Commitment Hour lop-2

by James Alan Gardner

  "What do you blame yourself for?" I asked.

  "Steck turning…" He stopped, as if he couldn't say the word. Suddenly, he blurted, "You call them Neuts, but they aren't neuter. Neuter means sexless, and they're perfectly hermaphroditic. They can even have children: father them or mother them, both ways work."

  "How do you know about Neuts?"

  "Steck wasn't the first of her kind — you know that. I met another down in Feliss City, almost forty years ago. A manwoman named Qwan. Qwan missed Tober Cove a little, but still thought getting exiled was the best thing that ever happened to her. Or him."

  "It," I said pointedly.

  "Qwan wasn't an It. Qwan was a contented father of three, and just as good a mother. And don't make faces like you're going to be sick," Zephram snapped. "Half the people in this village have been both mothers and fathers."

  "Not at the same time."

  "Neither was Qwan: married to a woman for ten years, widowed, then married to a man. Both marriages were happy, believe me."

  "And you told that to Steck?"

  Zephram sighed. "Yes. I told that to Steck."

  "You are to blame."

  "So I said." He poked at his bacon with a fork… probably just to shift his attention to something that wasn't accusing him. "I told Steck about the bad parts too. Qwan had two happy marriages, but she sometimes ran into trouble walking down the street. Boys shouted insults… mothers pulled their children out of the way… there were a few close calls with drunks… I told Steck about those things too, but she must have thought it would be different for her. And Steck could never resist a melodramatic gesture. She was the sort of person who had crazy impulses, thought about them a long time, then surrendered to them anyway."

  Zephram's tone of voice suggested he wasn't just thinking of Steck's decision to Commit Neut. "What kind of impulses?" I asked.

  "Well… me." He kept his eyes on the bacon. "She was a stunning twenty-year-old beauty, while I was a middle-aged outsider, half-dead with grief. What could she possibly see in such a shattered wreck of a man? Most folks in the cove thought it was my money. I thought so too for a while — it was a motive I could understand. Then I wondered if she just wanted to shock people… or if she looked on me as a charity case, with herself as Sister of Pity, bringing me back to life with fleshly mercy. But I've had twenty years to think about Steck, and I've rejected all the easy answers. She met a withdrawn, far-from-enticing stranger and the idea just popped into her mind: 'Wouldn't he be unlikely!' I imagine she wrestled with the notion for weeks. In time, she succumbed to the idea… and I succumbed to her."

  I could barely hold my stomach down. My foster father and a Neut? But of course, Steck hadn't been Neut back then: just a normal girl, a good-looking one if Zephram could be believed. Then again, by the time you're sixty, every woman you've slept with must turn beautiful in memory. Beautiful, or else hideous; when you're sixty, why waste your memories on anyone in between?

  "So you and Steck were…" I let my voice trail off rather than say a word that would make me cringe.

  "Lovers?" Zephram finished for me. "Depends on your definition. I was a needer rather than a lover. I needed someone in the nights, and I needed someone in the days too. Steck saved me from smothering under grief. As for what was in it for her — I don't know if she loved me or needed me, but some impulse made her claim me." He suddenly picked up his knife and briskly chopped his bacon into pieces. "Let me tell you about meeting Steck," he said. And he did.

  The Silence of Mistress Snow settles over the village with the first snowfall every winter. By tradition, no one speaks a word from the first sight or touch of a snowflake until dawn the next day. This isn't the Patriarch's Law — Leeta thinks it goes way back to monkey times, when the coming of snow stopped our ancestors jabbering in the trees and reduced them to watching the world coat up with white. There's something about the quiet of snow, especially when it comes after sunset and descends like a million ghosts slipping from the skirts of Mistress Night: you have to hold your breath. You stand silent in the open doorway, with no thought of how hard winter will be, no worry whether you've put up enough preserves or stored enough hay for the cattle. What's done is done; you're ready or you're not, and either way, the snow is too beautiful to care.

  So Tober Cove falls silent when the snow arrives, as mute as an initiate in prayer. Even the children understand. Parents hug them to show it's all right, but keep a finger to their lips until they get the idea. Chores get set aside to let the hush settle in deeper; many people sit on their front steps or in their windows, with no lamps cheapening the blackness.

  Then, around midnight, the Council Hall bell rings once: the Cold Chime, rung by Mistress Snow herself. Sure, it might be the mayor who pulls the bell-rope, but it's Mistress Snow who carries the sound through the village, her fingers so fuzzed with frost that they muffle the tone. The chime signals people in town to make their Visits… Visits which are promises, sealed by Mistress Snow, that you'll help another household through the winter.

  A Visit is simple. You get a small piece of burnable wood and carry it to someone else's home. Every front door is open, if only by a crack. You walk in without a word, add your stick to the fire, then go, closing the door tight behind you. The closed door shows that this house has been placed under your protection — others who might come by should Visit elsewhere, looking for a door that's still open to the wind. One by one, the doors are closed; and so the people of Tober Cove silently promise that no one will face the winter alone.

  You don't break promises made to Mistress Snow.

  Zephram had lived in our town almost a month by the time snow came. He couldn't say why he hadn't left while there was still time before winter. "I'm bad with explanations," he told me. "Now and then I believe I understand why things happen… but then I always think better of it."

  People had seen the snow coming long before it arrived: a bundle of bleak clouds advancing across Mother Lake from the northwest. The clouds had the feathery gray look of mourning doves, and they closed off the afternoon as they drew in. Every perch boat came back to harbor early. Down at the Elemarchy School, the teacher let her children out at two o'clock so they could scurry home to help with last-minute chores.

  Zephram happened to be near the docks when the boats started to come in. "All right," he admitted, "I was sitting half-numb on the pier, watching the clouds choke the sky" — but he fought off his gloom and roused himself to help unload the day's catch. That's when he heard about the Silence of Mistress Snow, and the other Tober traditions associated with winter's coming. The men were divided on what Zephram himself should do at midnight: whether he should make a Visit of his own or keep shut behind a closed door. Both sides of the discussion meant well. Some thought it would be good for Zephram to participate in community traditions, while others said it would be easier on him not to get involved. After all, if Zephram made a formal Visit at midnight, he was committing himself to stay in the cove until spring. Was that what he wanted? The trip down-peninsula wasn't easy in winter, but a few sleighs made the journey every year — supposedly to buy supplies, really just for something to do once the harbor froze. Zephram could catch a ride down to Ohna Sound any time he wanted… but not if he promised Mistress Snow to see someone else through the hard cold season.

  After the fish were unloaded, Zephram went to ask Leeta whether he should or shouldn't make a Visit when the snow came. That shows how much Zephram already knew about being a Tober — a true outsider might have gone to Hakoore and received a flat no. Leeta, on the other hand, gave a typical Mocking Priestess answer: Zephram had to decide for himself. If he wanted to remain an outsider, he could stay home, keep his door shut, Visit no one. If he wanted to be part of the community, he had to leave his door open and choose someone to help.

  That was Leeta, all right: "You have a completely free choice, and never mind that there's only one decision a decent person would make."

  Zephram said the snow
arrived around sunset — not that anyone could see the sun with the sky smothered by those gray-feather clouds. I could imagine the way the snow sifted down that evening, bleaching away the world's color. Gray and gray, white and white. No sound from any house — even the sheep and cattle subdued as they huddled in barns that were tautly insulated with hay.

  Night nestled down into hours of muted blackness. Zephram's house, called the Guest Home back then, had always been quiet — it stood apart from the rest of the village, separated by a big stand of trees — but on Mistress Snow's night, the normal quiet turned to thick granite silence. No dogs barked. No hammers tapped and no saws rasped, now that people had set aside their usual carpentry work. Many couples choose Mistress Snow's arrival as a time to make love… but even that goes slow and silent, voiceless as an iced-in pond.

  Zephram sat alone in darkness; and as the snow on the window thickened flake by flake, he too thought of making love. The silence of snow was not a tradition in the South, but people still felt it and held each other as winter floated in. Zephram thought about his fresh-lost Anne, how they had watched and loved many snowfalls together. What would she want him to choose tonight? An open door or a closed one?

  Easy question.

  When the chime rang, he pulled on his boots and went out into the snow. Behind him, his door was propped open with a block of pristine pinewood he'd always intended to whittle into a bust of Anne. (Even as he told me this story, he still had that block, untouched, sitting on his work table amidst the shavings of owls and beavers that actually did get carved.)

  Zephram cleared out of the house fast because he was shy of meeting whoever visited him. He had no doubt that someone would come; on the docks that afternoon, several men had dropped hints they wouldn't let an ignorant city-gent freeze to death. Most Tobers wouldn't mind lending Zephram a little help and a lot of advice — telling your neighbors what they ought to be doing has always been the cove's chief pastime in winter — but Zephram didn't want to see people coming to give what he regarded as charity.

  (In that, he showed he was an outsider. No Tober thinks of our silent Visits as charity: it's something you do because the alternative is just too mean.)

  Once Zephram was clear of the house, he slowed his pace. Snow still fell, but not much; the air was damp and windless, with the kind of cold that freshens rather than chills you. The night was fine for walking… and Zephram took his time, letting the native Tobers go about their Visits without him. He had no one special he wanted to claim as his responsibility, no person or family he was closer to than any other. Instead, he intended to give the real villagers first choice of whom to support, then take the house left over. He had some idea that people would resent him intruding, or become annoyed if he "adopted" the family they wanted to claim themselves. Zephram thought it more polite to let the others sort themselves out. It meant, of course, that he would end up visiting someone unpopular, or perhaps a family so needy no one else dared commit to their well-being; but Zephram could afford both unpopularity and expense.

  Or so he thought.

  He ambled quietly along the edge of the forest for perhaps twenty minutes — ample time, he thought, for the rest of Tober Cove to settle who was going where. Then he aimed his feet toward the Council Hall steeple: the center of the village and a natural place to start looking for an open door. Most of the houses he passed were dark already, all lamps extinguished and the hearths damped down. People in the cove almost never stayed up to midnight, so they were quick to do their business and get back to bed… though not necessarily to sleep. In time, however, Zephram found one house still lit, with three stubby candles on a stand outside the open door.

  Steck's house.

  He knew Steck vaguely, just as he knew almost everyone in the village by now. Zephram had nodded to Steck that afternoon when he visited Leeta; Steck had been puttering with herbs on Leeta's kitchen table, making mint-scented packets for unknown priestess purposes. To Zephram, Steck was just Leeta's apprentice, a keen-eyed girl of twenty who carried herself like a spear, even if she was seven months pregnant with Master Crow's child.

  Zephram approached the door with a flush of bashfulness, embarrassed by the boldness of walking unannounced into someone else's house… a young woman's house at that. It seemed indecent, a middle-aged man becoming this girl's "protector"; and now that he thought about her, she grew imposing in his mind — not just a girl, but a beautiful one, alarmingly so. Wasn't it disloyal to his late wife to "claim" a girl like Steck so soon after Anne's death? But he knew what Anne would say about that. You're being an ass. Do what's right and don't invent complications.

  Even so, he found himself hoping Steck was still out on her own Visit, so he could scurry in, toss a stick on her fire, then rush away into the night.

  She was home: seated on a rocking chair in front of the fireplace, tucked under a down coverlet that came up to her throat. Her jaw was clenched as if she was fighting the shivers. Zephram didn't think the cabin felt cool, but Steck was pregnant and might suffer chills more easily. Without thinking, Zephram closed the door behind him to shut out the cold. When he turned back, it struck him, I'm alone with her now; then he mentally kicked himself and set about fulfilling his new commitment to take care of her.

  He made tea.

  She watched him with firelight reflecting in her eyes, the expression on her face unreadable. Several times Zephram was on the verge of speaking, to ask if she was all right, and whether the jar of apple-scented flakes was really tea or just potpourri; but he remembered Mistress Snow's Silence and held his tongue. The only sound was the soft crackle of the hearth, with Zephram's split of wood atop the flames. He took his time hanging the kettle on its hook above the fire — he knew that once it was put in place, he'd have nothing else to do but avoid Steck's gaze until the water boiled.

  And yet he had to look at her eventually: her fire-flickered eyes, her mouth set as if she were trying not to let her teeth chatter. When he summoned what he hoped was a comforting smile, she didn't smile back; she only nodded toward a chair on the other side of the hearth. Zephram took the hint and sat.

  The chair was angled to look directly at the girl rather than the fire. This would be Leeta's seat, he realized, when the priestess came over to bestow wisdom on her apprentice — Leeta was the sort to aim herself face-on to anyone she was talking with. Zephram had no choice but to aim face-on too… and Steck stared back in the midnight hush, with snow drifting down outside.

  He found himself prickling with the hope she would make love to him… that she would throw off the coverlet to reveal she was naked underneath, and that she would rise from the chair with unashamed deliberateness, she would walk slowly to him, and in the thick silence of the night…

  ("Hey!" I said from the other side of the breakfast table, "do I need to hear this?"

  "What's wrong?" Zephram asked. "One reason I like Tober Cove is how open you are about sexual feelings."

  "Yeah, but…" It was one thing for me to talk about my fantasies, and quite another for my father to blather away.

  "I'm not trying to upset you," Zephram said. "I only wanted… it was the first time since Anne died that I had thoughts about another woman—"

  "Just tell what happened," I interrupted, "and skip the daydreams. Unless Steck actually took off the coverlet and things got…"

  "No," my father answered. "She was shivering cold and seven months pregnant.")

  Zephram might have allowed himself to imagine the touch of Steck's soft skin, but that was only a tiny chink in his armor of mourning — Anne was still too much with him. After a time, he found he could superimpose his lost wife over the reality of Steck's eyes and the fantasy of her body… so that when he pictured making love with this girl, he was actually remembering Anne at the same age, and the sweet honeymoon caresses of long ago.

  Soon enough, Steck's kettle boiled. Zephram stirred himself to find mugs — good clay mugs fired in the local kiln — then set one filled with st
eeping tea on a small table beside the girl. Steck took the mug immediately and pulled it under the coverlet… cradling it in her hands, Zephram supposed, although the cup was burning hot. Perhaps Steck rested it on the roundness of her stomach, where the heat would flow to the child within; perhaps that felt soothing to her. Zephram didn't know what pregnant women found comforting: he and Anne had never managed to have children.

  While his own tea steeped, Zephram poked up the fire and slid in another piece of wood. Now that the cabin door was closed, the room was warming up: warm enough that he would soon have to decide whether to take off his coat or just go home. He didn't want to leave while Steck still looked close to freezing, but he also didn't want to outstay his welcome. The houses outside lay dark now; all the other Visits were clearly finished, and the visitors gone back to bed. He wondered if the cove's etiquette required Visits to be as short as possible… especially since talk was forbidden till dawn. Zephram was preparing himself for a conversation with Steck, spoken entirely with silent gestures — Shall I go? Will you be all right? — when the girl slipped off the coverlet and stood up.

  She wore pure white: a white pleated dress so long it touched the floor, and a white wool sweater knit as fine as a spider web. The clothes were impractical for life in the cove — sure to get dirty, hard to clean — and the bottom hem of the dress was already soggy from traipsing through snow outdoors. Steck must have worn this outfit when she went on her own Visit… as if she were pretending to be Mistress Snow Herself, come to bring cold serenity to the world.

  The girl still held the mug of tea in her hands. She lifted it and sipped, her eyes on Zephram. With anyone else, the gesture might have been coy or seductively blatant — when I was female, I used that move myself — but Zephram assured me Steck was simply using it as a "thank you": wordlessly showing she was grateful for his efforts. He took this as a cue to leave and gave her a good-bye nod; but she held up her hand and motioned him back to his chair.