by Betsy James
I saw this.
Nondany watched my face.
I said, “What else could I have done?”
“Nothing,” said Nondany. “Nothing that I know of. Pigalee.”
A little round woman—Lilliena, no doubt—came out carrying a teapot and saying, “What’s all this fuss and shout? And who is this lass, our very own Lali Kat?” She chattered and bustled as if this were any night on her patio, exclaimed and fretted at me, at Nondany and the boy; she knew I was the witch but not a witch, really, such a pretty lass, she’d seen me at the market all these years and wasn’t it a fine one, dried apricots cheap and plenty on a good year, but good years only one in seven?
“I have to go,” I said. There was only one place, one person left to run to.
“Go? Poor little wren!” she said, laying the lad straight. I could not tell whether she meant the boy or me or the dog that wagged at her feet. “Go, like that, all alone into the night with drunks about and dreams, those Rigi, and to be sure we’ll have none of that Rig nonsense, we’re Badger clan aren’t we, short legs and ill tempers, eh, Songsparrow?”
“Pigalee,” sang Nondany.
“That song, will we never be done with it! Try him with the kitty song, the mewly one. Ah, my lamb”—she meant me this time—“stay till morning, won’t you? There’s work in every house, herbs to be pounded, and have you had any sleep at all? I thought not. Poor bunny! Songsparrow, don’t muss the laddie’s shirt about. Lali Kat, aren’t you thirsty? You’ll need a drink, a dipperful, I’ve never been so grateful to have water again, we don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone. Where are you going? Songsparrow, does she think she’s a bird?”
“She’s a Kat,” said Nondany as I fled up the apricot tree and onto the wall.
“Kat, stop, poor kitty—”
The boy kicked out his legs. “No pigalee!” he said. “Ting kitty song!”
“By life!” said Nondany. “Great day!
36
Deep in the east,
Under the sea’s brim,
Under the world’s rim,
Dwells a fire,
A hearth, a pyre,
A woman, a beast,
So fierce, so bright,
So red, so white,
That sleeping night
Stirs with a dim cry,
And she comes to him.
Night and Day. The Rigi
I RAN THE TOPS of garden walls, Tanshari below me like a maze. The gardens were mostly deserted wells of dark, but here and there folk were gathered, speaking or singing. I was a sky goddess floating above the world, listening to human prayers as they rose.
I found a branchy olive and climbed down to the street. Footsore, breathless, weary beyond thought, I ran out the gate through which we had walked toward Ab Harlan’s. It was like one of those nightmares in which you have to do something over and over until you get it right, and I could not get it right. I could only run to Dai, the first of all, and the last.
Dai was with the cow. Dai would know what to do. I ran as if I could escape what I had seen, the man stripping and swimming into the dark. Like a fox that smells the spittle of the hounds, tastes its own blood in its mouth, I ran fast and faster, up the cattle path to Dai.
A wraith of smoke marked where his house had stood. But some last paidman or reveler strode down the starlit path; I half fell behind a scrubby oak, trying to breathe without gasping, and not until he was nearly past did I hear “—cuddy-o—”
“Dai!”
He whirled and crouched, lips in a snarl. Then he jumped and caught me, embraced me, but just as soon was shaking me, saying, “Running around alone—you little chit, what are you about? Where’ve you been? Sweating blood with worry, all of us, d’you think you’re the only person in the world?”
I clung so tight, he had a hard time shaking me. I had no breath left, could not even say, Dai Father’s dead. But it was huger than that. The whole world we had grown up in had died, and Nall with it, like a wave that is not a wave anymore, only sea.
He plucked me off and held me away. “Spit it out, brat. What the hell is going on with Nall?”
“Nall!”
“To hear him talk you’d think it’s over, that you’ve ended it. Ended it? So you fought, whatever—you think Robin and I don’t fight? Cats and dogs, makes the love good after. You called him out of the damned sea, Sister. What are you thinking of?”
“How do you—You talked to him? Where—”
Dai jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “In the cowshed.”
The cowshed!
But I had seen him lean into the waves. He was gone.
Dai shook me again. “Told him, ‘Get some sleep, you idiot!’ but he won’t sleep, won’t go down to Mailin, won’t go after you, either. Strung up like a bow, and no wonder—when’s the last he had any rest? What am I supposed to do, knock him out with my fist? Left him a candle lantern for company. I said, ‘Make yourself useful, for god’s sake. Here’s Moss with her little one dead and days unmilked, now there’s grief! Cow helped you once, now you help her.’ I was coming down to find you, smack some sense into you. It’s like his heart’s not there at all. What happened?”
I clasped my hands over my own heart. “It’s nothing—,” I began, and then laughed, grievously. The world rocked like the manat. “Dai, if I never married—if I never married him, would you still love me?”
“Yes. But I’d think you were crazy. Already think you’re crazy, so it’s no odds. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never will. You think I know? But I know when I’m lucky.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Then ask me, I’ll tell you. All that man wants is room to be the disaster he is, same as the rest of us. Now get in there. Slap some sense into him.” He faced me up the lane and gave me a shove. “Come to a conclusion I like, or I’ll kill you both.”
I took two steps in the dust. “Dai, our father—”
“Dead. Nall told me. Now there’s a life to emulate. Poor old man. Sweetheart and husband and father, and never a loving word spoken under the eye of the sun.”
I thought of the portrait case. “Not never.”
“Never to me. And now never from me to him. Well, I know one child who’s going to hear plenty. I’m going down now to my own lass, Sister, but I’ll see you up that path first. Get you to that living man.”
“I—”
“Wrong word,” said Dai. “No wonder the two of you can’t get it right. Try ‘we.’ ”
Dai watched my back, standing in the path with his arms crossed. There were new trees planted on either side of the way, apricots, and when the path bent among them I was hidden from him. I could have slipped away into the dark. Some of the little trees had been trampled, the stems snapped, the wood showing white at the break.
Where the house had been was a dark heap that stank of fire. Two walls still stood, and part of a window, but its ruin made the little shed beyond look big as a house. It was built of stone like the one at Father’s, but its thatch was thick as a pelt, and I could not think how it had escaped burning except by that chance of war in which one child dies, another lives.
The door was shut.
I had stood once before outside the closed door of a cowshed, knowing Nall was in there and maybe dead. I had stepped close then, and entered, and there he was.
But this time Nall was not there. The Nall I had dreamed and called and named had swum back into the dark. I knew this the way I had known when a baby tooth was gone and I could put my tongue in the gap.
Who, then, was in the cowshed?
I stepped closer. Heard nothing.
A glimmer showed me the chink in the door. I stood for a long time, feeling my clasped hands touch each other. Then, quiet as my old cat, I slipped to the chink and looked through.
I saw Moss’s shadowy neck, her soft eye in candle-glow. Heard a harsh, repeated clang. A hand with barked knuckles came into the li
ttle illuminated world. It scratched Moss’s forehead.
“Sweet cow,” said a man’s voice. “You shall have another child.”
The hand went away. Clang and scrape. Somebody was shoveling manure.
I leaned my cheek on the jamb. Heard the clank of the shovel being put up, rattle of a dragged stool, growl of the first stream of milk into the pail. Through the crack in the door I could see him, his forehead pressed on the cow’s flank. Tousled brown curls, gaunt face hazed with beard, a mouth whose corners tucked back as if they had secrets. Behind him a heap of straw shone like gold.
An owl called on the hillside. I raised one finger and tapped at the door.
He looked up frowning, reaching for his knife. Stood. His shoulders blocked the line of candlelight, and the door opened.
I put my hands behind me, like Auntie Jerash.
After a moment he let go of the door and stepped back. Candlelight gilded him all over: scars, worn face. His leg shook. He sat down on the stool.
The thousand things I might have said.
I said, “I—We—” Then, “Where—where did you learn to milk?”
“Dai taught me.”
He turned away, began to milk again. Moss swung her mild head.
Hish, hish, milk in the pail.
The wrinkle at his brow was there for good. His ribs stared like a street dog’s. To the cow’s flank he said, “I don’t know.”
Odor of beeswax, new milk. He looked up. Deep inside I felt a soft clutch like a hand closing. Milk spurted into the foamy pail.
I said, “I don’t know either.”
He nodded.
I wet my lips. “In the Hills, when I was herding goats, it was so dry that sometimes I’d dig a hole in the sand, to get down to where it was damp. So I could smell water.”
He rose. He fetched a clay cup from a nail, dipped it full of milk, and held it out. I stepped onto the gleamy straw, took the cup, and drank half.
It watered me right down to my heels. I gave him the other half. He tipped back his head and drank it off, filled the cup again, held it out. “There’s plenty,” he said.
I took the cup. He returned to milking. I could see only half his face. He said, “What was it like there?”
At the Gate? In my dead father’s house? In the world without you in it? “Where?” I said.
“In the Hills. When you were gone that long time.”
Such a long time!
“It’s dry,” I said. “And high, and clear, and lonely.”
“Tell me.”
I sat down in the heaped straw. My feet were so grateful.
“They call them hills,” I said, “but they’re mountains, really. So high, they have patches of snow on them even in summer, and in winter they’re white as ice. Nobody has ever climbed to the top. But you can go up partway. You follow the creek.”
“Is it snow makes the creek?”
“I don’t know. The creek wells out of the mountain. Maybe the mountain itself makes it, like tears.” I drank the milk, listened to the hush of foam, smelled cow and clean straw and him.
“Down on the plains the creek is lined with river poplars—huge old trees with green leaves always moving. That’s where the village is, my aunt and everybody, my cousin Jekka. She and I brushed each other’s hair.”
His hand touched mine; he took the cup away and refilled it for himself. “The creek,” he said.
“By the village its banks are red sandstone. There are big trout there if you know where they hide. But when you start to climb the mountain the stone changes to granite, all gray and sparkling. The slope gets steep. You might see a deer, or a weasel, or a skunk. Even a bobcat.”
He turned on the stool to rest his elbows on his knees, his head bent over the cup.
“Then it starts to be high up, and greener because of the snows. The trees are aspen instead of river poplars—white slender trunks and little round leaves glittering and rustling. Along the creek there are meadows, and if you’re lucky, you might see a bear.”
“You never told me about the Bear,” he said to the cup. “The holy one.”
“I’ve only been back five days,” I said, amazed. “I’ll tell you sometime. If you want.”
And I’ll tell you what I know about Nothing, but I’ll find a different name for it; maybe I’ll call it the Mystery. I’ll tell you how the Mystery sent a lover to a lonely girl, for her to dream and name; how that lover leaned into the waves and gave himself back to the Mystery.
I’ll tell you that things between us might get easier. Maybe. Never easy; we are not easy people. But I see the mistake I made, to think “Nothing matters” meant “I don’t care.” I’ve been afraid of being left with nothing, but what I’m left with is the Mystery; safe in it.
“The Bear is a big thing,” I said. “I can’t stand any more bigness right now.”
“No.”
“I could tell you about bears, though. Just bears. On the mountain.”
“Yes.”
I reached to take the cup from him. He would not let go of it; I knelt in front of him. “Right before I came back to Downshore, I saw bears, up the creek. Three of them.”
He looked up with a listening face.
I started to speak. I could not. I had to put my hands on his thighs and say, “I ran away from you again. Probably I always will.”
“I know,” he said. “I went silent on you again.”
Probably you always will. “I know,” I said.
He set down the cup. He put his hands over mine. “Tell me about the bears.”
Kneeling between his knees, I thought about the bears and the meadow and the mountain—everything earth is—and peace. “I was digging wild celery for my aunt,” I said.
This time the rope I threw to him was not borrowed or stolen or cobbled out of other people’s. It was mine. It braided itself as though it had already existed—like a baby who has been swimming just beyond the Gate, wanting to get born.
“I’ll tell you with a song,” I said. “It has no music, though. Just words. Listen.”
Summer is coming up in thyme and foxtails,
The aspen meadow’s knee-deep in columbine and daisies.
Here you come snootling with your big fur coat on,
Honey-lover, my fat lady.
You turn the logs over with your shiny claws,
You munch up beetles, wreck the shrew’s front room.
Your two cubs follow you, slapping each other
And falling down, squalling over bones.
You whack the big fish out of the splashing water
And strip the blackberry bushes. Your scat is full of seeds.
Your cubs catch stinkbugs and jump on speckled frogs. In the slow backwater where the killdeer wades.
When the sun goes down, and the big moon rises Over the mountain’s back all black and silver, You snort and settle your babies at your belly, To sleep until the short summer night is over.
He slid from the stool. He held me so close I could not move. With no words at all he said, Never leave me!
But I would leave him a thousand thousand times. As he changed with every morning, I would leave him with every breath; and someday I would die, and so would he.
I leaned away from him and let my eyes speak.
He heard what I did not say, and let me go.
With his hands still firm at my waist he drew back and looked at me, the way a seal rises from the sea to take a breath. I watched his face go smooth, intent, for an instant immortal; then he sank as if into a current rushing outward, giving up to it.
Come with me.
Yes, I will
The tide came in, wave after wave, on all the beaches of the world, and one after the other we let go of the shore.
37
Rocking in and out,
Boat upon the water,
Baby in the cradle,
Bird upon the bough.
Rocking in and out,
Birth, death, living breath,
<
br /> Over the threshold of—
Kiss me now!
Baby-Dandling Song. Tanshari.
I WOKE TO OTHER WAKINGS. Naked, as on the hillside after the Bear; tucked into the curve of Nall’s body, as long ago on Mailin’s hearth. His arm lay over me heavy as water. Under the old blanket that covered us a cat was curled, purring, against the back of his hand.
I lifted the blanket to look at her. She was black with white feet. She blinked and began to wash between her toes.
Smell of cow, ashes, morning damp. Because Moss was haltered we had let the door stand open, and beyond it I could see a misty thin light.
I tried to sit up. Nall held me tighter and grunted. I wriggled out and gave him the cat instead, but he scowled and groped, and she ran out the door with her tail straight up.
He opened his eyes and looked up smiling, still as a pool. I leaned down to be kissed by the last of his dream.
Speaking from it, he said, “I was the cup and I was the water. When I knew that, I was neither. And this: I lay asleep, and one word woke me.”
“What was the word?”
“I don’t remember. But the voice was yours.”
His eyes were so clear I could have tossed a gold ring into them and watched it sink.
Outside, the noise that had waked me without my knowing was repeated, a knocking like someone kicking a log with his boot.
Dai shouted, “You two get it worked out?”
Together we yelled, “No!”
He laughed. His hand appeared at the jamb, tossed the cat back in, and pulled the door shut. “Breakfast’s on the beach,” he said.
The drum had stopped. We walked down to the sea handfast, in silence.
There were many bathers. The children were bare and screeching and blue. Fires burned up and down the strand. Kettles steamed.
“There!” I said.
At the end of a sandy spit, bare as the children, Ab Harlan stood in the sea, a stick in his hand.
