Folk of the Fringe

by Orson Scott Card

  Teague made good his promise. It near drove Pete crazy the first few times, when his rock always missed and Teague's almost never did. But after a while he got the knack of it. It was like pitching with a smaller strike zone. By the time they skirted around Asheville, he could clean a squirrel in two minutes and a rabbit in three. He also learned how to choose a hunting ground. You always look for a cabin and walk up singing, so they know you're coming. Then you ask the owner where it's OK to hunt, and if he'd like you to split your catch with him. To hear these mountain folks talk, you could hunt wherever you liked; but Teague would never so much as pick up a rock unless the folks had said "That holler down there" or "Along that slope there," and even though they always said, "No need to bring me none," Teague always took the whole catch to them and offered them half. He wouldn't leave until they'd accepted at least one animal. "They can't claim you stole it then," said Teague. "If they took part of it, it wasn't poaching."

  "What's to stop them from lying and saying you stole it?" asked Pete.

  Teague looked at him like he was stupid. "These are mountain people."

  Whenever they returned from hunting, Pete loved to hear the sound of the children singing, and the grown-ups too now, more and more. Most of all he loved hearing his Annalee's voice, singing and laughing. When they climbed up out of the piedmont and into the mountains, it was like rising out of hell. This is what redemption feels like, he thought. This is what it's like when Christ forgives you of your sins. Like putting you on the top of a green mountain, with as many clouds below you as above; and all your bad memories just washed away with the rain, got lost in the morning fogs. All those bad memories were lowland troubles, left behind, gone. Pete had been born again.

  "I never want to come down out of here," he told Annalee.

  "I know," she said. "I feel like that too."

  "Then let's don't go down."

  She looked at him sharply. "What's got into you, Peter? You talk like Teague, you walk like Teague. If I'd wanted to marry a hillbilly I'd've gone to Appalachian State or Western Carolina."

  "A man belongs up here."

  "A Latter-day Saint belongs in the kingdom of God."

  "Look around you, Annalee, and tell me God doesn't love this place."

  "There's no safety here. You feel good cause we don't have to hide every night. But we aren't staying in the open cause we're safe and free, we're staying in the open so somebody won't shoot our heads off. We'd never belong here. But we're already citizens of Utah. Every Mormon is."

  After that Pete didn't mention his desire to stay in the mountains, not to Annalee, not to anybody. He knew that after a while they'd all come around to his point of view. When you get to heaven, why go farther? That's what Pete thought.

  "Sister Monk, your dress is getting longer," said Valerie Letterman one day.

  "I must be getting shorter," Tina answered.

  "You're getting prettier."

  "Child, you're going to make a lot of friends in this world."

  But Valerie was right. Walking more than two hundred miles was every bit as effective as stomach stapling in the old days. She'd already hemmed up the skirts of all her dresses twice, as her bulk evaporated. She could feel the muscles working under the flesh of her arms and legs. She could spring to her feet all at once, instead of step by step—all fours, kneel up, one foot planted, two feet squatting, and the last terrible unbending of the knees. That was ancient history now. She rolled out of her blanket—it was cold at night up here—and got right to her feet and felt like every step she was jumping several feet into the air. All the pills she'd tried, all the doctors, all the diets, all the exercises—but the only thing that worked was to walk from Greensboro to Topton.

  No trouble all through the mountains. No danger that felt like danger, except a few tight minutes at the Cherokee border, till somebody came along who recognized Jamie Teague. And at last they left the paved road and climbed up a dirt track, all overgrown now that no cars ever came through, and came to a two-story house completely dwarfed by giant oak trees.

  "I thought you called this a cabin, Jamie Teague," she said.

  "My foster parents called it that," he said. "They were summer people. But as soon as I was old enough, I stayed year-round."

  Tina caught up that information and remembered it. Teague had foster parents before he was old enough to decide where he was going to live. So if he was fostered out because he killed his parents, he must have killed them when he was young. Probably very young.

  The door was not locked. Yet inside, the house was untouched by thieves or vandals. It was deep with dust and dead insects—no one had entered all summer, least of all to clean. Yet every implement was in its place, and Annalee immediately set everyone to work cleaning up. Tina knew she should have joined in—she probably knew more about cleaning than everybody else put together—but for some reason she just felt an aversion to it, just didn't want to. And the more she thought she ought to help, the less she felt like helping, until finally she fled the house.

  "Stop," said Teague.

  "Why?"

  "You don't just walk outside and go where you want," said Teague.

  "Why not?"

  "My neighbors don't know you yet."

  "They'll know me soon enough," she said. "I've always been a good neighbor."

  "It ain't like the neighbors down in the city, Mrs. Monk."

  "If you can't bring yourself to call me Sister Monk, then at least call me Tina."

  Teague grinned. "Go in there and get everybody ready for an expedition."

  The expedition was a trip to each of four neighbors' houses, singing and talking the whole way. The houses were set so far apart you couldn't see any of them from the other. But that didn't matter. They were neighbors all the same. They were the reason Teague's house was untouched. And they could be deadly.

  "Mr. Bicker," said Teague. "I see you pulled a good crop of tobacco."

  "Mountain tobacco's only a speck better than chewing dog turds," said Bicker, "but I got a few leaves curing anyway."

  "Mr. Bicker, you see these folks I got with me?"

  "Do I look blind?"

  "I've been with these folks since Winston, and they treated me like kin. We've been eating out of the same pot and walking the same road, and stood back to back a few times. They're staying the winter with me and then they're moving on. I showed them the property line, and they all know what land is mine and what land is yours."

  Bicker sniffed. "Never knowed city people could tell one tree from another."

  But we can read, thought Tina, and we don't let snot trail on our upper lips. She had sense enough not to say it.

  "City people or not, Mr. Bicker, they're my people, all of them."

  "Them is colored there."

  "I call that a deep suntan, Mr. Bicker. Or maybe Cherokee blood. But they'll be gone in spring, and you'll hardly notice they're around."

  Bicker squinted.

  "But they'll be around," said Teague. "Every one of them. Every last one, alive and moving around in the spring."

  "Hope there's no influenza," said Bicker. Then he went back into his cabin, laughing and laughing.

  Teague led them away. "Sing," he told Tina, and she led them in singing.

  "This is like Christmas caroling," said Annalee's girl Donna.

  "Except we didn't used to sing carols so people wouldn't shoot at us," said Tina.

  "Oh, Bicker's all right," said Teague. "He'll be fine."

  "Fine? He practically loaded his shotgun right in front of us."

  "Oh, he's a good neighbor, Tina. You just got to know how to treat him."

  "I don't call it a good neighbor when he merely agrees not to kill you before spring."

  But Tina was pretty sure Teague didn't entirely know what he was talking about. After all, he'd been a boy up here, not a girl. There was one kind of neighborliness between men, which mostly consisted of not stealing from each other and not sleeping with each other's wi
fe. Then there was the neighborliness of women, which Teague wouldn't know a thing about.

  So she made sure to go along with him as he started going around trading the things he'd gotten on his trip to the coast. All kinds of tooled metal, threads and needles, buttons, pins, scissors, spoons and knives and forks. A precious pair of binoculars, for which Teague got a queen-size mattress in exchange. Bullets to fit half a dozen different guns. A bottle of vitamin C and a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol Caplets, both for an old lady with arthritis.

  And right after he got through bartering, Tina would start in talking about how she was near helpless cooking wild game. "I make a fair broth, and I expect I can use my sweet dumpling recipe with honey for the sugar, but you must know ten dozen herbs and vegetables that I'll just step on thinking they're weeds. I don't want to be a bother, but I can trade sewing for cooking lessons. I've got a decent eye with a needle." Teague was dumbfounded at first—it was obvious that in all the time he'd been trading with the menfolk, talking in words of one or two syllables and sentences of three or four words, he'd never had an inkling of how a woman goes calling, of how women help each other instead of trying to drive a bargain. "It's called civilization," she said to Teague, between visits. "Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again."

  By Christmas she had Bicker himself coming over for supper every night, bringing his fiddle and a memory of a thousand old songs, none of which he sang on key, which nobody minded except Tina, who had been cursed with pitch so clear she could sing quarter tones in a chromatic scale. Never mind—the kids didn't have to live in fear of getting their feet shot off if they happened to stray over the line into Bicker's land. And Teague just sat there singing and laughing along with everybody else, now and then getting this look of surprise on his face, like he'd never had a notion that folks in these mountains ever did such things as this.

  In only one thing did Tina follow Teague's heartfelt advice. She never told a soul, nor did anybody else, that they were Mormons. They never sang a Mormon hymn, and on Sunday mornings, when Brother Deaver and Pete Cinn broke bread and blessed the sacrament and passed it, and then they preached, why, they kept the shutters closed and never sang. It wasn't the hate from the TV preachers and the Baptist ministers of the city that they feared. It was an older kind of loathing. Put a name like Mormon on somebody, and he stopped being folks and started being Other. And around here, Other got ostracized at the least, and usually got burnt out before spring planting.

  But it was a good winter all the same. And Tina noticed how Teague listened and finally came downstairs during church meetings, and even asked a question now and then about something from the Book of Mormon or some point of doctrine he'd never heard of before. Sometimes he shook his head like it was the craziest mess he'd ever heard of. And sometimes he kind of almost nodded. At Christmas he even told the Christmas story, pretty much following Luke.

  Tina held school every day, at first just for the kids in their group, but pretty soon for whatever mountain kids could make it through the snow. She got Rona and Marie to teach sometimes, so she could divide the classes. Brother Deaver taught grammar to Donna and the older kids from the nearby cabins. The worst thing was, no paper to write on, and nothing to write with. They wrote with burnt sticks on the porch, then scrubbed the porch with snow and started over. Mostly, though, they did their writing and arithmetic in their heads, reciting their answers. Tina realized she was growing old when the kids regularly out-ciphered her—she just couldn't hold as many numbers at once as they could. That was when Rona became the permanent arithmetic teacher.

  They didn't teach geography at all. Nobody knew geography anymore. Everything had changed.

  All through the winter, Teague took Pete along to teach him more about hunting and tracking, and Pete learned pretty well, Tina gathered; at least Teague seemed to get closer to him all the time, approving of him, trusting him. At the same time, Tina noticed that Pete seemed to get more and more distant from his family. There wasn't much room for privacy, but as the only married couple, Pete and Annalee had a room to themselves. The day after Christmas Annalee told Tina that she might as well sleep on the dining room table for all the lovemaking she got anymore. "I might as well be a widow, he never even talks to me." And then: "Tina, I think he isn't planning to go on west with us."

  Tina let things ride through January, watching. Annalee was right. Pete never took part in their frequent speculations about Utah. Teague would tease them all sometimes, when nobody else was around. "Nothing grows out west," he'd say. "They probably all moved on to Seattle. You'll get to Utah and nobody'll be there."

  "You don't know what you're talking about, Jamie Teague," said Tina one time. "You don't know our people. If it floods we all go into the boatmaking business. If there's a hurricane we all learn to fly."

  Others picked up on it. "If the corn crop fails, we learn to eat grass," said Donna.

  "And when the grass gets used up, we chew up the trees!" said Mick Porter.

  "And then we eat bugs!" shouted his little brother Scotty.

  "And worms!" shouted Mick, even louder.

  Annalee put a hand on Mick's mouth. "Let's keep it down." Didn't want the neighbors to hear them talking about Utah.

  "You can bet they're making gasoline out of shale oil," Tina said. "That's no tall tale. I bet there's still tractors plowing there, and fertilizer."

  "I believe the fertilizer," said Teague. But his eyes danced a little, Tina could see that.

  So she pressed her case. "And what have you got here, Jamie?"

  It wasn't Teague who answered. It was Pete. "He's got everything," he said. "Safety. Good land. Enough to eat. Good neighbors. And no reason to move on, ever."

  There it was, out in the open.

  But Tina pretended that it was still Teague she was talking to, instead of Pete. "That's this year, Jamie. You make your trips down into the Carolinas. You go into abandoned houses, you visit places and tell stories and they give you gifts. And what do you collect to bring back here? Needles and pins, scissors and thread, tools and all the things that make life halfway livable. Think about that! Do you think those things will last forever? Nobody's making them anymore, and someday the scavenging will run out. Someday there'll be no more thread, no more needles. What'll you wear then? Some rag of homespun? Anybody spinning yet?"

  "Lady down in Murphy spins and weaves real good," said Teague. Pete nodded like that answered everything.

  "Enough for everybody in the hills? Jamie, don't you see that folks around here are just holding on by their fingernails? It isn't as plain to see here because you don't go to sleep in fear of mobs every night. But it's all slipping away. It's fading. And whoever stays here is going to fade, too. But out west—"

  "Out west they might all be dead!" said Pete.

  "Out west the temple is still standing, and the wards are all still functioning, just like they always have. They're growing crops on good land—in peace—and there'll still be hospitals and medicines. What if you marry someday, Jamie? What if your kids get some disease? A simple one like measles. And they end up blind. A kidney infection. Appendicitis, for heaven's sake. You see any more doctors growing up around here? Every year you'll slip back another fifty years."

  "It's safe here," said Pete. But his voice was fainter.

  "It isn't safe compared to safety," said Tina. "It's only safe compared to the open lands where the mob rules. And someday you know the mobbers are coming up here. They'll have killed off or run off everybody down there who isn't protected by an army. Those mobbers aren't going to settle down and learn to farm, you know. They won't attack the Cherokees, either. They'll come to places like this—"

  "And we'll kill them all," said Pete.

  "Till you run out of bullets. Then there's no more shooting from behind trees. Then you fight out in the open against ten times your number, by hand, till they sweep you under. I tell you there's only one place safe in all America,
only one place that's growing upward against all the dying."

  "Says you," said Pete.

  "Says all the history of the Mormon people. We've been driven out and mobbed and massacred before, and all we ever do is move on and settle somewhere else. And wherever we settle there's peace and progress. We never hold still. I'm betting we don't even have to get to the mountains to find them. I'm betting they send people out to meet folks like us and help us safely in. That's what they used to do, in the covered wagon days."

  All this time Tina only looked at Teague, never once at Pete. But out of the corner of her eye she could see how Pete deflated when Teague nodded. "I guess you aren't crazy to try to get there after all. I just wish I had more hope of your making it."

  "The Lord will protect us," said Tina.

  "He was doing a slim job of it till Teague came along," said Pete.

  "But Jamie came along, didn't you, Jamie? Why do you think you happened to be there when we needed you so bad?"

  Teague grinned. "I reckon I'm just a regular old angel," he said.

  Still, Easter came and no decision had been made. They had a church service on Easter Sunday, but nobody preached this time. They just bore testimony. It wasn't like the old days, when people used to get up and recite the same old I'm-thankful-fors and I-know-thats. This time they spoke from the heart, spoke of terrible things and wonderful things, spoke of love for each other and anger at the Lord and yet in the end spoke of faith that things would all work out.

  And after a while they started talking about the thing they'd only hinted at all these months together. The thing that had happened back in May, almost a year before. The terrible death of so many of the people they knew and loved and missed so bad. And the even worse thing—that they themselves had not died.