Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Someone walked in the summer camp. I thought it was Sored, one of the bogy's.

  I took Veronique's arm and tugged her up. I was stiff from sitting and colder than I had noticed, but moving helped. We slid down the hill into the summer camp.

  The summer camp sat in a V that looked at the river frozen below. Sored was already out of the camp when we got there, but he waved at us from the trees and we scrambled back up there. Veronique slipped and used her hands.

  There were two people crouched around a fire so tiny it was invisible and one of them was Tuuvin.

  "Where is everyone else?" Sored asked.

  "I don't know," I said. Tuuvin stood up.

  "Where's your mother and sister?" he asked.

  "I was at Wanji's house all night," I said. "Where's your family?"

  "My da and I were at the stabros pen this morning with Harup," he said.

  "We found Harup," I said.

  "Did you find my da?" he asked.

  "No. Was he shot?"

  "I don't know. I don't think so."

  "We saw some people running across the field behind the schoolhouse. Maybe one of them was shot."

  He looked down at Gerda, crouched by the fire. "None of us were shot."

  "Did you come together?"

  "No," Sored said. "I found Gerda here and Tuuvin here."

  He had gone down to see the fire at the distillery. The outrunners had taken some of the casks. He didn't know how the fire started, if it was an accident or if they'd done it on purpose. It would be easy to start if someone spilled something too close to the fire.

  Veronique was crouched next to the tiny fire. "Janna," she said, "has anyone seen Ian?"

  "Did you see the offworlder teacher?" I asked.

  No one had.

  "We have to find him," she said.

  "Okay," I said.

  "What are you going to do with her?" Sored asked, pointing at Veronique with his chin. "Is she ill?"

  She crouched over the fire like someone who was sick.

  "She's not sick," I said. "We need to see what is happening at Sckarline."

  "I'm not going back," Gerda said, looking at no one. I did not know Gerda very well. She was old enough to have children but she had no one. She lived by herself She'd had her nose slit by her clan for adultery, but I never knew if she had a husband with her old clan or not. Some people came to Sckarline because they didn't want to be part of their clan anymore. Most of them went back, but Gerda had stayed.

  Tuuvin said, "I'll go:"

  Sored said he would stay in case anyone else came to the summer camp. In a day or two they were going to head towards the west and see if they could come across the winter pastures of Haufsdaag Clan. Sored had kin there.

  "That's pretty far," Tuuvin said. "Toolie clan would he closer."

  "You have kin with Toolie Clan," Sored said.

  Tuuvin nodded.

  "We go to Sckarline," I said to Veronique.

  She stood up. "It's so damn cold," she said. Then she said something about wanting coffee. I didn't understand a lot of what she said. Then she laughed and said she wished she could have breakfast.

  Sored looked at me. I didn't translate what she had said. He turned his back on her, but she didn't notice.

  It took us through the sunrise and beyond the short midwinter morning and into afternoon to get to Sckarline. The only good thing about winterdark is that it would be dark for the outrunners, too.

  Only hours of daylight.

  Nothing was moving when we got back to Sckarline. From the back the schoolhouse looked all right, but the houses were all burned. I could see where my house had been. Charred logs standing in the red afternoon sun. The ground around them was wet and muddy from the heat of the fires.

  Tuuvin's house. Ayudesh's house. Wanji's house. In front of the schoolhouse there were bodies. My da's body, thrown back in the snow. My mam and my sister. My sister's head was broken in. My mam didn't have her pants on. The front of the schoolhouse had burned, but the fire must have burned out before the whole building was gone. The dogs were moving among the bodies, sniffing, stopping to tug on the freezing flesh.

  Tuuvin shouted at them to drive them off.

  My mam's hip bones were sharp under the bloody skin and her sex was there for everyone to see, but I kept noticing her bare feet. The soles were dark. Her toenails were thick and her feet looked old, an old, old woman's feet. As if she were as old as Wanji.

  I looked at people to see who else was there. I saw Wanji, although she had no face, but I knew her from her skin. Veronique's teacher was there, his face red and peeled from fire and his eyes baked white like a smoked fish. Ayudesh had no ears and no sex. His clothes had been taken.

  The dogs were circling back, watching Tuuvin.

  He screamed at them. Then he crouched down on his heels and covered his eyes with his arm and cried.

  I did not feel anything. Not yet.

  I whistled the tune that Wanji had taught me to send out the message, and the world went dark. It was something to do, and for a moment, I didn't have to look at my mother's bare feet.

  The place for the Sckarline dead was up the hill beyond the town, away from the river, but without stabros I couldn't think of how we could get all these bodies there. We didn't have anything for the bodies, either. Nothing for the spirit journey, not even blankets to wrap them in.

  I could not bear to think of my mother without pants. There were lots of dead women in the snow and many of them did have pants. It may not have been fair that my mother should have someone else's, but I could not think of anything else to do so I took the leggings off of Maitra and tried to put them on my mother. I could not really get them right- my mother was tall and her body was stiff from the cold and from death. I hated handling her.

  Veronique asked me what I was doing, but even if I knew enough English to answer, I was too embarrassed to really try to explain.

  My mother's flesh was white and odd to touch. Not like flesh at all. Like plastic. Soft looking but not to touch.

  Tuuvin watched me without saying anything. I thought he might tell me not to, but he didn't. Finally he said, "We can't get them to the place for the dead."

  I didn't know what to say to that.

  "We don't have anyone to talk to the spirits," he said. "Only me."

  He was the man here. I didn't know if Tuuvin had talked with spirits or not, people didn't talk about that with women.

  "I say that this place is a place of the dead, too," he said. His voice was strange. "Sckarline is a place of the dead now."

  "We leave them here?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  He was beardless, but he was a boy and he was old enough that he had walked through the spirit door. I was glad that he had made the decision.

  I looked in houses for things for the dead to have with them, but most things were burned. I found things half-burned and sometimes not burned at all. I found a fur, and used that to wrap the woman whose leggings I had stolen. I tried to make sure that everybody got something- a bit of stitching or a cup or something, so they would not be completely without possessions. I managed to find something for almost everybody, and I found enough blankets to wrap Tuuvin's family and Veronique's teacher. I wrapped Bet with my mother. I kept blankets separate for Veronique, Tuuvin, and me and anything I found that we could use I didn't give to the dead, but everything else I gave to them.

  Tuuvin sat in the burned-out schoolhouse and I didn't know if what he did was a spirit thing or if it was just grief, but I didn't bother him. He kept the dogs away. Veronique followed me and picked through the blackened sticks of the houses. Both of us had black all over our gloves and our clothes, and black marks on our faces.

  We stopped when it got too dark, and then we made camp in the schoolhouse next to the dead. Normally I would not have been able to stay so close to the dead, but now I felt part of them.

  Tuuvin had killed and skinned a dog and cooked that. Veronique cried while
she ate. Not like Tuuvin had cried. Not sobs. Just helpless tears that ran down her face. As if she didn't notice.

  "What are we going to do?" she asked.

  Tuuvin said, "We will try for Toolie Clan."

  I didn't have any idea where their winter pastures were, much less how to find them, and I almost asked Tuuvin if he did, but I didn't want to shame his new manhood, so I didn't.

  "The skimmer will come back here," Veronique said. "I have to wait here."

  "We can't wait here," Tuuvin said. "It is going to get darker, winter is coming and we'll have no sun. We don't have any animals. We can't live here."

  I told her what Tuuvin said. "I have, in here," I pointed to my head, "I call your people. Wanji give to me"

  Veronique didn't understand and didn't even really try.

  I tried not to think about the dogs wandering among the dead. I tried not to think about bad weather. I tried not to think about my house or my mam. It did not leave much to think about.

  Tuuvin had kin with Toolie Clan but I didn't. Tuuvin was my clankin, though, even if he wasn't a cousin or anything. I wondered if he would still want me after we got to Toolie Clan. Maybe there would be other girls. New girls, that he had never talked to before. They would be pretty, some of them.

  My kin were Lagskold. I didn't know where their pastures were, but someone would know. I could go to them if I didn't like Toolie Clan. I had met a couple of my cousins when they came and brought my father's half brother, my little uncle.

  "Listen," Tuuvin said, touching my arm.

  I didn't hear it at first, then I did.

  "What?" Veronique said. "Are they coming back?"

  "Hush," Tuuvin snapped at her, and even though she didn't understand the word, she did.

  It was a skimmer.

  It was far away. Skimmers didn't land at night. They didn't even come at night. It had come to my message, I guessed.

  Tuuvin got up, and Veronique scrambled to her feet and we all went out to the edge of the field behind the schoolhouse.

  "You can hear it?" I asked Veronique.

  She shook her head.

  "Listen," I said. I could hear it. Just a rumble. "The skimmer."

  "The skimmer?" she said. "The skimmer is coming? Oh God. Oh God. I wish we had lights for them. We need light, to signal them that someone is here."

  "Tell her to hush," Tuuvin said.

  "I send message," I said. "They know someone is here."

  "We should move the fire."

  I could send them another message, but Wanji had said to do it one time a day until they came and they were here.

  Dogs started barking.

  Finally we saw lights from the skimmer, strange green and red stars. They moved against the sky as if they had been shaken loose.

  Veronique stopped talking and stood still.

  The lights came towards us for a long time. They got bigger and brighter, more than any star. It seemed as if they stopped, but the lights kept getting brighter and I finally decided that they were coming straight towards us and it didn't look as if they were moving, but they were.

  Then we could see the skimmer in its own lights.

  It flew low over us and Veronique shouted, "I'm here! I'm here!"

  I shouted, and Tuuvin shouted, too, but the skimmer didn't seem to hear us. But then it turned and slowly curved around, the sound of it going farther away and then just hanging in the air. It got to where it had been before and came back. This time it came even lower and it dropped red lights. One. Two. Three.

  Then a third time it came around and I wondered what it would do now. But this time it landed, the sound of it so loud that I could feel it as well as hear it. It was a different skimmer from the one we always saw. It was bigger, with a belly like it was pregnant. It was white and red. It settled easily on the snow. Its engines, pointed down, melted snow beneath them.

  And then it sat. Lights blinked. The red lights on the ground flickered. The dogs barked.

  Veronique ran towards it.

  The door opened and a man called out to watch something, but I didn't understand. Veronique stopped and from where I was, she was a black shape against the lights of the skimmer.

  Finally a man jumped down, and then two more men and two women and they ran to Veronique.

  She gestured and the lights flickered in the movements of her arms until my eyes hurt and I looked away. I couldn't see anything around us. The offworlders' lights made me quite nightblind.

  "Janna," Veronique called. " Tuuvin!" She waved at us to come over. So we walked out of the dark into the relentless lights of the skimmer.

  I couldn't understand what anyone was saying in English. They asked me questions, but I just kept shaking my head. I was tired and now, finally, I wanted to cry.

  " Janna," Veronique said. "You called them. Did you call them?"

  I nodded.

  "How?"

  "Wanji give me ... In my head ..:' I had no idea how to explain. I pointed to my ear.

  One of the women came over, and handling my head as if I were a stabros, turned it so she could push my hair out of the way and look in my car. I still couldn't hear very well out of that ear. Her handling wasn't rough, but it was not something people do to each other.

  She was talking and nodding, but I didn't try to understand. The English washed over us and around us.

  One of the men brought us something hot and bitter and sweet to drink. The drink was in blue plastic cups, the same color as the jackets that they all wore except for one man whose jacket was red with blue writing. Pretty things. Veronique drank hers gratefully. I made myself drink mine. Anything this black and bitter must have been medicine. Tuuvin just held his.

  Then they got hand lights and we all walked over and looked at the bodies. Dogs ran from the lights, staying at the edges and slinking as if guilty of something.

  "Janna," Veronique said. "Which one is Ian? Which is my teacher?"

  I had to walk between the bodies. We had laid them out so their heads all faced the schoolhouse and their feet all faced the center of the village. They were more bundles than people. I could have told her in the light, but in the dark, with the hand lights making it hard to see anything but where they were pointed, it took me a while. I found Harup. Then I found the teacher.

  Veronique cried and the woman who had looked in my ear held her like she was her child. But that woman didn't look dark like Veronique at all and I thought she was just kin because she was an offworlder, not by blood. All the offworlders were like Sckarline; kin because of where they were, not because of family.

  The two men in blue jackets picked up the body of the teacher. With the body they were clumsy on the packed snow. The man holding the teacher's head slipped and fell. Tuuvin took the teacher's head and I took his feet. His boots were gone. His feet were as naked as my mother's. I had wrapped him in a skin, but it wasn't very big, and so his feet hung out. But they were so cold, they felt like meat, not like a person.

  We walked right up to the door of the skimmer and I could look in. It was big inside. Hollow. It was dark in the back. I had thought it would be all lights inside and I was disappointed. There were things hanging on the walls but mostly it was empty. One of the offworld men jumped up into the skimmer and then he was not clumsy at all. He pulled the body to the back of the skimmer.

  They were talking again. Tuuvin and I stood there. Tuuvin's breath was an enormous white plume in the lights of the skimmer. I stamped my feet. The lights were bright but they were a cheat. They didn't make you any warmer.

  The offworlders wanted to go back to the bodies, so we did. "Your teachers," Veronique said. "Where are your teachers?"

  I remembered Wanji's body. It had no face but it was easy to tell it was her. Ayudesh's body was still naked under the blanket I had found. The blanket was burned along one side and didn't cover him. Where his sex had been, the frozen blood shone in the hand lights. I thought the dogs might have been at him, but I couldn't tell.


  They wanted to take Wanji's and Ayudesh's bodies hack to the skimmer. They motioned for us to take Ayudesh.

  "Wait," Tuuvin said. "They shouldn't do that."

  I squatted down.

  "They are Sckarline people," Tuuvin said.

  "Their spirit is already gone," I said.

  "They won't have anything," he said.

  "If the offworlders take them, won't they give them offworlder things?"

  "They didn't want offworld things," Tuuvin said. "That's why they were here."

  "But we don't have anything to give them. At least if the offworlders give them things, they'll have something."

  -Tuuvin shook his head. "Harup-," he started to say, but stopped. Harup talked to spirits more than anyone. He would have known. But I didn't know how to ask him and I didn't think Tuuvin did either. Although I wasn't sure. There wasn't any drum or anything for spirit talk anyway.

  The offworlders stood looking at us.

  "Okay," Tuuvin said. So I stood up and we picked up Ayudesh's body and the two offworld men picked up Wanji's body and we took them to the skimmer.

  A dog followed us in the dark.

  The man in the red jacket climbed up and went to the front of the skimmer. There were chairs there and he sat in one and talked to someone on a radio. I could remember the world for radio in English. Ayudesh used to have one until it stopped working and then he didn't get another.

  My thoughts rattled through my empty head.

  They put the bodies of the teachers next to the body of Veronique's teacher. Tuuvin and I stood outside the door, leaning in to watch them. The floor of the skimmer was metal.

  One of the blue-jacket men brought us two blankets. The blankets were the same blue as his jacket and had a red symbol on them. A circle with words. I didn't pay much attention to them. He brought us foil packets. Five. Ten of them.

  "Food," he said, pointing to the packets.

  I nodded. "Food," I repeated.

  "Do they have guns?" Tuuvin asked harshly.

  "Guns?" I asked. "You have guns?"