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To hold down the fort; to keep the home fires burning; to look after hearth and home.
Their language had birthed so many phrases, most grounded in a reality that was no more. And yet the meanings remained, divorced from (or, in some cases, returned to) their roots. Idioms and collocations whose connections lay in a shared past, a memory that verged on myth: Once, long ago, before the Tiger.
Amina had been born on a blue moon, and her mother said it was lucky. That she would be special, and her life would be blessed; someday, her mother said, in a hushed whisper, so as not to wake the things in the dark, someday you will see a forest, unlike ours. It will be green and marvelous and alive, as far as the eye can see. Amina believed her, as a child believes its mother. She had never fully believed anyone since.
When Amina was nineteen, her mother died. The way mothers tended to die: dried brittle by fire, worn thin by winter, and leeched pale by loneliness. Her father had died long before that, the way fathers tended to: in the forest, searching. Amina was left with two sisters, a brother, and one tattered family Bible whose aging words crumbled in her mind as she read them. She was skilled in the ways of staying. She knew nothing of searching.
After her father’s death (It was a creature, fearsome and fast, the survivors of the sortie had said. There was nothing to be done), her mother had bargained with a neighbor. He would search for them, as well as for his own. And as to what her mother had offered in trade, Amina never asked, but she knew she could not offer its continuance.
After her mother’s funeral, their neighbors could offer them sustenance in grief only so long. (We are not savages, Amina, her mother had said once. We care for our own. But one has only so much care, and spreading it too thin does nothing for no one.) So Amina, for the first time in her life, sought. Sought a searcher, so that she could return to the only thing she knew how to do.
She found Aaron, and he consented to be found. She had known him before, from community classes (a small tow-headed boy; older than her, and so in his own corner, in the corner of her eye; the one who knew Marlowe from Jonson by sound alone; one whose laugh was a bright thing, before it aged out of him). But her knowing had been as one knows someone on the periphery of one’s own trajectory: Lightly, tangentially, so that if they died one might feel sorry but not sad.
He sought for her (that is to say, on her behalf; for she always remained where he left her), and for her siblings (and, she reminded herself, sometimes—for himself—for he was yet a thing apart from them), and when they ate what he found and were warmed by the logs he tumbled upon their fires, she knew that she had done well. For him, she stayed, and she cooked, and she cleaned; she kept watch, and she kept peace; she took her shifts at the community school, and she took her shrift in silence, to herself alone; and when these things were done (even, sometimes, when they were not), she told her siblings the stories of their mother, and of hers before her, and of a world their ancestors had known that shone with sparks not born of fire, that glowed with life and health and happiness. A world where people sometimes walked barefoot in grass, and it bent rather than crunched underfoot.
And Aaron—she assumed he, too, was satisfied. Sometimes he touched her hair, softly, and his eyes were gentle as he gave his customary goodbyes. His goodbyes, that were always cautions, but in them she heard a kind of love.
You stay here, he said. And she did.
She stayed even as they moved, because once the sorties had exhausted a territory, there was nothing to do but move on. Move on, hoping to find things, but not people. The people they found were always colder than they, and with cold came desperation; with desperation, danger. She had prayed, to the God she hoped for, the God Aaron searched for, and the God her mother had sworn loved all his children. Amina thought, sometimes, that the God they meant was all the same, but when she looked into the fire in the middle of a night (tonight, tomorrow, the next), the flames in their dancing told her that her mother’s God had left when the rivers began to dry up. She thought of a baby Moses, if placed in a basket in a dried riverbed. And how for that child, there would be no floating to a princess who might reach down and find him (serendipitously, miraculously, allegedly).
She tossed a log on the flames, and they bounced as it crackled. The last, for now, until Aaron returned with more. The fires must be kept burning, even when there was nothing left to feed them that didn’t reek of cannibalism. A rocking chair, a book, a breath, a prayer. The fires were warmth, and comfort, and safety. People talked of a damped fire as a death sentence: an invitation to the cold winds and to the guerillas to come and take and destroy.
The wars had ended before Amina’s time, leaving only the scorched earth behind as memorial, but the hold-outs still remained, and their marauding (vengeance, whispered a narrative Amina could not hear) took the stragglers the cold did not. There was word on the winds of the Tiger, whose knife was as swift as his true name was unknown. He was one of the original revolutionaries, legend had it; and so, he must be very old. Too old to fight, and still too young to be the source of a legend that had terrified Amina since childhood, but yet he remained. Aaron had joked once that the Tiger was older than that, even: that he had been prowling the forests since the eighteenth century, a thing of night and fire born of an unseen hand. Amina had frowned, as she did whenever she did not understand, and most particularly when she did not think she was intended to understand. But Aaron had smiled gently and said Never mind, I only meant to make you smile, and though she doubted that, she smiled back anyway.
Amina had seen an old movie, once, in the square of the town she had been born in, before they had had to leave. An old man of the town (so old he thought himself yet young) worked magic with an even older machine’s parts and innards, and the machine gave them back magic in kind; eventually, though, the last of the magic faded (except the magic of memory, and that Amina kept). Memory of a movie wherein death was dodged, again and again, and where a Dread Pirate could retire and yet live on. Stories are for warmth, her mother had said, for when the fires are not enough. But we live in a world without princesses, and this is not your story.
Her mother had also said, once (but in the later days, when there were no movies in the square, anymore): If someone offers you a bet, refuse; if they offer you a poison, take it outright.
Amina hadn’t thought to ask why; she questioned little, because the answers never helped. But she thought she knew, now. Because it was better to know what you were getting, and because if you were resigned to death, the living could be worse than dying.
A tug at her pants leg woke Amina from daydreams, brought her back into the day-to-day work of staying. She fed the children (though Paul was almost not a child anymore, and she didn’t know what they would do with him when he wasn’t). She sang to them, a short, lilting song about hope and a sun behind clouds. It was Annabelle’s favorite, and so one Amina had sung so long her vocal cords could replicate it without instruction from her mind, leaving her free to think of other things. Of the need to insulate the windows, of the need to find something with which to insulate the windows. Of the remnants of previous residents scattered throughout the dwelling they had claimed as their own. Nothing useful (no one would ever leave anything useful): photographs, knick-knacks, shelves of crockery, a jar full of ash.
And then, later, she wove pine needles into baskets to the tune of soft snores and the murmurs of the innocent in sleep. The pattern she wove was one of memory and instinct, for the base was of her mother and the straps formed from her memory of Aaron’s broad but too-sloped (too-burdened) shoulders. The things she created, with her hands, were the realest things she knew. More real than flesh, and blood, for those stretched and quickened and moved with minds of their own. The things that she shaped were her mark upon the world, and she might leave them behind (to fade away), but they would always be hers.
The textbooks she had read (in classes, once) spoke of hunter-gatherer societies, a precursor to modern civilization. They said, in addendums that the local government had printed out on fly-leaves that teachers then painstakingly pasted in, that the post-modern civilization had merged these concepts; that the searcher-stayer model provided a return to a gender-based division of labor that provided structure and comfort in trying times. They used careful words that danced with mincing steps, but Amina saw the pattern that they trod, of new words with old meanings and present troubles the universe had seen before.
You are not an optimist, my dear, her father had said once (or his ghost had said, as he lived in her ever-changing memory; she was never sure). Never change, darling, for the world will not.
A sound at the door startled Amina, for she was always on edge, and always had the frying pan close at hand. The fires were precautionary, not preventative. But it was Aaron, tired and familiar, and when he said, “I’m home,” she heard I’m glad to be home. Please hold me. She responded to the unspoken, because that was always the loudest in her head, and as she pulled him close she sent unspoken messages of her own. I do not love you at all, but I need you. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for having left, and for preparing to leave again. And if you ever cannot come back, know that I do not blame you. And that the fires will always await you.
Steady as a rock, she was. Sedimentary, worn and welded by pressures and now an amalgam of the places she had been and the forces she had encountered. Aaron called her a survivor, said that they all were. He said it like it was something to be proud of, and she soaked up the pride even as she sloughed off the sentiment. She would make him proud, but she would survive only because it was the only choice, not because it was noble or commendable.
Search meant salvage as much as it did hunt. Search meant scavenge as much as it did salvage. Search, Aaron said, was nothing to be proud of. It meant only that you had an iron stomach and had convinced yourself that the dead were beyond caring what you took from them. It meant you had a sharp eye and had learned the difference between want (the things that sparkled and shone) and need (the things that filled bellies and warmed toes). Amina said softly, If it is a skill, you can take pride in it. If it is needed, it is worth doing. If it helps us, I am proud of you. Aaron’s eyes said he did not believe, but she didn’t take it personally, for he believed in very little. She took comfort in the slight relaxation of his shoulders, and in the fact that he kept going out, and kept coming back. She knew the pattern with the certainty one learns the tides and the rise and set of the sun, and she knew she was a fool for trusting even that.
Thank you, she whispered, in the night, against the back of his neck. For myself, and for my siblings. For our family as it is now, and for the family we will build.
It was dark in the morning when he left again, and dark when he would return. She saw him off by the light of the fire, and welcomed him back to the same. Whenever she pictured his face, now, this was how she saw it: a flickering thing of light and shadow.
You stay here, he told her, and she did.