The Margarets (40 page)

“Is this where your people live?”

She shook her head. “Some of them, yes, but I don’t know what direction they might be in. I do have an anticipatory feeling, though. As though enlightenment may be around the next corner.”

Glory sneaked a look at me. I was chewing my lip.

“You know, Grandma,” Glory said, “you might as well tell us now. There’s something bothering you.”

I shook my head, then looked at Falija, then looked up at the sky. Maybe I was asking God for a sign.

“She will,” said Falija. “But not now, not with all these hayfolk about.”

The hayfolk came out of the woods as the umoxen untied their
ears and got to their feet, making harrumph, harrumph sounds. “Where are you headed?” Falija asked the nigh umox.

“The Howkel Farm. Just outside the woods. Dallydance is just down the road, if you’re looking for a town.”

“Are there humans there?” Glory asked the umox.

“Like you? No. A few of the ordinary sort, though. Like her,” and he pointed at me with one leg.

Glory tried to sort that out. “She’s my grandmother. We’re the same kind of people.”

“Humph,” said the off umox. “Tell that to the gizzardile. You don’t even smell alike.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Falija in a commanding tone. “We don’t discuss how people smell, and umoxen aren’t the best judge of odors, anyhow.”

It was true they had a decidedly barnyard smell, which all of us present were more or less used to, but the umoxen took it as an insult.

“Oh, isn’t it a commanding Gibbekotkin! Doesn’t it have qualities of leadership! Pardon us, your royal sagacity, but those two, the boy and the girl, are alike, and that one, the old woman, is something else again. And anyone who says different is blind as a battle-bat, smell or no smell.”

“Here, here, what’s this,” said Howkel, who was the last to emerge from the woods. “Controversy? Argument? On such a lovely day? What are you umoxen up to?”

“Harrumph,” said the nigh umox. “Nothing at all. Except having my intelligence insulted and my fragrance referred to in a tone of derogation.”

“Tsk,” said Howkel. “Well, folk, you’ve lost your ride for sure. I never ask the umoxen to haul anyone who’s insulted them. If you get so far as our farm, though, do drop in for a meal and a bed. Dame Howkel is a fine cook, if I do say so myself.”

And with that, he and his tribe leapt upon the wagon, dumped our backpacks onto the road, and trundled off, leaving us standing there with our mouths open. I felt I’d done nothing but gape for weeks.

“Now what?” I asked, simmering.

“Now,” said Falija very softly, “now that our curious hayraiders have departed, it’s time Gloriana knew the truth.”

I could feel myself turning red, then white, then gray before my legs went out from under me and I was suddenly sitting on the grass, not knowing how I got there. Glory got her water bottle out of her pack and moistened a clean hanky to make a coolness for my forehead.

Finally, I murmured, “It was twins, Glory. All those twins.”

“What was?” Glory asked. “What about it. I’m not one!”

“I know. I know. I married your Grandpa Doc, and I had twins. Conjoined twins. They died almost as soon as they were born. And we thought, well, it’s probably for the best, it happens sometimes, next time will be normal. Then I had your mother and your aunt Mayleen, and they were joined, too. Grandpa Doc had to cut them apart because they were joined at the back of the head. That was the end of having babies, so far as I was concerned. We figured, it was just me, you know. Some mutation that happened on our way to Tercis. Years went by. Then Mayleen…

“Mayleen was only seventeen when she had Billy Wayne and Joe Bob, and they were joined, but Grandpa Doc separated them all right except for the terrible scars. After them, two or three sets died, then it was Ella May and Janice Ruth. Then Benny Paul and his brother who died. And more dead ones in between before Trish survived. Then Sue Elaine and Lou Ellen. We’d already realized, by then, that every time Grandpa separated twins, one of them was…wrong, somehow.

“Your mother, Maybelle, is sweetness itself, but Mayleen…And Joe Bob is a sensible, kind person, but it’s good Billy Wayne went into the army, because he’s as bad as Benny Paul. It was the same with Ella May and Janine Ruth. Ella May applied to the Siblinghood because she couldn’t stand it that her sister was a really vicious person. It was as though only one out of each pair had any goodness. Trish is like an empty bottle. Nothing there at all but babble and bubbles. And it went on and on, sometimes one lived, sometimes neither, five times both. And you know what happened to poor Lou Ellen after she and Sue Elaine…”

I saw Glory’s face change, saw it convulsed with fury, and suddenly she was screaming, “It wasn’t fair letting Sue Elaine have legs and not letting Lou Ellen have any!” Then there was a vast quiet, as though the whole world was waiting for her answer.

I whispered, “The nerves to the legs were connected to Sue Elaine’s brain, not to Lou Ellen’s. There were only two legs, only one spine attached at the pelvis. Actually, Lou Ellen didn’t have any legs, Glory. You know that. Grandpa Doc had to separate them. He waited until they were three. You used to play with her on the bed for hours, and you knew…”

“She got well. She does too have legs now,” Glory said. “She does. She goes everywhere with me!”

Falija put her paw on Glory’s hand and let the claws out, just a tiny bit. “Glory, Glory, Lou Ellen is dead. You know that. You saw her dancing with all her selves. You know she isn’t really alive. In your heart you know that.”

Glory’s hands went to her throat, as though she were choking, but still she cried out, “Bamber’s seen her! Tell them, Bamber!”

“Well,” he said in a sad voice, “I’ve seen her ghost, Glory. But then, I can see people’s ghosts, and I guess you can, too.”

“She’s buried in the cemetery,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t go to her funeral or even into the graveyard to see the stone, but her grave is there, Glory. Really.”

Glory looked around, trying to find something else to prove Lou Ellen was still alive. “You make her sandwiches,” she said frantically. “You say hello to her.”

“Just to keep you contented, Glory, so you won’t go back into the state you went into when she died. You end up eating the sandwiches yourself. And nobody says hello to Lou Ellen until you look at her and show us where you think she is. Except Falija says you really can see her, and now Bamber says he can, so you’re not…you know, what we thought you were…”

“You all thought I was crazy. Mama and Daddy and you!”

“Well,” I cried, “I beg your forgiveness for that, but there was just no end to the tragedy and the loss and the pain. And when your mama had Til and Jeff, it was the same thing. Jeff is a wonderful boy, but Til…Til’s another one like Benny Paul. When your mother got pregnant the second time, Grandpa Doc knew the babies wouldn’t live, because a friend of his had sneaked across the Walled-Off to lend him some other medical machine that The Valley doesn’t have.

“I…I went up to Contrition City and I went to the refuge there,
the one for pregnant women who want to give up their babies for adoption. Women sometimes come to Rueful just for that reason, you know. I asked for a woman who would have a baby about that same time Maybelle would; Grandpa arranged for a private place for the birthing. Maybelle’s babies were born dead, all scrambled together. We never told her. When she woke up, you were there, and she and your daddy have always thought you were theirs. Nobody knew you weren’t except Grandpa Doc and me and the real mother.”

“And Mama got her tubes tied,” Glory said in a dull voice. “But Aunt Mayleen didn’t.”

“Not right then. She and Billy Ray were dead set against it, but Grandpa did it the year before he died. He told her she had an infection he had to clear up, but what he really cleared up was her having any more babies. He just said it was the infection did it, and that’s what he told Billy Ray.”

“I can’t understand how you kept all this quiet,” said Bamber. “That many conjoined twins would have been on everyone’s tongue.”

I said, “If my husband hadn’t been a very fine doctor, if he hadn’t had a few advanced medical devices that he really shouldn’t have had in Rueful, and if he hadn’t had me to help out, it would have been a circus. But Billy Ray’s farm is away from everyone, and so is Jimmy Joe’s. We never allowed anyone to see the babies until they were apart. Later, when they went to school and played with other children who saw the scars, we had stories to explain what happened. With Til and Jeff, it was an accident in an old barn. With Maybelle and Mayleen, the scars were small anyhow, just at the back of their heads, mostly covered by their hair, and we just told them they were born that way…”

“How did you keep Mayleen quiet?” Glory cried. “When she started having twins, she’d have screamed about it.”

“Not Mayleen. You know what the folks in Rueful would have thought about it and said about it. She didn’t want that. She’d have died before she’d have admitted it, and Billy Ray likewise.”

Everyone was still. I was watching Glory, thinking she’d break out any minute with tears, howls, accusations, but she seemed more…interested, or troubled than outraged.

“I don’t know what this means,” Glory complained. “I feel like
I’m lost. Not…not orphaned, exactly. I know that Mama and Daddy love me and that you do, too, Grandma. But I feel like there’s part of me floating free, like a wood chip going down the river, turning around and around, with no idea where it’s going…”

“Which means the umoxen were right,” said Falija. “Glory and Bamber are a different sort. What did the woman look like, the one who gave up Glory?”

I wiped my eyes with the wet hanky. “I never saw her. She sent an old woman to bring Glory to us, a very old woman. Budness or Bodness, she said her name was. She said the mother was too broken up to do it. Well, I understand that. No woman gives up a child unless things are terrible for her. As for Glory, well, even as a baby she had dark, dark hair and brown skin, and when I commented on it, the old woman said the baby’s father was very tall, and very dark. I asked her what had happened to the father, wondering, you know, why the mother was giving up her child, and the old woman said he had disappeared and the mother couldn’t raise her little girl alone.”

“Why didn’t you just tell Mama the babies died?” Glory asked, still in that curious, almost uninvolved voice.

“Because your mama has a heart condition, Glory. You’ve heard us mention it. She almost died when Til and Jeff were born. And she almost died again when she saw them, and again when they were operated on. And she’s fretted herself for years over the fact that they aren’t…equally endowed. Grandpa Doc didn’t realize how serious your mother’s condition until after the Til and Jeff were born, but after that, he just couldn’t let her go through all that again.”

Glory turned to stare at Bamber, her eyes moving from his hair to his eyes to his height. Like hers, all of them. He had an arching nose and a wide mouth, like hers, one that always looked like it had too many teeth in it. Dark, vital, lean, and fit. I felt soft compared to both of them. I could have howled.

“I knew we were alike,” Glory said very softly. “More like family. I never looked like the Mackeys or the Judsons. Do you think we have the same parents?”

He thought about this, troubled, as she was, but not angry. “It’s possible,” he said at last. “I don’t remember what my mother looked like. I don’t remember anybody before we came here to Rueful. It
would explain her leaving me with Abe Johnson, because she might have wanted us to grow up near one another…”

I was listening to this with continuing amazement. I had known about Gloriana’s birth mother! Why hadn’t it occurred to me that Bamber might have had the same one?

“What about when Til, and Jeff, and Trish, and all of the rest of Mayleen’s children start having babies?” Glory demanded.

“Grandpa Doc fixed them all, before he died, even Emmaline, when she was just a baby. We had quite a plague of appendicitis among the girls and hernias among the boys, but none of them will have children, not even the nice ones, and that’s another reason why your cousin Ella May joined the Siblinghood. She and Joe Bob were old enough and sensible enough that Grandpa told them the truth. Oh, Glory, it was such a burden for your grandfather. I know he felt he’d been cursed. I felt I was a curse to him….”

Glory murmured, “Then I’m glad I wasn’t Mama’s baby, really, but I’m glad I’m her child.”

I broke down then and cried, while Bamber and Glory tried to comfort me, though every now and then Glory would mutter that it would have made so much more sense if we’d just admitted it to one another instead of trying to keep it secret. Perhaps later I could explain that both Grandpa Doc and I had been from an older time on Earth, when things like that couldn’t be talked about at all. Maybe he had been ashamed of it. I
had
been ashamed of it. Maybe he’d had dreams of his family going on, down the generations, and he just couldn’t admit to the world that they wouldn’t. And then, too, I knew Bryan hadn’t struggled to keep life in some of those babies, when he’d seen how awful their lives would be. Like Lou Ellen. That poor baby had whispered to me that she prayed to die, so the pain could stop. Glory had just been so generously accepting that she’d never realized how dreadful Lou Ellen’s life really was…

Glory stood up, her jaw set. “I think I’ve had about all the emotions I can take for one day.” She took a deep breath and helped me get to my feet. “If we’re going to find someplace to sleep by sundown, we’d better get started.”

We reached the gate of the Howkel Farm at nightfall. While Falija and I waited at the gate, Glory and Bamber went to the door and knocked politely. Dame Howkel answered the knock.

“So you’ve arrived!” she said. “Good enough. I always say to Lafaniel, that’s my husband, Lafaniel, that he truckles too much to them umoxen. Nice creature, true, polite in their habits, but set on having their way! Beckon your folk in, now, and we’ll see about supper.”

The two beckoned as instructed, I thinking meanwhile that I’d never imagined anyone quite so round, green, and cheerful as Dame Howkel. Once inside, however, I forgot about the probability of eating hay, for the aroma was of something very savory. Dame Howkel bobbed a curtsy toward Falija.

“Welcome, ma’am and Gibbekotkin. Howkel’l be along shortly. Our young have had their supper, us oldsters waited for you.”

She showed us the way out back, where a washbowl sat on a table next to the well beside a stack of towels and a steaming kettle. Once back inside, we were given mugs of fragrant green tea, and by the time Lafaniel Howkel showed up, we were deep in conversation with the Dame concerning the plight of Fajnard.

“I was speaking of the Frossians,” said the Dame to
her husband. “I was telling how the Gibbekot planted those acid trees all along the valleys to stop the Frossians coming.”

“I would’ve warned you of the same,” Howkel said, pouring himself a mug of tea. “They smell very pungent, so they’re easy to avoid. You’d think the Frossians’d learn to look at the trees to see which ones do it to ’em, but they never do.”

He turned toward me and said pointedly, with a sidelong glance at Falija, “Since you’re Ghoss, you’ll be going to the Gibbekot, won’t you? They’ll be wondering where that child is, wanderin’ off and findin’ the comp’ny of strangers.”

“I’m not from Fajnard, and they’re not Ghoss,” said Falija, in a lofty tone. “We came through a way-gate from Tercis.”

“Not Ghoss? Then what are they?” demanded Howkel.

“Same race,” said Falija. “Not the same…talents.”

“You say a way-gate,” breathed the Dame. “I didn’t know we had a way-gate anywhere near here.”

“Never seen fit to mention it to you,” Howkel said, fixing Falija with a doubtful eye. “We have a pair of ’em, one that comes in from Tercis, and one that goes out to Thairy. And right now, there’s gizzardiles lyin’ both ways like sentries!”

“We saw one,” said Bamber. “Very ugly.”

“Supper,” said Dame Howkel in a peremptory tone. “Let’s not upset ourselfs with gizzardiles right afore supper.”

We sat down at the long, wide table, the Dame at one end, Howkel at the other, his feet neatly crossed so his toenails curved inward before him, making floor space for the feet of those at his sides. Each place held a large bowl of stew, which had a certain verdant leafiness about it, but also bits that crunched or melted. We talked about food, the Dame ticking off many kinds of nuts and roots and seeds that made up hayfolk meals. “Along with hay,” she said, listing the kinds of hay, each with its own taste and texture.

“Have you always been hayraiders?” Gloriana asked.

“Hayfolk,” said Howkel. “Not raiders ’til the umoxen came, and they was brought from the plains below by the Gibbekot. They was the ones started cuttin’ hay from the grasslands, not knowin’ we was countin’ on it for winter food for ourselfs. Generally nice folk, the Gibbekot. We told ’em we needed it, and they worked it out right
away. We get first cut. After that, we cut hay for the umoxen, and we get umox wool from the Gibbekot in return. Hayraidin’s just doin’ what we always did.”

“You always cut the hay at night?” asked Bamber Joy.

“Oh, sure. Nicer, cooler at night, and there’s usually a moon, since Fajnard has five of ’em.”

“Did you always have those remarkable toenails?” I asked.

“Our people say we always did,” said Dame Howkel. “Course, I cut mine, now I’m past dancin’ the hay, and we all cut ’em off after the hay’s in for the season and sell ’em in the market for sickle blades. No better edge nowhere than Hayfolk toenails. Besides, it’s warmer in the winter if you can keep your feet under the blanket ’stead of lettin’ ’em hang out the foot of the bed. Now, suppose you tell us where you’re headed. We can tell you the safest roads, depending on where you’re going.”

Falija, who had been rather quiet since Grandma’s revelations on the road, made a little annunciatory noise, then: “My duty is to guide these folk in walking the seven roads of the Keeper. It is a task I was given by my people.”

All of us turned to her in amazement, Bamber and Glory with their eyes wide, the Howkels with their mouths wide, me with both eyes and lips shut tight, afraid to say the wrong thing.

“When did you decide that?” cried Glory.

“It came to me while I was thinking of the fish story,” Falija said. “You remember what I told you about my language and my mother-mind. I said you sometimes have to hear a word in context before you can understand what it really means. I had the seven roads in my mother-memory. It’s my job to help the walker walk the seven roads. I knew the story of the fish, but it didn’t connect to anything in my mind until just a few hours ago. All seven roads are one, and they must be walked simultaneously by one person.” Her voice faltered. “There’s nothing in my mind about how that’s to be done.”

“What is it, a riddle?” asked Bamber.

Falija shook her head. “All I know is, we just have to keep going.”

“On this road?” I demanded. “In front of the house?”

Falija dropped her head, shaking it slightly, saying in a sorrowful voice, “I don’t know.”

“Road you came by was a way-gate road,” said Howkel, pushing his chair back and honing his toenails together with a sound like steel on whetstone. “That road out front just goes to Gibbekotika by way of the mountains, that’s all. So, likely it’s a way-gate road that’s meant.”

“And there’s one that goes on to Thairy,” murmured Bamber Joy. “You said.”

“Well, yes,” mused Howkel. “A way-gate road as well.”

“That’s two roads that are one road,” said Glory.

I took a deep breath. “Are all the way-gates one-way roads?”

“One way,” Falija murmured. “I remember that someone long ago invented a machine to reverse them; but when they’re let alone, they’re always one way.”

“My oh my,” the Dame said, shaking her head. “That’s a lot of confusion and supposition, that is. Seems to me you’d be better off finishing your supper, having a good night’s sleep, then deciding what you’re going to do next.”

“Dame’s right,” said Howkel. “Never make plans when you’re weary, and I’m weary. Been cuttin’ hay the last eleven nights.”

“There, that’s so,” the Dame said, nodding to her husband. “No more talk of roads tonight.”

Glory and Bamber agreed, though Falija looked slightly mutinous. I reached out and petted her between the ears. Falija sighed and settled to her supper.

“There, now,” said the Dame. “That’s better. You’re a dutiful Gibbekotkin, the more credit to you, but even the dutiful have to eat and rest.” She turned to her own bowl, raising her spoon with a little moue of discomfort.

I saw that her arm was bruised. “What have you done to yourself there?” I asked. “That looks painful!”

“And so it is,” said Howkel. “And it’s gettin’ no better, neither. It’s a summer bruise, and it’s been there a time now.”

“Let me see,” I said, taking the Dame’s arm in my hands. Indeed, there was a darkness, like a bruise, except that on the green flesh it looked more like a crushed place, one that was not healing. “Tell me,” I said, after some thought. “When you are ill, does your body get hot? Do you run a fever?”

“A fever? And what is a fever?” asked the Dame. “When our people are ill, they get cold.”

“But this place on your arm is not cold. The tissue there is ruined. It needs to die and fall away, so the good tissue underneath can heal. Isn’t that what usually happens?”

“Oh, aye, it does,” said Howkel. “When Maniacal’s toes were cut to pieces on the sharp rocks, they got cold and fell off, and the new ones grew. Thankful it was wintertime, we were.”

I nodded. “But in summer, warm as it is, it would be hard for a bruised place to get cold enough to fall away. Well then, I would put ice on this. Is there any ice about?”

“Close enough,” said Howkel. “And where did you learn such thinking out, ma’am?”

“My husband was a doctor,” I said. “He always said, find out what the body does for itself and help it along.”

“Think of that,” said the Dame. “Just think of that, Howkel.” And, with a smile of great sweetness, she reached up and kissed me on the cheek.