Medicine for the Dead

by Arianne Thompson

  Yet the evidence so far indicated a tremendous likelihood that Halfwick would not act sensibly, and a more modest probability that he actually meant what he said, and would share Elim’s penance, if he could not excuse him from it.

  This thought concluded with Día’s first sight of the corral: of Fours, her papá, greeting a towering woman leading a big brown mare.

  Día did not know the horse, but the woman was too big to belong to anyone but the Washchaw, and bowing too deferentially to be anyone but Wi-Chuck, one of Twoblood’s four deputies.

  That was less than fortuitous.

  Because although the Washchaw were not universally alike, their divine mother – O-San, the Silver Bear – had called her people to observe the special duties of the clan to which they belonged. For the Ant-Watching Clan, who made up the majority of the Washchaw in Island Town, it was a sacred obligation to protect the small, the fragile, and the needy... and a grievous sin to have any contact with the dead.

  Día did not have many regrets about her decision to become a grave bride. But the hardest sacrifice by far had been her place among the Ant-Watchers, who had so lovingly passed her between their huge, furry arms on the nights when she was hard-pressed to bear the loss of her father, the memories of Sixes’ last night, and her own intolerable smallness. There was respect for her decision to follow in her father’s footsteps, yes: she was the sexton’s daughter, after all. But there could be no place among the Washchaw for a woman who would so willingly contaminate herself. They would not even look at her now.

  So perhaps she would go around and let herself in through the back.

  Día rolled the shaft of her parasol back and forth across her shoulder, belatedly crawling out of her own head to navigate the busy hum and clamor all around her. Down Morning Snake Street and left on Yellow Road – that would be the easiest way.

  Día did not often venture down to the southern side of Island Town. Up north, the Moon Quarter was quiet and sleeping during the daylight hours, and of course she had the Burnt Quarter all to herself. Down here, though, the daylight citizens of Island Town rose with the sun. La Soleada, the great pueblo at the tip of the island, was a spectacular multi-storied adobe castle whose many mouths and roofs and ladders were already crawling with the in-and-out, up-and-down traffic of daily life. Even here, as she passed between the more modest repurposed buildings of old Sixes, it was impossible not to be taken aback by the squalid splendor of more than two thousand warm human molecules careering and colliding in less than half of one square mile.

  Provided that Bertold’s Hydrodynamics was correct, of course, in arguing for natural molecular motion. Delaroux’s theory of static suspension certainly didn’t agree. Regardless: in the cries of infants and pushcart-men, in the flap and wave of clothes-poled laundry, in the intermingled smells of fresh paint and goat-droppings and simmering pumpkin soup, the business of a hot September morning was inescapable.

  “Are you passing by, Cariñosa?” Hops-the-Stone sat up from where she knelt at one of the metates in the dwindling shade of her house. Her daughters were too shy to say any such thing, but took advantage of the time to stretch and supply their own grinding-slabs with fresh corn from the basket.

  Día dipped her head, and remembered to smile. “Very briefly, and with gratitude for your kind notice.” That, and an immoderate pang of envy at the sight of the three of them there, so effortlessly alike in their broad features and floury hands and even in the matching necklaces of sweat at the collars of their bright cotton dresses.

  She passed three more adobe houses, and then a turkey-pen, and then turned left at the old wooden frame of Crowley’s Cigars, where Mint Crowley had once smiled at her from under his bushy white moustache, and given her penny candy whenever she brought him discarded news-papers from the stage house. It belonged to Counting-Cats and her family now.

  “Good morning, Lovey!” Bent nearly double under the weight of the dead sheep at his shoulders, Hap’piki Dos Puertas nevertheless found the energy to greet her as he passed. Día had never worked out where the Ikwei boy’s interest in Ardish came from... or found the heart to tell him that it was pronounced Loving. “Good morning, Mr. Two-Doors,” she replied. “And to you, Mrs. Mutton.”

  Día glanced behind her as she continued on, and was rewarded by a backwards-flashed smile which said that yes, he had understood the joke.

  Really, why didn’t she come down more often? As Fours never tired of reminding her, she was a daylight citizen herself, with every right to walk the streets of her own – only – home. And more than that, she would never properly belong if she didn’t learn to act as though she already did. In fact –

  The sound of a slamming door and clattering wood startled Día back to the present. Up ahead, a broom rolled to stillness on the porch of what Fours told her had once been a hardware store.

  Did the Caraballo family still live there?

  Did it really matter?

  Día clasped her hands and waited, hoping to have been mistaken. But no: just there, three plums dropped from the tiny clay-framed window. Día swallowed a sigh, stepped up, and dutifully bent to retrieve them. She’d long since learned that they would only go to waste otherwise. “You are very kind,” she said as she did so. “Thank you for your generosity. May you enjoy the blessings of old age and happiness.”

  She picked up the fruits, stuffed them in the pocket of her cassock, and walked on.

  He was not a ‘Starving’ God, of course. He was only Himself. But if by some accident of time Día ever met those followers who had so tarnished His name, she would be hard-pressed not to hurl His offerings at their ignorant righteous faces.

  It was an unbecoming exercise, and one that occupied her all the way down the street and around the back of Fours’ barn. At last, Día was enveloped again by the welcoming smell of livestock and manure, and by the feel of wet earth under her bare feet as she passed by the pump, and by the unchanging creak of what had used to be a kitchen door, whose middle hinge Fours had been intending to oil since Día had been small enough to look up and inspect its underside.

  It was dim inside, musty and cluttered as always, but Día folded her parasol and found her way through the maze of overstocked shelves with automatic grace. The stairs squeaked more than they used to, twin functions of age and weight whose intersection would be found on the day someone finally put a foot through a floorboard.

  But for today, there was nothing to impede her as she made her way up to what had once been her room and sat down on her old bed, its sun-faded quilt dusty with disuse.

  Fours had no use for the bed, of course. He said that he kept it for show, in case any visitor ever wandered upstairs... but any visitor who made more than passing inspection would soon find the false ears and teeth and eyebrows in the bureau drawers, and the jars of fermenting fish-eggs peeping out from behind the piles of papers and knick-knacks that overloaded Día’s old schoolroom writing-desk, and the spare wig hanging on the interior door-knob.

  So perhaps he kept the bed for her sake... or perhaps she was only flattering herself to think so. Regardless, it was the only flat surface not entirely taken up with clutter.

  But although the horizontal planes were all given over to earthly concerns, Fours had aligned the vertical parts of Día’s old room exclusively with heaven. The walls were covered, almost frantically smothered, with holy artifacts of every conceivable kind: Penitent sun-wheels and Set-Seti mud paintings and glittering glass masks from the Kingdom of the Sun. Marhuk’s thousand dried golden eyes looked down at her from their four-quartered hoop, while braided clan-knots hung from the string of O-San’s holy bow, and the woven cloud-net of Summer Coyote draped as delicately as a corn-silk cobweb across the window-frame.

  Downstairs, the door squeaked open. “Are you waiting for me, miha?”

  Día’s gaze lingered on the net, bedewed with a rainbow of beads that glistened in the sunlight. It was beautiful, but ultimately did little to hide the dirty glass. “
Upstairs, papá.”

  She ordered her thoughts as each successive stair-step received his weight. It’s good to see you again. How are you keeping? I meant to come by last week, but –

  Then he was there, and everything else fell out of her mind.

  “Great heavens!” Día was on her feet in an instant, and at his side in two more. “Papá, what’s happened?”

  He was still himself, broadly speaking – still doing an excellent impression of a small native man at the far side of middle age, his grandfatherly mien enhanced by his old-fashioned eastern clothing and snow white hair. She had made a good likeness of his face, once, by gluing a tuft of cottonwood to an acorn.

  But mereaux did not wear their distress like human beings. With earth-persons, grief and pain bled out from the eyes, leaving swollen, smudged, dark-hollowed testaments to afflictions of every kind. But a mereau wept with his whole body, anguish literally seeping from every pore... and Fours’ emaciated frame, together with that faint, sweat-like sheen, said too plainly for speaking that he had grieved himself dry.

  He looked up at her, and from behind the trapezoid frames of his glasses, his sunken eyes smiled. “Nothing very much, miha. Just thinking back to older days. Now come and sit down so I can see you properly. Terribly rude of you to keep growing like that, you know...”

  By every external measure, Día had long since finished her growth. But she was likewise hard-pressed to explain why Fours seemed to get smaller and more frail with every passing year. She followed him back to the bed and sat with him, side by side, his gaunt, clammy fingers threading through the spaces between hers. His blousy, over-large sleeves were still dry, but at this intimate distance, it was easy to see where the close fit of his buckskin vest pressed his white dress shirt too close to his wet flesh. He smelled of laundry soap and hay. “I wish you would tell me,” she said.

  He did not look up from their joined hands. “I wish I could, ma claire. One day, I will.”

  Día did not miss the change in his voice, or the dampening of his palm. He had always been careful to use Marín with her: miha this and niña that and Dios mío when she was disobedient or clumsy. If he were overheard speaking his own language, it would be as good as admitting that he was one of those mysterious mistrusted ‘fish-men’, and his carefully-built human façade would crumble. But there, in one silly, indiscreet term of endearment – ma claire, my oyster-basin – was every night she had lain awake in this same bed, hearing the kitchen-door squeak downstairs, almost-hearing the peculiar footsteps that accompanied it. Then the silence as strangers spoke to her papá only with their hands. And although the floorboards might smell faintly of river-algae in the morning, Fours would never admit to anything. It was always a neighbor, if you believed him, needing to borrow some article from the shop, or an itinerant foreigner wanting medicine.

  Día had long since stopped believing him.

  “In the meantime, you can do me a kindness, and give me something new to think about.” He smiled at her, his artificial teeth gleaming. “What’s keeping you busy today?”

  Still, that care and interest in his honey-smooth voice was not artificial at all. It might even be the last unspoiled, unaltered part of him. And she was desperately thirsty for it.

  Día sat forward, her elbows to her knees, the heels of her hands massaging her eyes. “It’s the Northman – the Eadan boy,” she said. “The rites haven’t... they haven’t gone as they should, and I can’t – I don’t know what God wants me to do.”

  His hand gently parted the knotted locks of her hair and kneaded the back of her neck, as if she were a kitten to be soothed. She looked over as his nut-brown skin darkened to match hers – a peculiar mereau expression of sympathy that she had never grown used to. It was well meant, but his lips were too thin, his nose too sharp, his chin too weak to show her anything of herself in him. “Is it something you can tell me about?”

  No. Of course not. Día hated those night-time strangers for what they did to her papá: frightening, wearying, aging him. Using him all up, so that adding even a fragment of her burden to his would be an act of monstrous, shameless self-regard. She couldn’t let him worry on her behalf.

  But they would both feel better if he believed he had done something for her. “Papá,” she said to the rumpled black cotton fabric of her lap, “how do you know the right thing to do?”

  His hand stopped kneading, though it lingered at her neck. When Día glanced up, his colors had faded, and he was staring ahead at some invisible point. “Do you know, I’ve rarely had any difficulty in knowing the right thing. It’s doing it that is just... just that bit trickier, somehow.”

  Día followed his gaze to the opposite side of the room. It was a warm and pleasant space, cluttered with the business of earth and heaven alike. But there was still that pervasive, pathetic sadness about it, and about its occupant. He had warded himself on all sides with every relic and holy sign imaginable, none of which had ever excluded one single solitary ounce of the evil that he himself tracked in with him.

  And not for the first time, Día was glad that they now lived separately. “How do you know, then?” she asked.

  His eyes remained fixed on something only he could see, but his hand left her neck. It joined its mate in his lap, and busied itself with pinching the skin between his fingers, as if he would encourage the webbing there to grow back. “Well, I just think of what I might do, you know, this way or that one, and it’s...” The nearer side of his face twitched with some vestigial humor. “... Do you know, the right thing is almost always the one that I am most powerfully anxious to avoid.”

  Well, that was one way of trying the question. What would she be most reluctant to do for Halfwick?

  Easy enough to turn him out of town on his own two feet. She might feel a pang for Elim, even in spite of his exceptional rudeness at their last meeting.

  Harder to justify giving Halfwick the means to go and fetch him. It would be difficult to sleep for the next couple of weeks, until the a’Krah returned and she learned whether the Eadan boy had spoiled their quest.

  But the hardest thing? The choice that would be the most troublesome and vexing, that would tempt her to back out of it altogether?

  “Oh, miha, I meant to say,” and suddenly Fours had returned to the present, ordinary moment, “I haven’t any mule to give you for carrying him out to the field, but I’m sure Penny Caracola would let you borrow one of his. I spoke with him just last week, and he’s got...”

  Día’s first thought was that yes, that probably would be for the best: now that most of the harvest was in, the Caracolas could probably afford to spare an animal for the space of a morning.

  Her second thought ended with the word borrow.

  Halfwick did not need to be given a horse. He would only need the use of one for the time it would take to catch up to the funeral party.

  That, of course, would require someone to go with him. To spend the day in his company... and then the night with him and the a’Krah. To ride out again in the morning, confident enough to make the twenty or thirty-mile trip back to Island Town alone. To do it all with no guide or guardian outside of one’s own inexperienced, insignificant self.

  Día’s stomach curled in horror.

  “... which he says is very gentle, and anyway, you won’t need it for more than...”

  It was unsound, this new idea. Unsafe. And yet she couldn’t un-think it. By the current limits of anyone’s understanding, God had raised Halfwick from the dead, and seeded his mind with a singular purpose – and both God and the Azahi had trusted it all to Día’s handling. Was this truly meant to conclude with her putting him out of doors like an unwanted cat, and going on about her business? Would she let rank fear forfeit her part in a miracle?

  “Mihita? What are you thinking of?”

  Día returned her attention to the concern etched in Fours’ soft, sculpted features. “Papá... what if I were to tell you that I believe I should take Halfwick an unusuall
y far ways? Not tremendously so,” she hastened to add. “Only what could be achieved in the space of a day.”

  He stared at her, his bespectacled black eyes glittering with a fresh, welcome strictness. “You aren’t thinking of crossing the border.”

  “Certainly not!” Día replied. East of the river that parted around Island Town was Eaden, the vast and dangerous country from which Halfwick and Elim had come. Día knew from her books that it was full of marvels, of great cities and breathtaking wonders. But the books had been written by men of property and wealth, as Fours had explained to her, whose pale skin excused them from slavery, and whose names won them kindly treatment under the law. Día’s own parents had risked everything to cross the border to the Etascado territory, and freedom. Only Día and her father had made it.

  “Honestly, I would never,” she continued. “It’s just – you know, Elim was concerned for Halfwick’s body, and I know the Azahi promised that we would keep it close to hand, so Elim can take it home again if the a’Krah grant him pardon. But I was thinking that perhaps I ought to mark and bury it where the two of them first crossed over, and to say as much to Topple-Rock and Bii’ditsa. Just in case any of Halfwick’s acquaintances try to buy ferry passage, you know.”

  It was a splendid, perfectly serviceable lie, one whose plausibility oiled its passage as she heaved it up from her gorge. Her father would never have tolerated it, she was sure.

  But her father was long gone, leaving her with just her amphibious, ambiguous papá... and if his example was any indication, lies told to spare family members the anxiety of learning uncomfortable truths were scarcely lies at all.

  By the guarded expression on Fours’ face, she’d been a good study. “Have you discussed that with the Azahi?”

  Día dipped her head, a welcome return to the truth. “Oh, yes. I spoke with him first, before I came here. He gave me his approval,” though Día was careful not to specify what exactly the Azahi had approved, “and we agreed that it would be best if I left promptly. I just... I hadn’t thought it through very well, and in any case, I wanted to see you before I left.”