The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [13]
That evening, there was a special house meeting to decide what had to be done about Sara climbing the house. It wasn’t the first time a special meeting had been called, nor was it the first parental meeting in which the whole discussion was devoted to arguments about how best to fit a punishment to a crime, but it was different nevertheless, because it was the first time Sara had ever gone into such a meeting in a defiant mood. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel ashamed at having climbed nearly to the top of the hometree’s crown when she’d been forbidden to do it, but that she felt too much delight in her achievement to worry about any reprisals that her parents were likely to dream up. She expected to be punished, but she was determined to bear her punishment stoically. She also expected to have to face up to a rare unanimity of disapproval and purpose on the part of her eight parents—but that wasn’t quite the way it worked out.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Father Lemuel demanded, almost as soon as Mother Maryelle—whose turn it was to act as chairperson—had called the meeting to order.
“We all know how testy you get when you’re dragged out of Fantasyland, Lem,” Father Gustave said, “but it really is important. What Sara did was dangerous. If she’d fallen, she could have been killed.”
“That’s not really the point at issue,” Father Stephen put in. “It’s a matter of disobedience—a point of principle.”
“No it’s not,” said Mother Quilla. “Obedience isn’t a principle. Sara shouldn’t do what we say simply because we say it. It’s a matter of trust. The principle is whether Sara trusts our judgment in regard to acceptable risk.”
“That certainly isn’t a principle,” Father Gustave objected, scornfully. “Not that it matters a jot one way or the other. Principles don’t have anything to do with it. It’s purely a matter of making things clear, of explaining to Sara why she shouldn’t do things like that.”
“Which is a matter of trust, just as Quill says,” Mother Jolene put in. She has to realize that we have good reasons for telling her what to do and what not to do, even if they aren’t....”
Sara assumed that Mother Jolene was about to say “obvious”, but it didn’t really matter, because Father Stephen cut her off before she finished the sentence—and Sara had had plenty of opportunity to observe that as soon as one parent took it upon himself, or herself, to interrupt one of the others before a sentence was finished, the rules of polite conversation immediately fell apart. Everybody would then start talking at once—as, indeed, they did.
Two or three minutes elapsed before Mother Maryelle resorted to banging the table with the claw-hammer that had served as a temporary gavel ever since the real one had been mislaid three years earlier. Sara immediately began counting the blows. A five bang row was about average, a ten-bang row exceptional, and a twenty-bang row was likely to lead to talk of divorce. This one turned out to be a twelve-bang row.
“I would have thought,” Mother Maryelle said, when she had finally restored silence, “that this was one issue on which we could present a united front. There’s no point in arguing about why we’re angry....”
“We’re not angry,” Mother Verena said, getting the comment in an instant before Mother Maryelle started her next sentence, so that it didn’t quite qualify as a fully-fledged interruption.
“We’re anxious,” said Mother Jolene.
“Fearful,” said Father Aubrey.
“Concerned,” was Father Stephen’s offering.
A single bang of the claw-hammer was all it took to put a stop to that sort of trickle.
“The point,” Mother Maryelle said, her voice consumed by the acid authority that came with the chairperson’s job, “is to decide what to do about our...can we call it a disturbance? Is there anyone who can’t agree that we’re disturbed by what happened?”
For half a second, it actually seemed that the compromise might hold—but then Father Lemuel