by Molly Gloss
There were six apartments in this domaro and twenty-four adults, but only twelve or fourteen who regularly came together on the First Day of the week: Meeting for Worship. What were they thinking, those other people, the ones who stayed away? Kristina wondered. Did they think there was an explanation for the soul, for its feelings of truth and beauty and goodness, for its moral imperatives and its intimations of wider scope—did they think there was an explanation for this that did not involve God?
She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead there, eyes closed, to allow the silence to take form. There seemed always a little while at the beginning of a Meeting when the silence was trivial—people would cough and squirm, it was clear in their faces that they were thinking about commonplace things. Only after the first restless quiet was there real silence—the silence of God, as distinct from the silence of people, Kristina thought.
She waited with her eyes closed, her forehead pressed against her knees. Her mind wandered, touching on large and small worries to do with her son, Bjoro, with the broken grouting between the floor tiles of the lavejo, and the piece of drafting work she had been doing for some people over in Kantado ŝiro, a plan for the rerouting of an irrigation aqueduct. Eventually—perhaps it was when the silence began to belong to God—she also thought of Linda Florencio, whose son Alberto had killed himself only the evening before. On Last Day, she realized suddenly.
She saw little of Linda now, but they had been friendly once, during the years their children were central to their lives. Linda had been on the Waters Committee, and Kristina had drafted projects that involved her; because their younger children were of like ages, eventually they had confided a few things, difficulties and satisfactions having to do with mothering. Kristina never had known Linda’s older son, Alberto Poreda, so her allegiance was with Linda, and it was hard not to blame Alberto for causing grief to his mother. Death was inevitable, universal, and that rendered it meaningless, she felt; people had to look for meaning in the way they lived their lives. She never had given much credit to this thing people called the ŝimanas, was impatient with suicides generally, believing people just looked for too much happiness in their lives. Her own husband, Aŭgustino, had been that way, imagining that happiness ought to be a kind of reward for managing your life well. God is love comprised Kristina’s whole system of ethics, and there was not much allowance in it for a husband who gave himself up to despair, or a son who killed himself while his mother still lived.
Perhaps other people were thinking of Alberto, as well. Kristina felt a damp, heavy mood among them, and an image gradually settled in her mind: the limbs of blooming locust trees slouching under the weight of rain.
“Today something has come in my mind of a very serious nature.” It was old Arno Masano, who was often given to inward voices; he stood to speak rather more often than other people, and liked to cite ancient Quaker documents without attribution. He spoke with his eyes fixed on the hunched shoulders all around him on the floor. “I have had a revelation that I believe makes our obedience to God a very simple thing. It is this—that the voice of God comes through our judgment, and not through our impressions.” He pronounced the words sincerely, solemnly, waiting for their understanding to come in on the following silence. Kristina waited for it too, in impatient confusion. “When people go by impressions, rather than judgment,” Arno said, “they turn from the true voice of God, and follow the false voice of self. When they are led by God—that is, by careful judgment—they make very few mistakes.” After a moment, with evident satisfaction, he sat down among the shoulders and knees of his neighbors.
Kristina rested her head back against the door jamb of the lavejo. She closed her eyes again. She had learned to give Arno’s words as much regard as someone else’s unborrowed leading—it had occurred to her, God might find it necessary to repeat some things more than once. But she thought Arno ought to have given them a little more help, this time, distinguishing between judgment and impression. If it was so easy, we always would make correct choices, she thought irritably. But in the lengthening silence after Arno had spoken, she began to think of Linda’s son Alberto, following impression, and not judgment, when he killed his mother’s son. The false voice of self.
After an interval, Silvia Troelsen stood slowly. She lived with her husband and his family over in Revenana, but until her marriage she had lived with her mother in the apartment next to Filisa Ilmen’s. She had a new baby tied against her belly; one of her hands was cupped beneath the solid roundness of the manta, lightly balancing or guarding the child there. “I worry—” she said, with her eyes cast down, her voice thin, timid, “—is it impression only that makes me fear this New World we are coming to? How am I to know if it’s my fear leading me from it, or God’s voice warning me away from quakes and storms? If it’s the weather scares me, is that good judgment, or only cold feet?” Smiles went around the loĝio, but Silvia’s face was solemn, earnest, she may not have meant the little joke her words played.
For 175 years they had gone on talking and thinking and making ready for leaving this world. They had lived for 175 years in a kind of suspended state, a continual waiting for change, but it was a balanced and deep-grounded condition, an equilibrium. They knew their world, root and branch, knew its history and its economies. The human life of the Miller and the life of its soil and its plants and animals revolved together, in a society that was well-considered, a community that was sustaining. Some people thought they had lived for 175 years in a world that was a kind of Eden.
Now they had come to their sea change—it was an enormous revolution that was pending in all their lives—and it had become common for people to raise the issue of being afraid. Before the Ruby had gone ahead of them, before they’d known the dimensions of the unpromising weather, the stony landscape, when people spoke of fear, it was of direful dreams, vague apprehensions. Just lately, as a result of all this bad news, these weather reports from the Ruby, people were more precise, speaking of the weather, vulcanism, rocky soil, instead of dim dreads. Well, it’s all right to be afraid, Kristina thought. Only don’t count it as judgment.
She found, though, that she held a certain sympathy toward Silvia Troelsen, who had this new baby and a young child, and had gone against good advice when she’d married a man without patience in anything, a man everybody knew was lazy and short-tempered like his father. Her husband, over there in Revenana, wasn’t likely to come to a First Day Meeting; Silvia may have come to this Meeting in her mother’s domaro to say this one thing on her mind.
Kristina thought, It isn’t the weather you’re afraid of, dear girl, but she wasn’t moved to speak this thought, knowing it to be opinion, which she was prone to put forward too often. Only afterward, in the long silence after Silvia’s witness, she felt a gradual restlessness, an agitation she recognized: She would, after all, eventually be driven to stand and share some leading, though there was no telling what she would say; she never did know that until the words were out.
After a while of increasing unease, Kristina stiffly got up in the little space where she had sat. She looked at the broken grouting between the tiles of the lavejo, just left of her left sandal. “I’ve been thinking of locust trees,” she said finally. Her voice was husky, its sound a surprise, though not the words—now, it was as if she had known all along what words would come out of her mouth. She kept from clearing her throat, she let the speaking clear it. “They have blossoms like sweet peas, they’re violet-pink or white. They bear them in big loose bunches, and when it rains, the weight of the water and the blooms makes the limbs hang down, they’re very yielding, even the thick ones will droop as if they haven’t any strength.” She sent a look around to her neighbors, considering whether she had given them a sufficient image. “But the locust wood is very hard—the young limbs, even, are strong wood—and proof against rot. Some of you may know, the prunings are favored for the carving of eave ornaments, and canes.” She gestured toward old Arno M
asano, who lifted his cane and flourished it in the air.
She kept standing a moment, waiting as the others waited, to see if she might have any more to say. But the silence felt solid, comfortable, so she sat down.
The metaphor satisfied her. With her eyes closed, she turned it over in her mind, examining it, looking for ways it bore on Arno Masano’s leading about judgment and impression. She had thought, hearing the words come out, she had spoken a straightforward symbolism of the strengths and weaknesses of their community. Now she saw, as well, a parallel between the locust tree and this unnamed world they had been steering toward for nine generations. It might be they should look for advantages in stormy weather, stony ground—maybe there was a hidden luck in them—canes to be made from broken wood. She wondered, also, if they lacked the information that would better their judgment—there were the two failed balloons. She thought, with something like stubborn insistence, Now the Lark is landing, eh? we’ll see.
After a while, Hilda Fugate stood. She was a woman forty or forty-five; she and her husband had only lately come to live in the Pacema district, in the household of Virdela Rota, who was an aunt of Hilda’s. Kristina knew Virdela Rota, but not this niece, yet. She had a broad nose, an intelligent face, not much like Virdela—maybe their relation was by marriage. “The image of the locust trees,” Hilda said in a murmuring, diffident voice, “has made me think of the tree called mule’s-kick. I don’t know its botanical name.”
Someone spoke out, “miconia,” and another voice said, “styrax,” which Kristina knew as snowbell, and not mule’s-kick, though some trees had more than one common name. Hilda’s eyes went briefly across all the heads, focusing upon no particular place. She nodded and said, “I know about this tree because my mother was a forester”—two or three old people nodded as if they remembered Hilda’s mother’s tenure—“and when I was eight or nine years old she had an apprentice who was killed, cutting one of those trees down after it had died on its feet. Some of you probably remember that apprentice who was killed, Rubeno, I think was his name.” People nodded. Kristina remembered it herself. The man’s name had been Rubeno Mendoza, he had been the young son of her husband’s cousin. “That mule’s-kick wood is hard, but it splits, and if a dead tree needs cutting down, then it likes to fall before it’s cut through, and as it goes over, the trunk splits lengthwise and kicks out, or upward.”
Hilda let a silence fall. She stood at the edge of the loĝio, and Kristina was drawn to the outlook behind her. There was a draft slightly stirring in the strands of a weeping willow tree that stood beside the alteja aqueduct. When her children had been young, they had liked to play in such places, under a willow’s trailing long tresses, in the secret dimness. She wasn’t able to remember what a mule’s-kick tree looked like. In her mind’s eye, though, she saw the split trunk recoiling, and Rubeno Mendoza’s startled face.
After a long while of standing looking across all the heads, Hilda said, shifting her weight self-consciously, “I don’t know what this means—my remembering that man’s death, and the mule’s-kick tree—but his name I think means ruby, so perhaps God knows.” She said this in a voice of hesitation and tenderness and then sat down slowly beside Virdela Rota.
The silence vibrated slightly with Hilda’s words. Kristina felt it enter her own body and ring inside her skull. The mood of the meeting was abruptly changed, but who knew in what direction? Afterward, Virdela, and old Arno, and then Leo Furuso spoke wildly various leadings, to do with cautious decision-making, with precipitate death, with souls hiding a malign bent, or a durable. Kristina nodded when Karlo Eŭbioso stood and simply said, “The voice of the Holy Spirit, in these times of anxiety and decision, must be listened for, both in strength of spirit and the breaking of it.”
In the very long silence after Karlo’s witness, finally Arno Masano and Kristina’s neighbor Filisa Ilmen—both of them were of the Ministry and Counsel Committee—clasped hands and stood up, and the shaking of hands went around the room. Coming onto the loĝio, people had been quiet, had come by ones and twos, or by family groups, silently, establishing the hush of the Meeting, but now bunches of people at once stood and began to talk. No one tried to keep silence. The Meeting was finished.
Kristina used the toilet and then came out to stand and talk with Arno Masano. “It was a gathered meeting, eh?” Arno said happily.
It had been a while since a First Day Meeting had been Gathered Into the Light—not since the Ruby was gone ahead of them, Kristina realized suddenly. She and Arno believed with the old Quakers, when words were truly spoken In the Light, they didn’t break the silence but continued it, the silence and the words all of one texture, one piece, so when the words ceased you had a sense of the silence continuing uninterrupted, seamless; and it was in such silences that God’s voice could be heard. She nodded. “I guess it was.” She had felt it herself, when Hilda Fugate had spoken, though afterward no one had seemed to know what her words meant.
Arno’s look was serious, confiding. “It was after Hilda Fugate spoke her witness. She surprised me, when she stood up. I thought right away, it might be God’s witness we’d be hearing out of her mouth because I don’t think she used to speak at Meeting much, over there in Bonveno where she lived. That’s what I heard.”
He leaned his head nearer Kristina. “Somebody said she moved because her husband and his brother had a falling out. Her husband’s brother is Ĉito Meĵia, you know Ĉito, eh? You drafted for him, I bet, because he was an engineer, or something like it. Now they’ve moved here from Bonveno because Hilda’s husband and this brother lived in the same household and they have hard feelings or something, and he doesn’t want to keep living with him in the same house. That’s what somebody said.” Arno knew everybody’s business. There was an unfocused look of happiness that would come in his eyes when he was standing in position to overhear someone else’s conversation.
Kristina wanted to ignore this talk of Hilda Fugate’s family life—she was in a religious mood just now. She said, “You gave us the first words to think on, Arno,” which was true.
“Well, it may be I spoke In the Light, myself,” Arno said. He nodded and smiled modestly. “God does speak in me, from time to time.”
She looked away. She never could make up her mind if his spirituality was honest—maybe it was just too forward for her liking. “In all of us, Arno,” she said flatly, and moved away from him. She found other people to talk to, Filisa Ilmen and her husband, Leo, and then Karlo Eŭbioso made a beckoning gesture and she went to stand with him and young Silvia Troelsen.
“We were just speaking of locust trees,” Karlo said, beginning to smile.
Kristina made a disrespectful sound with her lips; she thought Karlo might have been teasing her a little. “Don’t chide God’s words, Karlo, whoever speaks them.”
Karlo laughed. “No, no chiding. We liked those words ourselves.” His look became more tender, more serious. “Silvia liked them.”
Silvia gave Kristina a timid look. She said, “A man I know, his father was killed yesterday, killed out on the sail—the ŝimanas, I guess, that’s what people say. I thought of him—that man I know, and his father—when you told about the locust tree. Who knows why? But there was a little comfort in it. It was like poetry.”
Kristina wouldn’t have said anything so sentimental as that, even when she was Silvia’s age. And she was suddenly angry with Alberto again. She hadn’t thought of him leaving his own children. What were you thinking of, damn your selfish eyes. “Then it must be God who is the poet,” she said irritably. “I never have had a facility that way.”
Karlo nodded happily. “God’s words, whoever speaks them,” he said.
Kristina reached out to stroke the palm of her hand across the silky crown of the baby’s head where it lay bundled against Silvia’s breast. “Who is your husband—is it Ole?” she said to Silvia, and the woman said, “Ole Hiroŝi,” nodding.
She’d had a slight notion to offer advice, or t
ake Silvia to task for accepting a bad husband against the advice of her neighbors, her family, the Pacema Clearness Committee. You can always divorce, take a new husband, but your children will have only the one father, she thought of saying. But she kept still, and petted the child again. Sometimes a person would come right, when the job was rearing children. You could learn patience: It wasn’t like left-handedness or poetry, something you were born with or not. Ole Hiroŝi might still master it.
When people began to leave the loĝio and go on with other things in their lives, she put on a clean shirt and collected her flat clay bowl and a little sack of ground breadnut, a lime, sapotes, a knife—there were always too many people at a mortafesto, and there was never enough food—and she hunted up her clarinet, because sometimes people would play music and dance at a funeral. She didn’t know if Alberto Poreda’s body would be laid out at his mother’s house, or at his wife’s, but she went over to Linda Florencio’s house in the Esperplena ŝiro.
She kept a deliberate pace, swinging in one hand the battered old clarinet case and in the other the string sack with her groceries in it, and the shallow bowl. Her eye told an uphill way, the curve of the torus always rising ahead, and behind, following the architecture of the wheel, but it was flat to her feet, easy walking—it was only the distance that made her sweat a little, made her calves ache, now she was gotten old.
Esperplena was half around the circle from Pacema; it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d gone east with the turn of the world or west against it. You could walk clear around the torus anyway in a few minutes, if you were young and in a hurry, though there were the fields and neighborhoods and the spokes to be got around, aqueducts and ditches to be crossed; and if you kept down along the maltejo, there was the bridging of the Ring River and the rebridging, as the watercourse was deliberately roundabout. There had once been woodland between Mandala and Alaŭdo, a belt of trees that stood across all the incurvature, and in that place the through path rose high up on the altejo. It had been, in old days, a narrow, shadowed, duffy track winding along the shoulders of the uncut forest at the edge of the ceiling. In Kristina’s childhood, those trees still were living, but she remembered the quick plague that had killed them, and now the path along the altejo made a winding way among orchards of pear, sapote, persimmon, fig.
