The Pocketwatch

The Pocketwatch

We lost Ferguson yesterday. We were scrounging around in a collapsed supermarket looking for canned food that might have eluded earlier scavengers. A support beam that had been hanging on by a thread finally let go and crashed down on him, killing him instantly. We didn't bother with a funeral. We just left him where he lay crushed beneath the beam. So much death had long since caused us to dispense with such niceties as burying our dead. "Better him than me." was the thought uppermost in our minds.

Someone would have to deal with the girl. She might become a problem. He had claimed that she was his daughter, but no one really believed that. She was undoubtedly a stray that he had picked up somewhere along the road back from Dayton. With so few survivors in Columbus, it was ludicrous to believe that his daughter was one of them and that he had managed to find her. And I knew for a fact that the area where he had lived was now under two hundred feet of water.

I considered taking her on myself. She was almost twelve after all. If I didn't take her, someone else certainly would. But did I really want to take on the responsibility of a woman and all the complications that involved? Who needed the added burden of the children that would inevitably result? I decided to let someone else deal with all of that.

When Turner and I got back to the campsite, the girl was helping Molly, one of the older women, butcher what at first glance appeared to be a dog. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a possum. There would be stew tonight. My mouth watered in anticipation. After the initial glut of dead farm animals and salvaged canned foods, meat had become a scarce commodity. If we were lucky, we might bag an occasional stray dog, a possum, or a raccoon. But our diet mostly consisted of fish, corn, wheat and the odd leafy vegetable we had managed to cultivate in the three years since setting up camp here. Even that was better than those first two years of scavenging that had seen our numbers dwindle to the twenty some who now survived.

"Ferguson won't be coming back." I told the girl. No use sugar coating it. He wasn't the first one to go off in the morning and not make it back that evening. And he probably wouldn't be the last.

The girl's eyes got big. She took in a deep breath and held it for several seconds. "Good!" She wailed. "I hated him. I hate you too. I hate all of you." She burst into tears and ran into the trees near the campsite.

"She'll get over it." Molly said in a voice devoid of sympathy. "We all had to get over losing our man at one time or another." Molly was one of those persons for whom the suffering of others served to validate her own feelings of martyrdom. She looked at her survival as a punishment for the loss of her husband and children. The rest of us had long since given up trying to convince her that she was one of the lucky ones.

"Ferguson wasn't her man, Molly. He may not have been her real father, but he certainly treated her like a daughter." I knew better than to argue with Molly. She always assumed the worst in everyone.

"So you say." She said knowingly, then turned her back on me and resumed the task of butchering the possum.

I decided that I had better go after the girl and try to comfort her if she would let me. I entered the clump of trees she had run into and followed the well worn path toward the creek. In the distance I thought I heard the soft tinkling of music. As I followed the path, the sound grew louder until I came upon the girl curled up on a big rock next to the creek. She was holding what appeared to be a pocket watch next to her ear. The sounds of "Danny Boy" chimed as she shook in spasms of grief.

When she sensed my presence, she turned her tear streaked face toward me and said, "His name was Daniel. Did you know that? His father gave him this watch when he was just a little boy. He gave it to me last year when I started having nightmares about my parents and my brother. I never let him know that I hated the music. It reminded me of the sounds our house made right before the shaking started. I didn't want to hurt his feelings. He gave me his most prized possession to help me feel better. I'm glad he didn't know."

I held out my hand and said, "Come on. You'll be staying with me from now on until you're old enough to take care of yourself. You'll be safe with me."

As we walked back along the path to the campsite, her small hand in mine, I couldn't rid my mind of the image of Pete Ferguson laughing about how he had spent an entire day busting open safety deposit boxes in a small abandoned bank in Mechanicsburg, and holding up the musical pocket watch "some dumb old geezer" had left stuck among bundles of hundred dollar bills. "All that money was as worthless as this crummy little watch." he had groaned. "Maybe I can get old Molly to take it for a quick tumble. If she won't, I'm sure someone else will."