To Build A Shipt - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  All along the length of the lodge stretched a line of seated, naked men, their faces and bodies painted in patterns I had never seen, great black slashes of soot across the brown skin. Before each of them was a long pole, attached to the ridge beam by a leather loop. Steadily and relentlessly the poles rose and fell, thumping on blocks of wood set in the sand floor. Facing them was another line of Indians, neither naked nor painted; just the people who had come to sing their tyee into death. They were mostly old, but there were half a dozen of the young men. From time to time one of the old people would stand and make a song in the space between the two lines, or a dance. When I came in an emaciated old man was dancing a figure that looked like the movements of the beach birds, sharp, nervous, jerky. The poles of the professional death-singers rang like heartbeats through the lodge. Sometimes a woman's voice would be raised in the death song, sometimes simply in a wailing cry that rustled in my brain like a shifting fire.

  I walked the length of the lodge behind the poles. No one paid any attention to me. On the sleeping platform at the far end was the huge form of the tyee, wrapped in blankets and robes until only his head was showing. He was on his back, looking at the ridgepole above him through half-lidded eyes. He was so motionless I did not know if he were still alive or not. Indian Jim motioned me to stand by him. I waited there while the pulsing roar of the poles caught my heart up and forced it into the same anguished, throbbing rhythm.

  In a moment the great black face turned slightly toward me. The firelight molded it in red and black planes, like the glow of dying coals, and his features seemed to shift as the light of coals shifts in a soft breeze. He looked the same, the great, rough-hewn visage seeming to be a single massive carving, hard and immobile, not composed of parts but a simple whole.

  Finally his lips moved slowly, and I bent over to him.

  I was abruptly struck by a nauseous odor, like rotten meat, and involuntarily flinched away from it.

  "Kilchis—" I said. I

  "You must stay," he said painfully. "There is no one else."

  "Kilchis, what is it? I heard you were hurt, but—I thought—"

  "It was—nothing," he said. "The ball—it was nothing. It hurt my side. But the puli, the rottenness. All hurts are the same size when the puli is in them."

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and his face turned back up toward the roof. When he spoke again his voice was low and even. The poles thundered behind me and a woman's shriek made me shiver. Kilchis did not hear them.

  "Vaughn sees only what is in his mind," Kilchis said.

  "Tenas Sam is sullics. You must keep peace with my people. There is no one among the Boston to keep the peace when I am gone."

  He breathed slowly and long. There was a long pause between phrases, while he gained enough strength for the next.

  The other Boston tyee, he with the beard that came before to the Bay. He understood. We could keep the peace between us, it was agreed. But he did not come back. Why did he not come back when he said he was coming? I do not know. Others came, but there was no agreement and now some of my people have died. I should not have let them stay." He closed his eyes again.

  Indian ]im was standing beside me, and I turned to him. ‘"How'd he get hurt, who was it?"

  "A band of the Yaquina young men from the south."

  "Why did he have to go out there? The guards were enough, he didn't have to go out there." I suppose I was talking more to myself than to Jim.

  "He is the tyee," Jim said simply.

  Kilchis spoke again. "If the other Boston tyee does not come back, you must keep peace among the Bostons. You understand what I say?"

  "Yes, Kilchis. I'll try. I'm not—I'm not a tyee, Kilchis."

  "No," Kilchis said softly. "No, you are a small man. But there is no one else. My people suffer now. I must trust a man who is not strong to keep the peace. That is bad, it is hard for a man who is not strong."

  He turned again and looked at me for a long time; then turned back and spoke to the ridge above. "I do not understand the Boston. You live on the same land with my people. The same Bay, the same trees, the same rivers. But your world is not the world of our people. In your minds you are different from us. You live with a world you make in your minds, and not the world that is real. I do not understand this. I see it, but I do not understand how it can be. It is a terrible world you live in, there in your minds. It is dangerous for my people. They must be protected."

  "I'll do everything I can, Kilchis," I said. "You're going to get well—"

  "All that is over now," he said, almost impatiently. "I die now, like all before me and all after me. Can you not see even death clearly? The people must be protected. I want peace."

  "Kilchis—"

  He turned his head toward me again, fixing me with his eyes. "This is what I have to tell you. I want peace in my Bay." Then he turned his face to the wall.

  Indian ]im took me by the shoulders. "You go now," he said.

  "No, wait—" There were ten thousand things I wanted to say, questions to ask. Jim forced me around, away from the still form of the tyee.

  "He isn't—"

  "It comes now. He is finished with you."

  Blindly I let him pull me past the line of poles. My heart followed their pulse, my throat was caught up and tight with the keening note of the death-singing women. I pushed through the skin flap and was suddenly outside again.

  "Jim listen to me. I want—I want to do something—"

  "You have done something," Jim said. "Estacuga, Cockshaten, Kilchis. The Boston have done something in this Bay, yes." He spoke without anger, without blame. It was simply a fact. He blamed us no more than he would blame a falling tree in the forest. He accepted the world

  as it was.

  "You go now," he repeated. He turned back inside, letting the flap fall behind him.

  I stood for a moment outside, listening with half my mind to the muted thumping of the poles and the voices of anguish, cut off from me by the plank walls. The air was cold, the first sharp cold of fall. The rain drifted down and wet my face and collected in droplets in my hair that streamed down my temples and neck. The wind blew chillingly, lightly, brushing the treetops one against the other. I was alone.

  I found myself down by the beach, without remembrance of going there. My shirt was soaked and cold rivulets of rain ran down my back and collected around my belt. I turned my collar up, and it did no good. The mist was thick, I could see only a few yards into the swirling grayness. By the time I reached Her I had almost lost the sensation of a real world.

  There was only the faint light from the moon, hidden deep in some vast reach beyond the overcast. A luminous stain above me from which the light seemed to seep, as the water seeped from the sky. The masts were black against the gray of the mist, and disappeared in swirling clouds. I could not see their tops. The hull itself swelled out toward me, silent and massive in the night. It stretched in a swooping curve to either side of me and was lost in the shifting rain as though She swam deep in some murky sea.

  I put my hand on the hull, feeling the smoothness of the plank and the roughness of the tarred seam. I walked around toward the bow, running my hand along the planking. When I reached the other side I could faintly see the light of the camphine lamp in Vaughn's window, glowing helplessly in the endless infinity of mist.

  Even that tiny light made a reflected gleam on the hull, almost as faint as the reflection of a star. I touched the glow with my fingertips and it vanished. Droplets ran down from my touch, trailing streaks through the velvety covering of mist. I rested the side of my face against the hull and closed my eyes. The cold wetness was real. She was real.

  I do not know how long I was there. The rain misted down and drowned the land. It soaked the Ship and ran in icy rivulets from her spars and rails and planks, washing her beauty, immersing her in the clean and neutral waters of this world. The mist dissolved the substance of reality and merged all things, what had existed, what would exist. A
nd what, in the end, could a man point to as reality?

  Estacuga, Cockshaten, Kilchis. Or the passion of the goddess, the beauty like fire, the blinding hot image of love. I did not know which was real, for they were not of the same world. But I had known the love of goddesses and there was nothing of it I would change. Nothing.

  She took her place in the world, She was a part of it now. She lived and was bathed in the rain and the moon and the Bay and the clouds and streams. She needed me no longer; new lovers touched her body with their hands of mist.

  The brief spark flickered up the slope ahead, almost drowned in fog. A world of sorts was there, where Thomas thundered with his boots a song he could not sing, where Sam sat weeping in a shadowed corner for a love he'd never known. Gray enough, sad enough. But I had nowhere else to go.

  I started up the rise, back into the realms of faint reality. Semblance of life; a world I did not want. The night was dark and silent and the cold rain chilled my skin.