Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  “I’ll tell you why you come back,” Molly said quietly. She still held the doorframe hard. “They punish you by locking you up in a small room, don’t they? And it doesn’t frighten you. In the small room you can hear yourself, can’t you? In your mind’s eye you see the clay, the stone you will shape. You see the form emerging, and it is almost as if you are simply freeing it, allowing it to come into being. That other self that speaks to you, it knows what the shape is in the clay. It tells you through your hands, in dreams, in images that no one but you can see. And they tell you this is sick, or bad, or disobedient. Don’t they?”

  He was watching her now. “Don’t they?” she repeated. He nodded.

  “Mark, they’ll never understand. They can’t hear that other self whispering, always whispering. They can’t see the pictures. They’ll never hear or get a glimpse of that other self. The brothers and sisters overwhelm it. The whisper becomes fainter, the images dimmer, until finally they are gone, the other self gives up. Perhaps it dies.” She paused and looked at him, then said softly, “You come here because you can find that self here, just as I could find my other self here. And that’s more important than anything they can give you, or take away from you.”

  He looked down at the floor, at the shambles of the pieces he had made, and wiped his face with his arm. “Mother,” he said, and stopped.

  Now Molly moved. Somehow she reached him before he could speak again and she held him tightly and he held her, and they both wept.

  “I’m sorry I busted everything.”

  “You’ll make more.”

  “I wanted to show you.”

  “I looked at them all. They were very good. The hands especially.”

  “They were hard. The fingers were funny, but I couldn’t make them not funny.”

  “Hands are the hardest of all.”

  He finally pushed away from her slightly, and she let him go. He wiped his face again. “Are you going to hide here?”

  “No. They’ll be back looking for me.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To keep a promise,” she said softly. “Do you remember our last walk up the hill, you wanted to climb to the top, and I said next time? Remember?”

  “I’ve got some food we can take,” he said excitedly. “I hide it here so when I get hungry I’ll have something.”

  “Good. We’ll use it. We’ll start as soon as it gets light enough to see.”

  It was a beautiful day, with high thin clouds in the north, the rest of the sky unmarred, breathtakingly clear. Each hill, each mountain in the distance, was sharply outlined; no haze had formed yet, the breeze was gentle and warm. The silence was so complete that the woman and boy were both reluctant to break it with speech, and they walked quietly. When they paused to rest, she smiled at him and he grinned back and then lay with his hands under his head and stared at the sky.

  “What’s in your big pack?” he asked as they climbed later. She had made a small pack for him to carry, and she still carried the laundry bag, now strapped to her back.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “A surprise.”

  And later he said, “It’s farther than it looked, isn’t it? Will we get there before dark?”

  “Long before dark,” she said. “But it is far. Do you want to rest again?”

  He nodded and they sat under a spruce tree. The spruces were coming down the mountains, she thought, recalling in detail old forestry maps of the region.

  “Do you still read much?” she asked.

  Mark shifted uneasily and looked at the sky, then at the trees, and finally grunted noncommittally.

  “So did I,” she said. “The old house is full of books, isn’t it? They’re so brittle, though, you have to be careful with them. After you went to sleep every night I sat up and read everything in the house.”

  “Did you read the one about Indians?” he asked, and rolled over on his stomach and propped his head up in his cupped hands. “They knew how to do everything, make fires, make canoes, tents, everything.”

  “And there’s one about how boys, a club or something, used to go camping and relearn all the Indian methods. It can still be done,” she said dreamily.

  “And what you can eat in the woods, and stuff like that? I read that one.”

  They walked, rested, talked about the books in the old house, talked about the things Mark planned to make, climbed some more, and late in the afternoon they came to the summit of the mountain and looked down over the entire valley, all the way to the Shenandoah River in the distance.

  Molly found a spot that was level and sheltered, and Mark finally got to see the surprise she had prepared for him: blankets, some preserved food, fruits, meat, six pieces of cornbread, and corn to pop over the open fire. After they ate, they pushed spruce needles into mounds and Mark rolled up in his blanket and yawned.

  “What’s that noise?” he asked after a moment.

  “The trees,” Molly said softly. “The wind moves up there even when we can’t feel it down here, and the trees and wind tell each other secrets.”

  Mark laughed and yawned again. “They’re talking about us,” he said. Molly smiled in the dark. “I can almost hear the words,” he said.

  “We’re the first human beings they’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “They’re probably surprised that there are any more of us around.”

  “I won’t go back either!” Mark shouted at her. They had eaten the last of the cornbread and dried apples, and the fire was out, the ground smoothed around it.

  “Mark, listen to me. They will put me back in the breeders’ compound. Do you understand? I won’t be allowed out again. They will give me medicines that will keep me very quiet and I won’t know anything or anyone. That will be my life back there. But you? You have so much to learn. Read all the books in the old house, learn everything you can from them. And one day you might decide to leave, but not until you’re a man, Mark.”

  “I’m staying with you.”

  She shook her head. “Remember the voices of the trees? When you’re lonely, go into the woods and let the trees talk to you. Maybe you’ll hear my voice there too. I’ll never be far away, if you listen.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down the river, to the Shenandoah, to look for your father. They won’t bother me there.”

  Tears stood in his eyes, but he didn’t shed them. He lifted his pack and put his arms through the harness. They started down the mountain again. Midway down they stopped. “You can see the valley from here,” Molly said. “I won’t go any farther with you.”

  He didn’t look at her.

  “Good-bye, Mark.”

  “Will the trees talk to me if you’re not there?”

  “Always. If you listen. The others are looking to the cities to save them, and the cities are dead and ruined. But the trees are alive, and when you need them, they’ll talk to you. I promise you that, Mark.”

  Now he came to her and hugged her hard. “I love you,” he said. Then he turned and started down the hill, and she stood watching him until her tears blinded her and she could no longer see him.

  She waited until he emerged from the woods and started across the cleared valley. Then she turned and walked south, toward the Shenandoah. All that night the trees whispered to her. When she awakened, she knew the trees had accepted her; they didn’t stop their murmuring as they had always done in the past when she stirred about. Over and under and through their voices she could hear the voice of the river, still far off, and beyond it, she was certain she could hear Ben’s voice, growing stronger as she hurried toward him. She could smell the fresh water now; and the voices of the river and the trees and Ben’s voice blended as they called to her to hurry. She ran toward him joyously. He caught her and together they floated down, down into the cool, sweet water.

  PART THREE

  At the Still Point

  Chapter 20

  The new dormitory was dark except for the pale lights spaced regularl
y in the halls. Mark darted down the hallway and went inside one of the rooms. There was too little light to make out details; only the shapes of sleeping boys on the white beds could be seen at first. The windows were dark shadows.

  Mark stood by the door silently and waited for his eyes to adjust; the shapes emerged from darkness and became dark and light areas — arms, faces, hair. His bare feet made no sound as he approached the first cot, and again he stopped; this time his wait was shorter. The boy on the cot didn’t stir. Slowly Mark opened a small bottle of ink, made from blackberries and walnuts, and dipped a fine brush into it. He had been holding the ink next to his chest; it was warm. Moving very carefully, he leaned over the sleeping boy and quickly painted the numeral 1 on the boy’s cheek. The boy didn’t move.

  Mark backed away from the first bed, went to another, and again paused to make certain the boy was sleeping deeply. This time he painted a 2.

  Presently he left the room and hurried to the next one. He repeated the procedure there. If the boy was sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in the covers, Mark painted a number on his hand or arm.

  Shortly before dawn Mark put the top back on his bottle of ink and crept to his own room, a cubicle large enough to contain only his cot and some shelves above it. He put the ink on a shelf, making no attempt to hide it. Then he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited.

  He was a slightly built boy, with dark, abundant hair that made his head seem overlarge, not conspicuously so, but noticeable if one examined him closely. The only startling feature was his eyes, a blue of such intensity and depth that they were unforgettable. He sat patiently, a slight smile playing on his lips, deepening, leaving, forming again. The light outside his window brightened; it was spring and the air had a luminosity that was missing in other seasons.

  Now he could hear voices, and his smile deepened, widened his mouth. The voices were loud and angry. He began to laugh, and was weak from laughter when his door opened and five boys entered. There was so little room they had to line up with their legs tight against his cot.

  “Good morning, One, Two, Three, Four, Five,” Mark said, choking on the words with new laughter. They flushed angrily and he doubled over, unable to contain himself.

  “Where is he?” Miriam asked. She had entered the conference room and was still standing at the door.

  Barry was at the head of the table. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said. “You know what he did?”

  She sat at the other end of the long table and nodded. “Who doesn’t? It’s all over, that’s all anyone’s talking about.” She glanced at the others. The doctors were there, Lawrence, Thomas, Sara . . . A full council meeting.

  “Has he said anything?” she asked.

  Thomas shrugged. “He didn’t deny it.”

  “Did he say why he did it?”

  “So he could tell them apart,” Barry said.

  For a brief moment Miriam thought she heard a trace of amusement in his voice, but nothing of it showed on his face. She felt tight with fury, as if somehow she might be held responsible for the boy, for his aberrant behavior. She wouldn’t have it, she thought angrily. She leaned forward, her hands pressed on the tabletop, and demanded, “What are you going to do about him? Why don’t you control him?”

  “This meeting has been called to discuss that,” Barry said. “Have you any suggestions?”

  She shook her head, still furious, unappeased. She shouldn’t even be there, she thought. The boy was nothing to her; she had avoided contact with him from the beginning. By inviting her to the meeting, they had made a link that in reality didn’t exist. Again she shook her head and now she leaned back in her chair, as if to divorce herself from the proceedings.

  “We’ll have to punish him,” Lawrence said after a moment of silence. “The only question is how.”

  How? Barry wondered. Not isolation; he thrived on it, sought it out at every turn. Not extra work; he was still working off his last escapade. Only three months ago he had gotten inside the girls’ rooms and mixed up their ribbons and sashes so that no group had anything matching. It had taken hours for them to get everything back in place. And now this, and this time it would take weeks for the ink to wear off.

  Lawrence spoke again, his voice thoughtful, a slight frown on his face. “We should admit we made a mistake,” he said. “There is no place for him among us. The boys his age reject him; he has no friends. He is capricious and willful, brilliant and moronic by turns. We made a mistake with him. Now his pranks are only that, childish pranks, but in five years? Ten years? What can we expect from him in the future?” He directed his questions at Barry.

  “In five years he will be downriver, as you know. It is during the next few years that we have to find a way to manage him better.”

  Sara moved slightly in her chair, and Barry turned to her. “We have found that he is not made repentant by being isolated,” Sara said. “It is his nature to be an isolate, therefore by not allowing him the privacy he craves we will have found the correct punishment for him.”

  Barry shook his head. “We discussed that before,” he said. “It would not be fair to the others to force them to accept him, an outsider. He is disruptive among his peers; they should not be punished along with him.”

  “Not his peers,” Sara said emphatically. “You and your brothers voted to keep him here in order to study him for clues in how to train others to endure separate existences. It is your responsibility to accept him among yourselves, to let his punishment be to have to live with you under your watchful eyes. Or else admit Lawrence is right, that we made a mistake, and that it is better to correct the mistake now than to let it continue to compound.”

  “You would punish us for the misdeeds of the boy?” Bruce asked.

  “That boy wouldn’t be here if it were not for you and your brothers,” Sara said distinctly. “If you’ll recall, at our first meeting concerning him, the rest of us voted to rid ourselves of him. We foresaw trouble from the beginning, and it was your arguments about his possible usefulness that finally swayed us. If you want to keep him, then you keep him with you, under your observation, away from the other children, who are constantly being hurt by him and his pranks. He is an isolate, an aberration, a troublemaker. These meetings have become more frequent, his pranks more destructive. How many more hours must we spend discussing his behavior?”

  “You know that isn’t practical,” Barry said impatiently. “We’re in the lab half the time, in the breeders’ quarters, in the hospital. Those aren’t places for a child of ten.”

  “Then get rid of him,” Sara said. She sat back now and crossed her arms over her chest.

  Barry looked at Miriam, whose lips were tightly compressed. She met his gaze coldly. He turned to Lawrence.

  “Can you think of any other way?” Lawrence asked. “We’ve tried everything we can think of, and nothing has worked. Those boys were angry enough to kill him this morning. Next time there might be violence. Have you thought what violence would do to this community?”

  They were a people without violence in their history. Physical punishment had never been considered, because it was impossible to hurt one without hurting others equally. That didn’t apply to Mark, Barry thought suddenly, but he didn’t say it. The thought of hurting him, of causing him physical pain, was repugnant. He glanced at his brothers and saw the same confusion on their faces that he was feeling. They couldn’t abandon the boy. He did hold clues about how man lived alone; they needed him. His mind refused to probe more deeply than that: they needed to study him. There were so many things about human beings that were incomprehensible to them; Mark might be the link that would enable them to understand.

  The fact that the boy was Ben’s child, that Ben and his brothers had been as one, had nothing to do with it. He felt no particular bond to the boy. None at all. If anyone could feel such a bond, it should be Miriam, he thought, and looked at her for a sign that she felt something. Her face was stony, her eyes avoided him. Too rigid, he real
ized, too cold.

  And if that were so, he thought coolly, as if thinking about an experiment with insensate material, then it truly was a mistake to keep the boy with them. If that one child had the power to hurt the Miriam sisters as well as the Barry brothers, he was a mistake. It was unthinkable that an outsider could somehow reach in and twist the old hurts so much that they became new hurts, with even more destructive aftermaths.

  “We could do it,” Bob said suddenly. “There are risks, of course, but we could manage him. In four years,” he continued, looking now at Sara, “he’ll be sent out with the road crew, and from then on, he won’t be a threat to any of us. But we will need him when we begin to reach out to try to understand the cities. He can scout out the paths, survive alone in the woods without danger of mental breakdown through separation. We’ll need him.”

  Sara nodded. “And if we have to have another meeting such as this one, can we agree today that it will be our final meeting?”

  The Barry brothers exchanged glances, then reluctantly nodded and Barry said, “Agreed. We manage him or get rid of him.”

  The doctors returned to Barry’s office, where Mark was waiting for them. He was standing at the window, a small dark figure against the glare of sunlight. He turned to face them, and his own face seemed featureless. The sun touched his hair and made it gleam with red-gold highlights.

  “What will you do with me?” he asked. His voice was steady.

  “Come over here and sit down,” Barry said, taking his place behind the desk. The boy crossed the room and sat on a straight chair, perching on the extreme front of it, as if ready to leap up and run.

  “Relax,” Bob said, and sat on the edge of the desk, swinging his leg as he regarded the boy. When the five brothers were in the room it seemed very crowded suddenly. The boy looked from one to another of them and finally turned his attention to Barry. He didn’t ask again.