THE DRY SEASON was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take the light away, mamou! Please, mamou, take away the light!” The child’s father went across the room on hands and knees and held him against his body, saying, “Mamou will be home soon, Torippi. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. Whe the day began, Torip was hot and weak and dull-witted.
Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that. Don’t fuss. My grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.
Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you’re here, Hunter.” Modona said, “So you’re here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife Hwette is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew they said Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking she’s hurt and not able to make her way back.”
The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who’d been in Ounmalin said they’d seen Hwette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”
“I don’t think they could be altogether correct,”† Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Hwette.”
The hunter said with a smile, “Are there women who look like Hwette?”
Kamedan was at a loss. He did not like Modona. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and the hunter went on his way, still grinning.
Torip lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha said it was a summer cold, there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. But in the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “Mamou, mamou! come here! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke up and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened a little and the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the worst of it, he’s over the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”
Kamedan went to the lofts, but his mind would not turn fully to his work.
Sahelm was helping him that day. Usually he observed and followed Kamedan attentively, learning the art; this day he saw Kamedan making mistakes, and once he had to say, “I think that may not be altogether correct,” to prevent Kamedan from jamming the machine on a miswound bobbin. Kamedan threw the switch to stop the power, and then sat down on the floor with his head between his hands.
Sahelm sat down not far away from him, crosslegged.
The sun was at noon. The moon was opposite it, directly opposed, pulling down.‡
Kamedan said, “Five days ago my wife Hwette left the Obsidian heyimas, where she’d been at Blood Clown practice. In the heyimas they say she said she was going to walk on Spring Mountain. But it was late to go there and get back before dark. In the Blood Lodge some women say she was going to meet some dancers in a clearing on Spring Mountain, but didn’t come. Her mother says she went to Kastoha-na to stay in her brother’s wife’s household for a few days. Her sister says probably she went down the Valley, the way she used to do before she married, walking alone to the seacoast and back. Modona says that people have seen her in Ounmalin.”
Sahelm listened.
Kamedan said, “The child wakes in fever under the moon and calls to her. The grandmother says nothing is the matter. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to look for Hwette. I don’t want to leave the child. I must do something and there’s nothing I can do. Thank you for listening to me, Sahelm.”
He got up and turned the power of the loom back on. Sahelm got up, and they worked together. The thread broke and broke again, a bobbin caught and caught again. Sahelm said, “This isn’t a good day for weavers.”
Kamedan went on working until the loom jammed and he had to stop. He said then, “Leave me to untangle this mess. Maybe I can do that.”
Sahelm said, “Let me do it. That kid§ might be glad to see you.”
Kamedan would not go, and Sahelm thought it better to leave him. He went from the lofts to the herb gardens down by Moon Creek. He had seen Duhe there in the morning, and she was still there. She was sitting under the oak Nehaga¶ eating fresh lettuce. Sahelm came under the shade of the oak and said, “So you’re here, Doctor.” She said, “So you’re here, man of the Fourth House, sit down.” He sat down near her.
She squeezed lemon juice on lettuce leaves and gave them to him. They finished the lettuce she had washed, and she cut the sweet lemon in quarters and they ate it. They went down to Moon Creek to wash their hands, and returned to the large shade of Nehaga. Duhe had been watering, weeding, pruning, and harvesting herbs. The air was fragrant where she was, and where the baskets she had filled with cutting were in the shade covered with netting, and where she had laid rosemary and catnip and lemon balm and rue on linen cloth in the sunlight to dry. Some cats were hanging around, wanting to get at the catnip as the sun released its scent. She gave a sprig to each cat once, and if the cat came back she threw pebbles at it to keep it off. An old grey woman-cat kept coming back; she was so fat the pebbles did not sting her and so greedy nothing frightened her.
Duhe asked, “Where has the day taken you on the way here?”
Sahelm replied, “Into the broadloom lofts, where I’m learning the craft with Kamedan.”
“Hwette’s husband,” said Duhe. “Has she come back yet?”
“Where would she come back from?”
“Some people were saying that she went to the Springs of the River.”
“I wonder, did she tell them she was going there?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Did any of them see her going there, I wonder?”
“Nobody said so,” Duhe said, and laughed as if puzzled.
Sahelm said, “Here’s how it is: she went five different ways at the same time. People have told Kamedan that she went to walk alone on Spring Mountain, to meet to dance on Spring Mountain, to Kastoha, to Ounmalin, and to the Ocean. His mind keeps trying to follow her. It seems she said nothing to him about going anywhere before she went.”
Duhe threw an oakgall at the fat cat, who was coming at the catnip from the southeast. The cat went half a stone’s-throw away, sat down with her back turned to them, and began to wash her hind legs. Duhe watched the cat and said, “That’s strange, that story you tell. Everybody knows where Hwette is and nobody knows.”
“Kamedan says the child wakes and cries in the night, and the grandmother says nothing is the matter.”
“Shamsha has brought up three children. Very likely she’s right,” said Duhe, whose mind was not very much on Hwette, but mostly on the catnip and the cat, the hot sunlight and the shade, Sahelm and herself.
Duhe had lived about forty years in the Third House at that time.** She was a short woman with large breasts, heavy hips, sleek, fine arms and legs, a slow, calm manner, a secretive nature, an intelligent and well-disciplined mind. The Lodge name†† she had given herself was Sleepwalker. A girl, now thirteen, had made her a mother,‡‡ but she had not married the father, an Obsidian man, nor any other man. She and her daughter lived in her sister’s household in After the Earthquake House, but she was mostly outdoors or in the Doctors Lodge.
She said, “You have a gift, Sahelm.”
He said, “I have a burden.”
“Bring it to the Doctors, not the Millers.”
Sahelm pointed: the old fat cat was approaching the catnip slowly from the southwest. Duhe threw a piece of bark at her, but she made a rush at the catnip nonetheless. Duhe got up and chased her down to the creek, and came back hot and sat down by Sahelm in the shaded grass again.
He said, “How could a person go five ways at once?”
“A person could go one way and four people could be mistaken.”
“Or lying.”
“What would they be lying for?”
“Some people are malicious.”
“Has Kamedan done something to bring malice against him?”
“No,” Sahelm said. “Kamedan is without malice. But Modona . . .”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Besides malice,” the doctor said, “there’s laziness. It’s easier to explain than to wonder. . . . And there’s vanity. People don’t like to know they don’t know where she went. So they make up knowledge: She went to Spring Mountain—She went to Wakwaha—She went to the moon! I don’t know where she went, but I know some of the reasons why people who don’t know would say they know.”
“Why didn’t she herself tell anybody before she went?”
“That I don’t know! Do you know Hwette well?”
“No.”
“When they married, people called them Awar and Bulekwe.§§ When they danced on the Wedding Night, they were like those who dance on the rainbow. People watched in wonder.”
Again they sat in silence. Duhe pointed: the old fat cat was sneaking along in the wild oats above the creekbed, coming back towards the catnip. Sahelm threw an oakgall at her. It rolled between the cat’s front and hind legs, and she leaped in the air and rushed away down the creekbed. Sahelm laughed, and Duhe laughed with him. Up in Nehaga a bluejay screeched and a squirrel yelled back. Bees in the lavender bushes nearby made a noise like always boiling.
Sahelm said, “I wish you hadn’t said she went to the moon.”
“I’m sorry I said that. It was spoken without sense. A bubble word.”
“The child too is Obsidian,”¶¶ he said.
Not knowing that Hwette’s child was ill, she did not know why he said that. She was tired of talking about Hwette, and sleepy after eating lettuce in the long, hot, late afternoon. She said, “Will you keep the cats off for the next while, if you have nothing else you’d rather do? I want to go to sleep.”
She did not sleep altogether. Sometimes she watched Sahelm from within her eyelashes and under her hair. He sat still, without motion, his legs crossed, his wrists on his knees, his back straight as a fir. Although he was much younger than Duhe, he did not look young, sitting still. When he spoke he seemed a boy; when he was still he seemed an old man, an old stone.
After she had dozed she sat up, rested, and said, “You sit well.”
He said, “I was well trained to sit. The teacher of my sprouting years in the Yellow Adobe heyimas of Kastoha told me to sit still long enough to see and hear every sight and sound in all the six directions, so I myself would become the seventh.”
“What did you see?” she asked. “What did you hear?”
“Just now here? Everything, nothing. My mind wasn’t still. It wouldn’t sit. It was running here and there all the time like the squirrel up there in the branches.”
Duhe laughed. She picked up a duck’s feather from the grasses, a down feather, lighter than breath. She said, “Your mind the squirrel. Hwette the lost acorn.”
Sahelm said, “You’re right. I was trying to see her.”
Duhe blew the feather into the air with a puff of breath and it floated back down to the grasses. She said, “The air’s beginning to cool.” She got up and went to see to the drying herbs, heaping them onto basket trays or tying them into bunches to hang. She stacked the trays, which were triple-footed so they stood one on the other without crushing what was in them. They were light but awkward to carry, stacked up, and Sahelm helped her carry them to the storehouse the Doctors Lodge was using.*** It stood southwest of the northwest common place, a half-dugout with stone walling and redwood roof. All the back room of it was stored with herbs drying and dried. Duhe sang††† as she entered this room. As she stored and hung the herbs she continued to whisper the song.
Standing in the doorway, Sahelm said, “The smells in here are strong. Too strong.”
Duhe said, “Before mind saw, it smelled, and tasted, and touched. Even hearing is a most delicate touching. Often, in this Lodge, a person must close their eyes in order to learn.”
The young man said, “Sight is the sun’s gift.”
The doctor said, “And the moon’s gift as well.”
She gave him a sprig of sweet rosemary to wear in his hair, and as she gave it to him, said, “What you fear is what you need, I think. I begrudge you to the Millers,‡‡‡ man of Kastoha-na!”
He took the sprig of rosemary and smelled it, saying nothing.
Duhe left the storehouse, going to After the Earthquake House.
Sahelm went along to Between the Orchards House, the last house of the middle arm of town, where he was staying since Kailikusha had sent him away from her household.§§§ A Yellow Adobe family in Between the Orchards, having a spare room and balcony, had given them to Sahelm to use; one of the women of that house was his cousin and had grown up with him in Kastoha. He cooked dinner for the family that evening, and after they had cleared away he walked back inward and across towards Hardcinder House. The sun had set behind his back, the full moon was rising before his eyes above the northeast range. He stopped in the gardens where he saw the moon between two houses. He stood still with his gaze fixed on the moon¶¶¶ as it heightened and whitened in the dark blue sky, shining.
People from another place**** were coming in along the southeast arm there, three donkeys, three women, four men. They all carried backpacks and wore hats over their ears. One of the men played a four-note finger-drum slung on a cord round his neck as they walked along. One of the women piped a few notes of a tune now and then on a fife. A person up on a first-floor balcony greeted these strangers, saying, “Hey, people of the Valley, so you are here!” Other people came out on other porches and balconies to see so many strangers going by, and some children ran out to follow them. The strangers stopped, and the man with the finger-drum tapped it with his nails to make a hard clear sound, playing a rain piece, and called out aloud, “Hey, people of this Telina-na town, so you are fortunately and beautifully here! We’re coming in among you thus on four feet and two feet, twenty-six feet in all, dragging our heels with weariness, dancing on our toes for joy, speaking and braying and singing and piping and drumming and thumping as we go, until we get to the right place and the right time, and there and then we stop, we stay, we paint, we dress, and we change the world for you!”
A person called from a balcony, “What play?”
The drummer called back, “As you like it!”
People began to call out plays they wanted to hear. The drummer called back to each one, “Yes, we’ll play that one, yes, yes, we’ll play that one,” promising to play them all, the next day, on the middle common place.
A woman called from a window, “This is the right place, players, this is the right time!” The drummer laughed and gestured to one of the women, who came out of the group and stood in the moonlight where it ran bright through the air and along the ground across the gardens between the houses. The drummer brought up his dance-drum and drummed five and five, and the players all sang the Continuing Tone,†††† and the woman lifted her arms up high. The beat changed to four and four, and she danced a scene from the play Tobbe, dancing the ghost of the lost wife. As she danced she cried out again and again in a high faint voice. She sank down into a bar of darkness, the shadow of a house, and seemed so to vanish. The drummer changed the beat; the piper lifted her fife and began to play a stamp-dance; and so calling and playing the players went on towards the common place, but only nine of them went.
The woman who had danced‡‡‡‡ went along alone in the shadow of the unlighted house until she came beside Hardcinder House, among the big oleanders, white-flowered. There in the white light a man stood still with eyes fixed on the moon. So she had seen him standing with his back to the players while they played and sang and she danced the ghost’s dance.
She stood and watched him watch the moon for a long time from the shadow of the oleanders. She went then, following shadows all along, to the edge of Cheptash Vineyard, and sat down in the mixed dark and moonlight near the trunk of a long-armed vine. From there she watched the still man. When the moon was shining higher in the sky, she went along the side of the vineyard to the corner of the apricot orchard behind Generously Dwelling House, and stood in the shadow of the porches of that house, watching him. He had not moved yet when she slipped away, still following shadow, towards the galleries on the common place where the others of her troupe had camped.
Sahelm stood still, head now held back, face lifted, eyes looking at the moon steadily. To him the blink of his eyes was a slow drumbeat. Of nothing else was he aware but the light of the moon and the drumbeat of the dark.
Kamedan came to him saying his name, late, when all lights in houses were out and the moon was above the southwestern range. “Sahelm! Sahelm! Sahelm!” he said. The fourth time he said his name, “Sahelm!” the visionary moved, cried out, staggered, and fell to hands and knees. Kamedan helped him stand up, saying to him, “Go to the Doctors Lodge, Sahelm, please, go there for me.”
“I have seen her,” Sahelm said.
Kamedan said, “Please, go to the Doctors for me. I’m afraid to move the child, I’m afraid to leave him. The others are crazy, they won’t do anything!”
Looking at Kamedan, Sahelm said, “I saw Hwette. I saw your wife. She stood near your house. By the northeast windows.”
Kamedan said, “The child is dying.” He let go his hold of Sahelm’s arms. Sahelm could not stand up, but fell again to his knees. Kamedan turned away and ran back to Hardcinder House.
He hurried into his household rooms, wrapped up Torip in the bedding, and carried him to the outer door. Shamsha followed him, a blanket pulled round her and her grey hair over her eyes, saying, “Are you crazy? The child is perfectly all right, what are you doing, where are you going with him?” She called to Fefinum and Tai, shouting, “Your sister’s husband is crazy, make him stop!” But Kamedan was already out of the house, running to the Doctors Lodge.
No one was in the house of the Lodge but Duhe, who could not sleep under the full moon. She was reading in lamplight.
Kamedan spoke at the doorway and came in, carrying the child. He said, “This child of the First House is very ill, I think.”
Duhe got up, saying as doctors say, “Well, well, well, well, let’s see about this,” slowly. She showed Kamedan a cane cot to set the child down on. “A choking? A burn? Fever, is it?” she asked, and while Kamedan answered, she watched Torip, who was half-awake, bewildered and whimpering. Kamedan said in haste, “Last night and the night before he was in high fever. In the daylight the fever goes away, but when the moon rises he calls to his mother over and over. In the household they pay no attention, they say nothing is wrong with him.”
Duhe said, “Come away into the light.” She tried to make Kamedan leave the child, but he would not go out of reach of him. She told him, “Please talk quietly if you can. That person is sleepy, and frightened a little. How long has he lived in the Moon’s House now?”§§§§
“Three winters,” Kamedan said. “His name is Torip, but he has a nickname, his mother calls him Monkeyflower.”
“Well, well, well, well,” said Duhe. “Yes, a little person with gold skin and a pretty little mouth—I see the monkeyflower. There isn’t any fever just now in this little flower, or not much. Bad dreams, is it, and crying and waking in the night, is that how it’s been?” She talked slowly and softly, and Kamedan did the same when he answered, saying, “Yes, he cries, and he burns in my arms.”
The doctor said, “You see, it’s quiet here, and the light is quiet, and a person goes to sleep very easily. . . . Let him sleep now. Come over here.” Kamedan followed her this time. When they were on the other side of the room, near the lamp, Duhe said, “Now, I didn’t understand well, please tell me again what’s been wrong.”
Kamedan began to weep, standing there. Tears ran down his face. He said, “She doesn’t come. He calls, she doesn’t hear, she doesn’t come. She’s gone.”
Duhe’s mind had been in the book she had been reading, and then her attention had gone all to the child, so only as he wept and spoke did she bring into her mind now the things Sahelm had spoken of in the afternoon under Nehaga.
Kamedan went on, speaking louder. “The grandmother says that nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the matter—the mother gone and the child sick and nothing is the matter!”
“Hush,” Duhe said. “Let him sleep, please. Listen now. It’s not good carrying him about here and there, is it. Let him sleep the night here, and you stay with him, of course. If medicine will help, we have medicine. If a bringing-in would be good for him,¶¶¶¶ we’ll hold a bringing-in, maybe for both of you. We’ll do whatever seems the right thing to do. We’ll decide that in daylight, after talking and thinking and watching. Just now here, the best thing to do is sleep, I think. Since I can’t do that when the moon’s full in the sky, I’ll be sitting on the porch by the door there. If the little one cries out in dream or waking I’ll be here, I’ll be awake, listening and hearing.” While she spoke she was setting a mattress down on the floor beside the cane cot, and she said, “Now, my brother of the Serpentine, please lie down. You’re as tired as your child is. If you want to go on talking, you see, I’m sitting here in the doorway; you can lie down and talk, I can sit here and talk. The night’s cooling off at last, it’ll be better for sleeping. Are you comfortable?”
Kamedan thanked her, and lay in silence for some while.
Duhe sang in undertone on a matrix word,***** making an interval and place for his silence. Her voice control was excellent; she sang always more faintly until the song became inaudible breath, and then stillness. After a while she stretched and yawned as she sat by the door, so that Kamedan would know the song was done if he wanted to talk.
He said, “I don’t understand the people in that house, this child’s mother’s house.”
Duhe said something so that he knew she was listening.
He went on, “When a Miller marries into a family whose work is all in the Five Houses,††††† if they’re conservative people, respectable, superstitious, you know, that can be difficult. Hard on everybody. I understood that, I understood how they felt. That’s why I joined the Cloth Art, took up weaving, when I married. My gift is mechanical, that’s how it is. You can’t deny your gift, can you? All you can do is accept it and use it, fit it into your life with the others, the people you live with, your people. When I saw how people from Telina were going to Kastoha for canvas because nobody here was using the canvas loom or doing much broadcloth weaving here, I thought, there’s the place for me, that’s work they’ll understand and approve of, using my own gift and my training as a Miller. Four years now I’ve been a member of the Cloth Art. Who else in Telina is making sheeting, canvas, broadloom linens? Since Houne left the lofts, I do all that work. Now Sahelm and Asole-Verou are learning the art with me, doing good work. I’m their teacher. But none of that does me any good in my wife’s house. They don’t care about my work, it’s Miller’s work. I’m not respectable, it’s dangerous, they don’t trust me. They wish she’d married any other man. The child, he’s a Miller’s child. And only a boy, anyway. They don’t care for him. Five days, five days she’s been gone without a word, and they don’t worry about it, they say don’t worry, what are you upset about, they say, oh, she always used to walk down to the coast alone! They make me a fool—the fool they want me to be. The moon rises and he cries out for her and they say, nothing’s wrong! Go back to sleep, fool!”
His voice had grown louder, and the child stirred a little. He fell silent.
After a while Duhe said in a quiet voice, “Please tell me how it was that Hwette left.”
Kamedan said, “I came into the house from working at the East Fields generator. They called me over there, there was a consultation, you know some work needs to be done there, and people in the Milling Art had to talk and decide about it. It took all day. I came home and Tai was cooking dinner. Nobody else was home yet. I said, ‘Where are Hwette and Monkeyflower?’ He said, ‘He’s with my wife and daughter. She went up onto Spring Mountain.’ Pretty soon Fefinum came in with both the children, from the gardens. The grandmother came in from somewhere. The grandfather showed up too, though he doesn’t live with us. We ate together. I went over up the Spring Mountain way to meet Hwette coming home. She never came. She never came that night, or since.”
The doctor said, “Tell me what you think about this, Kamedan.”
“I think she went off with someone. Some person that walked with her. I don’t think she meant to stay away, stay with them. Nobody’s missing, that I’ve heard about. I haven’t heard that any man is staying away somewhere or hasn’t come home from somewhere. But it might not be far. She could be in the woods, on the hunting side, in the hills. Maybe at some summer place, up high. So many people are up in the hills this time of year, nobody really knows where anybody is. She might be staying with some people at a summerhouse. Or maybe she went on from where they were dancing, went on a ways to be alone, and got hurt. People can trip and fall, break an ankle, in those canyons. It’s wild there on the south side and southeast side of Spring Mountain. All those paths are bad, nothing but hunters’ paths, it’s hard not to get lost there. Once you get round on the wrong side of Spring Mountain it’s very confusing. I ended up once coming into Chukulmas when I thought I’d been going southwest all day. I couldn’t believe it was Chukulmas—I thought I’d blundered into some town over in Osho Valley, a foreign town, and I saw Chukulmas Tower but I kept thinking what’s that doing here, I couldn’t make sense of it. I had got turned around. It could have happened that Hwette did the opposite thing, she meant to turn back here and kept going the wrong way, she might be over there outside the Valley, with the Osho people, not sure how to get home. Or what worries me the most, you know—if she has hurt herself—if she broke an ankle, and is where nobody can hear her—The rattlesnake. I can’t think when I think of the rattlesnake.”‡‡‡‡‡
Kamedan stopped talking. Duhe said nothing more for some time. She said at last, “Maybe some people should be going up on Spring Mountain calling out. Maybe there’s a dog that knows Hwette and would help find her if she’s there.”
“Her mother and sister and the others say that would be foolish, they all say she went down the Valley to the Mouths of the Na, or up to the Springs. Fefinum is certain that she went downriver. She used to do that. Probably she’s on the way home now. I’m a fool to worry this way, I know. But the child kept waking and crying to her.”
Duhe did not answer. Presently she began to sing under her voice, a Serpentine blessing song:
|
Where grass grows, go well, go easily. Where grass grows, go well. |
Kamedan knew the song. He did not sing with her, but listened to the song. She sang it very quietly and let her voice become fainter until the song became inaudible breath. After that they spoke no more, and Kamedan slept.
In the morning the little boy woke early and stared all around himself for a while, wondering. The only thing he saw that he knew was his father, sleeping beside the cot. Monkeyflower had never slept up on a cot with legs, and felt as if he might fall out of bed, but he liked the feeling. He lay still for a while, and then climbed down off the cot, stepped over his father’s legs, and went to the door of the room to look out. There was a woman he did not know curled up asleep in the porch there, so he went the other direction, to the inner door, into the second room. There he saw a lot of beautiful glass jars and bottles and containers of various colors and shapes, many ceramic bowls and holders, and several grinders with handles to turn. He turned all the handles he could reach, and then took down off the low shelves first one colored glass jar and then another, until he had a great many of them on the floor. There he began to arrange them. Some of them had something inside that made a noise when the jar was shaken. He shook all the jars. He opened one to see what was inside, and saw a grey, coarse powder, which he thought was sand. Another one had fine white sand in it. A blue glass jar had black water in it. A red glass jar had brown honey in it; that got onto his fingers, and he licked them. The honey tasted as bitter as oakgalls, but he was hungry, and finished licking his fingers. He was opening another bottle when he saw the woman stand in the doorway looking at him. He stopped doing anything and sat there amidst all the jars and bottles arranged around him. The black water had run out of the jar and soaked into the floor. Seeing that, he wanted to piss, and did not dare to.
Duhe said, “Well, well, well, well. Monkeyflower, you get to work early!” She came into the pharmacy. Monkeyflower sat very small.
“What’s this one?” Duhe said. She picked up the red jar. She looked at the child, took his hand, and sniffed it. “Sticky Monkeyflower, you are going to be constipated,” she said to him. “When you become a doctor you can use all these things. Until you become a doctor you’d better not. So let’s go outside.”
Monkeyflower let out a wail. He had pissed on the floor.
Duhe said, “O Spring of the Yellow River! Come on outside now!” He would not get up, so she picked him up and carried him out to the porch.
Kamedan woke and came out on the porch. Monkeyflower was standing there, and Duhe was washing his buttocks and legs. Kamedan said, “Is he all right?”
“He is interested in becoming a doctor,” Duhe said. Monkeyflower put up his arms and whimpered to Kamedan. Duhe picked him up and gave him to Kamedan to hold. The child was between them in the first light of the day’s sun, hinging them.§§§§§ Monkeyflower held his father tight and would not speak or look at Duhe, being ashamed.
Duhe said, “Listen, brother, instead of going to the lofts this morning, maybe you could go with Monkeyflower somewhere, do some work with him. Stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, make sure there’ll be plenty of water to drink where you go. This way you’ll be able to judge for yourself whether he’s well or ill. I think he’s been wishing to be with you, since his mother is away. You might come back by here with him towards the end of the day, and we can talk then about whether we might want to hold a singing, or a bringing-in, and about other things. We’ll talk, we’ll see. All right?”
Kamedan thanked her and left, carrying the child on his shoulders.
After Duhe had straightened up the pharmacy, she went to bathe and eat breakfast in her household. Later in the morning she started across the arms to Hardcinder House. She wanted to talk to Hwette’s people. On the way, in the narrow gardens, Sahelm came to meet her. He said, “I’ve seen Hwette.”¶¶¶¶¶
“You saw her? Where?”
“Outside the house.”
“Is she home, then?”
“I do not know.”
“Who else saw her?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Hwettez—Hwette?”
“I could not tell.”
“Whom have you told?”
“No one but you.”
“You’re crazy, Sahelm,” the doctor said. “What have you been doing? Moongazing?”
Sahelm said again, “I saw Hwette,” but the doctor was angry at him. She said, “Everybody’s seen her, and each in a different place! If she’s here, she’ll be in her house, not outside it. This is all crazy. I’m going to Hardcinder House and talk to the women there. Come if you want to.”
Sahelm said nothing, and Duhe went on through the narrow gardens. He watched her go around the oleander bushes towards Hardcinder House. Somebody up on a balcony of that house was shaking out blankets and hanging them over the railing to air. The day was already getting hot. Squash blossoms and tomato blossoms were yellow all around in the narrow gardens, and the eggplant flowers were beautiful. Sahelm had eaten nothing but lettuce and lemon the day before. He felt dizzy, and began to separate and be in two times at one time. In one time he was standing among squash blossoms alone, in one time he was on a hillside talking to a woman wearing white clothes. She said, “I am Hwette.”
“You’re not Hwette.”
“Who am I, then?”
“I do not know.”
The woman laughed and whirled around. His head whirled around inside itself. He came back together on his hands and knees on the path between tomato vines. A woman was standing there saying something to him. He said, “You are Hwette!”
She said, “What’s the matter? Can you stand up? Come on out of the sun. Maybe you’ve been fasting?” She pulled his arm and helped him up, and held his arm till they came into the shade of the drying-racks at the end of the narrow gardens by the first row of Pedoduks vines. She pushed him a little till he sat down on the ground in the shade. “Are you feeling better at all?” she asked him. “I came to pick tomatoes and saw you there, talking, and then you fell down. Who was it you were talking to?”
He asked, “Did you see someone?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see well through the tomato vines. Maybe some woman was there.”
“Was she wearing white, or undyed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the people here,” she said. She was a slender, strong, young woman with very long hair braided nine times, wearing a white shift belted with a many-colored woven sash, carrying a gathering basket.
Sahelm said, “I’ve been fasting and going into trance. I think I should go home and rest a while.”
“Eat something before you walk,” the young woman said. She went and took some plums off the racks and picked some yellow pear-tomatoes from a vine. She brought these to Sahelm, gave them to him, and watched him eat them. He ate very slowly. “The flavors are strong,” he said.
“You’re weak,” she said. “Go on. Eat it all, the food of your gardens given you by the stranger.” When he was done, she asked, “Which house do you live in?”
“Between the Orchards,” he answered. “But you live in Hardcinder House. With Kamedan.”
“Not any more,” she said. “Come on now, stand up. Show me where your house is between the orchards, and I’ll go with you.” She went with him to his house and up the stairs to the first floor; she went with him into the room he used, laid out his mattress, and said to him, “Now lie down.” While he turned away to lie down, she turned away and left.
Coming away from that house she saw a man coming down into Telina between the Telory Hills, following the creek path from the hunting side, carrying a dead deer. She greeted them: “Heya, guest from the Right Hand coming, my word and thanks to you! And you, Hunter of Telina, so you’re here.”
He said, “So you’re here, Dancer of Wakwaha!”
She walked along beside them. “Very beautiful, that Blue Clay person who gave himself to you. You must be a strong singer.”
“And a strong crossbowman.”
“Tell me all about your hunt.”
Modona laughed. “I see you know that the best of the hunting is the telling. Well, I went up on Spring Mountain in the middle of the day, and spent the night at a camp I know up there, a well-hidden place. The next day I watched the deer. I saw which doe went with two fawns and which with one and which with a fawn and a yearling. I saw where they met and gathered, and what bucks were about alone. I chose this spike-horned buck to sing to, and began singing in my mind. In the twilight of evening he came, and died on my arrow. I slept by the death, and in the twilight of morning the coyote came by singing too. Now I’m bringing the death to the heyimas; they need deer hooves for the Water Dance, and the hide will go to the Tanners, and the meat to the old women in my household, to jerk; and the horns—maybe you’d like the horns to dance with?”
“I don’t need the horns. Give them to your wife.”
“Such a being there is not,” said Modona.
The smell of the blood and meat and hair of the death was pungent and sweet. The deer’s head was near the dancer’s shoulder, moving up and down as Modona walked. Grass seeds and chaff lay on the open eye of the deer. Seeing this, the dancer blinked and rubbed her eyes. She said, “How do you know I’m from Wakwaha?”
“I’ve seen you dance.”
“Not here in Telina.”
“Maybe not.”
“In Chukulmas?”
“Maybe so.”
She laughed. She said, “And maybe in Kastoha-na, and maybe in Wakwaha-na, and maybe in Ababa-badaba-na! You can see me dance in Telina this evening, anyhow. What strange men there are in this town!”
“What have they done that you think so?”
“One of them sees me dancing where I’m not, another doesn’t see me dancing where I am.”
“What man is that—Kamedan?”
“No,” she answered. “Kamedan lives there,” pointing to Hardcinder House, “though the man says I do. He lives there,” pointing along the arm to Between the Orchards House, “and has visions in the tomato patch.”
Modona said nothing. He kept looking at her across the death, turning his eyes but not his head. They came to the narrow gardens, and Isitut stopped there, saying, “I was sent to pick tomatoes for our troupe to eat.”
“If your players would like venison as well, here it is. Will you be here several days? It has to be hung.”
“The old women in your household need the meat for jerky.”
“What they need, I’ll give them.”
“A true hunter! Always giving himself!” said the dancer, laughing and showing her teeth. “We’ll be here four days or five days at least.”
“If you want enough to go around, I’ll kill a kid to roast with this meat. How many are you?”
“Nine and myself,” said Isitut, “but only seven of us eat meat. The deer is enough; we will be filled full with meat and gratitude. Tell me what to play for the feast you bring us.”
“Play Tobbe, if you will,” Modona said.
“We’ll play Tobbe, on the fourth evening.”
She was picking tomatoes now, filling her basket with yellow pear and small red tomatoes. The day was hot and bright, all smells very powerful, the cicadas shrilling loud near and far continuously. Flies swarmed to the blood on the hair of the deer’s death.
Modona said, “That man you met here, the visionary, he came here from Kastoha. He’s always acting crazy. He doesn’t go across into the Four Houses, he just walks around here staring and jabbering, making accusations, making up the world.”
“A moongazer,” said Isitut.
“In what House do you live, woman of Wakwaha?”
“In the moon’s House, man of Telina.”
“I live in this person’s House,” Modona said, lifting the deer’s head with his hand so that the death seemed to look forward. The tongue had swollen and stuck out a little from the black lips. The dancer moved away, picking from the tall, strong-smelling vines.
The hunter asked, “What will you be playing this evening?”
From behind the vines Isitut replied, “I’ll know that when I go back with the tomatoes.” She moved farther away, picking.
Modona went on to the dancing place. Outside his heyimas he stopped, set the death down on the earth, and cut off the four hooves with his hunter’s knife. He cleaned and strung them, tied the string to a bamboo rod, and stuck this in the earth near the southwest corner of the heyimas roof so that the hooves would dry in the sun. He went down into the heyimas to wash, and talked to some people there. He came back up the ladder and walked down the west steps of the roof, looking for the dead deer. It was not where he had set it down.
He walked clear round the heyimas roof, and then around the dancing place, hurrying and staring. Some people greeted him, and he said, “There’s a death walking around on four legs here. Where’s it gone?”
They laughed.
“There’s a two-legged coyote around here,” Modona said. “If you see a spike-horn buck walking without hooves, let me know!” He went off at a run, across the Hinge, to the middle common place. The troupe of players from Wakwaha were all sitting around in the shade of the gallery and the booths, eating flat bread, sheep’s-milk cheese, and red and yellow tomatoes, and drinking dry Betebbes. Isitut was with them, eating and drinking. She said, “So you’re here, man of the Blue Clay. Where’s your brother?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” he said. He looked around the booths and gallery. A cloud of flies was in one place behind the gallery, and he went to look there, but it was dog turds they were clustering on. The deer was nowhere there. He came back by the players, speaking to them: “So you’re here, people of the Valley. Has any of you seen a deer’s death go by this place?” He made his voice sound easy, but there was an angry look in his body and face. The strangers did not laugh. A man answered politely, “No, we have not seen such a thing.”
“It was to be a gift to you. If you see it, take it, it’s yours,” the hunter said. He looked at Isitut. She was eating, and did not look at him. He went back to the dancing place.
This time he noticed some marks in the dirt at the foot of the southwest side of the roof of the Blue Clay heyimas. He looked with care and saw that farther on there were dry grass stems broken, pointing away from the heyimas. He went on in that direction. Clear over at the bank of the River, down under the bank, he saw something white. He walked towards it, staring. The white being moved. It rose up and faced the hunter. It stood over the deer’s death, which it had been eating. It showed its teeth and cried out.
Modona saw a woman in white clothes. His mind whirled round in his skull and he saw a white dog.
He stooped and picked up rocks and threw them hard, shouting, “Get away! Get off that!”
When a rock hit the dog in the head she shrieked and ran away from the death, downstream, towards the dwelling-houses.
This dog’s mother was hechi, her father dui, and she was unusually tall and strong; her coat of hair was white, with no other color, and her eyes were bluish. When a puppy she had been befriended by Hwette, and they had played together and gone together whenever Hwette went outside the town. Hwette had called her Moondog. After marrying Kamedan Hwette had seldom called the dog to walk or guard, and nobody else knew her well; she would not have anything to do with any human being but Hwette, and kept alone even in dogtown. She was getting old now and had lost keenness of hearing; lately she had been getting thin. Hunger had given her the strength to drag the death from the heyimas down to the River, and she had eaten most of one haunch. Bewildered by the pain where the rock had struck her between eye and ear, she ran up into Telina, between the houses, to Hardcinder House.
Inside Shamsha’s household the people heard a clawing and a crying at the outer door, which was closed to keep out the day’s heat. Fefinum heard the voice crying and said, “She’s back! She has come back!” Speaking, she cowered down in the corner of the room farthest from the door.
Shamsha jumped up and said, talking loudly, “Children playing on the porches, it’s a shame, it’s never quiet here!” She stood in front of her daughter, concealing her from Duhe.
Duhe looked at them, went over to the door, and opened it enough to look out. She said, “It’s a white dog, crying here. Hwette used to walk with this dog, I think.”
Shamsha came to look. “Yes, but not for years now,” she said. “Let me drive her away. She’s crazy, coming here, trying to get inside the house like that. Old and crazy. Get away, get off, you!” She took up a broom and poked it out the door at Moondog, but Duhe kept the broom from striking the dog, and said, “Please wait a minute. It seems to me the dog’s been hurt and wants help.” She went out to look more closely at Moondog’s head, having seen blood on the white hair about the eye. Moondog cringed and snarled at first but feeling that the doctor was not at all afraid, she held still. When the doctor’s hands touched her she felt great authority in them, and she made no objection while Duhe examined the wound the rock had made between her left ear and eye.
Duhe spoke to her: “What a beautiful old woman-dog you are, though a queer color for a dog, better for a sheep; and you haven’t been overeating recently, to judge by your ribs. Now what happened, did you run into a branch? No, this looks more like a rock was thrown at you and you didn’t dodge it; that’s not so smart, old woman-dog. Shamsha, may I please have some water and a clean cloth to wash this injury with?”
The old woman brought a bowl of water and some rags, grumbling, “That dog is worthless, of no account.”
Duhe cleaned the wound. Moondog made no protest and stood still and patient, trembling a little in the hindquarters. When Duhe was done the dog wagged her tail several times.
“Please lie down now,” the doctor said.
Moondog looked into the doctor’s eyes, and lay down with her head on her outstretched front legs.
Duhe stroked her head behind the ears. Shamsha was inside the room, Fefinum had come near the door to watch. Duhe said to them, “She may have some concussion of the brain. That was a hard blow.”
Shamsha asked, “Will she go into fits?”
The doctor said, “She might. More likely she’ll sleep it off, if she’s allowed to stay in a quiet place where she isn’t disturbed. Sleep is a wonderful healer. I didn’t have much of it myself last night, between the moon and your grandson the Monkeyflower.” She came back indoors, bringing the bowl and rags. Fefinum kept her back turned, and started cutting up cucumbers for pickling. Duhe said, “That is the dog who used to go along with Hwette, isn’t she? What did Hwette call her?”
Shamsha said, “I don’t remember.”
Fefinum said without turning round, “My sister called her Moondog.”
“It seems she came here to find Hwette, or to help us find Hwette,” said Duhe.
“She’s deaf, blind, and crazy,” Shamsha said. “She couldn’t find a dead deer if she fell over it. In any case, I don’t understand what you say about finding my daughter. Anybody who wants to talk with her can go up to Wakwaha, they don’t need a dog to show them the way upriver.”
While the women were talking, Monkeyflower and Kamedan came up the stairs onto the porch, hearing the women’s voices behind the open door. Kamedan looked at the dog and went in without speaking. Monkeyflower stopped and looked at the dog for some time. Her tail thumped on the porch floor quietly. Monkeyflower said in a low voice, “Moondog, do you know where she is?”
Moondog yawned with anxiety, showing all her yellow teeth, and shut her mouth with a snap, looking at Monkeyflower.
“Come on, dog,” Monkeyflower said. He thought about telling his father that he was going to find his mother, but all the adults were talking inside the house, and he did not want to be in there among them. He liked the doctor and wanted to see her again, but was ashamed of having pissed on her floor. He did not go in, but went back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder at Moondog.
Moondog got up, whining a little, trying to do both what Duhe had told her to do and what Monkeyflower wanted her to do. She yawned again and then with her tail down and wagging a little, her head down, she followed him. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and stood waiting for her to show him the way to go. She waited a while too, to see what he wanted, and then set off towards the River. Monkeyflower came along walking beside her. When she stopped he patted her back and said, “Go on, dog.” So they went on out of town, northwestward, into the willow flats along the River, and along beside the water, going upstream.