by Leona Gom
He ran past the chicken coop, brown wings with a memory of flight beating away from his careless feet. Only when he reached the woods did he stop running, his breath hammering at his chest. He found the thick fir at whose base he’d often sat, reading and rereading the books he’d borrowed from the longhouse, and he sank down there again. But it offered him no comfort. Everything familiar around him seemed to be changed and turned against him, an external world he could no longer trust. He put his face against the rough chapped trunk and cried.
It was how Highlands found him, later.
She sat down beside him, her long muscular legs stretched out in front of her, and she put her hand on his knee and said softly, “Ah, Daniel.”
He didn’t answer, only pressed his forehead harder into the bark of the tree. He wished she would go away.
“She wasn’t fair to you, Daniel. But you will find someone else.”
“I don’t want someone else. I want Bluesky.”
She sighed. “Sometimes it’s best not to get what you want.” Daniel knew she was thinking about Montney’s father, Rossiter, the male she had mated with for two tumultuous years before he left her for someone at East Farm. When she talked about him she referred to him only as “that piss-head.”
“That’s hindsight,” he said, unable even now to resist arguing with her.
She smiled, darkening the little pale pleats at the corners of her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. “While it’s happening, your life has a certain sense of —” she waved her hand vaguely in the air “— being out of control. Especially when it comes to mating desires.”
“She said it was unnatural. To make love with me.” He slapped harder than was necessary at a bloated mosquito on his wrist. The blood splattered up his arm like a small explosion.
Highlands sat for several moments, squinting at the sky, where a hawk was circling on the thermals. The sun coming through the leaves fell along the scar on her cheek from where the cultivator blade had come loose and flown up to cut her five years ago, only one of several scars she had accumulated in farm accidents. She reached up and brushed back her greying brown hair from her forehead, which was wide and corrugated.
At last she said, “I don’t know how to answer you, Daniel. Bluesky has the right to make her choices, for whatever reasons.”
“I’m a freak,” he said.
“You’re rare. It’s not the same thing.”
“I wish I’d lived before the Change! Things would have been different then. Bluesky wouldn’t have rejected me.”
Immediately he knew he shouldn’t have said it. But it was too late to pull back the words. He could feel Highlands go tense beside him. She took her hand away from his knee, and its absence made the spot feel suddenly cold and bare. She stood up, blotting the sun. When he dared to look up at her, her face was a black circle cut in the sky.
“Tell me First Law,” she said.
“Before the Change was Chaos, and it was Male. Male is Danger and Death. Male must be Hidden.” First Law, what everyone on the farms had to learn almost as soon as they learned to speak. He knew he had challenged it. Nervously he twisted a fallen leaf around his fingers.
“I’m glad you remember,” she said, her voice hard.
“I didn’t mean to challenge,” he said. “I was just angry.”
“I know.” Still she stood above him, rigid as the trees, looking down. He wanted to shrivel into the earth.
Suddenly she said, “Did your father ever tell you how First Law was when we had to learn it as children?”
“No. You mean, it wasn’t the same as now?” He was amazed to think that First Law could ever have been different.
“There was another part to it. It said, ‘Male must Live in Shame.’ I was one of the ones who insisted we change that.”
Male must Live in Shame: it sounded horrible. He had been teased as a child for his difference, and sometimes people still said cruel and thoughtless things to him, but he had never been taught to feel shame. It made First Law as he had learned it seem generous and benign — and Highlands had helped make it so. He looked up at her, grateful, wanting to thank her, but he felt his mouth fill only with one word, a word that was wrong, that was somehow contradiction and denial: Bluesky.
He could tell she was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t speak, simply sat there, staring over her shoulder at a dark surge of rain clouds in the western sky.
Finally she said, her voice cold and irritable, “Just don’t think life before the Change was better, for anyone. If you believe that, even for a moment, you’ve learned nothing. Nothing at all. Don’t make me doubt I was right to amend First Law.”
“I’m sorry,” he said then, making the words come as he looked up at her black, faceless silhouette, Highlands, the one he had always needed to please now suddenly turning her hard judgments against him, too. “I know it wasn’t better before the Change. It was just … Bluesky saying she didn’t want me. Because I was male.”
He could tell by the way Highlands shifted her feet, the way her arms dropped to her sides that he had regained her sympathy, and he sighed with relief. Slowly she unfolded herself from the sky and sat down again beside him, no longer a dark shape above him, the Leader, but Highlands, familiar, his friend.
“I know it’s difficult,” she said. “But you mustn’t feel yourself diminished. As long as you follow First Law, you’re equal to anyone on the farm now that you’re an adult.”
“Then why did Bluesky say I was unnatural? Why did she choose someone else?”
“She has that right, Daniel. Just as you have the right to choose someone else.”
“I know. It’s just … her reason I find so painful.”
“Any reason is painful.”
He smiled wanly up at her. She was right, he supposed, but, still, she couldn’t really understand, couldn’t know what it was like.
“Perhaps you should talk to Christoph,” Highlands said, as though she knew his thoughts.
“You don’t usually recommend my father’s advice.”
Highlands laughed. “It only seems that way,” she said. “You know what your grandmother used to say about us? She said we argued so much because we were interested in each other’s opinions. That’s true, you know. Your father’s a very wise man.”
Her comment surprised him. “I always thought you considered him, well, something of a fool.”
“Oh, Daniel,” she said, shocked. “That’s not true, no. Now that piss-head, Montney’s father, he’s a fool.”
Daniel laughed.
“Come back to the farm with me,” she said. “I’ll give you one of the chocolate sweet-buns I brought back from Fairview. I ate a whole bag of them after that piss-head left me, and I never lusted for anything better since.”
So he got up and walked with her, but although she made light and frivolous conversation he could feel her looking at him with concern. He smiled up at her, eager to reassure — of course he knew the time before the Change was brutal; of course he wouldn’t want to go back to that. Even if it meant Bluesky might have admired and wanted him — the forbidden thought clutched at him like a sudden root tangling his feet.
Bluesky: he would have to see her, every day. Every day she would be there to remind him of what he wanted and could never have. A branch Highlands had pulled forward slapped back at him, and although he saw it coming he didn’t raise his arm to brush it aside; it thumped into his chest like a fist.
If only he could leave. If only, like the others, he were free to live Outside for a while. He remembered his old dream of University in Leth, how when he was a child and Cayley had gone there he had told his mother proudly that he would go, too. Her hands had stilled on the pair of overalls she was patching, and she looked at him with such sadness that he exclaimed, “What’s wrong?”
And, haltingly, she
had told him how it was too dangerous for the males to go, how no males could live Outside.
“So I’m trapped here forever?” he cried. “I can never leave?”
“Well, for a day at a time, perhaps. Like your father goes to Fairview sometimes. And Kit from East Farm went to the Farm Conference in Leth last year. But that was only for a week, and others went with him.” She looked down at her stitching, pushed the needle through the coarse fabric. “But University? No, Daniel. It would take two, three years. It’s just not possible.”
Not believing her, he had gone to Highlands, who had told him the same thing.
“But it’s not fair! Why should I be denied just because I’m a male?”
“Life is full of denials and disappointments, Daniel. We have to learn to accept them.”
He thought of that comment now, coming out of the trees onto the open fields, trying to concentrate on what Highlands was saying about the corn crop. His mother and sister were digging a new compost trench behind one of the sheds, and his mother, seeing them, put down her spade and came over to them. They talked some more about the corn crop, Daniel’s mother saying she was more worried about the ergot this year, and then Highlands went on to her house and left Daniel alone with his mother.
She rubbed with apparent thoughtfulness at a smear of dirt on her wrist. Then she put her arm around Daniel’s waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. “My dear Daniel,” she said. “My sweet child.”
He had to smile. His mother was the only one who could still call him “child.” Or who could, for that matter, still call him “sweet.”
“My sweet mother,” he said. He put his arm around her waist and walked with her to the shed.
• • •
IT WAS ONLY HIS second Meeting as an adult, but he was tired and aching from the woodchopping he’d been assigned this afternoon, so he found it difficult to pay attention, especially with Bluesky sitting only three seats to his right. Whenever he glanced her way he saw her looking down determinedly at her hands, which she’d clasped into one tight fist on top of her desk. He tried to keep his thoughts calm and neutral.
They were meeting in the longhouse instead of outside as they’d planned because the rain had blown in from the west. He could hear it rattle in little gusts against the window, and, far away, the light snore of thunder.
They were all there except Huallen, who was minding the youngest children. Sara-Berwyn and Cayley, Bluesky’s mothers, sat to his right; then Bluesky and her sister, Shaw-Ellen; Daniel’s mother and father and younger sister, Mitchell; Johnson-Dene; Huallen’s mate, North, and their daughters, Aden and Fraser-David. Sometimes more of the older children came to the Meetings, but today had been a hard day for them, helping to clear the roads out to the grain fields, so, except for Mitchell, who came to most Meetings even though it would be years before she could participate in Consensus, none of them was interested in coming and listening to more instructions from adults.
There wasn’t much to discuss this time, although Johnson-Dene had her usual complaints about last month’s supplies and how they were costing too much. Cayley, who was on purchasing shift for the next few months, sighed loudly, but Johnson-Dene ignored her.
“Would you like to change your shift for Cayley’s and do the purchasing?” Highlands asked patiently.
And no, of course she wouldn’t, but and but and but.
“I know it’s more expensive to buy instore, but it takes too much time to get the flour from the mill,” Cayley said. “When we did that it meant staying in town a whole extra day.”
“Well, I hate paying so much jackup,” Johnson-Dene said. She clicked her teeth together sharply several times, as she would when she was annoyed. Daniel imagined her teeth must be nearly ground down to the gums by now.
“If we go to the mill we’d need to take an extra person, and another horse. That costs us, too,” Cayley said.
Daniel looked around the loose circle of desks, past Cayley’s face to Bluesky’s, like a hazed mirror of her mother’s, the same sharp nose, the mouth with the lower lip curving out slightly farther than the top one. Only her colouring was different, a reminder of another parent, not Cayley’s mate, Sara-Berwyn, but a donor chosen by Doctor, who monitored the farms’ kinship bases periodically to avoid inbreeding. Beyond Bluesky he could glimpse the round and small-featured and sunburned face of Shaw-Ellen, with her perpetual anxious smile; although the biological daughter of Cayley and Sara-Berwyn, she looked like neither.
“But we wouldn’t save anything,” Cayley was saying. She began tapping her forefinger irritably on her desk.
Daniel wished Highlands would just settle it, one way or the other, but he knew that although she could lose her temper when Consensus took too long and could abruptly call a vote or make the decision herself, she resisted doing so. The meeting isn’t over, she’d say sharply sometimes, until everyone is satisfied. How can she stand it, Daniel thought, the endless attempts to compromise and placate, when Johnson-Dene was so clearly being obstinate and everyone would have welcomed a ruling against her. But he also knew Second Law: that power-over is never as good as power-with. It would be a lot more efficient, though, he thought wearily.
“Well, no, that’s all right,” he heard Johnson-Dene say finally, the way she always would, as though all she had really wanted was a chance to complain, to talk.
And then he jerked to sudden sharp attention, because it was Bluesky’s soft voice he heard, Bluesky who had never spoken up at Meeting before.
“I was wondering,” she fumbled. “I was just wondering if I …”
If what? He held his breath, waiting.
“… if I could start helping with the teaching a little.” She looked shyly at Huallen.
“Of course,” Huallen said. “I’d be delighted.”
“Good,” Highlands said. “Arrange that between yourselves, then.”
Help with the teaching, he thought, sinking back into his seat. As though nothing important had happened to her today.
There were only a few things left to discuss — the workloads to fix the east-pasture fence the cows had broken through, the first of the peas to can, who wanted to lead the reading group next or did they want to stop for the summer. Daniel almost volunteered to organize the reading group, to show Bluesky that he, too, could sit here calmly planning his life, but he decided against it; he didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. Finally his mother agreed to take the group, and then Highlands said, “Well, I guess Meeting is over,” and they all drifted away. Bluesky, he noticed, was the first out the door, casting a quick, nervous glance behind her as though she expected him to pursue her.
His father lingered at the side of the room, adjusting a bookcase shelf that had warped and come loose. Mitchell came over and took Daniel’s hand and led him around the room, pointing at all the desks, explaining which of the children used which desk for which lesson. She had, Daniel noticed, cut her bangs this morning, and, unable to get them straight, had kept snipping until she had only a little bristly fringe left, still slanting to the right. She was only trying to cheer him up with her chatter, he knew, but he found it tiring and somehow depressing, and finally he said, his voice sounding more abrupt than he intended, “Leave me alone for a while, will you, Mitchell?”
She looked up at him, her eyes filling immediately with tears. Without a word, she let go of his hand and left. He could hear her footsteps pounding into a run outside. He felt ashamed and angry at himself for his thoughtlessness.
“She’s so sensitive,” he said miserably, sinking into one of the desk chairs.
“We’re all sensitive,” his father said. He came over and sat in the desk opposite him. “It’s been a difficult day for you.”
Daniel smiled wryly, rubbed his hand in a circle on the desktop. “Does everyone know about me and Bluesky?”
“Probably,” his fat
her said unapologetically. He paused. “It’s natural for young liaisons to end, you know. And for others to form.”
“Natural. Do you know why Bluesky wanted to end it?”
“No.”
“Because it was unnatural, she said. Because I was a male.”
His father was silent for a long time, the way Highlands had been. At last he said, gently, “We are unnatural, Daniel. The world has moved on and left us no place in it. Except here. And even here we have to suffer humiliations from people like Bluesky. Try not to blame her. More and more of the Outside comes in now, and we can’t expect our people not to be influenced by it. In the Outside we don’t exist. They think of us as monsters who died out long ago. I still don’t really know why we didn’t, why our people weren’t affected as much during the Change. But here we are. We have to make the best of it.”
Daniel sighed and picked at a splinter in the desktop. It began to spread, growing thicker and thicker at the root instead of breaking, and finally he stopped trying to make it taper off and snap. He’d have to bring in a knife and sandpaper to fix it now. He felt like a destructive child under his father’s eyes, mutilating something carved long ago by someone determined to preserve in them education, literacy, a respect for history.
“When I was talking to Highlands,” he said, “I told her I wished I had lived before the Change.”
“What?” His father’s voice was shocked, as Daniel had expected it to be.
“Because then Bluesky wouldn’t have left me.”
“Daniel, ah, Daniel….” His father leaned forward in his desk, stretching his arms as far forward as he could. His hands clutched the edge of Daniel’s desk, shook it a little.
“I know,” Daniel said. “First Law. I challenged First Law. I didn’t intend to. It was stupid of me. I was just angry about Bluesky.”
“You’re lucky Highlands didn’t cut your testicles off.”
Daniel stared at his father’s serious face. “What?” he gasped.
