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“But I will say also on yer first day that the attractiveness of power is something you should learn about before you get too much older, it’s the thing that separates men from boys, tho not in the way most men think.
“And that’s all I’ll say. Prying eyes and all that.
“Oh, son, there’s so much wonder in the world. Don’t let no one tell you otherwise. Yes, life has been hard here on New World and I’ll even admit to you here, cuz if I’m going to start out at all it has to be an honest start, I’ll tell you that I was nearly given to despair. Things in the settlement are maybe more complicated than I can quite explain right now and there’s things you’ll learn for yerself before too long whether I like it or not and there’ve been difficulties with food and with sickness and it was hard enough even before I lost yer pa and I nearly gave up.
“But I didn’t give up. I didn’t give up cuz of you, my beautiful, beautiful boy, my wondrous son who might make something better of this world, who I promise to raise only with love and hope and who I swear will see this world come good. I swear it.
“Cuz when I held you for the first time this morning and fed you from my own body, I felt so much love for you it was almost like pain, almost like I couldn’t stand it one second longer.
“But only almost.
“And I sang to you a song that my mother sang to me and her mother sang to her and it goes,”
And here, amazingly, Viola sings.
Actually sings.
My skin goes gooseflesh, my chest crushes. She musta heard the whole tune in my Noise and of course Ben singing it cuz here it comes, rolling outta her mouth like the peal of a bell.
The voice of Viola making the world into the voice of my ma, singing the song.
“Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maiden call from the valley below,
‘Oh don’t deceive me, oh never leave me,
How could you use a poor maiden so?’”
I can’t look at her.
I can’t look at her.
I put my hands to my head.
“And it’s a sad song, Todd, but it’s also a promise. I’ll never deceive you and I’ll never leave you and I promise you this so you can one day promise it to others and know that it’s true.
“Oh, ha, Todd! That’s you crying. That’s you crying from yer cot, waking up from yer first sleep on yer first day, waking up and asking the world to come to you.
“And so for today I have to put this aside.
“Yer calling for me, son, and I will answer.”
Viola stops and there’s only the river and my Noise.
“There’s more,” Viola says after a while when I don’t raise my head, flipping thru the pages. “There’s a lot more.” She looks at me. “Do you want me to read more?” She looks back at the book. “Do you want me to read the end?”
The end.
Read the last thing my ma wrote in the last days before–
“No,” I say quickly.
Yer calling for me, son, and I will answer.
In my Noise forever.
“No,” I say again. “Let’s leave it there for now.”
I glance over at Viola and I see that her face is pulled as sad as my Noise feels. Her eyes are wet and her chin shakes, just barely, just a tremble in the dawn sunlight. She sees me watching, feels my Noise watching her, and she turns away to face the river.
And there, in that morning, in that new sunrise, I realize something.
I realize something important.
So important that as it dawns fully I have to stand up.
I know what she’s thinking.
I know what she’s thinking.
Even looking at her back, I know what she’s thinking and feeling and what’s going on inside her.
The way she’s turned her body, the way she’s holding her head and her hands and the book in her lap, the way she’s stiffening a little in her back as she hears all this in my Noise.
I can read it.
I can read her.
Cuz she’s thinking about how her own parents also came here with hope like my ma. She’s wondering if the hope at the end of our road is just as false as the one that was at the end of my ma’s. And she’s taking the words of my ma and putting them into the mouths of her own ma and pa and hearing them say that they love her and they miss her and they wish her the world. And she’s taking the song of my ma and she’s weaving it into everything else till it becomes a sad thing all her own.
And it hurts her, but it’s an okay hurt, but it hurts still, but it’s good, but it hurts.
She hurts.
I know all this.
I know it’s true.
Cuz I can read her.
I can read her Noise even tho she ain’t got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade.
I raise my hands to the side of my head to hold it all in.
“Viola,” I whisper, my voice shaking.
“I know,” she says quietly, pulling her arms tight around her, still facing away from me.
And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing.
Each of us knowing the other.
The sun creeps up into the sky and the river is loud as we look across it and we can now see it rushing fast down towards the valley’s end, throwing up whitewater and rapids.
It’s Viola who breaks the spell that’s fallen twixt us. “You know what it has to be, don’t you?” she says. She takes out the binos and looks downriver. The sun is rising at the end of the valley. She has to shield the lenses with her hand.
“What is it?” I say.
She presses a button or two and looks again.
“What do you see?” I ask.
She hands the binos to me.
I look downriver, following the rapids, the foam, right to–
Right to the end.
A few kilometres away, the river ends in mid-air.
“Another falls,” I say.
“Looks way bigger than the one we saw with Wilf,” she says.
“The road’ll find a way past it,” I say. “Shouldn’t bother us.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
“I mean,” she says, frowning a bit at my denseness, “that falls that big’re bound to have a city at the bottom of them. That if you had to choose a place anywhere on a planet for first settlement, then a valley at the base of a waterfall with rich farmland and ready water might just look perfect from space.”
My Noise rises a little but only a little.
Cuz who would dare to think?
“Haven,” I say.
“I’ll bet you anything we’ve found it,” she says. “I’ll bet you when we get to that waterfall we’ll be able to see it below us.”
“If we run,” I say, “we could be there in an hour. Less than”
She looks me in the eye for the first time since my ma’s book.
And she says, “If we run?”
And then she smiles.
A genuine smile.
And I know what that means, too.
We grab up our few things and go.
Faster than before.
My feet are tired and sore. Hers must be, too. I’ve got blisters and aches and my heart hurts from all I miss and all that’s gone. And hers does, too.
But we run.
Boy, do we run.
Cuz maybe (shut up)–
Just maybe (don’t think it)–
Maybe there really is hope at the end of the road.
The river grows wider and straighter as we rush on and the walls of the valley move in closer and closer, the one on our side getting so close the edge of the road starts to slope up. Spray from the rapids is floating in the air. Our clothes get wet, our faces, too, and hands. The roar becomes thunderous, filling up the world with itself, almost like a physical thing, but not in a bad way. Like it’s washing you, like it’s washing the Noise away.