Ursula Le Guin: Five Ways to Forgiveness

She had him sit up in the chair while she made their dinner. She talked to cheer him up, for he never complained at her demands, but he looked gloomy and bleak, and she blamed herself for upsetting him yesterday. Were they not both here to leave all that behind them, all their mistakes and failures as well as their loves and victories? She told him about Wada and Eyid, spinning out the story of the star-crossed lovers, who were, in fact, in bed in her house that afternoon. “I didn’t use to have anywhere to go when they came,” she said. “It could be rather inconvenient, cold days like today. I’d have to hang around the shops in the village. This is better, I must say. I like this house.”

He only grunted, but she felt he was listening intently, almost that he was trying to understand, like a foreigner who did not know the language.

“You don’t care about the house, do you?” she said, and laughed, serving up their soup. “You’re honest, at least. Here I am pretending to be holy, to be making my soul, and I get fond of things, attached to them, I love things.” She sat down by the fire to eat her soup. “There’s a beautiful room upstairs,” she said, “the front corner room, looking west. Something good happened in that room, lovers lived there once, maybe. I like to look out at the marshes from there.”

When she made ready to go he asked, “Will they be gone?”

“The fawns? Oh yes. Long since. Back to their hateful families. I suppose if they could live together, they’d soon be just as hateful. They’re very ignorant. How can they help it? The village is narrow-minded, they’re so poor. But they cling to their love for each other, as if they knew it… it was their truth…”

“‘Hold fast to the noble thing,’” Abberkam said. She knew the quotation.

“Would you like me to read to you?” she asked. “I have the Arkamye , I could bring it.”

He shook his head, with a sudden, broad smile. “No need,” he said. “I know it.”

“All of it?”

He nodded.

“I meant to learn it—part of it anyway—when I came here,” she said, awed. “But I never did. There never seems to be time. Did you learn it here?”

“Long ago. In the jail, in Gebba City,” he said. “Plenty of time there…. These days, I lie here and say it to myself.” His smile lingered as he looked up at her. “It gives me company in your absence.”

She stood wordless.

“Your presence is sweet to me,” he said.

She wrapped herself in her shawl and hurried out with scarcely a word of good-bye.

She walked home in a crowd of confused, conflicted feelings. What a monster the man was! He had been flirting with her: there was no doubt about it. Coming on to her, was more like it. Lying in bed like a great felled ox, with his wheezing and his grey hair! That soft, deep voice, that smile, he knew the uses of that smile, he knew how to keep it rare. He knew how to get round a woman, he’d got round a thousand if the stories were true, round them and into them and out again, here’s a little semen to remember your Chief by, and bye-bye, baby. Lord!

So, why had she taken it into her head to tell him about Eyid and Wada being in her bed? Stupid woman, she told herself, striding into the mean east wind that scoured the greying reeds. Stupid, stupid, old, old woman.

Gubu came to meet her, dancing and batting with soft paws at her legs and hands, waving his short, end-knotted, black-spotted tail. She had left the door unlatched for him, and he could push it open. It was ajar. Feathers of some kind of small bird were strewn all over the room and there was a little blood and a bit of entrail on the hearthrug. “Monster,” she told him. “Murder outside!” He danced his battle dance and cried Hoo! Hoo! He slept all night curled up in the small of her back, obligingly getting up, stepping over her, and curling up on the other side each time she turned over.

She turned over frequently, imagining or dreaming the weight and heat of a massive body, the weight of hands on her breasts, the tug of lips at her nipples, sucking life.

She shortened her visits to Abberkam. He was able to get up, see to his needs, get his own breakfast; she kept his peatbox by the chimney filled and his larder supplied, and she now brought him dinner but did not stay to eat it with him. He was mostly grave and silent, and she watched her tongue. They were wary with each other. She missed her hours upstairs in the western room; but that was done with, a kind of dream, a sweetness gone.

Eyid came to Yoss’s house alone one afternoon, sullen-faced. “I guess I won’t come back out here,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

The girl shrugged.

“Are they watching you?”

“No. I don’t know. I might, you know. I might get stuffed.” She used the old slave word for pregnant.

“You used the contraceptives, didn’t you?” She had bought them for the pair in Veo, a good supply.

Eyid nodded vaguely. “I guess it’s wrong,” she said, pursing her mouth.

“Making love? Using contraceptives?”

“I guess it’s wrong,” the girl repeated, with a quick, vengeful glance.

“All right,” Yoss said.

Eyid turned away.

“Good-bye, Eyid.”

Without speaking, Eyid went off by the bog-path.

“Hold fast to the noble thing,” Yoss thought, bitterly.

She went round the house to Tikuli’s grave, but it was too cold to stand outside for long, a still, aching, midwinter cold. She went in and shut the door. The room seemed small and dark and low. The dull peat fire smoked and smouldered. It made no noise burning. There was no noise outside the house. The wind was down, the ice-bound reeds were still.

I want some wood, I want a wood fire, Yoss thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-telling fire, like we used to have in the grandmothers’ house on the plantation.

The next day she went off one of the bog-paths to a ruined house half a mile away and pulled some loose boards off the fallen-in porch. She had a roaring blaze in her fireplace that night. She took to going to the ruined house once or more daily, and built up a sizeable woodpile next to the stacked peat in the nook on the other side of the chimney from her bed nook. She was no longer going to Abberkam’s house; he was recovered, and she wanted a goal to walk to. She had no way to cut the longer boards, and so shoved them into the fireplace a bit at a time; that way one would last all the evening. She sat by the bright fire and tried to learn the First Book of the Arkamye . Gubu lay on the hearthstone sometimes watching the flames and whispering roo, roo, sometimes asleep. He hated so to go out into the icy reeds that she made him a little dirt-box in the scullery, and he used it very neatly.

The deep cold continued, the worst winter she had known on the marshes. Fierce drafts led her to cracks in the wood walls she had not known about; she had no rags to stuff them with and used mud and wadded reeds. If she let the fire go out, the little house grew icy within an hour. The peat fire, banked, got her through the nights. In the daytime often she put on a piece of wood for the flare, the brightness, the company of it.

She had to go into the village. She had put off going for days, hoping that the cold might relent, and had run out of practically everything. It was colder than ever. The peat blocks now on the fire were earthy and burned poorly, smouldering, so she put a piece of wood in with them to keep the fire lively and the house warm. She wrapped every jacket and shawl she had around her and set off with her sack. Gubu blinked at her from the hearth. “Lazy lout,” she told him. “Wise beast.”

The cold was frightening. If I slipped on the ice and broke a leg, no one might come by for days, she thought. I’d lie here and be frozen dead in a few hours. Well, well, well, I’m in the Lord’s hands, and dead in a few years one way or the other. Only, dear Lord, let me get to the village and get warm!