The Eye of the Heron Page 7

  “What else is there, for a woman? What else that really counts?”

  Vera turned a little to look out the open doors into the gray garden. She sighed, a deep involuntary drawing of breath.

  “I wanted a child very much,” she said. “But you see, there were other things … that counted.” She smiled faintly. “Oh, yes, it’s a choice. But not the only one. One can be a mother and a great deal else besides. One can do more than one thing. With the will, and the luck … . My luck wasn’t good, or maybe I was wrongheaded, made the wrong choice. I don’t like compromise, you see. I set my heart on a man who … had his heart set on somebody else. That was Sasha—Alexander Shults, Lev’s father. Oh, a long long time ago, before you were born. So he married, and I went on with the work I was good at, because it always interested me, but there weren’t any other men who did. But even if I’d married did I have to sit in the back room all my life? You know, if we sit in the back room, with babies or without babies, and leave all the rest of the world to the men, then of course the men will do everything and be everything. Why should they? They’re only half the human race. It’s not fair to leave them all the work to do. Not fair to them or us. Besides,” and she smiled more broadly, “I like men very much, but sometimes … they’re so stupid, so stuffed with theories … . They go in straight lines only, and won’t stop. It’s dangerous to do that. It’s dangerous to leave everything up to the men, you know. That’s one reason why I’d like to go home, at least for a visit. To see what Elia with his theories, and my dear young Lev with his ideals, are up to. I get worried they’ll go too fast and too straight and get us into a place we can’t get out of, a trap. You see it seems to me that where men are weak and dangerous is in their vanity. A woman has a center, is a center. But a man isn’t, he’s a reaching out. So he reaches out and grabs things and piles them up around him and says, I’m this, I’m that, this is me, that’s me, I’ll prove that I am me! And he can wreck a lot of things, trying to prove it. That’s what I was trying to say about your father. If he’d only be Luis Falco. That is quite enough. But no, he has to be the Boss, the Councillor, the Father, and so on. What a waste! And Lev, he’s terribly vain too, maybe in the same way. A great heart, but not sure where the center is. Oh, I wish I could talk with him, just for ten minutes, and make sure … .” Vera had long since forgotten to wind her thread; she shook her head sadly and looked down at the skein with a faraway gaze.

  “Go on, then,” Luz said in a low voice.

  Vera looked mildly puzzled.

  “Go back to the Town. Tonight. I’ll let you out. And I’ll tell my father, tomorrow, that I did so. I can do something—something besides sit here and sew and swear and listen to that stupid Macmilan!”

  Lithe, robust, and commanding, the girl had leapt to her feet and stood over Vera, who sat still, looking shrunken.

  “I’ve given my word, Luz Marina.”

  “What does that matter?”

  “If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth,” Vera answered in a hard voice.

  They stared at each other, their faces set.

  “I have no child,” Vera said, “and you have no mother. If I could help you, child, I would. But not that way. I keep my promises.”

  “I make no promises,” Luz said.

  She cleared a strand of thread from the spindle, Vera wound it onto the skein.

  6

  Whip butts rattled on doors. Men’s voices rang out; down by River Farm somebody was shouting or screaming. Villagers huddled together in a group in the cold, smoke-scented fog; it was not daybreak yet, houses and faces were lost in the fog and dark. Inside the little houses children, frightened by their parents’ fear and confusion, screamed aloud. People tried to get lamps lighted, to find their clothes, to hush the children. The City guards, excited, armed among the weaponless and clothed among the unclothed, flung open doors, shouldered into warm dark interiors of houses, shouted orders at the villagers and each other, pushed men one way and women another; their officer could have no control over them, dispersed as they were in the dark, among houses, and in the growing crowd in the one street of the village; only the docility of the villagers prevented the excitement of brutality from becoming the ecstasy of murder and rape. They protested, argued, and questioned verbally, but since most of them thought they were being arrested, and all had agreed at the Meeting House not to resist arrest, they obeyed the guards’ orders as promptly as they could; when they understood the orders, they passed the information on readily and clearly—grown men out onto the street, women and children stay indoors—as the best means of self-protection; so the frantic officer found his prisoners rounding themselves up. As soon as there was a group of twenty or so, he told off four guards, one armed with a musket, to march them out of the village. Two such groups had been marched off from Tableland Village; the fourth from South Village was being brought together when Lev arrived. Lyons’s wife Rosa had run from Tableland to Shantih, and, exhausted, had hammered at the Shultses’ door, gasping, “They’re taking off the men, the guards, they’re taking off all the men.” Lev had set off at once, alone, leaving Sasha to rouse the rest of the Town. As he came up, panting from the three-kilometer run, the fog was thinning, growing luminous; the figures of villagers and guards on the South Road bulked strangely in the half-light, as he cut across the fields to the head of the group. He stopped in front of the man at the head of the half-bunched, half-straggling line. “What’s going on?”

  “Labor draft. Get in line with the others.”

  Lev knew the guard, a tall fellow named Angel; they had been at school together for a year. Southwind and the other girls from Shantih had been afraid of Angel, because he cornered them in the hallway when he could and tried to handle them.

  “Get in line,” Angel repeated, and swung up his musket, resting the end of the barrel on Lev’s chest. He was breathing almost as hard as Lev, and his eyes were widely dilated; he gave a kind of gasping laugh, watching how Lev’s winded breathing made the gun barrel rise and fall. “You ever hear one of these go off, boy? Loud, loud, like a ringtree seed—” He pushed the musket harder against Lev’s breastbone, then swung the gun up suddenly pointing at the sky, and fired.

  Dazed by the terrific noise, Lev staggered back and stood staring. Angel’s face had gone dead gray; he also stood blank for some seconds, shaken by the recoil of the crudely made gun.

  The villagers behind Lev, thinking he had been shot, came surging forward, and the other guards ran with them, yelling and cursing; the long whips uncoiled and cracked, flickering weirdly in the fog. “I’m all right,” Lev said. His voice sounded faint and distant inside his head. “I’m all right!” he shouted as loud as he could. He heard Angel also shouting, saw a villager take a whiplash straight across his face. “Get back in line!” He joined the group of villagers, and they huddled together, then, obeying the guards, strung out by twos and threes, and started to walk southward down the rough track.

  “Why are we going south? This isn’t the City Road, why are we going south?” the one next to him, a boy of eighteen or so, said in a ragged whisper.

  “It’s a labor draft,” Lev said. “Some kind of work. How many have they taken?” He shook his head to rid it of a buzzing dizziness.

  “All the men in our valley. Why do we have to go?”

  “To bring the others back. When we’re all together we can act together. It’ll be all right. Nobody got hurt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’ll be all right. Hold fast,” Lev whispered, not knowing what he was saying. He began to drop back through the others until he came alongside the man who had been whipped. He was walking with his arm across his eyes, another man was holding his shoulder to guide him; they were last in line; barely visible in the ground mist, a guard followed behind.

  “Can you see?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said, pressing his arm across his face. His gray hair stood up ruffled and tufted; he was wearing a nightshirt and t
rousers, and was barefoot; his broad bare feet looked curiously childlike, shuffling and stubbing on the rocks and mud of the road.

  “Take your arm away, Pamplona,” the other man said anxiously. “So we can have a look.”

  The guard following behind shouted something, a threat or an order to move along faster.

  Pamplona lowered his arm. Both his eyes were shut; one was untouched, the other was lost in an open bleeding slash where the whipthong had cut from the corner of the brow to the bridge of the nose. “It hurts,” he said. “What was it? I can’t see, there’s something in my eye. Lyons? Is that you? I want to go home.”

  More than a hundred men were taken from the villages and outlying farms south and west of Shantih to begin work on the new estates in South Valley. They got there in mid-morning, as the fog was lifting off Mill River in writhing banners. Several guards were posted out on the South Road to prevent troublemakers from Shantih joining the forced-labor group. Tools were distributed, hoes, mattocks, brush-knives; and they were put to work in groups of four or five, each watched over by a guard armed with whip or musket. No barracks or shelters had been set up for them or for the thirty guards. When evening came, they built campfires of wet wood and slept on the wet ground. Food had been provided, but the bread had got rain-soaked so that most of it was a mass of dough. The guards grumbled bitterly among themselves. The villagers talked, persistently. At first the officer in charge of the operation, Captain Eden, tried to forbid them from talking, fearing conspiracy; then, when he realized that one group among them was arguing with another lot who were for running off during the night, he let them talk. He had no way to prevent them from sneaking off by ones and twos in the darkness; guards were stationed about with muskets, but they couldn’t see in the dark, there was no possibility of keeping bright fires going in the rain, and they had not been able to build a “compound area” as ordered. The villagers had worked hard at ground-clearing, but had proved inept and stupid at constructing any kind of fence or palisade out of the cut shrubs and brambles, and his own men would not lay down their weapons to do such work.

  Captain Eden set his men on watch and watch; he himself did not sleep that night.

  In the morning the whole lot of them, his men and the villagers, still seemed to be there; everyone was slow-moving in the misty cold, and it took hours to get fires lighted and some kind of breakfast cooked and served out. Then the tools must be distributed again, the long hoes, the wicked steel brush-knives, mattocks, machetes. A hundred and twenty men armed with those, against thirty with whips and muskets. Didn’t they see what they could so easily do? Under Captain Eden’s disbelieving gaze the villagers filed past the heap of tools, just as they had done yesterday, took what they needed, and set to work again clearing the brush and undergrowth off the slope down to the river. They worked hard and well; they knew this kind of work; without paying much heed to the guards’ commands, they divided themselves into teams, rotating the hardest labor. Most of the guards both looked and felt bored, cold, and superfluous; their mood was sullen, as it had been ever since the brief and unfulfilled excitement of raiding the villages and rounding up the men.

  The sun came out late in the morning, but by midday the clouds had thickened and the rain was beginning again. Captain Eden ordered a break for a meal—another ration of ruined bread—and was talking with two guards he was sending back to the City to request fresh supplies and some canvas to use for tents and groundcloths, when Lev came over to him.

  “One of our people needs a doctor, and two of them are too old for this kind of work.” He pointed to Pamplona, who sat, his head bandaged with a torn shirt, talking with Lyons and two gray-headed men. “They should be sent back to their village.”

  Lev’s manner, though not that of an inferior addressing an officer, was perfectly civil. The captain looked at him appraisingly, but not with prejudice. Angel had pointed out this wiry little fellow last night as one of the Shanty Town ringleaders, and it was evident that the villagers tended to look at Lev whenever an order was given or a threat made, as if for direction. How they got it the captain did not know, for he had not seen Lev giving them any orders himself; but if the boy was, in some fashion, a leader, Captain Eden was willing to deal with him as such. The most unnerving element in the situation to the captain was its lack of structure. He was in charge, yet he had no authority beyond what these men, and his own men, were willing to allow him. His men were rough customers at best, and now felt frustrated and ill-used; the Shanty people were an unknown quantity. In the last analysis he had nothing completely dependable except his musket; and nine of his men were also armed.

  Whether the odds were thirty against a hundred and twenty, or one against a hundred and forty-nine, the wise course was evidently reasonable firmness without bullying. “It’s just a whip cut,” he said quietly to the young man. “He can lay off work for a couple of days. The old men can look after the food, dry out this bread, keep the fires going. No one is allowed to leave until the work is done.”

  “The cut’s deep. He’ll lose his eye if it isn’t looked after. And he’s in pain. He has got to go home.”

  The captain considered. “All right,” he said. “If he can’t work, he can go. Alone.”

  “It’s too far for him to walk without help.”

  “Then he stays.”

  “He’ll have to be carried. It’ll take four men to carry a stretcher.”

  Captain Eden shrugged and turned away.

  “Senhor, we’ve agreed not to work until Pamplona’s taken care of.”

  The captain turned to face Lev again, not impatiently, but with a steady gaze. “‘Agreed’—?”

  “When he and the old men are sent home, we’ll get back to work.”

  “My orders are from the Council,” the captain said, “and your orders are from me. You must make that clear to these men.”

  “Look,” the young man said, with a little warmth but no anger, “we’ve decided to go ahead, at least temporarily. The work’s worth doing, the community does need new farmlands; this is a good location for a village. But we’re not obeying orders. We’re yielding to your threat of force, in order to spare ourselves, and you, injury or murder. But right now the man whose life’s at stake is Pamplona there, and if you won’t act to save him, then we have to. The two old men, too; they can’t stay here with no shelter. Old Sun has arthritis. Until they’re sent home, we can’t go on with the work.”

  Captain Eden’s round, swarthy face had gone rather pale. Young Boss Macmilan had told him, “Round up a couple of hundred peasants and get them clearing the west bank of Mill River below the ford,” and that had sounded straightforward, not an easy job but a man’s job, a real responsibility with reward to follow. But he seemed to be the only one responsible. His men were barely under control, and these Shanty-Towners were incomprehensible. First they were frightened and incredibly meek, now they were trying to give orders to him. If in fact they weren’t afraid of his guards, why did they waste time talking? If he was one of them he’d say the hell with it, and make sure he had a machete; they were four to one, and ten at most would be shot before they pulled down and pitchforked the guards who had muskets. There was no sense to their behavior, but it was shameful, unmanly. Where was he to find his own self-respect, in this damned wilderness? The gray river smoking with rain, the tangled, soggy valley, the moldy porridge that was supposed to be bread, the cold down his back where his soaked tunic clung to him, the sullen faces of his men, the voice of this queer boy telling him what to do, it was all too much. He shifted his musket around into his hands. “Listen,” he said. “You, and the rest, get back to work. Now. Or I’ll have you tied and taken back to the City, to jail. Take your pick.”

  He had not spoken loudly, but all the others, guards and villagers, were aware of the confrontation. Many stood up from the campfires, knots and clumps of men, mud-blackened, wet hair lank on their foreheads. A while passed, a few seconds, half a minute at most, very long, si
lent, except for the sound of rain on the raw dirt around them and on the tangled brush sloping down to the river and the leaves of the cottonwool trees by the river, a fine, soft, vast pattering.

  The captain’s eyes, trying to watch everything at once, his men, the villagers, the pile of tools, met Lev’s eyes and were held.

  “We’re stuck, senhor,” the young man said almost in a whisper. “What now?”

  “Tell them to get to work.”

  “All right!” Lev said, and turning, “Rolf, Adi, will you start making a stretcher? You and two of the City men will carry Pamplona back to Shantih. Thomas and Sun will go with them. The rest of us back to the job, right?” He and the rest of them went to the pile of hoes and mattocks, picked up their tools, and unhurriedly strung out across the slope again, chopping at the mats of bramble, digging at the roots of shrubs.

  Captain Eden, with a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, turned to his men. The two to whom he had been giving orders stood nearest. “You’ll escort the sick ones to their village, before going to the City. And be back with the two able-bodied ones by nightfall. Understand?” He saw Angel, musket in hand, looking at him. “You’ll go with them, lieutenant,” he said crisply. The two guards, looking blank, saluted; Angel’s gaze was openly insolent, jeering.

  That evening, by the cooking fire, Lev and three other villagers came to the captain again. “Senhor,” said one of the older men, “we’ve decided, see, that we’ll work here for a week, as community labor, if you City men work along with us. It won’t do, see, twenty or thirty of you just standing around doing nothing while we work.”

  “Get these men back where they belong, Martin!” the captain said to a guard on watch duty. The guard lounged forward, hand on whip butt; the villagers looked at one another, shrugged, and returned to their campfire. The important thing, Captain Eden said to himself, was not to talk, not to let them talk. Night came on, black and pouring. It never rained like this in the City; there were roofs there. The noise of the rain was terrible in the darkness, all around, on miles, miles, miles of black wilderness. The fires sputtered, drowned. The guards huddled wretchedly under trees, dropped their musket muzzles in squelching mud, crouched and cursed and shivered. When dawn came, there were no villagers; they had melted off in the night, in the rain. Fourteen guards were also missing.