After every meal came the Invocation to Combat Ungratefulness. All three girls had been catechized in the simple prayers that preceded the salt-ration years earlier but for a long time were without a godmother to chant the clarification. Meals were always taken outside, weather permitting, and only once the sun had gone down, with their godmother alone on one side of the low stone table in the garden. The girls sat on the other side, whomever had finished her work the soonest seated closest to the head.
This had been the order of things: Paul, the eldest, had a dead mother who had been reduced to salt a decade since. The bones had been gathered in a square of fabric, bundled neatly, and buried at the northwest end of the family grounds; a false cypress, which was not by the strictest definition a tree but an overgrown shrub, grew over them, and dropped fat pale spiders from its branches. After an appropriate but not elaborately drawn-out mourning period, Paul’s father was taken husband again, and produced her sisters in quick succession. Gomer and Robin were equally black-eyed and charming, quick with both work and a smile, handsome of face and of person, less eager to please than universally pleasing.
Gomer and Robin’s mother had no training in the motherly arts and confined herself to matters of business and household management. Their father knew the primary psalms, his place, and not much else. The godmother had appeared on the day of Gomer’s baptism and supplied the family with water she had conjured herself to mark the occasion. She joined the household as godmother and doctrinal master that same evening. Gomer, who had little native interest in religion but a placid desire to be generally approved of, took to her godmother at once. Robin took to her too, although with none of Gomer’s innate placidity; Robin created the unique impression of always seeming to be on the verge of spilling something on herself, despite not being in the least bit clumsy. Paul’s comparative reserve could not help but draw the godmother’s attention, and Paul was often the worse off for it.
The godmother could read, and write a little when the situation called for it; she could walk in the noonday sun without fainting; commission deacons; haggle with the grocer; perform minor miracles; turn a dog into a man for upward of three hours; cast out territorial spirits; slaughter a chicken without spilling a drop of blood; initiate mysteries; and she could name over one thousand neurotoxins. She made all her own clothing, and the children’s too, and she was neither bent nor stooped with age. The garden, since she began to tend to it, produced both onions and cabbage and several other eatable things beside, and no birds ever landed in it.
“Receive all things,” the godmother began. “Bless all things, mind all things; guard against ingratitude and the waste of water. Build your seat on a high place and watch for thieves; mind in what manner, when, whence, how many, and what kind come to break in and steal. When the watch grows weary, stand up and enter into the guard of the mind, then sit down again and attend to the task.” She turned her head to Paul. “What is it to be grateful, girl?”
“To be grateful is to be wakeful and watchful,” Paul said. “To be grateful is to remember. To be grateful is to acknowledge one’s lawful debts and keep a balanced ledger.”
“Attend, and affirm, the reasons you are grateful to me,” the godmother said. “Eldest first.”
“For my life,” Gomer said. “For my going out and my lying down. For your right hand, which holds me fast. For my eyes, my ears, my limbs, and my senses. For the clothes on my back, the salt in my hand, the water-storage tanks in my home, the walls that keep out lawbreakers, for the rain when it comes, for the knowledge of the word you have given me.”
“It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and full rations for tomorrow.” Gomer’s flush broke through the dirt on her face, and she smiled broadly as she twisted her hands under the table, as if wringing out every last drop of the compliment.
Robin came next, reciting in a high, practiced voice: “For consolation, for comfort, for the discernment between what can be eaten and what not ought to be eaten, for the power to keep the dead in the ground, for your commandments, for your wonder-working, for the knowledge of poisons and of proofs, for the safety of your garden in a wicked world.”
“It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and three-quarters rations, for failing to mention the watch-fires I have set around this house that burn both day and night.”
Paul said nothing, and the godmother did not ask her to speak. She sat on the lowest stool at the end of the table, for her work had taken her to the farthest ends of the property, and she had been late in presenting herself to the house. She had broad shoulders and reddish-brown hair, which she wore very short. She sat at the end of the table six nights out of seven.
“Attend, and account how you love me,” the godmother said. “Youngest first.”
“More than eyes,” Robin said. “More than life, more than health, more than salt-rations and true water, more than breath, more than honor; you are speech and liberty to me.”
“More than milk,” Gomer said. “More than eggs, more than a portable generator, more than bread and lamps, more than my living parents and my own sweet bed; you are air and light to me.”
“Paul, I will not ask how you love me,” said the godmother, “as I know that you do not.” Gomer twisted her hands under the table again, but said nothing. Robin looked at Paul out of the corner of her eyes and pulled her mouth to one side, but said nothing. Paul stacked her sister’s dishes under her own and swept the crumbs off the table onto the ground.
“Sly,” said the godmother to Paul’s sisters. “Sly and secret and workful, and gives her loyalty to a dead woman even as she neglects the living woman who stands before her. She wastes water and salt weeping over those who neither notice nor profit from them. Look, she has been crying today; her eyes betray her.”
Paul still said nothing, having long since learned better than to offer a defense. Soon enough the godmother gathered up her cup and book and, rising from her seat, led them all in the final salt-prayer.
“Blessed be salt. Blessed be the solution, from water and from rock, intervener in the blood.
“Blessed be the anti-caking agent, the de-iced highway. Guard against the seizure and the fluid of the lungs.
“Blessed be the Trace Elements. You iodize all things, preserve all things, desiccate the living and the dead, the Great Solubizer.
“Blessed be Potassium, salt’s glorious spouse, guardian of the concentration gradient, protector of resting potential.
“Let my flesh be a safeguard of the reserves: let my body preserve the salt for those who will come after. Bless the rations. Bless the Alberger process. Keep us from the daily minimum, the saltless fits. May she who wastes salt, lose salt; may she who finds salt, keep salt.
“Salt within me, salt before me, salt behind me, salt beneath me, salt to my left and to my right, salt when I lie down, salt when I sit down, salt when I arise, salt in the heart of all who think of me, salt in the mouth of all who speak of me, salt in every eye that sees, salt in every ear that hears.”
With that the meal was over, and they went inside.
* * *
Gomer and Robin attended to their own rooms, their own laundry, and their own labor. Their mother managed the house’s income and expenditures; their held-in-common father handled all responsibilities municipal and civic. Paul was responsible for the kitchen, the guardroom, the chapel, the compost heap that fed the garden, the neatening of the family pathways, the tithe, and the several public rooms of the house, because, as the godmother had pointed out, “Paul has a dead mother, who does no work, and so her daughter must work for both.”
What had happened, what had always happened, was this: Paul’s work took her often to the false cypress that flourished over her mother’s bones at the end of the field. There were no other trees nearby (although it was not a tree, precisely, but a shrub, no more than six feet in height and perhaps eight feet around), which meant it provided the only shade to be found for half a mile during the worst heat of the day. It was not for emotional but logistical reasons that Paul preferred it. Had there been another option, she would gladly have availed herself of it, for the shade the false cypress provided was patchy and thin, and she had to thrust herself underneath its branches in order to hide herself from the sun, and cover her face with her hands, as bloated yellow spiders rained softly down on her. If she cried sometimes as she lay underneath, that was an expected physiological reaction. If her mother’s tree sometimes responded sympathetically, that was to be expected, too. Her mother had been in possession of not-insignificant sympathetic powers, and if every so often a spare bundle of nails or scrap of ash-soap or loaf of bread dropped down with the spiders, Paul did not waste them.
That evening, Paul was using her mother’s soap to scrub the dishes in her sink and was up to her elbows in foam when the godmother appeared in the doorway. Paul briefly dropped one knee in the lightest possible genuflection without releasing the dish in her hand.
“When you need something next,” the godmother said, “you do not go to her. You will come to me.”
Paul shrugged. “It is no concern of yours, I think,” she said. “I have rejected nothing from you, nor sought any of her favors. What I am given, I use, and give thanks for it, as you have taught me.”
For a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the light splashing of Paul’s hands in the sink. Then the godmother was at her elbow, spilling a low and steady stream of words in her ear.
“You cannot continue to take from the dead without incurring a debt you cannot possibly pay. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light; the yoke of the dead is not so easily thrown off. What you need, I will provide. No one else.”
“You do provide for me,” Paul said. “I seek nothing from her but shade at noon, and yet I cannot turn away a gift given unasked.”
“Then you do not love me,” the godmother cried. “You do not love me, and I have loved you with my whole and living heart from the first day I mothered you, and I will perish for the want of you.”
The godmother plunged her hand into the sink and groped blindly until she found Paul’s fingers, and clutched at them. “You will kill me,” she said again. “Have I not given you more than your sisters, although you love me less? Have you not the privilege of sharing my own bed? Do I not appoint you in the best clothes, the first pair of new shoes, the best tools, the first choice of food, when you have earned food? Who else’s hand would I clasp against my own? Who else have I offered my heart to but you? Yet you spurn it, and offer me stares, and dawdle in the fields rather than sit at my honored side at table. If I thought it would bring a smile to your face, I would let myself slip underground like your first mother, to have you willingly climb under my branches, to know you love me.”
Paul let her hands go slack under the water. “I love you,” she said, and the godmother clasped her all the harder, stroking between each knuckle with her long fingers.
“How do you love me?” the godmother said. “How can one be so young, so lovely, and so unfeeling?”
“I will come to you,” Paul said. “I will come to you for everything.”
The godmother smiled in great triumph, and her fingers encircled Paul’s wrists tightly. “And you will bring me the gifts she gives you? Not hoard them to yourself? Not drive me off, as some stranger unfit to share your joy?”
“I will bring you everything.”
“Not to come to me,” the godmother said, “suggests you are not prepared to be grateful to me. It smacks of ingratitude. Am I not your proper godmother? Is not my power sufficient? There is nothing I would not give you, if you would only acknowledge my right to grant you favors. What is it that I ask of you, that you find so impossible? What have I only ever asked of you?”
“To be good,” Paul said. “To be a good girl, a good daughter, and to return your love honorably.” The godmother looked at her with a long and searching look, and nodded, and broke her hold, and shook her hands dry over the soaking-water.
The godmother handed her a dish from the drying rack. “This is dirty. Clean it again.” Paul thrust it back into the sink and scrubbed again, then handed it back for inspection. The godmother swiped it with the dishcloth that hung from her belt and stacked it neatly with the others.
“Everything you need, I will provide,” the godmother said again. “All I ask of you is to love me and to be good. Are you prepared to meet those terms?”
“I am prepared,” Paul said, and allowed herself to lean a little against the edge of the sink.
“You need salt,” the godmother said—it was not a question—and flashed something small and white in her hand. Paul shook her head and pressed her lips together.
“You have been crying,” the godmother said in her most businesslike tone, “and have been at half rations for nine days. Your head aches, and you cannot eat, and you are clutching at the sink to stay upright.”
Paul nodded, and in an instant the godmother’s hands flew to Paul’s face, one at her throat and one on her lips. Paul felt the familiar prickle on the back of her tongue, and tried to swallow. The hand at her throat stroked gently downward as she gulped and heaved over the sink. “I can’t,” she said, gasping, and then there was a glass of water at her lips and a hand in her hair, and she accepted both gratefully. Finally she swallowed, and felt the prickle blossom into a hot, hysterical pool in her stomach.
“Are you going to be sick?” the godmother asked, brushing the back of her hand over Paul’s forehead. “Shall I fetch a bucket?”
“No,” Paul said, and shook her head tightly. She straightened up and kept her hands close at her side. “No, I’m not going to be sick.”
“Are you quite all right now?” the godmother said, and her voice was gentle.
“Yes,” Paul said. “I’m sorry. I’m all right now.”
* * *
It did not happen that the members of the parish gathered together often; there were monsters on the earth in those days. But the priest’s son was in need of a wedding, and the neighborhood offered up their children for his selection.
The girls’ father had called it a public concern, reminded them the family had never balked at civic participation, and left it at that. Gomer and Robin’s mother had calculated their bridewealth in both directions the day they were baptized and determined that whether they went as grooms or as maids, the budget would abide. So they were all right to go, if they liked, and both decided they would like.
“Gomer might bathe, for a change,” Paul said over the washtub to her sisters the afternoon they had been granted ordinary leave. “There’s plenty of room with the laundry; jump in and take a bath, if you think you can stand the shock.”
“And resign my wife to a lifetime of disappointed hopes, dreaming always of the day I take another?” Gomer said. “Thanks just the same, but he’ll have to be clean enough for both.”
“You’d wife him, then?” Paul said.
“What, catch me volunteering for anything more than husband’s work?” Gomer said. “He’s a priest’s son, he can already read, and anyhow I’m too old to train in anything new. No, I’ll go unwashed and husband both, or I won’t go at all.”
Robin looked more shocked than usual, which took some doing. “It would be presumptuous,” she said, “to assume yourself husband, when you do not know their household’s need—when our own mother has set a perfectly good example of finding a role that suits her talents, rather than making demands of—”
“I rather wonder, Robin,” Paul said, “at your eagerness to follow her good example, as it is no secret that you’d scrape up the dust with your heels and crow like the Devil if our godmother told you it held the key to mastering the mothering arts.”
There was silence for a minute, then Paul spoke again. “What an interesting game you’ve found, Robin, alternating your mouth between open and closed so quickly. I wonder what it’s called, and if anyone can play?”
“Spoken like a true wife,” Gomer said, laughing, and after a minute Robin found it in herself to laugh, too.
The seat by the fire had been empty, and then it was not; the godmother did not fuss about making her appearances now that the girls had grown and ceased to be overcome with delight by the many secret ways she knew to enter a room.
“How much joy you find in thinking which of you will leave me first,” she said, writing something unintelligible with her finger in the ashes on the hearth, “which of you will take your strength and add it to another family, and diminish the power of mine. I wonder if you have ever thought of bringing someone to me, of joining their strength with ours? Perhaps not. You will notice, of course, that your father has granted you leave, and your mother has granted you leave, but I have granted you nothing, nor indeed has my leave been sought.”
Gomer was the first to her feet, genuflecting so earnestly she quite lost her balance and had to reestablish herself against the table. Robin followed suit, a little less desperately, and remained frozen mid-droop until the godmother nodded her acknowledgment. Paul kept at the washtub.
“See how Paul doesn’t greet me,” the godmother said sadly to the ashes on the hearth. “Paul, Paul, you are careful and troubled about many things, yet only one thing is needful. Your sisters have chosen that good part, and it will not be taken away from them.”
“Luke ten, forty-one and forty-two,” Robin said, but no praise was forthcoming, and she sat back down.
“The mangler is electric,” Paul said without looking up, “and I know you don’t want us running out the generator.”
“Let me mind the generator,” the godmother said. “You mind your manners and look at me.”
Paul did, and grinned a little as she felt the familiar tug against her own mind as she caught her godmother’s hopeful eyes. “Godmother,” she said, and swept a leg slowly behind her.
“Mind your labor” was all the godmother said, and Paul returned to her laundry.
“We would not go without your permission,” Gomer said. “That was never our intention.”
“Remember your baptism and do not lie,” the godmother said. “You mock me in my own home and make plans to leave it. But the journey could be quite difficult, I should think. A journey to the priest’s house could be quite impossible, if it were undertaken without permission and without blessing to guard the walk. Fire, what do you think?”
The fire went out quite suddenly, throwing the room into blackness and smoke. Robin, who could never manage her response to anything, squealed aloud, and Gomer choked out something that might have, if one were feeling generous, been described as a cough.
After a moment, a scrap of flame reappeared over the hearth, and the godmother’s face was wreathed in lights. “I am not unreasonable,” she said. “Make an act of contrition, and you can go with my blessing.”
Gomer and Robin, on both their knees, declared they were heartily sorry for having offended her, and detested all their shortcomings because of her just punishments, but mostly because they had offended her who was deserving of all-love; they firmly resolved, with her help, to err no more and to avoid the near occasion of ingratitude. Paul said nothing. Paul was not allowed to make the same acts of contrition as her sisters; Paul could only ever be forgiven in a manner that was peculiar to herself, which often meant that she went unforgiven altogether.
“Dress yourselves. Attempt to do so without humiliating me” was all the godmother said in response, and they were dismissed, Gomer flinging her roundest eyes over her shoulder at Paul as she went.
“And will Paul go tonight?” the godmother asked. “Will Paul turn wife or husband?”
“I would go,” Paul said, “if for nothing else than to see another family’s house; beyond that I have no thought.”
“Paul will marry,” the godmother said. “Paul would marry her own pride, if no one else sought her out.”
There was very little Paul could say to that that would not be called a lie, and Paul would rather be called ungrateful than a liar, as long as she had to choose between the two.
“To Paul,” the godmother said, drawing herself up from her seat, “who loves her labor above all things, I give an extra gift: more work, and more solitude.” She scattered two handfuls of black lentils over the dying fire, until they were mixed in with the ashes. “Pick them all out in an hour, and I will dress you myself.” There was a touch on Paul’s shoulder. “Mind you do not burn your hands. I could not stand to see them ruined.” Then she was gone.
Before Paul could move toward the hearth, two gray pigeons alighted on the kitchen window, cocking their heads this way and that, and jumped down onto the floor, strutting smartly and kicking up their red heels. They moved like heartbeats under the table, and were quickly joined by a pair of turtledoves, then two great black crows, shiny as beetles. Then the sky opened up in a great whirring swarm, and the floor came alive with the mumbling and rustling of wings. The pigeons nodded their heads and surged up to the hearth’s edge and began to pick, pick, pick. And the others also began to pick, pick, pick, and Paul could not move for the soft press of feathers against her.
* * *
The godmother had said nothing when Paul had pressed a fist-warm bundle of lentils into her hands, merely wiped the ash away tidily and looked over all three of the girls. Gomer, who still had not bathed, made a concession to the public good and wore her best work clothes, and a new coat over them. Robin’s eyes were bright, though it was difficult to tell if this came from anticipation of an unusual event or merely her customary anxiety. They were to keep their eyes to themselves on the walk to the priest’s house. They were to speak to no one before they reached the priest’s gate. They were to eat and speak once inside as they pleased, and Paul was to be home by matins.
The godmother had kept her word and dressed Paul herself, bringing in three heavily wrapped bundles from the garden and laying them at Paul’s feet. The first she muttered over and tapped at before opening. She pulled out a fine white shirt, and carefully laced Paul’s arms through it, and fastened each button to the throat. “I have made this for only you,” she said in Paul’s ear as she fixed the collar. “I have put such power in it, engendered it with such virtue as could make even a stone heart happy.”
Paul began to recite the first part of the Invocation to Combat Ungratefulness, but the godmother placed a hand on her chin and searched her face with unsparing eyes. “Not that tonight, love,” she said softly. “The mothering-psalm first, before you go.”
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Paul said, and swayed backward only a very little. “If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me,’ even the night shall be light around me. The night shines as day, the darkness and the light are both alike to you.”
The godmother pointed at the remaining two bundles, which speedily unwrapped themselves. Two bobbing, jerking figures rose up and danced out the front door to the first gatepost, where they swayed brokenly under the lamplight.
“Follow them to the priest’s house,” she said. “Let them go first. Do not let them get behind you.”
* * *
The priest’s son was attentive—and more than attentive, amiable; and more than amiable, kind. He made Gomer laugh twice and kept Robin awake all through dinner. To Paul, he had spoken of fence repair and drought and how to best tend gospel-trees, and smiled as he spoke in his mild and pleasant voice. She found herself unwilling to abandon his conversation, even as Gomer had displayed increasingly concerned faces from across the room as the night wore on. Once she got up to leave, and he said, “Oh, must you? Only I’d rather you didn’t,” and so she stayed.
It wasn’t until well after Night Office concluded that she realized Gomer and Robin were nowhere to be found, that dawn was already smearing itself across the sky, that her face was quite flushed, and that she had made a spectacle of herself. “I am sorry,” she said as she dipped her head politely and downed the remaining water in her cup. “I’ll go now. I do like you, priest’s son.”
“I like you too, Paul, who is twice mothered,” he said, trying to remain grave. “You might consider marrying me, if you have thoughts of marrying.”
“I might,” she said, and left her chair. “You might be worth marrying.”
There were no bobbing figures waiting for her by the garden gate, and she tore down the path toward home guideless.
“You are late, you are late, you are late,” the godmother cried out in a pinched voice as Paul rushed through the door. “I did not fetch up those guides from their sleep to see you come home late.”
“I am sorry,” Paul said.
“Your sisters’ feet,” the godmother said, yanking at Paul’s sleeves, “who hobbled them? Their hopes—who trammeled them, that your clumsy hands might be stuffed threefold with gifts? Who wedged their bloody feet in hob-nailed shoes, that you might walk the freer? Who did all this and more for you?”
“You did,” Paul said. She did not look at her sisters sitting quietly at the kitchen table, hands hidden in their laps.
“I, I, I,” the godmother crowed, and smiled, and settled back down onto her heels. “Who has mothered you better? Who has mothered you else?”
“None have,” Paul said.
“Who could marry you better? Who has sought your heart, as I have sought it? Not for an evening, not for a conversation—your heart, whole and dangerous.”
“None,” Paul said.
The godmother smiled, and pulled again at her sleeves. “Paul does not deserve such fine things to wear,” she said to no one in particular. “Paul should not go about in clothes she is not suited for.” Paul felt the fabric molt and sag into something loathsomely soft; she knew rather than felt the press of dead fur against her, and little dead mice peeled from her skin and dropped onto the floor.
* * *
When Paul woke next, she was married and in bed in the priest’s house, now hers and her family’s, too. The window had been left open, and she could see out over the path leading up to the front door.
She rose up on one elbow and took further stock. The door was open, and the hallway was full of low, earnest voices. Her husband was seated at the desk in the corner and smiled when she looked at him. “You’re awake,” he said. “You’re awake, and you are married to me.”
Paul smiled back.
“I’ve got to confess something,” her husband said to her. “I know it’s a bit early to be confessing to you, but I figure I ought to get into the habit. I’ve had your things sent for. I should have waited for you to wake and ask you directly, but I’ve never had occasion to—ah—wake someone after giving them cause for sleep, and I didn’t like to disturb you. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Paul said, and meant it. “Te absolvo.”
“A shriving wife,” he said, looking enormously pleased with himself. “Or a shriving husband, if you’d like. I didn’t know if you wanted to be a wife or not, so I guessed, but we can still change it. I’m trained for both, if that helps.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Paul said again. “I don’t mind anything. God, but it’s nice out today.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Listen, give me five minutes to finish attending to this, and then let’s have a proper fight about which of us gets to be wife. Let’s have a terrible argument. Practice all the names you’re going to call me.”
“In five minutes, then,” Paul agreed. “Married life certainly is orderly.” She looked out the window and saw a black figure struggling over the horizon, resolving itself more clearly with every step through the haze of the day’s great heat. At first there was only a head visible over a squirming, flickering mass; gradually the torso solidified and was eventually joined by a pair of legs, as it made its way up the main road. It paused briefly under a great cypress tree, nearly vanishing in the blackness below its branches, then resumed its journey under the sunlight to the front door. Paul did not need to see the figure’s face to know it could read, and write a little when the situation called for it; could walk in the noonday sun without fainting; commission deacons; haggle with the grocer; perform minor miracles; turn a dog into a man for upward of three hours; cast out territorial spirits; slaughter a chicken without spilling a drop of blood; initiate mysteries; and name over one thousand neurotoxins. The godmother was terribly useful to any household fortunate enough to hold her. She was going to be a great help to Paul in her new position. Paul was terribly lucky to have her.
Paul bounded out of bed, her face warm and cold by turns, and pressed her hands against her temples. Her lungs seized at nothing, two empty fists in her chest. There was no air in this room, no air in the world. Her arms bloomed all over in hot pinpricks, the insides of her eyelids exploded into dark stars, and somewhere outside those footsteps came closer to her door. “Ah,” she cried softly, “I shall be sick, I shall be sick, I shall be sick—”
“What is it?” her husband asked, crouching at her feet, pressing cool hands against hers. “What’s the matter? Can you speak? Can I bring you water?” Someone near the door slipped out and returned with a glass a moment later. He brought it to her lips, and she drank deeply, and then fixed him with her steadiest smile.
“I’m all right,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m quite all right now.”