10
“It’s all right,” Luz said. “Everything is going well. Don’t worry.” She had to speak loudly, and she felt foolish, always saying the same thing; but it always worked, for a while. Vera would lie back and be quiet. But presently she would be trying to sit up again, asking what was happening, anxious and frightened. She would ask about Lev: “Is Lev all right? His hand was hurt.” Then she would say she had to go back to the City, to Casa Falco. She should never have come with those men with the guns, it was her fault, for wanting so badly to come home. If she went back to being a hostage again things would go better, wouldn’t they? “Everything is all right, don’t worry,” Luz said, loudly, for Vera’s hearing had been damaged. “Everything is going well.”
And indeed people went to bed at night and got up in the morning, did the work, cooked meals and ate them, talked together; everything went on. Luz went on. She went to bed at night. It was hard to get to sleep, and when she slept she woke up in the black dark from a horrible crowd of pushing, screaming people; but none of that was happening. It had happened. The room was dark and silent. It had happened, it was over, and everything went on.
The funeral of the seventeen who had been killed was held two days after the march to the City; some were to be buried in their own villages, but the meeting and service for all of them was held at the Meeting House. Luz felt that she did not belong there, and that Andre and Southwind and the others would find it easier if she did not come with them. She said she would stay with Vera, and they left her. But when a long time had passed in the utter silence of the house in the rainswept fields, Vera asleep, Luz picking the seeds from silktree fiber to be doing something with her hands, a man came to the door, a slight, gray-haired man; she did not recognize him at first. “I am Alexander Shults,” he said. “Is she asleep? Come on. They shouldn’t have left you here.” And he took her back with him to the Meeting House, to the end of the service for the dead, and on to the burial ground, in the silent procession that bore the twelve coffins of the dead from Shantih. So she stood in her black shawl in the rain at the graveside by Lev’s father. She was grateful to him for that, though she said nothing to him, nor he to her.
She and Southwind worked daily in Southwind’s potato field, for the crop had to be got in; another few days and it would begin to rot in the wet ground. They worked together when Vera was asleep, and took turns, one in the field and one in the house, when she was wakeful and needed someone with her. Southwind’s mother was often there, and the big, silent, competent Italia, Southwind’s friend; and Andre came by once a day, though he too had fieldwork and also had to spend time daily at the Meeting House with Elia and the others. Elia was in charge, it was Elia who talked with the City men now. Andre told Luz and Southwind what had been done and said; he expressed no opinion; Luz did not know if he approved or disapproved. All the opinions, beliefs, theories, principles, all that was gone, swept away, dead. The heavy, defeated grief of the great crowd at the funeral service was all that was left. Seventeen people of Shantih dead, there on the Road; eight people of the City. They had died in the name of peace, but they had also killed in the name of peace. It had all fallen apart. Andre’s eyes were dark as coals. He joked to cheer up Southwind (and Luz saw, as she saw everything now, dispassionately, that he had been in love with Southwind for a long time), and both girls smiled at his jokes, and tried to make him rest for a while, there with them and Vera. Luz and Southwind worked together, afternoons in the fields. The potatoes were small, firm, and clean, pulling up out of the mud on their fine-tangled tracery of roots. There was a pleasure in the fieldwork; not much in anything else.
From time to time Luz thought, “None of this is happening,” for it seemed to her that what did happen was only a kind of picture or screen, like a shadow-play, behind which lay whatever was real. This was a puppet show. It was all so strange, after all. What was she doing in a field in the late afternoon in a misty dark drizzle, wearing patched trousers, mud to the thighs and elbows, pulling potatoes for Shanty Town? All she had to do was get up and walk home. Her blue skirt and the embroidered blouse would be hanging clean and pressed in the closet in her dressing room; Teresa would bring hot water for a bath. There would be big logs in the fireplace at the west end of the hall of Casa Falco, in this weather, and a clear fire burning. Outside the thick glass of the windows the evening would darken bluer and bluer over the Bay. The doctor might drop in for a chat, with his crony Valera, or old Councillor Di Giulio hoping for a game of chess with her father—
No. Those were the puppets, little bright mind-puppets. That was nowhere; this was here: the potatoes, the mud, Southwind’s soft voice, Vera’s swollen, discolored face, the creaking of the straw mattress in the loft of this hut in Shanty Town in the black dark and stillness of the night. It was strange, it was all wrong, but it was all that was left.
Vera was improving. The physician, Jewel, said the effect of the concussion had worn off; she must stay in bed at least a week longer, but she would be all right. She asked for something to do. Southwind gave her a great basket of cottonwool, gathered from wild trees over in Red Valley, to spin.
Elia came to the door. The three women had just had their noon dinner. Southwind was washing up, Luz was straightening the table, Vera was sitting up against her pillow tying a starter-thread on the spindle. Elia looked clean, like the little potatoes, Luz thought, with his firm round face and blue eyes. His voice was unexpectedly deep, but very gentle. He sat at the cleared table and talked, mostly to Vera. “Everything is going well,” he told her. “Everything is all right.”
Vera said little. The left side of her face was still misshapen and bruised where she had been kicked or clubbed, but she tilted that side forward in order to hear; her right eardrum had been broken. She sat up against her pillow, set her spindle whirling, and nodded as Elia talked. Luz did not pay much heed to what he said. Andre had told them already: the hostages had been freed; terms of cooperation between City and Town agreed upon, and a fairer exchange in tools and dried fish for the food supplied by the Town; now they were discussing a plan for the joint settlement of the South Valley—work parties from the City opening up the land, then volunteer colonists from the Town moving there to farm.
“And the northern colony?” Vera asked in her quiet thin voice.
Elia looked down at his hands. Finally he said, “It was a dream.”
“Was it all a dream, Elia?”
Vera’s voice had changed; Luz, putting away the bowls, listened.
“No,” the man said. “No! But too much, too soon—too fast, Vera. Too much staked rashly on an act of open defiance.”
“Would covert defiance have been better?”
“No. But confrontation was wrong. Cooperation, talking together—reasoning—reason. I told Lev—All along, I tried to say—”
There were tears in Elia’s blue eyes, Luz noticed. She stacked the bowls neatly in the cupboard and sat down by the hearth.
“Councillor Marquez is a reasonable man. If only he had been Chief of the Council—” Elia checked himself. Vera said nothing.
“It’s Marquez you mostly talk with now, Andre says,” said Luz. “Is he Chief of the Council now?”
“Yes.”
“Is my father in jail?”
“Under house arrest, they call it,” Elia replied, with extreme embarrassment. Luz nodded, but Vera was staring at them. “Don Luis? Alive? I thought—Arrest? What for?”
Elia’s embarrassment was painful to see. Luz answered, “For killing Herman Macmilan.”