The Judas Rose (21 page)

“Yes. My brother-in-law. The man who sent me here.”

“Well, did you enjoy it?”

She found herself looking straight into the other woman's eyes, and those eyes were dancing with amusement, as if Dorcas knew all about what it had been like to live with Ham Klander.

“Oh . . .” she had said weakly. “No. No, not very much.”

“Then would you please try to imagine what it would be like to live in a house with dozens of men? With fifty men, or more?”

The expression on her face must have been eloquent; and what she had said had been the perfect thing to say. She had heard her mother say it so many times. She had said, “A hill is to climb. A man is to pick up after.” Talking to herself, really. And all of the other women had begun to laugh, laughing till there were tears in her eyes; laughing
for
her, not at her.

“It was such a blessed
relief
, moving over to Barren House!” Dorcas had managed at last, wiping her eyes with her hands. “I agree with you that the name of the place left a lot to be desired—but then, my dear, it was the men who did the naming. It wouldn't have been at all tactful for the women to ask them to change it to something like ‘Paradise On Earth House,' would it?”

And Jo had joined in the laughter, then, because she couldn't help it.

She still had her doubts about the merits of human tending versus the sterile services of the machines, nevertheless. She understood how they felt about it, and that was a help, but she still fretted. Right now, for instance, as she rubbed a scented cream into Letha Shannontry Chornyak's skin, so that it wouldn't be dry and flaking and itching because one hundred and three years of life had robbed it of the oils that had protected it in the past. Jo-Bethany felt squeamish, awkward. She had scrubbed her hands thoroughly before she began the task, twice. But she had seen the electronic microscope threedys of the surface of a well-scrubbed human hand . . . crawling with organisms, that looked like the holograms of nonhumanoid aliens you could buy in museum gift shops. No matter how hard you scrubbed, no matter how powerful the substance you scrubbed with! Suppose you did, by really working at it, manage to get every last little critter off without removing your skin along with them; by the time you walked the few yards between yourself and your patient, you would be alive with creepy-crawlies again. Jo-Bethany knew all about that, and had had nightmares about it at nursing school.

There was no such problem with the mechanical hands of the healthies, bathed constantly by ultrasonic cleaners; there were no bacteria or viruses on
those
hands! Clean—they were truly clean. All five of them. While her own two hands, now rubbing the balm into Letha's thin shoulders. . . . Jo-Bethany touched the fragile bones, that felt as if they could be effortlessly crushed, and the delicate thin skin over them, and it seemed to her that she was rubbing in filth right along with the cream. The stuff smelled faintly of almonds, and she was reminded of the mass-ed history lessons, the way ancient kings had poured perfume over the roast meats at their tables to hide the fact that they were rotten. It was Letha's preference that she do this; it was her
job
to do this; she would go right on doing it, in spite of the image in her mind of hordes of creatures crawling from her hands into the crevices of the old woman's skin. . . .

Jo-Bethany Schrafft, if you go on thinking like this there will be trouble!
she admonished herself. These women had spent their lives attending to the communication of others, even Alien others; they instantly sensed the least sign of unease or discomfort. She could just imagine trying to explain what she'd been thinking. She was not going to let it happen. To prevent it, and to provide a plausible excuse for the agitation that she knew would have become apparent to Letha Chornyak by now, she substituted a less serious concern.

“Mrs. Chornyak,” she began—and then stopped short as the old woman reached up and laid a finger over her lips. What in the world?

“Please, child, call me Letha . . . or Aunt Letha, if it suits you better! Everybody in this room, practically, is a ‘Mrs. Chornyak.' It gets tiresome hearing it. And I've asked you twice before. My dear, I will give you three chances, but that is as high as I propose to go.”

“Oh, dear . . . I'm sorry,” Jo answered, awkward and embarrassed because she
knew
she'd been asked before. “I keep forgetting. I'll remember now.
Letha
.” She was not about to call a linguist “Aunt.”

“Much better. Thank you. Now, please go on. What were you going to say to me? And why are you all adither like you are?”

“I have a problem. I need some advice. I wonder if you'd be willing to tell me what I should do.”

“Try me. There are few things I like better than giving advice.”

“It's the Thursday Night Devotional Meetings.”

“Something wrong with them?”

“No. Not at all.” Jo-Bethany shifted the old lady on the pillows gently, unbuttoned the plain cotton gown, and began rubbing the cream over her chest and throat. “No, I enjoy them very much. In fact, I enjoy them so much that I wanted to share them with some people I'm fond of—my sister, and a few nurses who are friends of mine.”

“They'd be very welcome, child, I'm sure,” said Letha. “If you're afraid young Johnny would be a wart about it, ask Dorcas to arrange it for you.”

It took Jo-Bethany a moment to realize that “young Johnny” would be Jonathan Asher Chornyak, Head of all the Lines, and she had to cough to cover her amusement at that; of course, this woman had probably changed the diapers of the Head of Heads, and saw him more as the Bottom of Bottoms. “The problem,” she said hastily, “is that their husbands won't let them come.”

“Ah, I perceive! No slumming about in the nasty Lingoe dens, eh?
That
sort of problem!”

“Something like that,” Jo said, not meeting the brown eyes, that were so uncomfortably piercing in spite of their setting of fine skin fallen into folds of wrinkled crepe. “I know it's ridiculous.”

“It's not your fault, dear,” the old lady said comfortingly. “You mustn't worry about it. Heaven knows we're used to it—we old Lingoe bitches!” And she chuckled the wise wicked chuckle of the very old, while Jo-Bethany felt pale red flare on her own cheeks. “Don't you apologize, Jo-Bethany! After a person listens to such stuff for a hundred years, I assure you she gets used to it!”

Jo-Bethany didn't believe that; she was sure she couldn't have joked about such a thing, not if she'd been listening to it for
two
hundred years. But perhaps she was wrong. Again. Perhaps when she was a hundred years old she'd find
many
things less worth worrying about than she found them now.

“It seems like such a shame,” she murmured, moving carefully on to Letha's arms and hands. “I know they would enjoy it, and I do wish they could be there just once. It's such a beautiful service.”

“Especially on sermon night.” Letha puckered up her mouth, and pinched her nostrils in. “Beautiful, my eye.”

“But that's only one Thursday a month. And the sermons aren't
that
bad.”

“Huh!” Letha made her back poker rigid and spread all the fingers of both hands wide and high, and proceeded to flabbergast Jo-Bethany with a flawless imitation of a Neo-Presbyterian hellfire-and-brimstone man in full spate.

“My goodness!” she said, for want of anything better, and she rubbed the last of the pleasant cream into her own hands. Rubbing little filthy critters into her
own
skin, she realized.

“That's beautiful, is it?” Letha challenged her. “That ranting?”

“No, it's not beautiful. Good for us, I'm sure, but not beautiful. But the rest of it . . . the music, and the readings, and the other parts . . . all of that is beautiful.”

“You mean the Láadan parts, don't you?”

“Láadan?”

“Langlish, child. Láadan is the word for Langlish,
in
Láadan.”

“I didn't know that,” said Jo-Bethany. “But yes, that's what I mean. I love the sound of it . . . it eases me, somehow. But it's hard to describe it to people who haven't heard it for themselves.”

“And the husbands are all dead set against it? What if one of our men asked? A formal invitation, on your behalf, from one of the senior Chornyak men? Would that help?”

“I don't think so,” said Jo-Bethany slowly. “All the husbands are—stubborn.”

“All bigots.”

“Perhaps. I hope not.”

“It used to be so much worse, dear child. There used to be crowds of nincompoops out in the front yard throwing rocks at our windows. No need for you to be distressed, child—it's getting better! Why, there was a time when no amount of money would have been enough to hire a ‘decent' woman to come take the job of nurse at Chornyak Household, but here
you
are. With some man's approval.”

“My brother-in-law.”

“Well, then! You perceive, he's not all that much of a bigot. Just a
smidgen
of a bigot, on the upward road. He'll risk the contamination of his sister-in-law, even if not his wife. That's progress, my dear.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yes, indeed! And you,” she added, “you're getting less prejudiced against us yourself. I've noticed it.”

Jo-Bethany had almost dropped the vial of skin cream, she was so startled. What could she have said, or done, to make these women aware of her prejudice? She was ashamed of it; and it wasn't in her mind, it was in her nasty
gut
, where she couldn't get at it. She would have sworn that never, not by look or word or deed, had she betrayed that anything so foul lurked in her! But Letha Chornyak didn't seem the least bit disturbed.

“I am so sorry,” Jo whispered. “I didn't think it showed.
And it
is
going away, ma'am. It's just—it's the way I was brought up.”

The old woman laughed softly, fondly. “Don't you give it a thought,” she said. “I myself am prejudiced against women that can't cook a decent meal. I always have been. I'm ashamed of that. Some of those women are in every other respect good fine women, and I ought to be able to remember that and not be so nitpicky.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Jo-Bethany, gratefully, although it wasn't the same thing at all, and she knew it.

“I have a suggestion, child.”

“I'd be very pleased to hear it.”

“Don't you go over to the local hospital a good deal? You do volunteer nursing over there, don't you?”

“Yes. I go once a week, usually.”

“Do they need you over there? What's the government up to? Not putting enough nurses on?”

“No—no, it's not that. It's that nobody here is really very sick, Letha. I go over to the hospital to work with more serious cases, so that I won't get behind, or out of practice. No, they have everything they need. I go for my own benefit, not theirs.”

Letha nodded approvingly, and told her she was a good dutiful conscientious child, and then said, “That means you have free use of the women's chapel at the hospital, then.”

“Does it? I suppose I do have. . . . I hadn't thought of it.”

“I'm
sure
you do. And all you have to do is start your own Thursday Night Devotionals, there at the hospital. Take half an hour, maybe—nobody will mind. Then the husbands could let their wives attend without having to worry about contamination, don't you know. And we'd send one of our women with you to do the Láadan readings a time or two, until you felt comfortable doing it yourself.”

It was an astonishing idea, and Jo-Bethany would never have thought of it on her own. But now that Letha had pointed it out, it was the obvious solution; in a way, it was exciting. There were possibilities . . . every hospital had a chapel for women, where nothing
at all
ever happened. Once in a great while some devout woman might step in there to pray for a loved one gravely ill, but most of the time the room was wasted space. Regular services there once a week would never be noticed. But the nurses at the hospitals would come, and Jo knew that would be a good thing.

She knew how much better she felt, listening to the language, how soothed she was afterward, how it made the tension inside
her melt away. She was a better nurse, she was convinced of that, because those services somehow lifted from her the piled-up strain of the preceding week. If nurses in the hospitals could have that, too, it would mean that Jo-Bethany had really done something useful in this world.

She could feel the excitement in her throat; she put it firmly down. A hundred things could happen to stop her. The hospital administrators could forbid it. The husbands could refuse. The women could refuse. It could turn out that she didn't have sense enough to learn to read the Langlish—Láadan?—out loud. She knew the women of the Lines wouldn't have time to do it for her more than once or twice, and then it would be up to her. She must not get her hopes up. But she would try.

“Do you think I could do it?” she asked hesitantly.