The Plains of Abraham

Chapter 24

Malcolm recovered mostly from his injuries. He felt useless as a "semiprofessional medical patient," as he put it, so he went to work in the gardens, tending vegetables, despite feeling too weak at times. An hour a day at first. It grew to four hours and to the point where they had to urge him out of the maze of tomato stalks and bean teepees as dusk fell. I wasn't surprised. At home he would have spent all his time nurturing "the bounty of the dirt" if he didn't have to teach in the seminary or conduct mass. He said it made him feel closer to God.

There were always public feasts and we usually attended them together, usually with Adrienne and Eva. It was like double dating, although the comparison would have horrified Malcolm. When there wasn't a public feast there was almost always a private one, a meal served by an individual household, one anybody could attend. Sometimes the private feasts were as populated as the public ones. The food raised and caught by the Ellanoyans was communal, so no hoarding, other than for winter stores, impeded what was already a natural tendency to generosity.

Malcolm sat next to me with Adrienne on my left and Eva on his right. "Every day a holiday," he liked to say, "every meal a banquet." But he was talking about God's good graces rather than pagan epicureanism, the latter of which, in its own way, was manna from Heaven.

The meals concluded with dancing, and once I overcame the discomfort of Malcolm's stern glare, I joined in. At night we slept the sleep of carefree children.

My career began at the library. I was unsure what my duties were, so I asked Jonah. He said he didn't know either. I asked what the previous librarian had done and he answered that I was the first librarian in the history of Bounty Rock, and as far as he knew, in all of Ellanoy.

"You're the beginning of a tradition," he said. "You might want to avoid mucking it up."

It took only a few minutes of orienting myself to discover the problem wasn't one of reorganization. The library had no organization. Books, parchments, maps, even scrolls were jammed wherever they would fit. I decided my job was to sort. Also to attain some mastery of the holdings, ostensibly so I could better serve patrons. But the real reason was that I hungered for the knowledge the library contained.

On the last morning of my first week a pouch appeared on my desk. Upon opening it, out spilled a handful of gleaming crystals. Some transparent, some various shades of violet. One an exquisite ultramarine blue. I'd been paid.

Adrienne and I attended the wedding of Ella and Rachel, as did the rest of the village. Malcolm refused, electing instead to sit in his cabin and sulk. "I will not sanction a heathen ritual," he said.

The heathen ritual was the most charming I'd ever witnessed. The two women wore white deerskin gowns, flowers in their hair, and beaded necklaces that fell to incremental lengths on their torsos. The beads were multi-colored crystals.

A pair of community elders, including Jonah, "gave them away" by escorting them to the center of a nine foot circle of low monoliths, where in the presence of the king they exchanged vows of love and loyalty and a commitment to total responsibility.

Adrienne explained the latter to me. There were no fifty-fifty marriages in Ellanoy. Each party in a formal relationship committed to one hundred percent of the responsibility for the other's happiness. No room for excuses. No comparison of effort. No tit-for-tat. You have one job, and you vow to do it.

Afterwards we congratulated the brides. They each said to me, "How beautiful the sun is, thanks to your presence. I'm so grateful you came."

The two women disappeared, presumably to consummate the marriage. The villagers remained. Adrienne told me a feast was being prepared, but first we had to pay our respects to a tree.