Finally I said, “Look, boys, you both know all about reproduction and genetics that I have been able to teach you. You both know what ‘Helen’s Day’ means. Don’t you? Andy?”
Andy did not answer; his older brother said, “Sure he knows, Papa. It means Helen can have babies now, just like Mama. You know that, Andy.” Andy nodded agreement, round-eyed. “We all know, Papa, even the kids. Well, I’m not sure about Ivar; he’s so little. But Iseult and Undine know it —Helen’s been telling them that she’s going to catch up with Mama—have her first baby right away.”
I controlled the cold chills I felt. Let me cut this short: I did not tell them that this was a bad idea; instead I took a long time drawing answers from them, things they both knew but had not yet thought of quite so personally—how Helen could not have a baby unless one or the other of them put it into her; how Helen was still too little for the strain of baking a baby even though “Helen’s Day” marked the fact that she was now vulnerable; how and why, even when Helen was big enough in a few years, a baby out of Helen by one of her brothers could be a tragedy instead of the fine babies Mama made every time. They told me, Andy’s eyes getting bigger all the time—I simply supplied leading questions.
I was helped in this by the fact that a little mule mare, Dancing Girl, had come into her first estrus when I thought she was not grown-up enough for a colt. So I had had Zack and Andy fence her off—and she kicked a hole in the fence and got what she wanted; Buckaroo covered her. Sure enough, the colt had been too big for her and I had to go in and cut it up and take it out in chunks—a routine job of emergency veterinary surgery but an impressive and bloody sight for two stripling boys who had helped their father by controlling the mare while he operated.
No, indeed, they did not want anything even a little bit like that to happen to Helen. No, sir!
Minerva, I cheated a little. I did not tell them that the way Helen was spreading in the butt and the measurements she already had made it appear to her family doctor—me—that she was even more of a natural baby factory than her mother and would be big enough for her first one much younger than Dora had had Zaccur; I did not tell them that the chances of a healthy baby from a brother-sister mating were higher than the chances of a defective. I certainly did not!
Instead, I waxed lyrical about what wonderful creatures girls are, what a miracle it is that they could make babies, how precious they are and how it is a man’s proud privilege to love and cherish and protect them—protect them even from their follies because Helen might behave just like Dancing Girl, impatient and foolish. So don’t let her tempt you, boys—jerk off instead, just like you’ve been doing. They promised, tears in their eyes.
I didn’t ask them to promise that or anything—but it gave me the idea: Have “Princess” Helen knight them.
The kids grabbed that idea and ran with it; Tales of King Arthur’s Court was one of the books Dora had fetched along because Helen Mayberry had given it to her. So we had Sir Zaccur the Strong and Sir Andrew the Valiant and two ladiesin-waiting—waiting rather eagerly; Iseult and Undine knew that they, too, would be “princesses” as each reached menarche. Ivar was squire to both knights and would be dubbed himself when his voice changed. Only Elf was too small as yet to play the game.
It worked, a stopgap. I suppose “Princess” Helen was protected more than she wanted to be protected. But if she could not lure her faithful knights into the cornfields, they did place her stool for her at meals, they bowed to her rather often, and usually addressed her as “Fair Princess”—considerably more than I ever did for my sisters.
Before the first anniversary of “Helen’s Day” those three new families dropped down the rise and the crisis was over. It was Sammy Roberts, not one of her brothers, who first spread “Princess” Helen’s thighs—certain, as she told her mother about it at once (more of Helen Mayberry’s influence) and Dora kissed her and told her that she was a good girl and now go find Papa and ask him to examine you—and I did and she hadn’t been hurt, not to mention. But it gave Dora some control over the matter, just as Helen Mayberry had guided Dora at about the same age—so Dora had told me, long before that. In consequence our oldest daughter did not get pregnant until she was almost as old as and quite a bit more filled out than Dora had been when I married her. Ole Hanson married her; and Sven Hanson and I, and Dora and Ingrid, helped the youngsters start their homestead. Helen thought the baby was Ole’s, and for all I know she was right. No fuss. No fuss when Zack married Hilda Hanson, either. In Happy Valley pregnancy was equivalent to betrothal; I can’t recall any girl who married without that proof of eligibility. Certaintly none of our daughters.
Having neighbors was grand. (Omitted)
—not only fetched his fiddle over the Rampart but could call. I could call some and, while I hadn’t touched a violin for fifty years or so, I found it came back to me, so we spelled each other as Pop like to dance, too. Like so:
“Square ’em up!
“Salute your lady! Opposite lady! Corner gal! Right-hand gal! Salute your own and make ’er a throne. All stand up and don’t let ’er fall; swing your ladies one and all!
“ ‘Moses lived a long time ago.
‘King said Yes; Moses said No!—form hands, circle right.
‘Phar’oh was dat king’s first name;
‘Made ’em live a life of shame!—allemande left!—with a dosey-doh! Then home you go and swing!
“ ‘ . . . said Yes and th’ waves did part. First couple through the Red Sea! Now corner gal and right-hand man! Corner boy, right-hand gal—on around and keep it coming right and left!
“ ‘A happy band on th’ opp’site shore,
‘So all form up and swing once more!
‘King weeps alone on Egypt’s shore;
‘Chosen People slaves no more!
‘So kiss your lady and whisper in her ear;
‘Then sit ’er down and get ‘er a beer.’ Intermission!”
Oh, we had fun! Dora learned to dance when she was a new grandmother—and was still dancing when she was a great-great-grandmother. Early years the parties were oftenest at our place because we had the biggest house and a compound large enough for a big party. Start dancing late afternoon, dance till you couldn’t see your partner; then a potluck buffet supper to candlelight and moonlight, then sing a while, and bed down all over the place—all the rooms, the roof, shakedowns in the compound, some in wagons—and if anybody ever slept alone, I never heard about it. Nor any trouble worth mentioning if things got a little loose around the edges.
Next morning there was likely to be a double performance by the Mermaid Tavern Players, one comedy, one tragedy, then it would be time for those who lived farthest away to round up their kids, hitch up their mules, and roll, while those who lived closer helped clean up before doing the same thing.
Oh, I remember one spot of trouble: A man gave his wife a black eye over nothing much, whereupon six men nearest him tossed him out the gate and barred it. Made him so mad he hitched up and left . . and headed back up the Great Gorge toward Hopeless Pass—a fact that wasn’t noticed for a while, as his wife and baby moved in with her sister and her husband and their kids, and stayed on, a polygamy—though not the only one. No laws about marriage or sex—no laws about anything for many years—except that incurring the disapproval of your neighbors, such as by giving your wife a black eye, meant risking Coventry, about the worst thing that can happen to a pioneer short of being lynched.
But migrants tend to be both horny and easy about it. Superior intelligence always includes strong sexual drive, and the pioneers in Happy Valley had been through a double screening, first in a decision to leave Earth and then in deciding to tackle Hopeless Pass. So we had real survivors in Happy Valley, smart, cooperative, industrious, tolerant—willing to fight when necessary but not likely to fight over trivial matters. Sex is not trivial, but fighting over it is usually pretty silly. It’s characteristic only of a man who isn’t sure of his manhood, which didn
’t describe any of these men; they were sure of themselves, no need to prove it. No cowards, no thieves, no weaklings, no bullies—the rare exception didn’t last long enough to count. Either dead like that first three, or ran away from us like that idiot who took a poke at his wife.
These rare purgings were always quick and informal. For many years the only law we had was the Golden Rule, unwritten but closely followed.
In such a community functionless taboos about sex couldn’t last; they didn’t tend to be brought into our valley in the first place. Oh, close inbreeding wasn’t well thought of; these pioneers were not ignorant of genetics, nor of conception control. But the attitude was pragmatic; I don’t think I ever heard anyone speak out against incest that was just a jolly romp with no outcome. But I recall one girl who married her half brother openly and had several children by him—I assume that they were his. There may have been gossip, but it did not get them ostracized. Any marriage pattern was treated as the private business of the partners in it, not something to be licensed by the community. I recall two young couples who decided to combine their farms, then built a house big enough by adding to the larger of their two houses and making the other into a barn. Nobody asked who slept with whom; it was taken for granted that it was then a four-cornered marriage, and no doubt had been one before they enlarged that house and pooled their goods. Nobody’s business but theirs.
Among such people the plural of “spouse” is “spice.” A pioneer community, poor in everything else, always makes its own recreations—with sex at the top of the list. We had no professional entertainers, no theaters (unless you count the amateur theatricals started by our kids), no cabarets, no diversions dependent on sophisticated electronics, no periodicals, few books. Certainly those meetings of the Happy Valley Dance Club continued as gentle orgies after it was too dark to dance and the younger children were bedded down for the night—how else? But it was all quite gentle; a couple could always go sleep in their own wagon and ignore the quiet luau elsewhere. No compulsion either way—shucks, they didn’t even have to attend the dances.
But no one stayed away from those weekly dances if he or she could make it. It was particularly nice for young people; it gave them a chance to get acquainted and do their courting. Perhaps most first babies were conceived at our dances; there was opportunity. On the other hand, a girl did not have to get knocked up just through a romp if it didn’t suit her. But a girl was likely to marry by fifteen, sixteen, and their bridegrooms weren’t much older—late first marriage is a big-city custom, never found in a pioneer culture.
Dora and I? But, Minerva dear, I told you earlier.
(Omitted)
—started the freight schedule to the outside the year Gibbie was born and Zack was, oh, eighteen I think—I have to keep converting New Beginnings years into standard years. Anyhow he was taller than I was, not much short of two meters and massed maybe eighty kilos, and Andy was almost as big and strong. There was pressure on me not to wait as I knew Zack might get married any day—and I could not send a wagon over the pass just with Andy. Ivar was only nine—a big help around the farm but not big enough for this job.
But I could not find teamsters other than in my own family. There were only about a dozen families in the valley; they had not been there long, and did not as yet feel the press to buy things that I did.
I wanted three new wagons, not just because my three were wearing out but because Zack would need one when he married. So would Andy. And I might have to dower Helen with one, if and when. The same applied to plows and several sorts of metal farm equipment. Prosperous as we were, Happy Valley could not be entirely self-supporting without a metals industry—which is to say: not for many years.
I had another long list of things to buy—
(Omitted)
—on a quarterly schedule. But the food that fifty-odd farms could ship out could not buy much at the other end in competition with farmers who did not have the expense of shipping by mule train over the Rampart and across the prairie; I still subsidized our link with civilization by writing drafts on John Magee to be debited against my partnership in the Andy J. and thereby brought things into the valley we would not otherwise have had. Some I kept—Dora got inhouse running water from that first trip our own boys made, just in time to keep my promise to her, as Zack got Hilda pregnant right after they got back, and their first baby, Ingrid Dora, and the completion of Dora’s bathroom, arrived about together. Other things I sold to other farmers for labor. But the Buck strain of mules, strong, intelligent, and all of them capable of being taught to talk, eventually corrected our balance of trade, once those two wells were drilled on the prairie and I could count on running a string of mules to Separation Center without losing half of them. This meant medicines, books, and many other things for our valley.
(Omitted)
Lazarus Long did not intend to surprise his wife. But neither of them ever knocked on their own bedroom door. Finding it closed, he opened it gently against the possibility that she might be napping.
Instead he found her standing at the window, mirror angled to the light, carefully plucking a long gray hair.
He watched her in shocked dismay. Then steadied himself and said, “Adorable—”
“Oh!” She turned. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you come in, dear.”
“I’m sorry. May I have that?”
“Have what, Woodrow?”
He went to her, bent down and picked up the silver hair. “This. Beloved, every hair of your head is precious to me. May I keep it?”
She did not answer. He saw that her eyes were filled with tears. They started to overflow. “Dora. Dora,” he repeated urgently, “why are you crying, beloved?”
“I’m sorry, Lazarus. I did not intend for you to see me doing this.”
“But why do it at all, Dorable? I have far more gray hair than you.”
She answered what he had not said, rather than what he did say. “Dearest, I can’t help it that I know when someone is—well, ‘fibbing’ I must call it since you have never lied to me.”
“Why, Dorable! My hair is gray.”
“Yes, sir. You did not mean to surprise me, I know . . and I did not mean to snoop when I cleaned your study. I found your cosmetics kit, Lazarus, more than a year ago. It’s sort of a fib, isn’t it?—when you do something to make your crisp red hair look gray? Something like what I do, I suppose, when I pluck hairs that are gray.”
“You’ve been plucking gray hairs since you learned that I have been aging myself? Oh, dear!”
“No, no, Lazarus! I’ve been plucking them for ages. Much longer than that. Heavens, darling, I’m a great-grandmother —and look it. But what you do—careful as you are with it—and kind as it is for you to try—and I do appreciate it!—doesn’t make you look my age; it just makes you look prematurely gray.”
“Possibly. Although I’m entitled to gray hair, Dorable—my hair was snow-white not many years before you were born. It took something much more drastic than cosmetics—or plucking hairs—to make me look young again. But there never seemed to be any reason to mention it.”
He stepped up to her, put an arm around her waist, took the mirror and tossed it on the bed, turned her toward the window. “Dora, your years are an achievement, not something to hide. Look out there. Farmhouses right up to the hills and many more we can’t see from here. How many of our Happy Valley people are descended from your slim body?”
“I’ve never counted.”
“I have; more than half of them—and I’m proud of you. Your breasts are baby-chewed, your belly shows stretch marks —your decorations of honor, Adorable One. Of valor. They make you more beautiful. So stand straight and tall, my lovely, and forget about silver hairs. Be what you are, and be it in style!”
“Yes, Lazarus. I don’t mind them myself—I did it to please you.”
“Dorable, you can’t help pleasing me, you always have. Do you want me to let my own hair go back to natural? It’s not dan
gerous for me to be a Howard—here in Happy Valley with my own kin all around me.”
“I don’t care, darling. Just don’t do it on my account. If it makes it easier for you—First Settler and all that—to look a little older, then do it.”
“It does make it easier when I deal with other people. And it’s no trouble; I know the routine so well I could do it in my sleep. But, Dora—listen to me, darling. Zack Briggs will call at Top Dollar sometime in the next ten years; you saw John’s letter. It’s not too late to go to Secundus. There they can make you look like a young girl again if that’s what you want . . . and tack a good many extra years on, too. Fifty. Maybe a hundred.”
She was slow in answering. “Lazarus, are you urging me to do this?”
“I’m offering it. But it’s your body, most dear one. Your life.”
She stared out the window. “ ‘More than half of them,’ you said.”
“With the percentage increasing. Our kids breed like cats. And so do their kids.”
“Lazarus, truly we settled this many, many years ago. But it is even more so now. I don’t want to leave our valley even to visit the outside. I don’t want to leave our children. Nor our children’s children, nor their children. And I certainly would not want to come back looking like a young girl . . to watch the births of our great-great-grandchildren. You’re right; I’ve earned my gray hairs. And now I’ll wear them!”
“That’s the girl I married! That’s my durable Dora!” He moved his hand up higher, cupped a breast and tickled a nipple. She jumped, then relaxed to it. “I knew your answer, but I had to ask. My darling, age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety. Where other women satiate, you most make hungry!”
She smiled. “I’m not Cleopatra, Woodrow.”