort to speak.
“I have to make sure you are okay, but you are radio- Randford? Wait, you’re one of those human nukes. The ones that caused the collapse. Before I was born,” the young man said.
“It was the collapse of a rigid hierarchical system that would have collapsed on its own,” she choked out.
“But all the human nukes blew themselves up? What are you? Why are you here?”
She hesitated and then answered. “All detonated but one, I turned myself in instead. And told them what they wanted to know. In return they let me live here all these years. But listen, don’t be afraid. Come close.” She sat up taller and beckoned Roy toward her.
Roy looked at her from across the room. He realized he had been backing up as she spoke.
“I didn’t tell them everything,” she said, “I thought this knowledge would die with me, that it was too dangerous, but I want it to live, I want you to know.” She kept beckoning him toward her with her hand.
“Know what?” The young man asked. Roy approached and knelt down next to Ms. Englander as she lay back on the blue grey pillows.
“The Randford process. To turn a human into a nuclear device, it isn’t hardware,” she said.
“It’s not a bomb? They didn’t put a bomb in you?” he asked.
“No. It’s mental, it’s done with the mind. Anybody can do it. Anyone can turn their body into a nuclear bomb. But only I know how. I am going to teach you. So more will know. But then you have to go.”
Roy leaned in, not sure what to think but ready to listen.
Ma stood by the clothesline outside her driftwood shack. She was listening to a faint sound in the distance. She could just make out a low humming whup whup. She looked up when her son rounded the corner still wearing his Sunday clothes. He marched straight to her and the shack.
“Hurry Ma, we need to leave. Get some clothes and let’s go.”
“What, Roy? Go? Go where? Where’s the basket? Where is your hat?” She asked.
“To hell with the basket. We are going inland and from there who knows. Get packed.” The young man was standing tall, taller than his fifteen years.
“Why, honey, what’s changed?” Ma asked. Her expectation of an answer died when she turned her head to the whup whup sound, now louder. Underneath the rhythmic bass was the growing scream of turbojets. She could just see the rapidly approaching military helicopters by the twinkle of sunlight off their distant metal bodies above the hills.
“Everything’s changed.” Roy said.
