Mockingbird. Part 17

That is how I got to know Annabel Baleen.

Annabel taught me how to make an omelette that morning, and a souffle. She made a coffee cake with me, showing me how to make dough from flour and how to use yeast. The flour came from a large bin under the counter that we worked on; she said it was grown "out in the field." That was where all the other members of the family were. Annabel was always in charge of the kitchen; she had been given that job, she said, because she was a "loner." The other woman was a.s.signed to help her with the cleaning up after meals. At other times she worked in the flower garden outside the house. Annabel had worked for a few years in the fields, but she hated the work and hated the way no one ever talked while working. When an older woman who had been in charge of the kitchen died Annabel asked for the job and got it. She had been cooking for thirteen years, she said. First as a married woman and now as a widow. Counting time in years and being "married" were no longer new concepts to me and although it was strange to hear them from her I understood what she was talking about.

Aside from the flour and eggs, all the other cooking ingredients came from the shelters in the mall. She had me read the labels for her, on yeast packets, on a can of pepper, on a box of irradiated pecans. All of the boxes read: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE.

While showing me how to cook, Annabel was quiet and pleasant and asked no questions except for her requests to read box labels. There were several times I wanted to ask her about herself and her family and how they seemed to avoid having anything to do with the modern way of life, but when I would start to ask a question I would think: Don't ask; relax, and it seemed, for once, to be good advice. She was very beautiful, and her movements in the kitchen were deft and graceful; it was a pleasure just to watch her at work.

But as noon approached she seemed to become more harried, and somehow a bit sad. Finally she reached under a counter into a cabinet and took out a large blue box and gave it to me to read.

It said VALIUM, in big letters, and under this in small ones: Fertility-inhibiting. And under that: U.S. Population Control. To be taken only under the advice of a physician.

When I had read it she said, "What's a *physician'?"

"Some kind of ancient healer," I said, not really sure of myself. And I was thinking: Is that why there are no children anywhere? Could all the downers and sopors be like that? Fertility-inhibiting?

She took two of the pills and chased them with coffee. When she offered the box to me I shook my head and she looked at me quizzically but said nothing. She merely put a small handful of Valium in her ap.r.o.n pocket, and replaced the box under the counter. Then she said, "I must prepare lunch."

For the next hour she worked at high speed, heating two kettles of soup and making cheese sandwiches on big slabs of dark bread that she cut with a knife. I asked if I could help, but she appeared not even to have heard the question. She set the table with the big brown plates and soup bowls. Trying to be helpful, I carried a stack of plates to the table from one of the cabinets and said, "These are unusual plates."

"Thank you," she said. "I made them." That was a surprise; I had never heard of anyonemaking things like plates. And there had been a whole department at the Sears store with plates and dishes. I had no idea of how anybody would personally make a dish.

When she saw me looking surprised she picked up one of the dishes and turned it over. On its bottom was a mark that looked somehow familiar to me. "What is it?" I said.

"It's my pottery mark. A cat's paw." She smiled at me faintly. "You have a cat."

She was right. It was the same mark that Biff left when she walked on sand-but smaller.

Then she said, "My husband and I used to have a cat. It was the only one. But it died before my husband did. One of the dogs killed it."

"Oh," I said, and began setting plates on the table.

After a while I heard noise outside and looked up to see, outside the window, two old green thought buses pull up and the men and the dogs silently pile out of them.

I went outside into the sunlight and saw that they were was.h.i.+ng up from a pair of faucets at the back of the building. They were silent and careful about it. I was surprised; I would have expected the kind of laughing and splas.h.i.+ng around of the prisoners I had known. Even the dogs were quiet, huddling their white bodies together on the other side of the men from me, their pink eyes occasionally staring at me.

From the flower garden and from some small outbuildings where they were working the women came and joined the men. All of them filed into the kitchen and seated themselves. Baleen motioned for me to be seated and I found myself a place on a bench that was as uncrowded as I could find.

When everyone except Annabel was seated they all bowed their heads over their plates and old Baleen began to pray, starting the same way Rod had the night before: "O Lord most powerful and most cruel, forgive our miserable afflictions and sins." But he went on differently. "Make us safe from the nuclear rain from Heaven and the sins of the Men of Old. Make us know and feel thy absolute dominion over the lives of men, in this the final age."

Everyone ate in silence. I tried to speak to the man next to me, praising the soup; but he ignored me.

No one thanked Annabel for the meal.

I spent the afternoon alone in my room, reading.

At dinner that evening I was pleased to see Annabel again, although she was too busy serving dinner to talk. I watched her face when I could and it seemed somehow sad, melancholy, as she kept putting food on the table and taking away empty plates. She worked very hard. There should have been someone to help her do more than wash dishes.

After dinner I hoped to see Annabel and possibly talk with her, but Baleen ushered me into the Bible Room and she was left in the kitchen to wash dishes.

The television was already on in the Bible Room when we came in and the seats soon filled with Baleen men and women, silently watching. The program was one of the old Literal Videos-a kind of rare old television that told a logical, rational story, with actors. It was impossible to tell whether the actors were human or robots. The story was about a young girl who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a gang of anti-Privacy drop-outs who had escaped from a Drop-out Reservation. They abused the girl in a variety of ways. Even though similar programs had been a part of my training as a child and part of my study as a university student, I found myself sickened by watching it, in a way that I would not have been a few years before.

Halfway through the program I closed my eyes tightly and saw no more of it. I could hear occasional responsive grunts from the Baleens around me. From the beginning they had all been pa.s.sionately absorbed in the story on the screen. It was horrible.

After the television show had ended-with Detectors saving the girl, judging from the sound track-the screen was turned off and I was brought to the lectern to read.

During my reading I came before long to the part about Noah, which I remembered from prison. Noah was a man whom G.o.d had decided to save from drowning during a flood that destroyed all of the rest of life on earth. There was a pa.s.sage in the reading that went like this: G.o.d said to Noah, "The loathsomeness of all mankind has become pain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them."

And when I read: "I intend to destroy them," I heard old Baleen beside me shout out, very loudly, "Amen!" and another shout of "Amen!" came from the people in front of me. It was startling, but I read on.

After the reading I had hoped to be able to talk with Annabel, but old Baleen took me over to the Mall and waited while I picked myself some new clothing at Sears. I wanted to stay for a while and look over all of the ancient things in that vast store, but he merely said, "This is sacred ground," and would not let me. He did not say so but I felt I had better not let myself be caught over here alone again.

And I did intend to return. I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been. And I was not afraid of Edgar Baleen.

We left the Mall. With fresh new jeans and a black turtleneck next to my skin I felt oddly elated, and while we were crossing the short moonlit distance over to Baleena, I was struck by an idea and said, "Do you mind if I help Annabel in the kitchen for a few days? I'm not very good at farm work." That wasn't exactly true; I merely hated farm work.

He stopped walking and was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You talk a lot."

Somehow that angered me slightly. "Why not?" I said.

"Talk's cheap," he said, and I wondered: What has that got to do with it?

There was silence for another long moment, and then he said, "Life is serious, Reader."

I nodded, not knowing what to say, and that seemed to placate him, for he went on, "You can help Annabel."

Annabel did not think talk was cheap, and she was the only one of them who felt that way. In a sense, she was not one of them. She was originally a Swisher, from one of the other Seven Families, and had changed her name to Baleen when she had married one of old Baleen's sons. The Swishers had been a more talkative breed, but a less prolific one than the Baleens. There were only three Swishers left, two very old men and a half-crazy old woman, Annabel's mother. They lived in what was called Swisher House, several miles up the coast, and bartered gasoline with the Baleens in return for food and clothing from the Mall. The rest of the families in what was called the Cities of the Plain were smaller and weaker than the Baleens. All of them farmed a little. The Baleens, Annabel told me, were more religious than the others, but all were "Christians."

I asked her about the reaction to Noah that I had received. I can still picture her vividly as she told me this, with her light hair pulled back in a bun, a coffee cup in her hand, and her blue-gray eyes shy and sa3.

"It's my father-in-law," she said. "He thinks he's a prophet. He thinks the reason there are no more children is that the Lord is punis.h.i.+ng the world for its sins-as with Noah. Everybody knows the story of Noah. My mother told it to me-but differently from the way you read it. She didn't tell about his being drunk, and about his sons."

"Is Edgar Baleen expecting to be saved, like Noah?"

She smiled. "I don't really know. I don't know how he could be. He's too old to have children."

I asked her a more personal question. It was difficult for me to become used to Invasion of Privacy, even though the Baleens did not believe in that rule. "What became of your husband?" I asked.

She sipped from her coffee. "Suicide. Two years ago."

"Oh," I said.

"He and two of his brothers took thirty sopors and then poured gasoline on themselves and lit it."

I was shocked. It was the same thing I had seen in New York, at the Burger Chef. "People have done that in New York," I said.

She lowered her eyes. "It's happened here-in all of the families," she said. "My husband wanted me to be the third in the group. I was attracted to the idea, but I declined. I want to live a while longer." She got up from the table where we were sitting and began to take dishes over to the sink. "At least I think I want to live."

I was made silent by the weariness that had suddenly come into her voice.

After clearing the table she got herself another cup of coffee and sat down again.

After a minute I spoke. "Do you think you will marry again?"

She looked up at me sadly. "It's not allowed. To marry a Baleen you must be a ... a virgin." She blushed slightly, and lowered her eyes.

This kind of talk was all rather strange to me, since I had never before met people who married. But I was familiar with such things from books and films, and I knew that it had been once considered a Mistake for a man to marry a "fallen woman" of the kind that Gloria Swanson often was-but I had not thought a widow was spoken of as "fallen." Still, all such masters were basically alien to my education. I had been taught "Quick s.e.x is best." I was only beginning to realize that the world might be full of people who had not received the education I had.

It was in the middle of the morning when we had that conversation, and I remember now that was the first time I felt a s.e.xual attraction toward Annabel. She was sitting there quietly, her face melancholy, holding one of the big ceramic coffee mugs that she had let me watch her make in the pottery shed that sat on the other side of the rose garden. I had watched her then at the wheel with awe, amazed at the sureness of her movements as she shaped wet clay into a flawless cylinder, her hands and wrists wet with gray and clayey water, and her eyes focused in complete, intelligent attention on her work. My respect and admiration for her at that time had been great; but I had felt nothing physical.

But now, sitting alone at the big table with her, I realized that I was becoming aroused. I had changed. Mary Lou had changed me; and the films and the books and prison and afterward had changed me too. The last thing I wanted with Annabel was quick s.e.x. I wanted to make love to her; but more importantly I wanted to touch her, and to comfort her from the sadness that seemed to . hold her spirit.

She had set her coffee cup down and was staring toward the windows. I reached my hand out and laid it gently on her forearm.

She jerked her arm away immediately, spilling the rest of her coffee. "No," she said, not looking at me. "You mustn't."

She got a cloth from the sink and wiped up what she had spilled.

During the next several weeks Annabel remained pleasant, but distant. She taught me to make corn pudding from the frozen corn in the refrigerators, and cheesecake and dill pickles and ice cream and soup and chili. I would set the table for lunch and dinner, and prepare the soups and help with the cleaning up. Some of the Baleen men looked at me strangely for doing such work, but none of them spoke aloud of it and I did not really care what they thought. I enjoyed it well enough, although it grieved me to see how sad the repeated work made Annabel feel. I would praise her cooking occasionally, and that seemed to help a little.

Once, when we were alone, I asked her about her sadness. Even though there was nothing physical between us, I had come to feel an intimacy with her from the work we did together and from the feeling I sensed we both had that we would never be like the Baleen family.

"Have you always been unhappy?" I said, once, when we were putting a stack of coffee cakes into irradiation bags for storage. I was wrapping the cakes in the plastic bags and she was working the Sears machine that sealed them and shone the yellow preserving light on them.

At first I thought she wasn't going to answer me. But then she said, "I was a very happy young girl. I used to sing often. And I loved to hear my mother tell me stories. There was a lot more of that within Swisher House than there is here." She gestured with her arm, talcing in the big, empty kitchen.

"Would you like to go back?" I said.

"It wouldn't be any good," she said. "They're all too old now."

"You should let me teach you to read," I said. We had talked about that before.

"No," she said. "I'm too busy. And I don't think I could make the effort." She smiled shyly. "But I love to hear you read. It sounds like . . . another world."

I finished wrapping the last of the coffee cakes, handed it to her, and poured myself a cup of coffee. I looked out toward the garden and the chicken house. "Is it your husband's death that makes you sad?"

"No," she said. "My husband was never . . . important to me. Not after I found that I wouldn't have any children. I always wanted very much to have children. I would have been a good mother."

I thought about that before I spoke. "If you quit using pills . . ." I had told her about the label on the Valium box.

"No," she said. "It's too late. I'm really . . . really worn out with it all. And I don't think I could live around here without the pills."

"Annabel," I said, "you and I could leave here together. And if you didn't take pills for a yellow you might be able to have a baby. My baby."

She looked at me strangely, and I could not tell what she was thinking. She said nothing.

I took a step over toward her and then reached out and gently took her shoulders in my hands, feeling the bones beneath the cloth of her s.h.i.+rt. She did not pull away from me this time. "We're different from these people. We could be together, and we might be able to have children."

And then she looked me in the face and I could see that she was crying. "Paul," she said, "I could not go with you unless Edgar Baleen gave me to you and married us in church."

I looked at her, not knowing what to say and upset by her tears. "Church," I knew, was the Sears store. It was used for weddings and funerals. In the old days children had been baptized there, in the same fountain that I had been baptized in.

Finally I thought of something to say. "I'm not a Baleen. And you aren't either."

"That's true," she said. "But I could never live in sin with a man. It would be ... immoral."

The way she said that last sentence had more feeling in it than I knew how to deal with. I knew about "living in sin"; I had learned about it from silent films. But I had had no idea that she would have possessed such a notion.

"It wouldn't have to be *sin,'" I said. "We could have our own ceremony-over at the Mall at night, if you wanted it."

"No, Paul," she said, and then she wiped her eyes with the hem of her ap.r.o.n. My heart went out to her at the gesture. For that moment I was in love with her.

"What is it, Annabel?" I said.

"Paul," she said, "I have heard of women who enjoy . . . making love." She looked down toward the floor. "That may be right for them to ... to fornicate. To commit adultery. But we women from the Plain are Christian."

I did not know what to make of it. I knew the word "Christian"; it was used for people who believed that Jesus was a G.o.d. But Jesus, as far as I could understand what I had read about him in the Bible, had seemed very tolerant of s.e.xual behavior. I remembered some people called "scribes" and "Pharisees" who had wanted to punish women who had committed adultery. But Jesus had disagreed with them.

I did not pursue that with her, though. Possibly it was something final about the way she p.r.o.nounced the word "Christian." Instead I said, "I don't know that I understand."

She looked at me, half pleadingly and half angrily. Then she said, "I don't like s.e.x, Paul. I hate it."

I did not know what to say.

It remained at that between Annabel and me for the rest of that spring; we did not discuss it again. But we worked together and got to know each other's ways very well and I came to feel closer to her than I have to anyone else in my life-closer even than to Mary Lou, with whom I had made love many times with a great and deep pleasure for both of us. She was such a good person. I can cry to remember how good she was-and how melancholy. And how competent at what she did. I can see her standing by her potter's wheel, or at the stove, or feeding the chickens with her blue ap.r.o.n blowing in the wind, or just pus.h.i.+ng a light-colored wisp of hair back off her forehead. And I can see her as she stood facing me that day with tears streaming down her cheeks, telling me that she could not live with me.

And it was she who got rid of Biff's fleas, and she who always prepared breakfast for me when I came downstairs in the early mornings. It was she who told me that I should consider fixing up this old house to live in. She was the first to take me to see it, a mile from the Maugre obelisk and on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

It was a house she had known of when she was a girl, one that had been lived in by some recluse who had died years before. The children from the Cities had thought of it as "haunted." She told me she had sneaked into it once on a dare, but had been too frightened to stay for more than a minute.

I think of Annabel as a little girl when I look around me now at my living room, as though she were standing there now as a frightened child. If the place is haunted, it is she who haunts it. A beautiful shy child, who loved to sing.

I loved Annabel. What I felt for her was different from what I felt-and, to some degree, still feel-about Mary Lou. What Annabel needed was a way to put her talent and her energy to use. She did a great deal of work; but no one thanked her for it and most of it could have been done by a Make Three robot without the Baleens' knowing the difference-all the cooking so lovingly and skillfully done, all the sweeping and dishwas.h.i.+ng and pottery making, for years. And no one thanked her for it.

I must write this down quickly, before the emotion of it paralyzes me while I sit here, on this morning in early summer, as I approach the end of this part of my journal.

We went on like that, Annabel and I, doing kitchen work together and talking after my readings in the mornings. I learned of many more things than the art of cooking and the sense of s.e.xual puritanism that was not only Annabel's but was a basic part of the culture of the Seven Cities of the Plain. Where the Baleens had come from Annabel did not know, except that they had been wandering preachers at one time, generations before, until the Bible and the literacy that went with it were gradually lost. She had been born in Swisher House, but her mother had been a wanderer in her youth. Once they had been singers of religious songs, but the "Plague of Childlessness" had caused old Baleen to silence them from singing, when Annabel was a young girl. She had been the last one born in the Cities.

I never tried to make love to her again. I have thought since that I should have tried; but once she had told me how she felt about lovemaking I was too confused and uncertain. I would think about Annabel and Mary Lou, loving them both and knowing both were unattainable. And somehow it was almost good that way. There were no risks.

Or so I thought until the morning that I came down to find a dirty kitchen with sc.r.a.ps of bread and eggsh.e.l.ls on the table and in the sink where the family had fixed their own breakfast. Annabel was not there. I went outside to look for her.

She was not anywhere near the chicken house. I went around the side of Baleena to where I could see the empty, overgrown city of Maugre. There was no sign of life there. I started to go toward the obelisk and then, on a sudden impulse, opened the door of the pottery shed.

The smell in the shed was overpowering. A rigid thin body, with its skin burned black and with what was once its hair now a charred black mat around the skull, stood with its back to me, facing the potter's wheel. The arms were straight and the hands still gripped the edges of the wheel.

Along with the burned flesh there was still the smell of gasoline in the little room.

I turned and ran, all the way to the ocean. I sat on the beach and stared out at the water until Rod Baleen found me there that evening.