Where The Long Grass Bends

My mother taught me to hunt. “Daughter,” she said, “women kill,” and so it was. If I clenched my legs by sinew and muscle, I moved soundless through the birch. My mother and I, we stalked, we stole, our strikes merciful and accurate. The bowstring hewed a deep furrow in my index finger. When I pressed my ear to their cool white trunks, the birch told me where to go to find rabbit for stew, squirrel for pie. They have always spoken to me, the trees.

Before I was born, my mother cleared a space among the birch and built a roofless house of stone. We had ivy for carpet, red foxes for pillows when we could catch them. As we slept, the foxes gnawed on our heads. Their rough tongues scrubbed our cheeks. Fox-tail smells of home, red and gold. If you catch a fox, smell, and you’ll see what I mean. But do not try too hard; they have grown shy and quick.

In fall, the ivy turned from green to orange and slipped like a flame across the floor of our house. At the corners of our walls, birds made their round, twiggy nests and hunted the insects humming in the ivy. I liked how the baby sparrows clamored for food: blind, demanding. My mother and I gathered molted feathers to fletch the end of our arrows, to steady their flight.

When the other woman came to join us, she built a roof of pine trunks fitted so neatly together no light splashed through. The ivy browned, then died. The foxes bit deep into our arms and scrabbled to be free, barking. Before the woman came, there was no need for me to have any will. But after—such a sharp slap of a word, after—my will sprouted. Because I needed it. That year, the birch that had been a seed when I was born turned ten.

She had a hidden face tucked into shiny, red humps of skin. My mother found her pretty. Always the woman whispered, so that my mother leaned close into her, so that I could not hear what she said. The woman filled the house with lifeless things. Sturdy, immovable dressers, wool rugs of constant colors, paintings of birches. Paintings of birches! The house surrounded by lithe, whistling trees, but she stayed inside and looked at paintings. She told my mother that as I grew older I would want to leave and find a man, and my mother would be alone again. In a creeping fashion, she made herself indispensable.

Oh, she was useful, unfailingly dependable. That woman could do anything. Cook, clean, stitch a sofa, carve a table. First, it happened to my mother. Her will wilted. Gradually, she did less. A haze drifted over her. She lounged on her side, her lean arm a pillow, and the woman bustled around her. And when I looked at my mother, I no longer recognized her. She sent me out to hunt. By myself. I did not like feeding that woman, but I did as my mother asked.

One day, my mother roused herself and left the house to gather sage. The woman and I were alone together. I stood next to her as she kneaded dough. She had built a kitchen, forged a stove, fashioned a countertop. On that countertop, she pounded the dough. Moving, like a streak of wind, she sprinkled flour on her fingers and the lump of raw bread. Occasionally, she glanced at me, her eyes flat and glassy. I had never seen a fish, never hunted one, but somehow I knew she shared their eyes.

Lifting the dough, she slammed it onto the counter. Spores of flour rose and hung between us. Turning the dough, she dug the soft pads of her fingers into its sticky flesh. A heaviness settled upon me. She would take care of everything. I need not do; I need not move. My mother, I knew, waded among the sunflowers at the edge of our plot. All their faces turned toward the house. The light fell there, in the space she had cleared, and the sunflowers strained toward it. I thought of my mother parting the flowers, disappearing into the birch. She sniffed the air for sage, her face upturned. Before the woman, we had sniffed together.

When the bread was done, the woman took it from the oven and placed it on the counter. “Eat,” she said to me. Her eyes flew at me, stuck. My stomach hardened. Firmly, my teeth settled into each other.

“No,” I said. We faced each other over the bread, a sweet steam rising from its surface erupting with edges of nuts and raisins. I smelled chocolate, too. Cluttered, I thought. She cluttered the bread.

“Bread is good for you,” she wheedled. “You like it. You want to eat this slice. It will feel soothing, huddled in your stomach.” Left then right, she tilted the bread. “No,” I said, but I did not move away from the proffered food. Something strong and blood-flavored rose inside me. It filled me.

She lowered the slab and wrenched raisins and nuts from it, a chocolate goo coating her fingers. The chips had melted and spread through the arteries of the dough. We stared at each other, over the cooling bread. And so we stayed till my mother returned with sprigs of sage sticking from her pockets. I had won. My will overpowered the woman’s. She pitted her strength against me, and I knocked it aside with my own.

The second time my mother left the house, this time without stating why, the woman and I battled again. I watched from the doorway as she hacked down five sunflowers, taller than her by a yard. She cut with spite, I think because the flowers had no use for her. When she came inside, dragging the flowers behind her like hunting spoil, she laid them at my feet. She filled five huge canning jars with water and lined them up before me.

Taking tubes of dye from her apron, she squeezed drops into each jar. The drops fell to the base of the water, then unfurled and rose like smoke through the liquid, changing it. In the end, there were five containers filled with green, red, black, blue, and orange water.

“Put one flower in each jar,” she commanded. I allowed my knees to buckle, and I sank to the floor. I sat on my hands and looked up at her. In response, she smiled, then grabbed each flower by the neck and thrust it into a jar. She ran out of the house, and I fell asleep with my hand on my bow.

I laughed then, for it was a mean and stupid trick. “You cannot change the dozens around the house,” I said. The smell of the pine roof turned my stomach. But I was pleased to see that the tips of the petals had retained their given pigment. I hoped she noticed, too.

After that day, the woman would not speak to me. My mother never came home, and the woman, she never left. We lived in silence. The colored sunflowers and their water dried up. Neither of us moved the jars. They stood as a line between us. She stayed on one side, in the kitchen. She baked and blew about. Still windlike, she was, but I could hear a hint of moan in her movements. I stayed on the other side of the jars, near the door, so I could come and go as I pleased.

Early one spring, I stood on the husks of sunflowers and examined the birch. I could feel seeds gathering beneath my feet. Soon they would push, green and stubby, through the soil. A black squirrel darted in front of me, followed closely by a red one. They chased each other up trees, they rolled and nipped. Small branches crashed down and thunked against the roof. The woman came outside and stood next to me.

Later that night, the woman made soup for me. Good and warm, clear and mushroomy. “It’s nice with croutons, go on, try it,” she said, and I did, to please her. She struck a match and I cupped my hand around it. Carefully, to create less wind, we moved in unison toward a candle. Both of us knew that we lit it for my mother, but neither of us spoke this aloud. My mother, my mother: gone.

The next morning, we were back to our old ways. But we did not fall silent ever again. I am grateful for that day of peace. Had those moments of forgiveness not passed between us, I might have felt guilty about her death.

That woman, she died in the only way possible for her. In a great wind, a hurricane. After all, only wind can extinguish wind. I climbed into the root cellar, calling for the woman to join me. But she wouldn’t. She said she would not let a storm drive her from her house (how I hated her, when she said that). As I pulled the trapdoor shut behind me, I saw her for the last time. Standing in the slanted rain and diagonal wind, she stared up at the sky. In the midst of all that power, she seemed a puff, a brief exhalation. I admired her stubbornness, despite its folly. Me, I sat in the dark hole, the smell of earth, onions, potatoes, and carrots, lulling me to sleep.

Since my mother and I had dug the root cellar at the edge of the sunflower patch, I heard the roof collapsing only as a low and unfamiliar thud. In retrospect, I recognize the moment of the woman’s death.

The pine roof snapped at the apex and tumbled into the house, burying the woman, the carpets, the shelves and dressers. Afterward, only one of her hands was visible, white and clutching. The hand was twisted in such a way that I could not tell if it was attached to her right or left arm. A girth of pine trunks covered the rest of her. Over the hand, I said: “Good-bye, woman.” I was surprised to feel so alone.

Although all the flowers and young birch had been uprooted and destroyed, it was satisfying to see my house, the house my mother built, returned to its original state. Roofless and open to the sky. The dead sunflowers stank as they decomposed. That smell will always remind me of hurricanes, be they wind or woman. These days, the pine trunks have rotted, and ivy once again covers the floor, forming strange bumps where it creeps over the broken remains of stove and sofa. Sparrows roost at the corners of the house, but the foxes, they never returned.

I went into the birch carrying a small sack of food. For weeks I wandered, sleeping in piles of dry leaves, eating the carrots, onions, and potatoes from the root cellar. Once, I stopped to make a bow and arrow, but upon completing the weapon, I threw it aside. I did not have the heart to kill rabbits. The woods were ragged from the storm, leaving animals no place to hide. Even the sun seemed fierce, with nothing to block it.

Finally, I reached the edge of the birch. Then I was very afraid. It had never occurred to me that the birch could end, would end. I believed them to stretch on forever, like the sky. I turned nineteen that day. And on that day, I met the man who called me willful.

He was tall and bowlegged and his shirt was red. The heel of his left boot was ground down, flattened. Walking with a gentle roll, from side to side, he relied too much on his left leg. Later, I would realize he was wavelike. Later, he would show me his collection of left boots, stored in a cabana by the seashore. One hundred and thirty-five boots, all brown. “I like brown,” he said, when I asked him why he didn’t try a different color. He had never replaced a right boot, but every three months, he changed the left.

He called me willful because I would not laugh at him. To me, he wasn’t funny. This he found incomprehensible. “I am a comedian,” he said, “I have to make you laugh.” He told me jokes about people I did not know, of Jew and Polack, St. Peter and some gates. “Why is any of this funny?” I asked him. Then he called me willful, and asked me if I had ever seen the ocean. “No,” I told him, “but I knew a woman who had eyes like a fish.”

As we walked toward the ocean (he claimed it was twenty-five miles away), he asked me many questions. After the fifth mile, he told me that in addition to being willful, I was half-crazy and had been born without a sense of humor. I said that perhaps humor had to do with place and what a person was used to. I asked him if he had ever found crows funny when they waddled around a carcass. Or a stream reforming itself around a rock. Or his mother while she peacefully snored a tune. When he said no, I told him all of those things made me laugh. He shrugged.

There was a song he sang to me. The only part I remember is, “. . . and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China, and just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her, she gets you on her wavelength, and lets the river answer that you’ll always be her lover.” It was a sad song, but he laughed at the end of it. He told me that large audiences scared him so he was not a successful comedian. I had never been in a room with more than two other people. When I saw the ocean for the first time, I thought of the word he had taught me: audience. So big that it frightens. The birch seemed shrunken and distant to me then.

The cabana smelled like old, dead rabbits. Sideways, the man smiled and said, “See how I wore those left boots out. See how they rest in their grave by the sea.” For an instant, I hesitated. Maybe he was not a good man. But besides the windy woman, he was the only person I had ever met, and so I stayed. I do not count my mother as a person I have met because she seems to be a part of me, someone who was always there, someone who will always remain.

That night, I slept behind the cabana, a brown left-boot for my pillow. At first, the sound of the ocean kept me awake, and I thought about my mother. She had seen the sea; she had come across it as a child. “That makes you a Narrowback,” she said. I remembered a story she told me, one day, as we hunted in the birch. “Let me tell you about how the Irishman got the soup,” she said. We crawled on our bellies toward a nervous grey squirrel. At the sound of her voice, the squirrel scurried away, but we didn’t care. Sometimes while hunting, we purposefully misshot an arrow or misthrew a rock.

When my mother told a story, I lived it. Under a net of branches, she began: “Once there was an Irishman who left home and went to America by boat.” The forest floor suddenly pitched beneath me. I smelled salt; I heard the creak of wood, the whip of sail.

“When the boat got to America, it stopped at a small island. The Irishman was sent to a hospital where he lay in bed for weeks. Every day a nurse came and fed him soup.” Tasting gritty barley, I smacked my lips. Soup. My mother did not describe the nurse, but I saw her—pale, with a green vein running from the top of her forehead to the scoop between her eyes.

“One day the Irishman did not feel like eating so he gave the soup, untouched, back to the nurse. She coaxed and threatened him, but still he refused to eat. Finally she left. But she returned that night to give him an enema that the doctor had ordered.

“The next day, another man was placed in the bed next to the Irishman. ‘How do they treat you here?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ the Irishman said, turning on his side, ‘They’re pretty good. But make sure you eat the soup, because if you don’t you’ll get it anyway, right up the arse.’”

At the end of the story, my mother laughed and laughed. I saw inside her: the arch of pink throat, canyons of molars. “Life is like that, Aileen,” my mother said. “Sometimes you get things you don’t want.” She turned away from me, but I knew she was crying.

I had never met a man but often read about them. My mother gave me biology books so I could learn their funny anatomy. It pleased me to discover that water makes up ninety-eight percent of human bodies. When I asked about my father, my mother said she had known him for one year. She said I had his brown eyes and soft skin. He was from a place called Brazil, and before he left, he gave my mother a jade ring. I wear it now, on my thumb.

The man who called me willful was the first real male I knew. For someone who wanted to make others laugh, he was very somber. I wondered if all men were like him. Or maybe just comedians.

While it was still dark, the man woke me. “Time to get to the boat,” he whispered, although there was no one to hear us except the surf. We walked another three miles, following the water as it funneled into two spits, two arms of land. The closer the arms drew to each other, the calmer the water in between. How soothing my mother’s arms had felt. I wanted to be embraced and pacified, like the water. I walked closer to the man, admiring his thick hair and curvy lips. Steering me, he put his hand on my back.

We reached a harbor filled with quiet, rocking ships. Light fell on the water in washboard shapes. The man said, “We have to be careful. Some people get uptight if they see me near the boats.” When he said this, I slipped into my hunting legs. He was surprised by how soundlessly I moved. Once, he lost me even though I stood right next to him. When I touched his shoulder to let him know where I was, he grabbed and shook me. “Stop making a fool of me,” he growled. I almost turned and erased myself into the darkness, but the sight of the boats and the idea of getting on one was exciting.

The boat we borrowed was about twenty feet long and had a motor. It was loud and created vibrations that thrummed up my legs into my stomach. I wanted to examine the motor, but did not want the man to know it was unfamiliar to me. “Sit up front,” he ordered, and slapped his hand on a red padded seat. We set off. Even more than the boat, the red seat indicated adventure.

To our left hung a slip of moon, strap of stars. To our right, a streamer of pink dawn showed. And so, in the middle of night and day, up the channel of water, we puttered. The farther away the harbor, the wider the distance between the two arms of land. I felt released, let go.

After a while the land disappeared, and it seemed that we cut through the center of the ocean. Gradually, the pink dawn deepened to red and tinted the tips of the waves. The water curled and sank. It grew up, up, and out; five-foot swells lifted and dropped the boat, as if it were a toy. And all around, the glinting sea, the marcelled waves. I left my seat and leaned over the side of the boat, enjoying the spray foaming against my cheeks, rinsing my eyes. Faster, the man drove, and the motor churned strongly under my feet. At times, the little boat soared up, and I felt as if I would float away. But the waves slammed the boat down again, rattling my teeth, pushing me deep inside ribs and against spine. The sun climbed; the foam turned sapphire. The motor droned over the slam and suck of waves; water shone on my forehead. Wind drenched me, blasted and snapped. I was happy. And still, all around us stretched the sea.

The will of the ocean crept up on me. As I looked at the water, it occurred to me that there was nothing else to see. Even the sky seemed like a type of ocean, only dry. I was adrift, lost. All this water—the same stuff that filled me. Staring into the chop, I suddenly felt as if my body had sprung a leak. What was inside me was also all around. Was I now empty?

Two hours had passed. The man watched me. “You look green,” he said. “You’re probably seasick.” He smiled; he rolled from side to side effortlessly, communing with the sea, its dips and crests. He was beautiful.

I noticed that I had not moved in some time. I noticed that I sat on the floor of the boat. To myself, I said, “Raise your hands to your head,” but they would not lift. I flopped about. The sea so big; me, so small. It made me angry, that water stealing my will. Standing, I faced the ocean and locked my knees. Twice I fell to the deck because the waves wanted me there. Both times I forced myself to stand again. The weighted will-less feeling bore down on my back. Really, I wanted to lie down, to be rocked and pummeled by a force stronger than my own. I found my weakness strangely relieving.

I rested my head on the gunwale of the boat. If I looked out to sea, my mind whirled. My eyes closed although I willed them open; they loathed the sight of the ocean. Faced with that infinity, they simply refused to see.

The man began driving the boat in tight circles. He seemed to think this would improve my condition. It didn’t. For hours, I was sick over the side of the boat. But when I slept it was with one hand dangling in the cold water to let the ocean know I was still there; I had not given up. Once, I awakened to sharp bites on my fingers. The ocean was still there, too.

My seasickness lasted ninety days. An ingenious capacity for change—that was my foe, the ocean. As soon as I grew accustomed to one motion, another took its place. The man enjoyed taking care of me, peeling oranges, squeezing pits from the fibrous seams and cloudy skin. In the beginning, fruit was all I could stomach. He wiped my mouth and rubbed my back; he carried me to the edge of the boat and dipped my feet in the water. Twice a day, he dangled oranges a few feet from where I lay so I had to crawl to eat. If he had not done this, I wouldn’t have moved at all. Sometimes he sang to me. He had a beautiful voice, like the sea on a wild, choppy day.

When we ran out of gas, we floated. There was fresh water and canned food stored in the hull of the boat. Surviving on syrupy pears, tuna, Spam, crackers, and olives did not bother me or the man. After the first month, I ate voraciously.

We slept under a maze of stars. One night, the man pulled me against his chest and sang about a place called Mississippi Goddam and having the right to sing the blues. The tunes warbled behind his breastbone, wordless and deep. When he sang, his face changed. He was a different person, someone smaller, softer. Afterward, he pressed his lips against mine. My jaw muscles cramped with a curious blend of hurt and want, like they had when, as a child, I ate lemons. Every night, the man pressed something else of his against me. I thought of lemons and their thick dented skins. In the birch, I had used my teeth to rake the sour pulp away from the rind. I did the same to the man’s body, with less force. He liked it. I could tell from the way he subsided.

I asked the man to tell me the name of every fish we saw, of every constellation and piece of kelp. There was one element he could not name. A phosphorescence that appeared as darting spots, just under the waves, always in the morning. When I asked him what it was, he answered, “I don’t know.” Something inside of me leaped. I loved that unnamed glow, that thing that would not be known. Every night, before we went to sleep, the man said to me, “I do not love you; I have nothing to give.” I nodded and smiled.

By the end of the third month, my will returned. I, too, could stand and roll with the waves. I learned not to fight the ocean, but to let the water inside me float freely. I twinned my insides to the sea. I enjoyed the ocean’s span; I enjoyed it as an audience. It was then the man and I fought.

He told me unending jokes; there was no place to hide. Once I even jumped into the water to escape him, but he dragged me back to the boat by my hair. “You’ll stay with me,” he said. “Or I’ll grind you down like a left boot.” One thing I knew about my will was that uncontested, it slackened. With someone to fight, it grew bold.

Without warning, in the fifth month, the man lost his will. Awakening, I was ready for battle. But all day he lay on his side with his eyes closed and murmured softly to himself. “My right heel is flattening,” he said. “I don’t want to go back, they won’t laugh at me, they won’t like my jokes.” It was not the sea that caused his will to sicken, nor was it me. Something inside of him slumped, something he could not see or name. Not knowing what else to do, I watched him and forced peaches and tuna down his throat. Before I lay down beside him to sleep, I asked him to tell me that he did not love me or have anything to give. He stayed silent. So I said it for him. “You do not love me; you have nothing to give.” Usually this made him cry. Fifteen hours a day he slept. Nothing I did affected him. His will was entirely gone.

One night, as the man slept, I pinned his body under my own. Holding his nose closed, I pried open his mouth and breathed into him. With my air, I gave him will. Like waves, his chest rose and fell. Rushing out of me, into him, my breath.

When the sun shone down on us, he sat up, gleeful. I had expected myself to weaken with each breath I gave. But I felt fortified. So did he. He embraced me, saying I had saved him. He called me a saint, a treasure, and sang a song called “Fine and Mellow.” With confidence, he cracked jokes, striding up and down the length of the boat, his boots sounding like vigorous surf. Often I would find him gazing foolishly at me. When he told me “I do not love you; I have nothing to give,” I did not believe him.

On a rainy morning, the man said it was time to go back to land because we were almost out of food. He removed two massive oars from the hull of the boat—one for me, one for him—and we began to row. After seven days we sighted land, off to the south. All those months, we had traveled no more than forty miles into the ocean, then drifted about in a large, messy circle. When I saw that trim shoreline, I felt close to the man. I wanted to be with him always. “Today, the foam takes the shape of a bride,” he said, grasping me jealously around the waist. Nodding, I felt sure of our future. I told him how home smelled red and gold, like fox tail.

We arrived back at the same harbor we had left from. There were the quiet, rocking ships. Dawn lingered on the horizon, a pink flush. I felt as though everything had changed. The man docked the boat but did not secure it, and I put the last can of peaches in my pocket before jumping onto land. I was ready to go where the man asked, ready to put my will aside. Placing his hand flat against my chest, he smiled. “Aileen,” he said. “I do not love you; I have nothing to give.” And then he turned and ran.

I chased him, following those run-down boot prints. He shouted at me, “I don’t love you! Leave me alone!” and hid like a squirrel in trees and bushes. The trees, they remembered me, and told me where to find him. If I asked nicely, they allowed me to carve messages into their trunks: “Love is an act of will. You will love me. You will.” Still the man ran, shouting his message: “I don’t love you; leave me alone!” I never heard him, because I didn’t want to.

When he reached the birch, I stopped chasing and watched him dart into the woods. His red shirt flashed between the white trunks; his boots thudded on the leaf-strewn ground. I knew what I had to do.

For shafts, I used willows. Striking quartz against slate, I whittled stone points. Twined hanks of my own hair served as string. And a young yew branch, curved by the pressure of my hair tied at either end, formed a bow. I caught a seagull and plucked it to feather my arrows.

With the weapon finished, I gathered red berries and stained my face in fat stripes. I wove a belt of poison ivy and ate the can of peaches for strength. Then I went into the birch, following the man’s clear tracks at a run.

I found him just where the trees said he would be. He was standing, leaning against an old birch. From ten feet away, I notched my arrow and took aim. He heard the whine of the bow and snapped his head up. That twang and release, the arrow’s thin speed. I thought of my mother as she threw rocks into trees, warning chipmunks, so they could escape her. Tasting blood, my body filled and swelled. I willed that arrow to its mark.

It sank into the edge of the man’s shirt, pinning his right arm to the tree. Around the arrowhead, the cloth wrinkled. The man opened his eyes and looked at the willow-shaft. When he moved his left hand toward it, I loosed another arrow, forcing both of his arms into stillness. With twenty-five arrows, I fastened his shirt and pants to the birch. I shot two arrows into the pointed toes of his boots, and rooted him to the ground.

“Aileen,” he said, as I crawled on my belly and elbows toward him. “You’ve gone crazy. I told you all along that I don’t love you; I have nothing to give. You refused to hear me.”

My will surged and blood beat against my ears. I felt sure they were turning red. Until he agreed to love me, I would keep him pinned to the tree. Folding my arms, I sat down at his feet and looked up at him. He seemed to know my plan and sighed. I sensed a joke coming.

Was that a whip of sail? I closed my eyes and felt the roll of the sea. I saw my mother’s arch of throat, heard her tight laugh. The underside of the man’s chin hung soft and sallow. I used my hands to push off the ground. I stood.

From the sleeve of his left arm, I removed three arrows. “You can get free now,” I said and walked into the birch, leaving my bow on the ground. The next day, I was back inside my mother’s house.

“Life is like that, Aileen,” she had said. “Sometimes you get things you don’t want.” What if she had reversed the words, an alteration, here, then there? Life is like that, Aileen. Sometimes you don’t get the things you want. Are the meanings the same? Is there any difference? I don’t know.

Those were his words: I don’t know. One day, at sea, the man asked me if I prayed. I said no, but I think about how to be good, to do good; I think about keeping my will strong so I do not get something I don’t want. Never had I thought to rearrange my mother’s words. I had not foreseen the day when I would squelch my own will and lose the thing I wanted.

A week later, I went back to that old birch. I did not expect to find the man still pinned to the tree, but I knew something of him would remain. His boots were there, rooted to the ground. He must have slipped from them, leaving the woods in socks so I could not track him. It had wounded him to leave the right boot, that I was sure of. Searching for my bow, I found a squirrel’s cache of nuts and filled my pockets. Both boots I carried home with me. I imagined the man walking through the woods, my bow slung over his shoulder, thinking of me.

And so I returned to the birch, but not alone, to live in my mother’s house. My daughter curled inside me then, a wad, a bundle. Already she can eat with both her right and left hands. When she is older, I will tell her about the sea. I will string a bow for her and feel pride in her straight back. Maybe she will lure squirrels into her arms; maybe she will take pity on the rabbits. I don’t know. But I know to teach her to wield a strong will, and I know to teach her to let go. That is enough for a beginning.