The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  The question Responsible had been dreading came just as she thought she was going to make it out the door without either of them thinking of it.

  “Responsible!”

  “Mother, I’m just on my way to put this Bestowing document back in my desk for safekeeping.”

  “Your grandmother said to leave it here, and you heard her; and besides, I want to ask you something.”

  Thorn of Guthrie sounded determined; Responsible turned back with a sigh, went to put the Bestowing document in the sittingroom desk, and then stood waiting.

  “How come you aren’t down at Confederation Hall yourself this morning, along with the Grannys?” her mother asked her, and Ruth of Motley looked up from her work for the answer.

  “Don’t plan on going,” said Responsible, short and sharp.

  “You don’t plan on going?”

  “Echo in here,” said Ruth of Motley, as was her habit.

  “Whatever do you mean, you don’t plan on going? All the fuss you’ve made, all the dust you’ve raised over this week of nonsense -and you stand there and tell me you don’t plan to go?”

  Responsible stuck to her guns.

  “That’s right, Thorn of Guthrie.”

  “Well, that beats all!”

  Her rescue came from an unexpected source. Ruth of Motley had turned back to her work, but she spoke attentively enough.

  “I think that’s wise of you, Responsible,” she said. “I think that’s very wise. Not a thing you can do to change what’s going to happen in that Hall, and for you to sit there and watch it going on and torturing yourself over it would be pure foolishness. You’re better off keeping busy here till it’s all over and we know how far they’ve gone. Not to mention the fact that there’s plenty of neglected work right here for you to turn your hand to while everybody else is off gawking at the delegations and going to carnivals.”

  That satisfied her mother, and Responsible blessed Ruth of Motley for her solid common sense. Here she’d been fully prepared to face them all down and just plain refuse to say why she was staying away from the proceedings, same way she’d refused ever to say who she’d learned had kidnapped the McDaniels baby, and to bear the fuss that went with the refusing. Just because no amount of thinking had brought a plausible reason to her mind. And now Ruth of Motley had taken the load right off her back, all unexpected and unasked. And while Thorn of Guthrie was still occupied in counting off all the things she wanted Responsible to see to while she was staying home and not tormenting herself, she slipped away, much relieved. It was time she turned on the comset in her room and had a look at what was happening; by now they’d have finished with the Opening Prayer, and whatever leftover trivia there’d been from the day before-and unless she was far wrong in her thinking, Jeremiah Thomas Traveller would of been recognized by the Chair and would be holding forth.

  She wasn’t wrong, either. She sat in her favorite rocker, the blue one with a back high enough to rest her head against, and paid the figure on the wall the compliment of her attention. Like many another thing in Castle Brightwater, the comset could have done with some repair. That had been sacrificed to the budget for the Jubilee, and every so often the projections ceased to be threedys and became flat as paper cutouts. But the sound was reliable, and that was the main thing; she knew well enough what they looked like.

  Jeremiah Thomas had just begun, and the speech promised to take some time, for he was not only Master of his Castle, he was a Reverend, ordained before he passed his sixteenth birthday, and he knew how to spin out the sentences.

  She had tuned him in just as he was finishing off his thanks to the Brightwaters for the “splendid program” of Opening Day-the hypocrite!-and allowing as how it had been a historic occasion fitly and abundantly observed. But now it was time for them to turn from ritual observance to the serious business of this meeting -and he proceeded to explain just what that meant to him.

  “Mister Chairman”-he rolled it out “Senior and Junior Delegates and Aides, gentle ladies that honor us by gracing the balcony of this grand and glorious Hall . . . and all the citizens of the six continents who join us this day through the miracle of technology . . . I stand before you now with a heavy heart. A heavy heart!”

  Responsible hoped it was heavy. She hoped it was a stone of Tinaseeh marble in his sly vicious breast, and well supplied with sharp little points.

  “Why, you ask, is my heart heavy?”

  I don’t ask any such thing.

  “Because, my dear friends, my dear colleagues, I have no choice open to me today but to speak the truth. Oh, not that I am not reluctant to be the first to do so-for many among you know what that truth is, and did I wait long enough you might well speak it for me! Not that the truth does not stick in my throat . . . no! I am reluctant! I do find it hard to force the words to come forth, as come forth they surely must! But I tell you all, my conscience will not let me rest until I have said what must be said.” He let his voice fall to a hush. “All night last night I knelt on the bare boards of my chamber floor-”

  There wasn’t a guestchamber in Castle Brightwater with bare boards to its floor, nor a servant’s room either, but Responsible could see that it wouldn’t of sounded nearly so dramatic for him to talk of kneeling for hours on soft rugs.

  “-and I wrestled with my conscience! Must I, I asked myself . . . must I, I asked the Holy One Almighty . . . must I, Jeremiah Thomas Traveller the Twenty-sixth, be the one to speak this truth?”

  He paused to let that settle over the heads of his listeners, and then he answered his own question.

  “And the answer came back to me-it came back YES! And it came back YES! again!”

  Just like him, thought Responsible, pleased to see him go flat and black on her wall, barely a flicker, to drag the Holy One into this and spread the blame.

  “Oh, my friends,” he said, “oh, my colleagues-”

  Careful! You’ll be saying dearly beloved next!

  “-I shuddered then. I shuddered . . . for the truth I must pronounce, the truth my conscience compels me to pronounce-that truth is not a joyous truth! That truth is not a merry truth! That truth is not a truth cast in a spirit of gaiety . . . unless, unless . . . but let me come back to that! For now, let me only tell you that the truth is sometimes a sad and solemn burden, and that this is such a time-but I will speak it, nonetheless; and I do not fear to do so.”

  He went on then, to remind them one and all of the reasons that had brought the Twelve Families from Old Earth to Ozark one thousand years ago. He talked of the air of Earth, that could not be breathed; of the water of Earth, that no one dared drink till it had been made so foul by chemicals that it burned the throat and offended the nose; of the soil of Earth, so poisoned that the food it grew was unfit for human beings to eat, that had taken in pollution till it could give back nothing else. He talked of the pollution of humankind as well, every hand set against every other; of the dank misery of the slums where the world’s poor had scrabbled from dole to dole. He spoke of the shame of the so-called holy men who threw out in their daily garbage the finest foodstuffs chemistry could produce, while billions lay swollen-bellied in the dust, dying of starvation. He talked of the politicians, that lived like great ticks upon the bodies of the citizens they had sworn to serve, bleeding them of their substance and fattening upon it till the bureaucracies were swollen to monstrous size. He spent a number of superb sentences upon the doctors, become so callous and so arrogant and so divorced from the people that they could heal nothing but their bank balances; and a few more upon the lawyers, who had lusted after the suffering of others and profited by it; and still more for those that had dared to call themselves teachers, while they spent their useless lives spreading ignorance and demanding ever more money for the pitiful job they did . . .

  On and on and on . . .

  Would he never stop? Responsible tried to imagine any gathering of women where such a monologue would of been tolerated past the five minutes it took to see wh
ere it was heading, and failed. No female would of sat still for the wasted time. Not a word that he said, looming there in his antiquated black suit, flickering with the straining of the comset-which was certainly poorly-standing there with a tie round his scrawny neck as a symbol of his bondage to the ancient nonsense he spoke against-not a word they hadn’t all heard a hundred dozen times. Not a turn of phrase they didn’t hear every three Sundys or so at Solemn Service . . . and he had no skill of control. He had the preacher’s skill. He could put one word after another without ever a stumble or a pause; but they sat for his mellifluous bombast out of politeness, not because they enjoyed it-and because they were men, and had no better sense.

  Granny Hazelbide had said it as well as ever she’d heard anybody say it, long ago at Granny School. “Men,” she’d said, “are of but two kinds. Splendid-and pitiful. The splendid ones are rare, and if you chance on one, you’ll know it. What I tell you now has to do with the rest of ‘em-as my Granny told me, and her Granny told her before that, and so back as far as time will take you.” They’d all leaned forward, because her voice told them something important was coming, and she’d gone on. “If,” she said, “a man does something properly, that’s an accident. That’s the first thing. As for the sorry messes they make in the ordinary way of things, that’s to be expected, and not to be held against them-they can’t help it. That’s the second thing. And the third thing-and this is to be well-remembered-is that no man must ever know the first two things.”

  Granny struck her cane on the floor, three times hard, to underline that. “When a man spills something, it’s your place to catch it before it touches, snatch it before it falls, and be sure certain he thinks he caught it himself. Men-all but those rare splendid ones -they’re frail creatures; they can’t bear much.”

  “And a woman?” one of the little girls had asked timidly. “How about a woman?”

  The Granny had gripped her cane till her knuckles gleamed like pearls. “There is nothing,” she said in a terrible voice like ice grinding together, “more despicable than a woman who cannot Cope!”

  Thump!

  “You remember that now!” she told them. “You keep that firmly in mind!”

  “It’s not fair!” It had run all around the circle, where they were sitting on the floor with their legs tucked neatly under them. “It’s not fair atall!” And she’d turned on them, brandishing the cane over their heads-Responsible remembered how that cane had seemed ready to crash down upon her head, and how she’d trembled-and she’d said, “Fair! This is the real world, and it is as it is. Let me never hear any more from you about fair!”

  She jumped, then, no longer a five-year-old at Granny School, once again a woman near grown watching a foolish man and listening to his useless words. The word that had made her jump, thundering out of the wall, had been “Jubilee!” She had missed, in her reverie, the part where he’d compared all those tribulations of Old Earth with the tribulations he now claimed to see building on Ozark, and had laid them at the feet of the Confederation of Continents.

  It didn’t matter, she’d heard it from him before, along with the part about the money wasted by the Confederation that should be staying in the treasuries of the individual Kingdoms where it belonged, where it had been honestly earned and should be honestly disbursed. She knew where he was in the speech-it was time now to make the motion to dissolve the Confederation-and what was he yelling Jubilee about? She leaned toward the wall, not wanting to miss this.

  “A Jubilee!” he was saying, voice like butter melting, voice like syrup on cakes, voice like rosy velvet against the cheek, “A Jubilee is a time of rejoicing and coming together in celebration. And I wouldn’t have you think I begrudge you your Jubilee-you have earned your Jubilee. I do not propose to take it from you. What I propose . . . what I propose is that we make this a new Jubilee, a true Jubilee, a Jubilee in honor of the celebration that will then go on for all the days that remain of this week! A celebration not of serfdom, not of slavery, but of independence! A celebration of our decision to stand upon our own feet at long, long last, sovereign states governing themselves as befits men . . . no more cowering under the skirts of Brightwater! Let us, my dear friends, oh my dear friends, let us celebrate not the Jubilee of the Confederation -but the Jubilee of Independence!”

  The whooping and the cheering and the shouts of “I so move!” and “Second the motion!” came through loud and clear, and Responsible had to admit, much as she despised to do it, that that had been a clever touch. Grim old Jeremiah Thomas, he’d managed to get rid of the role of ghost at the feast, managed to paint himself benevolent and warm of heart and in favor of people enjoying themselves-and at the same time, the motion to dissolve the Confederation permanently had been passed and set up for debate, just as he’d wanted it to be.

  She reached up and switched off the comset, no longer interested. It would be the standard procedure now, and it would take all of the following day at least. Every Senior Delegate would be allowed to speak to the question, first of all. Then every Junior Delegate, should any of them want to add something-and most were sure to, they had so few opportunities to be heard. And after that, there’d be the round of rebuttals, when anybody that wished to raise objections to the speeches could put that in. And the final summing up by the Chair . . . all of that, before the motion could be put to a vote. It would be tedious.

  She could count on some of them. The McDaniels, the Clarks, and the Airys, for sure; she could count on them to point out and underline what it was going to be like for the frontier continents with no comsets and no supply freighters, hacking out their existences with a few thousand people that hadn’t been here to vote for any such condition. She could count on the Travellers to scoff at that and allow as how people weren’t such puny creatures as some thought they were, and how a hard life here meant a fair life Hereafter, and how misery was what built men-she could be sure of that. There’d be the Purdys, saying nothing . . . and the Smiths helping them . . . but doing it at great length, trying to play both sides against the middle they could only just barely glimpse. The Lewises and the Motleys, they’d help specify as far as they dared what sovereign statehood was going to be like, once the rhetoric was done with and the hardscrabble was before you . . . And the others? No way to know, and nothing much to do but wait. It seemed to her the chances were good, in spite of the rhetoric, and she was sick to death of watching the delegates caper about, and weary to death of hearing them talk, and she turned them off as she would have pinched a bug between her fingers.

  And because of that, she missed the entrance of the Smith Delegation, filing sixteen strong into the back rows of the room, just in time to add their “Ayes!” to the vote for the Traveller motion. And she didn’t hear, until after Granny Hazelbide came to her room just before supper, of the stir it had caused when people had seen that Granny Gableframe wasn’t with them.

  Chapter 7

  Jewel of Wommack was out of her bed at the first sound from Lewis Motley’s guestchamber and into her nightrobe; by the time he closed his door-so softly-behind him and turned around, she was standing outside her own door with her arms folded over her chest and her foot tapping on the cool stone floor.

  “Hush!” he said at the top of his lungs; and then he roared at her: “You mean to wake up the whole Castle? Don’t you have any consideration at all for other people? You think you’re the only person in this Castle that--”

  Jewel backed hastily into her room, dragging her laughing brother after her by a death grip on his left earlobe. Scandalized, she pushed the door to with her free hand, praying that nobody had heard his carrying on.

  “Lewis Motley Wommack!” she said, stamping her foot at him -a wasted effort on the thick rug with its pattern of intertwined roses and ivy, but the only gesture short of biting him that she could think of in her fury. “You are a worthless, wicked man, and a disgrace to our Family, and you will drive me clean to distraction if you do not cease your dreadful ways!
Haven’t you got any shame at all?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose I have.”

  She glared at him, back to the door and determined he’d not go through it without going through her as well, determined she’d not cry no matter what he said or did, and silently cursing the mother who’d left her with this burdensome animal to torment her all her life long. He’d never marry, not him, she knew it; he could not bear the idea that there was anybody that had a claim on him, anybody he had to answer to for any smallest thing. She’d be a creaking old woman of ninety-nine and she’d still be accountable for his behavior.

  “I wish I was dead,” she announced bitterly. And then she changed her mind. “No, I wish you were, and then I’d have some peace!”

  Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd, all in black like a Traveller male, and a hood to cover the copper hair that might catch the glint of a stray light and give him away, lifted his little sister into the air and shook her gently at arm’s length, well beyond the reach of her nimble fingers.

  “Nasty, nasty child,” he said, “wishing your one and only brother laid out in his cold narrow grave, and him only nineteen! Whatever would people say if they could hear you now?”

  “That you’d driven me mad, that’s what they’d say! And they’d be right!”

  “What do you care about Responsible of Brightwater?” asked Lewis Motley in his most reasonable voice. “What has she ever done for you that you should have such tender scruples about her?”

  “My scruples,” hissed Jewel of Wommack, “my scruples are for any living creature that strikes your fancy! Any creature-always excepting your Mule, of course. You take right good care of your Mule.”