I knew them so well, and I really did, even Til. They were family, while Mayleen’s husband and children seemed more foreign than a tribe of Frossians. Or yaboons.
The choir voices began a slow diminuendo.
In the next pew, Abe Johnson had his eyes tightly closed. He usually spent double the average time ruing his mail-order wife, who had vanished, leaving him with her son, Bamber Joy, an event Abe would never understand if he rued the whole matter for a hundred years. Even he, however, eventually felt Pastor Grievy’s tightly focused gaze boring through his eyelids, and with a sigh, lifted his head. The words were spoken, and we slowly left the Ruehouse.
People walked to and from services on Rueday as a minor religious thing, only faintly colored by notions of expiation or propriety. Most people who felt reasonably well did it out of habit unless the weather was intolerable, which it rarely was. All Tercis’s extremes, either icy or furnace-hot, had been reserved for the coldhearted and the hot-tempered; the Rueful had been granted a Walled-Off with a pleasant climate.
The Judson clan gathered briefly at the Ruehouse steps. I touched Mayleen’s shoulder. “Have you heard from Ella Mae, Mayleen?”
“Of course not.” She shrugged my arm away. “She’s in the Siblinghood of Silence, so she’s silent so far as her family is concerned.”
“I thought she might have a furlough this summer.”
“Not with us, she won’t. Last time was enough.” She stalked off after Billy Ray, while I furtively gave the two little ones the cookies I had brought in my pocket. As quickly as a squirrel hides nuts in his mouth, they hid the cookies in their raggedy clothes. As Billy Ray led his brood westward on the highway toward the bridge that would take them across to their farm on the west side of the river, I saw them breaking off little pieces and taking sneaky little mouthfuls.
“Oatmeal,” whispered Maybelle. “And raisins, and eggs.”
I nodded as I cast a glance southward where my old home stood, now an addition to Ms. Barfinger’s Boardinghouse. “And sugar,” I whispered. “And butter.”
Jimmy Joe and Maybelle led us toward the road that wound down sloped meadows and northward on the river’s near side, strolling hand in hand, as if they were courting instead of having been married practically forever. Til raced on ahead as though eager to fit a whole day’s devilment in before sunset. Gloriana ambled along beside me, stopping when I stopped to admire a flower or a fluttering bee-bird, and Jeff trailed behind, probably still trying to think of a way to keep Til from getting him into any more trouble.
By the time our family neared the bottom of the hill, other people had turned off, and we were alone, moving north along the pasture road.
Gloriana whispered, “Grandma Meg, what did Aunt Mayleen mean about the Siblinghood of Silence?”
“It’s a kind of organization,” I said. “They don’t accept just anyone as a member. Only men and women who really want to spend their lives doing good for people. They call it the Siblinghood of Silence because they’re not allowed to talk about what they do.”
“I hardly remember Ella May.”
“She’s strong, and has a rather plain, pleasant face, and she’s a good person.” Unlike, I didn’t say, her twin sister.
“That’s why she left, I guess. Daddy says the only way you can give Aunt Mayleen and Uncle Billy Ray anything without their being nasty about it, is drop it off after dark and hope the dogs don’t drag it away before morning. Probably Ella May tried to do them some good.”
Which was one of the more perspicacious things Glory had said recently. Mayleen and Billy Ray would definitely resent any effort to do them good. “I think Ella May tried very hard to help them the last time she was home,” I said. “I think they told her not to come back.”
I saw her tuck that away, probably to think about later.
“Grandma, what was the great failing Pastor Grievy always talks about?”
Aha, I’d been right. “Probably something that happened a long time ago, before your Grandpa Doc and I came to Tercis. It might have been something that happened to cause the Walling-Off, when all those bondslaves were being dumped here, ready to kill anyone who looked at them crosswise.”
“You and Grandpa Doc came later.”
“We came here directly from Earth without any bondage in between. I was twenty-two, he was thirty.”
“And Grandpa Doc talked you into coming here.”
I pinched my lips and clenched my hands. “In a manner of speaking I suppose he talked me into it, yes. It was come here or go elsewhere, and this seemed appropriate at the time.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Glory, for heaven’s sake. You remember him!”
“Not really. He died six years ago, when I was only six or seven. I wasn’t grown enough to…to know what he was really like. As a person, I mean, not as a grandpa.”
“Well, when we get home, come on up to my house, and I’ll show you some views of him and tell you about him.”
I stared resolutely ahead, down the road, wondering when, if ever, I would be finished with trying to explain Bryan Mackey. How could I explain him to Gloriana when I couldn’t explain him to myself after all our years together? And when, under heaven, was I going to be able to stop trying to make it up to him and let him go?
After he died and I decided to sell the big house in town to Mrs. Barfinger, Jimmy Joe built what was locally called an “old-mother house” for me, up the hill behind his own place. The house wasn’t so far away as to be troublesome going back and forth, but it wasn’t so close as to infringe upon my privacy, or his and Maybelle’s. The house was surrounded by trees and
