Simon and Eve  

      Along the way he kicked over all the rocks he’d set up to mark the path.  From the last hilltop he looked back upon the sleepy town and knew that the next sunrise would bring them a day of mourning for the loss of the only leader they’d ever known, with no one able to fill his shoes.  "The world is full of changes, soon to come" he thought.  "Let all those pray who don't know what to do."

     Jonathan then bid his three companions take one last look at a town they’d never see again as it was.  They wondered at this uneasily, except Simon, who gleaned his meaning.  They all knew the old priest was about to pass away.  They rested there the night.  In the morning they continued, Jonathan taking care to erase all traces of the path.  They arrived a day later and were glad to find Peter and Sarah and Eve with a campfire burning and a large meal cooking, as if expecting their return.

     This was a happy reunion.  Jonathan told his troop of a new plan, the state of matrimony he’d conceived for them.  They would have one more small cabin to build and then the three couples would each enter their new homes to begin a new life which they’d learn to appreciate in time.

     They turned to their designated partners and stared in mute awe, along a table unused to such silence.  Paul and Mary were distinctly smiling and Peter and Sarah faintly so.  But Simon and Eve stood agape, utterly confounded by this unexpected, dictatorial decision.  One could imagine them blushing under their thick coatings of white ointment.  Eve was several inches taller than Simon and except for being his closest competitor in the art of calligraphy, unlike him in manners.

     Paul spoke up for the group and thanked Jonathan for his consideration, while the others more or less reluctantly chimed in.

     "Well it’s food for thought" he said as he rose from the table.  "Now get some sleep, we have lots of work to begin in the morning."

     In the following days Jonathan's first care was to plant a large enough garden of vegetables to get his colony through the year.  He decided it was also time to explore the surrounding hills to the north and east for a distance of some twenty to thirty miles.  He’d set a long string of traps as another food source.  If they could make it through this year and maintain their small fund of livestock, he was sure they could increase it in the following ones.

     For this business he took along Paul and Peter, so that they’d learn his skills and do the work themselves in the future.  He was thinking of their self-sufficiency and life without him, come what may.

     The other project, which most of his disciples were eager to complete was the building of the last cabin to make up their new-style village.  This structure was exactly like the other two small cabins and equally spaced a hundred feet from the next one, the three forming a semicircle around the long cabin that was the workshop.  Though the trees had to be felled and dragged quite a distance, with interruptions because of the rains, the square, little room was finished and furnished in less than two months.

     Then one morning two of the beds and trunks were carried from the other cabins to this one, and Jonathan convened his tribe for an impromptu ceremony at the shrine.  He lined up his three couples before the pool and after a long speech, filled with stray quotations, lines of verse, warnings and blessings, he made them take the oath, exchange a kiss, and pronounced them married.

     Next they proceeded down the hill and in a more substantive ceremony nailed together the two beds in each cabin to make one.  The rest of the afternoon they enjoyed a cookout and a warm fall day and dallied at the side of their little brook.  While this was going on Jonathan drew out a calendar on a tablet.  He wanted this day to be remembered each year as a holiday.  He explained to them his scheme and told Paul that his next project would be to carve a larger one which they’d hang up in the workroom and mark each passing day with a movable peg.  He simply guessed the present date from the season and declared it to be the first of October.

     "From this day forth" he told them, "we’ll keep track of time, and I hope it will improve our lives.  I’ll give this task to Simon, to record in a ledger a brief record of the events of each day.  We’ll keep this book in the common room where all of you can look into it and even add to it whatever you want.  There’s a pleasure in reviewing things past.  To do this you’ll have to become good readers and writers.  So I’ll set up a shelf of books which you can read in your free hours.  But I won't bore you with speeches any longer.  I'll retire now and see you in the morning, hopefully cheerful."

     As he walked away towards his own puny cabin around the hill, he felt a pang of loneliness such as he hadn’t known for years.  "There's no reason for this," he thought, "I only envy them for what I've missed.  What a wretched life I’ve lived, a desert, a stone.  And now when it’s too late for me, I repair it for others, a surrogate life, that pleases the mind but starves the rest of me."

     He stooped through the low door, sitting down at the single chair and table.  There was still some light outside.  Before him was the loose pile of sheets that made up his history, now left out in plain view along with some books, lined up against the wall.  In one corner of his desk stood his new collection of pens, filling an old mug, none of them used since his return.  On the shelf above them there was a tall stack of paper, from various places, still bundled in packages.

     "Perhaps I'll finish my history now," he said to himself with a sigh, eyeing the bundle of pens.

     "Perhaps not," he said again, more loudly.  And with that he folded his arms and lay his head down upon the table, letting out an even longer sigh.

     He fell asleep and dreamed once more of the long, cold winter he passed in a poorly built cabin with the outcasts and the company of the only woman he’d ever loved.  She was a short-haired girl in her early twenties, pretty, but somewhat emaciated from the sickness.  She kept her hair black, and her skin was well tanned, which distinctly marked her as a rebel from society.  He’d just come in from outside and was moving towards the corner where she waited, to lay with her, as much to keep her warm as anything else.  They had only two ragged blankets to share between them and the cabin was full of drafts and so the cold was as great an enemy as hunger.

     He came over to the dim corner and sat on the bed of grass they’d made and began rubbing her hands.  Her body was shivering.  This was a vivid dream, recalling the faces of the other inhabitants of that den as they milled around and passed near him in the gloomy silence, like ghosts.  Only the face of his loved one was smiling.  She was already pregnant and they were talking about the fine life they would lead in some warm valley, far away from these cold mountains and how they’d farm and fish and raise their child in a pastoral setting, a nature child, free from all the problems of the world.

     Throughout this dream Jonathan was vividly aware of every detail her face, her brown, watery eyes, her delicate voice, the bed of straw and rags beneath them and her soft, slender hands resting in his own.  But then with a start he saw his own hand as old, callous and white.  He pulled it back, realizing he wasn’t young anymore, and with that shock he awoke.

     He stood up and opened the door to get some fresh air.  It was dark outside, except for the light of a full moon straining through the thin clouds.  He stepped out and wiped a feverish sweat off his brow.  He stared a long while at the dark and waving silhouettes of the trees surrounding him.  Despite the shock of such a vivid memory, he felt like he had just passed a crisis, like a fever broken and that he’d be well shortly by taking in deep draughts of the cool night air.

     "We all have our chances in life," he thought, "and our full taste of it, however brief.  Though a span of months for me was a span of decades for others, I had my love and it nourishes a lifetime.  I see it in people’s faces, even in the face of an old man.  This is a harvest that few realize, that few see.  I was marked out for this solitary life.  I followed it from the start and now I spin it out, so where's the sorrow, where's the pity?  It's been fair enough to me."

     With these reflections he retired to bed and to sounder sleep.  In the morning he woke up happy.  He lay in bed full of thoughts for his colony, how much it had improved and how it could be more or less perfected, his own little colony, within another year.

     "In a year I could teach them all I know, all that's worth knowing," he thought on, "all my tricks of survival and how to read and write and think a little.  Then, if I'm still in health, I'll set out again alone and see what changes grace our holy Church.  Perhaps something can be salvaged from the chaos for our colony."

     He settled this plan in his mind and was eager to tell them the first part of it.  But winding down the hill he was surprised to find the village silent, the doors closed and his colonists apparently still sleeping.  He whistled loudly and in a minute saw one door crack open and Mary peek out.

     "Get up you lazy dogs," he yelled, "if you want to see an old man making breakfast for a bunch of newlyweds.  This will be your only chance to see it."

     With this he made the rounds to collect the wood and eggs and one of the last cans of beans for breakfast.  The pot of tea was steaming before the couples stumbled out, sleepy-eyed and hand-in-hand, to watch the old man cook.

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