by Molly Gloss
My daughter, when she married, might as well have stuck her finger up my nose. That man she married, Armando Fuĵino, had been married twice before—he had proven to everybody but my daughter that he couldn’t be a decent husband—but he was shameless, and my daughter was stupid, and we hadn’t spoken a word to one another since that day, though the Clearness Committee came around every little while and tried to counsel our quarrel When I saw the face of that dead woman, the woman who died in the Migremo, her face broad and brown as my daughter’s, I didn’t think about our quarrel. I thought of how, in the afternoon when you sleep the dormeto, and wake before other people, you can try to be as still as everyone else, or if you haven’t been married very long or are lying with a lover you can have quiet intercourse. Or if you’re a child you can whisper until you wake someone up. I thought of how, in the weeks before my daughter was born, I slept restlessly, and took up a habit of going out of my own house and standing in cold bare feet at the narrow fenestroj of other houses, bending to peer through the wavery panes of glass at the shut eyes of sleepers. In the low winter daylight, people sleeping have a solemn expression, they breathe quietly, lying loose and still, children tangled on a mattress, married couples sleeping face to face with their knees pressed together, sisters lying down without touching, a grandfather wrapped up with his little grandchild.
A few times people woke up startled to find me peering through their windows while they slept—I may have had a brief, mild renown that winter, as a crazy person. But in those last weeks while you’re waiting for a child to be born, you’re expected to be restless, beside yourself. I wonder what I was looking for in the faces of those dreamers? The face of that dead woman made me think of an old poem, something about the newborn emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates; how, when the wildest and bloodiest is over, all is peace.
Three people on the Steady pulled this dead woman up into their boat and laid her body on the deck, and Adria Berelo sat with her under cover of the aft tarpaulin. The swells were slapping against the boats by this time—in the bottom of the Pulls Together, in a slurry of blackish water and kelp, our tangle of salvaged plastic and aluminum slid around and knocked against the ribs of the hull—but we went on hunting. We were a fit match for seas running a couple of meters, and then we’d begin to think about getting off the water, out of the weather. We gave up bringing in every little piece of wreckage, though—we remembered why we had come out into the strait. Finding that woman’s body had rekindled in us a longing to find the bodies of the others.
For a while we veered here and there after indistinguishable shapes on the water, and when one became a company of wandering-tatters, or a cracked piece of plastic or metal, or a baleno breaking the surface to breathe, we veered away after the next. Hunting for a body on the sea was something some of us had done before—Kikuma had lived along that coast for thirty years, and once had gone out into the channels of the Goes To Grass Islands looking for the bodies of her brother-in-law and his daughter; I had been on the Eye of the Moon, when a murso breached under the stern of the boat and a woman, a cousin of my sister’s friend Eŭnisa Pare, was swept over the side. There is a certain image you learn, the discrete shading, form, drift, that distinguishes a dead body from other things, and gradually we recollected it. Then we became more deliberate, more intent, carried along by the tide, peering for that particular shape lost on the water, and now and then steering around the edges of tangled alĝo, leaning out from the heaving boat to scratch through the jams with our long-handled kelp rakes.
A silence came into the hunt and inhabited it. The near water was blackish now, glossy, but my eye was drawn far out, to the edgeless gray billowing of the sky, the sea. On the smoky distance it was only the birds who measured the world, gave it dimension. Some plum gulls sprang suddenly up—a shifting figure of birds rising into the sky and vanishing on a soundless blackish flash of wings—and then Kikuma said to me, “Look.” I saw a chip of white sliding down the pitch of a wave, and when it came up again and down the next slope, it became an exo spraddled on a broken piece of a hatch cover.
We quartered the waves, crying out strategy to one another for making intersection with the drift of the raft; we were signalling the Steady, too, with lifted arms, useless shouting, until they made us out and brought their windpipe around to follow us.
We were wary of having that heavy piece of steel pitching alongside our little boat, our hull of paper and aluminum, reeds and string, so I made a line fast to the girdle of my overalls and waited, crouching along the gunnel, while Kikuma brought us near. When the raft slipped laterally, lifting gently up to meet us on the swell, I leaped out and scuttled onto it, clutching a bent end of rebar, scrabbling my boots in the hook of a steel step. I shouted, holding on in the cold wash of the sea, and paid out my line as the Pulls Together veered neatly off again without a bump.
My heart had come up into my throat—I had to wait to get a breath before I could make my hand let go its grip on the rebar and touch the gloved wrist of the exo. The body was lying front-down, the suit breached up the back. In the ragged purplish rift were the crenelations of vertebrae. The hands were outspread and clenched on the coaming of the hatch—a death clutch I thought, but when I touched the arm, the fingers of that hand opened and closed, taking a new hold. The faceplate was down in the spillover on the surface of the hatch—it was maybe with my mindseye that I caught sight of a man’s mouth in a rigor of terror. I shouted to Kikuma. She made a glowering face and shouted back, a wordless gusting noise, and I knew she hadn’t heard what I’d said. But she brought the tiller around and let the boat come into the wind, veering to close with us again.
I put my line through a D-ring at the man’s hip, cinching him loosely to me, and then I peeled his fingers from the hatch and grappled his loose weight into my lap. His skin was pallid, translucent, and his eyes fixed on me with dreadful yearning. I put my head close to the faceplate but when he didn’t speak, I wasn’t able to think of anything to say myself.
Sometimes we are reminded. I suppose I had in my mind those few years while I was clerk of the Waters Committee, while I lived at Prolonged Singing with my in-laws. We never were done with repairing the fluejo, over there—those people at Prolonged Singing are still repairing them, aren’t they? That domaro is situated along the edge of the fault scarp and the culverts and aqueducts are prone to break every time the earth shakes; in a hard quake walls slip, roofs let down their loads, people die. Do you know that little river over there? the Crouches by a Grave River? the one that long ago agreed to share itself with those people? the small water wheel that powers their machine shop and their mill? One time there was a strong seism and the housing for the pilot rod broke away from the tube in the wheel. Next day two of us were fitting a new draft tube below the little dam, and while we were doing that repair there was another harder tertremo. It sat me down in the tailwater. Birĝita Ŝiomi was crouching between the draft tube and the dam head, and in the moment before the struts broke and let down the dam on her, she looked over at me. Sometimes we are reminded: All of us live steadfastly in that moment, the one between hope and the exercise of God’s will.
I pulled the man’s loose weight up over my shoulders and when the Pulls Together came alongside, I let out my shout again. “This man is still living!” Kikuma’s face opened in surprise. Coastal people say, piloting a boat is one of those things like playing the flute or writing poems—you are given it or not, and no amount of apprenticeship or striving will bring it to you. Kikuma never had been one of those people, but she delicately maneuvered, bringing the Pulls Together alongside and then pulling away again time after time without much banging against the hatch. And she went on being patient, not yelling much advice, while I crouched there with that man slung over my shoulders, getting up my nerve, imagining I was waiting for a perfect alignment.
The lacuna between the boat and the raft always was shifting, capricious, and I think it was finally on just an i
nstinct of motion that I went plunging outward. His weight made me awkward, top-heavy, or I was clumsy; I struck the gunnel hard with my shins, there was a breathless pitching moment—I saw Kikuma lunging for me—and then the cold breaking of the sea. I lost hold of him or let go, stupid with surprise, grappling along the sliding hull in an urgent confusion. His breached exo must have taken on a quick weight of water, because when he sank to the end of my line he pulled me like a millstone and I lost hold of the boat and sank with him, straight down.
I had been afraid, waiting to jump, but now I wasn’t afraid. How quickly our ties and ballasts are cast off! I was of the Owl Strait suddenly, my elbows resting in fjords, my palms outspread on the cobbled beaches. Inside my body there were forests of lichens, galaxies of starfishes and lamp jellies, and in my bones the shields of turtles, the teeth of balenoj. I felt in my blood the long slow tide, straining after the sun—I was water, and its unknowable alchemies, dreading nothing, simply streaming and alive. This was one of those times when your mind and body cohere and you understand suddenly what the poets say: To die is different from what you had supposed, and luckier.
Then inexplicably I began to rise up through the muffled darkness toward the dazzle of the daylight—Kikuma was hauling me up—I remembered I was tied fast to the Pulls Together. That was a curious moment: I had a sense that I must now make an accommodation to the world, as if I had lived a long time under the sea. Then my sister’s hands took a grip in my hair. I reached up blindly and caught the rail and the boat heeled over steeply—she pulled me across the gunnel, washing in on the sea, and I knew as soon as I was in the boat that the knot binding me to the Migremo man had come undone. Kikuma pulled the end of the line into her lap and then she clambered back to the tiller to get the boat turned into the wind while I sat cold and shaky among the salvaged wreckage. The Steady had come up behind us on the starboard side, and people over there were shouting back and forth with Kikuma but I didn’t try to hear what they were saying. I was too cold and wet through to take pleasure in my survival. I looked out over the water for birds.
The domaro where I lived after I married is the one people call Becoming Death, though its older, truer name is Prolonged Singing. At that domaro, before I was born, a man killed his young daughter by drowning her in the water where they were bathing. Or she died without his help, going down in the water silently while he was looking away. In the hot springs there, black-legged pipes raft on the water, and the little side-by-sides live in it, they don’t seem to care, those birds, that the water is scalding hot. Their outcry, the slight splashing of the water, the rustle of their wings among the clouds of steam is unending, and after a while you just begin to not hear it.
One day some of us were bathing in that hot springs. You know how it is sometimes, when you see something? when there is a moment? when your eye is drawn to something vanishing? and in that moment something sacred is made known? While I was soaking with other people in the stone basin of the bath—I remember we were shouting harassment to Nona Asaki who was repairing the tiles of the conduit by the outtake of the spring; I remember there was a weather moving over the sky but it was a facila wind, a squall bound for somewhere else—I felt a sudden glimpse of those birds—pipes, side-by-sides—their voices like exclamations, and the fleeting dip and rise of their bodies in the steam. And in that moment I thought, They are calling the name of that man, the one who looked away, whose eye was caught by birds, just as his daughter sank. And that time when I was in the Pulls Together with Kikuma, after a man had come loose from my line and gone down into the sea, I looked out over the water to see if any birds were calling my name. But then Kikuma said to me, “Ana, here, get warm,” and she peeled away my soaked clothes and put my arms in dry sleeves, my legs in dry trousers; she folded me under a tarpaulin.
I was grateful, exhausted. We were laboring through heavy seas with the edge of the puso weather whining in the windpipe, but I didn’t try to hold this or anything in my mind. I lolled in the bottom of the boat, my skull rocking dumbly among the sliding scraps of salvage. While Kikuma was steering for a lee shore, I suppose I stood up from my life and let it stream around me in a clear cataract. I was freed from time, not lying inside a dream but standing in the compass of heaven where everything goes onward and outward, nothing collapses—and when I lay down in my life again we were beating northeast along the Comes-Between Cape. When I looked over the gunnel of the boat, across the strait toward the Fisted Rocks, there was a break in the sky and the sun broke fleetingly across the water in a long bright reef—the puso weather had gone over our heads toward Abides.
A bird’s wing brushing your shoulder—or a fortunate weather while you’re traveling—how can these small blessings of the land be set apart from God’s will, any more than the bloody death that is inescapable, inherent in the world? When you open a hole in the earth by setting aside the turf with a spade, when you lay in the frame for a house and place the fenestroj to accept sunlight, and then mindfully replace the turf—when you do this work with skill and love and you stand at the edge of the field looking at it and see only the smooth grassy rise of the berm, isn’t that a moment as vital and defining as a sudden death, bloodshed, cataclysm?
I think of the Woman’s Frozen Toes, between Having Wind and Divided. In winter, the climb up from Having Wind is icy and relentless, people have died, even in good weather—it’s a fine place to bring your body and soul together. But from the crack between the Woman’s Toes, you can stand on your skis and slide down to Divided: It’s all gradual downhill and wide turns, intermittent glimpses north and northwest across the shoulder of the mountain or south to the distant summits of Sisters Getting Homesick. A lot of people use that way over to Divided in the winter, and on particular days in a certain kind of weather, once you’ve got over the Woman’s Frozen Toes you only need to set your skis in the tracks other people have laid in the snow and push downhill, a long lazy run.
For a while when I was still green, I was in love with someone who lived at Divided and one winter I made that climb over Woman’s Frozen Toes three or four times—my brain was in my sexual organs that winter! Skiing down, it’s most all in the cold shadow of the north side of the mountain until the last bend of the track where the ŝildo stones crouch in an open field close-shouldered under the snow, and on fair days the sunlight, crouching among the stones, leaps out brilliant, blinding. That time when I was in the Pulls Together, sitting up to look out toward the Fisted Rocks and the mouth of the Ŝiblingo Fjord, when the sunlight made a brief long glare on the water, I remembered suddenly the winter I had climbed over Woman’s Frozen Toes—I remembered how it was, skiing out from the shadow of the mountain into the unbroken glare of the ŝildo field, how I was blinded by the light—how I flew down the red darkness by the brief fierce burning of my heart.
No one stood on the beach waiting for us. Daylight was seeping out of the sky by then, the overcast taking up blackness slowly; they thought we had long since gone to shelter among the Goes To Grass Islands, or been caught by the puso weather and overturned in the Owl Strait. So we were left alone to haul out the boats along the lee shore, and our tiredness came out in a muttering of complaint and disagreement. We argued over who would carry the dead woman’s body, and which of us would keep her in their house until her family came after her. When that was settled, there was quarrelling over whether we ought to carry everything, all of the Migremo salvage, up the steep path to Holds Loneliness, or only drag it a little way and pile it up like a cairn of stones among the drift at the foot of the scarp, and let other people carry it up in the morning of the next day. Finally people just did as they liked, and it was the big, unwieldy pieces that were left behind on the beach, while glass and wire, small plastics and aluminum, damaged crates, the metal globes of xenon fixtures, those bits and pieces went up the path with us, shouldered or dragged or carried, behind the body of the unknown dead woman slung in a hammock of canvas between Kikuma and her friend Davido Ĉekli. What
I carried up in a cracked plastic box were dozens of bound books, sodden and heavy, and masses of stained wet paper. Nothing is ever wasted, or can be; if the Library Committee gave up trying to salvage the books, people of the Paper and Ink Committee would slurry the wet pages, re-form and dry them.
That climb from the beach up to Holds Loneliness is long and steep. My shins ached from striking the gunnel of the boat, so I trudged painfully, scuffing my boots. I had to stop every little while and shift the big crate to the other shoulder, and then Adria Berelo, Paŭlo Medina, Magdalena Ulsen and her son, one after the other went by me, some of them not even excusing themselves for this rudeness, and leaving me finally to be the last.
The air was sharp, hoary; in the rucks of the fjord where the light was already gone, the cold fog people call griza was cleaving to the stones. I don’t know why a fog, by diminishing the world, declares its vastness. But in a while I stopped climbing up through the narrow rift in the land’s edge and stood there leaning into the uphill rock, holding the box of books. I think I may have cried a little. A person, ambiguous and small, came downhill out of the fog—became Kikuma. “What,” she said in surprise, and she took the box out of my hands and peered at me across the edge of it.
You know how it is between sisters in their middle age? that old old friendship, how loose-fitting it is? the comfort and safety in it? how you can let silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? how you can let words out of your mouth without wariness or precision because you know your sister will listen to what’s worthwhile and let the rest fall out of her ears into the air? how you can be surly, unreasonable, stupid, in the certainty of her grace? We had hardly spoken through this long day, but I said, gesturing impatiently as if this was something we had already argued about, “Oh, this leg hurting, and this damn crate too heavy, I was left behind with the ghosts, eh? Something. My stupid daughter. A dread. I don’t know.” I was by then crying bitterly.
