The Margarets

  I pinched my lips and clenched my hands. “In a manner of speaking I suppose he talked me into it, yes. It was come here or go elsewhere, and this seemed appropriate at the time.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Glory, for heaven’s sake. You remember him!”

  “Not really. He died six years ago, when I was only six or seven. I wasn’t grown enough to…to know what he was really like. As a person, I mean, not as a grandpa.”

  “Well, when we get home, come on up to my house, and I’ll show you some views of him and tell you about him.”

  I stared resolutely ahead, down the road, wondering when, if ever, I would be finished with trying to explain Bryan Mackey. How could I explain him to Gloriana when I couldn’t explain him to myself after all our years together? And when, under heaven, was I going to be able to stop trying to make it up to him and let him go?

  After he died and I decided to sell the big house in town to Mrs. Barfinger, Jimmy Joe built what was locally called an “old-mother house” for me, up the hill behind his own place. The house wasn’t so far away as to be troublesome going back and forth, but it wasn’t so close as to infringe upon my privacy, or his and Maybelle’s. The house was surrounded by trees and set at the back of a wide, rocky ledge that gave a view across most of the valley. I had grown to love the place more than I had ever loved the house in town, perhaps because I could be alone there, and loneness was comforting to me. When we got there, Gloriana echoed my thoughts, saying as she usually did, “I like this better than your other house. The other one was too big.”

  “It needed to be big,” I told her, as I rummaged through my desk to find the viewcubes of Bryan. “We had three children, and Grandpa Doc was always bringing home stray cats.”

  “I don’t remember lots of cats,” said Gloriana doubtfully.

  “It’s just a way of speaking, Glory. I mean stray people. People in need of a bed or a bath or a meal.”

  “So he was nice to people.”

  I found the viewstage and set it on the window seat while considering this. Yes, on the whole, he had been nice to people, sometimes even those he was furiously angry with. Glory came to stand beside me as I flicked through the views. Bryan, a sandy-haired young man smiling, his arm around a young, pregnant Margaret, who had drawn cheeks and dark circles around her eyes; Dr. Mackey, a man thinner and older, still smiling, with a strained-looking Margaret at his side and teenaged Maybelle and Mayleen at his feet. That was taken just a few weeks before Mayleen got married. Then Grandpa Doc, a gray-haired old man seated beside light-haired Grandma, smiling, always smiling.

  “He doesn’t look angry,” Glory said. “You tell it like he was always angry.” She sat in the old rocking chair and touched her toe to the brick floor to make it sway. “I don’t remember Grandpa ever acting angry.”

  “He almost never let it show,” I admitted. “When we lived in the big house in Crossroads, he used to go out back and chop wood until he calmed down. One of the Walled-Offs here on Tercis is called Hostility, you know? Grandpa claimed to be afraid he’d be sent there, and he said there was nothing better for getting rid of hostility than an hour with an axe and some very resistant wood.” I put my handkerchief to my face, stood up, and walked to the window, where I stared out, my back to Gloriana.

  Gloriana knew I was crying. She changed the subject. “Grandma, whose fault is it that Lou Ellen’s family’s so poor?”

  I cleared my throat and dabbed at my eyes. Whose fault indeed? “Start with the fact Billy Ray never really worked his land. He was too busy chasing your Aunt Mayleen, who was sixteen at the time! They got married because she was pregnant. Your mother met your father at Mayleen’s wedding, so some good came of it, even though that’s where being poor started. Since we couldn’t have stopped it without chaining Mayleen to the wall, it’s nobody’s fault.”

  “Aunt Mayleen and Mama are different.”

  “They have different lives. There’s a difference between having a very large family starting when you are sixteen, or having a small family after you have both an education and a livelihood.”

  “Billy Ray always talks about being a farmer,” said Gloriana. “But he doesn’t even know what kind of a farmer he is. It’s always something different that doesn’t work out. But Mama and Dad are farmers, too. Sort of.”

  “Your mother and dad aim lower. A few chickens for eggs, a little garden for summer vegetables, a few fruit trees for preserves and jelly. And even if they had none of that, their jobs over in Remorseful would support you and Til and Jeff.”

  “So, if it weren’t for the money you give Mayleen, they’d go hungry?”

  “Even with it, they go hungry,” I said angrily. “I give it for food, but they don’t spend it on food! Did you see Emmaline’s face this morning? That poor baby! I’m going to stop giving money and concentrate on cookies! Oatmeal cookies keep really well!”

  “Couldn’t Uncle Billy Ray get a job that would support the family?”

  “He doesn’t want a job; he wants to farm. He says he can support the family farming if things would just go right. If the universe would just cooperate, he’d make a living. Since it’s the universe at fault, nobody should blame him.”

  Glory chewed on that for a while. “Anybody could say that about anything.”

  I murmured, “I give thanks every day that I ended up in such a cozy little house as this one in such a lovely place as The Valley, even if Ruers are mostly a little sad and not all that interesting.”

  “We’ve got some interesting people. Bamber Joy’s stepfather is sort of interesting.”

  “Abe Johnson? Well, advertising for a wife isn’t all that interesting, but getting one with a half-grown boy-child, a wife who pretty soon runs off, leaving the boy-child behind, that’s rather interesting. And where in heaven’s name did she go? Rueful isn’t that big! She should have turned up somewhere.”

  “Bamber Joy says he’s going to find her someday.”

  I shook my head at her, warningly. “Bamber Joy. The name alone is enough to guarantee he walks a hard road, Gloriana.”

  “He didn’t pick his name. I like him.”

  “Your mother and I don’t mind your liking him. We just object to your getting into fistfights on his behalf.”

  “He never starts them! Somebody needs to fight for him.”

  “Well, you’re two of a kind.”

  “Objects of derision, you mean,” Glory snapped.

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind, no. You’re simply taller and a lot smarter than most of the local residents.”

  Gloriana flushed. She always flushed when someone said something complimentary about her. “I have to go,” she said, getting to her feet and giving me a peck on the cheek. “I promised Lou Ellen a picnic down at the ferry pool.”

  “Oh, Glory…” I said.

  “Well, I promised, and she’s probably waiting for me.”

  She turned and fled, out the door and away down the hill before another word could be said. I went to the door, still blotting my eyes, watching the girl going away, always going away to something else, somewhere else, restless as a fleabit cat, just like me, restlessness chronic and exhausting to control, constantly throwing shovelfuls of activity over my wretchedness, trying to bury what wouldn’t stay buried.

  It had been a battle that took its toll on flesh and spirit, but I had not let Bryan see it. All my youthful dreams had been lost. The doubts had begun to circle almost as soon as we’d arrived, like those ancient carrion birds, scenting the rot that was setting in. And for what? If we could have made a real difference in Rueful, I would have been proud of our struggle, but all we really did was exhaust ourselves to keep a few pigheaded people alive a year or so past their time. Not a great achievement. If it hadn’t been for the idyllic fantasy Bryan had woven for me during the few days before we left Earth, I wouldn’t have been hypnotized by his exuberance, caught up in his certainty that love would see us through life, that it was a fair barg
ain for both of us, that it would all work out well.

  “I’ve loved you since I first met you, Maggie. You were worth every year.” He had told me that, time and again. I wish he hadn’t said it. If he’d been angry with me, just a few times, I could have given myself some room. As it was, I had to be as faithful and helpful as was humanly possible. Even so, I never honestly felt the scales were balanced. All the good times we planned were things we would be doing now, and he was gone. There were more doctors in Rueful now, things would have been easier. We could have had time together. My fault. I shouldn’t have let him bring me here. I should have taken my chances like everyone else.

  Instead, here I was, grandma to a very troubled brood. What the proctor had said back on Earth was true: my family did indeed run to twins, lots of them, and of them all, only Maybelle, and Jeff and Gloriana seemed capable of love and joy. No, that wasn’t fair. Probably Joe Bob, which is why he’d left, and Ella May’s joining the Siblinghood of Silence meant she had it in her to be happy and good, or the Siblinghood wouldn’t have taken her. And little Emmaline and Orvie John? They might turn out all right, too, if they didn’t starve to death first. The others though, well, they were fruit of a blasted tree, born because of bad choices I’d made, one after the other.

  Likely, if I said any of that to Gloriana, the girl would say, “Well, Grandma, if that’s so, here’s right where you belong! You sound mighty rueful to me.”

  And, as Gloriana all too often was, she would be right.

  All of which was fruitless and melancholy. I needed to get out of the house and do something. I knew the way to the ferry pool, where Gloriana was going, and I decided to join her there.

  I Am Margaret/on Tercis

  Sparkle in the noon-light, river running, road dust fluffing in a teasing wind, grass bending and swaying, Gloriana on her way to the ferry pool. From the road, I saw her running through the meadows down toward the river. Ahead of us, the Great Dike ran east to west, a wall of black stone, onetime southern edge of a mighty water that had covered a great part of south Rueful to a considerable depth. The water had worn its way through the top of the dike and begun chewing a channel all the way to the bottom. How many millennia it had taken to gnaw its way down, no one in The Valley knew, but we all gave thanks for the wide-cupped plain of loamy soil it had left behind. This was fat soil, coveted by anyone who knew how to farm.

  The day had warmed, and my face was wet, though it would be cooler near the river. Something was pushing the season. Every weed patch had turned into a jungle, every garden was sprouting a thicket, and each day was already full of lazy stupefactions from noontime right up ’til supper. I watched as Gloriana crossed the grassy riverside, eaten into a lawn by the Birkin’s geese, who honked at her querulously as she went by. “Glory, why such a hurry, have some nice grass.”

  “Thank you, no,” she said. “I’m meeting Lou Ellen, and I’m already late.” That’s what it sounded like to me, at least. Not that I spoke Goose. Not that I spoke anything much anymore. Sometimes I lay in bed at night thinking in Earthian, then translating those thoughts into Gentheran, or Pthas, or one of the other tongues I’d taken so much trouble to learn. I grieved over that. I grieved over the possibility I was losing my mind, too. Sometimes lately I had thought something was being said when there wasn’t a sound; sometimes I had known something had happened even though I hadn’t seen it. Senility. The madness of the old. I had gone so far back in time getting to Tercis that I was probably older than my own father right now. And thinking that, madam, I said to myself, will drive you bonkers.

  Gloriana climbed down into the river bottom to walk under the high arch of the bridge. Dominion had built the bridge to speed transport of materials quickly from Walled-Offs in the west to Walled-Offs in the east. Some nights we could hear the trucks roaring far across The Valley, growling and echoing as they crossed the bridge, then fading to a distant beelike hum among the mountains. They never came the other way, so we supposed they must return through other Walled-Offs, north or south, taking export stuff to the spaceport near the Western Sea.

  I didn’t follow Gloriana’s route. Under the bridge, the river bottom was scattered with rounded black boulders separated by narrow lanes of sand. Gloriana could swivel her way through them, but I no longer had hips hinged like that. The pool where the old rope ferry had been, prebridge, was on the far side of the dike, a circle of dark water with green rushes all around it, quiet as a dream even on noisy days. That’s where Glory said Sue Elaine’s sister, Lou Ellen, was waiting.

  When Lou Ellen was tiny, she had been very frail and had spent more time at Glory’s house than she had at home. It was easier on her to be in a quiet place rather than in Mayleen’s house with its cold drafts in winter and swarming flies in summer, where rackety, quarrelsome people were always going at it hammer and tongs. Besides, Mayleen didn’t have the patience for helping Lou Ellen eat, and Sue Elaine had said right out loud it would be better if she just starved to death and got it over with. Lou Ellen ate very well if the food was mashed up soft, and Gloriana was good at doing that. The two of them had spent hours playing card games on Glory’s bed, upstairs, where no one would bother them. Lou Ellen was a good player; there was nothing wrong with her mind even though her body had been fragile as a sooly leaf eaten away by worms until nothing was left but lace.

  One day I heard Lou Ellen ask, “Glory, are you my friend? Sue Elaine says I don’t have any friends.”

  “Of course I am, Lou Ellen. What you think I’m doin’ here?”

  “I thought maybe it was just you’re my cousin.”

  “That too. If you’d rather have me for a sister, I could be your blood sister, just like the blood brothers in those stories Aunt Hanna tells us when she comes visiting.”

  “I’d like that,” Lou Ellen whispered. “Oh, I’d like that.”

  Through the slit in the door I had watched while Glory got a darning needle and cooked it in the flame of the coal stove so it wouldn’t have any germs on it, then pricked their fingers and pressed them together and swore to be blood sisters forever.

  “Not just for this year or next year or the year after that, but blood sisters so long as I live,” Glory said. Glory was only in first grade then, but she could already write pretty well. She and I had taught Lou Ellen to read and write. The two of them wrote the promise out together, very neatly, and put their names on it. Glory put the folded-up promise in an old lozenge box, wrapped the box in a piece of oilcloth, and buried it at the foot of the tall, standing stone halfway up the hill toward my house. Glory had always said the stone looked like a huge, armored person, standing guard over the valley. I saw it all, and the place by the stone was a good place for a promise to be protected and safe. The whole thing was so dear it made me cry, but I never let on I’d seen them.

  Instead of going below the bridge, I went up to the near end of it, toward town, crossed the road, and went down the other side on the steep path through the woods. When I got to the bottom, deep into the shadows of the trees, I saw Glory coming out from under the bridge, looking toward the old, splintery pier, gray as a goose feather. She smiled radiantly, raised her hands, and called, “Lou Ellen!”

  I stopped. I was intruding on her. Everyone, even young people had a right to their private time. Still, I didn’t feel like going home. I sat down with my back to a tree and thought about having a nap. I shut my eyes.

  “How long you been here?” Glory called.

  I think my eyes must have opened, just a slit. I saw Lou Ellen on the pier. She shrugged waveringly, almost like heat waves rising. Her voice came like a whisper of wind.

  “Don’t know,” she murmured. “A while. You look all hot. You bothered by something?”

  “Me? Not much.” Glory felt her face. “Well, yes, I am. Here it is summer again, about time for me’n Sue Elaine’s birthday party, and as per usual, nobody’s invited you.”

  Lou Ellen smiled, then whispered in a soft little voice I could barely hear
, “Do you want to go to the birthday party?”

  “Ballygaggle no, Lou Ellen! I don’t even want to have a birthday party unless I can have one of my own. I’m tired of sharing my birthday with somebody I don’t even like just because we were born in midsummer. It’s the same dumb thing every year. Grandma and Mama make a big fuss over it, and everybody gets their feelings hurt, and Grandma goes around all sad and doesn’t talk to anybody for days and days afterward!”

  “Then why should my feelings be hurt not being invited someplace I don’t want to go anyhow? It’s nice I don’t have to.”

  At which point I should have picked myself up and gone home, but I didn’t. I was asleep, so I couldn’t.

  Glory asked, “You going to help fish?”

  Another of those wavering shrugs. “You do it, Glory. You like catching them.”

  Glory opened her pack and got out her fishing gear, a string tied to a piece of stinky meat, and lowered it into the shallows near some rocks. Within two minutes, a big crawdad grabbed it with his claws. Tercis crawdads weren’t earth crawdads, but Earthians had given them the same name because they had pretty much the same look to them, claws in front, legs behind. She pulled it out and put it in the bucket.

  “You’re sure lazy,” murmured Gloriana

  “I know.” Lou Ellen sighed. “I’ve been like this lately.”

  Lou Ellen went on dreaming, Glory caught crawdads, the sun slipped down from the top of the sky.

  “I’ve got twenty-one,” Glory said, yawning. “That’s ten each. What do you think’s better? Should we flip for the extra one, then maybe have hard feelings, or should we just toss the littlest one back?”

  “Throw it.”

  “You pick which one.”

  Lou Ellen drifted over to the bucket and pointed, but as Glory tried to toss it, it nipped her, pinching like crazy. She danced around, waving her arm and yelling ow, ow, leggo, leggo, her eyes so scrunched up it took her a moment to notice the two people who came out of the reeds across the pool and walked across the deep pond toward her, their feet leaving not so much as a ripple in the mirror surface of the water. In my dream, I had seen them coming.