Commitment Hour (12 page)

Zephram happened to be near the docks when the boats started to come in—”All right,” he admitted, “I was sitting half-numb on the pier, watching the clouds choke the sky”—but he fought off his gloom and roused himself to help unload the day’s catch. That’s when he heard about the Silence of Mistress Snow, and the other Tober traditions associated with winter’s coming. The men were divided on what Zephram himself should do at midnight: whether he should make a Visit of his own or keep shut behind a closed door. Both sides of the discussion meant well. Some thought it would be good for Zephram to participate in community traditions, while others said it would be easier on him not to get involved. After all, if Zephram made a formal Visit at midnight, he was committing himself to stay in the cove until spring. Was that what he wanted? The trip down-peninsula wasn’t easy in winter, but a few sleighs made the journey every year—supposedly to buy supplies, really just for something to do once the harbor froze. Zephram could catch a ride down to Ohna Sound any time he wanted…but not if he promised Mistress Snow to see someone else through the hard cold season.

After the fish were unloaded, Zephram went to ask Leeta whether he should or shouldn’t make a Visit when the snow came. That shows how much Zephram already knew about being a Tober—a true outsider might have gone to Hakoore and received a flat no. Leeta, on the other hand, gave a typical Mocking Priestess answer: Zephram had to decide for himself. If he wanted to remain an outsider, he could stay home, keep his door shut, Visit no one. If he wanted to be part of the community, he had to leave his door open and choose someone to help.

That was Leeta, all right: “You have a completely free choice, and never mind that there’s only one decision a decent person would make.”

Zephram said the snow arrived around sunset—not that anyone could see the sun with the sky smothered by those gray-feather clouds. I could imagine the way the snow sifted down that evening, bleaching away the world’s color. Gray and gray, white and white. No sound from any house—even the sheep and cattle subdued as they huddled in barns that were tautly insulated with hay.

Night nestled down into hours of muted blackness. Zephram’s house, called the Guest Home back then, had always been quiet—it stood apart from the rest of the village, separated by a big stand of trees—but on Mistress Snow’s night, the normal quiet turned to thick granite silence. No dogs barked. No hammers tapped and no saws rasped, now that people had set aside their usual carpentry work. Many couples choose Mistress Snow’s arrival as a time to make love…but even that goes slow and silent, voiceless as an iced-in pond.

Zephram sat alone in darkness; and as the snow on the window thickened flake by flake, he too thought of making love. The silence of snow was not a tradition in the South, but people still felt it and held each other as winter floated in. Zephram thought about his fresh-lost Anne, how they had watched and loved many snowfalls together. What would she want him to choose tonight? An open door or a closed one?

Easy question.

When the chime rang, he pulled on his boots and went out into the snow. Behind him, his door was propped open with a block of pristine pinewood he’d always intended to whittle into a bust of Anne. (Even as he told me this story, he still had that block, untouched, sitting on his work table amidst the shavings of owls and beavers that actually did get carved.)

Zephram cleared out of the house fast because he was shy of meeting whoever visited him. He had no doubt that someone would come; on the docks that afternoon, several men had dropped hints they wouldn’t let an ignorant city-gent freeze to death. Most Tobers wouldn’t mind lending Zephram a little help and a lot of advice—telling your neighbors what they ought to be doing has always been the cove’s chief pastime in winter—but Zephram didn’t want to see people coming to give what he regarded as charity.

(In that, he showed he
was
an outsider. No Tober thinks of our silent Visits as charity: it’s something you do because the alternative is just too mean.)

Once Zephram was clear of the house, he slowed his pace. Snow still fell, but not much; the air was damp and windless, with the kind of cold that freshens rather than chills you. The night was fine for walking…and Zephram took his time, letting the native Tobers go about their Visits without him. He had no one special he wanted to claim as his responsibility, no person or family he was closer to than any other. Instead, he intended to give the real villagers first choice of whom to support, then take the house left over. He had some idea that people would resent him intruding, or become annoyed if he “adopted” the family they wanted to claim themselves. Zephram thought it more polite to let the others sort themselves out. It meant, of course, that he would end up visiting someone unpopular, or perhaps a family so needy no one else dared commit to their well-being; but Zephram could afford both unpopularity and expense.

Or so he thought.

He ambled quietly along the edge of the forest for perhaps twenty minutes—ample time, he thought, for the rest of Tober Cove to settle who was going where. Then he aimed his feet toward the Council Hall steeple: the center of the village and a natural place to start looking for an open door. Most of the houses he passed were dark already, all lamps extinguished and the hearths damped down. People in the cove almost never stayed up to midnight, so they were quick to do their business and get back to bed…though not necessarily to sleep. In time, however, Zephram found one house still lit, with three stubby candles on a stand outside the open door.

Steck’s house.

He knew Steck vaguely, just as he knew almost everyone in the village by now. Zephram had nodded to Steck that afternoon when he visited Leeta; Steck had been puttering with herbs on Leeta’s kitchen table, making mint-scented packets for unknown priestess purposes. To Zephram, Steck was just Leeta’s apprentice, a keen-eyed girl of twenty who carried herself like a spear, even if she was seven months pregnant with Master Crow’s child.

Zephram approached the door with a flush of bashfulness, embarrassed by the boldness of walking unannounced into someone else’s house…a young woman’s house at that. It seemed indecent, a middle-aged man becoming this girl’s “protector”; and now that he thought about her, she grew imposing in his mind—not just a girl, but a beautiful one, alarmingly so. Wasn’t it disloyal to his late wife to “claim” a girl like Steck so soon after Anne’s death? But he knew what Anne would say about that.
You’re being an ass. Do what’s right and don’t invent complications.

Even so, he found himself hoping Steck was still out on her own Visit, so he could scurry in, toss a stick on her fire, then rush away into the night.

She was home: seated on a rocking chair in front of the fireplace, tucked under a down coverlet that came up to her throat. Her jaw was clenched as if she was fighting the shivers. Zephram didn’t think the cabin felt cool, but Steck was pregnant and might suffer chills more easily. Without thinking, Zephram closed the door behind him to shut out the cold. When he turned back, it struck him,
I’m alone with her now
; then he mentally kicked himself and set about fulfilling his new commitment to take care of her.

He made tea.

She watched him with firelight reflecting in her eyes, the expression on her face unreadable. Several times Zephram was on the verge of speaking, to ask if she was all right, and whether the jar of apple-scented flakes was really tea or just potpourri; but he remembered Mistress Snow’s Silence and held his tongue. The only sound was the soft crackle of the hearth, with Zephram’s split of wood atop the flames. He took his time hanging the kettle on its hook above the fire—he knew that once it was put in place, he’d have nothing else to do but avoid Steck’s gaze until the water boiled.

And yet he had to look at her eventually: her fire-flickered eyes, her mouth set as if she were trying not to let her teeth chatter. When he summoned what he hoped was a comforting smile, she didn’t smile back; she only nodded toward a chair on the other side of the hearth. Zephram took the hint and sat.

The chair was angled to look directly at the girl rather than the fire. This would be Leeta’s seat, he realized, when the priestess came over to bestow wisdom on her apprentice—Leeta was the sort to aim herself face-on to anyone she was talking with. Zephram had no choice but to aim face-on too…and Steck stared back in the midnight hush, with snow drifting down outside.

He found himself prickling with the hope she would make love to him…that she would throw off the coverlet to reveal she was naked underneath, and that she would rise from the chair with unashamed deliberateness, she would walk slowly to him, and in the thick silence of the night…

(“Hey!” I said from the other side of the breakfast table, “do I need to hear this?”

“What’s wrong?” Zephram asked. “One reason I like Tober Cove is how open you are about sexual feelings.”

“Yeah, but…” It was one thing for
me
to talk about my fantasies, and quite another for my
father
to blather away.

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Zephram said. “I only wanted…it was the first time since Anne died that I had thoughts about another woman—”

“Just tell what happened,” I interrupted, “and skip the daydreams. Unless Steck actually took off the coverlet and things got…”

“No,” my father answered. “She was shivering cold and seven months pregnant.”)

Zephram might have allowed himself to imagine the touch of Steck’s soft skin, but that was only a tiny chink in his armor of mourning—Anne was still too much with him. After a time, he found he could superimpose his lost wife over the reality of Steck’s eyes and the fantasy of her body…so that when he pictured making love with this girl, he was actually remembering Anne at the same age, and the sweet honeymoon caresses of long ago.

Soon enough, Steck’s kettle boiled. Zephram stirred himself to find mugs—good clay mugs fired in the local kiln—then set one filled with steeping tea on a small table beside the girl. Steck took the mug immediately and pulled it under the coverlet…cradling it in her hands, Zephram supposed, although the cup was burning hot. Perhaps Steck rested it on the roundness of her stomach, where the heat would flow to the child within; perhaps that felt soothing to her. Zephram didn’t know what pregnant women found comforting: he and Anne had never managed to have children.

While his own tea steeped, Zephram poked up the fire and slid in another piece of wood. Now that the cabin door was closed, the room was warming up: warm enough that he would soon have to decide whether to take off his coat or just go home. He didn’t want to leave while Steck still looked close to freezing, but he also didn’t want to outstay his welcome. The houses outside lay dark now; all the other Visits were clearly finished, and the visitors gone back to bed. He wondered if the cove’s etiquette required Visits to be as short as possible…especially since talk was forbidden till dawn. Zephram was preparing himself for a conversation with Steck, spoken entirely with silent gestures—
Shall I go? Will you be all right?
—when the girl slipped off the coverlet and stood up.

She wore pure white: a white pleated dress so long it touched the floor, and a white wool sweater knit as line as a spider web. The clothes were impractical for life in the cove—sure to get dirty, hard to clean—and the bottom hem of the dress was already soggy from traipsing through snow outdoors. Steck must have worn this outfit when she went on her own Visit…as if she were pretending to be Mistress Snow Herself, come to bring cold serenity to the world.

The girl still held the mug of tea in her hands. She lifted it and sipped, her eyes on Zephram. With anyone else, the gesture might have been coy or seductively blatant—when I was female, I used that move myself—but Zephram assured me Steck was simply using it as a “thank you”: wordlessly showing she was grateful for his efforts. He took this as a cue to leave and gave her a good-bye nod; but she held up her hand and motioned him back to his chair.

Zephram sat—the wary way you sit on the edge of your seat when you don’t know what’s happening and some part of your mind wants the option of retreat. Steck walked back to her bed and knelt beside it, giving Zephram a twinge of sexual panic…or perhaps hope. But she was only crouching down to pull out something stored under the bed: a violin case.

(When Zephram said that, it jolted me. Yes, Steck had played violin in the marsh; I’d thought, however, that the Neut had taken up music during Its time down south. If Steck had already been a violinist twenty years ago in Tober Cove…)

Zephram watched as Steck carefully took out the instrument and tuned it—not sounding the notes with the bow or even pizzicato plucks, but with delicate rubs of her finger that barely set the strings vibrating. The sound would never carry outside the house, which was obviously the girl’s intention; Zephram didn’t know if Mistress Snow’s Silence applied to violins as well as voices, but Steck clearly didn’t want to be heard rippling the quiet.

When she was happy with the tuning, Steck came back, pulled the rocking chair close to my father—close enough that their knees touched—then she settled down to play. She didn’t tuck the instrument under her chin; instead, she held it like a guitar, resting it on the gentle roundness of her stomach. Steck let her eyes lock with Zephram’s for a moment…then she bent her head and softly stroked the strings.

The tune was “Lonely Hung the Clouds,” a song I knew well myself. Wherever I played, you could count on the song being requested at least once a night…partly because the melody was dreamy and beautiful, partly because the sentiment struck a responsive chord in many listeners. The first half of each verse describes how the singer has “lived with empty hands” and held “many a conversation with cold bare walls”; the rest of each verse is a surprised and grateful confession that everything has changed—presumably because she has found someone to love, although that’s never said explicitly.

Lonely hung the clouds

But now the light has come.