I couldn’t keep myself from talking anymore.
I admitted, “I don’t understand. What was that call about?”
Neither spoke, at first.
On the frosty sidewalk I could see the little shoeprints of children, and in the grass, their mothers’ prints. I found myself listening for voices up ahead, and giggles. Yet I heard nothing but the bells. Suddenly I wanted to be with those children, sitting in the temple, nothing to do but sing for summer’s return.
As if reading my mind, Mother Chrome said, “We have a beautiful temple. Did you see it in all my fog?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Beautiful,” she repeated. “We built it from the local sandstone. More than a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered.
Past the long house, tucked inside a grove of little trees, was a pig pen. There was a strong high fence, electrified and barbed. The shaggy brown adults glared at us, while their newest daughters, striped and halfway cute, came closer, begging for scraps and careless fingers.
I asked again, “What about that call? What’s so important?”
“We were always a successful family,” said Mother Chrome. “My daughter’s told you, I’m sure.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Mostly we were farmers, but in the last few centuries, our real talents emerged. We like science and the healing arts most of all.”
My Chrome had told me the same thing. In the same words and tone.
We turned to the west, climbing up the hill toward the temple. Empty homes left empty for too long lined both sides of the little street. They were sad and sloppy, surrounded by thick stands of brown weeds. Up ahead of us, running from thicket to thicket, was a flock of wild pheasants, dark brown against the swirling fog.
“Chromatellas were a successful family,” she told me, “and relatively rich, too.”
Just before I made a fool of myself, I realized that Mother Chrome was trying to answer my questions.
“Nearly forty years ago, I was awarded a student slot at the Great Western Institute.” She looked back at me, then past me. “It was such a wonderful honor and a great opportunity. And of course my family threw a party for me. Complete with a parade. With my mother and my grand, I walked this route. This ground. My gown was new, and it was decorated with ribbons and flower blossoms. Everyone in Chromatella stood in two long lines, holding hands and singing to me. My sisters. My near-sisters. Plus travelers at the mother house, and various lovers, too.”
I was listening, trying hard to picture the day.
“A special feast was held in the temple. A hundred fat pigs were served. People got drunk and stood up on their chairs and told the same embarrassing stories about me, again and again. I was drunk for the first time. Badly. And when I finished throwing up, my mother and sisters bundled me up, made certain that my inoculation records were in my pocket, then they put me on the express train racing south.”
We were past the abandoned homes, and the bells were louder. Closer.
“When I woke, I had a premonition. I realized that I would never come home again. Which is a common enough premonition. And silly. Of course your family will always be there. Always, always. Where else can they be?”
Mother Chrome said those last words with a flat voice and strange eyes.
She was walking slower now, and I was beside her, the air tingling with old fears and angers. And that’s when the first of the tombstones appeared: Coming out of the cold fog, they were simple chunks of fieldstone set on end and crudely engraved.
They looked unreal at first.
Ready to dissolve back into the fog.
But with a few more steps, they turned as real as any of us, and a breath of wind began blowing away the worst of the fog, the long hillside suddenly visible, covered with hundreds and thousands of crude markers, the ground in front of each slumping and every grave decorated with wild flowers: Easy to seed, eager to grow, requiring no care and perfectly happy in this city of ghosts.
###
When my great was alive, she loved to talk about her voyage from Mother’s Land. She would describe the food she ate, the fleas in her clothes, the hurricane that tore the sails from the ship’s masts, and finally the extraordinary hope she felt when the New Lands finally passed into view.
None of it ever happened to her, of course.
The truth is that she was born on the Great Delta. It was her grand who had ridden on the immigrant boat, and what she remembered were her grand’s old stories. But isn’t that the way with families? Surrounded by people who are so much like you, you can’t help but have their large lives bleed into yours, and yours, you can only hope, into theirs.
Now the Chromatellas told the story together.
The older one would talk until she couldn’t anymore, then her daughter would effortlessly pick up the threads, barely a breath separating their two voices.
Like our great cities, they said, the Institutes are recent inventions.
Even four decades ago, the old precautions remained in effect. Students and professors had to keep their inoculation records on hand. No one could travel without a doctor’s certificate and forms to the Plague Bureau. To be given the chance to actually live with hundreds and thousands of people who didn’t share your blood—who didn’t even know you a little bit—was an honor and an astonishment for the young Chromatella.
After two years, she earned honors and new opportunities. One of her professors hired her as a research assistant, and after passing a battery of immunological tests, the two of them were allowed up into the wild mountain country. Aboriginals still lived the old ways. Most kept their distance. But a brave young person came forward, offering to be their guide and provider and very best friend. Assuming, of course, that they would pay her and pay her well.
She was a wild creature, said Mother Chrome.
She hunted deer for food and made what little clothing she needed from their skins. And to make herself more beautiful to her sister-lover, she would rub her body and hair with the fresh fat of a bear.
In those days, those mountains were barely mapped.
Only a handful of biologists had even walked that ground, much less made a thorough listing of its species.
As an assistant, Mother Chrome was given the simple jobs: She captured every kind of animal possible, by whatever means, measuring them and marking their location on the professor’s maps, then killing them and putting them away for future studies. To catch lizards, she used a string noose. Nooses worked well enough with the broad-headed, slow-witted fence lizards. But not with the swift, narrow-headed whiptails. They drove her crazy. She found herself screaming and chasing after them, which was how she slipped on rocks and tumbled to the rocky ground below.
The guide came running.
Her knee was bleeding and a thumb was jammed. But the Chromatella was mostly angry, reporting what had happened, cursing the idiot lizards until she realized that her hired friend and protector was laughing wildly.
“All right,” said Mother Chrome. “You do it better!”
The guide rose and strolled over to the nearest rock pile, and after waiting forever with a rock’s patience, she easily snatched up the first whiptail that crawled out of its crevice.
A deal was soon struck: One copper for each whiptail captured.
The guide brought her dozens of specimens, and whenever there was a backlog, she would sit in the shade and watch Mother Chrome at work. After a while, with genuine curiosity, the guide asked, “Why?” She held up a dull brown lizard, then asked, “Why do you put this one on that page, while the one in your hand goes on that other page?”
“Because they’re different species,” Mother Chrome explained. Then she flipped it on its back, pointing and saying, ‘The orange neck is the difference. And if you look carefully, you can tell that they’re not quite the same size.”
But the guide remained stubbornly puzzled. She shook her head and blew out her c
heeks as if she was inflating a balloon.
Mother Chrome opened up her field guide. She found the right page and pointed. “There!” At least one field biologist had come to the same easy conclusion: Two whiptails, two species. Sister species, obviously. Probably separated by one or two million years of evolution, from the looks of it.
The guide gave a big snort.
Then she calmly put the orange neck into her mouth and bit off the lizard’s head, and with a small steel blade, she opened up its belly and groin, telling Mother Chrome, “Look until you see it. Until you can.”
Chromatellas have a taste for details. With a field lens and the last of her patience, she examined the animal’s internal organs. Most were in their proper places, but a few were misplaced, or they were badly deformed.
The guide had a ready explanation:
“The colorful ones are lazy ladies,” she claimed. “They lure in the drab ones with their colors, and they’re the aggressors in love. But they never lay any eggs. What they do, I think, is slip their eggs inside their lovers. Then their lovers have to lay both hers and the mate’s together, in a common nest.”
It was an imaginative story, and wrong.
But it took the professor and her assistant another month to be sure it was wrong, and then another few months at the Institute to realize what was really happening.
And at that point in the story, suddenly, the two Chromatellas stopped talking. They were staring at each other, talking again with their eyes.
We were in the oldest, uppermost end of the cemetery. The tombstones there were older and better made, polished and pink and carefully engraved with nicknames and birthdates and deathdates. The temple bells were no longer ringing. But we were close now. I saw the big building looming over us for a moment, then it vanished as the fog thickened again. And that’s when I admitted, “I don’t understand.” I asked my Chrome, “If the guide was wrong, then what’s the right explanation?”
“The lizard is one species. But it exists in two forms.” She sighed and showed an odd little smile. “One form lays eggs. While the other one does nothing. Nothing but donate half of its genetic information, that is.”
I was lost.
I felt strange and alone, and lost, and now I wanted to cry, only I didn’t know why. How could I know?
“As it happens,” said Mother Chrome, “a team of biologists working near the south pole were first to report a similar species. A strange bird that comes in two forms. It’s the eggless form that wears the pretty colors.”
Something tugged at my memory.
Had my Chrome told me something about this, or did I read about it myself? Maybe from my days in school . . . maybe . . . ?
“Biologists have found several hundred species like that,” said my Chrome. “Some are snakes. Some are mice. Most of them are insects.” She looked in my direction, almost smiling. “Of course flowering plants do this trick, too. Pollen is made by the stamen, and the genetics in the seeds are constantly mixing and remixing their genes. Which can be helpful. If your conditions are changing, you need to make new models to keep current. To evolve.”
Again, the temple appeared from the fog.
I had been promised something beautiful, but the building only looked tall and cold to me. The stone was dull and simple and sad, and I hated it. I had to chew on my tongue just to keep myself from saying what I was thinking.
What was I thinking?
Finally, needing to break up all this deep thinking, I turned to Mother Chrome and said, “It must have been exciting, anyway. Being one of the first to learn something like that.”
Her eyes went blind, and she turned and walked away.
I stopped, and my Chrome stopped. We watched the old woman marching toward the big doors of the temple, and when she was out of earshot, I heard my lover say, “She wasn’t there when Dr. Corvus made the breakthrough.”
I swallowed and said, “No?”
“She was called home suddenly. In the middle of the term.” My Chrome took me by the shoulder and squeezed too hard, telling me, “Her family here, and everywhere else . . . all the Chromatellas in the world were just beginning to die . . .”
###
A stupid pesticide was to blame.
It was sold for the first time just after Mother Chrome left for school. It was too new and expensive for most farmers, but the Chromatellas loved it. I can never remember its name: Some clumsy thing full of ethanes and chlorines and phenyl-somethings. Her sisters sprayed it on their fields and their animals, and they ate traces of it on their favorite foods, and after the first summer, a few of the oldest Chromes complained of headaches that began to turn into brain tumors, which is how the plague showed itself.
At first, people considered the tumors to be bad luck.
When Mother Chrome’s great and grand died in the same winter, it was called a coincidence, and it was sad. Nothing more.
Not until the next summer did the Plague Bureau realize what was happening. Something in the Chromatella blood wasn’t right. The pesticide sneaked into their bodies and brains, and fast-growing tumors would flare up. First in the old, then the very young. The Bureau banned the poison immediately. Whatever was left unused was buried or destroyed. But almost every Chromatella had already eaten and breathed too much of it. When Mother Chrome finally came home, her mother met her at the train station, weeping uncontrollably. Babies were sick, she reported, and all the old people were dying. Even healthy adults were beginning to suffer headaches and tremors, which meant it would be all over by spring. Her mother said that several times. “Over by spring,” she said. Then she wiped at her tears and put on a brave Chromatella face, telling her daughter, “Dig your grave now. That’s my advice. And find a headstone you like, before they’re all gone.”
But Mother Chrome never got ill.
“The Institute grew their own food,” my Chrome told me.
We were in bed together, warm and happy and in love, and she told the story because it was important for me to know what had happened, and because she thought that I was curious. Even though I wasn’t. I knew enough already, I was telling myself.
“They grew their own food,” she repeated, “and they used different kinds of pesticides. Safer ones, it turns out.”
I nodded, saying nothing.
“Besides,” she told me, “Mother spent that summer in the wilderness. She ate clean deer and berries and the like.”
“That helped too?” I asked.
“She’s never had a sick day in her life,” my Chrome assured me. “But after she came home, and for those next few months, she watched everyone else get sicker and weaker. Neighbor communities sent help when they could, but it was never enough. Mother took care of her dying sisters and her mother, then she buried them. And by spring, as promised, it was over. The plague had burnt itself out. But instead of being like the old plagues, where a dozen or fifty of us would survive . . . instead of a nucleus of a town, there was one of us left. In the entire world, there was no one exactly like my mother.”
I was crying. I couldn’t help but sob and sniffle.
“Mother has lived at home ever since.” My Chrome was answering the question that she only imagined I would ask. “Mother felt it was her duty. To make a living, she reopened the old mothering house. A traveler was her lover, for a few nights, and that helped her conceive. Which was me. Until my twin sisters were born, I was the only other Chromatella in the world.”
And she was my Chrome.
Unimaginably rare, and because of it, precious.
###
Five sisters and better than a dozen children were waiting inside the temple, sitting together up front, singing loudly for the Solstice.
But the place felt empty nonetheless.
We walked up the long, long center aisle. After a few steps, Mother Chrome was pulling away from us. She was halfway running, while I found myself moving slower. And between us was my Chrome. She looked ahead, then turned and stared at me. I could
see her being patient. I could hear her patience.
She asked, “What?” Then she drifted back to me, asking again, “What?”
I felt out of place.
Lonely, and lost.
But instead of confessing it, I said, “I’m stupid. I know.”
“You are not stupid,” she told me. Her patience was fraying away. Too quietly, she said, “What don’t you understand? Tell me.”
“How can those lizards survive? If half of them are like you say, how do they ever lay enough eggs?”
“Because the eggs they lay have remixed genes,” she told me, as if nothing could be simpler. “Every whiptail born is different from every other one. Each is unique. A lot of them are weaker than their parents, sure. But if their world decides to change around them—which can happen in the mountains—then a few of them will thrive.”
But the earth is a mild place, mostly. Our sun has always been steady, and our axis tilts only a few degrees. Which was why I had to point out, “God knew what she was doing, making us the way we are. Why would anyone need to change?”
My Chrome almost spoke. Her mouth came open, then her face tilted, and she slowly turned away from me, saying nothing.
The singing had stopped.
Mother Chrome was speaking with a quick quiet voice, telling everyone about the telephone call. She didn’t need to explain it to her daughters for them to understand. Even the children seemed captivated, or maybe they were just bored with singing and wanted to play a new game.
My Chrome took one of her sisters downstairs to retrieve the old television.
I sat next to one of the twins, waiting.
There was no confusing her for my Chrome. She had a farmer’s hands and solid shoulders, and she was six months pregnant. With those scarred hands on her belly, she made small talk about the fog and the frost. But I could tell that her mind was elsewhere, and after a few moments, our conversation came to a halt.
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