The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  The young man glanced at his watch. Natalie looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps after the news conference. That lasts until…” He turned to Natalie. “Is it four o’clock, Reverend Abreu?”

  She tried to smile. “Yes, four. We should be going. Reverend Hoyt, if you’d like to come—”

  “I believe the bishop is coming later this afternoon, thank you.” The young man took Natalie’s arm. “After the press conference,” Reverend Hoyt continued, “please have Esau put the ladder away. Tell him he does not need to use it.”

  “But—”

  “Thank you, Reverend Abreu.”

  Natalie and her young man went to their press conference. He closed all the books he had checked out from the library and stacked them on the end of his desk. Then he put his head in his hands and tried to think.

  “Where’s Esau?” the bishop said when she came in.

  “In the sanctuary, I suppose. He’s supposed to be putting the webbing on the inside of the window.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Maybe Natalie took him with her to her press conference.”

  She sat down. “What have you decided?”

  I don’t know. Yesterday I managed to convince myself he was one of the lower animals. This morning at three I woke from a dream in which he was made a saint. I am no closer to knowing what to do than I have ever been.”

  “Have you thought, as my archbishop would say, who cannot forget his Baptist upbringing, about what our dear Lord would do?”

  “You mean, ‘Who is my neighbor? And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves.’ Esau said that, you know. When I asked him if he knew that God loved him he spelled out the word Samaritan.”

  “I wonder,” Moira said thoughtfully. “Did he mean the good Samaritan or—”

  “The odd thing about it was that Natalie’d apparently taught him some kind of shorthand sign for good Samaritan, but he wouldn’t use it. He kept spelling the word out, letter by letter.”

  “‘How is it that thou, being a Jew, askesth drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria?’”

  “What?”

  “John 4. That’s what the Samaritan woman said to Jesus at the well.”

  “You know, one of the first apes they raised with human parents used to have to do this test where she sorted through a pile of pictures and separated the humans from the apes. She could do it perfectly, except for one mistake. She always put her own picture in the human pile.” He stood up and went and stood at the doors. “I have thought all along that the reason he wanted to be baptized was because he didn’t know he wasn’t human. But he knows. He knows.”

  “Yes,” said the bishop. “I think he does.”

  They walked together as far as the sanctuary “I didn’t want to ride my bicycle today,” she said. “The reporters recognize it. What is that noise?”

  It was a peculiar sound, a sort of heavy wheezing. Esau was sitting on the floor by one of the pews, his chest and head leaning on the seat. He was making the noise.

  “Will,” Moira said. “The ladder’s down. I think he fell.”

  He whirled. The ladder lay full-length along the middle aisle. The plastic webbing was draped like fish net over the front pews. He knelt by Esau, forgetting to sign. ‘Are you all right?”

  Esau looked up at him. His eyes were clouded. There was blood and saliva under his nose and on his chin. “Go get Natalie,” Reverend Hoyt said.

  Natalie was in the door, looking like a childish angel. The young man from Cheyenne Mountain was with her. Her face went as white as her surplice. “Go call the doctor,” she whispered to him, and was instantly on her knees by Esau. “Esau, are you all right? Is he sick?”

  Reverend Hoyt did not know how to tell her. “I’m afraid he fell, Natalie.”

  “Off the ladder,” she said immediately. “He fell off the ladder.”

  “Do you think we should lay him down, get his feet up?” Moira asked. “He must be in shock.”

  Reverend Hoyt lifted Esau’s lip a little. The gums were grayish blue. Esau gave a little cough and spewed out a stream of frothy blood onto his chest.

  “Oh,” Natalie sobbed and put her hand over her mouth.

  “I think he can breathe better in this position,” Reverend Hoyt said. Moira got a blanket from somewhere. Reverend Hoyt put it over him, tucking it in at his shoulders. Natalie wiped his mouth and nose with the tail of her surplice. They waited for the doctor.

  The doctor was a tall man with owlish glasses. Reverend Hoyt didn’t know him. He eased Esau onto his back on the floor and jammed the velvet pew cushion under his feet to prop them up. He looked at Esau’s gums, as Reverend Hoyt had done, and took his pulse. He worked slowly and methodically to set up the intravenous equipment and shave a space on Esau’s arm. It had a calming effect on Natalie, She leaned back on her heels, and some of the color came back to her cheeks. Reverend Hoyt could see that there was almost no blood pressure. When the doctor inserted the needle and attached it to the plastic tube of sugar water, no blood backed up into the tube.

  The doctor examined Esau gently, having Natalie sign questions to him. He did not answer. His breathing eased a little, but blood bubbled out of his nose. “We’ve got a peritoneal hernia here,” the doctor said. “The organs have been pushed up into the rib cage and aren’t giving the lungs enough space. He must have struck something when he fell.” The corner of the pew. “He’s very shocky. How long ago did this happen?”

  “Before I came,” Moira said, standing to the side. “I didn’t see the ladder when I came.” She collected herself. “Before three.”

  “We’ll take him in as soon as we get a little bit more fluid in him.” He turned to the young man. “Did you call the ambulance?”

  The young man nodded. Esau coughed again. The blood was bright red and full of bubbles. The doctor said, “He’s bleeding into the lungs.” He adjusted the intravenous equipment slowly “If you will all leave for just a few moments, I’ll try to see if I can get him some additional air space in the lungs.”

  Natalie put both hands over her mouth and hiccuped a sob.

  “No,” Reverend Hoyt said.

  The doctor’s look was unmistakable. You know what’s coming. I am counting on you to be sensible and get people out of here so they don’t have to see it.

  “No,” he said again, more softly. “We would like to do something first. Natalie, go and get the baptismal bowl and my prayer book.”

  She stood up, wiping a bloody hand across her tears. She did not say anything as she went.

  “Esau,” Reverend Hoyt said. Please God, let me remember what few signs I know. “Esau God’s child.” He signed the foolish little salute for God. He held his hand out waist-high for child. He had no idea how to show a possessive.

  Esau’s breathing was shallower. He raised his right hand a little and made a fist. “S-A-M-”

  “No!” Reverend Hoyt jammed his two fingers against his thumb viciously. He shook his head vigorously. “No! Esau God’s child!” The signs would not say what he wanted them to. He crossed his fists on his chest, the sign for love, Esau tried to make the same sign. He could not move his left arm at all. He looked at Reverend Hoyt and raised his right hand. He waved.

  Natalie was standing over them, holding the bowl. She was shivering. He motioned her to kneel beside him and sign. He handed the bowl to Moira. “I baptize thee, Esau,” he said steadily, and dipped his hand in the water, “in the name of the Father”—he put his damp hand gently on the scraggly red head—”and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  He stood up and looked at the bishop. He put his arm around Natalie and led her into the nave. After a few minutes the doctor called them back.

  Esau was on his back, his arms flung out on either side, his little brown eyes open and unseeing. “He was just too shocky,” the doctor said. “There was nothing but blood left in his lungs.” He handed his card to Reverend Hoyt. “My number’s o
n there. If there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thank you,” Reverend Hoyt said. “You’ve been very kind.”

  The young man from Cheyenne Mountain said, “The Center will arrange for disposal of the body.”

  Natalie was looking at the card. “No,” she said. Her robe was covered with blood, and damp. “No, thank you.”

  There was something in her tone the young man was afraid to question. He went out with the doctor.

  Natalie sat down on the floor next to Esau’s body. “He called a vet,” she said. “He told me he’d help me get Esau baptized, and then he called a vet, like he was an animal!” She started to cry, reaching out and patting the limp palm of Esau’s hand. “Oh, my dear friend,” she said. “My dear friend.”

  Moira spent the night with Natalie. In the morning she brought her to Reverend Hoyt’s once. “I’ll talk to the reporters for you today,” she said. She hugged them both goodbye.

  Natalie sat down in the chair opposite Reverend Hoyt’s desk. She was wearing a simple blue skirt and blouse. She held a wadded Kleenex in her hands. “There isn’t anything you can say to me, is there?” she asked quite steadily. “I ought to know, after a whole year of counseling everybody else.” She sounded sad. “He was in pain, he did suffer a long time, it was my fault.”

  “I wasn’t going to say any of those things to you, Natalie,” he said gently.

  She was twisting the Kleenex, trying to get to the point where she could speak without crying. “Esau told me that you tucked him in when he stayed with you. He told me all about your cat, too.” She was not going to make it. “I want to thank you…for being so kind to him. And for baptizing him, even though you didn’t think he was a person.” The tears came, little choking sobs. “I know that you did it for me.” She stopped, her lips trembling.

  He didn’t know how to help her. “God chooses to believe that we have souls because He loves us,” he said. “I think He loves Esau, too. I know we did.”

  “I’m glad it was me that killed him,” Natalie said tearfully. “And not somebody that hated him, like the Charies or something. At least nobody hurt him on purpose.”

  “No,” Reverend Hoyt said. “Not on purpose.”

  “He was a person, you know, not just an animal.”

  “I know,” he said. He felt very sorry for her.

  She stood up and wiped at her eyes with the sodden Kleenex. “I’d better go see what can be done about the sanctuary.” She looked totally and finally humiliated, standing there in the blue dress. Natalie the unquenchable quenched at last. He could not bear it.

  “Natalie,” he said, “I know you’ll be busy, but if you have the time, would you mind finding a white robe for Sunday for me to wear? I have been meaning to ask you. So many of the congregation have told me how much they thought your robes added to the service. And a stole perhaps. What is the color for Trinity Sunday?”

  “White,” she said promptly, and then looked ashamed. “White and gold.”

  Cash Crop

  “Oh, Haze,” Sombra said. “Aren’t you excited about tomorrow? Our new dresses and the school all decorated with flowers?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to see down the hill to the peach tree. Francie always waited by the peach tree after school, triumphant that she had made it home before the downer. But this morning Mother had come to take her home, and I could not see any figure standing beside the stunted tree.

  “I can hardly wait to see the flowers!” Sombra said. “Mamita says they always bring yellow roses. And red carnations. Do you know what carnations look like, Haze?”

  I shook my head. The only flowers I had ever seen were my mother’s greentent geraniums.

  Earlier today the district nurse had talked to Mother for a long time. I had heard the words “scarlet fever” and “northern,” and the nurse’s face had become flushed and angry as she spoke. “Flowers!” she had said angrily. “They buy us off with flowers and antibiotics when they should be sending us a centrifuge so we can make our own antibiotics. They take our grain and give us flowers!” And Mother had hurried Francie home.

  “Just think,” Sombra said, looking up at the dusty haze, “right now the Magassar’s orbiting. Floating up there in space with its hold full of flowers.” She was shivering, hugging her arms across her chest. We had ridden the dustdowner home, clinging to the narrow seat under the sprinklers, and both of us were wet from the spray.

  Dirty downers, my father called them. “They buy us off with the downers when they could be doing climate control, when they could be eliminating the strep altogether.” All I seemed to be able to think of today were angry words against the government. There shouldn’t be, with graduation coming. The government had sent a special ship just for the occasion of our first graduating class. They had already sent fabric for graduation clothes with the last grain ship, and although Sombra’s romantic notions about the ship floating overhead with its hold full of flowers were not quite right and the Magassar was instead already filling its massive hold with compressed grain and alcohol from the orbiting silos, when it did land tomorrow there would be gifts and special foods from earth, fresh fruits and chocolate, and Sombra’s flowers. Yet all I heard were angry words.

  Father had threatened to dismantle the dustdowner that circled our stead daily and build a cannon out of it. “Then when the government men tell me they’re doing all they can about the strep, I can tell them what I think.” The government’s argument was that the strep outbreaks were being caused by the dust, so they sent the automated sprinklers crawling up and down the adobe-hard roads between the steads, wasting Haven’s already scarce water, and stirring up dust with their heavy wheels that their sprinklers didn’t even touch. The quarantine and sterilization regulations the first steaders set up did more to keep the strep under control than the downers ever would.

  The steaders made their own use of them, hitching supplies and messages on the back to send them between the steads. During quarantines the district nurse sent antibiotics that way and sometimes a coffin, And all the kids caught them on the way to and from school, if they could time it, arriving damp and disheveled at their angry mothers’, who told them they would get a chill and catch the strep, who forced the government-supplied Schultz-Charlton strips into their mouths and wrapped them in blankets. I had seen Mamita Turillo do it to Sombra and Mother to Francie. Not to me. I was never chilled. The breeze on my wet shirt and jeans today was cool, but not cold.

  “Oh, you’re never cold,” Sombra said now, her teeth chattering. “It isn’t fair.”

  Even in winter I slept under a thin blanket and forgot my coat at school. Even in Haven’s sudden intense summer that was nearly here, my dust-colored cheeks didn’t flush like Sombra’s red ones. Sweat didn’t curl my dust-colored hair as it did her black hair. Sombra looked like a greentent flower, her body tall and narrow, her cheeks and hair bright splashes of color. I only came to Sombra’s shoulder, and I looked more like the flowers Mother tried to plant outside the greentent, dusty and pinched and they never bloomed.

  I was not the only one. A few of the first-generation steaders, like Old Man Phelps, were short and hardy, and more and more of the new hands Mamita boarded fresh off the emigration ships looked like me. I looked out across our stead and Sombra’s with the bare hard road and low mud fence dividing the pale sweeps of winter wheat, and the pinkish-brown haze in the sky above them. Maybe the emigration people had decided to send people as colorless and dusty as Haven itself in the hope the strep would overlook them.

  I could see Father’s peach tree at the corner of our stead, where Sombra would turn to go another quarter-mile to her house, but no Francie. Only one thing would have made Mother come and get her, somebody sick here in western.

  “Sombra,” I said, “do you know of anybody sick in this district?”

  “Yes,” she said, unconcerned. “Old Man Phelps. I heard the district nurse tell your mother.”

  “Scarlet fever?” I said blankly, but it coul
d not be anything else. It was always scarlet fever. Stray streptococci brought by the first steaders had taken to Haven’s dry, dusty climate like cherrybrights to a tree. It was always there, waiting for a shortage of antibiotics. There had been a heart-stopping outbreak in northern three weeks ago, seventeen reported, mostly children, and a local had been slapped on the district by the district nurse. It shouldn’t have spread to western. What was worse, Mr. Phelps brought us within two of a planetwide quarantine. Mr. Phelps, one of the oldtimers who never got the strep, down with scarlet fever.

  “The district nurse told your mother there was nothing to worry about. Mr. Phelps lives alone, and she said she could stop an outbreak with the antibiotics the Magassar’s bringing.”

  “If the Magassar lands,” I said. A faint scratchiness of fear was beginning behind my throat. Two more reported cases and the Magassar would go back to earth without even landing. There would be no graduation.

  Sombra said, “Mamita says there’s no reason for them to quarantine us without antibiotics. She says they could drop the antibiotics from orbit. Do you think that’s true?”

  The scratchiness became almost an ache. “No, of course not. If they could, they would. They wouldn’t leave us without any antibiotics if there was any way to get them to us.” But I was remembering something from a long time ago, when little Willie died. Mother telling me to get out of the house, out of her sight, and Father saying, “Don’t take it out on Haze. It’s the government that’s left us to the wolves. Blame them. Blame me—I brought you here, knowing what they were doing. But not Haze. She can’t help being what she is.” The ache was worse. I swallowed hard, and when it didn’t go away, I pressed the flat of my hand against the hollow space between my collarbones and swallowed again. This time it went away.

  “Of course not,” I said again, feeling much better. “Don’t worry about Mr. Phelps. He won’t stop our graduation. There’s got to be an incubation period, and by the time it’s up, the Magassar will already be on the ground. The local’s probably already got it stopped.”