Margaret St. Clair - The Best of Margaret St. Clair

“So that’s how your face—”

“Yes. Of course, not all the bricks were dry. If they had been—but even a wet brick can be painful.”

“And you never got your chest back.”

“No. All I got were the artifacts the priest brought me just before the nuse levitated him. Would you like to see them?”

He sounded as if he wanted to show them to me. I said, “Yes, I’d like to.”

He got out a little box and opened it. Inside was a piece of lapis lazuli that he said was a whetstone, two crude gold rings with roughly cabochon cut blackish stones, and a handsome gold necklace with lapis lazuli beads and gold pendants shaped like some sort of leaf.

“Very pretty,” I said, examining them.

“You should have seen the stuff I had! But this is better than nothing. The home office will be glad to see it. I don’t usually get even this much.”

This was true, and he looked so depressed when he said it that I felt a burst of sympathy for him. I didn’t know what to say.

He picked up his last piece of toast on the plate and looked at it.

“Burned,” he said sourly, “and one of the other slices was, too. Listen, why don’t you let me put in a nuse installation for you? Then your toast would never be burned. It’s this housework that’s getting you down. You might get so you didn’t look any older than your real age if you used nuse.”

“You should live so long,” I said.

The Reverend Clem Adelburg had come out to cut some mistletoe. He tucked the hatchet tightly in the band of his trousers and shinned up the knobby trunk of the apple tree. When he got high enough, he saw that two ravens were seated on the apple tree branches, eating the mistletoe berries. There were always ravens around the cabin nowadays; he chased them away indignantly, with many loud whooshes. Then he felt a twinge of remorse.

“O Lord,” he prayed among the branches, his face upturned toward the dramatic cloudscape of an Arizona winter, “O Lord, bless this little experiment of thy servant. O Lord, grant that I wasn’t wrong to chase away those darned ravens. Yes, Lord.”

He sighted up at the berries. He chopped with the hatchet. Three branches of mistletoe fell down on the sheets of newspaper he had previously placed at the foot of the tree. He climbed down.

It was beginning to get dark. Mazda would have supper ready. There was a premonitory rumble and then the sound of Silent Night, played on an electric xylophone, filled the sky.

The Reverend Adelburg frowned. The noise must be coming from Parker; the municipal Christmas tree there would be thirty-five feet tall this year, and already he could see the red glow of Parker’s municipal Christmas street decoration project in the southern sky. Well, if the Lord continued to bless him, and if his next few sermons had the effect he hoped they’d have, he might be able to change the character of Parker’s Christmas celebration. The Forthright Temple, in Los Angeles, was a long way from Parker, but these F.M. broadcasts were receivable here, too.

He went in the kitchen. Mazda was cooking something on the oil stove, an oil lamp burning dimly on the table beside her. The kitchen smelled good.

“Hello, Clem,” she said, turning to face him. She smiled at him. “Did you get the berries for the tea?”

“Yes, dear.” He handed her the three branches of mistletoe. “Make it good and strong this time, dear. I just want to see if there’s anything in my little idea.”

“About mistletoe being the common element in all religions? Sure.”

He watched her as she went to fill the teakettle at the sink. She was a tall woman, with masses of puffy ginger hair and a very fair skin. Her figure was excellent, though rangy, and he always enjoyed watching her.

Most of the time Mazda’s being in the cabin seemed so ordinary, so fitting (she was remarkably domestic, when you got to know her), that he simply didn’t think about it. But there were moments, like the present, when her physical immediacy seemed to catch him in the solar plexus. Then he could only stand and look at her and draw deep, surprised breaths.

It wasn’t so much his living with her, in the technical sense, that troubled him. He hadn’t even tried to feel guilty about that. It seemed at once so extraordinary, and so perfectly natural, that it wasn’t something his conscience could get a grip on. No, it was Mazda’s being in the cabin at all that was the surprising thing.

Where had she come from, anyhow? He’d gone outside one morning early in September, meaning to walk up and down in the sand while he put the finishing touches on his sermon for next week, and there she had been, sitting quietly under a Joshua tree.

She couldn’t have been there for more than ten minutes: her skin, as he had come to know later, was extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight, and she was wearing the skimpiest Bikini imaginable. She’d have been sunburned all over if she’d been there for any length of time. And how had she got there? There’d been no sign of a car in any direction, and he hadn’t even heard the noise of a plane or a copter in the sky. Had she walked over from Parker? In a Bikini? Five miles?

He knew so little about her—no more now, really, than he had known on that first day when she had said, “Hi,” and gone in the house. It wasn’t that she was close-mouthed or sullen—she just didn’t talk about herself. Once only, when he had been elaborating his idea that the use of mistletoe might be the common element behind all religion, had she come out with anything that might be a personal remark. He’d spoken of the use of mistletoe in classical paganism, in druidism, in Christian festival, in the old Norse religion, in Zoroastrianism—Her lower lip had begun to protrude defiantly. “There’s no mistletoe in Zoroastrianism,” she had cut in sharply. “I know.”

Well? It wasn’t much for the fruit of more than three months.

He couldn’t help wondering about Mazda sometimes, though he didn’t want to fail in Christian charity. But he knew he had his enemies. Could she possibly be a Retail Merchants Association spy?

The teakettle was beginning to hum. Mazda gave the pot of string beans on the stove a stir with a wooden spoon. “How did you come out with your sermon, Clem?” she asked.

“Eh? Oh, spendidly. The ending, I really think, will have an effect. There are some striking passages. The ravens were quite impressed.” He smiled at his little joke.

“Ravens?” She turned to face him. “Were there ravens outside when you were rehearsing your speech?”

“Yes, indeed. We have ravens all the time here now. There were even ravens in the apple tree when I was cutting the mistletoe.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh…” she said thoughtfully.

“I fear I chased them away a little too vehemently,” he said, becoming serious. “Ravens, after all, are the Lord’s creatures too.”

“Not those ravens,” Mazda said.

There was a very brief pause. Mazda fingered the bracelet on her left wrist. Then she said, “Listen, Clem, I know you’ve talked about it, but I guess I’m just dumb. Why are you so down on modern Christmases, anyway?”

“My dear, if you’d ever attend the Temple service…” the Reverend Adelburg said in gentle reproof. “But I’ll try to make my point of view, which I humbly trust is also the Lord’s point of view, clear to you.” He began to talk.

He was an excellent talker. Phrases like “star in the darkness,” “the silent night of Bethlehem,” “pagan glitter,” “corruption,” “perversion,” “truer values,” “an old-time America,” “Myrrh, frankincense,” and “1776,” seemed to shimmer in the air between them. Mazda listened, nodding from time to time or prodding the potatoes in the saucepan with a two-tined kitchen fork.