The Margarets (25 page)

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 bargain 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.

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.

Glory’s eyes flew wide, and she forgot about the crawdad, which hung twitching on her finger while she stared at the impossible people. To me they looked to be partly silver and partly blue, as though extremely cold people were contained inside coats of clear ice, but they didn’t look at all frozen. Their eyes and arms and feet moved, their huge, furry ears twitched back and forward, and their little pink triangle noses wrinkled at the corners, just like cats. They had that same sort of upper lip, too, split just below the nose and curving up on either side to make a rounded W shape. If cats could smile ingratiatingly, that’s what these people were doing.

Glory said something like How do you do, or Hello there.

Lou Ellen said, “Who you talking to?”

Glory looked down where Lou Ellen was sitting at the end of the pier and said, “Them.”

Lou Ellen looked all around. “Who’s them?”

Glory turned toward the smaller cat-person, and said angrily, “Now, that’s not fair! You’re going to get me locked up again, everybody thinking I’m crazy, and that’s not a nice thing to do. You let Lou Ellen see you, too.”

The bigger one remarked, “Of course. How thoughtless of us,” and he cast his eyes over toward Lou Ellen, who immediately screeched and grabbed at Glory, getting the crawdad’s other claw instead. It pinched her, and she howled.

“What is it your intention to do with these creatures?” asked the bigger one.

Glory said, “We’d planned on eating them.”

“Are they edible?” the smaller one asked. “They seem to be quite barky and fibrous.”

“The tail meat inside the shell is very nice,” Glory said, self-consciously shifting herself into politeness mode. This meant doing what I had told her, over and over. Concentrate on good grammar, speak quietly, without expletives—even silly ones, like “Ballygaggle” instead of her daddy’s “Balls!”

“Then you’re carnivores,” said the bigger cat-person.

“No, we’re Judsons,” Glory said. “Gloriana and Lou Ellen Judson.”

“A judson is…” said the smaller one, leaving it hanging like it was something she didn’t know what to do about.

“A family,” Glory told them. “It’s a family. Like, we’re related. Lou Ellen and me, we’re cousins. Her daddy and my daddy are half brothers, Billy Ray and Jimmy Joe Judson, and her mama and my mama are twin sisters, Mayleen and Maybelle Mackey.”

“Sisters who are very like one another, perhaps?” asked the smaller one, her eyes glowing.

Glory took a long breath before she said, “Not all that much, no. Aunt Mayleen thinks my mama’s cornered the market on selfishness, and my mama thinks Mayleen’s too lazy to breathe on her own, but it makes no nevermind because Lou Ellen and I are best friends, no matter what.”

“It’s good to have friends,” said the smaller one to the bigger one. “No matter what kind they are…”

“Besides,” Glory interjected, “I didn’t catch on to your asking about carnivores right at first, because I was thinking of the Conovers, the folks on one of the farms down the road. But I do know what a carnivore is, and we’re not quite. There’s another word for what we are…”

“Omnivores,” said the smaller one in a satisfied voice, like she’d been planning a dinner and had been worrying what to serve. “No, we’re omnivores, too, so I wasn’t worried about our having a meal together. My companion’s name is Prrr Prrrpm by the way. I am Mrrrw Lrrrpa, and since you have called your cousin Lou Ellen, you must be Glorrrr-iana.”

In my dream I said their names, over and over, the
r
’s rolled like an engine running, and when they used Gloriana’s name, her jaw dropped, and it took a minute before she could say, “I’m Gloriana, but how come you know that?”

“We were given directions,” said the larger one. “We were told to find Gloriana Judson at this river, by this pier, early summer, period two, day ten, at twelve-forty-nine in the afternoon local time. We have a locator.” He removed a gadget from his belt and held it out: an egg-shaped, translucent blue thing with a silver handle.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“It says you are…who you are.”

“And why does it say that,” Glory demanded.

“Because,” said the littler one more softly, “you, no other person, are the optimum person to help us with our task.”

Gloriana considered this. She looked baffled. They just stood there, as though they expected her to do something, and in the dream, I could see her considering what might be proper.

“We were about to have our lunch. You’re welcome to share it, if you like. We’ve got enough crawdad tails for five each and enough potatoes and bacon and apples for everybody.”

“What fun,” said the smaller one. “What can we contribute?”

“There’s that roast pleckle leg,” he said. “And a whole basket of whalp berries. And those preserved grum stalks the trader gave us when we visited on…somewhere.”

Or something similar. The two cat-people walked up onshore as if it was all decided, shedding their ice coats as they came, and almost immediately the two of them had a fire going, the groceries out of their bags, and water boiling a lot faster than water ever behaved for me when I was in a hurry!

Glory wrapped the potatoes. “We’ll prob’ly have to have ’em for dessert,” she said, as she buried them in the fire. “They’ll take a lot longer to bake than the crawdads will to boil.”

The food the cat-people had taken out of the bags seemed more voluminous than the bags themselves, but Glory didn’t comment on that, which was dreamily appropriate. When the crawdads were cooked, the four of them took the shells off and ate a bit of them and a bit of grum stalk, which Glory said was spicy and tart and a little
peppery, and then a whalp berry or two, very sweet, then a bite of apple, and then some more of this or that while the little wind sent wavelets clucking around the splintery lopsided pier and terci-crows cussed at each other in the trees.