about the wooden men, the blockheads, the Old Islanders. They don't laugh about
it here. When he married me--" She turned to face Hamid, stepping into the shaft
of warm twilight from the one unshuttered window so that her clothing glimmered
white. "When Farre of Sandry, Farre Older courted me and married me, on the Broad Isle where I lived, the people there said don't do it to me, and the people here said don't do it to him. Marry your own kind, marry in your own kind. But what did we care for that? He didn't care and I didn't care. I didn't
believe! I wouldn't believe! But I came here-- Those trees, the Grove, the older
trees--you've been there, you've seen them. Do you know they have names?" She stopped, and the dragging, gasping, indrawn sob began again. She took hold of a
chair back and stood racking it back and forth: "He took me there. 'That is my grandfather,'" she said in a hoarse, jeering gasp. "'That's Alta, my mother's grandmother. Dorandem has stood four hundred years.'"
Her voice failed.
"We don't laugh about it," Hamid said. "It is a tale--something that might be true--a mystery. Who they are, the . . . the olders, what makes them change .
. how it happens. . . . Dr. Saker sent me here not only to be of use but to learn. To verify . . . the process."
"The process," Makali said.
She came back to the bedside, facing him across it, across the stiff body, the
"What am I carrying here?" she asked, soft and hoarse, her hands on her belly. "A child," Hamid said, without hesitating and clearly.
"What kind of child?"
"Does it matter?"
She said nothing.
"His child, your child, as your daughter is. Do you know what kind of child
Idi
is?"
After a while Makali said softly, "Like me. She does not have the amber eyes." "Would you care less for her if she did?"
"No," she said.
She stood silent. She looked down at her husband, then toward the windows, then
straight at Harold.
"You came to learn," she said.
"Yes. And to give what help I can give."
She nodded. "Thank you," she said.
He laid his hand a moment on his heart.
She sat down in her usual place beside the bed with a deep, very quiet breath, too quiet to be a sigh.
Hamid opened his mouth. "He's blind, deaf, without feeling. He doesn't know if you're there or not there. He's a log, a block, you need not keep this vigil!" All these words said themselves aloud in his mind, but he did not speak one of them. He closed his mouth and stood silent.
"How long?" she asked in her usual soft voice.
"I don't know. That change . . . came quickly. Maybe not long now."
She nodded. She laid her hand on her husband's hand, her light warm touch on the
hard bones under hard skin, the long, strong, motionless fingers. "Once," she said, "he showed me the stump of one of the olders, one that fell down a long time ago."
Hamid nodded, thinking of the sunny clearing in the grove, the wild rose.
"It had broken right across in a great storm, the trunk had been rotten. It was
old, ancient, they weren't sure even who . . . the name . . . hundreds of years
old. The roots were still in the ground but the trunk was rotten. So it broke right across in the gale. But the stump was still there in the ground. And you
could see. He showed me." After a pause she said, "You could see the bones.
The
leg bones. In the trunk of the tree. Like pieces of ivory. Inside it. Broken off
with it." After another silence, she said, "So they do die. Finally."
Hamid nodded.
Silence again. Though he listened and watched almost automatically, Hamid did not see Farre's chest rise or fall.
"You may go whenever you like, Hamiddem," she said gently. "I'm all right now. Thank you."
He went to his room. On the table, under the lamp when he lighted it, lay some leaves. He had picked them up from the border of the lane that went by the grove, the grove of the older trees. A few dry leaves, a twig What their blossom
was, their fruit, he did not know. It was summer, between the flower and the seed. And he dared not take a branch, a twig, a leaf from the living tree.
When he joined the people of the farm for supper, old Pask was there.
"Doctor-dem," the saddler said in his rumbling bass, "is he turning?"
"Yes," Hamid said.
"So you're giving him water?"
"Yes."
"You must give him water, dema," the old man said, relentless. "She doesn't know. She's not his kind. She doesn't know his needs."
"But she bears his seed," said Hamid, grinning suddenly, fiercely, at the old man.
Pask did not smile or make any sign, his stiff face impassive. He said, "Yes. The girl's not, but the other may be older." And he turned away.
Next morning after he had sent Makali out for her walk, Hamid studied Farre's feet. They were extended fully into the water, as if he had stretched downward to it, and the skin looked softer. The long brown toes stretched apart a little.
And his hands, still motionless, seemed longer, the fingers knotted as with arthritis yet powerful, lying spread on the coverlet at his sides.
Makali came back ruddy and sweaty from her walk in the summer morning. Her vitality, her vulnerability were infinitely moving and pathetic to Hamid after his long contemplation of a slow, inexorable toughening, hardening, withdrawal.
He said, "Makali-dem, there is no need for you to be here all day. There is nothing to do for him but keep the water-basin full."
"So it means nothing to him that ! sit by him," she said, half questioning
half
stating.
"I think it does not. Not any more."
Her gallantry touched him. He longed to help her. "Dema, did he, did anyone ever
speak to you about--if this should happen-- There may be ways we can ease the change, things that are traditionally done-- I don't know them. Are there people
here whom I might ask--Pask and Dyadi--?"
"Oh, they'll know what to do when the time comes," she said, with an edge in her
voice. "They'll see to it that it's done right. The right way, the old way.
You
don't have to worry about that. The doctor doesn't have to bury his patient, after all. The grave diggers do that."
"He is not dead."
"No. Only blind and deaf and dumb and doesn't know if I'm in the room or a hundred miles away." She looked up at Hamid, a gaze which for some reason embarrassed him. "If I stuck a knife in his hand would he feel it?" she asked.
He chose to take the question as one of curiosity, desire to know. "The response
to any stimulus has grown steadily less," he said, "and in the last few days it
has disappeared. That is, response to any stimulus I've offered." He took up Farre's wrist and pinched it as hard as he could, though the skin was so tough now and the flesh so dry that he had difficulty doing so.
She watched. "He was ticklish," she said. Hamid shook his head. He touched the sole of the long brown foot that rested in the basin of water; there was no withdrawal, no response at all.
"So he feels nothing. Nothing hurts him," she said.
"I think not."
"Lucky him."
Embarrassed again, Hamid bent down to study the wound. He had left off the bandages, for the slash had closed, leaving a clean seam, and the deep gash had
developed a tough lip all round it, a barky ring that was well on the way to sealing it shut.
"I could carve my name on him," Makali said, leaning close to Hamid, and then she bent down over the inert body, kissing and stroking and holding it; her tears running down.
When she had wept a while, Hamid went to call the women of the household, and they came gathering round her full of solace and took her off to an,other room.