CHAPTER TWO
The following weeks proved to be a happy and recuperative period in Jonathan's life, by virtue of the pleasant occupation that filled them, of reading through nearly all the miscellaneous literature he had discovered. He forgot about any serious purpose in being there. Like an idle boy on a summer day, he puttered and lolled about, reading this or that as fancy dictated. He made a bench for himself out of the scraps of wood lying around. He took little excursions to explore the environs, idyllically leading his burro along in search of grass, book in hand and careless of the hour.
When he’d run through the small library to his satisfaction, he began to interest himself in the rest of his acquisitions. He fitted himself out in the best of the old clothes there, after washing them and patching them, Robinson Crusoe-like, as he’d also found a needle and thread. He wore the old boots, though a size too large, and tramped around, recalling the years he passed in the mountains as an outcast.
With a hatchet and a rusty saw he began to dismantle and salvage what he could of the fallen cottage. He began to build himself a smaller cabin, right over that part of the flooring where the hatch lay. The structure was only large enough to contain a bed on one side and a small counter and table on the other. The built-in bed stretched from one wall to the other, just able to accommodate his six-foot height. The other end was wider, for the room finally assumed a sort of trapezoidal shape. The ceiling was low, only a few inches higher than himself at best and sloping low towards the bed. But the roof kept out the rain, thanks to the tarp he stretched over it.
There was a solid door in the middle of the front wall and even a window at each end, covered with old plastic, not quite transparent but able to let the light in. He also found some fragments of a mirror which he patched together. With this he resumed the habit of shaving each day, something neglected for several decades, but which he decided was the civilized thing to do in this improved and intellectual state of existence.
One last gesture, to celebrate the completion of his cabin, was to tear the picture of the cows from its book and post it on the wall near the foot of his bed, so that he could lay there and gaze at it and feel a little bit closer to the world he missed so much.
Almost a month went by in the making of this home before Jonathan ran out of purpose. He’d brought up the chair from the cellar along with everything else, except the cupboard of canned foods. The desk had to be cut in sections to be fitted out and he used the pieces to make the table and counter in what he called his kitchen. He had no use for the thing down below. It was too dark to work there, now doubly dark since he’d built his room right over it’s only aperture.
For many days the blank notebook and the pen lay in plain view, undisturbed and waiting for him on his new table. He was reluctant to open it, for he knew that when he did he would have a heavy task before him. He would have to make sense of a world gone mad and turn his own experience into lessons that would be of use to posterity, on the freak chance that some exponent of literacy remained to partake of it.
"I’ve done many futile things in my life, and of all the schemes I’ve parented, perhaps this is the worst," he began writing, "making a record that no one can read, or dare to read even if they could.
"But I have something to say and fate has now put into my hands the means to say it. Never despise chance. It’s all we have.
"When I look back upon my life, I see such a succession of strange coincidences guiding it and preserving me even against my own wishes I don't doubt that some higher purpose is at work, though I can't say what it is.
"I won’t proceed to defend myself. I admit extreme degrees of fault in managing my own wretched career. Look at me now, a priest, breaking cardinal laws. No one can mistake it. I am so uncleansed and unamended by the revolution that I even resume an outlawed profession, that of historian. And I do this with a heavy heart, as I have a sad story to relate."
At this point Jonathan paused and set down his pen. He didn't know how to proceed. It would be painful, he thought, to dredge up all the sad details of his own life. It would be trivial too unless there was some meaning of value to others. He realized that a better plan would be to try to describe the historic changes that shook the world, weaving it into his own life story. But this goal made the task even more obscure and complicated. He thought on it a long while.
"I'm torturing myself with details!" he concluded. "I'll get nowhere at this rate. Now that I can write, I muddy-up my head with abstractions. A plague upon me."
But then he picked up his pen, turned to a fresh page and wrote: "The first cause of our revolution and all our woes was the plague."
"There's enough for one day," he thought with satisfaction. "iacta alea est; ‘The die is cast’. I'll start tomorrow in earnest."
That evening, after a delicious meal of one of the cans of beans from his new larder and a pot of tea, his thoughts drifted off to a time some twenty years earlier, when he and his mountain companion shared similar meals beside similar campfires, taking in the sounds of the forest under the blanket of night.
