I Trust You to Kill Me

Joyce's maternal family-the Owens-landed in Plymouth from the ship, Hopewell, in 1634. Six generations later, a younger, poorer son migrated to the rocky hills of Quebec, one crop of hay, two crops of stone every summer. Three hundred years after the Hopewell, Joyce was born in an isolated farmhouse on the border.In those hills, there was no electricity, no running water, or telephones. Radio batteries could be counted on to die a few days before the big hurricane.She learned to be afraid of horses because they were nervous. The women could hitch up the old mare, but not the gelding. It was her own daughter many years later, on a California mountain, who taught her that horses were afraid because they were prey animals. The best way to talk to them was by gesture or by speaking quietly. Indeed, her grandfather clucked and hee-ed and haw-ed to his team, which understood instantly.Joyce's Hood grandmother read the King James Bible aloud after dinner for her husband and little Joyce, neither of whom could read. It was a musical introduction to the love of English language, even that of Shakespeare. So, she taught English until she was 57. One day, she spent 10 minutes reciting Lear's curse from her copy of Hamlet. Time to go. Then she started to read and write.Covid-19 presented a unique opportunity. Initially, old people were forbidden from leaving the house. She cracked open the storage room pantry, fitted out with all the supplies that hill farms ran out of in mid-winter. And began to read.The research started with Roy Stanton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. Stanton had practiced dying daily in Bagdad as a member of the U.S. army. He rehearsed the myriad of ways he could go as he gassed up his vehicle before driving out of the compound. He applied what he had learned to the coming climate crisis caused by us -the anthros-which would mean either the end of civilization, the end of us or the end of the world. There were so many other books on that topic, and they flew magically onto Joyce's reading device, even in the middle of the night.Weren't they depressing? Not any more than a world that stopped on a dime and stored bodies in ice rinks, refrigerated trucks and cathedrals. Besides, these books managed somehow to be encouraging in the end. They made her heart lift like suddenly getting grocery delivery and restaurant meals at her door.Why not write a novel about that and set it a hundred years in the future? And why not set it, say, in Colombia? She had immersed herself in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Colombia years ago. Picking up his A Hundred Years of Solitude, she realized she had read it several times, just as she had all his others. Now she was on to her second year of off-and on-quarantine, she had time to devour the myriad books about Colombia. One night, she started to dream the story. Every so often, she would dream a new chapter. She had to be pretty quick to catch the scene on paper before it melted away. When she finished I Trust You to Kill, Me beta readers had a few notes, but COVID was happy to provide a spring surge and more weeks of quarantine.