After the Rain by John Bowen Page B

immediately sick; Arthur stayed where he was. Nothing else could be alive inside, I thought; there would not be room. But there was something. It appeared in the doorway, blinking against the light, its mouth and eyes opening contrapuntally. But no sound came from the mouth, and the eyes were red in a face encrusted with filth, and set in a frame of matted hair. Arthur said, “Get the water bottle,” and when I had hoisted it from the dinghy, and we had laid the scarecrow man down in the shade, and fed him gently with water, he spoke to us, and said, “They all died; they all died.”
    “Your livestock?”
    “Yes. There was no water. And they had fouled their quarters. I saved … saved grain,” he said. “I saved it for food and seed. Some of it was spoiled by the storm, and afterwards there was no water. There had been so much before. I could not think of everything.”
    “You had better take a look round, Mr. Clarke,” Arthur said.
    “I have drunk blood,” said the man. “Ham, Shem—both dead. My wife left me, you know, before theWord was fulfilled; she took Japhet, and went to her married sister in Ruislip. When we were very thirsty, we drank the blood of our Shetland pony, but the two boys died. More has occurred than was foretold.”
    “Where is the grain?” Arthur said.
    “Inside. And the seeds in tins. Flowers too. Beauty should not vanish from the earth. I bought nasturtiums since they were cheap, and marigolds, and London Pride. No gardens without flowers.”
    “Let me know what you find, Mr. Clarke,” Arthur said.
    Getting through that door was like walking into a grave. Each forward step I took built up the force within me that wanted to turn and run out again. I tried to cover my nose and mouth against the stench, breathing through the chinks between my fingers, but it did little good.
    All the interior of the ark was one large room. The animals lay there, dead in their stalls, their bodies already bloated with decay and filthy with ordure. To one end were piled sacks of grain and roots; the rain had rotted them, but I could see a number of bins that must contain seed, and the contents of these would be in good condition. I made a move to open them, but before I could reach the bins I felt my dizziness begin again, and knew that I should faint if I did not return to the deck outside.
    I made my report to Arthur. “Can we carry the bins away with us?” he asked.
    “Not really. They’d sink the dinghy.”
    “Very well. We must devise something else.”
    “What about the man?”
    “He is in no state to be moved,” Arthur said. “You can see that for yourself. Let us make him comfortable where he is.”
    “And come back for him?”
    “Unless you would care to stay.”
    “I don’t think I could,” I said. “The stench … I suppose he’s grown used to it.”
    “Yes.”
    I bent over the man. “Look,” I said. “We’re going away now, but we’ll come back tomorrow. We’re going to leave the water bottle with you. We’ll bring food when we come.” The man did not reply; he had talked himself out, it seemed. But he stared up at me, and his eyes blinked, and I think he would have nodded his head if he could.
    We returned to the raft more quickly than we had come. Except when he gave the order to rest, Arthur was silent, his lips tightly pressed together in thought. When the journey was almost over, he said, “I have decided. We cannot bring the grain to the raft as easily as we can tow the raft to the grain. We shall do it tomorrow.”
    *
    In fact, it was not a task that could be finished in one day; my promise to the scarecrow man was broken. First there was the straining and sweating at the paddles of the dinghy to get the raft to move at all; then, even after our effort had become effective, it could not bediminished, for the raft never gathered enough speed through the water to allow us to rest for a while as it coasted. We all took turns, even Arthur himself, in shifts of