Story Excerpt

The Greenway

by Susan Palwick

Susan Palwick has published four novels with Tor Books: Flying in Place (1992), The Necessary Beggar (2005), Shelter (2007), and Mending the Moon (2013). Her first story collection, The Fate of Mice, appeared in 2007 from Tachyon Publications, and her second collection, All Words Are Real, was published in 2019 by Fairwood Press. Susan’s fiction has been honored with a Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and an Asimov’s Reader’s Award, and it has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. Several of her stories have been selected for the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series. She was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2023, having received their Silver Pen Award in 2006. In the author’s latest story, an unusual plague brings both destruction and renewal, as a family who are the last survivors in their settlement await the arrival of . . .

We had Mama in the shed when the caravan came. It was still hard winter, the ground too frozen to dig, and she was frozen that hard in the shed, too. The parts of her that would grow would be safe. They’d wake up when it warmed.

I’d wanted her safely planted with us, home forever, but I had a gut feeling a caravan might get here before that could happen. Don’t ask me why: they don’t come through here often. Our last one was eight years ago, which is one reason we have so many crops here, because most of our dead stay. Maybe I was just being superstitious.

The tiny settlement that used to be here was called Streamside, and sure enough the river runs half a mile to the east. To the west it’s flat plains until the mountains start on the horizon, purple and hazy. So the children and I could see the caravan coming from far off, see the trail it left of green growth, saplings, tall flowers.

All that green. It sprouts in human bodies and kills them, but it doesn’t die itself. It doesn’t hurt us when we eat it, later, even though it kills the people it grows in. It kills us and saves us at the same time: regreening the world so anyone still alive will be able to eat.

The caravans bring spring wherever they travel, carpets of grass and flowers: the greenway. I’ve always been confused about what we should call the wagons. I learned that a caravan is a line of wagons, and these are always just one. So I think the caravan is all the wagons in the world, all traveling different places, and we call each wagon by that name to honor the whole.

No one knows how they make spring, thawing the ground where they pass. When we still had a town here, some believed that the undying seed the caravans carry is so desperate to grow that it will plant itself in any soil it touches, so the wagons only have to drop a body every few feet. Other people said no, the caravan drivers planted them with shovels, the same as any other seed. That wouldn’t account for the warmth, though.

I’d thought about trying to plant Mama even though it was winter, taking her off her shelf in the shed and putting her in the corner of the garden where I wanted her. Would her heat make a hole in the ground where she could grow? But she didn’t feel warm when I visited her, and it was so cold outside, ice and snow, and I didn’t want her to have to fight through all that, even though I don’t know if what’s left is really her.

If we have unburied folk, we owe them to the caravan. It’s nothing like a law. No one will punish you but your own conscience. And it’s not like, out here, anyone would know if I withheld her body. The children and I are the last of Streamside. But I’d know, and part of me thinks Mama would, too. She loved green growing things even when the vines started sprouting in her lungs, and she always wanted to see other places. She chafed against staying here on this bit of land with its bit of house, however much she loved me and the children.

She’d want to travel with the caravan. It’s just that I don’t want to let her go.

 

I was feeding baby Mira green beans I’d put up from her grandfather—he’d died six months before Mama, when the ground was still soft—when my older boy Lim, five and fierce and funny, danced up to the highchair. “Look,” he said, and stood on tiptoe to point out the window, and on the horizon I saw a hint of green, waving stalks, and a dust trail in front of it. He’d never seen a caravan before. “Growing stuff! Pick me up, Mama!”

So I did, even though my knee complained about it. I twisted it tripping on a rock in the orchard last year, and it’s never been quite right since, but I wrap it tightly and do what I have to do. I held Lim up to the window so he could see better, and he laughed. “So pretty!”

The kids get starved for color in the winter. Spring and summer and autumn are riots of growth and harvest outside, all the dead of Streamside thrusting up new growth to feed us, red tomatoes and yellow corn and green peppers, golden peaches, purple eggplant. There are rabbits and birds and fish in abundance too, all year, although I’m careful about what we eat. Too many of the creatures have growths that don’t look healthy, don’t look like flowers or beans or vines, and we don’t need whatever illnesses they’re carrying. I know that happened before, fevers and plagues jumping from one kind of animal to another, from fox to fowl and fowl to farmer.

I love wild creatures, and I don’t believe humans are better than they—worse, after all, for look what we made of the world—but I’ve never seen a non-human creature produce any growths we could eat. Regular meat, yes. That’s always been safe, as far as I can tell. Maybe their growths are, too, but I don’t trust them, maybe because I don’t know the animals. With my father, and the schoolteacher and mayor and minister and all those other folk, my neighbors, I can tell. I know whose carrots these are, whose apples, whose beans and squash and lettuce. I don’t know if there’s really any connection between how good a person was, how much I loved them, and how much they nourish us, but I feel like there is. There should be.

So in fall, we harvest, and I spend days canning anything we aren’t eating right then and arrange the jars on shelves too high for the children to reach. I arrange them by color, in a rainbow: yellow to orange to red to purple, ending in green. When everything has died outside, the house blazes with color, although the walls grow drabber again as we make our way through the jars. And Mira and Lim tire of the jars. Those colors don’t sway and move, don’t dance in sunlight the way plants do outside, the way we could see the stalks bending in the wind behind the caravan, even from so far away.

Lim stared, rapt. He knows from his storybooks that wagons take people places and bring them to other people. He’d never seen a wagon in person before. “Maybe Daddy’s coming back,” he said.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I have to put you down again, big boy, but we’ll bring a chair over here so you can climb on it, okay?”

I eased him down, my knee and shoulders both aching. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he mentioned his Daddy, although I couldn’t believe he even remembered Bill. He’d been three when the man left us, Mira planted but not stirring yet in my womb. Bill was one of those people who seemed like a good idea at the time and wasn’t. The whole house breathed easier when he was gone, except maybe Lim, who’d taken whatever dim things he remembered, and the stories I read him and his sister, and built of them a shining paragon. Daddy was coming home. Daddy would help with the house. Daddy would be sad Mama had died, whereas in fact they avoided each other at all costs, no easy thing in a one-room cabin.

I let Lim have his stories, there being no danger that Bill would reappear to smash them. Everyone needs a dream, especially in winter when there’s no color outside and the brightness inside is diminishing every day. Bill told me once that the caravans come to steal our dead in winter because they know we’re so starved for grass and flowers, so starved for the greenway that grows behind them. I told him it wasn’t stealing and that he was a fine one to talk, and where was that paycheck he’d promised me from his mining work up north?

That wasn’t a good night for any of us. Lots of screaming, Lim crying, until finally Mama shouted louder than anyone else and put an end to it. She still had her lungs then. The spores hadn’t yet settled, sprouting into tendrils that finally choked her, growing out of her mouth and then out of every other orifice before I wrapped both her and the vines, with their delicate purple flowers, in thick plastic and put her in the shed.

I was happy Lim didn’t remember his Daddy as he’d really been. So I smoothed my hand over his hair, the stubborn cowlick in the middle, and said, “We’ll have to see who comes. All kinds of different people, maybe.”

I knew they’d have one or two healthy folk and a few more who were turning, getting ready to go, shoots and stems creeping out of joints and blossoms appearing between vertebrae. Those would join the seedbed, the tightly wrapped bundles in their leak-proof bags under the wagon.

Lim peered hopefully up at me. “Other kids?” Aside from his sister, other children were mythical to him, no way to tell the unicorns in his picture books from youngsters on swings and slides and seesaws. Bill had put up a rope swing for him, hung it from the big tree that used to be the postmaster, so he knew swings, but just the one. He’d never seen a set of them.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Wait and see. Can you help me by reading your book while I take care of Mira, Lim?” She was cranky, teething, and needed a change and a bath. In the sink, though, she splashed and laughed. One advantage of snow, when it piles right outside your door, is plenty of water to warm over the hearth. It had been weeks since I’d had to pick my way to the well, which I didn’t like doing in bad weather with a bad knee.

Later I fed the children and myself: more of the beans, and some dried fish from one of my good days on the river last summer, and canned peaches that used to be the schoolteacher, when there was a school here. Sweet lady. Sweet peaches. With her belly full, Mira went down easily, and so did Lim, once we sang the ABC song together. I was teaching him his letters so he could read the storybooks on his own.

 

Every day for a week we watched the caravan getting closer. Lim kept waving at it—I’d pulled over a chair, as I’d promised, and he’d have stayed in that window all day if I’d let him—but they were too far off to wave back yet. Who knew if they even saw him.

Lim got happier the closer they got. I didn’t. I should have been starved for new faces, but I knew I’d have to be hospitable, and I didn’t know if I remembered how. And I didn’t want them to take what we had.

Of course I knew better, knew I should be ashamed of thinking that way, so I worked to get ready. I checked on Mama—still snug in the shed—and went through my protein stores to make sure I had enough to feed guests. I’d had a good autumn, but I hadn’t been able to hunt or fish much since, between the icy weather and my knee, which wouldn’t take another fall. I rewrapped it every night and kept it elevated when I could, but it still ached. Arthritis. Mama and Daddy had both had that.

I figured I could handle a few guests, for a while anyway. The caravan couldn’t hold that many people, and I didn’t know how many of them would be healthy and eating, or how long they’d stay. Probably they’d stay for one meal or two, if that, and then collect Mama and be on their way. And there’d be growth behind them, so we’d have new crops, a harvest in the cold. The children would love that. So would I.

I used the time to do chores I’d been putting off: mending the kids’ clothing so they’d be presentable, organizing toys and books, fixing the outhouse door so it closed right. And late one night when the caravan was a day or two out, when Lim and Mira were already asleep, I went through my box of Mama’s things. I hadn’t done that in a while, but I felt like I was going to be saying goodbye to her all over again.

Here were the love letters she and Daddy wrote to each other before they were married, when he was working on seawater reclamation on the western coast and she was teaching a botany class at a little college in the Midwest. The mail still worked then: pony express or runners on foot, since all the old computer systems had gotten corrupted and finally died completely. Here was their marriage certificate, from a little church halfway between those two places, where they’d stopped on a whim on their way to Streamside. The preacher was so glad to see anyone in the church that he cheerfully agreed to marry them. He went outside and invited in a crew of day laborers and blinking old people and folks just traveling through the way Mama and Daddy were. All these strangers cheered the new couple and feasted on old tins of sardines and a dusty jar of peanut butter the preacher had been hoarding for just such an occasion. Mama said it made her feel like the whole world could be kin.

They chose Streamside for its water: the river, and a good well, and game and good land for planting—ordinary crops, the greenway hadn’t shown up yet—and a healthy community with five generations of some families, but newcomers too, all working together. They helped Mama and Daddy build the cabin, which was always supposed to grow from one room into several and somehow never did. First everyone was too busy, and then they were too sick.

I listened for the steady sound of the children’s breathing behind me and picked up Mama’s journal. She’d kept journals all her life but always destroyed them when they were full, never let anyone read them. The last one was different, because she got sick before she finished it and died without telling me to burn it or not to read it. I knew those would have been her instructions. I kept it and read it anyway.

It was full of regret she’d barely hinted at in our daily lives: how much she wished she and Daddy had kept moving, how badly she wanted to strike out for somewhere new, how confining the cabin was with two couples, and then one and a half couples and a child, and then two women and two children. Mira was three months old when Mama died, and I know Mama loved her—loved all of us—but she was desperate for freedom, too. She wanted to see new places, meet new people. Her last entry, when her handwriting had turned crabbed and strange, barely legible, said “I will never leave this place.” That stabbed me in the gut every time I read it, but I couldn’t not read it. It was why I couldn’t refuse to give her to the caravan. She’d get to leave Streamside. I’d tell them not to plant her until she was far away somewhere, near an ocean or a mountain or anywhere a place she hadn’t seen before, a place where she could feed new people and help them grow the way she’d helped all of us grow, the way I was trying to help Mira and Lim grow.

I turned to look at them, sleeping peacefully now, faces flickering in the lantern light. I shouldn’t have stayed up so late, shouldn’t have wasted the oil. I snuffed the lantern, and waited for my eyes to adjust, and curled up in my own bed, covering my swollen knee with warm woolen blankets.

 

The caravan arrived the next morning. Lim knew before I did. I woke to Mira crying and Lim calling “Mama Mama Mama” from his chair by the window. He waved frantically out the window, and as I tore out of bed, wincing from my knee, and threw on a robe and rushed to join him, I saw that at last the caravan was waving back.

Two people stood outside the wagon: a woman and a man of the same height, the same nose and hair and thin willowy stature. Brother and sister, must be: no spouses looked that much alike. I didn’t have tea made for them, but I had the dried fish, and I could brew tea while they ate.

I went outside, even wearing just my robe, because it would be rude not to greet them right away. I’d pulled on boots, though, because we still had snow. Lim ran after me in his bare feet and shot through the door before I could stop him, but then he slowed and fell back behind my legs. I don’t think he was prepared for how big the wagon was, although we’d been watching it get bigger for days. He needed to get back inside before his feet froze.

Mira was still howling inside. “Tend to your little one,” the woman said, kindly. “There will be time for welcome later. We don’t want to make anything difficult for you.”

I nodded and gulped and ducked back inside, Lim still molded to the back of my thigh. I scooped up Mira from her crib, changed and fed her—thank the river she was eating solid food now—got myself and Lim into decent clothing appropriate to the weather, and went back outside. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m Devona.”

The strangers sat on the wagon steps, a ladder they lowered to get in and out. They were gnawing some kind of jerky. Beneath the wagon, I saw the seedbed, many wrapped bundles, and my throat tightened. I couldn’t see what was inside the wagon. “We’re Ruha and Tyron,” the woman said. “Why are you sorry? You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“You caught me unprepared, although we’ve been watching your approach for days.” I reached around my back to touch Lim’s head. “My son’s very excited, but he’s also shy. We haven’t seen—” I stopped and thought. “I’m not sure he’s ever seen a stranger. He’s only known his grandma who died, my mama, and his little sister and me. And his daddy who left.”

They listened to me with their heads slightly bent, as if to catch every word. “So now it’s just the three of you?” Tyron said. His voice was deeper than his sister’s but also the same. I thought they must be twins. “You and the children?”

“Yes, for three months now.” I swallowed. “Mama’s in the shed. I have her ready to give to you, so you can plant her somewhere else.” I saw the siblings exchange a glance.

“There’s time for that,” Ruha said. “May we stay here a day or two? We promise not to bother you, and we’ll help you if we can. With the children, or the cabin. It often takes children time to get used to us, and we don’t like to leave fear in our wake.” She smiled at me, her face open and friendly. “And we don’t collect beloved dead until families are ready.”

I wondered if I’d ever be ready, but I nodded, and then—because she’d talked about their wake—I thought to look at the path the wagon had traveled, cutting through my orchard between the rows of trees waiting to bloom. Had the ground thawed where the wheels had rolled over it? Was grass sprouting now, in this wrong season?

No grass yet, but the snow was gone, a pathway of dark soil where there had been white before. I walked between the trees and bent to touch the ground. Yes, it was warmer, thawing. Ruha and Tyron watched me. “How does this happen?” I asked. “Did you plant anyone here?”

“No.”

“The shed where I have my mama isn’t warmer.”

“She is just one,” Ruha said quietly, and gestured underneath the wagon at the seedbed, ten or fifteen bundles. “When they are clustered together, they generate energy. It melts the ground below them and warms the wagon above, to succor those who still live.”

I swallowed. “How many living do you have?”

“Three. One is close to leaving. We will plant one from underneath when it is his time to join the seedbed.”

I walked around the wagon to look at the horses—ponies, really, a white and a grey—who had been pulling it. “Sturdy beasts. I have no feed for them, I am afraid.”

“They fare well on what grows behind us,” Tyron said. “The warmth awakens the regular grasses. They will graze here tomorrow.”