For the first time since her veil came off, I see a tiredness and sadness in her eyes. Her lips are dry and the color of her makeup has faded with the afternoon. The edges of her eyes show wrinkles and creases I’ve never noticed before. Her hair has more gray and looks more brittle than I remember, not the silky smooth black that it used to be. For a moment, she reminds me of my mother, not the First Wife, and I want to reach out to her, to touch her hand.
It had not occurred to me that she might need comfort, too. Maybe that’s why she allowed herself to be drawn by Darius to the bedroom.
Her voice comes soft and soothing, but it has scratches and breaks in it as she says, “Not all things are as they seem, Dane. I need to talk with you. But now is not the time.”
The door clicks and swings open, and we are confronted by what looks like a candy-cane sausage in spindly heels, topped by a ruffle of whipped cream. Oh my god, it’s the daughter of the farmer who donated his lamb, the one who makes the wonderful lamb jerky. The girl immediately starts twittering like a terrified starling and click-clacks across the floor to the seat. Her crinkled, walnut nose floats above the sea of teeth that make up her eager, yellowish smile.
She plops onto the stool and does not even wait for my mother’s silent inspection to begin before blurting out, “I hope you like my dress. I made it myself!” She pats at the red curls which revolt from under her ruffled white bonnet, but her thick hands fail to subdue them. She fans her pinkish face with both hands and declares, “Isn’t it hot today? So hot even the dead might rise up and go swim in the lake!”
She appears completely oblivious to the impact such a remark might make on the recently bereaved. I turn off my ears before they can be further assaulted, and I let my mother take over the interview.
When it’s all over and she’s curtseyed her blubbery way out the door, my mother turns to me. “She is the one, Dane. We will allow the final two interviews out of courtesy, and to ensure our choice is not known until tomorrow morning, as is tradition.”
My jaw drops open. I wait for her to laugh at the joke, but no such relief comes.
“You can’t be serious. There’s no way I will ever have her as First Wife.”
“I am, and you will, Dane.”
“Then you’re dooming Southshaw. I could never bring myself to… to… um, you know. To give her a child.”
“Oh, Dane. Don’t worry. When the time comes, I do believe you will find you have the strength in you.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure. Now is not the time.”
The door clicks and our conversation stops once more. The next hour I spend ignoring the last two girls, both of whom are sweet and forgettable and timid like mice in a wolf’s den. Even though my mind should be contemplating the next twenty-four hours, all I can think about is the candy-cane sausage girl—I still can’t remember her name—and what my wedding night might be like. What could my mother see in her? It is so clear that Freda would make an ideal First Wife, that Freda is so terribly similar to my own mother. And it is so clear that the sausage girl is… well, not. If my mother has to pick someone bad for the job, why couldn’t she pick Kitta? At least then I’d have a reason to look forward to my wedding night.
When the door finally clicks shut for the last time, my mother stands immediately. Without a word, she strides toward the door. I move to protest, but as she opens the door she whispers, “Now is not the time!” She disappears through the door and leaves it open as an indication that I should follow. It has been five grueling hours, and I am ready for any place other than this room. There will be a feast, and a festival where each of the Verges will dance with me, and a recital from the church choir.
Darius appears in the doorway as I’m rising from my chair. Aches come rushing back with the blood flow, twice as bad as they hurt earlier in the day. Darius leans on the doorjamb and grins at me in his doggish manner. “Judith tells me you’ve made your selection.” He laughs. “Not the one I would have chosen if I were a young man choosing a wife.” He laughs again, loud and mirthful. “Come on. It’s time for the feast.”
I walk toward him, but he doesn’t move as I near the door. It appears he wants me to shove past him as he blocks half the space of the doorway, so I try to make myself thin and slip through. As I do, he puts his hand on my chest and pushes hard to stop me. His voice drops to a hiss. “Don’t play games with this, Dane. This is too important. To Southshaw.”
I look at him and try to understand what he means. “What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He pokes me in the chest with his finger, and it hurts more than I would expect. “Baddock returned an hour ago. He and I had a very interesting chat.”
Baddock. The name alone knocks me senseless. The room seems to spin around me. I know that Darius is talking more but all I hear is a vague buzzing, and my legs feel week and trembly. Baddock would have told Darius about Lupay. He would have told the wrong story. My stomach churns with fear and exhaustion, and despite not eating for hours, I feel like I’m going to retch right here in the doorway. To steady myself and stop the room spinning, I reach behind me to grab the doorframe.
“…needs leadership, Dane. Leadership they can trust. Without trust, there is no stability. If they can’t trust you…” He lets his sentence die into the sound of his boot heels clicking away on the wood floor, and his implications lingering in the air with the syrupy stench of his cologne.
CHAPTER 11
Chiliss brushes a final few unseen specks of lint from my jacket. “Remember what to say,” she chatters. Chiliss has the slightest lisp, a soft, whistly way of mangling her esses. “And for goodness sake don’t forget the girl’s name. She is going to be your wife for forever, you know!”
It feels like the first time I’ve had a reason to smile in days. My friends joke that Chiliss, who was my nursemaid when I was a baby and has stayed on as my valet as I’ve grown, is old enough to have been part of the Evacuation. Some say her exposure to the Radiation right after the War caused her to be unable to have children of her own, but she told me recently that she’s only sixty-three. She’s just short and wrinkled and gray-haired. And she lisps and frets over the littlest things.
“So?” She steps back and squints half sideways at me. Everyone knows she needs glasses for her bad eye, but she insists she doesn’t.
“So what, Chiliss?”
“So! So! You are such a little boy, Dane.” She chuffs out a sharp sigh and pokes me in the chest. “So. What is her name!”
Gayle. Or maybe Glenda. Or Gwen. Or maybe Martha? “Um…”
I hesitate too long, and I earn a wallop to the side of my head for my stupidity. Chiliss quickly frets about the hairs she whacked out of place and tsk-tsks me. “Suzee. Suzee Lummon.”
“Oh. Right. That should be easy enough to remember.”
“Yes it should. I can’t believe you don’t remember her name. You picked her from all the others.” She looks absently at the floor, pondering. Then she fixes me with her good eye again, not unlike a crow staring me down sideways. “So stunned by her ravishing beauty that you can’t remember her name?”
I can’t hide my smile at that. She’s joking, surely. Sausage-ee Lump-on—the way I’m remembering her name, even though I may get in trouble if I say it out loud—is perhaps the homeliest girl in all of Southshaw. Her only asset is her father’s powerful position as one of Darius' inner circle. But I realize my smile has faded when I see Chiliss is eyeing me with suspicion.
“Don’t lie to me, you whelp,” Chiliss says gently. “You didn’t pick her, did you?”
I straighten because I can hear the choir outside on the stage piping up with the pre-introduction song. “She’s the loveliest, Chiliss. She’s beautiful on the inside.”
“Oh, Dane.” She looks sad and sounds defeated. “If your father were—“
“He isn’t.” I lay awake a long time before exhaustion finally overcame me last night, and in that time I came
to peace with my father’s absence. It is my time to be a leader, to do what Southshaw needs of me. If that means marrying the daughter of Shepherd Lummon, then that’s what it means.
The song outside progresses through peaks and valleys of harmony, and even through the thick wooden walls I admire the beautiful tones. I’ve always wished I could make sounds that beautiful, but I was unfortunate to be gifted with a rough and clumsy voice like my father. The song hits a pause, then slowly grows as it reaches up into the sky and demands with its beauty and strength the attention of every living thing, even of God himself.
Chiliss opens the door, and I stride into the warm morning. I look only to my spot on the stage and walk straight to it, trying to look like the man who will run the entire nation until I have a son of my own old enough to take over.
I am not sure what I expected. This is, after all, the first Wifing since nearly twenty years before I was born, and the first Promotion since my father was named Semper more than twenty years ago. I guess I expected some happiness in the people. This is supposed to be a festival. This is supposed to be a happy occasion.
The song crests and crashes like a wave in the wind, and the choir recedes like a fading breeze. Before me, a thousand Southshawans are crammed into the square, standing shoulder to shoulder, sweating on each other in the bright sunlight. I look over them, catching eyes here and there. Not one shows any happiness at all. Some look at me with a kind of pity or regret in their faces. A few women are even crying. Have they been told already whom I’ve “chosen” to be my bride?
At the base of the stage in specially built pews sit the ten Verges and their mothers. Most look stoic, holding their emotions inside as best they can. Only two of the pews are looking at me. The rest are looking at the choir, admiring the final fading voices. Sausage-ee’s mother is grinning like her fat, idiot daughter. She must already have been told, then. But Sausage-ee is nibbling at her nails, her nose scrunched up to get her beaver teeth a better angle on the stubby fingertips. She, then, has not been told. Her mother must think it will be great fun for her to be surprised.
I glance at the stunningly beautiful Kitta, dressed today in the traditional white gown. It does a good job of hiding her curves, but the sheer god-given graceful lines of her face, the beauty of her lake-blue eyes, the golden glow of her hair… they all conspire to convince me to change my mind and pick her. Chiliss, for one, would be pleased, I think. I take a deep breath and tear my gaze away from Kitta. Pleasing Chiliss is not important. Southshaw’s future is important.
Freda is the only other of the Verges that looks at me. She is staring at me hard, piercing me, gouging out my insides and spilling them over the stage. Hatred and rage burn across the empty space between us, and it hurts. I don’t understand. Of all the Verges, hers is the only opinion I could even come close to caring about. And yet she hates me. Has she, too, been told of the selection?
I tear my attention from her but feel the burn of her stare still boring holes in me. I stand here, left of center on the stage, in rich blue woolen clothes—oh. Freda perhaps made these clothes. And… didn’t she talk yesterday about how the Wifing should be postponed? It’s coming back to me as I stand here in the sunlight. She wanted a period of mourning.
And I stand in exactly the same place my father’s body lay not twenty four hours earlier.
I look to my right where Darius stands center stage. His hands are clasped before him. The song is finally faded to silence, and only a few coughs and sniffles from the crowd interrupt the morning. I feel my own chest rise and fall with a quickening breath. Sausage-ee Lump-on. Suzee Lummon. Suzee Lummon. I think the name over and over and over, focusing only on the sounds. I cannot forget. Suzee Lummon.
Darius’ voice booms with a sudden ferocity across the square, so loud and sharp that it echoes back at me and knocks the sausage girl’s name right out of my mind.
“People of Southshaw!” By reflex, every person turns to look at him, including me. But something looks out of place. Darius continues while I try to puzzle out what’s different from what Chiliss told me would happen. Darius in the center. Me, off to the left but slightly forward. The Verges in the front row, with their mothers. My own mother standing—
“Normally, we would begin with the morning prayer to initiate the Wifing ceremony. All is prepared. We have our Semper-son standing ready. We have our ten Verges at hand, one of whom will soon, by the time the sun goes down today, be your new First Wife.”
First Wife. My mother is not at my side, where the First Wife should be during her son’s Wifing. By tradition, the First Wife receives her successor to unite the new couple. But my mother stands behind Darius. She stands where the First Wife stands when the Semper is addressing the nation. Where she stood every time my father made an announcement. And it is wrong.
Confusion sweeps over me, but not the dizzy confusion of last night. Now it’s the confusion of being unable to solve a riddle I know I’ve heard before.
Darius has paused as if he is waiting for a cheer, but none comes. The crowd has noticed the misplacement as well, and they withhold their approval.
I look to Freda, and she is still staring at me in exactly the same way. But it’s not hate and rage against me she’s burning with—the hate and rage are directed at Darius, and at my mother. The intensity in her stare at me is something else. Expectation.
But I am not yet Semper. Darius is rightfully in charge of the ceremony. The Law says he is the one to hold temporary power until the new Semper is promoted. What can I possibly do? If I interfere, my action will be seen as childish and petty. Maybe I will be seen as a nuisance, a crybaby. Weak.
“Before we begin the festivities, however,” Darius says, “hear this announcement. This happiest of days for our nation, for our community, and—“ he pauses to smile in what he must think is a loving way but looks more like a bearded snake—“our household, has become happier still.”
A gasp rises from some people in the crowd, and even the normally stoic Southshawans can’t entirely stifle the murmur of disapproval that rises in pockets. Something in their reaction chills me, digs an empty hole in my gut. But the solution to the puzzle, the answer to the riddle, still lies just outside my reach.
“For this morning, at sunrise, in a private ceremony under the eyes of God, Judith consented to take me as her husband.”
If it’s possible for a person’s body to lose all its heat, for the blood to disappear from its veins, for every nerve to burn as if stuck by ten thousand pins—that is the feeling that overcomes me. My body threatens to collapse under me. Suzee Lummon. Suzee Lummon. From the void that has taken over my mind, these sounds emerge and give me something to hold on to. I hear them forming themselves, the remnants of a rhythm I’d burned into my brain. I grasp them and begin thinking them myself. Suzee Lummon. Suzee Lummon.
A thumping solidifies within me, like a heavy drum beating in time to the words. Suzee Lummon. Bum-bum, bum-bum. Suzee Lummon. Bum-bum, bum-bum. I fix my thoughts on that and realize that there’s no drum at all, that it is my heart beating. The words have no meaning to me, and soon they disappear in a whining buzz like a swarm of mosquitoes inside my head.
The buzzing is distant but growing nearer. I have no idea where I am, and memories flit in and out of my vision seemingly at random. I know I’ve had this feeling before. In the ancient house. I am overcome by something, and I have fallen and hit my head. Lupay will rouse me in a moment.
In a few seconds I realize I am still standing upright and have not fallen down at all. The buzzing changes from mosquitoes to a crowd of voices. Their disapproval climbs up over the front of the stage to confront Darius and my mother, damning them and the horror of their union. It is the buzzing of a crowd becoming a mob.
Darius stands with his dog smile looking out over the crowd. He is unmoved, anchored to center stage by his thick-soled, black leather boots. He slowly turns to his new wife and reaches to her. She is trembling visibly, her white dress sh
aking and dark stains showing under her arms. Sweat beads form on her quivering lips, and she almost stumbles as she leans forward in an awkward step. Darius grabs her hand and steadies her. His arm slithers around her waist and draws her tight to his side. She looks down at the floor to hide her face from the mob. Two tears fall from her cheeks and splash to the wood floor.
I should protest. I want to hit Darius. I wish my knife were in my hand. I wish Lupay were at my side, her blade whishing through the air to slice through his neck. But she’s not here. And my own hands will have to do, since I have no knife.
I lean forward to push myself into a step. My legs are still unsteady, but I swear I will kill him. I take one step, then stop when I see a figure dart from the shadows across the way. It’s fast and ruthless and efficient, and it comes out of the shadows just enough into the light. I see the glint of a silver blade in its hand, and I stop cold.
Baddock.
Darius acts as if he has not even noticed the two of us. My mother stands trembling, head bowed. Baddock continues at a slower pace to stand on the other side of my mother. He, too, turns his head to the floor, but I know all his attention is on me.
“That is my happy announcement,” Darius booms. “And now, dear friends and fellow Southshawans, let us make ready for today’s grand event.”
Baddock lifts my mother’s arm and escorts her to stand at her proper place by my side for the Wifing ceremony. He should depart after delivering her, but he does not. He simply takes one step back to stand behind her. Whether it’s to protect her or as some sort of threat is unclear.
“Let us pray,” Darius says, and all the crowd bow their heads and listen to Darius intone a blessing and invocation, the traditional start to the Wifing ceremony. It takes nearly a minute. I ignore the words and look down at the girls and their mothers. Nine of the ten are looking down, eyes closed, hands clasped, mouths silently working the words they want God to hear. The tenth—Freda—stands staring up at me. Hate and rage still smolder there, but now there’s something else. Fear?
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