I AM THINKING of my past. There are powerful songs. Husk who saw everything in terms of science, told me once how metal bridges were taken down, collapsed by the song of wind, a certain tone, a certain pitch of wind. If wind spoke across a bridge just right, he said, the bridge would fall. But there were songs with other strengths. People say this and it is true. According to John Husk, Bush knew a song that broke down other kinds of bridges. It had to do with the wrong beings walking down from sky or across water. Or maybe rising up from the ground. Through her words, through her singing, something was taken apart. Bush learned these songs, he said, not because she wanted to, but because she had to keep some things from being put together again. Because the beings in Hannah came from other places. She had to take out the bridges between bad spirits and people, to close bridges between those places and here. And she sang to keep the spirit bridges closed, to keep them from coming back together again. She knew the pathway, he said.
At the time I didn’t know what he meant by this or what lived behind the words, but now I’ve seen that bridge and it wasn’t so unlike the ones that were being built up north, with muddy, earth moving water flowing beneath them, bridges that should not have been there. Animals in the path of it were killed, people’s lives displaced, plants and lives gone forever to make way.
“Last night a man hurt me,” your mother said one day. No one had come toward us that winter. I would have seen if they had.
“He came in here,” she said. “See, my pants are all stretched out.”
I looked. It was true, her pants were stretched, torn at the seam.
Another day she said, “A ghost unbuttoned my dress.” It was true. Her dress was open, and she, Hannah, had a look of terror on her face.
“Did you see that man come in here? He was carrying my head.” Hannah said this.
She broke the window. I saw her do it. And she said she didn’t, even though I stood right there. “I saw it with my eyes,” I told her.
“No, I didn’t.”
I almost believed her. I doubted my own mind, my eyes. It took a while before I knew she told the truth. That there was a man come in the night, a ghost. Anyway, it was the truth to her. Because of the others inside her. They were the ones who had done what she denied. They were the ones who were dangerous.
Old Man said you could sing the soul back if you knew the old song. All I could figure how to do was to sing myself into her. I thought, if all this could dwell in her, maybe I, too, could go inside. To understand them, the ones who lived in her, to coax them out, to cajole them into stillness and rest. I wanted to know where she had gone. I thought there must be a way to call lost souls back.
And so I did it. I prepared myself. I slept outdoors on the sacred ground. I sang. I fasted. And one day a part of me stepped inside the girl and looked around. I saw the hand she spoke of, heard the voices in languages neither of us knew. I could see how dangerous it was. An inescapable place with no map for it. Inside were the ruins of humans. Burned children were in there, as well as fire. It pulled me toward it, like gravity, like dust to earth and whatever it was, I had to call on all my strength to get away.
WHILE THE BIRDS MIGRATED SOUTH, noisy and swift, we prepared for the trout run. In the dimming light of fall we lifted nets in the clear water of the stream. The fish were thick. The water seemed full of them, turning crowded and wild, shining in the light of afternoon. They were thick, the flashing sides of them, the white stomachs, as if the waters themselves were thrashing. It was dark when we returned home along the white stones of the path, a storm brewing out in the other world.
One day I went to Adam’s Rib to purchase some caulk and plastic to place over the windows.
“Let me see you,” said Agnes. “You are getting busty. Are you gaining weight? It’s about time.”
But Dora-Rouge said, “It’s my time to die. I need to go back home to the Fat-Eaters. You can come, Angel. Your mother is there.” And then she drifted off. “There are things Bush won’t tell you about your mother.”
“Won’t tell me?”
“Bush will never tell you about the killing of the dog. She’s never talked of it yet.”
This was all she said. But she was wrong about Bush. She did tell me. She told me on a day when the last rain fell, before water froze, before the clouds transformed themselves into six-sided flakes with a fleck of solar dust at each one’s center.
One day she killed the dog. I heard him yelp. I ran out the door to see where he was and he lay still and bent. She kicked him. There were needles in his mouth and nose and ears, and he’d been cut, the red blood on the fur, matted, one foot cut off. He died panting, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
It haunts me. All this time I wanted that out of my mind. I can’t bear to think of it.
That’s how dangerous she was. That’s what I want you to know. I loved the dog. I loved you. But we were all afraid of the naked ice inside her. We didn’t want to send her away because it was not her fault. At least we thought that. But it wasn’t long, anyway, until she drifted away, first to the north, where she lives now, then to Oklahoma. We were grateful she was gone.
And then there was you. When she returned, she was pregnant with you. Then we needed to keep her here. We knew she would kill you. You, yourself, seemed to know what you were born to; I heard you cry one time when you were not even in the house. Agnes heard it, too, or I wouldn’t have believed my own ears.
She would kill you. Husk said that was a law of probability. He also said that a glacier gives off what it can’t absorb, blue light and beauty, and that you were the light given off by your mother.
ON THE ISLAND THAT YEAR, I thought if it was true that there’s no true north, no still center, no steady magnetic pole, how could I believe anything I’d learned before? Even land moves. So in a swampy place where peat fires burn for years with the power of rising gas, I learned to doubt things I’d previously learned. And so, too, I began to believe things, like the stories Bush told, things I would not have listened to months before.
I would one day understand my mother. I would one day take in the fact that we were those who walked out of bullets and hunger, and even that walking was something miraculous. Even now I think of it. How the wind still sweeps us up in it. Even now there are places where currents meet and where people are turned to ice. I understood it first like this: the mouth of a river goes one way; my mother was the opposite. Things and people fell into her like into the eye of a storm, and they were destroyed. Like the black hole Husk had described to me. I understood things then in the manner of Husk’s telling. Except for how I emerged from Hannah and how there are rages and wounds so large, love is swallowed by them and is itself changed, the lover taken in and destroyed.
AUTUMN MOVED BACK and made way for winter. A wind began to blow the leaves and they swirled upward and were gone. The windows creaked. Where did the wind gather its strength, I wondered. That was what I wanted to know so I could go there.
Husk brought us Agnes’ old treadle sewing machine that had sat beside the cot. It had gold leaves painted and engraved on it, and a bunch of silver grapes. It was the first time I’d seen it dust-free and now I noticed it was a lovely machine, dark cherry. Bush showed me the technique for sewing ribbons, and how to finish a sleeve. We borrowed another, perfume-scented sewing machine from Frenchie. This one was electric and Bush used it only when the generator was on, doing hand hemming at other times.
I sat for hours, aching, and moved my legs rhythmically. It was a good idea at first, this shirt business. But when the first needle broke, I stood up and paced with frustration. It was just the beginning. Thread broke if the machine wasn’t threaded perfectly. Once, the oil leaked onto a precious, nearly finished shirt. Sometimes the feeder wouldn’t move. Then I would cuss under my breath and go outside to look at the lake. Everything that could go wrong, did. The bobbin was not wound right and I’d rip out a seam, start over. I hated to sew. But I did it over and over and soon I grew patient with it. From school, I remembered Psyche and how she had to separate a hill of grain one grain at a time. Perhaps I was separating grain.
Perhaps I was remaking myself. As with the machine, I tried to put words to things over and over, in the way Bush put together the skeletons. They would one day look like a living animal, with eyes of glass, clean fur. But for them, something was missing, always. The spirit was gone. They would never breathe. For me, it would be different. One day I would wake up and know that everything had started to change, that I was no longer empty space, that I had become full, or was growing toward it. It would start with a small, warm circle inside my stomach. It was longing. It was sadness. It was moments of joy. It was new dreams I blamed on Dora-Rouge’s potion for sleeplessness. It was everything that entered through my eyes, the northern lights that were bright and gauzy clothing on night’s skin of darkness. It was moose meat given by the hunters, and the fish Bush caught, and Husk with his theories.
A wind began to blow, a storm from far off. Then rain fell, a hint of winter. And on land, the air filled with ice crystals and the odor of smoke. Grasses became stiff, earth solid. My footprints in mud were iced over. There was the sound of a distant wolf.
The lake froze, moved slightly, and with the sound of broken glass, re-formed itself.
And what I pieced together was more than shirts or dresses, sleeves and collars. From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life.