Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  I wanted to paint over this place with my place and pretend that underneath there hadn’t been any blood, nothing bad at all, that differences in history were unimportant. Everywhere there has been sadness; I just like not to look at it, to act as though these things don’t change people, as though there is such a thing as a truly clean slate. My Wheel mama, she spoiled me. She kept me sheltered from the things she had suffered.

  Let’s just do it my way, I had come to say, and my Martin had followed me. I wanted to be like my mother, but maybe I didn’t know what that really meant. My Martin had followed me across the big Valley with screams of buried rivers longing for flood in it. On top of them there were fields and fields once full of food so bountiful it could feed the world, but it was only bountiful because it was fed by poison, and that poison killed the ground and everybody nearby, eventually. As it always does. As we walked those fields were only dust at our ankles. The dust climbed up and with it the memory of the blood of the people there, at the End, fighting for that Food which was not life-giving at all, but had death in every seed.

  I should have known up here, where the snow falls and melts and makes the water clear, at its beginning, that these People were not like us at all. In order to have survived, they had only up to run. Here, the highest of places, the harshest of places, where only the mercy of the wild could keep them alive.

  I have tried to speak of my mother Wheel, of my aunt Ffion, of Iris, but these People here, they only smile politely, stir the stew, change the subject to next month, when the snows will begin to melt, when the walking will start up again.

  My seven babies—I did not even know what they were when they came out clawing and whiskered. They mewled for me to wipe the placenta from their tiny dark noses. They are not creatures we have back in our place. Martin was right outside and he ran in at the end. He scooped those little ones toward me, sweet man, a better heart than I have, truly—golden. Mine is made of Pride. He didn’t flinch. For a second, I thought of letting them smother. It’s horrible. I, the daughter of a Buckeye, I should of all people be tolerant. I cry at night, knowing I had that thought. A hypocrite, I am. A bad woman, I am. My mama kept me too safe, too special, and thought that kindness would come with the package. Maybe it didn’t.

  They were like baby rabbits, but rounder, with mouse-sized ears. How they quivered, all pink. Of course that murderous thought passed. I heaved them up on my breast and cleaned them. I let them drink with their tiny piercing teeth. The midwife had wiped me dark with hare blood, making me long for the way trees give birth—clean, the slow growing of a seed, the stately procession of its blossoming and fruiting. Not this screaming, this blood everywhere, mostly from the young doe-hare. Her ears did calm me, laid against my belly like she could hear those babies coming on through.

  Now I wonder if it was their doing, some sorcery, to turn my baby, Martin’s baby, into some cousin of the hare. We had made the little life in me fierce and deep in one of those barren fields of dust, no longer able to bear that wasteland. We sank into each other like the two last fruits with all the sweetness of all the fruits of the world packed into them.

  As we walked and my belly grew, I am certain I felt human feet kicking, not furred and clawed. So I wonder still if some metamorphosis occurred, some meddling, the mountain air turning whatever had been in my womb to soup, and then to something new.

  The midwife screamed when she saw the pikas come out, but not really with shock. No, it looked to me like glee, like joy, like something she had waited for but hadn’t been entirely sure would work out. She brought over another woman, and an old man who carried a battered instrument called a clarino. He played on it the saddest high song, a wail, with stars falling in it. My babies—pikas, the people kept murmuring, pikas!—huddled all around my neck as Martin ran his hands again and again through my hair and stroked their tiny pink backs with his big fingers which he could make so soft.

  Extinct, they were saying—they’ve been dead since just after the Fall. World got too hot for them, with that thick fur. All dead. They were whispering, fast, not really to me at all. Is it really them? The midwife nodded, pleased, as if she herself had brought them into the world. Soon the whole encampment, bundled in their sturdy felts, in their tall fur caps, was huddled around that winter solstice hut-den where a stranger had birthed pikas. They all had small bells in their hands, and they were ringing them, a sweet cacophony.

  I became a sort of oddity, a kind of pet. The pikas were what everyone had longed for, not me. I was like the river that bears the vessel full of an old friend thought lost at sea. No one cares at all about my own mother, the river that bore me, and all of us, up to high ground. I guess they are already on their own high ground, the highest, and have no need of our Way.

  I miss her, my Wheel-mama, my axis. I wish she would tell me—Anja, sweetheart, my little buckeye-flower, here are blackberries for you, honey, the woodrats picked them, come, eat up, and what a big strong lady you’ll become.

  TWO

  Two moons have passed and my pikas are already almost grown. What torture is this to a mother? They are little strangers, really—since the beginning they have been. Still, the dense chestnut of their fur, their long toes like hands, their black eyes that watch me softly and blink with happiness when I have been away and come back to them—these things have come to turn me tender. And I wonder, at night, cupped around Martin in the round tent they have given us—it seems they want us to stay, me the exceptional brood mare, Martin a good hand at chopping wood—where were they before? If they were all gone from the world, the last mothers and fathers expired in their winter dens in the talus, filled with their haystacks of grass, where were those little pika-seeds hiding? In the wind, and they drifted like dandelion propellers out over the Valley, slipped in me with Martin as we cradled and we crooned so desperately, full of sadness?

  In a pocket of my mind, or maybe my heart, I know things. I know to teach my pikas to gather and to store certain grasses for winter, in tall haystacks, in dens of granite they are making now, that far in advance. It’s like I’ve been turned a little bit pika myself. Just enough to show them by example, but not enough for us to speak. They are settling each into a territory, like we do, I suppose. I keep expecting one to shift, finally, to some round-eared girl—adorable, how I would kiss her apple-blossom cheeks!—and tell me to spin that haystack grass to gold, or find the needle of my death in it. Like our Wild Folk would have done. But such things don’t happen here. People speak of black bears like cousins down the road, yellow-billed magpies like misbehaved brothers-in-law—but they all keep their dark feathers, their dark fur, and no words are exchanged that I have heard. No burly women amble up to the camp while the girls are having climbing competitions in the snowy cedars and demand that one be her companion, her house-maid, for a year and a day. No blue-jays require plates of shining glass, metal, blue plastic, to be left for them in tree crotches.

  They don’t want my thoughts on the subject—that much has not changed, not with these wanderers of their single circular Road. They loop around the Road yearly. The summit of the mountain at the center of it is topped with a glacier. That’s the axis. On the Road we are moving toward meadows rich with seed, deer places, berry patches.

  We are unmoored, my Martin and I. They seem to see us as their disciples. Quite the opposite of what we had expected, though Martin is demure. He watches the men trap squirrels with admiration. We could just walk down the mountain, and home. I know. But we don’t. Maybe it’s just the air, so thin and cold with the stories of snow in it. Or the blue peaks rough as teeth, glowing at dawn. Alpenglow, they call it, like the word is a bell being rung for a prayer. Or that they know pieces of this world that I don’t. They hold them far under their furs and felts, pieces of the husking of this land, pieces of the source of All Water, All Rivers. I want to hold these pieces in my hands like the organs of the doe-leveret that were given to me to eat after I gave birth: heart, liver.

 
I am used to getting what I want, Martin tells me as he kisses my cheek and my neck, then all of me. I laugh, because this is true. Everybody and everything is not a mother, carrying to you handfuls of blackberries. I must learn to find, and to pick, my own. And so we will stay.

  THREE

  This time—only three months since the pikas, god save me—Martin and I have made two bighorn sheep lambs for babies. Their hooves and knees bruised my every corner coming out. Maybe it is the water here, the snowmelt. Maybe it has old ghosts stuck there, waiting to be swallowed down. Because at the sight of those rumpled brown bodies, hoofed, little noses fluttering, the midwife again yelled with joy but not surprise, and gestured over the old man with the clarino, who got teary eyed, again and again saying—“the sheep, the sheep have returned, the bighorn sheep!” He played a slow reel on his instrument, lilting, which made the ears of my little lambs perk and move. They were so much mine in that moment, covered still in the fluids from my body, more mine then they ever would be again.

  I like to watch them leaping in the snow. They seem never to sink. Martin and I sit for hours this way, wrapped in many layers because the spring is only now thawing through the world. We hold hands. We don’t speak. We behold them, close-curled brown fur, growing stubby horns, this brother and sister, as they leap from stone to stone as if there could be nothing at all more joyous in the world.

  FOUR

  We have been a year and a day on their Road. The whole circle, the whole circumambulation of that glacier which they call Beatrice Mother of Waters. A year and a day is a long time to be tested, to be held distant, to be treated only politely but never with tenderness. These are patient and hard people. Martin kept hold of my hand every day. We hung to each other and the babies at our ankles, gathering wood with the rest, making felt from rabbit fur.

  They have a brood of rabbits, kept very safe and hidden, carried on a sort of litter which the men take turns hoisting on their shoulders, laughing—“our dozen Queens!” These rabbits have long fur, exceptionally so, and soft. I learned from the other women how to make felted coats and hats, mittens and slippers, from their wool. How to make a red dye from crushed cinnabar found only in one place, a ledge and a cavern reached around September, near the base of the glacier.

  They acted, those women, like I spoke another language. And maybe, I have found, I did. I still do. My pika children, my big-horned lambs—these they seemed to understand and to take to more than I, though I have still yet to see or hear a word pass between them.

  In that year I gave birth also to a grizzly bear cub, the color of honeycomb and granite dust, with teeth that scarred my nipples. Even she they would not let me mother as I wanted to—holding her always to me, bathing her tenderly in every blue stream, wreathing her in green braids of sweet-grass.

  “She isn’t all yours,” they would say to me, passing the cub around in their arms, then leaving her in a meadow to find her way after us, to catch a ground squirrel on her own, discovering the strength of her jaws. I think I was always waiting, each time, for the little person to eventually unfurl from under that fur of bear, pika, sheep. I think they knew this, and would not let me rub off my humanness on them.

  Now, we are back again, here. Where you are, your dark tunnel where I can chatter like a girl to her gossiping friend. A year and a day, sullen for much of it was I, even when they fawned over my summer shed hair, velvet green, and gave it all to my pikas for their new nests. None of my babies stayed with me. They are wild again already, having chosen each a place to live, to make their lives as grazers, as seed-gatherers, as rambling hunters, following me no further. Back where they belong, the women mutter. Back where they belong.

  They have told us one new thing—a year on their Road for this, a hard apprenticeship, but I think their reserve has to do with trusting. Their world is made from the ashes of a harsh escape. They gave it to us like a special, rare berry, candied and glistening, as we sat all around the thickness of a second solstice fire, snow making the world drift soft and cold into its own dreaming.

  “Under my skin, I change and I go out to meet them.” A woman named Susannah said this right into my eyes, and Martin’s. “Everything is at its source, here.” She had hair the color of snow though she was only a little older than Martin. It matched, right then, the ground and the trees in the darkness, and so her face seemed to float before us.

  “Oh,” I said, not understanding. Martin only nodded. We did not have a clue what she meant, not really. We drank up the dark elderberry Winter Tea, for keeping sickness away, left in our cups. She didn’t say anything else, only went back to a piece of rabbit felt in her lap and the pinwheels she was embroidering there.

  I wanted to say—oh yes, you know, my mother is Wheel. She has wheeled feet, and rolls. But there is nobody here like my mother, or like any of the Fools, really—nobody torqued or numerous of limb, hair falling or round backed or with extra fingers, eyes, nipples. Holy strange ones, we were. Some of us normal in appearance, of course, by whatever standards approve such things, but soft in heart or mind somewhere, somehow, in some way that made that Old Way of ours, with the Masters and the Tool Sheds, unbearable. Once it was said a body or a mind got shaped thus from the poisons of Before—freaks and rubbish. But in my mother’s tree-tent world, we were our own Court and every odd shape was a strength that said—I’ve been marked by the past of my species, yes, and by what was left behind, but it is no illness, no, it is a little doorway, my body, my mind, and tenderness lies on the other side. Tenderness, tenacity, teal-blue slippers for dancing on Wheel’s webs and calling down the night-flying barn owls to wheel at our hands, a strange hybridity of woman and wild.

  I wanted to tell Susannah all of this as she stitched that pinwheel shape in deer gut thread on the green of the rabbit felt—under my skin, there are many stories, I wanted to say. But I know she was making the Road, and the axis of Beatrice Mother of Waters, and the lines going there each a different month of the year—a calendar of walking. So I kept quiet, and wondered who it was she went out to meet, changing only under her skin.

  FIVE

  Five years, fifty little ones. I feel like a tree. I am half one, I must remind myself, bearing one glossy buckeye after another. All of them have been creatures these People call extinct. Their bloodlines lost. I wonder desperately where I have been storing them. Or if it is in Martin, from all his time underground by torch, brushing against myriad roots and bones. If he got seeded with lost ones down there.

  I can tell you each species: pika, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear, yellow-legged frog, great gray owl, willow flycatcher, yellow-bellied marmot, Yosemite toad, even the seeds of a wooly sunflower. I feel more like a river bearing ships than a mother—each finding again its old berth, and my only purpose to get them there.

  I’ve said it before: we could leave. We could walk back down this mountain, down from this cold. But they are kinder now to us, if only by a little, calling us by our names, smoothing at my hair when the next little seedling comes. That’s what Martin and I call them now, what we murmur, laying together in the dark after making love. Who will it be, who are you, little seedling?

  And what is it, we say together on early mornings, having tea inside the pale skin of our round tent, watching the kingfisher hunt across some clear alpine lake out the unrolled felt of our window—what is it beneath all of their eyes that keeps us here? What is it that spins them around and around this glacier, and us with them, like all the spokes on a Wheel?

  Well, a person cannot very well leave, wanting the answer to such a question.

  SIX

  The glacier is the shape of a nipple, or a breast. When snow falls and then melts it is like milk in all the streams. All the streams go eventually to the rivers buried halfway in cement under the Valley. We walked together in what seems like a different life entirely, a different Anja, a different Martin, whose lungs had not yet been winnowed by alpine air, ice crystals, whose bodies had not yet become two floodgates. Hi
s into mine, mine into theirs, into hers, that peak, these mountains called the Sierra Nevada. If it is ever a human child, Martin, my love, I will call her Sierra, and if she has a brother, a twin, he will be Nevada, for here is the spine of the world and the snow its milk.

  Here, the people seem first like this ice and this snow, cold and beautiful and impossible to hold, but it is only because they fled here. I have learned this. In all of them is the strength and the sadness of fleeing a land that maybe the world had once called the place of Milk and Honey, because fruits were grown there and sent on ships and airplanes to every corner of the earth. Yes, it was called this, the big long Valley we walked, only dusty now from its unnatural and poisoned fertility. When the World Fell, at the End, they have told us that a person had to flee, or fight, or die. Mostly all three at once. They have stories here around the fires about Demons. But I’ve learned this to be another word for a person who would kill you with any handy pipe, piece of car door or broken bottle, for the clothes on your back, for the last cans of your beans, for your pretty little daughter. Only people who could turn their hearts to ice, and climb the granite with their hands, having each lost someone they loved more than the sun itself, made it up here, and survived. Now there is nobody down there but ghosts.

  They never had a Fool’s Revolt of fire and webs. They never had a Lyoobov made out of Dreams. Only that fleeing—running away its own revolution, a form of new creation, of hope. Nobody made it up here but the strongest, the longest of limb or the most wiry and tough. I don’t like to think of those buried along the way, but on the Road we say their names and throw down the petals of wild roses that the oldest women have saved. I did not know this for many years. The names are plants, because everybody changed them as they fled together, to leave behind that other time. Peony, Oak, Forget Me Not, Foxtail, Ryegrass, Tule, Milkmaid, Alder, Mint. Great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers to the People whose Road we walk now. It was all so many generations ago but the people and their Road keep tight to their bones, they make like the snow, they speak still of the Fleeing, the Fires in the Valley, the Climbs, the Ones that Had to Be Left. The way we speak of the Fool’s Revolt, and much longer before of Lyoobov, Rose, and Ash.