Leaving
Alice Hatcher
He had waited too long to prepare his mother for the evacuation everyone in the village had been expecting for weeks. He had just been trying to protect her, downplaying rumors of an impending invasion to spare her the kind of anxiety that disordered her thoughts and loosened her grip on fading memories. Now she was sweeping bread crumbs off the dining table and tossing them into the cold hearth, as if she didn’t understand the urgency of leaving. He glanced at his phone, at live footage of a military convoy crossing a bridge, and stepped up to the front window. Outside, his older brother was wrestling a suitcase into the trunk of a Citroën, watched by a young man – a boy, really – from down the road, standing beside a rusted moped and cradling a large can of turpentine. Soon, the road to the border would be glutted with overloaded flatbed trucks; women fleeing on foot, with cloth bundles strapped to their backs; and cars loaded with petrol cans, water jugs, and food drawn from cupboards nearly bare after two years of unremitting conflict.
He backed away from the window to escape the boy’s notice, only to find his mother gathering a platter that, two hours earlier, had been covered with heels of rye bread, a block of goat cheese, and the last tomatoes from the garden. He imagined his brother’s anger about how long he was taking and, as his mother shuffled from the room, heard his brother shouting.
Berating himself for being so weak and easily cowed by his mother’s stubborn nature, he made his way to the small kitchen at the back of the house.
He found his mother standing at the sink, clutching the platter and looking through a tiny casement window, at the twisted apple tree growing between the barn and garden wall. He imagined the ghosts crowding his mother’s vision – specters of his grandmother washing sheets in a steel tub; his grandfather, who had taught him, as a young boy, to shear sheep by hand and given him a sip of brandy to calm his nerves after he nicked an ewe’s leg and burst into tears at the sight of fresh blood; his father, a man he’d known only from creased photographs; and the village widows who had prayed beside the graves of each other’s husbands and died off, leaving his mother to inhabit a world of fragile memories, as she was now, whispering to herself and waiting for the water spluttering from the tap to run clear.
“We need to leave,” he said, watching her guide a line of dissolving bread crumbs toward the drain. “Before the roads are blocked off. Do you understand?”
She traced a line of worn gilt on the platter’s edge with her fingertip and, then, as if she hadn’t heard him, began drying the platter with a dishtowel. She tensed when he placed his hand on her back. He felt the vertebrae of her hunched spine shift beneath his fingertips as she drew away from him, with the platter pressed tightly to her chest.
“We can’t take the platter with us,” he said, following her to the front room. “It will be here when we return,” he continued, unsettled by an intrusive childhood memory of trying to calm a sheep in the moment before its slaughter, while his brother looked on in disgust.
He thought he detected signs of comprehension in her clouded blue eyes, but then she set the platter on a stand on the buffet and returned to the kitchen to gather three plates from a drying rack. “We don’t have time for this,” he said, when she returned to the front room and set the plates on a shelf above the platter.
She gathered a candlestick from the table and dusted its base with the hem of her sleeve. “I need to get things in order,” she said, speaking for the first time since breakfast.
He was trying to ease the candlestick from her hand when his brother entered the house. “We need to go,” his brother said sharply, bending over to collect two suitcases sitting just inside the door. “Now.”
He released his mother’s hand and, with a sickening sense of time speeding up, followed his brother outside. The car was resting heavily on its suspension, weighed down by luggage and boxes filled with old books, silver flatware, and family photographs. The boy was still standing beside the moped, with the can resting on the ground at his feet. As his brother slid the suitcases into the trunk, he studied the precocious furrow between the boy’s eyes and the scuffed uppers of the boy’s oversized work boots. Before he could ask the boy about his family, his brother slammed the trunk closed and pressed the stub of a cigarette between his lips.
“Why isn’t she ready?” His brother lit the cigarette and set a box of matches on the moped’s cracked leather seat.
He forced himself to meet his brother’s eyes. “I’m trying to keep her calm.”
“By letting her wash dishes? Tell her there won’t be a house soon.”
“Everything she’s ever known is in that house.”
“Then she can stay here and die in it.”
“This is the only way she’ll go,” he said.
His brother gestured at the boy. “We can’t ask him to stay much longer. If she doesn’t hurry, I’ll find ways to make her go.”
He tensed at the intimation of violence – the brutishness and single- mindedness that had bolstered his brother’s unbending will through droughts and floods and, now, the war quickly coming to their doorstep – and felt sick and ashamed.
“We should have let her make this decision with us.”
“She has no mind left, and it’s not just about her.” His brother took a sharp drag off his cigarette, crushed its butt beneath his heel, and pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “It’s time to get her into the car.”
He turned away from his brother and went back into the house. In the front room, his mother was folding the cloth napkins they had used at breakfast, using her thumbnail to sharpen their creases.
“You don’t need to clean up,” he began.
Without looking up, his mother turned a napkin over in her mottled hands, as though she were examining its hem for loose threads. He approached the table and touched her shoulder.
Again, she tensed, and, again, he had the same feeling he’d experienced as a young boy trying to calm a sheep on its way to slaughter, slipping on the muddy barn floor and stung by his brother’s pronouncement that he would someday starve to death because he lacked the stomach for killing. Panic stirred in the pit of his stomach, and, just when he thought he might go mad trying to coax his mother from the house, she set the napkins in the buffet drawer.
She slowly turned around, took in the swept hearth, the lace runner stretched evenly across the table, and the crystal sugar bowl her own mother had given her, and then gathered her threadbare sweater from the back of a chair. If her mind was too weak to compass the enormity of what lay ahead, she was walking towards the front door, still, taking tiny steps and pausing to bless herself at its threshold.
“The boy will take care of things while we’re gone,” he said, and, when she paused on the stoop to consider the apple tree, he saw her eyes water and realized she had overheard whispered conversations about failed counter- offensives and closing borders; that she understood the finality of leaving and possessed sources of sorrow and strength he could only imagine.
As he helped her into the car, he saw his brother nodding at the boy, and the boy reaching, already, for the box of matches. The boy was barely tall enough to mount the moped, but soon, he would splash turpentine on the barn doors and burn the sheep his brother had herded into stalls strewn with hay to speed the fire; douse his mother’s curtains and strike a match to set the house alight; torch the brittle leaves of the apple tree and poison the well behind the house, so that no stranger would butcher their sheep or steal fruit from their tree, shelter beneath their roof, or quench their thirst with water from their land. The entire village would be reduced to ash by nightfall if the boy did his job. Sliding into the passenger seat, he knew the boy possessed a desperate resolve, and a greater affinity to his brother than he, himself, would ever know, and that he would always live with a phantom pain where, as his brother had once said, he had no stomach.
Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc, 2018). Hatcher’s work has appeared in Pleiades, Mississippi Review, Fourth Genre, Pinch 44.2, and Bellevue Literary Review.