Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Neely did understand. Her strong little arms and tiny hands proved extremely useful in several difficult births in the other towns in the valley! Lillis taught her how to clean wounds and treat them. She taught Needly to look carefully at the difference between what a person says and what that person actually does—­putting this in context of “other places.” In Hench Valley there were no differences between vile words and vile actions. And she went on waiting for a sign. The only thing about Needly she felt at all strange about was that when Needly was told something important, real, and meaningful, she always nodded, as though checking an item off a list of things she either already knew or had been expected to learn.

  Lillis had been wearing healer shoes when she had left Hench Valley; Healer Grandma had returned to Hench Valley in that same pair of shoes. And though Needly was certainly odd enough to warrant stoning, for the Healer Grandma’s sake, Needly had been let strictly alone.

  As did any girl in Hench Valley, strange-­looking or not, Needly grew up to live what the men called “a good life fer a wummin.” Up early in the morning to fetch water from the well, and it not even an hour away, she had a nice stroll in the morning! The yoke across the shoulders was a burden, true, so the men said, females who grew up to the yoke grew strong under the burden! Besides, they weren’t expected to carry full buckets until they were maybe six or even seven! And once the water was fetched, there was only the stock to be seen to—­little of it though there was—­and the byre to be shoveled and the house swept and the day’s grain to be ground in the hand mill and the meals to cook and the garden weeded as the Great Fathers had intended. It was all good, healthful exercise for the strengthening, training of young females. Constant chastisement reinforced all three.

  It was each girl’s own Ma who broke the girl into hauling water and digging gardens, thus building up helpful calluses on shoulders, hands, feet. It was a girl’s own Ma who uglified her by rubbing manure in her hair and mud and soot on her face, thus making her even fouler to see and worse to smell than the usual Hench Valley person. Girls were kept salable until puberty by making them as undesirable as possible. Repeated chastisement by a girl’s Pa and her brothers kept her in line. Slap and Grudge tried chastising Needly only once. Grandma had heard their whispering and had been poised to intervene when the unexpected happened. Slap raised a stick. There was a loud noise. Still holding the stick he had intended to hit Needly with, Slap lay in a corner, black-­and-­blue in the face and upper body. Across the room from him, Grudge nursed a broken arm. Even after Slap and Grudge were healed, no one touched Needly. It was almost as though someone had dropped a veil of invisibility over her.

  If and when girls were de-­uglified to be sold or mated, most of them stayed alive for quite some time, just as Trudis had. Men didn’t spend that kind of money on somebody who’d be around only a year or so, unless they were like Old Digger, and Old Digger bought really young ones, sometimes as young as eight or nine years old, and kept them only three or four years. Never past their womanlies, though. Once they started to get breasts, Digger was finished with them. They disappeared and he’d go back to digging salvage or gold out of the buried cities until he had enough to buy another one.

  Gralf liked to annoy Grandma by talking of selling Needly to Old Digger. If he sold her to anyone else, he’d have to pay taxes when the king’s tax-­hogs came by Hench Valley, the far east edge of what the King of Ghastain considered his own lands, but nobody’d know he’d sold her because Digger didn’t keep them long. There’d be no taxes on a girl who just disappeared. “There’s no taxes owing on girls who just run off, and that’s what I’ll say she did, run off.” Gralf considered himself clever, and he bragged drunkenly to Grandma about his plan to sell Needly and fool the tax-­hogs.

  “Who’s going to fetch the water then?” Grandma asked the air in her casual murmur, speaking the garbled, half-­swallowed tongue Hench Valley ­people spoke rather than the speech she had taught Needly to use when they were alone. “Needly goes, I’m gettin’ too old to do much. Alla’ yer boys but Slap and Grudge’re gone. Y’think they’ll decide to help? Y’think Trudis gonna stir ’rself allofa sudden? Wonder who’ll feed the stock and hoe the garden?”

  The mutter was mere misdirection. Grandma had spurred the first and second of Gralf’s sons into departure with stories of cities and women and drink. Slap and Grudge would follow very soon. As for Grandma herself, she had no intention of being anywhere in Hench Valley once Needly was out of it, and the minute Gralf started talking about Digger, she knew it was time for Needly to go. If some purpose was to have been served by Needly’s being here, in this place, that purpose had had plenty of time to declare itself. Grandma said this quite frequently and loudly! She was letting THEM, the Planners, know. Whoever THEY were.

  Yes, Grandma decided. The purpose had either been met or canceled, and Grandma intended to be gone in the dark hours, taking the child with her. Dull-­witted as he was, Gralf half suspected that’s what would happen. Grandma had gone away before, she’d likely do it again. He could kill the old lady, of course, but that wouldn’t get the water brought either. Besides, some said she was a witch, and killing old witch ladies was jitchus, real jitchus.

  When he considered selling Needly, Gralf hadn’t thought about who’d do the work. Trudis didn’t turn her hand to anything. Couldn’t cook worth spit. Couldn’t fetch water without spilling most of it. Couldn’t fork out hay without catching a pitchfork tine into the hide of the cow or milk goat she was supposed to be feeding! Hellfires, he had to put his own water in the kettle on the back of the stove at night to be sure he had tea water hot in the morning! Had to do it his-­own-­self ! Well, he made damn sure there was only enough water for him. Trudis wants hot water, she c’n make her own fire, fill her own kettle! Far’s he c’d figure there was only one thing Trudis did do fairly well, fairly often. He enjoyed it some, but—­though he was incapable of expressing it in those terms—­surfeit had been sure death to appetite.

  Though Lillis well knew Gralf and the way his mind worked, he had one idea so ridiculous that she had never suspected it for a moment. On that long-­ago Midsummer Day when Gralf came home with Lillis’s daughter, one of his reasons, not the least one, had concerned Lillis herself more than it had her daughter. Lillis was known to be a midwife, a healer, she knew herbs; the ­people she helped probably paid her something for doing it. Certainly no Hench Valley man did anything for anyone without being paid. So, Gralf figured, since she was making all those pennies with the herbs and the healing and the midwife thing, those pennies could just as well add up in his pocket as in hers. A house always belonged to the eldest woman in it, which had never seemed right to Gralf, but that house was the man’s to rule! If he ruled, then nothing said he couldn’t take whatever pennies she got. Those theoretical pennies—­in theoretically improbable aggregate—­had figured large in Gralf’s decision to accept the utterly inedible cake Trudis offered him before he followed her home.

  Gralf had fully intended to get rid of Needly by selling her, but no boy with any pride would do girl’s work, and if Needly was gone, Grandma likely wouldn’t stay. So there’d be three men in the house and nobody to do for them but Trudis, and she wouldn’t!

  Unless! Unless he could buy a girl for Grudge or Slap, and that brought him back to Grandma Healer’s pennies. Grandma, now she was back, would still be doing what she used to do, and he could probably lay hands on what ­people paid her, so he’d let her get into the habit of doin’ it all again. Though Grandma could read what passed for thought in Gralf’s mind as though it were printed on his forehead, the last thing she would have suspected to find there was money that she, Lillis, was supposed to have. Until, that is, one day when the pennies loomed so large in Gralf’s mind that he told her he’d be taking what she was paid in future.

  She could not keep the laughter inside her. So that’s what the fool had been thinking of. “Well, Gralf,” she sa
id. “You’re welcome to everything I get, but you’ll have to come along with me each time to get it. The most I get from anybody is a mug of tea, and some days I almost drown in it! But I can’t carry it home; you’ll have to be right there to get any.”

  Grandma said Gralf never let Trudis have any money. Why would he think any other man would let a woman have money to pay for a healer? Gralf heard her say it. He went around hitting things for several frustrated days. He would have preferred to hit the old woman, but there was that jitchus thing! Kill an old woman who might be a witch, and it’d jitchus!

  Needly herself remained blessedly ignorant of either Gralf or Grandma’s thoughts. Thus far she was merely wary, as all Hench Valley females were when any of the men, including any supposed father, was involved.

  Those were Grandma’s words. Supposed father. When Needly had been about nine, she had considered those words. What, after all, Needly puzzled, did she know about Grandma? Only what Grandma had told her. Grandma’s name had been Lillis; Lillis had birthed twin daughters, then four other children, then Trudis in this house. All but Trudis had been taken away while they were quite young.

  Lillis had been told originally that they would all live well, elsewhere. Far elsewhere. Lillis had been told the several fathers of those children had been selected for Lillis by ­people from elsewhere: selected because children from those couplings would be born with certain attributes that fit long-­planned purposes of those ­people. Lillis was told those ­people did not and never had lived in or near Tuckwhip, but those ­people had made sure each time that the right man would visit Lillis in her house and stay with her for long enough, however long that needed to be. Those ­people were not, Lillis reasoned, the same as those who lived in the House of the Oracles. Both, she assumed, might have contributed to her life and future, but the two groups were quite separate, though they might be aware of one another. She thought. Perhaps.

  Whenever she told Needly things she thought Needly might at some time need to know, Grandma was careful to identify guesses and possibilities as just that. She never said definitely that she knew who was responsible for what. Needly, in fact, made no more sense of it than Grandma had.

  More pertinently, she knew Grandma had purposefully learned herb lore and midwifery and healing because these would be useful skills in places like Hench Valley. Needly also realized that whoever had made the plans, whoever had sponsored the roll of the genetic dice, that individual had come up good for the three sons and three daughters who had departed as children.

  “But they didn’t stay with you, Grandma!” Needly had cried. “It makes me unhappy! I want someone to explain things. I really do!”

  The woman had given her a long, measuring look, put the kettle on, made a pot of tea, and placed two cups on the table. She couldn’t explain. She could tell the child only what she herself had wondered over.

  “Needly, one of the men who lived in our family house for a time told me our world is very sick. He said lots of ­people know this, though there are even more ­people who deny it. I’m told that several groups of thoughtful ­people have looked into the future—­using every tool they had, thinking machines, gatherings of the wise, reading of history—­trying to come up with a way of straightening things out. They all agreed, finally, that mankind simply has not evolved far enough from the ape. Mankind still has parts of his brain that are monkey-­brain. It isn’t their fault, they don’t choose to think like monkeys, it’s the only way they can think. They need immediate gratification. They aren’t able to look ahead, to consider the consequences of their own actions. It’s like an inherited disease—­no, more a condition. Monkey-­brain condition.”

  She saw puzzlement in the child’s face. “We don’t have monkeys in this part of the world, Needly, but I’ve told you about them. Let’s pretend, like we did when you were little. Let’s pretend you’re a monkey. Let’s say you and your monkey husband somehow get blown by a storm onto a little island where there’s nothing to eat except delicious fruit from one tree that bears fruit all the year around. Even the seeds of the fruit are delicious. Are you going to eat the fruit?”

  Needly nodded. “ ’F I was hungry, I would. We all would.”

  “Yes. A monkey wouldn’t look at the fact there’s just that one tree. A monkey wouldn’t think, ‘Hey, wait, maybe we’d better plant some of these seeds.’ A monkey would just eat the fruit as it gets ripe, year-around: him and his mate and their child. They chew and swallow the seeds and shit on the ground around the tree. And the next year there’d be another child. And the year after that another child. The children would mate and have other children. And the family would get bigger and bigger. And the fruit wouldn’t quite fill them up, so they’d fight over it and some of them might be killed or hurt. And eventually there’s so much poop around the tree that it burns the roots and the tree dies. That was the only tree, so the monkeys die as well. Monkeys don’t know how to stop having babies. Monkeys don’t know how to plant trees. Monkeys just know how to be monkeys: greedy, heedless monkeys. They have monkey-­brain.

  “Humans evolved from creatures very much like monkeys, and they brag about their children. Even here, notice? Look out there at that Pa, strutting on the road, pointing out this little one, that little one, ‘That one’s mine,’ ‘Those two’re mine,’ ‘All these’re mine!’ The children are skinny little things that are always hungry; sometimes they have runny eyes and sores, but the men don’t care. It isn’t the children they’re proud of. It’s the willy-­wagging they’re doing. Those men are willy-­waggers. ‘Oh, look how my willy waggles to make little ones, looky at me!’ And when the tree dies, they’ll starve to death on whatever island they’re on. They have monkey-­brain.

  ­“People are still evolving, you know. At first there wasn’t much difference between the smartest ones and the stupidest ones. But gradually, over the millennia, the difference between the most intelligent ones and the least intelligent ones has grown wider and wider. Why do you suppose?”

  Needly’s mouth puckered, and the skin between her eyes. “Because . . . because, Grandma, when smart women have a choice about it, they’d rather have smart men as fathers for their children, wouldn’t they? It’s kind of . . .”

  “Selective. Right. Women would rather. Men . . . not so much. They’re usually thinking about breasts more than they are of brains. But, very gradually, over the centuries, the distance between the smartest and the dumbest has grown. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s a critical difference. It means some ­people have developed a part of their brain that others haven’t. They aren’t the majority, mind you. The ­people with monkey-­brain are in the majority . . .”

  “Why? Why are they?”

  “What did I tell you about monkeys? They don’t know how to plant trees, and they don’t know how to—­”

  “Stop having babies.”

  “Right. Not every one, or each one, but in the aggregate, they have more than can be provided for. More than our island planet Earth can provide for. But because there are always more monkey-brains than there are the other kind, no one could do anything about it. The ones with the monkey-­brain fished the seas empty. They polluted the oceans. They strutted their children. And whenever someone pointed out what they were doing, the ­people with monkey-­brain said, ‘There’s plenty of empty space.’ Or, ‘Science will think of some new kind of crop,’ or ‘We’ll farm the oceans.’ Remember, monkey-­brains aren’t very smart. They don’t realize that all the empty space is ice or desert or rock. They don’t realize that there’d be no water to irrigate that new crop because they’d already used up the millions of years’ worth of deep water in the underground aquifers. They didn’t see that they’d already polluted the oceans with filth, and chemicals and deadly nuclear trash.”

  “Didn’t anybody tell them?”

  “Of course! But you can’t tell a monkey-­brain willy-­wagger anything. It’d be lik
e a dog howling at the moon. The moon doesn’t care. And the monkey-­brain willy-­waggers . . . I need a shorter word for that!”

  “ ‘Mobwow,’ ” cried Needly. “Call them Mobwows, Grandma. It’s monkey-­brain willy-­wagger with an oh-­oh in the middle. It’ll work for women, too. Monkey-­brain womb-­wallowers.”

  Grandma started to harrumph, then laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes. “Well, If anyone tries to tell a . . . Mobwow anything, the Mobwow says, ‘Oh, that’s a lie the other side puts out.’ The other side, mind you, is anyone who disagrees with them, that includes anyone who says population should be limited, anyone who says anything except ‘Wag your willy and use this world up.’

  “Do you know that some religions used to say not having too many children was a sin! Willy-­wagging without having babies was a sin. The myth instead of the reality. Oh, shame.”

  “Weren’t they scared of what was going to happen when they ran out of room and food and clean water . . . ?”

  “No. They either didn’t believe it or they figured it wasn’t going to happen in their lifetime, so they didn’t care. Finally, back before the Big Kill, when the earth was actually dying, some very intelligent beings got together to try and find a solution. And they found there were actually two distinguishable races of humans. Not different colors or different languages or anything like that, but two distinguishable types. One kind had evolved a brain part that the other kind of ­people did not have. If you’re born with that part, you don’t have monkey-­brain. My family calls it the ‘if-­then’ part.