Mockingbird

Then she said, “My husband and I used to have a cat. It was the only one. But it died before my husband did. One of the dogs killed it.”

“Oh,” I said, and began setting plates on the table.

After a while I heard noise outside and looked up to see, outside the window, two old green thought buses pull up and the men and the dogs silently pile out of them.

I went outside into the sunlight and saw that they were washing up from a pair of faucets at the back of the building. They were silent and careful about it. I was surprised; I would have expected the kind of laughing and splashing around of the prisoners I had known. Even the dogs were quiet, huddling their white bodies together on the other side of the men from me, their pink eyes occasionally staring at me.

From the flower garden and from some small outbuildings where they were working the women came and joined the men. All of them filed into the kitchen and seated themselves. Baleen motioned for me to be seated and I found myself a place on a bench that was as uncrowded as I could find.

When everyone except Annabel was seated they all bowed their heads over their plates and old Baleen began to pray, starting the same way Rod had the night before: “O Lord most powerful and most cruel, forgive our miserable afflictions and sins.” But he went on differently. “Make us safe from the nuclear rain from Heaven and the sins of the Men of Old. Make us know and feel thy absolute dominion over the lives of men, in this the final age.”

Everyone ate in silence. I tried to speak to the man next to me, praising the soup; but he ignored me.

No one thanked Annabel for the meal.

I spent the afternoon alone in my room, reading.

At dinner that evening I was pleased to see Annabel again, although she was too busy serving dinner to talk. I watched her face when I could and it seemed somehow sad, melancholy, as she kept putting food on the table and taking away empty plates. She worked very hard. There should have been someone to help her do more than wash dishes.

After dinner I hoped to see Annabel and possibly talk with her, but Baleen ushered me into the Bible Room and she was left in the kitchen to wash dishes.

The television was already on in the Bible Room when we came in and the seats soon filled with Baleen men and women, silently watching. The program was one of the old Literal Videos—a kind of rare old television that told a logical, rational story, with actors. It was impossible to tell whether the actors were human or robots. The story was about a young girl who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a gang of anti-Privacy drop-outs who had escaped from a Drop-out Reservation. They abused the girl in a variety of ways. Even though similar programs had been a part of my training as a child and part of my study as a university student, I found myself sickened by watching it, in a way that I would not have been a few years before.

Halfway through the program I closed my eyes tightly and saw no more of it. I could hear occasional responsive grunts from the Baleens around me. From the beginning they had all been passionately absorbed in the story on the screen. It was horrible.

After the television show had ended—with Detectors saving the girl, judging from the sound track—the screen was turned off and I was brought to the lectern to read.

During my reading I came before long to the part about Noah, which I remembered from prison. Noah was a man whom God had decided to save from drowning during a flood that destroyed all of the rest of life on earth. There was a passage in the reading that went like this:

God said to Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become pain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them.”

And when I read: “I intend to destroy them,” I heard old Baleen beside me shout out, very loudly, “Amen!” and another shout of “Amen!” came from the people in front of me. It was startling, but I read on.

After the reading I had hoped to be able to talk with Annabel, but old Baleen took me over to the Mall and waited while I picked myself some new clothing at Sears. I wanted to stay for a while and look over all of the ancient things in that vast store, but he merely said, “This is sacred ground,” and would not let me. He did not say so but I felt I had better not let myself be caught over here alone again.

And I did intend to return. I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been. And I was not afraid of Edgar Baleen.

We left the Mall. With fresh new jeans and a black turtleneck next to my skin I felt oddly elated, and while we were crossing the short moonlit distance over to Baleena, I was struck by an idea and said, “Do you mind if I help Annabel in the kitchen for a few days? I’m not very good at farm work.” That wasn’t exactly true; I merely hated farm work.

He stopped walking and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You talk a lot.”

Somehow that angered me slightly. “Why not?” I said.

“Talk’s cheap,” he said, and I wondered: What has that got to do with it?

There was silence for another long moment, and then he said, “Life is serious, Reader.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say, and that seemed to placate him, for he went on, “You can help Annabel.”

Annabel did not think talk was cheap, and she was the only one of them who felt that way. In a sense, she was not one of them. She was originally a Swisher, from one of the other Seven Families, and had changed her name to Baleen when she had married one of old Baleen’s sons. The Swishers had been a more talkative breed, but a less prolific one than the Baleens. There were only three Swishers left, two very old men and a half-crazy old woman, Annabel’s mother. They lived in what was called Swisher House, several miles up the coast, and bartered gasoline with the Baleens in return for food and clothing from the Mall. The rest of the families in what was called the Cities of the Plain were smaller and weaker than the Baleens. All of them farmed a little. The Baleens, Annabel told me, were more religious than the others, but all were “Christians.”

I asked her about the reaction to Noah that I had received. I can still picture her vividly as she told me this, with her light hair pulled back in a bun, a coffee cup in her hand, and her blue-gray eyes shy and sa3.

“It’s my father-in-law,” she said. “He thinks he’s a prophet. He thinks the reason there are no more children is that the Lord is punishing the world for its sins—as with Noah. Everybody knows the story of Noah. My mother told it to me—but differently from the way you read it. She didn’t tell about his being drunk, and about his sons.”

“Is Edgar Baleen expecting to be saved, like Noah?”

She smiled. “I don’t really know. I don’t know how he could be. He’s too old to have children.”

I asked her a more personal question. It was difficult for me to become used to Invasion of Privacy, even though the Baleens did not believe in that rule. “What became of your husband?” I asked.

She sipped from her coffee. “Suicide. Two years ago.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He and two of his brothers took thirty sopors and then poured gasoline on themselves and lit it.”

I was shocked. It was the same thing I had seen in New York, at the Burger Chef. “People have done that in New York,” I said.

She lowered her eyes. “It’s happened here—in all of the families,” she said. “My husband wanted me to be the third in the group. I was attracted to the idea, but I declined. I want to live a while longer.” She got up from the table where we were sitting and began to take dishes over to the sink. “At least I think I want to live.”

I was made silent by the weariness that had suddenly come into her voice.

After clearing the table she got herself another cup of coffee and sat down again.

After a minute I spoke. “Do you think you will marry again?”

She looked up at me sadly. “It’s not allowed. To marry a Baleen you must be a… a virgin.” She blushed slightly, and lowered her eyes.

This kind of talk was all rather strange to me, since I had never before met people who married. But I was familiar with such things from books and films, and I knew that it had been once considered a Mistake for a man to