The Smile

By Vanda M Denton

Abrin's Wife knows no other life. Obedience to men, drudgery and severe punishments are, for the women of Kalvry's Fort, normal. Obsequiousness to husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, is seemly.

That is until the day she is kidnapped; snatched out of the centre of the fort, reeled up on a rope and flown away.

From this time on she is known by the name her mother blessed her with: Faehan. Here in the City, she acquires skills forbidden to her in the fort, has privileges she’d never hoped for and gradually comes to understand the injustices suffered by generations of women in the farming communities.

While her new friends are hoping she will help them attain their liberal aims she has only one desire. She must rescue her children from their brutal father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326905279

Book preview

The Smile

The Smile

Vanda M Denton

© 2017 Vanda M Denton

All rights reserved by the author. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers and/or authors.

ISBN: 978-1-326-90527-9

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Chapter 1

It began on a normal day. Abrin left, wearing his work clothes and carrying the spade that would keep him away until lunchtime and next door Crouch’s Wife was screaming in agony.

Freda hovered with her small hands straining to hold the pots I’d passed to her. For a brief second I observed my daughter, questioning why she’d risk dropping our dishes. Yet I resumed my cleaning when the expression on her face should have alerted me to a sudden increase in her fear of stacking pottery on her father’s table.

I turned my back in order to complete my task whilst instructing her, ‘Remember the symbol on the can Abrin used. This stuff can make you very sick.’

My husband had sprayed the pottery shelves with a potent insecticide to kill a swarm of coojies and I had waited until he left to clear the cupboard of the nasty little carcases in preparation for washing out the poison that could harm my children.

I did not get the response I expected from Freda.

Instead she told me, ‘I will not place these dishes on Abrin’s table.’

Other than Freda’s defensive blaming of me, I had no warning. I saved my admonishment for her defiance in favour of quickly finishing this job when I really should have acted on the words she spoke in an effort to shift any blame that might come her way.

The beating began and ended in a blur punctuated by moments of horrific clarity. My shoulders were clamped in powerful hands. Hands that were familiar with heavy, daily manual labour. I was wrenched off my feet, spun round and sent flying by a back-handed blow on the side of my face. I stumbled and fell. My head exploded on the cooking range and for the longest time, I knew of nothing else. Then, gradually, I became aware of action continuing around me.

Abrin hurled the table over, sending pottery flying.

‘Who the kuff do you think you are?’ My husband pulled me back to my feet in order to sink his fist into my stomach, knocking the wind from my lungs, prompting my bowels into a desire for movement that was swiftly curtailed by terror of the consequences and left me staggering in pain.

My eyes darted around the near vicinity, noting that Freda had fled to the relative safety of my mother and sisters.

Somewhere deep in my mind awareness of my wrong doing began making itself known. I’d idly rocked my four year-old, selfishly enjoying the sweet softness of her. I’d greedily scrubbed my own pottery. What else must I learn from this? Pounding in my head and sorely aching eye kept the clarity of thought I needed, out of reach.

Through mist and pain, I saw him stepping across to me and sensed my mother and sisters drawing the children further into our corner.

‘Unless you want to look like them,’ he bent to yell into my throbbing face whilst jabbing a finger in the direction of my two older sisters who kept their backs to him, ‘keep their hideous faces out of my sight!’

Knowing only too well that that attention presaged his habitual targeting of them and their unfortunate circumstances they pulled the children to them and away from their father, preparing to take the brunt of his wrath on themselves. That action alone, they knew, would turn his thoughts away from me.

He was in the process of dragging Jessel to her feet by the hair, with one hand pulled back to punch her in the spine when Kalvry’s distinctive voice broke through the mayhem.

‘What the kuff is going on here, man?’

I hardly dared look up to our Fort Elder for fear of further punishment but I was compelled to check his mood. I looked away quickly, trying to think if he expected me to show willingness by working in some way, or to show humility and obedience by remaining still. I stifled the groans that wanted to break free of my lips in expression of the agony I suffered. And I noted, somehow, somewhere in all that turmoil, that Kalvry was amused.

‘Your domestic control is abysmal, Abrin.’

My husband, now with the wind taken out of him, could either strike Jessel with less heat or save his vengeance. He chose the latter and followed his Fort Elder out of the house.

Only then did the children begin weeping, quietly. That was a lesson learned early in life. Dazed, I automatically shuffled away from the range on my bottom whilst looking as well as I could from my sister’s smiles to my mother assessing the children for damage and on to my eldest child. My son. Soon he would be sitting at the table with his father. And going out to the fields with him. He would be a man before I knew it.

My mother, Jadry’s Wife, told my sisters to begin clearing the broken pottery. There was no need for anyone to tell me I should go to dig clay in preparation for replacing the pots.

Out in the yard the women of Kalvry’s Fort made various judgements concerning my unsteady steps, the red handprints and bruising on my face and the throbbing eye now swelling and closing. Normally, when possible, a woman who’d incurred her husband’s wrath would remain hidden. None of us wanted other wives and girls to know we’d been slatterns or appear to be trying to court sympathy. Besides, showing the marks of a punishment could frighten the girls and cause the weaker women to bring the same on themselves in their fear of doing exactly that.

So, it was obvious I had an urgent need to be out there for something specific while I had the chance. They’d have heard the smashing of pots and knew where I must go as I aimed for the gate out of the fort. The man on the gate grinned as he opened it for me. His companion remained a step behind him, trying to hide feelings he shouldn’t have. He was sorry for me.

I didn’t like leaving the safety of the fort. I couldn’t guess at the dangers out there. They ranged from Tyrant Lizards to sandstorms and I was aware of the existence of very much more, with no particulars for which I could prepare a defence, such as it could be in any case.

Naturally, I kept my head down. I wouldn’t be seen immodestly holding my face up, seeking admiration, should there be a man out there. No, not even in this state. I’d been lucky, escaping that when raising my eyes to the men at the gate. I had the added shame too, of noting pity too personal for decency, in Flyn’s dark eyes. Because I must concentrate on my task I pushed his possible kind intentions away from my thoughts.

I had difficulty walking a straight line and already the spade and pail felt heavy in my hands. When the aching in my belly abruptly turned to sharp pains I automatically hooked the bucket over my arm, to clutch at my abdomen.

Holding my sore stomach was, as always, a reminder of the earliest days of my marriage. And how it was Abrin I came to be married to.

Like all girls with any wit at all, I was ignorant of the details of marriage but wise enough to be scared of it.

When I was twelve years old my mother sought to save me. Being neither plain nor pretty she aimed neither high nor low. When she believed she had identified the right boy for my marriage she put a daring plan into action.

She had an advantage, though she should not so much as have acknowledged that in her own thoughts never mind make use of it. It was a bargaining tool she’d gained by chance, or misfortune, as a side-issue of another action she once took. Whichever of those you find truth in depends on your perspective and will become clear in time.

The fact is, she was in a strong position because of timing: the timings of my father’s death as well as those of mine and my sisters’ births, marriages and divorces.

There was always a new marriage, a marriage pending or a marriage promised for one or other of her daughters. Naturally, these were arranged by the men of the fort whilst Jadry’s property was rightfully being held for whatever man in that process would make use of it. Thus Jadry’s Wife and her children were allowed to remain in Jadry’s house after he died, until such a time as it would be claimed.

There was also good fortune in mother’s position as a widow allowed to live in a dead man’s house. Having children, even though she’d only ever managed to produce girls, put her beyond the frequent use of the men of the fort. He might be dead but mother still belonged to Jadry.

Better than that, because she was little more than a baby, Jadry’s youngest child, irrespective of being the fourth girl and of little worth, made mother unwanted as a wife, even for a man who would aspire to owning Jadry’s house.

I was about ten when I realised my precarious position in that respect. Mother became ill and I feared her dying. That I feared more for my own possible fate than for the sorrow of losing her because I’d recently witnessed what could become of me in the eventuality.

I’d watched the girl in the yard for over a year. When her father died and nobody claimed her I occasionally heard mother speak of her to my older sisters. In those early days she used the name given to the girl by her mother at a time when they were forbidden to use her name under any circumstances because she had become a girl without a name on the death of her father. The girl’s mother had died some years earlier. It was said her father had preferred to keep her for his comfort rather than have her married. Thus when he died she also lost her shelter. Her brother inherited the house and didn’t want her in it.

In time even mother stopped using her name. She became ‘the girl’. She was the girl who’d been lashed with a bullwhip by Blake because his wife had allowed her into his house to use the toilet. Blake’s Wife was limping for a week following that. I could guess what the rest of her punishment had been. For that reason, I feared who would punish mother, and how, for the many times she allowed the girl to run into Jadry’s house to make use of Jadry’s toilet. I hated the girl then.

The girl was frequently slapped, any male from nine years upwards would slide his hand up her dress though most past their teens rarely bothered. She’d been raped, out there in public, in the early days. I saw it once. It was a man swearing about the mess of his wife who’d just given birth. It was that same man months later, I heard telling his son, ‘Don’t even touch her. The girl is diseased now.’

She became ill from what the men and boys did to her body as well as from the sun beating down on her whenever she was shoved on from a shaded corner too close to someone’s front door. Her skin was burnt and blistered, unlike mine which was saved by the gradual tanning of only spending certain times outside. She was stick thin yet with a big belly that mother said could as likely have been malnutrition as pregnancy. Her clothes had become rags by the time she died.

I last saw her when Blake dragged his wife out of the house and pointed at the girl’s body, growling, ‘Get that piece of kuff out and buried in the Field of Shame before I come back.’

Mother was one of the women Blake’s Wife asked for help with that. They wrapped her in an old sheet and carried her out down the narrow alley and through the rarely used back door of the fort, to what I later learned was the Field of Shame.

Mostly, all I felt concerning that, was relief that mother had recovered from her illness. She was strong enough to help Blake’s Wife and a few other women, bury the girl. That meant I was safe again.

Mother’s good fortune held out. She had not died and she was still required to live in Jadry’s house until all of his daughters were married because sooner or later the ownership of that property would be settled by one or other of those marriages. Jessel and Fina had gone before me without a claim being made and so I was next.

The Kalvry of the time, when I was approaching my teens, was a relatively kind man, in poor health. The son who would take his place however, was an entirely different personality. I remember the lenient days of the old Kalvry. Those were the times when girls were not circumcised before the menarche and we could take longer than one day to scrub the yard.

Jadry’s Wife, my mother, worked through a complex plot with more knowledge than was seemly, but she did it for me. She had seen that when the old Kalvry was ill his most regular visitor was Abrin’s father. Thus, she knew the Fort Elder had a particular interest in Abrin’s progress. Having been agreeable weaving companions as girls, and subsequently acted as midwife for her, mother also knew Kalvry’s Wife well.

And so it was that when I was young, Jadry’s Wife spoke to Kalvry’s Wife who in turn spoke to the uncle who was perhaps a little too fond of her when his brother lay in his sick bed. By that route she suggested me as a bride for Abrin, the son of his loyal friend.

It was an average ceremony during which, in spite of the relatively low key affair, I was very nervous because I knew one thing: women spoke of marriage in only slightly less hushed tones than they spoke of those who would never marry.

Twelve. There are advantages and disadvantages. I hadn’t yet experienced the menarche. Mother chose that time because if another month passed I’d be circumcised. That would involve very considerable pain yet far less agony than that of a circumcised girl on the consummation of her marriage.

My new young husband would have a less bloody sheet than most, to wave around as he bragged to the drunken men. Mother judged that to be my best chance. He was young. He’d be teased but not humiliated. He would come to our home less angry than an older new husband. My mother, myself, my little sister and even my two older sisters might well be saved any beating at all. And he’d be man of the house. That was a proud place for any young man. Every woman knows that a proud man is a happy one. Such a mood would herald a lenient regime along with better provisions than the crumbs of charity we’d received from the old Elder.

Now I will tell you where Jadry’s wife was wise and where she was mistaken. She saved me a very great deal of physical pain by marrying me off before I was circumcised. That I know. However, her belief in the choice of the ‘right boy’ was in error. He was a seventeen-year-old tyrant who had been raised by a thuggish mid-thirties father and an early fifties brute of a grandfather, the progeny of a sadistic great-grandfather who remained as strong as an ox.

The sheet was less bloody than those waved around by the other nine new husbands during the alcohol-fuelled celebrations. I know that because I managed to speak to some fellow brides who, like me, checked their own sheets before being pushed off the bed in order for the new husbands to rip away their trophies.

As far as I know he was in fact, teased rather than humiliated. That is, I know he was teased because when he came to our home after the party he told me what they said, in between slapping me.

‘You were not a virgin!’ Crack! Fearing my skull had been broken open I was unable to stifle the cry that flew from my wide mouth. Naturally, that asked for a second thump on the other side of my head. Stupidly I tried to deny the accusation.

‘Why by Nzeva didn’t you bleed then!’ Slap! This time it was my cheek and I could taste blood where he’d cut it against my teeth on the inside of my mouth.

It was a long time since a man had hit me and I’d been very young then. I suppose I’d forgotten how to react.

With one hand on my head and the other on the side of my face I tried again to defend my honour, ‘I haven’t seen a man since father died…’

‘So your father had you!’ Smack! The inside of the other cheek went the same way as the first. ‘Then your mother knew!’

He grabbed mother who blatantly disrespected him by trying to protect me and punched her in the stomach. While she doubled over and fell to the floor my little sister cried and hid behind the furniture.

‘No. I swear. He was never one for children. He only ever used my mother.’

Thump! This time I staggered from the pain and the fear that he’d broken my jaw. ‘How could there be so little blood!’

I should never have contradicted him. In truth I knew, even at that age I should not have spoken back to him even once. For that reason, I made not another sound never mind uttering a coherent word.

And after that I knew nothing more until I regained consciousness in my mother’s bed. It took several minutes to remember the beginning of the beating. Then my hands flew to my face. Only when I felt swelling and tenderness but no cuts there, could I relax just a little. It was some time before I realised my mother was lying next to me, less aware than I was. My little sister sat at the bottom of the bed and my two older sisters had obeyed mother’s earlier orders. They had not been beaten. They had stayed out of sight in the loft until it was over and then they took care of us.

Jessel told me how she and Fina had hung on tightly to one another. Naturally, she should never have told me that much because we knew by then that Abrin would punish us for any and every infringement and that the grumbling of women was particularly hated by him as by all men. I believe Jessel told me by way of an attempt to offer comfort. She might even have hoped her tale could help me and mother in some way.

As I matured my mother and older sisters helped me refine my household skills. They birthed my babies too. On some occasions, while carrying out everyday duties such as moulding and coiling clay we would all talk together. In fact, after Abrin moved in we developed a stronger bond even than Jadry’s Wife had managed to cultivate since the death of Jadry.

I had never been to another village but mother, when young, had worked with some women from other farms that were a little less excluding of their females. Now I could hear a third-hand account of life beyond our small world. I suppose it was disappointing. Their menfolk were more lenient though not in a way in which they made their women and girls more aware of the dangers of disobedience. Being traded as a wife to Kalvry’s Fort was their greatest fear. But it was not a well-defined one. So I learned that my home fort was notorious even before the Kalvry of my adult years became the Fort Elder. Foolishly I’d hoped to hear of a less painful life somewhere. A place I might one day escape to. Naturally, I had no frame of reference by which to imagine such a place. I couldn’t form a concept from negatives. My dream place was a fort where I could have a whole day without pain. Then why not two, or more, such days?

Such imagination could not be shared. Not even with my mother and sisters. I would not unsettle them and I would not take the chance of attracting another woman’s scorn. Or, oh my, of a man’s son telling his father of my despicable ingratitude and disgusting desires if the boy overheard me talking in that way to his mother.

I learned to be silent. Then I learned to stop dreaming. I listened to Jadry’s Wife’s actual knowledge and understood that this was the natural order. Right and proper.

All fort farms are the same in nature if not in detail. Physically all are tall and square with a public area, an open yard, at the centre. There, in safety, women carry out their daily chores: washing clothes and sheets in the big communal sinks of the laundry house, hanging them to dry on our allocated airers and getting them inside before the men returned from the farm, grinding grain in the store mills, coiling clay pots, drying herbs and so on.

Mostly, if we left the fort we left together. The slaughter house was established a little away from the fort. On those days, usually once a week, the men would bring in five beasts: goats, pigs and sheep usually. Cows would have been killed elsewhere and brought halved. Chickens, geese and ducks also would be recently killed and would often arrive ready-plucked, in crates.

The live animals were killed by the men who handled them, with a single bullet in the head. Occasionally I’d see a nine-year-old son learning his father’s trade. Naturally, his first attempt would be poor and the animal would howl and squeal until it was correctly despatched. We then would learn from older women how to skin the animals and carve them into pieces. The younger ones amongst us took meat in well-scrubbed barrows into the adjoining butchery while others scraped skins before cleaning them, treating them and stretching them on frames to dry. It was the unmarried girls who scrubbed the slaughterhouse. A job none of us would ever forget.

Cutting the meat for the men was an exacting task. Nothing must be wasted. A selection of the best steaks must be prepared for the celebrations that evening, and all other preparations made long before the rest of the men came home. The butchery must be spotless with all cuts of meat not to be cooked for the evening, carefully stored in fridges we’d have dearly loved to climb into whilst knowing we must close the doors and chest lids quickly.

Even though the entire butchery was cooled we were weakened, many to the point of collapsing from exhaustion, by our exertion. Always, without fail, we’d need to help one another to walk back to the fort. Those with children who could not be left at home were doubly tested.

By the time the men returned on those festive evenings we’d have tables set out in the square. A few of the chairs must be carefully placed. Kalvry’s Wife and Thwain’s Wife in particular, had the honour of struggling out with big chairs I heard Abrin call ‘kuffing great carvers’ to place at the heads of the largest tables. These were in fact made up of several tables taken from the houses and joined together. It took four of us to carry some of them.

It was hot. Sickeningly hot. But my sisters and I took care of one another, making sure too that Jadry’s Wife always appeared useful. And we listened to her stories until it was time to prepare the bathhouse so that the men could be clean for their evening festivities.

There must be no errors. No one wanted to embarrass her husband by forcing him to inflict a public punishment on a wife who was shamefully spoiling their fun. We were proud, both of our married state and our prim behaviour. We tried to outdo one another with the tasty snacks we placed on the tables. There were secret smiles, mockery, for the very young wives trying to be clever with a plate of new succulent morsels, that the wise amongst us knew would be dried and too hard to eat by the time the men sat there. Abrin was easy to please in this respect. He very much enjoyed the crisp potato slices I fried in herb-infused oil and ordered no variation on that. I was smug in my pleasing of him.

When all big cooking jobs were allotted we returned to our husband’s houses while the men began their evening with the snacks and opened the jars of alcohol. In our kitchens we each cooked our share of their feast. And mother told us more of her stories.

Along with my sisters I discovered that all farm forts are set in areas of land so vast that you would walk for days to get from one to the next. We didn’t so much as exchange glances as she spoke. A look of interest or discontent might be reported to Abrin by my son especially when he was older.

Those evenings were times of great animation. Only the inexperienced worried and fretted over possible mistakes where they might humiliate their husbands by bringing out a badly cooked dish. A crime bettered only by having nothing to bring out at all.

My forte was in spicing the hot vegetables while mother was entrusted with two chickens or geese, according to who amongst the women was indisposed. We enjoyed the specialness of the occasion as greatly as the knowledge that the men were happily occupied in their celebrations. Always there were times of waiting when we’d cradle our dozing infants while the men’s voices rose in jubilation out in the yard, for their work well done.

It was on one of those occasions, while I sat by the range watching my youngest child sleeping in my arms, that Jadry’s Wife told us that the men of the other farms, just like ours, planted and harvested the wheat and rye with the massive machines that frightened us. When we heard that noise in the distance we called it ‘roaring’. That is the noise of the Tyrant Lizard I had heard about from other children when I was young enough to play with them. Some had fathers who allowed their mothers to tell them stories. Mine didn’t.

Jadry’s Wife said that the noise comes from engines. Big engines. I had seen a small engine in Abrin’s motorcycle. I saw it when I had to take his lunch to the outside where I found him with the mighty two-wheeled conveyance I hoped would kill him. It didn’t. He returned from his work safe and sound, and as angry as always.

Abrin also had very small machines in his study. These were intricate things I must take great care in cleaning: a ‘computer’ bearing strange markings, a machine for ‘printing out’ everyday objects that need replacing such as spoons, dishes for him and pans for the range.

Everything Jadry had owned became Abrin’s when he married me. There were Jadry’s computers, Jadry’s bed, Jadry’s house and Jadry’s women as well as items, components they are called, for his motorcycle and Jadry’s car. That had been my father’s car though I’d never seen it, nor hardly knew it existed, until some time after Abrin made me his wife.

I hated asking Abrin for domestic replacements because he’d shout and slap me. He never seemed to be short of those materials when he wanted something or when his great grandfather told him to make something. Of course, with so many sons, grandsons and great grandsons, Abrin’s great grandfather lived in luxury and answered only to Kalvry, but that’s another story.

This story begins on the day when Abrin beat me for putting pottery on his table whilst cleaning out a cupboard. The day he broke almost all my earthenware.

Chapter 2

I had to go further from the fort walls than ever before, to dig clay. I’d filled the bucket with water from the well, tipped my heavy load into the dry, shallow hollow left by the last woman to dig here and was waiting for it to soak in far enough for me to get the spade in, when a quiet rushing sound cranked up to what sounded like the roaring of the Tyrant Lizard. Naturally, I drew up straight, trying to identify the noise. I saw dust flying up, far along a road I’d never travelled.

I stood, shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare with my hand, fearing a storm was approaching. When I discerned fast-moving vehicles I resumed my work, testing my clay’s readiness and thinking about the fun the men were enjoying in their sport.

However, when the rumble came closer and I again looked up, as well as the cars, motorcycles and trucks, men were running across fields. They were shouting into their radiophones. Soon they were near enough for me to see their expressions. This was no game. Oh my. Oh no! Some were merely excited, many were angry