The Margarets (24 page)

On Rueday, all the Judsons are present in the Ruehouse, from me, Dr. Bryan’s widow, Grandma Mackey, right down to Mayleen’s daughter, Emmaline, youngest of the fourteen who’d been born to Mayleen, the ten who had survived. Though I have been Ruing for close to forty years now, I am still unable to confine my ruing to Rueday. Ever since Bryan died, I have stood here each Rueday, between my daughter Maybelle and my granddaughter Gloriana, eyes tight shut, hands twisting at one another, body trembling like a branch of autumn leaves in a chill wind while I rue having let Bryan sacrifice himself for me. Not that Bryan is the only thing I rue. I rue the twins, oh, the twins, my two sets of them, Maybelle’s one set, Mayleen’s seven sets—not even including all the ones miscarried or born dead. Oh, for how many years have I rued, and still I wish I could go back and undo it all.

In the pew behind me, Mayleen was ruing having a sister and a sister’s family who were so rotten to her. Marriage and motherhood had not changed Mayleen; they had merely confirmed her misery. Billy Ray Judson was probably ruing that his brother had ever been born, for Billy Ray was as Billy Ray had ever been, jealous and hateful.

The seven Billy Ray Judson children who still lived in Rueful would be spending their ruetime as they did most of the rest of their time. Each Rueday I told their names
over to myself. The eldest, Joe Bob, had left home to work on the Conover Farm, down The Valley. Perhaps he was ruing the fact he had not joined his twin in volunteering for the army. The second oldest twins had left years ago. Ella May had applied for membership in the Siblinghood of Silence and been accepted. Janine Ruth, her sister, had also applied and been refused, so had moved up to Repentance, which had more scope for her talents, which I refused to think about. Only one of the third set of twins had lived, Benny Paul, who was probably spending ruetime planning how to get Jeff, Gloriana’s brother, into trouble. Trish, the survivor of the fourth set, who was simple but not asexual, was probably thinking of whatever boy was currently making use of her. Sue Elaine and Lou Ellen had made up the fifth set, and Sue Elaine was without doubt ruing the existence of her cousin, Gloriana Judson; while little Orvie John and even littler Emmaline, each sole survivors, rued the fact they had been given no breakfast this morning and probably no supper last night and were so hungry it was very hard to be quiet. The moment I laid eyes on them this morning I knew the money I had most recently given their mother had not been spent on food! Poor babies.

I knew them so well. I did not know them at all.

Next to me, I knew that Maybelle was resolving to be more patient with her twin. James Joseph Judson, Billy Ray’s half brother, Maybelle’s husband and Gloriana’s father, was probably ruing not chastising his son Til, who was becoming more and more like Benny Paul. Til’s twin, Jeff, was conscientiously ruing whatever iniquities Til and Benny Paul had got him into most recently. He always rued saying yes; he always said yes because Til was his brother.

Maybelle’s daughter, barely pubescent Gloriana, usually had a lengthy list to rue, I’d seen her look up attentively when Pastor Grievy asked us to rue “…the great failing of our people in the long ago…” and I wagered with myself she was trying to figure that out. Gloriana was a great one for figuring things out.

I knew them so well, and I really did, even Til. They were family, while Mayleen’s husband and children seemed more foreign than a tribe of Frossians. Or yaboons.

The choir voices began a slow diminuendo.

In the next pew, Abe Johnson had his eyes tightly closed. He usu
ally spent double the average time ruing his mail-order wife, who had vanished, leaving him with her son, Bamber Joy, an event Abe would never understand if he rued the whole matter for a hundred years. Even he, however, eventually felt Pastor Grievy’s tightly focused gaze boring through his eyelids, and with a sigh, lifted his head. The words were spoken, and we slowly left the Ruehouse.

People walked to and from services on Rueday as a minor religious thing, only faintly colored by notions of expiation or propriety. Most people who felt reasonably well did it out of habit unless the weather was intolerable, which it rarely was. All Tercis’s extremes, either icy or furnace-hot, had been reserved for the coldhearted and the hot-tempered; the Rueful had been granted a Walled-Off with a pleasant climate.

The Judson clan gathered briefly at the Ruehouse steps. I touched Mayleen’s shoulder. “Have you heard from Ella Mae, Mayleen?”

“Of course not.” She shrugged my arm away. “She’s in the Siblinghood of Silence, so she’s silent so far as her family is concerned.”

“I thought she might have a furlough this summer.”

“Not with us, she won’t. Last time was enough.” She stalked off after Billy Ray, while I furtively gave the two little ones the cookies I had brought in my pocket. As quickly as a squirrel hides nuts in his mouth, they hid the cookies in their raggedy clothes. As Billy Ray led his brood westward on the highway toward the bridge that would take them across to their farm on the west side of the river, I saw them breaking off little pieces and taking sneaky little mouthfuls.

“Oatmeal,” whispered Maybelle. “And raisins, and eggs.”

I nodded as I cast a glance southward where my old home stood, now an addition to Ms. Barfinger’s Boardinghouse. “And sugar,” I whispered. “And butter.”

Jimmy Joe and Maybelle led us toward the road that wound down sloped meadows and northward on the river’s near side, strolling hand in hand, as if they were courting instead of having been married practically forever. Til raced on ahead as though eager to fit a whole day’s devilment in before sunset. Gloriana ambled along beside me, stopping when I stopped to admire a flower or a fluttering bee-bird, and Jeff trailed behind, probably still trying to think of a way to keep Til from getting him into any more trouble.

By the time our family neared the bottom of the hill, other people had turned off, and we were alone, moving north along the pasture road.

Gloriana whispered, “Grandma Meg, what did Aunt Mayleen mean about the Siblinghood of Silence?”

“It’s a kind of organization,” I said. “They don’t accept just anyone as a member. Only men and women who really want to spend their lives doing good for people. They call it the Siblinghood of Silence because they’re not allowed to talk about what they do.”

“I hardly remember Ella May.”

“She’s strong, and has a rather plain, pleasant face, and she’s a good person.” Unlike, I didn’t say, her twin sister.

“That’s why she left, I guess. Daddy says the only way you can give Aunt Mayleen and Uncle Billy Ray anything without their being nasty about it, is drop it off after dark and hope the dogs don’t drag it away before morning. Probably Ella May tried to do them some good.”

Which was one of the more perspicacious things Glory had said recently. Mayleen and Billy Ray would definitely resent any effort to do them good. “I think Ella May tried very hard to help them the last time she was home,” I said. “I think they told her not to come back.”

I saw her tuck that away, probably to think about later.

“Grandma, what was the great failing Pastor Grievy always talks about?”

Aha, I’d been right. “Probably something that happened a long time ago, before your Grandpa Doc and I came to Tercis. It might have been something that happened to cause the Walling-Off, when all those bondslaves were being dumped here, ready to kill anyone who looked at them crosswise.”

“You and Grandpa Doc came later.”

“We came here directly from Earth without any bondage in between. I was twenty-two, he was thirty.”

“And Grandpa Doc talked you into coming here.”

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.”