Authors: Suzette Haden Elgin
“Too small to be any use,” said her grandmother Ruth of Motley when Responsible carried it downstairs to the small sittingroom.
“Too
large
, to my mind!” her mother had objected. “We’ve almost no land left to give, Responsible; if somebody actually did a deed worthy of gratitude, Castle Brightwater would be hard put to it to find any acres to Bestow. I don’t approve, myself; I don’t approve at all.”
“Responsible didn’t expect you to,” said Ruth of Motley comfortably. “It’d spoil your image.
I
approve, and I’ll speak for both my husband and my sons: none of them would grudge the young woman her two piddling little acres.”
“I don’t see,” said Responsible’s mother stubbornly, “what Flag of Airy has done to merit a Bestowing. The last one we gave-and it’s been eleven years ago, mind, before Responsible ever saw daylight!-was twelve acres to the young man that tried to save the lives of Jewel of Wommack’s family. You remember that, Ruth?”
“I’m not senile,” answered Ruth of Motley, giving Thorn of Guthrie a look as she bit through a strand of embroidery floss that spoke of a preference for setting her teeth elsewhere.
“Grandmother, you’ll ruin your teeth,” said Responsible automatically. She’d been saying that ever since she could remember, and she’d learned it from hearing everyone else say it. But Ruth of Motley never paid it any mind, and her teeth gleamed bright as they ever had. Then she realized what Thorn of Guthrie had said, and she looked at her mother and tried for a casual face.
“I didn’t know that happened here,” she said. “Thought it was on Kintucky.”
“
No
-sir,” said Thorn of Guthrie. “The Wommacks were here at Brightwater on a visit, the old man and that young wife of his-she was no more than a child, and he had no business marrying her, if you ask me, not that anybody ever has-and Jacob Donahue Wommack’s wife, and the two children. Praise the Gates, they left the tadlings home . . . But the others went down in the river, there where that root tangle is just past the bend, right out there beyond the Castle grounds. And they all died, trapped in the roots and sunken logs, with the boat turned over on top of them. And,” she wound it up, “it was the young man as near drowned him
self
trying to save them that had the last Bestowing of land from this Kingdom. They were perfect fools, you know-going out on the river, and it in flood, and not knowing what kind of mess there was trapped in that tangle, but they wouldn’t hear no; nothing would do but they should have a day on the river-and they paid in full.”
“That was a sorry day,” Ruth of Motley added. “Everybody carrying on about the Wommack Curse, like it wouldn’t of happened if anybody else had been in that fool boat. I remember it well.”
“And
that
young man did something worth notice, Responsible. He must of gone down a dozen times trying to free the Wommacks, and at the last they had to hold him back to keep him from having another go at it when he was so exhausted he’d never in the world have come up again himself:”
“Mother,” said Responsible reasonably, “do think. If, as you put it, somebody did something that
really
called for a gift from Brightwater, those two little acres wouldn’t serve anyway. But they’ll please Flag of Airy and her husband, both of them fine young people. There’s room enough for him to raise a house, and her to put in a garden that’ll feed the two of them and a few tadlings as the years go by. Don’t be selfish, Mother-it’s not becoming.”
“Wait till the men are home,” said Thorn of Guthrie, “and we’ll see what they say. Not to mention Patience of Clark.”
“I’m not likely to make any Bestowing without the whole Family’s approving,” protested Responsible. “What do you take me for?”
“Responsible,” said Ruth of Motley mildly, “don’t tempt your mother.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The document’s well drawn, and you were wise to do it and have it out of the way. Put it in the desk over there, and then after supper tonight we’ll call a short Meeting and send the vote around. But there’ll be no trouble.”
“
I
still
say-” Thorn of Guthrie began, but her mother-in-law cut her off. Enough was enough.
“Thorn of Guthrie,” she said, “for two long
months
Flag of Airy saw her own babe suckled at the breasts of Vine of Motley, so her milk would not dry up before we Brightwaters got Vine’s own child back to her arms. And in that two months she bore a heavy load. Responsible is quite right.”
“Fiddle!” said Thorn of Guthrie. “I’ve suckled two daughters myself, one of them there before you, and I’d have welcomed anyone that cared to take the task from me. I don’t see it.”
Ruth of Motley rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and then bent over her embroidery in silence. She was doing a panel of ferns and flowers that required a good deal of attention, and she intended to waste no more effort on her sharp-tongued companion.
There they sat, the two of them: Ruth of Motley with her needlework, one piece after another till the Castle was smothered in the stuff, and Thorn of Guthrie with yet another of the endless series of diaries she’d been scribbling away at for thirty years. They were almost alone in the Castle. It wasn’t large, as Castles went; but today, with nearly everyone gone to the fair or the Hall or some one of the other entertainments, it seemed a vast echoing cavern.
The question Responsible had been dreading came just as she thought she was going to make it out the door without either of them thinking of it.
“Responsible!”
“Mother, I’m just on my way to put this Bestowing document back in my desk for safekeeping.”
“Your grandmother said to leave it here, and you heard her; and besides, I want to ask you something.”
Thorn of Guthrie sounded determined; Responsible turned back with a sigh, went to put the Bestowing document in the sittingroom desk, and then stood waiting.
“How come you aren’t down at Confederation Hall
yourself
this morning, along with the Grannys?” her mother asked her, and Ruth of Motley looked up from her work for the answer.
“Don’t plan on going,” said Responsible, short and sharp.
“You don’t plan on going?”
“Echo in here,” said Ruth of Motley, as was her habit.
“Whatever do you mean, you don’t plan on going? All the fuss you’ve made, all the dust you’ve raised over this week of nonsense -and you stand there and tell me you don’t plan to go?”
Responsible stuck to her guns.
“That’s right, Thorn of Guthrie.”
“Well, that beats all!”
Her rescue came from an unexpected source. Ruth of Motley had turned back to her work, but she spoke attentively enough.
“I think that’s wise of you, Responsible,” she said. “I think that’s
very
wise. Not a thing you can do to change what’s going to happen in that Hall, and for you to sit there and watch it going on and torturing yourself over it would be pure foolishness. You’re better off keeping busy here till it’s all over and we know how far they’ve gone. Not to mention the fact that there’s plenty of neglected work right here for you to turn your hand to while everybody else is off gawking at the delegations and going to carnivals.”
That satisfied her mother, and Responsible blessed Ruth of Motley for her solid common sense. Here she’d been fully prepared to face them all down and just plain refuse to say why she was staying away from the proceedings, same way she’d refused ever to say who she’d learned had kidnapped the McDaniels baby, and to bear the fuss that went with the refusing. Just because no amount of thinking had brought a plausible reason to her mind. And now Ruth of Motley had taken the load right off her back, all unexpected and unasked. And while Thorn of Guthrie was still occupied in counting off all the things she wanted Responsible to see to while she was staying home and not tormenting herself, she slipped away, much relieved. It was time she turned on the comset in her room and had a look at what was happening; by now they’d have finished with the Opening Prayer, and whatever leftover trivia there’d been from the day before-and unless she was far wrong in her thinking, Jeremiah Thomas Traveller would of been recognized by the Chair and would be holding forth.
She wasn’t wrong, either. She sat in her favorite rocker, the blue one with a back high enough to rest her head against, and paid the figure on the wall the compliment of
her
attention. Like many another thing in Castle Brightwater, the comset could have done with some repair. That had been sacrificed to the budget for the Jubilee, and every so often the projections ceased to be threedys and became flat as paper cutouts. But the sound was reliable, and that was the main thing; she knew well enough what they looked like.
Jeremiah Thomas had just begun, and the speech promised to take some time, for he was not only Master of his Castle, he was a Reverend, ordained before he passed his sixteenth birthday, and he knew how to spin out the sentences.
She had tuned him in just as he was finishing off his thanks to the Brightwaters for the “splendid program” of Opening Day-the hypocrite!-and allowing as how it had been a historic occasion fitly and abundantly observed. But now it was time for them to turn from ritual observance to the serious business of this meeting -and he proceeded to explain just what that meant to him.
“Mister Chairman”-he rolled it out “Senior and Junior Delegates and Aides, gentle ladies that honor us by gracing the balcony of this grand and glorious Hall . . . and all the citizens of the six continents who join us this day through the miracle of technology . . . I stand before you now with a heavy heart. A
heavy
heart!”
Responsible hoped it was heavy. She hoped it was a stone of Tinaseeh marble in his sly vicious breast, and well supplied with sharp little points.
“Why, you ask, is my heart heavy?”
I don’t ask any such thing.
“Because, my dear friends, my dear colleagues, I have no choice open to me today but to speak the truth. Oh, not that I am not reluctant to be the first to do so-for many among you know what that truth is, and did I wait long enough you might well speak it for me! Not that the truth does not stick in my
throat . . .
no! I
am
reluctant! I
do
find it hard to force the words to come forth, as come forth they surely must! But I tell you all, my conscience will not let me rest until I have said what
must be said.”
He let his voice fall to a hush. “All night last night I knelt on the bare boards of my chamber floor-”
There wasn’t a guestchamber in Castle Brightwater with bare boards to its floor, nor a servant’s room either, but Responsible could see that it wouldn’t of sounded nearly so dramatic for him to talk of kneeling for hours on soft rugs.
“-and I
wrestled
with my conscience!
Must
I
,
I asked myself . . .
must
I, I asked the Holy One Almighty . . . must I, Jeremiah Thomas Traveller the Twenty-sixth, be the one to speak this truth?”
He paused to let that settle over the heads of his listeners, and then he answered his own question.
“And the answer came back to me-it came back YES! And it came back YES! again!”
Just like him, thought Responsible, pleased to see him go flat and black on her wall, barely a flicker, to drag the Holy One into this and spread the blame.
“Oh, my friends,” he said, “oh, my colleagues-”
Careful! You’ll be saying dearly beloved next!
“-
I shuddered then. I shuddered . . . for the truth I must pronounce, the truth my conscience
compels
me to pronounce-that truth is not a joyous truth! That truth is not a merry truth! That truth is not a truth cast in a spirit of gaiety . . . unless, unless . . . but let me come back to that! For now, let me only tell you that the truth is sometimes a sad and solemn burden, and that this is such a time-but I will speak it, nonetheless; and I do not fear to do so.”
He went on then, to remind them one and all of the reasons that had brought the Twelve Families from Old Earth to Ozark one thousand years ago. He talked of the air of Earth, that could not be breathed; of the water of Earth, that no one dared drink till it had been made so foul by chemicals that it burned the throat and offended the nose; of the soil of Earth, so poisoned that the food it grew was unfit for human beings to eat, that had taken in pollution till it could give back nothing else. He talked of the pollution of humankind as well, every hand set against every other; of the dank misery of the slums where the world’s poor had scrabbled from dole to dole. He spoke of the shame of the so-called holy men who threw out in their daily garbage the finest foodstuffs chemistry could produce, while billions lay swollen-bellied in the dust, dying of starvation. He talked of the politicians, that lived like great ticks upon the bodies of the citizens they had sworn to serve, bleeding them of their substance and fattening upon it till the bureaucracies were swollen to monstrous size. He spent a number of superb sentences upon the doctors, become so callous and so arrogant and so divorced from the people that they could heal nothing but their bank balances; and a few more upon the lawyers, who had lusted after the suffering of others and profited by it; and still more for those that had dared to call themselves teachers, while they spent their useless lives spreading ignorance and demanding ever more money for the pitiful job they did . . .
On and on and on . . .