“Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”
“I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”
“Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”
The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.
“Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”
“I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”
Chickadee shook her head once, silent.
“It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas…You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”
The child nodded.
“They’ve been looking for you.”
“They have?”
“Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”
“Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.
“Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain…”
“I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”
The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.
“Will I ever see Coyote?”
“I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.
The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”
“Yes. You can keep your eye.”
“Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.
Horse Camp
All the other seniors were over at the street side of the parking lot, but Sal stayed with Norah while they waited for the bus drivers. “Maybe you’ll be in the creek cabin,” Sal said, quiet and serious. “I had it second year. It’s the best one. Number Five.”
“How do they, when do you, like find out, what cabin?”
“They better remember we’re in the same cabin,” Ev said, sounding shrill. Norah did not look at her. She and Ev had planned for months and known for weeks that they were to be cabin-mates, but what good was that if they never found their cabin, and also Sal was not looking at Ev, only at Norah. Sal was cool, a tower of ivory. “They show you around, as soon as you get there,” she said, her quiet voice speaking directly to Norah’s lastnight dream of never finding the room where she had to take a test she was late for and looking among endless thatched barracks in a forest of thin black trees growing very close together like hair under a hand-lens. Norah had told no one the dream and now remembered and forgot it. “Then you have dinner, and First Campfire,” Sal said. “Kimmy’s going to be a counselor again. She’s really neat. Listen, you tell old Meredy…”
Norah drew breath. In all the histories of Horse Camp which she had asked for and heard over and over for three years—the thunderstorm story, the horsethief story, the wonderful Stevens Mountain stories—in all of them Meredy the handler had been, Meredy said, Meredy did, Meredy knew.
“Tell him I said hi,” Sal said, with a shadowy smile, looking across the parking lot at the far, insubstantial towers of downtown. Behind them the doors of the Junior Girls bus gasped open. One after another the engines of the four busses roared and spewed. Across the asphalt in the hot morning light small figures were lining up and climbing into the Junior Boys bus. High, rough, faint voices bawled. “OK, hey, have fun,” Sal said. She hugged Norah and then, keeping a hand on her arm, looked down at her intently for a moment from the tower of ivory. She turned away. Norah watched her walk lightfoot and buxom across the black gap to the others of her kind who enclosed her, greeting her, “Sal! Hey, Sal!”
Ev was twitching and nickering, “Come on, Nor, come on, we’ll have to sit way at the back, come on!” Side by side they pressed into the line below the gaping doorway of the bus.
In Number Five cabin four iron cots, thin-mattressed, grey-blanketed, stood strewn with bottles of insect repellent and styling mousse, T-shirts lettered UCSD and I ♥ Teddy Bears, a flashlight, an apple, a comb with hair caught in it, a paperback book open face down: The Black Colt of Pirate Island. Over the shingle roof huge second-growth redwoods cast deep shade, and a few feet below the porch the creek ran out into sunlight over brown stones streaming bright green weed. Behind the cabin Jim Meredith the horse-handler, a short man of fifty who had ridden as a jockey in his teens, walked along the well-beaten path, quick and a bit bowlegged. Meredith’s lips were pressed firmly together. His eyes, narrow and darting, glanced from cabin to cabin, from side to side. Far through the trees high voices cried.
The Counselors know what is to be known. Red Ginger, blonde Kimmy, and beautiful black Sue: they know the vices of Pal, and how to keep Trigger from putting her head down and drinking for ten minutes from every creek. They strike the great shoulders smartly, “Aw, get over, you big lunk!” They know how to swim underwater, how to sing in harmony, how to get seconds, and when a shoe is loose. They know where they are. They know where the rest of Horse Camp is. “Home Creek runs into Little River here,” Kimmy says, drawing lines in the soft dust with a redwood twig that breaks. “Senior Girls here, Senior Boys across there, Junior Birdmen about here.”—“Who needs ’em?” says Sue, yawning. “Come on, who’s going to help me walk the mares?”
They were all around the campfire on Quartz Meadow after the long first day of the First Overnight. The counselors were still singing, but very soft, so soft you almost couldn’t hear them, lying in the sleeping bag listening to One Spot stamp and Trigger snort and the shifting at the pickets, standing in the fine, cool alpine grass listening to the soft voices and the sleepers shifting and later one coyote down the mountain singing all alone.
“Nothing wrong with you. Get up!” said Meredy, and slapped her hip. Turning her long, delicate head to him with a deprecating gaze, Philly got to her feet. She stood a moment, shuddering the reddish silk of her flank as if to dislodge flies, tested her left foreleg with caution, and then walked on, step by step. Step by step, watching, Norah went with her. Inside her body there was still a deep trembling. As she passed him, the handler just nodded. “You’re all right,” he meant. She was all right.
Freedom, the freedom to run, freedom is to run. Freedom is galloping. What else can it be? Only other ways to run, imitations of galloping across great highlands with the wind. Oh Philly sweet Philly my love! If Ev and Trigger couldn’t keep up she’d slow down and come round in a while, after a while, over there, across the long, long field of grass, once she had learned this by heart and knew it forever, the purity, the pure joy.
“Right leg, Nor,” said Meredy. And passed on to Cass and Tammy.
You have to start with the right fore. Everything else is all right. Freedom depends on this, that you start with the right fore, that long leg well balanced on its elegant pastern, that you set down that tiptoe middle-fingernail so hard and round, and spurn the dirt. Highstepping, trot past old Meredy, who always hides his smile.
Shoulder to shoulder, she and Ev, in the long heat of afternoon, in a trance of light, across the home creek in the dry wild oats and cow parsley of the Long Pasture. “I was afraid before I came here,” thinks Norah, incredulous, remembering childhood. She leans her head against Ev’s firm and silken side. The sting of small flies awakens, the swish of long tails sends to sleep. Down by the creek in a patch of coarse grass Philly grazes and dozes. Sue comes striding by, winks wordless, beautiful as a burning coal, lazy and purposeful, bound for the shade of the willows. Is it wo
rth getting up to go down to get your feet in the cool water? Next year Sal will be too old for a camper, but can come back as a counselor, come back here. Norah will come back a second-year camper, Sal a counselor. They will be here. This is what freedom is, what goes on, the sun in summer, the wild grass, coming back each year.
Coming back from the Long Pack Trip to Stevens Mountain weary and dirty, thirsty and in bliss, coming down from the high places, in line, Sue jogging just in front of her and Ev half asleep behind her, some sound or motion caught and turned Norah’s head to look across the alpine field. On the far side under dark firs a line of horses, mounted and with packs—“Look!”
Ev snorted, Sue flicked her ears and stopped. Norah halted in line behind her, stretching her neck to see. She saw her sister going first in the distant line, the small head proudly borne. She was walking lightfoot and easy, fresh, just starting up to the high passes of the mountain. On her back a young man sat erect, his fine, fair head turned a little aside, to the forest. One hand was on his thigh, the other on the reins, guiding her. Norah called out and then broke from the line, going to Sal, calling out to her. “No, no, no, no!” she called. Behind her Ev and then Sue called to her, “Nor! Nor!”
Sal did not hear or heed. Going straight ahead, the color of ivory, distant in the clear, dry light, she stepped into the shadow of the trees. The others and their riders followed, jogging one after the other till the last was gone.
Norah had stopped in the middle of the meadow, and stood in grass in sunlight. Flies hummed.
She tossed her head, turned, and trotted back to the line. She went along it from one to the next, teasing, chivying, Kimmy yelling at her to get back in line, till Sue broke out of line to chase her and she ran, and then Ev began to run, whinnying shrill, and then Cass, and Philly, and all the rest, the whole bunch, cantering first and then running flat out, running wild, racing, heading for Horse Camp and the Long Pasture, for Meredy and the long evening standing in the fenced field, in the sweet dry grass, in the fetlock-shallow water of the home creek.
The Water Is Wide
“You here?”
“To see you.”
After a while he said, “Where’s here?” He was lying flat, so could not have much in view but ceiling and the top third of Anna; in any case his eyes looked unfocussed.
“Hospital.”
Another pause. He said something like, “Is it me that’s here?” The words were slurred. He added clearly enough, “It’s not you. You look all right.”
“I am. You’re here. And I’m here. To see you.”
This made him smile. The smile of an adult lying flat on his back resembles the smile of an infant, in that gravity works with it, not against it.
“Can I be told,” he said, “or will the knowledge kill me?”
“If knowledge could kill you, you’d have been dead for years.”
“Am I sick?”
“Do you feel well?”
He turned his head away, the first bodily movement he had made. “I feel ill.” The words were slurred. “Full of drugs, some kind drugs.” The head moved again, restless. “Don’t like it,” he said. He looked straight at her now. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “Anna, I’m cold. I feel cold.” Tears filled the eyes and ran down from them into the greying hair. This happens in cases of human suffering, when the sufferer is lying face up and is middleaged.
Anna said his name and took his hand. Her hand was somewhat smaller than his, several degrees warmer, and very similar in structure and texture; even the shape of the nails was similar. She held his hand. He held her hand. After some time his hand began to relax.
“Kind drugs,” he said. The eyes were shut now.
He spoke once more; he said either “Wait,” or “Weight.” Anna answered the first, saying, “I will.” Then she thought he had spoken of a weight that lay upon him. She could see the weight in the way he breathed, asleep.
“It’s the drugs,” she said, “he’s asked every time if you could stop giving him the drugs. Could you decrease the dose?”
The doctor said, “Chemotherapy,” and other words, some of which were the names of drugs, ending in zil and ine.
“He says that he can’t sleep, but he can’t wake up either. I think he needs to sleep. And to wake up.”
The doctor said many other words. He said them in so rapid, distinct, and fluent a manner, and with such assurance, that Anna believed them all for at least three hours.
“Is this a loony bin?” Gideon inquired with perfect clarity.
“Mhm.” Anna knitted.
“Thought wards.”
“Oh, it’s all private rooms here. It’s a nice private sort of place. Rest home. Polite. Expensive.”
“Senile, incont…incontinent. Can’t talk. Anna.”
“Mhm?”
“Stroke?”
“No, no.” She put her knitting down on her knee. “You got overtired.”
“Tumor?”
“No. You’re sound as a bell. Only a little cracked. You got tired. You acted funny.”
“What’d I do?” he asked, his eyes brightening.
“Made an awful fool of yourself.”
“Did?”
“Well, you washed all the blackboards. At the Institute. With soap and water.”
“That all?”
“You said it was time to start all over. You made the Dean fetch the soap and buckets.” They both jolted softly with laughter at the same time. “Never mind the rest. You had them all quite busy, believe me.”
They all understood now that his much publicised New Year’s Day letter to the Times, which he had defended with uncharacteristic vehemence, had been a symptom. This was a relief to many people, who had uncomfortably been thinking of the letter as a moral statement. Looking back, everyone at the Institute could now see that Gideon had not been himself for some months. Indeed the change could be traced back three years, to the death of his wife Dorothea of leukemia. He had borne his loss well, of course, but had he not remained somewhat withdrawn—increasingly withdrawn? Only no one had noticed it, because he had been so busy. He had ceased to take vacations at the family cabin up at the lake, and had done a good deal of public speaking in connection with the peace organisation of which he was co-chairman. He had been working much too hard. It was all clear now. Unfortunately it had not become clear until the evening in April when he began a public lecture on the Question of Ethics in Science by gazing at the audience in silence for 35 seconds (approx.: one of the mathematical philosophers present in the audience had begun to time the silence at the point when it became painful, though not yet unendurable), and then, in a slow, soft, rough voice which no one who heard it could forget, announced, “The quantification of Death is now the major problem facing theoretical physicists in the latter half of the Western Hemisphere.” He had then closed his mouth and stood gazing at them.
Hansen, who had introduced his talk and sat on the speakers’ platform, was a large man and a quick-witted one. He had without much trouble induced Gideon to come backstage with him, to one of the seminar rooms. It was there that Gideon had insisted that they wash all the blackboards perfectly clean. He had not become violent, though his behavior had been what Hansen termed “extraordinarily wilful.” Later on, in private, Hansen wondered whether Gideon’s behavior had not always been wilful, in that it had always been self-directed, and whether he should not have used, instead, the word “irrational.” That would have been the expectable word. But its expectability led him to wonder if Gideon’s behavior (as a theoretical physicist) had ever been rational; and, in fact, if his own behavior (as a theoretical physicist, or otherwise) had ever been adequately describable by the term “rational.” He said nothing, however, of these speculations, and worked very hard for several weekends at building a rock garden at the side of his house.
Though he offered no violence to others or himself, Gideon had attempted escape. At a certain moment he appeared to understand suddenly that medical aid
had been summoned. He acted with decision. He told the Dean, Dr. Hansen, Dr. Mehta, and the student Mr. Chew, all of whom were with him (several other members of the audience or of the Institute were busy keeping busybodies and reporters out), “You finish the blackboards in here, I’ll do Room 40,” and taking up a bucket and a sponge went rapidly across the hall into a vacant classroom, where Chew and Hansen, following him at once, prevented him from opening a window. The room was on the ground floor, and his intention was made clear by his saying, “Let me get out, please, help me get out.” Chew and Hansen were compelled to restrain his arms by force. He struggled briefly to free himself; failing, he became silent and apparently thoughtful. Shortly before the medical personnel arrived he suggested in a low voice to Chew, “If we sat down on the floor here they might not see us.” When the medical personnel entered the room and came close to him he said loudly, “All right, have it your way,” and at once began to yell wordlessly, or scream. The graduate student Chew, a brilliant young biophysicist who had not had much experience of human suffering, let go of his arm and broke into tears. The medical personnel, having had perhaps excessive experience of human suffering, promptly administered a quick-acting sedative or tranquilliser by hypodermic. Within 35 seconds (approx.) the patient fell silent and became tractable, accepting the straitjacket without resistance, and with only a slight expression (facial, not verbal) of bewilderment, or, possibly, curiosity.
“I have to get out of here.”
“Oh, Gid, not yet, you need to rest. It’s a decent place. They’ve eased up on the drugs. I can see the difference.”
“I have to get out, Anna.”
“You’re not well yet.”
“I am not a patient. I am impatient. Help me get out. Please.”
“Why, Gid? What for?”
“They won’t let me go where I have to go.”
“Where do you have to go?”
“Mad.”
Dear Lin,
They continue to let me visit Gideon every afternoon from five to six, because I am his only relative, the widower’s widowed sister, and I just sort of barge in. I don’t think the doctor approves of my visits, I think he thinks I leave the patient disturbed, but he hasn’t the authority to keep me out, I guess, until Gideon is committed. I guess he doesn’t really have any authority, in a private rest home like this, but he makes me feel guilty. I never did understand when to obey people. He is supposed to be the best man here for nervous breakdowns. He has been disapproving lately and says Gideon is deteriorating, ceasing to respond, but all he gives him to respond to is drugs. What is he supposed to say to them? He hasn’t eaten for four days. He responds to me, when nobody else is there, or anyhow he talks, and I respond. He asked me about you kids yesterday. I told him about Kate’s divorce. It made him sad. “Everybody is divorcing everybody else,” he said. I was sad, too, and I said, “Well, we didn’t. You and Dorothea, me and Louis. Death us did part. Which is preferable, I wonder?” He said, “It comes out much the same. Fission, fusion. The human race is one great Nuclear Family.” I wondered if the doctor would think that’s the way an insane person talks. Maybe he would think that’s the way two insane people talk
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