Loncie’s eyes brimmed suddenly, and Yana understood the term “dolorous” as she never had before. The woman’s chins trembled and her mouth contorted with sudden grief. Yana would have touched her arm, but Pablo was there already, his small frame supporting his wife’s larger one like steel scaffolding.
“Our second son, Alejandro.”
To Yana’s count that made the last of those from Petaybee who had died in that incident. She heaved a sigh of relief and allowed herself to be escorted into the house.
“Hey, a guitar!” The exclamation burst from Diego’s lips and then he flushed, realizing that his excitement was not quite suitable following mention of those who died at Bremport.
“You like guitar?” Lonciana asked, her whole expression brightening.
“Do I like guitar? I’ve been trying to make one.” Diego reached into his backpack and brought out the neck he had been so patiently shaping.
“Que hombre!” Lonciana embraced him as if he were a long-lost friend. Diego, momentarily engulfed by her, grinnedmore with acceptance of her enthusiasm than embarrassment.
They ate first, of course, and various young Ondelacy-Chompases were sent to inform the entire village that there would be a special singing this evening: too late to make it a latchkay, but certainly there would be blurry and a bite or two to go down with it.
“I thought blurry was Clodagh’s specialty,” Yana commented as she washed up before dinner.
Johnny grinned. “The north doesn’t have a corner on the market of all good things, Yana. Had you come up from the ranks as I did, instead of training at an officer’s academy with so few Petaybean candidates, you’d have learned something of the joys of comparative Petaybean blurry drinking. Every time Loncie returned from leave, she used to bring back a stash: Old Armadillo is what we nicknamed her recipe, because it armors you so well against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The spice she uses gives it a little more kick than the mulled-cider kinda thing you get up north.”
Bunny, who was watching Pablo demonstrate to an enraptured Diego first the techniques of playing the guitar and then the sound made by the bagpipes, said, “They have more than a few things down here that we don’t have up north.”
Lonciana did something with a mess of beans that Yana, sensitive now to such subtleties, would have given her right big toe to discover. It was tasty and filling, satisfying even their hearty appetites.
Immediately afterward, the table was dismantled and taken out of the main room, and chairs, benches, stools, and odd crates were placed about the room. The guitar came off the wall again, and Yana identified one round object with jingling bits fastened in its lip as a tambourine.
Lonciana was busy in the kitchen end of the house, mixing the blurry with the help of her eldest daughters, while Pablo, Johnny, and the older Ondelacy boys began to greet the visitors as they began to pour in.
Once again Yana wondered at the way a small Petaybean house could seem to expand infinitely to contain so many people. Eventually there was only a small space around the high stool that had been placed in the center of the room for the singersof which Yana was one, and probably the first. Bunny and Johnny both kept her mug as well as Diego’s full of blurry once Diego announced that he had his song, too.
Yana missed Sean desperately, but Johnny took her to the stool and settled her on it, taking the mug when she drained the last of the blurry.
“This is Major Yana Maddock, who was at Bremport and who is now one of us,” Johnny began simply. “She has a song for you.”
Silence has different qualities, Yana knew, from the absolute one she’d not heard on her few space walks to that of expectancy, either a hopeful or happy one, or a mean and miserable show-us-your-stuff kind. This was expectant and almost reverent. That startled her so much that she began to sing to stop what her ears weren’t hearing.
After the first few lines got past her teeth, she actually began to enjoy the act of singing, not that she would ever truly enjoy the song that she must sing. Maybe one day soon, as Sean had suggested, she’d find joy in making a song.