by Starhawk
“Fold your wings, you old bat,” Johanna said, looking down on her with her own arms crossed over her chest. “Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ?”
“I was on a talk show with him once,” Maya said. “Remember? Back in 1999. He said he’d returned for the New Millennium, but he was disgusted with the world. So he went away again. Tell me, you should know now. Was he the real Jesus?”
“I’m not here to debate theology with you. Sit up, girl. You’re not dead yet.”
“I want to be. I can’t bear to stick around and watch the sufferings of the young.”
“Why not? Are they more fragile than we were? Hell no, these kids are tougher than those biscuits you used to make, the ones we called bullets. Anyway, this is no time to turn wimpy on me. You’re still needed.”
“I’m going on strike. Besides, I can’t do anything! What can I do for Madrone, except worry? What can I do for Bird?”
“Leave him his own pain. Don’t try to bear it for him. Come on, Maya, sit up and let me put my arms around you.”
Maya sat up. Her arms caressed her own shoulders as she rocked, cradled in the arms of the dead.
“We had our challenges and our suffering,” Johanna said. “Leave the young their turn.”
“But their turn is so much harder than ours was! It is, Johanna, don’t pretend it’s not! And that’s not right. That’s not what we worked for!”
“What we worked for was to give them a turn at all. Given the way things were going when we were young, we should claim it as a victory that they’re alive and still have a world to suffer in.”
Bird sat in the garden. The moon had caressed his sore back, but it was dipping down below the neighbor’s roofline, and the air was chilly. Still he couldn’t bring himself to move, to get up and go in and face Madrone again, with her camping gear spread out all over her room and a look of determined kindness in her eyes.
The cold creeping along his shoulder blades felt almost like a hand. If he closed his eyes, he saw Rio’s face, his hair and beard blue-white in the starlight.
“I’m disappointed in you,” Rio said. “I thought you had more guts.”
“Lay off me, will you?” Bird said. “Or try another tactic. That one won’t fly. Believe me, Rio, nobody in the world can accuse me of not having guts. I have nothing more to prove on that score.”
“It’s not your machismo I’m talking about, it’s another kind of courage. And I’m not criticizing. Who am I to judge you? I just wish you had the courage to let yourself really feel your wounds.”
“I am doing that right now. Right now! I’m just sitting here feeling how my leg hurts and my back hurts and my fingers are stiff and heavy and nothing works right, okay? I can’t go south with Madrone, I know that now; I can’t play my music; I’m altogether fucked up and fairly useless, and I admit it to you.”
“But those aren’t the wounds I’m talking about,” Rio said. “Listen, Bird. There’s something that happens to you when you’ve been through things that other people haven’t. When you’ve encountered possibilities of ugliness that they don’t know about. We both know this, you and I. How it feels like you have to hold the pain for them, to contain it somehow and keep from spilling it out.”
“That’s why there’s so much I can’t talk about,” Bird said.
Rio shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Bird. It just eats away at you from the inside. It’s hurting you.”
“What can I do?”
“You know what you’ve got to do. The instinct is to close. But you’ve got to open.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You know. First open your mouth. Then you’ll be able to open your heart again.”
Bird approached Madrone the next day, as she was carrying an armload of herbs from the garden.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Sure. Let me put these down.” She placed them in the sink and followed him into his room, sitting beside him on the bed.
He took a deep breath and began. “I know I’ve been an asshole, Madrone. I’m sorry. You’re the one who needs help right now, and I’m going to try to give you all the help I can.”
She took his hands and held them in hers. He was suddenly so dear to her. She would have given anything for the power to heal all his wounds instantly. Maybe Lily was right, maybe she was not content with her limitations.
“Bird, you can get better, you know. I mean, you can at least improve. But you’ve got to take care of yourself. Give your body a chance to heal. There’s exercises I can show you for your back, and Lou could do acupuncture for you. Maybe you should talk to Sam again too, let him go ahead and reset that hip.”
She could feel him starting to close, but then he took a deep breath, exhaled, and smiled at her.
“Okay, I’ll think about it. I’d just hate to be immobilized in a cast when the Stewards’ army marches in.”
“Maybe you’ll be out of the cast by then. You’d be surprised how soon Sam can get you walking—at least on crutches.” Madrone heard the urging in her own voice, and it sounded like whining, pleading. Wrong. She was not meeting him in what he had come to offer. But she couldn’t stop herself. “And then whatever comes down, you’d be better prepared to deal with it.”
“We’re talking about my shit again,” Bird said. “I want to know what you need that I can give you.”
“Information.”
“I’ll give you all I have.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her. “Is that all?”
He had opened to her, and she could do no less for him. “I’m scared. I’m terrified. How do I do something I’m so scared to do?”
He held her tight, wondering what words of reassurance to say when he feared for her so much himself.
“I’m scared to do the things you’ve done, and go where you’ve been,” Madrone said. “I’m scared to come back broken.”
There it was, he thought. The unspeakable thing that I felt hiding behind her kindness. She pities me, and she is afraid of becoming like me. No wonder I couldn’t open up to her. But it’s all out now, we’ve just got to let it go.
“I can’t tell you everything’s going to be all right, because that would be a lie,” Bird said. “I don’t know how it will be.”
“I don’t want you to tell me that. I want you to tell me something about fear. Everybody in this family is always so fucking brave. I feel like a misfit.”
Bird laughed and held her tighter. “No, love, you’re not a misfit. And I, for one, am not that brave. If I had known what was going to happen, I can’t say I would have gone. I was young and dumb and thought I was just going to die, which seemed romantic and inevitable if you remember the times. Everyone was dying. Todo el mundo.”
“It seemed that way.”
“All I can say is, it’s not that the fear goes away but that it changes. When something really bad is happening, it’s just what’s happening. So you face it, because in that moment you don’t really have any choice.”
“I guess I know that,” Madrone said. “It’s like going through a difficult birth. You can’t stop it, so you just do it. But it’s now, thinking about it beforehand, that’s so hard. Weren’t you scared before you went away?”
“I was terrified.”
“I don’t want to die,” Madrone said. “I wish you were going with me. I’m scared of being alone.”
“I will be with you, in spirit as we like to say.” Bird tightened his arms around her and bent his head low. “Not a moment of any day will go by when some part of me won’t be with you.”
“I know.” They clung together, and his body felt so sweet against hers that she didn’t know how she could ever bring herself to let go.
Finally he pulled back, kissing her lightly on the forehead. “I want to give you something to take with you,” he said. “And I’ve thought and thought about it. Something you couldn’t lose, something nobody can take from you. So, I’ve made you a little song.”
“Bird!”
“I can’t really play it for you, but—come here.” He took her hand and led her over to the bench beside the upright piano, which took up one wall. “Sit here and let me sing it.”
She sat beside him on the bench, knowing what this gift had cost him. Awkwardly, his hands picked out a few key chords, a halting melody. He sang, his voice husky but still the true, resonant voice that she remembered.
The song he had made for her was a little piece of his own music, the music that came to him when he was almost dead and brought him back to life, the music that every now and then had given his own hands the power to heal. He could never do it justice; even when his hands had been whole and in the prime of their skill, at most he could have played an echo of what he heard in his mind. And now all he could do was hint at the melody with stumbling notes and sing a little of it without words. He felt embarrassed, but when he stopped she shook her head.
“Don’t stop, Bird. That’s beautiful.”
He could see in her face that she was moved, he hoped not just with pity.
“And now,” he said, making himself smile, “you have to learn it. And then it’ll be yours, and you can sing it as you hike down the coast, and when you’re afraid, and if … and if … Diosa, Madrone.…” He couldn’t speak anymore; all he could do was look at her and hold her. She was warm and alive and whole in his arms, and when they were together like this he could feel himself flowing out to her, feeding her and being fed in turn. How could he bear to believe that in a little while she’d be gone?
“This is going to be a good week,” he said. “We’re just going to love each other, and be good to each other, and build up our memories. Memories are important. They’re something you can hold on to.”
He was as good as his word. He dredged his mind for every scrap of information she might find useful—descriptions of places, names of people, stories, rumors, gossip, customs. Things came back to him that he’d forgotten: scraps of conversation overheard in the prison, the taste of moldy bread, thirst. During the day while the others were working they rode gondolas around the city, laughing together, walking on the sea dikes and climbing the green hills. They went to the ceremonies of the Ohlone and Miwok and Pomo tribes who came down to the city in the autumn to offer their ancient dances as gifts. He let her massage him, digging her strong fingers into his sore ligaments; he let her questions dig into the sore places in his soul.
At night, because he knew it would please her, he opened the piano and struggled to play, although it hurt him more than he could express. In his mind, his hands were the fluid expression of what he heard inside himself; now they were clumsy, like bundles of rags tied to sticks, thumping and crashing out a few broken chords. Nevertheless he kept on, he sang, because he understood that what she really needed from him was to know how to face the unfaceable. And he could only give her that knowledge by example.
And she sat, watching him, hearing the power in his awkward, banging music, loving him so much she could hardly bear to breathe.
Much to his surprise, Bird began to notice his playing improve. It was still rough, but not quite as rough. There were movements he could make that he couldn’t before. When no one was around, he tried scales, simple runs.
He would never be the musician he once was, but still there existed the possibility that he could improve enough to let music be his vehicle. With the thought came a new dimension of fear. He had no surety that with all the work in the world he could become even that good, yet he had no excuse not to try.
They made love most of the night, but when the blue light of morning came, the others slipped out, leaving Bird and Madrone alone. She clung to him, not intending to arouse him, but just to look into his eyes, feel the precise curve of his cheeks over their bones and the soft wiry curls of his new-grown beard, and then he was hard against her and she drew him into her, wanting only to lie still and be filled with him and remember him, but there was so much love in his eyes that she shuddered under him, drinking him in.
“What are you going to do when I’m gone?” she asked when they were through.
“I’ll be a good boy,” Bird said. “I’m going to let Sam knock me apart and put me back together again. I’ll play my scales. I’ll tell cheerful lies to Maya.”
“We might never see each other again. We might never be in each other like this again,” Madrone whispered.
“We’ll see each other, alive or dead. If I die first, I’ll haunt you.”
“It’s not the same,” Madrone said.
“I’m giving you six months,” Bird said. “After that, I don’t care if I’m in six different pieces and the whole Stewards’ army is encamped in our greenhouse. I’m coming down to get you if I have to crawl.”
She left in the morning, on the back of a wagon heading back south from the weekly market. Maya had said her goodbyes in the house, too upset to speak much. She cupped Madrone’s head between her hands, looked long and deep into her eyes, memorizing them, and then let her go. Bird and Sage and Nita and Holybear walked down with her to the market and watched as the wagon lumbered down the old freeway, until it disappeared in the distance. Then they accompanied Bird to the hospital.
“Okay, Sam,” he said. “Do your dirty work. I’m yours, now.”
13
Madrone laid another stick on her fire, watching the warm light of the sunset color the ocean waves gold and violet. If her count was correct, it was the night of the Winter Solstice. She’d been traveling for two weeks now, making her slow way down through the coastal mountains, through canyons thick with redwoods and the peeling madrones, their gray outer bark pulled back to reveal the reds and bronzes and purples of the papery inner bark and, beneath it, smooth green-gold skin. They were her talismans; she too was stripping and peeling. It had been so long since she had spent days in silence. It had been so long since she’d had no one to answer to, no one to be responsible for except herself.
Now she waited in a place Bird had described, the strip of sand with the rotting pier at the southern end of the mountains, where the land leveled off into rolling dunes. It might be days, he had said, maybe longer, before the Web sent a boat to cruise the pickup site. They traded, he’d been told, with some of the groups inland from here, but the pickups came irregularly. Certainly she had seen no one else here. While she had conserved her food, gathering nuts from the woods and living off the land as much as possible, she couldn’t wait forever. She had a sudden picture of herself, old as Maya, still waiting, never knowing when to give up and turn back and go home.
Suddenly she wished, more than anything, that she were home. In the city now the gondolas would be filled with people laughing and singing, on their way to the beaches, where they would plunge into the cold, cold waters of winter to cleanse themselves of the faults of the year, ignoring for this one night the threat of toxins. The sea dikes would be alight with fires, and as dark fell the gondolas would come alive with the flames of candles, carrying the Yule fire back to the hearths. Then later there would be food: roast wild pig brought down to the City by the Wild Boar People, exiles banished for antisocial behavior who were allowed back at this time of year to sell their wares at market. For the vegetarians, plates would be piled high with tofu and sweet potatoes and bowls would brim with red chile.
In Black Dragon House, the altares for the dead had been taken down before Madrone left. The family altar was rearranged to feature a nativity scene, in which a statue of the Venus of Willendorf, ample and fertile, stood next to a golden ball that represented the sun, reborn on the Solstice out of the womb of Mother Night. Madrone had helped Sage collect figurines and small stuffed animals to witness the central scene: plastic dinosaurs, carved wooden dogs playing instruments, small painted angels from Germany, a wind-up Godzilla devouring Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a set of clay snakes made long ago by a child.
Tonight at home they were all together, keeping vigil all night long, baking the Solstice bread that filled the house with its fragra
nce, singing and drumming and telling stories. At dawn they would climb the hills, ringing bells and beating drums, to chant and dance as the sun rose. They were not lonely.
Maybe she should have waited until after the holidays. But once she had made up her mind, delay had become unbearable. No, she couldn’t have gone through the celebrations, knowing all along that each thing she did might be for the last time.
She shivered. Her fire was going well, and she placed a fat log on top and waited as it caught. The sun was almost down. Really, there ought to be a battery of ritual drummers here to raise power. Alone in the silence, with only the power she could raise with an act of will, she stripped quickly and walked into the waves. The water burned cold on her legs and thighs. She waded in gingerly up to her breast and, bracing herself against the pull of the tide, splashed her face and the crown of her head and the nape of her neck. Let it go, sickness and despair and hurt and loss, anger and humiliation and all the pain of the year. Wash it away, take it with the turning of the tide, the turning of the wheel.
Light played around her, silver and gold and purple. She sang the old Yoruba chant to Yemaya, the Sea Goddess:
Yemaya Asesu, Asesu Yemaya,
Yemaya olodo, olodo Yemaya.…
Three more days went by before the boat came. It appeared on the horizon, its patched sails looking like a collection of rags on sticks. Windspinners and solar panels dangled at odd angles, but it moved at a fast pace through the water, swooping into the bay and pulling up by the dock. The slender boat was about thirty feet long, trailing a small dinghy which a dark figure hauled to the side. With a graceful leap, the sailor swung into it and began rowing toward shore.
Madrone stood up and waved her arms in a wide circle above her head. She felt a rush of anticipation, mixed with fear. At last it was really beginning, this work—after the next few moments there would be no backing out, no last chance to change her mind and go home.
