by Ray Cluley
“It’s nearly six.”
“Your father will be home soon.”
Tanya sat again and resumed her circles, moving dust round and round with her finger as the clock tocked quietly. Tocked. And tocked.
“Yes Ma.”
The curtain shivered but Tanya ignored it, pretended not to see, because she knew why it moved and what it waited for.
S
Tanya set the table without knowing what dinner would be, laying out bowls on top of plates and lining up spoons next to forks next to knives. She put the two candles they had in the middle and put a cushion on one chair in case Mother joined them in the kitchen. She was trying to plump it into a shape it had given up long ago when she heard the gate catch on the gravel path with a sudden sharp crunch, and then the rusty groan it only made when closing.
“Dad’s home.”
He was late, the tocking clock close to half past seven.
But it wasn’t Father. It was another man from the caves, a man called Gerald who had a bushy beard but no hair on his head.
“Hello Tanya, is your mother home?”
He must have known she was. Everybody knew she was bedridden. Only for a little while, but everybody knew.
“Who is it?” Mother called from her room.
“It’s Gerald, ma’am. Your husband, he’s . . . Well, he’s working late.” Gerald was calling the information from the door because Tanya hadn’t invited him in yet. “Asked me to bring you some dinner.”
“Come in. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Gerald came in, giving Tanya a smile with a bottle of pop drink. She didn’t have pop drink often so it was very easy to smile back.
“No, don’t get yourself up. It’s just a bit of stewing beef and a few vegetables. I’ll put it on the table.”
Which he did. It was more than a few vegetables, and the stew-beef was wrapped in a lot of paper so there was probably more than a bit of that, too. Tanya thought it was a nice lie, though.
She twisted the lid off her bottle with it near her face so the hiss-fizz of it would wet her cheek and tickle.
Gerald went to the doorway where Mother’s room was. “It’s simple enough for the little one to cook,” he said. “You rest up some more.”
Mother said something in reply but Tanya didn’t hear it because she was swallowing. She took too much and had to burp quietly afterwards. She hid it in her hand.
“No, I’ll show her how. Don’t you worry. Can I get you something to drink?”
He didn’t go into the room. Maybe to be polite, maybe because of the sick smell.
“Here,” said Tanya. She went in because she was used to the sick smell now. She held up the pop drink. There was most of it left still.
Her mother was lying on top of the sheets and Tanya couldn’t help but think of the flies on the curtain though she didn’t mean to. Her mother smiled because she didn’t know about the flies or Tanya’s thoughts and said, “No, dear, you drink it.”
“It’s delicious, you’ll like it,” Tanya promised, words her mother and father had used on her plenty of times, even though sometimes it wasn’t true.
“It tickles my nose too much,” Mother said. But she licked her lips and Tanya thought maybe it was another nice lie that adults do sometimes. “Go and help Gerald in the kitchen.” Then louder, to Gerald, “Would you like to stay for supper?”
Gerald was stroking his beard like he was far away, looking over at the curtain in the front room. Tanya wondered when Father would be home, and wondered if the curtain wondered.
“Ma wants to know if you’d like to stay for supper.” She took another sip of drink. A little one, to make it last longer.
“That’s very kind,” he said. He said it twice, the second time so Mother could hear as well, adding, “I’ve got to get on back to the caves.”
He crouched so he was nearly Tanya’s height, though he was so big he could never be so small, and asked, “Do you want to learn how to cook a grown-up dinner?”
Tanya thought that was even better than a pop drink because she only knew how to make sandwiches (without cutting them because knives were Dangerous) so she nodded hard enough to put her hair in her eyes, which made Gerald laugh.
When he was finished laughing the house sounded more sad.
S
Gerald told her to wash her hands first, then showed her how to fill the pan with enough water to cover the meat. There was a lot of it. Some of it was stringy but he said it didn’t matter because of how it would cook. He showed her how to cut the vegetables and said to use them all even though there was a lot because they wouldn’t keep but in the stew they would. He showed her how to use the knife properly and safely and said big chunks were better but Tanya knew that was because it was safer. When Father cooked he cut things really small.
“It will take a while to cook properly. When it starts to bubble, turn it down so it just bubbles a little bit, and stir it once in a while.” He showed her how. “And then just wait until your mother says it’s ready. She’ll know when. If you get hungry waiting, eat some of the carrot pieces we saved, remember? I always save a couple to nibble on.”
Tanya decided she loved Gerald a little bit.
He came down next to her again, squatting so they were nearly the same height but never quite. “You know, your father works hard so you both have food and this house and so you don’t have to pay tribute too often. You know that, don’t you?”
Tanya nodded. She tipped the pop bottle up for the last of it but the last of it was gone.
“And he will always try to keep things that way, all right? Even if things look bad, he’ll try and make it good like it was.”
She nodded again, giving up on the bottle but deciding to keep it. She’d put a flower in it for Mother’s dinner tray.
Gerald stood and ruffled her hair.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
He wiped his hands on his trousers after, even though her hair wasn’t dirty, and then he did something unexpected. He walked quickly over to where the curtain hung and put his hands to it. He didn’t wrap them up in the middle like Father did, bunching it up around his hands like he was drying them, but placed them palm-flat against the flesh and let it feed. It was such a surprise that Tanya watched even though she never liked to. She watched the red spread from his fingertips, saw the lines become pink as they stretched out from his hands, only to deepen to crimson as he waited, and waited. Waited. With a final grunt, he withdrew his hands and stepped back. The curtain where he’d touched it was so dark it was black. Father never gave it that much.
“Right,” he said. His face was still dirty from the caves but it was white, too, around the dirt. Pale, like the curtain used to be. “You watch that stew now.”
Tanya nodded and he left, calling a polite goodbye to Mother but Mother was asleep again.
“Bye Gerald,” Tanya said for her, but the door was already closing. She heard the gravel beneath his boots as he walked away and watched his black handprints fade to dark brown and then maroon, deep red to mauve to a fading pink. The colours of dying, that’s what Mother called them. Briefly, it had been the auburn colour of her hair.
Tanya watched until there was no longer any trace of tribute, by which time the stew was ready.
S
Tanya first learnt about the curtain at the schoolhouse. She never used to want to go to school, she wanted to work in the Drapery when she was older like Mother, and like Grandma used to before she got sick. Grandma told her stories about it, which was like being at school half the time anyway. Grandma told her about Grandpa too, who was a brave man and fought in a war but didn’t come back. He wasn’t killed, he just didn’t come back. Father said that meant he wasn’t brave at all but Mother said there was always another way of lookin
g at it and he probably had his reasons, which is what Grandma said as well. There were lots of photos of him in an album Grandma kept, a big book which was almost as cracked and leathery as Grandma.
“This is him when we first met,” Grandma pointed out. Tanya was sitting on the bed with her, drinking tea because Grandma said she could. She didn’t like it much but she pretended to.
“He’s younger than Father.”
“He was then, yes. And that’s me.”
Grandma looked just like Mother, and people said Tanya looked just like Mother too, so that meant she’d look just like Grandma one day.
“You’re very pretty,” Tanya said, which was true but sounded like boasting.
“I was a bit. Not now. I’m cleverer now, though, and that’s important.”
Which was how they started talking about the schoolhouse where Mother and Father wanted her to go. Tanya didn’t want to because she knew it would be expensive and Father already paid a lot to the cloth. He was the only one who could, except Tanya, and they wouldn’t let her.
“I don’t want to go,” she said again to Grandma, but of course Grandma persuaded her it was for the best.
They had a curtain at the schoolhouse bigger than the one in Tanya’s house. It was mostly for the teachers but sometimes, on special days, the children had to touch it too. The curtains were a part of their lives long before they knew what they were, just like tables and chairs and the sky.
When Tanya went to Koji’s house once she saw their bloodcloth wasn’t a curtain; it was shaped and positioned like a flag. When Mr. Aibagawa touched it he used his head instead of his hands, bowing so the top of his head met the bloodcloth. When he stepped away it looked like the flag of where they came from, Koji explained. Mr. Aibagawa never touched it long enough for it to go black and dark, just red, but he made up for that by doing it often. Every day, Koji said. And one day Koji would be allowed to do it too. Tanya used to be jealous of that, once. Mr. Aibagawa was always pale. So was Mrs. Aibagawa, but she used makeup to look that way.
Mrs. Tucker at the schoolhouse said some people were so rich or famous or respected that instead of a red carpet they were welcomed to places by a sodden bloodcloth laid at their feet so soaked that they could walk barefoot without paying tribute. Tanya didn’t know if she believed that or not, but she believed most of what Mrs. Tucker taught her. She liked history lessons best because they sounded made up but weren’t. That was when she first learnt about the bloodcloth curtains, but it was Koji who told her about ubasute.
S
“Hummingbird, what’s wrong?”
They were in the bedroom, bowls of stew in their laps. Tanya was looking at her Mother, watching her eat.
“I was thinking of Grandma.”
Mother pulled the blankets down and sat up straighter. She looked a lot like Grandma now, especially in bed, but not much when she sat up and shook her head so her hair hung back.
“I’ll be all right,” Mother said.
Tanya nodded.
“This is delicious stew,” Mother said. “Is there much left?”
“Gerald said enough for three days if we filled up with bread as well.”
Mother nodded and spooned herself another mouthful. Her hand trembled a little bit and she spilled some but it landed back in the bowl.
“Gerald touched the curtain before he left,” Tanya said.
The spoon stopped partway to Mother’s mouth, which she opened prematurely and then closed again. When she opened it the second time she managed to speak.
“How?”
Tanya told her about him putting both hands flat on it until it went dark, leaving his prints like waving bruises.
“He gave it a lot. Was it because Father’s late?”
Mother began to cry.
S
There had been an accident at the caves. Father had been standing near one of the mangles when the chain that turned it buckled and snapped. The roller dropped and fat folds of bloodcloth spewed from the line behind like a thickened tongue, spilling and spilling into itself without the heavy press of the machine to flatten and shape it. Father had reached out to push the roller back in place and his arm had been engulfed in unprocessed flesh, wrapped in heavy bloodcloth that was getting heavier as it drained his limb. There had been no pain, he said, but he screamed and screamed because of what it might do and some of the other men managed to stop the machines and pull his arm out for him, digging through the layers of bloodcloth like it was laundry.
His arm was mottled yellow, like an old bruise. It had already withered to limp flesh and narrow bone. The rest of him was white, like moonlight.
“I wanted to see how bad it was,” Father explained, “so I stayed in one of the bunkhouses for a while. I was hoping . . .” He shrugged instead of finishing.
They were sitting around the table. There was more stew cooking, reheating Tanya’s and Mother’s abandoned meals, but Tanya doubted she would ever eat stew again. The smell would always make her think of Mother crying, and Father’s hitching breath as he tried not to.
“I wanted to see if it would . . . plump up.” He raised his arm from the table as if they might not know what he was talking about. He did it too quickly, not yet used to the lightness of it. “I’m lucky I can still use it, I suppose.”
He had avoided coming home until he knew more, but after Tanya said about Gerald and the curtain, Mother guessed something bad had happened. She made Tanya go and get Gerald again and then she made Gerald tell her what happened.
“You can lift it,” Mother said. “You can’t use it.”
“No,” Father agreed. “It’s dried up.”
It was quiet between them for a long moment.
“The arteries might open up again,” he said. “Veins might redirect. If not, they’ll have to amp—”
“Will you be able to work?”
Mother had asked Gerald the same thing but he didn’t know.
Neither did Father.
Tanya was silent and still. She knew if she made any noise or moved they’d remember she was there and send her to her room. This was adult talk and normally they’d have a conversation like this in their own room, where she could still hear but where they didn’t know she could still hear. Tanya was crying without fully understanding why, but she was doing it quietly.
Father’s arm looked dead. It looked like the stringy meat Gerald had brought them, but with less colour.
“They didn’t cut the cloth,” he said. “No damage, no debt.” He tried to smile for that at least, but it was weak.
Suddenly Mother struck out at Father, which was something Tanya had never seen and it made her shriek in surprise. Mother was sick and frail, so it wasn’t much, but Father flinched from her as if it burned, and then she hit him again, and again, but she was sobbing by then and Father was gathering her in with his good arm and holding her close and she cried against him instead of hitting. She hugged him and hugged him.
“It’s all right,” he hushed, whispering into her hair. He beckoned Tanya over with a tilt of his head and hugged her too. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be all right.”
The arm that held Tanya was dead and heavy on her shoulders, and his words were heavy in her heart because they didn’t sound true.
S
“That’s a lie,” Tanya said, but Koji shrugged like he didn’t care if she believed him or not.
“That’s what they did when Mr. Olderstein stopped working. He said he wanted them to do it when he couldn’t teach no more because if he couldn’t teach anymore he couldn’t do much else either. They did it in assembly, wrapped him up in the schoolcloth so the classes wouldn’t have to tribute for a while. It was before you were here.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tanya allowed, unable to prove otherwise, “but Mrs. Gowan is a wom
an. Women can’t tribute.”
“Old women can, just like little girls. It’s the ones in between that can’t. I dunno why.”
Tanya thought she might know why because Mother had told her about the special blood that made you a woman. She didn’t tell Koji, though. He would think it was gross.
Mrs. Gowan worked in the Drapery where most women worked, although she was a supervisor instead of one of the cutters or pressers because she was old. Grandma said she sometimes did cut and press, though, if they needed people to. She’d put on special gloves. She worked a lot because her son was what Mother called special but the kids at the schoolhouse called stupid and slow and other mean names because he was a grown man but acted like a baby. When Mrs. Gowan took on the sickness she wasn’t able to do much anymore. Tanya always thought they moved away but Koji was saying she let them wrap her up in the curtain. They lay it on her like a bed sheet, he said. She did it for her son, Koji said, but couldn’t explain more than that. Koji’s dad said it was very noble, which was a word Tanya liked when Grandma explained it.
Tanya’s father said it was stupid and that it should have been the son who was curtained to help the mother because he couldn’t do anything and after her tribute what would he do? “Probably got wrapped up anyway,” he said. “I reckon that’s what the hospitals do all the time.”
Father did not like the hospitals. Not many people did.
When Tanya asked Mother about it Mother asked a lot of questions, sometimes more than once, and was angry with the Aibagawas for a while.
It was Grandma who explained what noble was and why Mrs. Gowan did it.
Later that year, Grandma did the same thing herself.
S
After dinner, Tanya was told to go out and play, but not outside the fence. Mother and Father had a lot to talk about. They must have forgotten how late it was, probably because there’d been two dinners, but Tanya kept quiet because she wasn’t usually allowed out at night.