by Molly Gloss
Kikuma looked at me, shifting the weight of the box. Then she turned sidelong to me and rubbed her cheek along mine. I clung to her until I was finished. Then she said tenderly, “Let’s go up, Ana,” and I followed her along the narrow notch, the dark lead rising to Holds Loneliness.
When we came out at the head of the fjord it was not yet night—the sky was dark but holding the light beneath it as a hand cups a flame—and the wind had fallen utterly away. The other people had already gone to ground ahead of us, and from the edge of that fell there’s no seeing the fenestroj of the houses, or the light cast out from those windows into the shadowed swales—it was a world without humankind in it, the land falling and rising and falling like swells of the sea. Across the shoulders of the berms the long wiry stems of the pinion poppies stood erect, holding their seedheads above the myriad shorter grasses, the brindled pelt of false skipper and flywing, hightail and boozy. Against the darkening sky, over the black water of the fjord a flock of bush owls hunted mites and moths, their dip and rise profoundly synchronous, silent. On the flanks of the glacier there were patches of shadow, thousands of pew larks with their twig-legs folded under, lying together in sleep. Out there were sand hares, flicker lemmings, hermit mice, in galleries and corridors under the ice. And in the waters of the Owl Strait, bowfish were choosing a home for eggs in the crevices of a man’s relinquished vertebrae.
There is something about that particular time of day, the failing of the light; at twilight, when the air is cold and still and un-colored, when something moves in it the whole world sees it. As I was standing there at the top of the beach path—standing inside my memory of that day as if it were a stream of light—I came to a magic place in my life. I saw that man from the Migremo, the one who had fallen into the sea with me and drowned. Something moved apart from the birds, and I saw that man where he walked among the ŝildoj of Holds Loneliness, looking for a stone to give his name to.
Kikuma stopped with me, looking up the long slope. If she saw the man herself, she didn’t say, but stood with me in silence while I watched him wade the swift white stripe of the Bears Grief River, and while I watched him walk across the hip of the hill, his shape gradually becoming indistinguishable, a part of the darkness. Then I said, “Well, he’s gone now,” and we trudged tiredly across the rocky mezlando, going home with that box of wet pages. People call this world Reiradi, an old word that has a tangled meaning, but something like circling back, or maybe returning. I wonder if those pioneer people, the ones who gave the world that name, I wonder if they were thinking of times like this one, coming home late and cold, carrying a weight.
This time I’m remembering, when the Migremo fell, we were living in a house with Kikuma’s husband and my niece and our old parents, and a cousin who had quarreled with her husband. Our family’s relief made itself known in a little stream of jokes at our expense, while they brought forward bowls and spoons and placed them in our hands and watched us eat our soup. My mother began to sort through the box we had brought up from the Migremo, and before long she was standing the wet books open, ruffling their pages with her thumb. When she had a field of books spread in front of her on the floor she stood up and turned around facing the other way and began again, setting out the rest. Then when she was done, she was in the center and couldn’t step out and we had to help her move the books and make a path for herself.
My mother has an old, religious reverence for books. I value them myself, though my mother’s experience of books is not mine. In her childhood people looked to books as a repository of wisdom about the land; in mine, people looked to the land itself. The child knows the world more sensuously than the adult, and I think my mother’s understanding of this world, even after seventy years, is intimately linked to the fusty smell inside the covers of books, the thickened, buttery texture of the old paper, the sibilant sound of the pages slipping across one another. Mine is in waxy panes of riverine ice, in the smell of a mouse’s old bones and the spiny rustle of a ring-eye’s nest. The landscape we inhabit as children, inhabits us.
When I had eaten my soup, I had an odd compulsion to go out again in the darkness and look among the ŝildoj for the stone I had seen that ghost giving his name to. I said something else to my family—that I had a compulsion to go to Davido Ĉekli’s house and sit with the dead woman. They sighed and reasoned briefly with me—this was something that they understood, but it could wait for the morning of the next day. Still, no one argued very strongly to keep me inside. I suppose they knew what I was doing, though I hardly knew it myself. I put my arms in my coat sleeves again and went out through the darkness between the houses.
The twilight calm had drifted off on the light, and the wind was cold again, a glaciejo wind, dry and lashing. I put my head down to climb the steep alta to the ŝildo field, walking among the stones in a misery of cold, hunching my shoulders, waiting for something to be revealed. If that man’s ghost was there, he didn’t speak. At the high edge of the field I stood looking seaward across the long black downsweep of the grass. There was a fine violet line marking the boundary of the sky—a vanishingly delicate memory of the sun. And then something was revealed after all. That dark filament of light illumined an early, childish memory:
Something more than a hundred years ago, people had buried an old woman in the ground east of my parents’ domaro, and at Having Wind they were always telling this woman’s story—why she wasn’t burnt, how she had wanted to lie down in the earth after all those years apart from it. No one knew where this grave was—in my childhood, the people who used to know that were already corpses, their names given to ŝildo stones, their souls living in the spaces that connect one blade of grass, one crumb of sand, to the next. What I remembered, standing at the edge of the ŝildo field above the houses of Holds Loneliness, looking out at the violet line of the sky, was a time, as a child, when I stood on the berm of my parents’ house watching the weather coming. It was angviso weather, that time, a weather without any experience of abruptness; it moved slowly at an angle toward me out of the east. Between me and the weather the brown grass was sunlit and I thought, When the shadow of the weather crosses the grass I’ll see the sunken place where that pioneer woman’s bones are buried.
When I first stood there on the roof of the house looking, there was nothing but the land itself, it seemed all one piece and unalterable. But then I became what I was seeing, and my eyes gave life to even the smallest things—blue stems of moss, the veiny ruts where meltwater sometimes ran, a turnstone, a dead-drop of shed feathers, the wind pushing the grass over in an image resembling a human head or a flight of birds. The weather rode very slowly across the grass, and in the shadow there was a deep old silence, and whispering into it was the land. I suppose that was the first time I heard the earth speaking, as inexplicably coherent as an old book in a forgotten language, transcendent in its meaning.
Now I walked across the ŝildo field, across the crackling grass to the bank of the Bears Grief River and stood there a moment, peering into the blackness, hoping I might yet see the ghost of that dead man, the one I had lost to the sea. But the urgency had gone out of the air, out of me, like a breath, and when I started down again toward the lighted fenestroj of the houses, I thought, That pioneer woman is still there under the grass, alive in the body of the world.
GLOSSARY
altejo: highlands, nearest the ceiling; narrow terraces along the upper edges of the torus’s inhabited interior
avino: grandmother
caparajo: loose, lightweight drawstring trousers
dankon: thanks; thank you
domaro: a large multifamily house containing several apartments
exo: pressure suit
kremaciejo: crematory
kura: doctor; nurse; healer
lavejo: lavatory
librajo: small laptop device for reading electronic books
loĝio: a covered, interior porch; the public space, the open middle, of a U-shaped domaro
maĉeta: farm implement for weeding and for cutting canes
maltejo: lowlands, in the trough of the torus’s inhabited interior
mezlando: midlands; broad terraces along the middle reaches of the interior of the torus
mortafesto: funeral; wake; a celebration of a life that has ended
paĉjo: diminutive, affectionate name for a father
panja: diminutive, affectionate name for a mother
pasado: the exterior corridor of a domaro; a narrow porch that circles the house beneath its overhanging eave
plantodomo: greenhouse
repozo: wicker chair-back for floor use
sadaŭ: attic of a house, used for storage
sutaĝo: the open underneath of a domaro built on poles
ŝimanas: a spiritual malaise; exaggerated feeling of isolation and loneliness, leading toward depression, alienation, suicide
ŝiro: neighborhood; village; consisting usually of ten or twelve apartment houses. There are eight siroj: Esperplena [Hopeful], Senlima [Boundless], Pacema [Peaceable], Alaŭdo [Lark], Kantado [Prolonged Singing], Bonveno [Open Arms], Mandala [Circling], Revenana [Daydreaming]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the descriptions of leaf-cutter ants, and for details of tropical birds and tropical farming, I am indebted to the published writings of Alexander F. Skutch, a naturalist of profound compassion and thought.
In the mid-1970’s, argument over the feasibility and desirability of funding the O’Neill space colonies was an ongoing matter for discussion in The CoEvolution Quarterly, and eventually that material, including the invited responses of several notable people, was gathered together and published under the title Space Colonies (Penguin Books: New York, 1977). Some of the arguments and insights spoken by characters in this novel (addressing a rather different question) have been abstracted from the discussion in that book.
All epigraphs in this book are from the writings of the sometime-Quaker Walt Whitman, his lifework, Leaves of Grass.
Keep reading for a preview of
The Unforeseen
by
Molly Gloss
FROM MAY TO September, Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries, but otherwise, she was alone; alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines; they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her, and by early summer she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate. The dogs were named Jesus and Alice. “Away to me, Hey-sus,” she said when they were moving the sheep. “Go bye, Alice.” From May to September these words spoken in command of the dogs were almost the only times she heard her own voice; that, and when the Mexican brought the groceries—a polite exchange in Spanish about the weather, the health of the dogs, the fecundity of the ewes.
The Churros were a very old breed. The O-Bar Ranch had a federal allotment up on the mountain, which was all rimrock and sparse grasses—well suited to the Churros that were fiercely protective of their lambs and had a long-stapled topcoat that could take the weather. They did well on the thin grass of the mountain, where other sheep would lose flesh and give up their lambs to the coyotes. The Mexican was an old man. He said he remembered Churros from his childhood in the Oaxaca highlands, the rams with their four horns—two curving up, two down. “Buen’ carne,” he told Delia. Uncommonly fine meat.
The wind blew out of the southwest in the early part of the season, a wind that smelled of juniper and sage and pollen; in the later months it blew straight from the east, a dry wind smelling of dust and smoke, bringing down showers of parched leaves and seed heads of yarrow and bitter cress. Thunderstorms came frequently out of the east, enormous cloudscapes with hearts of livid magenta and glaucous green. At those times, if she was camped on a ridge, she’d get out of her bed and walk downhill to find a draw where she could feel safer, but if she was camped in a low place, she would stay with the sheep while a war passed over their heads, spectacular, jagged flares of lightning; skull-rumbling cannonades of thunder. It was maybe bred into the bones of Churros, a knowledge and a tolerance of mountain weather, for they shifted together and waited out the thunder with surprising composure; they stood forbearingly while rain beat down in hard, blinding bursts.
Sheepherding was simple work, although Delia knew some herders who made it hard, dogging the sheep every minute, keeping them in a tight group, moving all the time. She let the sheep herd themselves, do what they wanted, make their own decisions. If the band began to separate, she would whistle or yell, and often the strays would turn around and rejoin the main group. Only if they were badly scattered did she send out the dogs. Mostly, she just kept an eye on the sheep, made sure they got good feed, that the band didn’t split, that they stayed in the boundaries of the O-Bar allotment. She studied the sheep for the language of their bodies and tried to handle them just as close to their nature as possible. When she put out salt for them, she scattered it on rocks and stumps as if she were hiding Easter eggs, because she saw how they enjoyed the search.
The spring grass made their manure wet, so she kept the wool cut away from the ewes’ tail areas with a pair of sharp, short-bladed shears. She dosed the sheep with wormer, trimmed their feet, inspected their teeth, treated ewes for mastitis. She combed the burrs from the dogs’ coats and inspected them for ticks. You’re such good dogs, she told them with her hands. I’m very, very proud of you.
She had some old binoculars, 7x32 mms, and in the long, quiet days, she watched bands of wild horses, miles off in the distance; ragged-looking mares with dorsal stripes and black legs. She read the back issues of the local newspapers, looking in the obits for names she recognized. She read spine-broken paperback novels and played solitaire and scoured the ground for arrowheads and rocks she would later sell to rock hounds. She studied the parched brown grass, which was full of grasshoppers and beetles and crickets and ants. But most of her day was spent just walking. The sheep sometimes bedded quite a ways from her trailer, and she had to get out to them before sunrise, when the coyotes would make their kills. She was usually up by three or four and walking out to the sheep in darkness. Sometimes she returned to the camp for lunch, but she was always out with the sheep again until sundown, when the coyotes were likely to return, and then she walked home after dark to water and feed the dogs, eat supper, climb into bed.
In her first years on Joe-Johns, she had often walked three or four miles away from the band, just to see what was over a hill, or to study the intricate architecture of a sheepherder’s monument. Stacking up flat stones in the form of an obelisk was a common herders’ pastime, their monuments all over that sheep country, and though Delia had never felt an impulse to start one herself, she admired the ones other people had built. She sometimes walked miles out of her way just to look at a rock pile up close.
She had a mental map of the allotment, divided into ten pastures. Every few days, when the sheep had moved on to a new pasture, she moved her camp. She towed the trailer with an old Dodge pickup, over the rocks and creek beds, the sloughs and dry meadows, to the new place. For a while afterward, after the engine was shut off and while the heavy old body of the truck was settling onto its tires, she would be deaf, her head filled with a dull, roaring white noise.
She had about eight hundred ewes, as well as their lambs, many of them twins or triplets. The ferocity of the Churro ewes in defending their offspring was sometimes a problem for the dogs, but in the balance of things, she knew it kept her losses small. Many coyotes lived on Joe-Johns, and sometimes a cougar or bear would come up from the salt pan desert on the north side of the mountain, looking for better country to own. These animals considered the sheep to be fair game, which Delia understood to be their
right, and also her right—hers and the dogs—to take the side of the sheep. Sheep were smarter than people commonly believed, and the Churros smarter than other sheep she had tended, but by midsummer the coyotes had passed the word among themselves—buen’ carne—and Delia and the dogs then had a job of work, keeping the sheep out of harm’s way.
She carried a .32-caliber Colt pistol in an old-fashioned holster worn on her belt. If you’re a coyot’, you’d better be careful of this woman, she said with her body, with the way she stood and the way she walked when she was wearing the pistol. That gun and holster had once belonged to her mother’s mother, a woman who had come west on her own and homesteaded for a while, down in the Sprague River Canyon. Delia’s grandmother had liked to tell the story: how a concerned neighbor, a bachelor with an interest in marriageable females, had pressed the gun upon her, back when the Klamaths were at war with the army of General Joel Palmer; and how she never had used it for anything but shooting rabbits.
In July a coyote killed a lamb while Delia was camped no more than two hundred feet away from the bedded sheep. It was dusk, and she was sitting on the steps of the trailer reading a two-gun Western, leaning close over the pages in the failing light, and the dogs were dozing at her feet. She heard the small sound, a strange, high, faint squeal she did not recognize and then did recognize, and she jumped up and fumbled for the gun, yelling at the coyote, at the dogs, her yell startling the entire band to its feet but the ewes making their charge too late, Delia firing too late, and none of it doing any good beyond a release of fear and anger.
A lion might well have taken the lamb entire; she had known of lion kills where the only evidence was blood on the grass and a dribble of entrails in the beam of a flashlight. But a coyote is small and will kill with a bite to the throat and then perhaps eat just the liver and heart, though a mother coyote will take all she can carry in her stomach, bolt it down and carry it home to her pups. Delia’s grandmother’s pistol had scared this one off before it could even take a bite, and the lamb was twitching and whole on the grass, bleeding only from its neck. The mother ewe stood over it, crying in a distraught and pitiful way, but there was nothing to be done, and in a few minutes the lamb was dead.
