The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (67 page)

I was not the only one. A few of
the first-generation steaders, like Old Man Phelps, were short and hardy, and more and more
of the new hands Mamita boarded fresh off the emigration ships looked like me. I looked out across our stead and Sombra’s with the bare hard road and low mud fence dividing the pale sweeps of winter wheat, and the pinkish-brown haze in the sky above them. Maybe the emigration people had decided to send people as colorless and dusty as Haven itself in the hope the strep would overlook them.

I
could see Father’s peach tree at the corner of our stead, where Sombra would turn to go another quarter-mile to her house, but no Francie. Only one thing would have made Mother come and get her, somebody sick here in western.

“Sombra,” I said, “do you know of anybody sick in this district?”

“Yes,” she said, unconcerned. “Old Man Phelps. I heard the district nurse tell your mother.”

“Scarlet
fever?” I said blankly, but it could not be anything else. It was always scarlet fever. Stray streptococci brought by the first steaders had taken to Haven’s dry, dusty climate like cherrybrights to a tree. It was always there, waiting for a shortage of antibiotics. There had been a heart-stopping outbreak in northern three weeks ago, seventeen reported, mostly children, and a local had been slapped
on the district by the district nurse. It shouldn’t have spread to western. What was worse, Mr. Phelps brought us within two of a planetwide quarantine. Mr. Phelps, one of the oldtimers who never got the strep, down with scarlet fever.

“The district nurse
told your mother there was nothing to worry about. Mr. Phelps lives alone, and she said she could stop an outbreak with the antibiotics the
Magassar’s
bringing.”

“If the
Magassar
lands,” I said. A faint scratchiness of fear was beginning behind my throat. Two more reported cases and the
Magassar
would go back to earth without even landing. There would be no graduation.

Sombra said, “Mamita says there’s no reason for them to quarantine us without antibiotics. She says they could drop the antibiotics from orbit. Do you think that’s
true?”

The scratchiness became almost an ache. “No, of course not. If they could, they would. They wouldn’t leave us without any antibiotics if there was any way to get them to us.” But I was remembering something from a long time ago, when little Willie died. Mother telling me to get out of the house, out of her sight, and Father saying, “Don’t take it out on Haze. It’s the government that’s
left us to the wolves. Blame them. Blame me—I brought you here, knowing what they were doing. But not Haze. She can’t help being what she is.” The ache was worse. I swallowed hard, and when it didn’t go away, I pressed the flat of my hand against the hollow space between my collarbones and swallowed again. This time it went away.

“Of course not,” I said again, feeling much better. “Don’t worry
about Mr. Phelps. He won’t stop our graduation. There’s got to be an incubation period, and by the time it’s up, the
Magassar
will already be on the ground. The local’s probably already got it stopped.”

We were nearly down the long hill to the corner, and I didn’t want to leave her thinking about a possible quarantine. I said, “Mother finished our dresses last night. Are you going to come over
to try yours on?” Sombra’s flushed cheeks darkened. “To make sure about the hem,” I said hesitantly. “To see how we’re going to look tomorrow.”

Sombra shook her dark head. “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” she said uncomfortably. “Mamita has a lot of chores for me today. With the
Magassar
coming in tomorrow. She’s taking the new hands to board again, and so she said she wanted me to bring in everything
ripe from the greentent for the supper tomorrow night. I wish Mamita had made our dresses,” she finished unhappily.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll bring it over tomorrow morning. We’ll get dressed together.”

It had been a mistake to mention the dresses, and a worse one to have had Mother make them for us. I had been to Sombra’s house countless times, with Mamita bright and cheerful as a cherrybright,
feeding us vegetables from the greentent and asking us about school, reaching up on tiptoe to pull Sombra’s curls away from her face and, no taller than me, hugging me goodbye when I left. Mother was rigid and erect as one of the tallgrasses that shaded our porch when Sombra came home with me. She had not spoken a dozen words to her during all the fittings. We should have had Mamita make
the dresses.

Yesterday Sombra had tried
on her dress timidly. I had not seen it so nearly finished before, with the red ribbons pinned where they would be threaded through the bodice. “Oh, Sombra, you look so beautiful!” I had blurted out, “Oh, Mama, it’s the loveliest dress I’ve ever seen.”

Mother had turned on me with a look that made Sombra gasp. “I will not allow you to call me that,” she
had said, and slammed the door behind her. Sombra had shimmied out of the dress and into her jeans so fast she nearly tore the thin white cotton.

“It’s because of the babies,” I had said helplessly. “She had seven babies that died between Francie and me. Little Willie lived to be three. I remember when he died. It was a planetwide and there wasn’t anything to give him and he laid upstairs in
the big bed crying, ‘Mama! Mama!’ for five days.”

Sombra had her shirt buttoned and her books scooped up. “She lets Francie call her Mama,” she said, her cheeks flaming with anger.

“That’s different,” I had said.

“How is it different? Mamita lost nine babies to the strep. Nine.”

“But she has you and the twins left. And all Mother has is Francie.”

“And you. She has you.” I had not known how
to explain to her that Francie, with her blue eyes and yellow hair, made her think of San Francisco, of earth. Francie and the geraniums she tended so carefully in the hot damp air of the greentent. And when she looked at me, what did she think? She had found me that day after Willie died, hiding in the greentent, and had switched me. What was she thinking then? And what did she think this morning
when the district nurse told her Mr. Phelps had scarlet fever and we were within two of a planetwide? The scratchiness had returned, this time as a dull ache. I knotted my hand into a fist and pushed against it, but it did no good. I wondered if I’d better take a strip when I got home.

“You’re worried about them imposing a quarantine, aren’t you?” Sombra said. We were nearly down the hill, and
I had not said anything the whole way.

“I was wondering if they’ll have pink carnations tomorrow,” I said. “I was wondering if they’ll give us some to wear in our hair?”

“Of course. Mamita said so. You’ll have red roses. You’ll be so pretty.” The long walk down the dusty hill had dried us off. She looked hot now, the sweat on her forehead curling her dark hair. “Let’s sit down a minute, all
right?” She sank down on the low mudbrick fence and fanned herself with her books. “It’s so hot today.”

I looked over her head at the peach tree. It was no taller than me and folded-in on itself so that it barely gave any shade at all. Its leaves were narrow and so pale a green the dust made them look the same color as the wheat. There were little pinkish-white specks between the leaves. I squinted
at them.

“Don’t you
think it’s hot?” Sombra said.

This was the only one of Father’s trees that had lived past the ponics tanks. It had lasted five years now, though it had never borne fruit. And now there were the pale specks all over it, which could be moths or sorrel ants. The ache pressed dully against the hard bone of my sternum, bending me forward under it. I put the edge of my fist against
the pain, pressing hard into the bone, willing myself to straighten. Mother was always telling me to stand up straight, to try to look at least as tall as I could, not like some hunched dwarf, and I would straighten automatically, my whole body responding. I willed myself to hear her voice now. My shoulder blades pulled back, stretching the ache with it till it had pulled out to nothing. I stood
still, breathing hard.

“I can’t sit down,” I said breathlessly. “I have to go right home.”

“But it’s so hot! Do I feel hot to you?” She pulled me onto the wall with her and pressed her cheek against mine. It was burning against my chilled face.

“A little,” I said. I must take a strip when I get home. And tell Father about the tree.

“You’re not getting sick, are you?” she said. “You can’t get
sick, Haze, not for graduation. You go right home and go to bed, all right? I don’t want you sending us under a planetwide.”

“I will,” I promised her, climbing over the fence and into the field for a closer look at the tree. The specks were larger than I had thought, almost the size of…

“Oh, Sombra,” I shouted after her delightedly, “we won’t go under a planetwide, and I’m not getting sick either.
I’ve had a good omen. There’ll be flowers for graduation.”

“How do you know?” she shouted back.

“I thought the tree had something wrong with it,” I said. “But it doesn’t. It’s in bloom!”

She grinned in happy surprise. “You mean blossoms?” She was over the low fence in an easy step and peering eagerly at the tiny tight blossoms. “Oh, they’re just starting to come out, aren’t they? Oh, Haze,
think how pretty they’ll be!”

A red cherrybright whizzed through the air over our heads and lighted unafraid on the top of the tree, shaking the branch in our faces. The folded blossoms bowed and dipped.

“The pink blossoms
are for my ribbons,” Sombra said happily, “and the cherrybright’s for your red ribbons!” She put her arm around my waist. It felt warm through my thin shirt. “And you know
what they mean?”

“That we’ll be beautiful tomorrow! That nothing can possibly go wrong because we’re going to graduate!”

“Oh, Haze,” she said, hugging me, “I can hardly wait.” She ran back to the road. “Bring my dress over first thing in the morning and we’ll get ready together. Everything’s going to be perfect,” she shouted to me. “The day is full of omens.”

No one was in the house but Francie,
sitting at the kitchen table, dawdling over her lessons with a strip in her mouth.

“Papa’s in the greentent. With Mama,” she said, taking the strip out of her mouth so she could talk. It was the bright red of a negative reading. Active strep blanched the strips like a person going white from fear. “Are you scared?” she said.

“Of what?”

“Mama says two more and they’ll call a planetwide. There
won’t be any graduation.”

“There will so, Francie. There hasn’t been a planetwide in ages.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” I said, thinking of the peach tree and what Father would say when he saw it was in bloom. He would think it was a good omen, too. I smiled at Francie and went out to find Father.

He stood in the door of the greentent, blocking it with his bulk. Mother stood across the
ponics tanks from him, holding onto one of the metal supports. Through the thick plastic, she looked as if she were drowning. Her hand clutched the strut so hard I thought she would pull the whole tent down.

“It’s what they want,” Father said. “It ties us to them. We’ll be doing just what they want.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“It will take away every chance of a cash crop. You know that, don’t
you?”

“Mr. Phelps died this morning. There have been seventeen cases in northern.”

“The
Magassar
will be landing tomorrow. We don’t have to…”

“No,” she said, and
looked steadily at him. “You owe it to me.”

His hand on the doorframe tightened until I could see the veins stand out on his hands.

“The peach tree’s in bloom,” I blurted, and they both turned to look at me, Father with blank drowned
eyes, Mother with a look like triumph. “It’s a good sign, don’t you think?” I said into the silence. “An omen. It means the
Magassar
will land tomorrow and everything will be all right…anyway, it has to have some kind of incubation period, doesn’t it? People can’t just catch it in one day.”

“It’s a new strain,” Mother said. She had let go of the strut and was pushing dirt around the base of a
geranium. “The district nurse said it appears to have a very short incubation period.”

“She doesn’t know that,” I said earnestly. “How could she know that for sure?”

She looked up, but at my father, not at me. “Mr. Phelps had taken a strip that morning. It was negative. You would not have expected Mr. Phelps to get it at all, let alone so quickly. Maybe others you wouldn’t expect will get it,
too.”

The call box, attached to the plastic feederlines above the ponics tanks, barked suddenly. The sharp, short signal that called the district nurse. The signal that meant our district. Mother looked at me. “What did I tell you?” she said.

My father let go of the doorframe, and took a step toward her. “Move your geraniums to ponics,” he said, “I need the plaindirt to plant more corn in.”
He turned and walked away.

I helped Mother move the geraniums into the tanks, my body tensed for the alerting bark of the box, but it did not ring again. After supper we stayed in the kitchen, and when we went up to bed, Father carried the little box with him, trailing its wires like ribbons, but the box did not sound again. Oh, yes, the day was full of omens.

The pale pink haze was gone in
the morning, replaced with the clear chill to the sky that meant night frost. I took Father down to the tree before breakfast to look at the peach blossoms. They dropped like scraps of paper at his feet when he put out his hand to a branch. “The frost got them,” he said, as if he didn’t even mind.

“Not all of them,” I said. Some of them, crumpled and tight, like little knots against the cold,
still clung to the branches. “The frost didn’t get all of them,” I said. “It’s supposed to be warm today. I knew it would be warm for graduation.” He was looking past me, past the tree. I turned to look. A cherrybright fluttered on Sombra’s fence. Our good omen.

“No!” Father said sharply, and then more gently as I turned back to him in surprise, “the frost didn’t get them all. Some of them are
still alive.” He took my arm, and steered me back to the house, keeping himself between the tree and me, as if the frozen blossoms were my disappointment and I could not bear to see them.