The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (69 page)

The day after that I had a negative strip, and I looked at it a long time, thinking about how I was never hot, never cold, how I had never had strep as a child. But Mr. Phelps had died of scarlet fever. Mr. Phelps, who looked like me and never felt the cold. And Mother’s gene prints were almost like Mr. Phelps’.

I ran down to the tree, almost tripping in the tangle of ripening wheat. Father was standing by the tree, examining one of the peaches. It was no larger that I could see, but it had lost a little of its greenish cast.

“Do you think we should put a moth net on?” he said. “It’s a little early for moths.”

“Father,” I said, “I don’t think anything we do will help or hurt it. I think it’s all in
the seed.”

He smiled, and his smile
told me what I had been afraid to see before. “So I’ve been told,” he said.

“I’m immune to the strep, aren’t I?”

“Her prints were almost exactly those of Mr. Phelps. I had only had the strep twice. We thought it would be close enough, and after you were born, we were sure it would.” He looked through me, as he had done on that day when he saw the sticker
on Sombra’s fence. “I have done the best I can for her. I have tried to remember that it was not her fault, that I brought her here to this, that it is my fault for thinking of her as I thought of my peach trees. I have let her turn Francie into a greentent flower that cannot possibly survive. I have let her treat you like a stepchild because I knew you could survive no matter what she did to you.
I have let her…” He stopped and passed his hand over his chest. “There is a cache of blackmarket penicillin in the greentent for Francie. It took the cash crop to do it. It will save her once.” He looked away from me toward Turillos’. “I think it’s time to send you to Mamita’s. She’s got all the hands to do for. She’ll need you.”

He sent me back to the house to pack my things. The day was very
hot. Halfway across the field I put my hand up to my forehead, and I could feel the damp sweat curling my hair. It will be cooler under the peach tree, I thought, and started back toward the tree. But halfway there the haze seemed to thicken almost to clouds with a fine pink tint, and the temperature to drop. It will be warmer in the greentent, I thought, shivering. I turned back the way I had come.

I hit one of the supports in the greentent when I fell. Francie will see that it’s down, I thought, Francie will find me. I tried to pull myself up by the edge of the ponics tanks, but I had cut my hand when I fell and it bled into the tanks.

Mother found me. Francie had seen the greentent sagging heavily on one side and run to the house to tell her. Mother stood over me for a long time, as if
she could not think what to do.

“What’s wrong with her?” Francie asked from the doorway.

“Did you touch her?” Mother said.

“No, Mama.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama,” she said, her bright blue eyes full of tears. “Shouldn’t I go get Papa?”

And at last she knelt
beside me and put her cool hand on my hot cheek. “She has the scarlet fever,” she said to Francie. “Go into the house.”

They put me
in the big bed in the front bedroom because of Francie. I tried to keep the covers on, but it was so hot that I kicked them off without meaning to, and then I shivered so that they had to bring more blankets off Francie’s bed.

“How is she?” Father said.

“No better,” Mother said. “Her fever still hasn’t broken.” Her voice was less afraid than it had been in the greentent. I wondered if the planetwide
had been lifted.

“I called the district nurse.”

“Why?” Mother said, still in that quiet voice. “She doesn’t have anything to give her. The
Magassar
won’t come back again.”

“There’s the penicillin.” I wondered if they looked as they had looked that day in the greentent, each clutching the frame of the bed as they had held onto the supports of the greentent.

Mother put her hand to my cheek.
It felt cool. “No,” she said quietly.

“She’ll die without it,” he said. I could hardly hear his voice.

“There isn’t any penicillin,” Mother said, and her voice was as still as her hand on my cheek. “I gave it to Francie.”

Something worried at the edge of my mind. I tried to get a hold on it, but my teeth were chattering so badly I could not. The pain in my chest burned like a flame. I thought
if I could press with my hand against it, the pain would lessen, but my hand felt muffled, and when I tried to look at it, it was as white as a positive strip.

Mamita had told me to take a strip when I got home. I did and it was white. But that could not be right, because the incubation period was very short, and I had not gotten sick for nearly a month. But I already had it, I thought. That
day Sombra had asked if I was getting sick and there had been that pain behind my sternum that nearly doubled me over by the tree, I had already been getting sick.

I was edging closer to
the worrisome thing, but it was so cold. I never felt the cold. Or the heat. Sombra had leaned forward to me on the wall and said, “Don’t I feel hot?” and the pain had almost doubled me over. She was already
getting sick, but so was I. I had been getting sick that day, and I had gotten over it.

I pulled my hand free of the blankets, and that started me shivering again. The hand was still white and clumsily heavy. I put it over the hollow space between my collarbones and pressed and pressed, my whole body straightening, tautening with the pain until it stretched to nothing.

Then I got up and put
on my graduation dress, fumbling over the buttons with my bandaged hand, a little weak from the fever, but better, better.

Father was standing by the peach tree, throwing the peaches at the road. They bounced when they hit the hard mud and rolled against Turillos’ fence.

“Oh, Papa,” I said, “don’t do that.”

He did not seem to hear me. The dustdowner was kicking up its little trail of dust far
down the road. He picked a hard peach off the tree, covered it with his big fist in a grip that should have smashed it, and pitched it at the distant downer.

“Papa,” I said again. He whirled violently as if he would throw the peach at me. I stepped back in surprise.

“She killed you,” he said, “to save her precious Francie. She let you die up there crying out her name. Putting her hand on your
cheek and tucking you in. She murdered you!” He flung the peach down violently. It rolled to my feet. “Murderer!” He turned to wrench another peach off the tree.

I put up my hand in protest. “Papa, don’t! Not your cash crop!”

He dropped his hands and stared limply at the dustdowner rattling down the road toward us. It was pulling a coffin behind it. My coffin. “You were my cash crop,” he said
quietly.

I remembered Mamita’s face when she thought I’d brought the dress for Sombra’s laying out. I looked down at my white shroudlike dress and my hand wrapped in the white bandage. “Oh, Papa,” I said, finally understanding. “I didn’t die. I got better.”

“She gave the penicillin to Francie,” he said. “While you were still in the greentent. Before she even let Francie come to get me. Your
hand was bleeding. She gave her the penicillin before she even bandaged your hand.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I didn’t need the medicine. I got over the scarlet fever by myself.”

It was finally coming
to him, bit by bit, like it had come to me in the big bed. “You were supposed to be immune,” he said. “But you got it anyway. You were supposed to be immune.”

“I’m not immune, Papa, but I
can get over the strep myself. I’ve been doing it all along, all my life.” I picked up the peach at my feet and handed it to him. He looked at it numbly.

“We were breeding for immunity,” he said.

“I know, Papa. You knew what you were breeding for, but you didn’t know what you’d get.” I wanted to put my arms around him. “Haven will always be coming up with new strains. It would be impossible
to be immune to all of them.”

He took a knife out of his pocket, slowly, as if he were still asleep. He cut into the peach in his hand, sawing through the thick, dusty skin to the sudden softness underneath. He bit into it, and I watched his face anxiously.

“Is it all right, Papa?” I said. “Is it sweet?”

“Sweet beyond hope,” he said, and put his arms around me, holding me close. “Oh, my sweet
Haze, we bred to fight the strep, and look, look what we got!”

He held me by the shoulders and looked down at me. “I want you to go to Mamita’s. You can’t help here. But the hands all have gene prints like yours.” His eyes were full of tears. “You are my cash crop after all.”

“Now run,” he said and walked away from me, back through the field toward the house. I stood for a minute, watching him,
unable to call to him, to shout after him how much I loved them all. I climbed over the fence and stood in the road, looking at the litter of unhurt peaches. The downer was finishing its determined circuit at the top of the hill. If I hurried I could ride my own coffin to Mamita’s and not even get my graduation dress wet. It seemed to me suddenly the most joyous chance in the world—to ride my
own coffin, triumphant in my white dress with its fluttering red ribbons.

I stopped to catch my breath at the top of the hill and looked back at the peach tree. Francie was standing by it, with her hand raised almost in a question. Mama had done her hair in sugar curls for some occasion, and they did not move in the dusty wind that fluttered the red ribbons on my dress. She seemed as still as
the brown haze that surrounded her, hugging her thin arms against her chest. I was too far away to see her shivering. Perhaps I would not have known what it meant if I had: I was not bred to read omens.

“I’ll bring you
some penicillin,” I shouted, though she would have no idea of what I was saying. I shouted past her to Papa, who was too far away already to hear me. “I’ll bring you some if I
have to walk all the way to the
Magassar
.”

“Don’t worry!” I
shouted. “They’ll lift the planetwide. I know it.” The dustdowner rattled past me, drowning out my words, and I ran to pull myself up onto the splintery edge of the coffin. “Don’t worry, Francie!” I shouted again, putting my bandaged hand up to my mouth and holding on tight with the other. “We’re all going to live forever!”

The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still hadn’t gone by eight o’clock.

“Perhaps our Violet’s tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters,” Morris said, “and they’re so taken by her charms, they’ve forgotten to wind the sirens.”

“You’d best watch out, then,” Swales said, taking off his tin warden’s hat. He’d just come back from patrol. We
made room for him at the linoleum-covered table, moving our teacups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham shuffled his papers into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.

Swales sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. “She’ll set her cap for the ARP next,” he said, reaching for the milk. Morris pushed it toward him. “And none of us will be safe.” He grinned
at me. “Especially the young ones, Jack.”

“I’m safe,” I said. “I’m being called up soon. Twickenham’s the one who should be worrying.”

Twickenham looked up from his typing at the sound of his name. “Worrying about what?” he asked, his hands poised over the keyboard.

“Our Violet setting her cap for you,” Swales said. “Girls always go for poets.”

“I’m a journalist, not a poet. What about Renfrew?”
He nodded his head toward the cots in the other room.

“Renfrew!” Swales boomed, pushing his chair back and starting into the room.

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t wake him. He hasn’t slept all week.”

“You’re
right. It wouldn’t be fair in his weakened condition.” He sat back down. “And Morris is married. What about your son, Morris? He’s a pilot, isn’t he? Stationed in London?”

Morris shook his head.
“Quincy’s up at North Weald.”

“Lucky, that,” Swales said. “Looks as if that leaves you, Twickenham.”

“Sorry,” Twickenham said, typing. “She’s not my type.”

“She’s not anyone’s type, is she?” Swales said.

“The RAF’s,” Morris said, and we all fell silent, thinking of Vi and her bewildering popularity with the RAF pilots in and around London. She had pale eyelashes and colorless brown hair she
put up in flat little pin curls while she was on duty, which was against regulations, though Mrs. Lucy didn’t say anything to her about them. Vi was dumpy and rather stupid, and yet she was out constantly with one pilot after another, going to dances and parties.

“I still say she makes it all up,” Swales said. “She buys all those things she says they give her herself, all those oranges and chocolate.
She buys them on the black market.”

“On a full-time’s salary?” I said. We only made two pounds a week, and the things she brought home to the post—sweets and sherry and cigarettes—couldn’t be bought on that. Vi shared them round freely, though liquor and cigarettes were against regulations as well. Mrs. Lucy didn’t say anything about them, either.

She never reprimanded her wardens about anything,
except being malicious about Vi, and we never gossiped in her presence. I wondered where she was. I hadn’t seen her since I came in.

“Where’s Mrs. Lucy?” I asked. “She’s not late as well, is she?”

Morris nodded toward the pantry door. “She’s in her office. Olmwood’s replacement is here. She’s filling him in.”

Olmwood had been our best part-time, a huge out-of-work collier who could lift a house
beam by himself, which was why Nelson, using his authority as district warden, had had him transferred to his own post.

“I hope the new man’s not any good,” Swales said. “Or Nelson will steal him.”

“I saw Olmwood
yesterday,” Morris said. “He looked like Renfrew, only worse. He told me Nelson keeps them out the whole night patrolling and looking for incendiaries.”

There was no point in that.
You couldn’t see where the incendiaries were falling from the street, and if there was an incident, nobody was anywhere to be found. Mrs. Lucy had assigned patrols at the beginning of the Blitz, but within a week she’d stopped them at midnight so we could get some sleep. Mrs. Lucy said she saw no point in our getting killed when everyone was already in bed anyway.