“What are we going to do?” asked the boy.
“There’s nothing we can do now but wait,” said his father.
The female man had her hands out and the boy placed her baby gently into them. The baby made contented sounds as it received milk from its mother.
There was still food on the table, but nobody was eating as they watched the female man nurse her baby and then rock her to sleep.
There was still food on the table, and after a while the boy’s mother got up and put everything away.
It was three days before they came.
This time they took both the infant and its mother.
When they brought her back late that night, her eyes were red from crying and both her hands were bandaged.
The professional who brought her back had papers for the father to sign and instructions on what was to happen next.
“You will be billed for the broken lock on the house she burgled. You will be billed for the medicals of those she bit. She bit the father, the mother, and their boy. They are nice people. They don’t deserve this,” he lectured. “And this is the bill for her medicals.” He handed the father a folded card and a bottle. “This is the medication for her hands. Do not remove the bandages for two days. When you do remove them, rub this ointment generously on the place where her thumbs used to be. The doctor says that she should be back to normal in about a week. One thing is for sure — she won’t be stealing other people’s property anymore.”
They all heard the sound and looked up. The weeping female man was in the grand room plucking the strings of the small singing harp, but without thumbs she could not make it sing properly.
The small singing harp sang, “Baabveee, baabveee, baabveee, baabveee.”
It sounded vaguely like a song they knew. They could make out neither the tune nor the words, but it made them all very sad.
She never touched the small singing harp again after that night.
The wealthy boy continued to be the best friend of the poor boy, but his father would not let him keep his promise to have the female man come to visit and nurse her child.
He explained, “My father says that she is dangerous. It would be bad to have her around the baby man. She might try to harm it.”
After that the female man became deeply dejected, though she lived another four months — one full man year — before the boy found her unmoving and unbreathing on her bedding in her proper kennel.
When they buried her in the backyard beside her proper kennel, the boy cried out, “Oh Red Sleeves, oh Red Sleeves.”
The doctor said that she had died of a heart condition that was common among that breed.
But the boy believed, and always would, that she had died of a heart that was simply and irreparably broken.
“We are the rulers of this earth, which the lord great creator did give us to rule. On earth there is none greater than we. That which we envision we can build. That which we desire we can have. All that we desire we can have. But should we have it all since we can have it all? Should we take it all? And if we take it all, then what becomes of it? And after it is gone, and there is no more, what becomes of us? No creature on earth can say us nay. We as wise stewards of the earth are the only creatures that can say us nay. We must learn to say us nay,” spake the sacred speaker.
And the boy lowered his head to hide the wetness in his eyes.
4
His Musical Man
After the female man died, the wealthy boy told the poor, “The baby man is yours. You can come to my house every day and watch them feed her.”
And the poor boy did visit every day, for now he had no man of his own to love and his father possessed no discretionary money to purchase another.
At the wealthy boy’s house, the poor boy was treated with a respectful sadness, even by the wealthy boy’s father, who regretted originating the cruel though legal actions that had led to the unfortunate ending. Each time the poor boy visited, the father sent him home with a gift of food or silver for his parents, which the poor boy always accepted with discomfort and reluctance.
But the poor boy was not there for the generosity of the wealthy father nor even the friendship of the wealthy son. He was there for the infant baby man of his female man.
Each day she came to look more and more like her mother, with the red frecks on her face and arms growing rustier, and the red of her hair becoming more like fire.
The man’s year is three times faster than the regular year, so at the end of the first year the poor boy had watched the baby man go from cradler to toddler and utter her first words. She was a man that talked, as had been her lidless-eyed father before her.
In the second year, the poor boy watched her grow from toddler into precocious childhood as she began early to display her natural gifts.
In his grand room, the wealthy boy’s father had many instruments of music, enough for an entire orchestra, and the child man reached for the tinny drums and the colored flute and both the small and large singing harps, each of which she did play, for she was a musical man, as had been her mother before her.
The music she played was always bright and cheerful.
In her fourth year, when she was a budding prepubescent of twelve in man years, the child female man did become more melancholy, as did her music, as she went into heat and began to attract the attention of the man mans in the wealthy house.
The wealthy boy, who was twelve in regular years, did not want her to be fixed as his father had threatened. He told his friend, who was also twelve, “My father wants to have her fixed, but I have a plan. Why don’t you take her? You still have the proper kennel your father built for her mother, don’t you?”
The poor boy lit up. “That’s a great idea!”
He exchanged the secret handshake with his friend and embraced him.
When the poor boy’s father came home, he found his son pounding nails into the roof of the proper kennel in the backyard.
“I’m fixing it up. I’m getting a new female man,” the boy explained.
His father’s brows and spirit lifted. “The one with the red frecks? The one who is the daughter of your old female man?”
The hammering boy nodded.
He heard the muttered words beneath his father’s breath: “It’s a good idea, I suppose. But how are we going to pay for it?”
The boy stopped hammering nails. “It’s not that much money — she’s not a baby anymore and she’s housebroken domesticated. It won’t cost much. Anyway, there is the money I earn down at the mill.”
The father nodded. Down at the mill. The boy worked with him as a loader for a few hours every day after school. The boy was a hard worker, not like some of the other goof-off boys who worked at the mill part-time. The father was proud of his son; every father should have a boy like him.
He said to him, “Very good, but if you ever run short, come to me. Together we will find a way.”
The boy went back to pounding nails and the father leaned against the fence and said, “It is not true when your mother tells you that I do not like mans. I like them just fine, but when I was growing up, my mother and I lived on the edge of the wilderness in a dwelling on the farm of a friend of my dead father. Our living was hard because we had very little money. It was not a farm with animals, but with grain. I was a small boy and lonely because there was nothing to do and no one to play with. Yes, the farmer had two dogs, but they were work dogs and not very good for companionship. One day I went to the edge of the wilderness and I spotted a little man man in the long grass. He was feral, but I was a boy and lonely, so I coaxed him with a gentle voice and the few grains in my hand that were to be my lunch. Eventually he came out and took the grain. He was a short, round man with thick fingers, pale skin, and a bad smell. He was feral, to be sure, but he allowed me to pet him as he ate the grains. And I petted him until he finished the grains, and then he darted back into the long grass and disappeared from my sight.”