Dusk - Chapter 5

         Winter took its price, the cold causing frostbite in exposed fingers. Illnesses appeared. Some got pneumonia. Usually, if someone had a friend or relative who would fight for an extra serving of soup at the end of the line, the sick person got well. When there was no one, the sick often died within a week.

         That did mean more food for everyone else – their numbers were falling. Raff knew nobody except for Everett, Gene, and Mia, and he didn’t try to talk to anyone else. In some ways, life became easier. The Protectorate army had apparently reached its peak and was even dropping, because the work of making boots and armor and other gear slowed. Sometimes, there were two or three hours when many people had no work to do, and they would sleep or go to the mess hall and scrape the salty dregs of the morning’s soup from the vat.

         Mia was working in the granary, and somehow she and Gene had managed to be together. He was glad they had each other, yet they didn’t seem to talk.

         “It’s not my fault,” Gene said once when he asked about it. “She keeps to herself, she won’t even talk to me. I think she’s scared of something but I don’t know what.”

         Raff still thought it odd.

         He would have traded the extra food to have Welck back as the General; Moessing had stepped into the role without blinking. For a few days, Everett had said that maybe the Protectorate would send down a real general who would take Moessing’s place. But now there was little hope of that happening.

         There was a camp farther north that solved the problem of punishing escape attempts and yet keeping the number of workers up. Moessing announced one morning before breakfast that anyone caught trying to escape would no longer be shot. Instead, he or she would be blinded in one eye.

         Nobody tried to escape. There was nowhere to go.


         The boot factory was turned into a distillery, and Raff worked carrying bags of grain across the courtyard from the boxcars. The Protectorate had managed to pull through the grain shortage, getting their wheat and barley from some other country. It was a source of frustration to them that there were fields to be had farther west, but the outlanders had stopped cooperating. Raff knew because he listened to everything they said. If there was trouble coming, he wanted to know about it.

         “It’s costing us nearly twice as much to import that miserable stuff,” one of the guards had said, gesturing at the green-stamped sacks in the train car. “It would be easier to just go out there and take what we need.”

         A commander was standing behind the opinionated soldier and Raff walked a little slower.

         “You’d be on the front lines, would you?” the commander asked wryly. “Against all those angry outlanders? A scythe isn’t very nice when it’s going through your gut.”

         The guard took an offended stance but said nothing. The commander chuckled to himself and walked away.

         So they were losing, in a way. They couldn’t control anything except their work cities, and even those were failing. He hoped they would fail faster. After that he began to be careless with the grain that went to the distillery. Once he ripped a bag in the bottom corner by dragging it across the sliding door track of the boxcar. It spilled wheat all along the way to the factory. One of the guard happened to see and followed along beside him, trying to decide if he had done it on purpose or not. In the end, he only got a cuff on the head and a warning to be more careful. He didn’t do it again after that, but he did his work slowly.

         Everyone felt the resentment. The Protectorate might have the advantage, but they were constantly forced to address some misfortune or small rebellion that disturbed the order of their days.

         One afternoon, when things were slow, he saw Mia sitting in the courtyard, pulling up some of the long grasses that sprang from the fountain’s blasted circle of stone. The yellow weeds made tiny pinstripes against the faded navy fabric of her skirt, and her dark head was bent in purposeful distraction – she had decided not to notice anything, not to think of anything except the grass she was plucking from the earth between the cobbled canyons.

         “You ought to have gloves,” Raff said, when he had stood nearby for a few moments in silence.

         She just looked up at him, then smiled bitterly.

         “And where would I get these necessary gloves?”

         He shrugged and sat down on the fountain’s rim. A wet and nasty snow had started blowing across the courtyard.

         “I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t feel bad.”

         The courthouse clock chimed, but it was the wrong hour. It had come unwound and nobody would fix it. Raff looked at the majestic building and saw one of the guards stomping about on the wraparound porch, then stopping to scrape his boots on the banister.

         “It used to be a place for justice,” he said.

         “You sound like your mother used to,” Mia replied as if amused. “She would say things like that – about ideals and justice and the way things ought to be.”

         Raff looked down at the ground beneath his shoes, then looked at her.

         “They’re real things.”

         “Maybe once they were. Not here.”

         And then Mia told him that Gene didn’t know everything that had happened at their camp.

         “He doesn’t pay attention,” she said. “It’s hard to realize he’s just a few years younger than you.”

         “So what happened?”

         She sighed deeply and lifted her gaze from the blades of grass for the first time, focusing on the blue-gray clouds that, from behind the back fence, peered between a gap in the buildings.

         “The children didn’t all starve.”

         He waited for the rest of the story, but she was quiet. He realized what must have happened to them and didn’t blame her for not wanting to say anything more.

         “Gene doesn’t know. I think he didn’t want to understand.”

         “I’m sorry,” Raff said.

         She nodded and arranged the grass lying across her knees. The dry rasp of her hands over the grass seemed one with the wisp of snow that tickled Raff’s neck.

         “Are you okay?” he asked, the words leaping from his mouth with such earnestness that she looked up, startled.

         It looked like she began to say “of course”, but she must have realized that he wanted a true answer.

         “I will be,” she said. “It’s harder than you know, Raff. You don’t understand what you see, you don’t even see what you would if you were grown.”

         She stood up.

         “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You worry about eating and about getting ready for when you can leave here.”

         He watched her walk away. As she entered the alley the yellow grass slipped from her hand. Raff sat there as the wind sharpened and the snow turned to flurries and then to steady gusts, thinking about what she could mean about him not seeing. He saw everything.


         He had somehow found the energy to grow about two inches. He knew because he could look straight through the windows in the brewery without having to dodge the dividing bar in the center of each pane. Even this business had gotten slower, and the Protectorate had a look of desperation. One day he counted each of the guards during the day, making sure not to count anyone twice.
There were only thirty-five of them, guarding a camp of nearly eighty. He told Everett this and got a curt answer.

         “And they have the only firepower around, don’t forget that. The time isn’t right. You think nobody else has done the math?”

         “I don’t know,” Raff said.

         He went to the granary, where Gene was running the mill. He waved and Raff climbed the steps to the platform. From here, you could look in and see the grain being stirred around by the giant gears, pieces rolling from the outside to the center and then being pulled down beneath the other grains.

         “Sort of hypnotic, isn’t it?” Gene said. “It will make you sleepy if you look at it for long.”

         “Yeah.”

         “See that girl?”

         Raff looked down at the girl he pointed to, a slight blond girl with a blue dress. She was carrying the buckets of ground wheat back and forth. The girl looked up and smiled at Gene.

         “Yes.”

         “Her name’s Iris. She was in our other camp, her and her brothers.”

         Raff knew who they were, then, big bruisers he had seen walking around the camp with this girl. He had assumed they were her brothers, because they were always together, but he had never noticed her, really. Gene obviously had.


         It was the middle of winter and it seemed there was never going to be any rise in the temperature. The nights were cold, the days only marginally warmer – sometimes it might have been that it only felt warmer because they were working. Every man and woman had something to do now, with disease going through and taking the weak or the unfortunate in the night, or in the early morning. It was a rare week when Raff did not see a group of men being escorted outside the gates, carrying a heavy burlap bag. Sometimes there was a small group huddling together at the fence, watching and weeping or standing stolid and noiseless in their rage. But most of the time there was only one person to see the dead carried off. Saddest of all was when there was no one.

         One afternoon as he carried a bag of wheat over his shoulder, a grating shriek rang over the courtyard. A woman was running toward the open gates. Four men were already leaving the compound with the brown sack between them. Later when he thought about it, he would always remember her hands outstretched after them, as if by a mere touch she could bring him back, discover that there had been a mistake and that the dead one was not hers but was someone else’s, or if it was hers, that he was merely deeply sleeping and would wake at her touch. Her skirts snapped around her legs and she looked like she was falling straight down from a great height.

         A guard stopped her, catching her awkwardly around the arms. He was young and although he was frowning he seemed to be sorry to stop her. The woman began screaming and hitting him as well as she could, then to claw at his face. The guard didn’t get rough but he couldn’t control her. Two other guards went running to help and the woman gave up, dropping to her knees and covering her face with one hand.

         Someone stalked past him, unsnapping a baton. It got quiet as Zelasko stopped in front of the woman. Raff started to walk on, knowing he would have to pass them before he could get to the distillery.

         “Take her to the prison,” he said.

         “Sir, she was just running,” the uncertain guard replied. “It was someone she knew.”

         Zelasko said something and the guard let go of her. The other two took the woman off. Her weeping went up a pitch and she began protesting, then wailing. Raff kept walking, watching Zelasko dressing down the remaining guard. Contempt welled up in him and Zelasko spotted his look before he realized the expression his face wore. Instantly he looked at the distillery in the distance, willing himself to keep walking, wishing that by seeing the building he could be there at once.

         “You have something to say?” Zelasko asked, snapping the baton closed. “Stop when you’re spoken to.”

         Raff stopped and focused on Zelasko’s collar and the lighter green corner where it was becoming a bit threadbare. The other guard went past and cast a near-sympathetic glance back.

         “I think you’d better just keep on walking next time. Don’t you?”

         “Yes.”

         Zelasko turned abruptly and walked toward the officer’s quarters. Raff didn’t watch him. The woman’s image rose up in his mind’s eye, her shoulders stooped brokenly as she was taken to the prison.

         He had heard awful things about Zelasko, that he was not only brutal but that he frequented the women’s area. It made a sick spot in his stomach to think about. No one had seen anything happen, but the men speculated in the barracks or in the mess hall when the guards were not around. Some said that the first time he was seen attacking a woman was his last day alive, no matter what the consequences were.

         As he set the sack of wheat on the distillery floor, Everett came through the door.

         “You got a minute?” he asked.

         Raff glanced at the guard, who was preoccupied with a beer.

         “I can’t stop work,” he said. “I’m already in trouble.”

         Everett walked with him to the boxcar.

         “I thought I’d give you some good news. It’s not about family.”

         “Ok.”

         The older man scrubbed his hand across his rough chin and stepped up into the boxcar. Raff hoisted a sack of grain so he would look busy, and then waited to listen.

         “The Protectorate is having to fight,” Everett said under his breath. “There’s another army coming down from Canada – they’re from Europe – and they’re trying to get in on the coastal trade.”

         “That’s good?” Raff asked.

         “Yes. They can’t keep this up.”

         Raff looked at the tracked dusty floor of the boxcar.

         “But what are these people like?”

         “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter as long as they get the Protectorate off our backs.”

         Everett took a bag and they went back to the distillery. The guard heard the door closing and tossed the rest of his beer in the corner before turning and seeing that it was only a pair of workers. He sighed, looking balefully at his sudsy glass.
A week later, there was a night when everyone was brought to the courtyard and they learned that the enemy had broken through the borders and that two of the Protectorate cities had fallen. Horror tales went around the camp, spurred on by Moessing’s silence on the fate of the prisoners in the fallen work cities. Had they been enslaved (forgetting that now they were as much enslaved as anyone could be), had they been slaughtered, had they been turned into meat for the starving armies of the enemy? No one knew if the armies were starving, but it was a good guess. The food available in the cities and suburbs was winter-scarce.

         The guards had abandoned their stations in the mess hall and now walked the perimeter of the city endlessly, like toys on a track. People fought to be first to the food, stuffing it in their mouths as they snatched all they could carry. With no order, the weaker were usually pushed to the back and left to get what might remain after everyone else was done. Then the tenor of their work changed, because war had come again.

         The distillery was shut down and they moved the machinery out. Once the building was empty, everyone avoided it, dreading whatever new purpose it might serve – it was haunted by its future.

         One evening a train ground to a stop outside the gates. Some Protectorate guards opened the boxcar doors with a bang and Raff stared at the stacks of brown boxes. The lights went on in a blaze along the main road and to the gates, and the young and able-bodied were set to unpack the car. There was no writing on the box, and it was heavy. They put them in the back of a truck, and once it was filled it was driven to the empty distillery and unloaded. On the third and final truck, Raff climbed into the back and rode along.

         He carried a box in so he would look useful. Papers blew up in the wind as he opened the door. It was mostly women and children inside; the noise of their high-pitched voices made him feel slightly woozy, and he realized it had been a long time since he’d heard people speaking naturally, as they always had before the work cities – since he’d heard a woman piecing together a repetitive song for her own enjoyment. It was a habit Diane had, that aimless humming which had irritated him but which now made him ache.

         Mia was sitting cross-legged on the floor as she pulled open the cardboard flaps.

         “What is it?” he asked, looking down at shiny steel.

         She looked up, smiling in bewildered wonder.

         “They’re sewing machines,” she said. “I haven’t seen one except in a store window in town once.”

         The women were unpacking, chattering and laughing as if it was a holiday. Raff saw Gene and Iris standing in a corner, watching and being together. They looked frail, both blond and pink like schoolchildren.

         The next train brought fabric, some of it canvas, some cotton, some of it the green, dismal cloth the Protectorate wore. The women were taught how to make the jackets and pants and shirts the Protectorate needed, and Mia sat day after day in the chilly sewing room piecing together and stitching sleeves and belt loops. The loops were wide – she showed him once, and he realized that they were made to support the holster belts.