Bone Talk

by Candy Gourlay

  A fence of bamboo spears circled the trunk, to keep dogs away. Father stepped carefully over it and waved at me to cross.

  The dog pressed a cold nose against my knee. I allowed my fingers to brush over her head before I followed Father over the fence.

  He cut the chicken’s throat. Its soul departed quickly as its blood soaked into the mossy roots of the tree. ‘O spirits,’ Father prayed. ‘Accept this gift: another spirit for your world. We beg your permission to allow this boy to leave childhood behind and become a man.’

  Father stepped up onto one of the tree’s sunken branches and it bounced under his weight, the tree made a tinkling noise.

  ‘Hear that?’ Father whispered. ‘They’re calling your name: Samkad … Samkad.’

  I peered up at the snarl of moss above our heads. The tinkling came from the bones that dangled from every branch of the huge tree, offerings from times past. Small black figures sat on every branch, their white pebble eyes watching. Each carved figure represented the soul of an ancestor. Right at the top of the tree one of the figures leaned out slightly, as if it was trying to get a better look at us. It was smaller than the others, just big enough to fit in my cupped hands. Mother’s spirit figure.

  We carefully walked up the sagging branch together. And as we made our way up, the tree shook and the bones clattered.

  Near the top where the tree became twiggier and more precarious we had to pull ourselves up, hand over hand. Mother’s spirit figure watched serenely, its wooden arms folded over its knees.

  Father tied the chicken’s carcass carefully to Mother’s branch. He pulled a strand of polished granite beads from his belt and wound it round the figure’s neck. I laid my hands over its head and Father wrapped his great hands over mine.

  ‘Mother, this precious strand belonged to you when you were alive. May you enjoy it in the world of the dead,’ he intoned softly. ‘Mother, protect our son and grant him the courage and strength he needs to become a man.’

  I bowed my head, enjoying the warmth of Father’s palms on my hands.

  Father paused. I looked up. He was staring at me with a strange expression on his face. The whites of his eyes were suddenly veined with red and his lips hardened into a line.

  He snatched his hands away, pulled his axe from his belt and swung it at my head with all his might.

  3

  Chak! Father’s axe struck the bough just behind my skull, the blade embedding itself in the wood.

  Something dropped onto my elbow with a hissing noise.

  I stared. It was bright green. A snake.

  The diamond eyes held mine, mouth opening and closing as if it was trying to tell me something.

  And then, suddenly, the eyes emptied of life and the coiling body seemed to dry up, instantly inert as a twig. It slid off my arm into the dapple of shadows below.

  Father reached over my head to pull his axe out. Droplets of sweat glistened on his forehead and the lump in his throat bobbed up and down as he scanned the sky.

  Now his eyes searched my face. He touched my cheek and his fingers came away red. Snake blood. Father looked at it with glassy eyes. There was a chittering in the foliage above our heads and he startled.

  ‘Omen bird,’ Father whispered. ‘We must leave. Now.’

  So we did.

  When it was still dark, we had managed to climb the tree without a single stumble. But now, in the yellow light of day, we faltered and slipped, as if a hundred angry spirits were chasing us.

  And maybe they were. Lumawig had surely sent the snake to warn us about something. How Luki and I had laughed at Pito’s terror when we played our little trick with the dead snake! But this snake had been alive. It had stared right into my eyes, trying to warn me about something before its soul departed. And then Father murdered it. Surely, Lumawig will punish him for it. I glanced up but the sky was empty. No clouds. No thunderbolts. No scorpions. No stones.

  The black dog was waiting for us by the fence. She greeted me with a broad smile, but we ran right past her. She chased after us, barking as if we were running for a game. Father said nothing as we began to climb the mountain to the village. He didn’t even glance over his shoulder to make sure that I was keeping up.

  We ran past the tree fern with the water buffalo skull. Past the pigs in stone pens, where several men were mixing manure with grass to feed the mud of the rice paddies. Past the House for Women, where girls were pounding rice in a large stone mortar.

  The girls shrieked and waved. It was hard to tell if they were greeting or teasing me. I turned my burning face away.

  ‘Sam!’ A familiar voice cried. It was Little Luki, who was waiting her turn at the mortar. She quickly rolled her skirt up over her knees and raced after me. ‘Is it time? Is Salluyud going to do the Cut?’

  She grabbed my arm, but I shook her off.

  Her mango face frowned. ‘What’s wrong? You look like you swallowed a cockroach!’

  Before I could say anything, Chochon was there, tugging Luki away. ‘No, no, no … where do you think you’re going, daughter? How many times do I have to tell you to leave the men to their business!’

  She dragged Luki back to the mortar. ‘Luki wants to be a boy!’ one of the girls jeered.

  ‘Better than wanting to be an ugly monkey like you!’ I heard Luki yell.

  At the House for Men, Tambul was lounging under a tree. When he spotted me, he raised his axe and yelled, ‘All praise Samkad, our new man!’

  ‘Come on, Sam!’ Father barked over his shoulder.

  I hurried past Tambul, looking everywhere except at him. All four ancients were waiting when we arrived at the stone circle. Salluyud stood abruptly and held up his bamboo blade – but the smile slid off his face as Father and I came to a stop, hands on knees, panting.

  ‘What?’ the old man cried. ‘What has happened?’

  Tambul hurried over, trying to catch my eye as Father began to explain.

  I couldn’t meet his or anyone else’s gaze. In my belly, shame and fear were nibbling with tiny pointed teeth.

  When Father got to the part where he saw the snake slithering towards me, the ancients all straightened, their spines crunching.

  ‘After it appeared, we heard an omen bird cry out a warning,’ Father said. ‘We ran back as fast as we could.’

  Then he shut his mouth.

  Weh! Was he not going to tell them that he chopped Lumawig’s messenger in half? That he killed it?

  Salluyud laid a hand on Father’s shoulder. ‘Samkad, the snake is our friend,’ he said, as if we didn’t already know this. ‘It would not reveal itself without good reason.’

  Maklan blinked his boiled egg eyes. ‘You did well to heed these warnings and leave the Tree of Bones.’

  Heed the warning? Father didn’t heed any warning. He just killed it. I frowned at him, but his eyes avoided mine. Surely you will tell them what you did, Father. Tell them you killed it. Tell them!

  But Father kept his eyes on the ground.

  Now Salluyud was patting my shoulder. ‘Young Sam.’ He turned me gently towards him. His eyes reflected the fire, tiny, glimmering torches in each pupil. ‘Do not fear – the spirits will tell us the right thing to do. We will examine the portents now.’

  ‘Yes. The portents will explain,’ Father said quickly then he looked at me. I could see the warning in his eyes: Don’t you dare tell them. Don’t you dare.

  Pito fetched a chicken and the four ancients sat close together as Salluyud prepared to send the bird’s soul to our ancestors.

  Dugas and Pito crowded close as Salluyud cut its throat and exposed its insides with his blade. They muttered to each other as they read the portents left by the bird’s spirit.

  ‘What do you see?’ Maklan’s blind eyes rolled impatiently in his eye sockets.

  Tambul once told me that a warrior had to practise hiding his emotions. ‘Your face is the great betrayer,’ he had explained, ‘You must train yourself not to show fear, sorrow, even happiness.’ />
  I glanced at Father. His face was unreadable, like stone.

  ‘We should have known,’ Pito sighed, tossing his black mane over one bony shoulder.

  Salluyud turned to me. ‘Sam, the portents say that like your mother before you, your soul is tied to one other.’

  ‘To one other?’ I said. ‘To who?’

  ‘Kinyo.’ Dugas struck the fire with his cane and I flinched as it sent a shower of tiny sparks over me.

  ‘Kinyo?’ I blinked furiously. ‘There’s nobody by that name in the village.’

  ‘Your soul is tied to his,’ Dugas explained. ‘You cannot become a man until he returns to Bontok.’

  ‘Kinyo, named after an old warrior.’ Salluyud started chanting. The other ancients joined in.

  ‘Kinyo, son of Sipaa, your mother’s best friend.’

  ‘Kinyo is tied to your soul the way Sipaa’s soul was tied to your mother’s.’

  Kinyo. Kinyo. Kinyo.

  ‘Father! Make them stop!’ I cried. ‘I don’t know anybody named Kinyo!’

  But I was lying.

  4

  My dead mother’s name was Uda and her soul had always been tied to that of her best friend, Sipaa.

  Uda and Sipaa. Sipaa and Uda. When I was growing up, everybody in the village was eager to tell me what great friends the two women were.

  ‘Lovely girls, faces smooth as new fruit, hair always festooned with flowers,’ remembered old Pito, twirling a lock of his youthful hair. ‘Their skirts were exactly the same weave. When one had a flower over her right ear, the other wore a flower over her left.’

  ‘Inseparable!’ Dugas said in his complaining voice. ‘Like tandem birds always swooping about side by side. It was as if they were tied together by invisible string.’

  ‘How can you turn the soil when you’re arm in arm with someone else? How does one thresh rice with another person alongside? But they did it!’ Salluyud said, with his barking laugh. ‘They did everything together!’

  Mother and Sipaa continued to be inseparable when they grew up. They even fell in love at the same time. Mother with Father, and Sipaa with Tomo, who made salt in the hot springs at the top of the mountain.

  They continued to do everything together even after they had chosen husbands and moved out of the House for Women into their own homes. They visited the river together to collect water at the same time every day. They did their kitchen jobs together, sitting side by side as they peeled sweet potatoes or prepared the grain.

  So when they discovered that they both had babies growing in their bellies, it was said, they became too smug with happiness. ‘We truly share one soul!’ my mother told everyone.

  Uda and Sipaa needed to make an offering to the spirits to make sure their births would go well. But they were so full of contentment and satisfaction that they kept putting it off. They forgot to fear the wrath of the spirit world.

  It was not until their bellies were already as round and smooth as river boulders that they remembered they had respects to pay.

  They each took a chicken and set off for the Tree. But their bellies were so enormous that the steep downward path to the mossy forest was a struggle. The tree was still a distance away when they struggled to a stop. They could not face the rest of the walk.

  Should they return on another day when they were feeling stronger? But even that prospect was exhausting. Surely the spirits would not mind if they left the chickens at the foot of another tree? Surely Lumawig could hear their prayers if they prayed loudly enough?

  And that is what they did.

  They dispatched their chickens to the spirit world quickly, mumbling their prayers to Lumawig and the ancestors. They left the carcasses there, under that other tree, not far from the Tree of Bones. And went home.

  When the ancients scolded them, the two women just laughed. ‘Our ancestors will understand,’ they smiled, patting their fat bellies. ‘All will be well.’

  These are our collected memories, the ancients say. This is how we remember: we remember together. And I do treasure those memories of my mother and her friend, of times I did not know. But even more precious are the memories that I do remember, once I was born.

  I remember how it hurt to become alive. The inside of my chest stung like a new wound as air filled it for the first time. It hurt on the outside, too – my skin was so new every fresh sensation was like a slap. It hurt when I moved, and it hurt the first time I opened my throat to scream.

  I remember when I saw Father for the first time. I can remember the heat of his breath against my face and the way his lips parted to show his teeth. And even though I didn’t know what a father or a smile was, it felt good. He felt good.

  I remember Mother. I had one glimpse of her before Father carried me off to be washed. She lay on a blanket in front of the hearth, smiling. Her eyes were warm. The light from the fire flapped over her like so many yellow butterflies. Beads of sweat glittered on her forehead.

  Father tipped ladles of water over me, rubbing me all over with water so cold it made my skin itch. When he was done, Father wrapped me in a blanket and took me back to Mother.

  ‘See, Uda,’ he whispered. ‘Our son.’

  I looked at Mother curiously. Her eyes were closed and her lips were a dark purple in the firelight. This was not the smiling creature I had seen before.

  ‘Uda! Uda!’ Suddenly Father was sobbing. He pressed his face against the top of my head. The bones of his face felt hard, and my hair became wet with his tears. I began to whimper. Then he shouted. ‘Why are you taking her from me? Why are you calling away her soul?’

  Father was frantic. He grabbed a fistful of rice from a basket nearby and scattered it across the floor. I have seen people do this hundreds of times since. A wicked spirit seeking to steal Mother’s soul away would not be able to resist counting the grains on the ground.

  But then Father fell to his knees, retrieving the grains he’d only just scattered.

  ‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘You will not have him as well!’

  He had realized that the rice might lead the wicked spirits to me. He didn’t want them to steal me too.

  Father staggered out of the hut, shouting and calling, begging Lumawig to intercede with the world of the dead. ‘Mercy!’ he cried. ‘Pity this motherless child!’ He held me high, and for the first time I gazed up at the night sky, speckled with millions of tiny lights. I saw the moon for the first time, round and yellow.

  And then we both became aware of another raw voice. Someone else, weeping and calling. I saw another man in the shadows. He too had a new baby in his arms.

  It was not only my mother who had been stolen away that night.

  Of course I remembered Kinyo. How could I forget the other boy whose mother was taken on the same night as mine? The spirits took our mothers that first night, and soon after, the news came that Kinyo’s father Tomo had been found dead in the forest. Killed by our blood enemy, the Mangili, and his head taken for a trophy.

  The ancients rushed to give us names for our own safety, so that our ancestors could protect us from enemy spirits.

  My name was easy. ‘Samkad’, after Father, who took his name from a line of great warrior ancestors.

  But the ancients had trouble naming the other baby. It would have been unkind to name the child ‘Tomo’, after a father whose soul had been dispatched by his enemy.

  It took some time but eventually one of the ancients vaguely remembered a distant warrior ancestor named ‘Kinyo’.

  We had to feed on a thin gruel of rice washing until Father persuaded a woman to allow me to suckle alongside her own babe. ‘She only has enough milk for Samkad,’ I heard one of the ancients remark. ‘There isn’t enough for the orphan as well.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to hand him over to the care of his mother and father in the world of the dead,’ another ancient replied.

  Gentle fingers brushed against my forehead and I looked up to see Father’s eyes gazing wetly down at me. ‘No,’ he said
. ‘We must save the boy.’

  ‘But he is not ours to raise!’ the ancient cried.

  ‘His aunt will raise him,’ Father said.

  Kinyo’s mother had a sister, younger than her, named Agkus. But Agkus was a troublesome one. She had begged the ancients to allow her to become a trader, even though it was a job for a man, wearing them down with her nagging until they allowed her to carry our goods to other villages. Then she returned from one of her trips and announced that she was going to marry a man from the lowlands.

  Of course the ancients opposed the marriage. What? Leave the village? Leave her people? How could she make her home in the lowlands where she had no ancestors to protect her? But Agkus said she was happy to abandon all these things for her man.

  ‘That girl, Agkus?’ one of the old men scoffed. ‘Pah!’

  I had stopped feeding to listen. The milk mother nudged her teat back into my mouth. The baby on her other breast made loud smacking noises. In the background, I could hear Kinyo wailing. It was a thin, exhausted sound.

  ‘He is her blood,’ Father said.

  ‘But she has left us. She has chosen to become a stranger.’

  ‘Let me take him to her,’ Father said. ‘I will journey down to the lowlands and deliver the baby to Agkus. Until then, little Samkad will have to give half his share to his brother.’

  Father took me then, away from the nourishing breast. I nuzzled and searched, but there was no more milk for me that day.

  Kinyo’s cries ceased abruptly as he took my place at the milk woman’s breast.

  5

  I shook my head, pushing the memories aside, and watched the old men poring over the chicken’s entrails, shaking their heads. Father hovered behind them, his face grim. People were trickling into the courtyard, curious to know what calamity had happened. I felt like I was shrinking, the stones and trees and houses beginning to loom over my head.