He'd
developed a taste for food, real people food, that he'd buy in town at
the Loblaws Superstore, but he couldn't leave Davey alone in the cave,
and he certainly couldn't carry the howling, shitting, puking, pissing,
filthy baby into town with him.
So they ate what the golems brought them: sweet grasses, soft berries,
frozen winter fruit dug from the base of the orchards in town, blind
winter fish from the streams. They drank snowmelt and ate pine cones and
the baby Davey cried and cried until Alan couldn't remember what it was
to live in a world of words and conversations and thought and
reflection.
No one knew what to do about Davey. Their father blew warm winds scented
with coal dust and loam to calm him, but still Davey cried. Their mother
rocked him on her gentlest spin cycle, but still Davey cried. Alan
walked down the slope to Carl's landmass, growing with the dust and
rains and snow, and set him down on the soft grass and earth there, but
still Davey cried, and Carlos inched farther and farther toward the
St. Lawrence seaway, sluggishly making his way out to the ocean and as
far away from the baby as possible.
After his first birthday, David started taking breaks from his
screaming, learning to crawl and then totter, becoming a holy terror. If
Alan left his schoolbooks within reach of the boy, they'd be reduced to
shreds of damp mulch in minutes.
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