Ashes of the Moon Chapter Fourteen
They left two days later, driving in a Range Rover that Lon had mysteriously procured from a source dismissed as ‘just a business acquaintance, nothing more’. Jared didn’t ask too many questions. He sat quietly in the passenger seat while Lon chatted at times, or sang operatic ballads, badly, at others. The northern road was still too badly damaged and blocked to be easily traversed, so they unwittingly followed Jensen’s route of months before, swinging out eastwards until they turned north at Kaga’ill.
Along the way they saw signs that the country was returning to something like normal. People were heading out along each road - a thin stream, yet, but one that would grow each day. Some hamlets were already re-occupied by people anxious to plant crops while the water still lay around in the dams and ponds and irrigation channels.
They reached Jim Beaver’s farm by mid-afternoon. They found more serious looting had occurred since he and Jensen and the children had left it. The first attack had likely been under the command of an officer with an eye to the future, who recognized the beauty and usefulness of the house and farm and so limited his men to a quick kill. But at some point others had returned and taken the silver, the paintings, the rugs, and broken much of what remained. The old clock on the mantelpiece was smashed into a thousand pieces.
Jared wandered, lost, through the rooms. His body and mind ached for the voice that would never sound in here again. In Jensen’s room he looked at the upended bed, the slashed mattress, and could only see Jensen standing naked in the doorway to the bathroom, hopeful, confused, weary with loss.
Later, he helped Lon dig three graves. In the first they placed Jim and Dymphna. The third held Zimi and Mosa. They left the one between the two empty, waiting.
Afterwards, Jared took off the handkerchief he’d tied across his face and vomited into the hedge that marked the pool.
The pool itself was a deep green color. While the rains came it had filled to the point of overflow, and it had stayed relatively fresh. But now, a month into the next dry season, it was full of algae and mosquitoes. Jared tried to remember Jensen’s strong, pale body lifting Juma in the air, throwing him far into the water, the giggles and shrieks of the children as Jensen stood there, a laugh in his mouth but not his eyes. He bent his head at the gate and rested it there, breathing deeply, feeling such sadness that he knew it would always be a part of him, staining his skin and soul like a dust-traced tattoo.
The aridity of his soul was ironic, of course, a fact Jared noted, because the garden, and everywhere he looked on the plains, was vibrant with new life. You won’t know it after the rains, Jensen had said, and he was right. There was a sense of richness in this landscape that made Jared’s pain seem almost inappropriate, as if no one should be mourning when the world had exploded with such exuberant growth.
Lon rested an understanding hand on Jared’s shoulder, and drew him back inside, where they prepared a meal of pancakes and fresh tomatoes on Lon’s camp stove.
When they bedded down - Jared alone in the living room, away from the chaos of the bedrooms - he expected he would be unable to sleep. But the moon was full again, and he remembered Jensen’s voice in the darkness, telling him about the sun striving for the moon and destroying it in the process, and how the ashes gave children life below. In the silvery light he could almost see Jensen standing there, so deep in grief and failure, trying to find comfort in a tale meant to teach acceptance, and patience. He remembered walking to him, kissing him, and everything else that came afterwards, and his body grew hard again at the memory, betraying him with life when he wanted to stay with the dead.
He reached down and gripped his hardness, stroked it in the dark and summoned Jensen’s shade to come back to him, to join him. He remembered Jensen dropping to his knees and sucking him so desperately, and how the exquisite pleasure pulled Jared forward to lie on top of him, rutting against his body, gripping their flesh together and rocking, wildly, as Jensen clutched at his shoulders, his back. He heard Jensen cry out, a high pitched gasp, a broken sound, heard himself shout something incoherent into the night.
He wished it had been Jensen’s name.
When he came this time, he was silent.
The morning broke too soon. He got up, weary with the night and his memories, and breakfasted with Lon on the front verandah, watching the procession of wildlife below. Birds were everywhere, feasting on the insects that hummed so loudly it was as though the entire plain was one, enormous animal and the insects, the sound of its breath. Zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and eland roamed, grown sleek and fat with the next generation ready to drop into this abundance. Jared watched and said nothing, and even Lon was quiet in the face of the day’s task.
They loaded shovels and a plastic tarpaulin, big enough to roll a man’s bones in. By 9am they were forty miles away, heading north.
The track had not been improved by the wet season, and at times the Rover bounced in a way that reminded Jared of the old Tata bus. But when the track smoothed out a little, the Rover picked up speed in a way Jared could only regret. This was a destination he told himself he could have gone his entire life without seeing again.
And yet - the thought of being where Jensen had stood, the last place on Earth that saw him breathing and brave and whole - it had its own pull. Jared knew Lon was right. This was a journey, a pilgrimage, he had to take.
Around a small curve, at the foot of the hill, a man stood.
Jared’s heart beat crazily for several seconds, shocked by the sudden intrusion of a human being on the landscape and by a moment of deluded, impossible recognition. No, it wasn’t him, though the slouch was painfully familiar. Lon slowed the truck anyway; no-one would drive past another man on foot in lion country.
Jared wound down the window, called out, “Kubanda kyoweka.”
The heavily bearded man stared at him, his chest heaving. Under the dirt, and the hair, Jared saw a smile growing. He looked above it, and the greenness of the land had come there, was gazing at him in a way he remembered, dazzling him, and he fell out of the Rover, to his knees, there in the rutted track, sobbing without tears, laughing without sound, as Jensen Ackles stepped forward and picked him up in a joyful embrace that had begun not far from this place three months ago and hadn’t stopped since.
And the first words in this new life were spoken so softly, so wonderingly, he almost didn’t hear them as they fell into his ears.
“There you are.”
Epilogue
Along the way they saw signs that the country was returning to something like normal. People were heading out along each road - a thin stream, yet, but one that would grow each day. Some hamlets were already re-occupied by people anxious to plant crops while the water still lay around in the dams and ponds and irrigation channels.
They reached Jim Beaver’s farm by mid-afternoon. They found more serious looting had occurred since he and Jensen and the children had left it. The first attack had likely been under the command of an officer with an eye to the future, who recognized the beauty and usefulness of the house and farm and so limited his men to a quick kill. But at some point others had returned and taken the silver, the paintings, the rugs, and broken much of what remained. The old clock on the mantelpiece was smashed into a thousand pieces.
Jared wandered, lost, through the rooms. His body and mind ached for the voice that would never sound in here again. In Jensen’s room he looked at the upended bed, the slashed mattress, and could only see Jensen standing naked in the doorway to the bathroom, hopeful, confused, weary with loss.
Later, he helped Lon dig three graves. In the first they placed Jim and Dymphna. The third held Zimi and Mosa. They left the one between the two empty, waiting.
Afterwards, Jared took off the handkerchief he’d tied across his face and vomited into the hedge that marked the pool.
The pool itself was a deep green color. While the rains came it had filled to the point of overflow, and it had stayed relatively fresh. But now, a month into the next dry season, it was full of algae and mosquitoes. Jared tried to remember Jensen’s strong, pale body lifting Juma in the air, throwing him far into the water, the giggles and shrieks of the children as Jensen stood there, a laugh in his mouth but not his eyes. He bent his head at the gate and rested it there, breathing deeply, feeling such sadness that he knew it would always be a part of him, staining his skin and soul like a dust-traced tattoo.
The aridity of his soul was ironic, of course, a fact Jared noted, because the garden, and everywhere he looked on the plains, was vibrant with new life. You won’t know it after the rains, Jensen had said, and he was right. There was a sense of richness in this landscape that made Jared’s pain seem almost inappropriate, as if no one should be mourning when the world had exploded with such exuberant growth.
Lon rested an understanding hand on Jared’s shoulder, and drew him back inside, where they prepared a meal of pancakes and fresh tomatoes on Lon’s camp stove.
When they bedded down - Jared alone in the living room, away from the chaos of the bedrooms - he expected he would be unable to sleep. But the moon was full again, and he remembered Jensen’s voice in the darkness, telling him about the sun striving for the moon and destroying it in the process, and how the ashes gave children life below. In the silvery light he could almost see Jensen standing there, so deep in grief and failure, trying to find comfort in a tale meant to teach acceptance, and patience. He remembered walking to him, kissing him, and everything else that came afterwards, and his body grew hard again at the memory, betraying him with life when he wanted to stay with the dead.
He reached down and gripped his hardness, stroked it in the dark and summoned Jensen’s shade to come back to him, to join him. He remembered Jensen dropping to his knees and sucking him so desperately, and how the exquisite pleasure pulled Jared forward to lie on top of him, rutting against his body, gripping their flesh together and rocking, wildly, as Jensen clutched at his shoulders, his back. He heard Jensen cry out, a high pitched gasp, a broken sound, heard himself shout something incoherent into the night.
He wished it had been Jensen’s name.
When he came this time, he was silent.
The morning broke too soon. He got up, weary with the night and his memories, and breakfasted with Lon on the front verandah, watching the procession of wildlife below. Birds were everywhere, feasting on the insects that hummed so loudly it was as though the entire plain was one, enormous animal and the insects, the sound of its breath. Zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and eland roamed, grown sleek and fat with the next generation ready to drop into this abundance. Jared watched and said nothing, and even Lon was quiet in the face of the day’s task.
They loaded shovels and a plastic tarpaulin, big enough to roll a man’s bones in. By 9am they were forty miles away, heading north.
The track had not been improved by the wet season, and at times the Rover bounced in a way that reminded Jared of the old Tata bus. But when the track smoothed out a little, the Rover picked up speed in a way Jared could only regret. This was a destination he told himself he could have gone his entire life without seeing again.
And yet - the thought of being where Jensen had stood, the last place on Earth that saw him breathing and brave and whole - it had its own pull. Jared knew Lon was right. This was a journey, a pilgrimage, he had to take.
Around a small curve, at the foot of the hill, a man stood.
Jared’s heart beat crazily for several seconds, shocked by the sudden intrusion of a human being on the landscape and by a moment of deluded, impossible recognition. No, it wasn’t him, though the slouch was painfully familiar. Lon slowed the truck anyway; no-one would drive past another man on foot in lion country.
Jared wound down the window, called out, “Kubanda kyoweka.”
The heavily bearded man stared at him, his chest heaving. Under the dirt, and the hair, Jared saw a smile growing. He looked above it, and the greenness of the land had come there, was gazing at him in a way he remembered, dazzling him, and he fell out of the Rover, to his knees, there in the rutted track, sobbing without tears, laughing without sound, as Jensen Ackles stepped forward and picked him up in a joyful embrace that had begun not far from this place three months ago and hadn’t stopped since.
And the first words in this new life were spoken so softly, so wonderingly, he almost didn’t hear them as they fell into his ears.
“There you are.”
Epilogue