by Leona Gom
Delacour didn’t answer for a long time. Finally, she stood up and, half-turned away from Bowden, she said, in a low voice, “I’m sorry you think that.”
Bowden looked at her, all her arguments, all the things she wanted to say, suddenly seeming futile and repetitive. It would be only later, much later, that she would realize that Delacour had probably been sincere in her offer. Now the only thought left circling in her head, madly, desperately, was: I’ll kill the baby.
7
DANIEL
DANIEL STOOD UP, STRETCHED his arms high above his head, then pressed his open hands into the small of his back, hard, trying to squeeze away the aching. A noose of stiffness circled his neck, and the back of his legs felt as though the muscles had been stretched taut and fastened down, like barbed wire pulled tight on fence posts and stapled there. He rubbed at his thighs and calves, but it only made them hurt more.
Shaw-Ellen, who was picking the beans along the other side of his row, stood up, too. “It’s so hot,” she said.
Daniel nodded, reached over, and picked off the thin green stem that was stuck like an ornament to her cheek.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it from his fingers as though he had given her a gift.
“Let’s take a rest,” he said. “We’ll get heat-stroke if we’re not careful.”
“I just want to finish this row,” she said. “I think I’ve only done half what you have today. Here, you can take these back.” She reached for his pail, poured the contents of her bucket into his, which did indeed contain about twice as much as hers. He was a faster picker than she was, and the only reason she kept parallel with him on the row was that he picked so many beans that were really on her side.
He knew why she was giving him her beans now to take back — because Highlands had finished with the washing and had come out to help Huallen cut up the beans. Shaw-Ellen wanted Highlands to be impressed with his industriousness, even if it meant that he took credit for her work. He smiled, decided not to tell her he understood her motives.
“Why don’t you come, too?” he said.
She shook her head. “Let me finish this row,” she said.
She bent back down and began picking, her fingers in the plants going snap, snap, the beans rattling into her empty container.
He swung the pail to his side and began walking to the houses. Sweat ran down his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose; his shirt stuck to him. He thought this was probably the hottest day of the year.
He approached Travers, who was picking on the next row, and she squinted up at him. Travers was from East Farm, and she had mated with Johnson-Dene six months ago, which improved Johnson-Dene’s disposition considerably, but Travers herself was a strange and unpredictable person, and Kit at East Farm had told him they were glad to have her go.
“Are you quitting?” she demanded.
He made himself smile. “No. Just taking a rest. It’s so hot.”
She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek. “It’s not so bad. Hurry up and come back.”
“I will,” he said. He resisted the urge to say something sarcastic to her about the hour-long break she and Montney had taken in the morning.
As he neared the houses he could see Highlands and Huallen sitting out on Highlands’s porch, cutting up the beans. His step faltered, but he made himself continue.
It had never been the same between Highlands and himself since what had happened at Leth, and how could he expect it to be? He knew how much he had disappointed her. She had had such faith in him, that he would do well and come back laden with learning, and instead he had done the worst thing of all. The others had been shocked and angry with him, too, of course, but, because Highlands had been able to resolve things in Leth, they had, except perhaps for Johnson-Dene and Travers, eventually forgiven him. But it was different with Highlands. He had exposed a lack of judgment not just in himself, but in her.
When they talked with each other now they were stiff and uncomfortable, and so mostly they avoided each other. Around her, Daniel thought, he would always feel like a failure, an undisciplined child who ran away from the damage he had done, expecting her to follow behind and mend it. When she had returned from Leth and told them that it had been settled, that she trusted Bowden to see that the pregnancy was stopped, he tried to thank her, but she had said, coldly, “You were luckier than you deserved.”
And then she’d said, “I had hoped you could be the next Leader, Daniel. But now I’m sure you can see it’s not possible.”
He’d stared down at his feet. Of course he could see. No one would select him, would trust him. He wouldn’t even select himself. It would have been difficult enough, being a male, but after what he’d done — He wouldn’t blame them if they forbade his even coming to Meetings.
“I can see now being Leader would have been too difficult for a male,” Highlands continued. “There’s too much responsibility.”
His fingers tightened on the wire handle as he remembered standing before her, knowing he had no defence, seeing everything changed. His very name now would become a warning to other males, an example of their untrustworthiness, a reason to restrict them.
He set the pail down in front of Huallen. “Well, aren’t you fast!” she exclaimed. “You just brought us a pail.”
“These are Shaw-Ellen’s, too,” he said. “I just wanted to come back for a break. I feel like I’m getting sunstroke out there.”
Highlands squinted out at the fields, where Shaw-Ellen and Travers and Montney looked like dark buds attached to the thick, long stems of rows. “Aren’t the others coming in, too?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I guess I’m the only one weakening.”
Highlands glanced at him but didn’t answer. She took another handful of beans and began cutting off the ends. She was, Daniel couldn’t help noticing, much less efficient at it than Huallen.
“It’s so hot,” Huallen said. “I feel guilty sitting out here in the shade doing the cutting. The kitchen is almost unbearable. Christoph says he feels like the beans he’s cooking. When he comes out he does look like he’s been boiled.”
Highlands laughed. “Tell him that,” she said.
Daniel shifted uncomfortably, “I’m going down to the stream for a minute,” he said. “I won’t be long.” He turned and walked away.
When he reached the woods he immediately felt cooler, the slight breeze pulling up from the creek drying the sweat on his face and back. He stumbled down the incline to the water. Pulling off his shirt, he lay down with his face and torso in the stream. He opened his mouth, let the water run in, swallowed. He spread his arms out in it, felt it bounce lightly against his armpits, his, shoulders, run over his forearms and wrists and hands as though they were simply branches fallen from the trees.
It was the way his father found him, and, alarmed, he stumbled down the bank and pulled at his arm. “Daniel!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”
Daniel sat up, flinching from the sudden light, his father’s disturbed face. “Yes, of course.” He smiled. “Did you think I was trying to drown myself?”
His father sat back, laughed nervously. “Well,” he said. “I thought you might have fallen.”
Daniel dried himself with his shirt, shook it out, and put it back on. “Did they tell you to come and get me?” he asked.
“No, of course not. They just said you’d come down here. It sounded like a good idea.” He picked up a pebble, threw it, underhand, a few feet into the stream.
“Well, I suppose I should get back. I don’t want anyone to think I’m shirking.”
“Why would they think that? Good heavens, Daniel, you’ve been working twice as hard as anyone. You always take extra workloads.”
“I have a lot to make up for.” He picked up a pebble and tossed it, the same way his father had, into the stream.
His father sighed, didn’t answer. They had had this conversation before.
Daniel watched him, pretending he was looking at something in the fir trees across the stream. In the past year his father had lost half his hair, and even though he laughed about it Daniel knew it made him feel ugly and anxious, worrying about sickness, unsure whether to believe Doctor, who said it was normal for males to lose their hair. He thought of his own thick hair, the way Delacour’s hands would clench in it when — the unexpected image startled him, and he stood up abruptly. It was a year since he’d been in Leth — he shouldn’t be having such vivid memory flashes anymore.
“I had a nice talk with Shaw-Ellen last night,” Daniel’s father said. “She’s a good person. You’re lucky to mate with her.”
“I know.”
“She has a more agreeable nature than Bluesky,” his father said, then stopped, sliding a quick, uneasy look at Daniel. It almost made him laugh. It seemed like such a long time since he had felt so strongly about Bluesky. She had moved to North Farm two months ago, and, now that he didn’t see her every day, he rarely thought about her at all.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m lucky Shaw-Ellen will have me. I don’t deserve her.” He stared across the stream, at a blue jay hopping from branch to branch on a poplar tree, getting lower and lower until it was on the bottom one, and then it lifted its wings in a flare of blue and flew away.
“You’re different,” his father said abruptly, “since you came back. You seem more … calm, perhaps. But you’re also …” He lifted his hand, moved it sideways as though to stir the term he wanted from the air.
Daniel tensed himself for the word.
But the one his father found surprised him. “You’re unhappy.”
Daniel smiled. “Unhappy,” he said. Was he? Since he had come back he had immersed himself so deeply in the work of the farm — building the new barn, digging another dug-out, in the winter doing almost all the teaching — he hadn’t allowed himself to think much about his own feelings, to remember. More calm, his father had said, too. Well, he was that, he supposed. But unhappy? Wasn’t being unhappy just another emotional indulgence of the kind he thought he had put behind him?
“Why should I be?” he asked, trying to make his voice light.
“Perhaps you miss Leth. Perhaps you miss Highlands.”
For one awful moment he thought his father had been going to say Delacour instead of Highlands, and he went rigid with denial. But what his father did say was just as uncomfortable to face. “I suppose I miss some things about Leth,” he said carefully. “But my life is here. I don’t yearn to go back. And Highlands … Well, things are different between us. I try to accept that. She has every reason to distance herself from me.”
His father nodded, didn’t answer, and they sat for a while in silence. A fish twisted out of the water downstream. They saw it flash like polished silver in the light, and then they kept watching the point where it fell back into the water as though they expected it to resurface.
“Are you happy, Father?” Daniel asked.
His father looked at him, startled. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ve always taken your happiness for granted, I suppose.”
His father looked down at his hands. “I don’t really think about it,” he said. “I suppose that means I’m happy enough.”
Daniel smiled. It was the kind of answer he should have expected.
“You know,” his father said, “it’s time you called me by my given name.”
Daniel shifted uncomfortably. He wondered when his father would mention that. It was something he could have started doing when he turned eighteen. Perhaps he had resisted it, not just because of habit but because he was reluctant to see his father as simply another person, a friend instead of a parent and protector. And he should be calling his mother Cambria, by now, too, although that might be easier, since he was accustomed to hearing the children with two mothers using their parents’ given names right from the beginning.
“Christoph,” he said, trying it out.
“That wasn’t so hard.”
Daniel laughed. “It will take getting used to. Christoph.”
They sat for a while longer, and then Daniel said, “Well, I guess I should go back.”
“I’ll stay a bit longer. If I’m not back by nightfall tell them to hitch up one of the horses and drag me back.”
The sun hit at Daniel like a hammer as he stepped out of the trees and headed for Highlands’s house, past the land he and Shaw-Ellen had cleared last month for their new house, which they would start building after the harvest if the weather held. They would be formally mated next month.
He turned the corner of Highlands’s house and was relieved to see Huallen there alone cutting the beans. He smiled at her, picked up his empty pail, and headed out to the field.
He saw that Shaw-Ellen had picked his side of the row, too, so he came even with her and set his pail down. She looked up, her face pebbled with sweat, and smiled. “You’re all wet,” she said.
“I went and lay down in the stream,” he answered, bending down. “I wish you’d have come, too.” He began picking, his fingers stiff, having to relearn the motions.
By the time they finished, the sun was brushing the tops of the trees. They plodded wearily back to the houses with their full pails and left them with Huallen, and then Shaw-Ellen followed him to his house to wash for supper.
Daniel was soaked with sweat; even his shoes felt full of it. When he pulled off his socks they looked like drowned mice curled up beside his shoes. He stripped himself naked, ran the cold, wet washcloth heavily over his body, the cold shocking his skin into goose bumps.
Shaw-Ellen had taken off her shirt, too, and was leaning over the basin; she cupped and lifted her breasts, one after the other, to wash underneath them. Soapy water dripped from her nipples. She saw Daniel watching and smiled. “You’re lucky you don’t have these things,” she said. “They’re a nuisance.”
“Lucky!” he exclaimed. “Would you rather have mine, empty and useless?”
“They’re not as heavy, at least,” Shaw-Ellen said, laughing, cupping her hand under his flat right breast. They towelled themselves dry and got dressed and went in to supper.
Shaw-Ellen seated herself where she usually did, beside her mothers, Cayley and Sara-Berwyn, and Daniel followed her and sat on her other side. He watched for his father — Christoph, he made himself think — to come in, hoping he would sit with them, but it was Travers who slid into the empty seat, offering him her odd smile that always made him uncomfortable.
Then Highlands came in, with Daniel’s sister, and they sat at the end of the table, intent on a conversation they had begun outside. Daniel watched them, trying not to let himself remember that it was he who had so often been there beside Highlands. It was likely Highlands would recommend Mitchell as Leader now. Well, he thought, pulling his eyes away and focusing them on the blue wall opposite him, Mitchell would make a good Leader. Although she still had an unwise devotion to her brother. He smiled wryly at the wall.
The others had all come in by now, everyone talking excitedly about how the grain harvesters from East Farm had just arrived at North Farm, which meant they would be here in less than two weeks. A lot needed to be done before then — the food had to be prepared, the tents put up, and, most importantly, the roads to the fields, many of which had only been travelled on horseback since last year, needed to be cleared and widened for the machines. Only Daniel and Cayley had learned how to drive the farm’s tractor, so when the harvesters brought them their fall gas quota they would take turns working with the harvesters in the fields. It was hard and dusty work, going late into the night, leaving no time to visit or talk. Meanwhile, there were still the garden crops to finish. It exhausted him just thinking about it. Johnson-Dene and Montney, who were serving the food, brought it in then, and they al
l began to eat, hungrily, asking for second helpings.
Travers poked at his forearm with the blunt end of her knife. When he looked at her, she leaned over and said, loud enough for the others to hear, “I was reading one of those books you brought back from Leth. It was talking about how before the Change the males would force people to have babies they didn’t want. Is that true? Is that really what males could do?”
Daniel made himself swallow his mouthful of potato-beef. He was aware of the others listening, of Highlands’s eyes on him.
He made himself think carefully before he replied, not because Travers really cared about the answer, or because of the others who were listening, but because he needed to explain it to himself. He thought of how he had once said he wished he’d lived before the Change so that Bluesky wouldn’t have rejected him then; of how he had explained away, even run away from, such questions when he was at Leth; then of the murderous impulse that had shaken him so badly outside Delacour’s door. And of how his whole relationship with Delacour had begun — she had forced him, in a way. He remembered the shame, the anger, the fear he had felt. Yet he had not been physically compelled: how much worse it would have been to have lost that final, crucial choice. He remembered hurting her, how he had had and wanted that power, even then.
Power-over — that’s where it all came from, he thought, all the exploiting and hurting of others: wanting power-over, envying or fearing it in others, using it to make oneself feel strong and capable, when all it would do is make one weaker, more pitiful, more of a child. The seeds of it were in all of them — he had seen it in Delacour as much as in himself — but the pre-Change males had nurtured it, valued it, taught it to their male children. He could see that now.
