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I push the door open, still walking with my hunter’s tread though I left the woods an hour ago, my game bag heavy with rabbits and squirrels and a rare wild turkey.
I stop. Sound is emanating from inside my home, and before I fully register what it is, I have an arrow loaded up and am creeping towards the living room that is far too big for me. Under the ridiculous chandelier, at the piano that is in all the homes in Victor’s Village, is Haymitch.
I cannot fathom why he is here in the first place; he may have dropped by to swipe some food from my pantry, or simply to have someplace else to lurk around, as he has begun to do. His dark hair is greasy and overgrown again, hanging over his face so neither of us can see the other’s expressions; I doubt he has even realized I am here yet. His fingers are clumsy as he tries to play a tune, hideously off-key, but he seems to know which notes he’s going for, if it’s any consolation. He’s warbling out lyrics to match the song; these, at least, are less pitchy, though not by much.
“You're headed for heaven
The sweet old hereafter
And I've got one foot in the door
But before I can fly up
I've loose ends to tie up
Right here, in the old therebefore.”
I am intrigued enough to not disturb him, to listen intently as I stand there, lowering my bow. His voice is raspy, and he mumbles the words such that I must make an effort to decipher some syllables. The song rings a faint bell somewhere deep inside my mind - an old funeral song; it’s never been sung at one that I have been to, but I hear the elderly who have returned to 12 singing it as they sit in the Meadow, the lush green expanse of wildflowers that is now a mass grave.
His fingers become a little steadier as he plays on, but his voice starts to break as well, as though the longer he sings, the more the melody saps from him, pulling threads from the poorly-woven cloth of his heart until it has unravelled, and lays in a knotted heap at the bottom of his ribcage. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him with this much emotion in his voice.
“I'll bring the news
When I've danced off my shoes
When my body's closed down
When my boat's run aground
When I've tallied the score
And I'm flat on the floor
Right here, in the old therebefore
When nothing is left anymore.”
The intensity and fervour that had possessed him earlier drains slowly from him as the tune winds down. He now only sounds tired, the way Peeta does on bad days and how I do most of the time. The tiredness that rest or medication or even well-deserved quiet cannot ease. The tiredness whose only cure, they say, is time; of course, time has not done much for Haymitch, has it?
“When I'm pure like a dove-” His voice cracks at the word. He swallows, is silent for a full beat before he continues.
“When I've learned how to love
Right here, in the old therebefore
When nothing is left anymore.”
Haymitch sits back now, staring at the piano like it has played him, and not the other way around. I wait to see if he will continue, but he doesn’t, just looks at it.
Eventually, I say, “I didn’t know you could play.”
He starts, bangs his knees against the underside of the instrument, whips his head around to glare at me. Mingled with the fury that is almost too easily evoked from him, there is grief set into his features. He takes a measured breath, attempting to steady himself, and fails miserably. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I live here,” I remind him.
The moment of silence that passes indicates he has no good retort to this.
“You don’t want to play your own?” I ask.
“They must be a new addition to the houses,” he replies. If there weren’t any when he moved to the Village, he mustn’t have played in years, since his Games maybe. It is remarkable that he could muster up even that horrendous performance. But it begs the question of what happened to the one he must have learnt on.
I sit beside him. He doesn’t resist.
“Who taught you?”
He ignores me, as he always does when he is unwilling to answer a question.
“Why that song?” I know I should stop prying, but there are few things I could do that would make Haymitch hate me more. I don’t think questions will damage our relationship beyond the gaping flaws it already boasts.
This one he entertains. “Been stuck in my head for a bit.”
Haymitch’s morbid choice of earworms does not surprise me.
I have been singing since my trial began - every song my father ever taught me, and a handful more I picked up during my childhood, before he died and my voice fell into disrepair. But never have I had music to accompany it. My television, which can now broadcast music and entertainment just like the ones in the Capitol since the revolution, has been dismantled; I don’t want any more reminders of the Hunger Games, even in the shape of the vehicle that broadcasted them. There are no more musicians left either. The only one I know of - the fiddler that played at Finnick and Annie’s wedding - has remained in 13. My singing has therefore always been without a tune to accompany it.
“Do you know ‘Deep in the Meadow’?”
Surprise flits across Haymitch’s face. “Yeah.”
He begins hesitantly to strike the first few chords out. This song he seems more well-versed in. Makes sense, I think to myself. If he learnt before his Games, he mustn’t have had enough to mourn to be practicing ‘The Old Therebefore’.
I sing. I find that I don’t mind how his notes lag behind or skip ahead of my words sometimes. It is music, and just like with singing, I had forgotten how much I missed it.
When we finish this one he wordlessly starts playing another. I recognize this one too - ‘Ladybug, Ladybug’, an old nursery rhyme. Strange that that is the one Haymitch would choose next. I only remember a few of the lyrics, so I sing them when they come to me. He does not fill in the gaps.
He plays a few more after this, until he sits back and flexes his fingers. I know he hasn’t stopped because they are aching, though - this is just for show, and I don’t suspect he thought I’d buy that act anyway. The music has seemed to hark back memories for him like the ones he works so hard to drown in liquor, and it shows in his expression. Either he has lost his impeccable poker face, or he doesn’t care enough to put it up now.
He gets up, cracks his back in a manner which sounds distinctly painful. “Getting late,” he says shortly, and leaves.
The next day, when Peeta wakes up - always later than I do, because I can no longer sleep for more than a couple hours at a time - I ask him to help me heave the piano over to Haymitch’s house. It is horrifically heavy, and this isn’t meant to be a two-person job at all, but we do it anyway. I know Haymitch will be knocked out until the afternoon - he always sleeps at dawn, never in the dark - and true to this, he does not rise from the couch, where he is out cold with a half-empty bottle in hand when we let ourselves in.
We don’t run this by Haymitch, of course, because broaching a conversation with him is in another sphere of trouble that Peeta and I agree no one ought to subject themselves to, never mind that he would never agree to taking it as long as he lives.
I am not a particularly kind person. I still resent him for a number of things I should have let go of by now - the thick-skulled refusal to heal, the lack of tact with which he mentored us the first time around, his withholding of information, not bringing Peeta to 13, almost entirely that. So, I tell myself that I am making an effort to do this for him because I have no use for the piano anyway and I don’t like waste, not with food and nor, it seems, with musical instruments.
I am not good at convincing myself of this, however; I’ve never been good at convincing anyone of anything, with all those botched propos being the case in point, and why should it be any different when it’s myself I am trying to persuade? I’ve begrudgingly become attached to Haymitch, if that’s the right word for it at all. I don’t feel the deep affection for him that I do for Peeta, like he is a part of me that I hold dearer than myself. Nor do I feel an obligation to support him despite any distaste I may harbour in his direction, like I did for my mother after my first Games, and I began to understand her a bit more.
No, I believe that as much as I want to hate him, I have developed a bit of care for Haymitch whether I like it or not, and some form of bitter respect for him has rooted its way into me against my will. However much I detested his methods he did get us through the Games. He fought to win over the other tributes in the Third Quarter Quell. Though he failed in bringing Peeta to 13, he pushed for the operation to get him out of the Capitol. Maybe most significant to me is simply that he has survived the aftermath. The aftermath of losing his family and his girl I know nothing about right after his Games, of mentoring year after year of tributes and watching each and every one of them die a gruesome, gory, grisly death.
Of course, the way he has coped is not admirable. Drowning in moonshine, putting a good six feet of metaphorical distance between his heart and anyone else’s. How he refuses to talk about the past when Peeta prompts him to, as though vocalizing his sorrows will help him any more than it has helped me; my infrequent sessions with Dr Aurelius can testify to the ineffectiveness of such methods. Even now, I cannot determine whether he does not permit himself to feel anything but coldness and anger, or whether he truly has flushed his soul of joy and hope and all other emotions which sustain life just as surely as food and water. If this really is all that is left of him, or if something remains to be salvaged.
Apart from Peeta and myself, whom I can admit I feel biased towards, Haymitch is the most broken person I have ever met. More than Johanna, who still found some passion in clothes. More than Finnick, who was able to find love, even though he lost grip of it much sooner than anyone could have imagined. More than my mother, who managed to pull herself together three months after my father died, who now buries herself in work back in District 4 to stay afloat. Haymitch has nothing to bury himself in but vice.
Maybe that too is why I am so determined that he have the piano, hauling it over the steps of his home despite how my body protests, how the exhaustion deep in my bones tells me it isn’t worth doing much of anything at all, and how Peeta reiterates that perhaps we should wait for Haymitch to wake up and have him help us with the load. Because he should have something waiting for him after his duty, to the war and to us, is through.
To have something to pull him through the aftermath. That’s all we're trying to do, isn’t it? Continue to live after everything we had to live for has disintegrated into the ashes embedded between 12’s cobblestones. To push forward when all we want to do is lay down and die. To figure out how to cope when there is no more pain, no more knives being raked across our skin, no need to look over our shoulders, no more real danger - only the memory of it; how to cope with the knowledge that the aftermath is almost certainly worse than the first time around, because our lives will now forever be divided into a before and after. Before the hurt and after it. To make ourselves believe that, somehow, there is still something left for us here in the old therebefore.
When nothing is left anymore.
I don’t even discuss it with him afterwards. The piano is left in his home, and that is the end of it. But two days later I can hear him playing it. His repertoire is much more expansive than mine, song after song I have never heard, intricate melodies he executes with mediocrity at first, but which he improves at quickly. Music must be like swimming, something you retain as long as you live, nestled inside of you like a flint rock only awaiting a striker to draw out the flame it has harboured all along. If it’s important enough to you, that is.
In a week or so, I muster up the courage, or the will, or the plain recurring curiosity to enter his house while he plays. I sit next to him and wait till he begins a song I know, and sing. Eventually, he does, too. Peeta knows a couple the two of us do not; everyone in 12 had their own traditions, I suppose. He teaches them to Haymitch, and he plays them for him. I teach Peeta to sing, so it can be a proper performance, even if it’s just a performance for Haymitch himself, and sometimes one of us. It is rare for him to let us both in his space at once - he has not come to tolerate us to this extent yet, not when he has no obligation to.
What feels like a long time, but is most likely only a couple months - the hours feel impossibly long, and I have stopped keeping track of the days - passes before I ask Haymitch again who taught him to play the piano. This time, he tells me. Haltingly, reluctantly, in a quieter voice than I have ever heard him speak in. He tells me who Lenore Dove is - he never uses the past tense for her, and I have a feeling he would not take kindly to my using it either, so I don’t. He tells me how it was the accordion (he calls it a tune box) she taught him, but he listened to her play so often, extending it to the piano happened naturally.
I bring around the Memory Book. This is not the first time I have broached it to him. Each time he refused to have anything to do with it, but now he takes the pen and parchment I give him, and makes me promise not to read it till he’s done, however long it takes. When he finally is, there is a whole notebook filled with miniscule, minute details in his scratchy handwriting about more people than I can count. His mother, and the stack cake she used to make every New Years’. His brother, and his fascination with the stars. Louella McCoy’s impish grin. Lou Lou’s ties to District 11, and Wyatt Callow’s ability to look beyond her meagre odds to give her just a little more time. Maysilee’s pride and her posters. All of his competitors in the Games - not just Ampert’s brilliance and Wellie’s endurance, but also how Silka was never really one of ‘them’, but another child doing what she had to do. Twenty-four years’ worth of tributes, each and every one, with a trait or a quirk or just the colour of their eyes beside their name.
And pages and pages on Lenore Dove Baird. The way her hair was nearly red in the sunlight, but not quite. How she had exactly seventeen freckles on her face the last time he counted, but that there were more during the summertime (she died in August), so that number was probably skewed. The lilts in her voice when she sang, that he is sure sounded exactly like they say the ocean does. The fire in her eyes, and the fire in her heart, and “I love you like all-fire”. How she is - he always writes is - the reason he kept himself alive, to see through his vow to never let the sun rise on the Reaping again.
Haymitch continues to play the piano. I keep hunting. Peeta bakes until flour is almost permanently caked over his fingernails. We all write down our memories. And we all deal with the aftermath.