Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

She was too old for this, Theresa thought. She and Scott and DeWayne, all sixty-four years old. Arthritis was starting to make it painful to turn her neck. She could no longer eat raw vegetables without stomach distress. She was too old to hunker down and then spring up to start over.

Autumn still didn’t bring rain. In December, Lillie’s children would turn eleven. Theresa decided to have a party. Everyone needed cheering up. She would hold a massive party for all fourteen kids on December 10, Cord’s birth date. The look in his eyes when they followed Lillie had changed. Wistfulness had been replaced by bewildered anger. Theresa was worried about him. He played, worked, and studied almost exclusively with Clari, his gentle shadow. She worshipped him, much to Senni’s annoyance.

“Let’s have party hats,” Julie said, from some memory at least a half century old. “I know how to fold them out of newspapers.”

“There aren’t any newspapers,” Sajelle pointed out.

“Well, any paper. And candles.”

“That we can get,” Theresa said, making a list. Lillie could go to Wenton and pick up the supplies for the party. It was probably the most involved Lillie would get.

“Carolina said she’d bake three of those Spanish cakes with the prickly-pear jelly inside,” Emily said. “They were soooooo good.”

“What about presents?” Bonnie said. “The same thing for everybody? Or each mother buys her own?”

“There shouldn’t be a large difference in cost, though,” Emily said, not looking at Sajelle, who thanks to DeWayne had so much more than the rest of them. Although Sajelle never flaunted it.

Bonnie said, “I heard Angie talk about a doll in Lucy Tertino’s store. Some woman in Wenton sews them by hand, with little outfits, too.”

Emily laughed. “Bonnie, your daughter is such a girly girl.”

Bonnie smiled. “You saying that’s ironic, Em?”

“Never.”

“I know!” Julie said. “Water balloons!”

Theresa listened to them plan, joke, enjoy, four young women of twenty-five, her school friends and contemporaries as she faced her sixty-fifth birthday. It would be a good party. And for a day at least, nobody would think about the drought. Maybe.

As the day grew closer, the children became frantic with excitement. Studies were neglected, chores left undone, sleep interrupted. Even obedient Clari forgot to water the winter herb garden because she was out playing with Cord, and after two days, when Theresa discovered this, the cooking herbs were nearly dead in their pots under the relentless sun.

“I’m sorry!” Clari sobbed, and Theresa wouldn’t have had the heart to punish her. But Senni did.

“You were off playing with Cord, weren’t you! You irresponsible brat! If you’d pay attention to your chores instead of that spoiled kid, everybody would be better off!”

“I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m sorry…”

“I’ll make you sorry, all right, Clari Marie. I’ll make sure you don’t forget again!” She took a bridle strap from its peg on the barn wall.

Theresa didn’t hear about this scene until the next day. By that time, Cord was gone.

“Who saw him last?” Theresa demanded. His brother Keith said, “Not me. We woke up this morning and Cord wasn’t in his bunk and the blankets were still all smooth.” For the last year, the bedrooms had been shuffled yet again to make separate bunkrooms for boys and girls. This wasn’t observed much; the kids slept wherever they chose, at whatever house they chose, in whatever groups the evening’s play had dictated to them.

Theresa looked at the people assembled in the great room: seven ten-year-old children, Lupe, Carolina, and a clutter of younger children. The others were already busy elsewhere. Lillie had left for town before dawn. Theresa said to Keith, “Was Cord around when you went to bed last night?”

“No,” volunteered Gavin, Bonnie’s son. “We looked for him and Clari to play Hot Rocks, but they weren’t around.”

“Clari’s missing, too? Carolina?”

“No, no, Clari, she here. She come breakfast, eat nothing. I say, ‘eat,’ but she no eat. She cry and cry.”

“Where is Clari now?”

“In the girl room. Not in her mother’s house, I say Clari no do chores today. Senni hit Clari.” Carolina’s dark eyes flashed; she didn’t approve of Senni’s child-raising methods. Her and Jody’s son Angel was never hit, and he was very well behaved.

Theresa said, “Senni hit Clari? For neglecting the herb garden?”

Carolina nodded, her lips pursed.

“All right, kids, everybody get to work. You, too, Lupe. I’ll take care of this.”

She knocked on the door to the girls’ bunkroom. There was no answer, but she pushed in anyway.

Clari lay rumpled in a dark corner of a bottom bunk. Theresa looked at the child’s miserable, tear-stained face and inwardly cursed Senni. Her daughter was a hard woman. Why Senni, when Jody and Spring were so sweet-tempered? Even moody Carlo would never have hit a child. And Clari herself was the gentlest kid on the farm. Genes were so strange.

“Clari, it’s Grandma. I want to talk to you, honey. Come out.”

Ever obedient, Clari crept from the bunk. She was taller than Cord but smaller-boned, with short brown curls and blue eyes. Theresa said, “Where did your mother hit you? Never mind, I can see from the way you’re moving. Take off your pants, honey.”

Painfully, Clari wiggled out of her pants. Red welts striped the backs of her thighs. Something turned over in Theresa’s chest: anger and fear and a painful love for Senni, who was alienating those who should love her. Carefully she took Clari on her lap.

“Tell Grandma what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

Every child at the farm and most of the adults obeyed that tone in Theresa’s voice. Clari said, “We were playing, me and Cord and Kella and Susie and Angel. Monday and Tuesday, a long game of Hot Rocks, it lasted three days and I forgot to take care of the herb garden in the evenings.”

Theresa had never asked the rules for Hot Rocks, an enormously complicated game the kids had invented and, apparently, kept adding to. She said, “Go on.”

“Mommy hit me and Cord found out ‘cause I was crying. He got really mad. He threw the Ender Rock so hard it broke, Grandma. Then he said him and me should run away and that would show Mom.”

“Run away? Where? How?”

“To our secret place. On Uncle Scott’s old horse.”

Cold seeped up Theresa’s spine. She hadn’t thought to check the horses. Scott’s bay, the one he’d first used when he came here, was too old for real use, but Scott let the children ride him for short periods and short distances. Cord wasn’t a very good rider.

“Did Cord go to your secret place on Uncle Scott’s horse?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t go with him, Mommy would have been really really mad. I came here and slept in Angie’s bed. Is Cord gone?” Clari looked scared.

“Yes, but I’m going to get him back right now. Where is your secret place, Clari?”

“Where all the dead bad men are buried. It has ghosts.”

Theresa closed her eyes. She should monitor the stuff the kids watched on the Net more carefully. There was never time. The “bad dead men” were the refugees that Jody had killed with the bioweapon and buried in the arroyo, once again dry in the year-and-a-half drought. How had Clari even known about that incident?

She didn’t ask. “Clari, I want you to go ask Carolina for some breakfast, eat it, and do two units of school software. It’s your turn.” DeWayne had bought school software and computers for all the kids to share.

“Is Cord okay?”

“Of course he is. Now go do as I told you.”