Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  they sent the Serpentine girl back too.

  She went to her mothers’ house,

  but I didn’t go to my mothers’ house,

  I went to a summer place in the hills.

  It was cold there,

  it was lonesome,

  it rained all the time.

  I got sick there,

  I got chills and fever,

  I nearly died there alone.

  I went to Sinshan,

  my father’s mother took me in,

  I stayed in Up the Hill House.

  They kept telling me I had behaved unwisely,

  I should learn more,

  I should be more mindful.

  I went down with them to fish at the Mouths of the Na,

  we spent a long time fishing in those dangerous salt marshes,

  we didn’t catch much along those dreary beaches.

  They said I was pestering a young girl there,

  but she was pestering me,

  she was always hanging around me.

  I went back up the River,

  but that girl followed me,

  she came inland with me.

  We tried to stay in Ounmalin,

  but people there said the girl was too young,

  they said she ought to go home to Sinshan.

  The people in Ounmalin are spiteful,

  meddling,

  and provincial.

  They interfered with us,

  and some Blue Clay people took the girl back to Sinshan,

  and I went alone to Tachas Touchas.

  In Tachas Touchas there was not much to do,

  there was no household to live in,

  there weren’t any friendly people.

  The people of Tachas Touchas are like scorpions,

  like rattlesnakes,

  like black widow spiders.

  An old Red Adobe woman in Tachas Touchas kept pestering me,

  she made me live in her household,

  she made me get married to her.

  I lived there a long time,

  working hard for that old woman,

  for ten years I worked for her household.

  Her daughter was a grown woman

  who had a daughter growing up there,

  and that girl began pestering me.

  She lived there in her grandmother’s house,

  she was always hanging around there,

  she made me have sex with her.

  She told her mother and grandmother about it,

  they told the heyimas,

  the heyimas people told the whole town.

  People came and shamed me,

  they humiliated me,

  they drove me away.

  None of them ever wanted me,

  none of them ever trusted me,

  none of them ever liked me.

  There’s no use going to a town where I haven’t been yet,

  all the towns are just the same,

  people are all just the same.

  Human people are small-souled,

  selfish,

  and cruel.

  I’ll live here in Madidinou, where I’m not wanted,

  or trusted,

  or liked,

  I’ll live here in my mothers’ house where I don’t want to live

  and they don’t want me to live,

  doing work I don’t like;

  I’ll live here to spite them nine years more,

  and nine more years after that,

  and nine more years after that.

  The Dog at the Door

  A record of a vision, given to the Red Adobe heyimas in Wakwaha as a written offering, not signed.

  I was in a town that was in the Valley yet was not one of the nine towns of the Valley, a place strange to me. I knew that I lived in a house in this town, but could not find it. I went to the common place and then to the dancing place, thinking I would go to the Red Adobe heyimas. In the dancing place there were not five heyimas, but four, and I did not know which was mine. I said to a person there, “Where is the other heyimas?” The person said, “Behind you.” I turned around and saw a dog running away between the high roofs of the heyimas. This much I dreamed asleep.

  Waking, I followed that dog. I came to a deep well lined with stone. I set my hands on the coping, looked down into the well, and saw the sky. I stood between the sky above and the sky below and cried out, “Must all things end?”

  The answer was: “They must end.”

  “Must my town fall?”

  “It is falling now.”

  “Must the dances be forgotten?”

  “They are forgotten.”

  The air became dark and earthquake shook the walls. Houses fell down, dust obscured the mountains and the sun, and a terrible cold came into the air. I cried out, “Is the world at its end?”

  The answer was: “There is no end.”

  “My town is destroyed!”

  “It is being built.”

  “I must die and forget all I have known!”

  “Remember.”

  Then the dog came to me in the dust and darkness and cold, carrying in its mouth a small bag woven of grass.

  In the bag were the souls of the human beings of the world, small like dill or chia seeds, very small and black.

  I took the bag and went along beside the dog. As the sky began to clear and the air grew pale, I saw that the mountains had fallen. Where they had been, where the Valley had been, there was a great plain. On this plain I walked with the dog northeastward among many other people. Each of them carried a bag like the one I carried. Some held seeds and some held little stones. The stones in the bags made a whispering as they moved together, saying, “In the end is no end. To build with us, unbuild with us.” Understanding them, having forgotten my way I remembered it, and so came walking past the willows of the River into my town, Telina-na, and past the Red Adobe heyimas, and to the door of my own house. But the dog was there at the door, snarling, and would not let me in.

  The Visionary:

  The Life Story Of Flicker Of The Serpentine Of Telina-Na

  My mother and aunt said that when I was learning to talk I talked to people they could not see or hear, sometimes speaking in our language and sometimes saying words or names they did not know. I can’t remember doing that, but I remember that I could not understand why people said that a room was empty, or that there was nobody in the gardens, because there were always people of different kinds, everywhere. Mostly they stayed quietly, or were going about their doings, or passing through. I had already learned that nobody talked to them and that they did not often pay heed or answer when I tried to talk to them; but it had not occurred to me that other people did not see them.

  I had a big argument with my cousin once when she said there was nobody in the washhouse, and I had seen a whole group of people there, passing things from hand to hand and laughing silently, as if they were playing some gambling game. My cousin who was older than I, said I was lying, and I began to scream an tried to knock her down. I can feel that same anger now. I was telling what I had seen, and could not believe she had not seen the people in the washhouse; I thought she was lying in order to call me a liar. That anger and shame stayed a long time and made me unwilling to look at the people that other people didn’t see or wouldn’t talk about. When I saw them, I looked away until they were gone. I had thought they were all my kinfolk, people of my household, and seeing them had been companionship and pleasure to me; but now I felt I could not trust them, since they had got me into trouble. Of course I had it all backwards, but there was nobody to help me get it straight. My family were not much given to thinking about things, and except for going to school I went to our heyimas only in the Summer before the games.

  When I turned away from all those people that I had used to see, they went on and did not come back. Only a few were left, and I was lonely.

  I liked to be with my father, Olive of the Yellow Adobe, a man who talked little and was cautious a
nd gentle in mind and hand. He repaired and re-installed solar panels and collectors and batteries and lines and fixtures in houses and outbuildings; all his work was with the Millers Art. He did not mind if I came along if I was quiet, and so I went with him to be away from our noisy, busy household. When he saw that I liked his art he began to teach it to me. My mothers were not enthusiastic about that. My Serpentine grandmother did not like having a Miller for son-in-law, and my mother wanted me to learn medicine. “If she has the third eye she ought to put it to good use,” they said, and they sent me to the Doctors Lodge on White Sulphur Creek to learn. Although I learned a good deal there and liked the teachers, I did not like the work, and was impatient with the illnesses and accidents of mortality, preferring the dangerous, dancing energies my father worked with. I could often see the electrical current, and there were excitements of feeling, tones of a kind of sweet music barely to be heard, and tones also of voices speaking and singing, distant and hard to understand, that came when I worked with the batteries and wires. I did not speak of this to my father. If he felt and heard any of these things he preferred to leave them unspoken, outside the house of words.

  My childhood was like everybody’s, except that with going to he Doctors Lodge and working with my father and liking to be alone, perhaps I played less with other children than many children do, after I was seven or eight years old. Also, though I went all over Telina with my father and knew all the ways and houses, we lever went out of town. My family had no summerhouse and never even visited the hills. “Why leave Telina?” my grandmother would say. “Everything is here!” And in summer the town was pleasant, even when it was hot; so many people were away that there was never a crowd at the wash house, and houses standing empty were entirely different from houses full of people, and the ways and gardens and common places were lonesome and lazy and quiet. It was always in summer, often in the great heat of the afternoon, that I would see the people passing through Telina-na, coming upriver. They are hard to describe, and I have no idea who they were. They were rather short and walked quietly, alone, or three or four one after the other; their limbs were smooth and their faces round, often with some lines or marks drawn on the lips or chin; their eyes were narrow, and sometimes looked swollen and sore as if from smoke or weeping. They would go quietly through the town not looking at it and never speaking, going upriver. When I saw them I would always say the four heyas. The way they went, silently, gripped at my heart. They were far from me, walking in sorrow.

  When I was nearly twelve years old my cousin came of age and the family gave a very big passage party for her, giving away al kinds of things I didn’t even know we had. The following year came of age and we had another big party, though without such lavishness, as we didn’t have so much left to give. I had entered the Blood Lodge just before the Moon, and the party for me was during the Summer Dance. At the end of the party there were horse game and races, for the Summer people had come down from Chukulmas.

  I had never been on horseback. The boys and girls who roc in the games and races for Telina brought a steady mare for me to ride, and boosted me up to her back and put the rein in my hand, and off we went. I felt like the wild swan. That was pure joy. And I could share it with the other young people; we were all joined by the good feeling of the party and the excitement of the games and races and the beauty and passion of the horses, who thought it was all their festival. The mare taught me how to ride that day, and I was on horseback all night dreaming, and the next day rode again; and on the third day I rode in a race, on a roan colt from a household in Chukulmas. The colt ran second in the big race when I rode him, and ran first in the match race when the boy who had raised him rode him. In all that glory of festival and riding and racing and friendship I left my childhood most joyously, but also I went out of my House, and got lost from too much being given me at once. I gave my heart to the red colt I rode and to the boy who rode him, a brother of the Serpentine of Chukulmas.

  It was a long time ago, and not his fault or doing; he did not know it. The word I write is my word; to myself let it be brought back.

  So the Summer games were over in our town and the horse-riders went off downriver to Madidinou and Ounmalin; and there I was, a thirteen-year-old woman, and afoot.

  I wore the undyed clothing I had been making all the year before, and I went often to the Blood Lodge, learning the songs and mysteries. Young people who had been friendly to me at the games remained friends, and when they found I longed to ride they shared the horses of their households with me. I learned to play vetulou,* and helped with caring for the horses, who were stabled and pastured then northwest of Moon Creek in Halfhoof Pasture and on Butt Hill. I said at the Doctors Lodge that I wanted to learn horse doctoring, and so they sent me to learn that art by working with an old man, Striffen, who was a great doctor of horses and cattle. He talked with them. It was no wonder he could heal them. I would listen to him. He used different kinds of noises, words like the matrix words of songs, and different kinds of silences and breathing; and so did the animals; but I never could understand what they were saying.

  He told me once, “I’m going to die next year around Grass time.”

  I said, “How do you know that?”

  He said, “An ox told me. He saw this. See?” He showed me that when he held out both his arms rigid they had the sideways shaking or tremor of sevai.*

  “The later it begins the longer you live with it,” said I, as I had learned at the Doctors Lodge; but he said, “One more World, one more Wine, the ox told me.”

  Another time I asked the old man, “How can I heal horses if I can’t talk with them?” It seemed I was not learning much from him.

  “You can’t,” he said. “Not the way I can. What are you here for?”

  I laughed and shouted, like the man in the play,

  “What am I here for?

  What was I born for?

  Answer me! Answer!”

  I was crazy. I was lost without knowing it, and did not care for anything.

  Once when I came to the Obsidian heyimas for a Blood Lodge singing, a woman, I thought her old then, named Milk, met me in the passage. She looked at me with eyes as sharp and blind as a snake’s eyes and said, “What are you here for?”

  I answered her, “For the singing,” and hurried by, but I knew that was not what she had asked.

  In the summer I went with the dancers and riders of Telina to Chukulmas. There I met that boy, that young man. We talked about the roan horse and about the little moon-horse I was riding in the vetulou games. When he stroked the roan horse’s flank I did so too, and the side of my hand touched the side of his hand once.

  Then there was another year until the Summer games returned. That was how it was to me: there was nothing I cared for or was mindful of but the Summer and the games.

  The old horse-doctor died on the first night of the Grass. I had gone to the Lodge Rejoining and learned the songs; I sang them for him. After he was burned I gave up learning his art. I could not talk with the animals, or with any other people. I saw nothing clearly and listened to no one. I went back to working with my father, and I rode and looked after the horses and practiced vetulou so that I could ride in the games in Summer. My cousin had a group of friends, girls who talked and played soulbone and dice, gambling for candy and almonds, sometimes for rings and earrings, and I hung around with them every evening. There were no real people in the world I saw at that time. All rooms were empty Nobody was in the common places and gardens of Telina. Nobody walked up-river grieving.

  When the sun turned south the dancers and riders came again from Chukulmas to Telina, and I rode in the games and races, spending all day and night at the fields. People said, “That girl is in love with the roan stallion from Chukulmas,” and teased me about it, but not shamefully; everybody knows how adolescents fall in love with horses, and songs have been made about that love. But the horse knew what was wrong: he would no longer let me handle him.

  In a
few days the riders went on to Madidinou, and I stayed behind.

  Things are very obstinate and stubborn, but also there is a sweet willingness in them; they offer what they meet. Electricity is like horses: crazy and wilful, and also willing and reliable. If you are careless and running counter, a horse or a live wire is a contrary and perilous thing. I burnt and shocked myself several times that year, and once I started a fire in the walls of a house by making a bad connection and not grounding the wire. They smelled the smoke and put out the fire before it did much harm, but my father, who had brought me into his Art as a novice, was so alarmed and angry that he forbade me to work with him until the next rainy season.

  At the Wine that year I was fifteen years old. I got drunk for the first time. I went around town shouting and talking to people nobody else saw: so I was told next day, but I could not remember anything of it. I thought if I got drunk again, but a little less drunk, I might see the kind of people I used to see, when the ways were full of them and they kept my soul company. So I stole wine from our house-neighbors, who had most of a barrel left in bottles after the dance, and I went down alone by the Na in the willow flats to drink it.

  I drank the first bottle and made some songs, then I spilled most of the second bottle and went home and felt sick for a couple of days. I stole wine again, and this time I drank two bottles quickly. I made no songs. I felt dizzy and sick, and fell asleep. Next morning I woke up there in the willow flats on the cold stones by he river, very weak and cold. My family was worried about me after that. It had been a hot night, so I could say I had stayed out for he cool and had fallen asleep; but my mother knew I was lying about something. She thought it must be that I had come inland with some boy, but for some reason would not admit it. It shamed and worried her to think that I was wearing undyed clothing when should no longer do so. It enraged me that she should so distrust le, yet I would say nothing to her in denial or explanation. My father knew that I was sick at heart; but it was soon after that that I set the fire, and his worry turned to anger. As for my cousin, she was in love with a Blue Clay boy and interested in nothing else; the girls with whom I gambled had taken to smoking a lot of hemp, which I never liked; and though the friends with whom I rode and looked after the horses were still kind, I did not want to be with humans much, or even with horses. I did not want the world to be as it was. I had begun making up the world.