11 - Chalk on the stepfather

The two points of red I knew from having felt them on my own cheeks rose on hers. My mother is a person of few words, fewer still when she is moved. Now she said only, “Why?”

All the others looked at me. I looked back at them, suddenly thinking, for one of the few times I ever had, that I’d done my share of the speaking and leading, and now someone else should take a turn.

“I don’t like him,” Naiga blurted. “He doesn’t belong here.”

“His hands smell of stone-dust,” said Artira.

“He’s fat,” said Handa. “He’s mean. He’s pom… pous.”

“He’s not as nice as Daddy.”

All excuses, most of them out-and-out lies. Yet though regret for the wrong we were doing had begun to wake in me, it was not enough to quench my anger, so I stood content to let others voice the darkness in my heart without sullying my own tongue with it.

She listened patiently until the words ran out. Bad enough that she had lost the man she loved, but to see her children’s grief come out so… I know it would have shaken me. But she said, “Let me think,” looked into the fire for a bit, and then turned to us and said, “It is unfair, isn’t it? Why should I be able to get myself another husband, when you will not be able to get another father?”

We all stood startled, to hear what we really felt put in words so much clearer than our own. It was like pushing against an opponent with all your might, only to have him give backwards completely, so that your own strength throws you over his head. The greatest warriors and sages fight that way.

Her dark eyes gazed clear and open at me, and through the exchanged look I was suddenly her, feeling her loneliness, my loneliness. The light of my life extinguished… the marching of days regardless, the turning of months, the changing of seasons; the wound in my soul scarring, crimson easing to pink and black fading to grey; food regaining taste and company pleasure. I still live, and need living love.

Chiravesa washed my soul clean as it often does. I saw the anger that had seemed as large as myself in its true size, the tantrum of a child, delicious in its purity and release, but still just a tantrum. I took a breath, wiped my eyes and turned to my siblings.

To my astonishment, their faces were still hard, unchanged as stone. I’d assumed they’d just realized what I had; how could they not? That was one of the times that taught me not to assume that others will take the same meaning from what they see. They looked at me, their eyes saying, “We voted; you’re our voice. Speak our decision.”

They were in their rights. As my aunt argued the will of the people to foreign powers whether she agreed with it or not, I must argue my sibs’ to my mother, for all the heart had gone out of me.

“We voted as we felt,” I said. She was looking into my eyes; I couldn’t tell whether she knew I was no longer speaking for myself or not. By the law of semana kra, it didn’t matter. I felt like a traitor twice over.

I found out when we talked about it years later that she had noticed. But she didn’t let on, then. She just called us all out to do chiravesa with her, to imagine ourselves in her place while she imagined herself in ours. “Chevenga,” she said to me. “You do it differently… imagine yourself him. As if, say, he had somehow known before he died that he was going to. What would you want for your wife, afterwards?” The best parents know how to make one lesson into two.

When she was about to imagining herself us, Artira blurted out, “You used to let us come into your room any time. Now we have to tap, and you always send us away.” Not quite true, not always; but true enough. My mother admitted that it was in part out of shame for letting other men be where he had been, in our sight.

If every parent had my mother’s wisdom, this would be a happier world. She didn’t even make us take the vote again in her presence, just let us go. I led the others into my room and took off my crystal again. “This vote is final,” I said. “If it goes chalk for Veraha, we’ve approved him, and no one can go back on it or be mean to him again, die cast, gates fast and all go home. All chalk, all charcoal… I see six chalks, he is approved unanimously.”

The wedding took place on the summer solstice, always considered a lucky day for a widow or widower to remarry. I remember how everything seemed charged with life: my mother’s face beneath her crown of ivy and star-flower, flushed like a girls for all she wore the black ribbon twined with the others around her neck; the ornate borders, embroidered in red, blue, purple and gold, of his wedding shirt, which men of his family had been married in for three hundred years; the way they all swore and kissed each other’s crystals and stood laughing with arms entwined as barley grains were showered on them. After the feast, the drums wove their sacred madness through ears and feet, body and soul, binding them together as one as the Hermaphrodite embodied, like the heartbeat of the world itself pulsing through its branching veins: all things that live. As we danced on the mountain, Veraha tossed me in his strong arms, and rancor and jealousy were as distant from me as death.

We tested, as children will, to see how firm a hand he had as a parent. One thing he had to resign himself to: our free passage into their room. Never again did my mother make us tap. At the beginning we tested that too, to make sure of our rights, at all hours, and so kept catching them making love. Finally once when Handa, Ardi, Iperaiga (who was little more than a toddler then) and I came in while they were, my mother said, “You want to see it, then see it!” and threw the sheets off. We all fled; we weren’t ready for that.

Veraha soon learned the old step-parent’s trick of saying, “Tell the truth: would your mother allow you to do that, if she were here?” With me, he was afraid of making some subtle but crucial mistake for which all Yeola-e would pay some day and, since my education was entirely out of his hands, he wondered if I had any use for him at all. He was frightened by me, too. I once overheard him say, “Was that child ever a child, Karani? He seems to understand things no one his age should.” She said only, “That’s just how he is.” All but one who raised me knew nothing of the thing which, to a great extent, shaped me. I can’t complain; I chose it.

So there he was, a new stepfather, too conscious of his position and stuck with one child who was inherently difficult to know how to befriend, yet who was leader of all the others. I don’t envy him. One day, I suspect when he’d been worrying about it too much, he snapped as I passed, “Fourth Chevenga, comb your hair. It’s a mess.” Considering it was usually a mess, I knew he was doing this just to show his authority. So I said lightly, “It’s no messier than yours,” which was also true, and went on without a break in stride or a glance at him.

He must have considered before coming after me, because it was a little time before he opened my door. His cheeks were flushed red. He said, in a strained soft voice, “Your mother married me, Fourth Chevenga. That makes me your father, in spirit. You have to listen to me and not answer rudely.”

I had learned how to make words cut quietly from Esora-e, and of course far too many words from both the political and legal wings of Assembly Palace. “Don’t play pretend, Veraha,” I said, hardly looking up. “You’re not my father, never were and never will be; you are here only because you were accepted. Never forget that, and don’t presume on your rights.” He gave back a pace, stunned, and I went back to my waxboard to go on with my homework, in exactly the pointed way the Assembly Palace staff would do to hint I’d been haunting their offices too long. For a time he stared, then turned and went.

I found out later to whom he spoke and what was said. My mother was out on some business; he might have been too ashamed to go to her anyway, to admit a child of ten had faced him down. But Esora-e, coming in sweaty from training, noticed his looked and badgered the truth out of him.

He was astonished, but not surprised. “Later we’ll laugh,” he said. “Now we must do right by Yeola-e. If he runs roughshod over his family now, he’ll grow up to do the same to the people. That boy has a sense of justice, but none of power—other people’s, that is.

“What you have to do, Veraha, is this. Go back to his room. Don’t talk or listen to him. Just pick him up under one arm and carry him outside. If he hits you, pin his arms; make him feel who’s stronger. Take him to the place behind the Hearthstone where the stream pools deep, toss him in, and walk away without a word.”

Veraha took the advice, to the letter. Though I’ll have it known, I didn’t hit him, I squirmed with all my strength and yelled all sorts of things. But his one stone-cutting-hardened arm was stronger than my whole body. The water was scalding-cold.

Now it was my turn to be too ashamed to admit something to my mother. I slunk into my room by climbing through the window. Before dinner I combed my hair with great deliberation right in front of him, but not knowing whose comb it had been before it had been mine, he missed the full significance and just gave me a satisfied nod. That night I lay awake conceiving all sorts of evil plots, to no end; I’d come close enough to breaking the spirit of my siblings’ and my vote.

My mother found out by overhearing Veraha and Esora-e laughing about his having done it. I don’t know what she said to Veraha, but he never upbraided me without good reason again. That night, just before my bedtime, he and I made peace. He had a bear’s embrace, that a child could lose himself in, though I wasn’t quite ready to entirely enjoy it. When we let go, he looked as if he were considering doing something, then deciding against, as he bid me good night.

It was almost fall, my eleventh birthday coming. Late at night at the new moon, a faint sound on my dresser half-woke me, but I fell asleep again. In the morning, remembering, I began to look there, excited, in the hope of finding some magical gift a being from the other world had left while I was asleep. As I woke more fully, reality impinged; I was old enough now to have learned, albeit recently, how slim the chances of this happening actually were. Being grown-up, I thought, means no longer looking for that sort of thing, in fact not needing to any more.

Swallowing my sadness, I opened the top drawer to take out a shirt, and gasped; the magical thing was there. It was the piece of malachite I’d picked out in spring when he’d taken me to the market, carven into a hexagon smooth as mirror-glass, with the profile in low-relief of my father.

I felt many things, as I held it in my hand and gazed at it. Mostly I felt its beauty. Now nearly everyone in the family has at least one such portrait, of someone they love; it’s lucky he makes them small, so that when war came they could be easily packed and carried to safety. My mother has the best one of Tennunga, of course. But I got one of the first.

Years later, when I was a man and we knew each other entirely except for my foreknowledge, we talked about it. “I finished carving your Tennunga a few days after we bought the stone,” he told me. “But I couldn’t give it to you then… I suspected you would have felt I was trying to buy into the household, like a person buying a share of a workfast. In the crassest of ways too, with the image of your father, whose place I was taking, as if I could worm my way in by pretending to give him back to you.”

“And now the truth comes clear,” I said. “You were entirely right.” We both laughed. No one understands the power of art more than an artist, I guess.

“When we made peace after I threw you in the stream, I almost gave it to you… I wanted to, badly, to win your forgiveness. But I saw that would be like saying your forgiveness could be bought, and would cheapen the carving in your eyes… was I right then, too?”

“I was a trial, I know I was,” I said, signing chalk at the same time. He just laughed, then went serious again.

“I didn’t carve it for such a small thing as to gain your love. Not that that’s a small thing… but it would have been for myself. I carved it for you to remember him by, and wanted nothing else. Only when I had made peace with you entirely, could it mean all to you that I meant it to. Before that, we both would have lost out, wouldn’t we?”

I signed chalk and kissed his hand again. Embarrassed, he tried to pull away, but I was stronger now, and yanked him into a hug.

I could have nursed resentment forever, thinking, had he not insinuated himself into the household, he would never had had the chance to do all that made me love him, so I never would have. But I chose my shadow- and blood-parents no more than I chose him. In the winds of chance blow the seeds of families; Veraha was here, so we got him, and we loved him. My mother eventually had three children by him, Makaina in 1537, Ilaches in ’39 and Masarao in ’41.

When my grandmother found out the fully story, she took me aside and asked what the most important lesson for me in all this was. “That you should always be loving? That you should never be mean, no matter what you feel? That you can’t bring back people who’ve died?”

She kept signing charcoal and pursing her lips and saying, “Obvious, obvious, open your eyes, if you haven’t got that by now… don’t you remember what you’re going to be when you grow up?” I started to get it then.

My father had spoken of it, once when he’d taken me up on the mountain. “Know the written law… and the unwritten. You can find yourself holding power that comes not of position, but of others’ love or admiration or fear or ignorance. I have a feeling you’re going to come into a lot of this, Chevenga. It’s full of allure.”

As always, he was right. I’d come into it with Veraha, and my siblings, and in grief and anger I’d abused it. I never forgot.