Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“‘What’re you doing with an ax?’ shouted my grandfather. ‘Women aren’t supposed to use axes! That’s my ax!’

“‘I know,’ answered my grandmother meekly, putting the ax down, ‘but I didn’t want to bother you. There was this thing I wanted to build. So I just thought I’d try building it myself—’

“‘ You build it!’ roared my grandfather. ‘You don’t know how to use an ax! How would you know how to build anything?’

“‘Well, I went and asked how to do it,’ my grandmother answered quietly. ‘I didn’t want to bother you, so I went down the road here to our next neighbor, and asked her husband—’

“At that my grandfather let out a bellow of rage.

“‘Him? You asked him ? That lard-head couldn’t build anything more complicated than tying one stick to another!’ he shouted. ‘How did he tell you how to build it? Just tell me—how did he say you ought to do it?’

“‘Well…’ began my grandmother; and she went on to describe the thing she wanted to build, with its backrest and its padding and all that. But before she was halfway through, my grandfather had grabbed the ax out of her hand and was busy telling her how wrong her neighbor’s husband had been in his direction, and he’d started to build the chair himself to prove it.”

Anita paused, and sighed and looked up and around at her audience.

“Well, that was it,” she said. “Inside of a week my grandmother had the padded chair with the backrest just the way she wanted it.”

There was first a titter, then a roar of laughter that gradually built up until some of the females dropped the net, and showed signs of literally rolling about on the floor in an excess of enjoyment.

“I thought you’d like hearing about that,” said Anita meekly, working away at the net when they were all silent once more. “—But I ought to tell you that that was only the beginning.”

“The beginning?” echoed Noggle Head in awe from across the circle. “You mean afterward he figured out what she’d done to him and—”

“Not likely!” sniffed No Rest. “A man figure out how he’d been made a fool of? He wouldn’t want to figure it out. Even if he came close to figuring it out, he’d back away from it for fear he would find out something he wouldn’t like!” She turned to Anita. “Wasn’t that the way it was, Dirty Teeth?”

“You’re right as usual, No Rest,” said Anita. “What I meant was, it was just the beginning of what my grandmother had set out to do. You see, this one chair was just the beginning. She wanted a whole house full of furniture like that.”

Gasps and grunts of sincere astonishment arose from her audience. Even No Rest seemed a little shaken.

“A whole houseful, Dirty Teeth?” said the outlaw matriarch. “Wasn’t that maybe going a little bit too far?”

“My grandmother didn’t think so,” replied Anita seriously. “After all, a man gets anything he wants, doesn’t he? All a woman has is her house and her children, isn’t that right? And the children grow up and leave fast enough, don’t they?”

“How true,” said No Rest, shaking her head sadly. “Yes, every word of it’s true. Go on, Dirty Teeth, how did your grandmother get her whole house full of furniture?”

“You’ll never guess,” said Anita.

“She hit him on the head—” Noggle Head was beginning hopefully, when she was sneered into silence almost automatically by the rest of the audience.

“No,” said Anita. “What my grandmother did was to take off one day and go down and visit her neighbor—the same one whose husband she had asked about building the piece of furniture she wanted—because she had really asked him, you see.”

“Ah,” said No Rest meaningfully, nodding her head as if she had known it all the time.

“And,” went on Anita, “she quite naturally invited her neighbor up to her house for a bite to eat and to look at her new chair that her husband had built. Well, the neighbor came up and admired the chair very much, and went home again. And what do you think happened before a week was out?”

“That neighbor had her husband make her a chair just like it!” said Word-and-a-Half emphatically. “She told him about the chair, and he went up and saw it and got all fired up, and he came back down and built one just like it!”

“That’s exactly right,” said Anita quietly but approvingly. “And of course the neighbor invited my grandmother down to see her chair. So my grandmother went down and admired it very much.”

“So they both had chairs,” said Noggle Head. “That was the end, then?”

“No,” said Anita. “That was still just the beginning. Because the next day my grandfather came in and saw that the chair he’d built my grandmother wasn’t out in the center of the room where it used to be; it was tucked back in a corner where it was dark and pretty well hidden. Well, of course he asked why it was put someplace else. And my grandmother told him about the neighbor’s chair. Which made him furious!”

“Why?” asked Noggle Head, blundering in where her older and wiser sisters hesitated to play the role of interlocutor.

“Why,” said Anita sweetly, “you see my grandmother was such a modest, kindly, unassuming sort of a Shorty female that she wouldn’t for any reason try to hold her head higher than her neighbor. So that when she told my grandfather about the chair her neighbor’s husband had built for her neighbor, somehow the way she told it made the chair the neighbor had built seem a lot bigger and grander and softer and higher polished than the one my grandfather had built for my grandmother—almost as if the neighbor’s husband had built a better chair than my grandfather had, just to spite my grandfather. So, as I say, my grandfather became furious and what do you suppose he did then?”

“Hit her on the head?” queried Noggle Head, but faintly and with a note of hope that was almost dead, in her voice.

“You think too much of hitting on the head, my girl!” snapped No Rest, in a tone of stern authority. “Only the most helpless sort of a woman tries to handle a husband that way. Little good ever comes of it. Most women don’t hit their husbands hard enough, anyway, and it doesn’t do anything but make the husbands mad!”

Noggle Head shrank up over her work again, once more properly crushed. No Rest turned back to Anita.

“Well, Dirty Teeth,” said Bone Breaker’s great-aunt, “go on. Tell us what happened next!”

“Nothing much,” said Anita mildly. “Although, by the time it was ended, my grandmother had the best houseful of furniture you have ever seen. But the point is—she continued to put her good sneaky talents to work the rest of her married life with my grandfather. And by the time of his death, he had become one of the richest and best known male Shorties around.”

The group considered this conclusion for a long moment in satisfied silence. Then No Rest sighed and placed her seal of approval upon the anecdote.

“There’s always a woman behind a man who amounts to anything,” she observed sagely.

Outside the window at which he was listening, Bill suddenly jerked his attention away from the aperture in the hide curtains, and strove suddenly with his light-dazzled eyes to pierce the night darkness surrounding him. There was no more time to waste. He had to get Anita outside and away from her net-weaving social circle before the rising moon exposed him to capture. He turned and peered in at the window again. Dilbians, he remembered, because of a difference from humans in jaw structure and lip muscles, could not whistle. Bill took a breath and whistled the first two lines of “ When Johnny Comes Marching Home .”