He didn’t know what he’d previously imagined might lie within him—what bled or ached or breathed—but he was stunned by the simplicity of the revelation. Seeing the body divided into a handful of pages, he realized he had, however vaguely, guessed at something much more complicated. He found he liked to think of the body as it was on those pages, and he nodded at his mother.
She told him she would teach him the physiology of the body, so he would understand it, and then she would teach him to use that knowledge to treat illness and injury as she did. “Here,” she said, “we have nothing. Those drugs the peddlers sell are spoiled or worse. I have no tools, no equipment. Just what I can scratch out of the wood—the balsam gum, yarrow, sweet flag, fireweed—but it’s a handful of sand thrown against the wind. That’s all we’ve got here, and that’s what I’m going to teach you. When I’m dead someday, you can take care of yourself and your brother. That is something, at least. To understand somebody’s pain, and know what’s the cause of it and how to stop it…”
She paused as if taken by a new thought. “That,” she said, “is what we are, that too. Hurting just because someone else is hurting, and wanting to fix it. The good of that. It’s what makes us different from those other ones.”
That evening, Eban’s brother found him reading by lamplight and took the stool across the table.
“You have a new book, Eban?” he asked.
Eban nodded.
“Read it to me, Eban?”
Eban had felt sorry for his brother the day their mother threw down the tattered book of stories about children from before and declared him unable to learn, but his brother had seemed only happy to be released from his lessons. Though he had always shown an intense dislike for the effort of sounding out letters and words, he loved the stories themselves, more than Eban ever had, even though they were written for much younger children. He would beg Eban to read them until Eban gave in, so often that they both could have recited the brief tales from memory.
Tonight, Eban refused, enjoying too greatly the sense of importance of his new undertaking, eager to learn every word of the pages his mother had assigned to him. But as usual his brother’s determination outlasted his own, and finally he began to read aloud, hurrying through the paragraphs on biochemistry in an affectless tone that he hoped would dull and exhaust even his brother’s persistence.
But his brother listened, chin in his hands on the tabletop, until Eban had read every line up to his mother’s pencil mark, and then read on, to the end of the chapter, and the beginning of the next, on organic chemistry. At last, his throat dry and eyes aching from reading by the low light, he stopped.
“That’s enough,” he told his brother, who nodded in acceptance and raised his head from the table.
“Why are you reading that, Eban?” he asked.
“Because I have to.”
“But why?”
“Because she told me to. Because I’m supposed to learn it.”
His brother thought about this. “Why do you want to learn it?”
“So I can help. If someone is injured or sick, I can help them get better.” He hesitated. “Do you want to learn it too? I could help you. I could read the books with you, if you wanted. We could be physicians, like she was. We could do it together.” The more he spoke, the more he liked the idea. They could study together in the evenings. His brother could be very quick to learn certain things. They might help each other. Somehow the bright light of knowledge his mother had described seemed more possible, more powerful, if the two of them might share and practise it together.
His brother shook his head. “No, Eban.”
“Why?” he asked, hearing in the word an echo of his brother’s own questions, and hating it.
His brother shuffled towards the bed, his back to Eban. “It isn’t interesting.”
* * *
—
It’s near dark when Judy returns. She is bruised and filthy, bent under the weight she carries over her shoulders. His mouth falls open as he sees what she has brought them.
“Well done,” says Tristan, pushing his way through his tent door. “Well done!” He strokes the muzzle of the deer Judy wears like a yoke almost fondly. “I haven’t had venison in years. I hardly thought they came this high, or thought maybe they were all shot dead a decade ago.” He turns to Eban. “Some hunter, your girl. A wonder you look half-starved if this is how you eat.”
Judy’s expression is dark as she swings her load to the ground and the women hurriedly crouch beside it and begin gutting the animal.
Judy remains standing over the bowed women and Eban touches her hand to try to call back her attention from wherever it has fled. What he took for a bruise running down her jaw and shoulder is a streak of purpling blood. When she doesn’t move or even flinch, he finds a rag from a coat pocket and tries to wipe her clean.
“It’s okay,” she says softly, and when he hesitates, “Please, Eban. Don’t.”
No one bothers them as the women string the deer up from a branch and stoke the fire they’ve kept smouldering all day. Tristan lies at the root of a tree beside the one where the deer hangs, smiling faintly as he watches the women work. Eban doesn’t know where Dean has gone.
While the family is preoccupied, Eban and Judy kneel on the ground and whisper to each other.
“Are we in danger?” Judy asks him.
He looks at Tristan. His eyes are half-closed. Is he really watching the women or watching him and Judy? “We could be.”
Eban remembers that he’s angry with Judy but feels too tired to chide or reproach her, so he only says, “I wish you’d stayed hidden. I might have been able to get away. At least you would be all right.”
Judy doesn’t dismiss the words as he expected. “But I couldn’t,” she says simply. “I could see them and you and knew I could have hidden for hours or maybe more, maybe waited till they slept and got you out. But then that man took out that horn and I thought how could anyone know how to use something like that and want to harm us? How could anyone able to do something so beautiful do anything terrible or wrong?”
Eban frowns. “Do you really believe that?”
She sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe not. I just couldn’t, Eban. I couldn’t just hide and not listen to that sound, or listen and not want to come closer or talk to the people who knew how to do that. And I thought you could only learn something like that in the cities. I thought we could end our travel here if they could tell us what we’re searching for Heaven to find out. We could go to the cities tonight.”
“I don’t know if I believe they’ve ever left these hills,” Eban mutters. “People like them belong here like the dirt and the rats do. And Judy, where did you find that deer anyway? How did you do this?”
She looks away without answering.
“I’ve hunted since I was five years old and never seen one,” he says. “I wouldn’t even have recognized it except for a picture in my mother’s old book on field dressing.”
“I’ve seen one once before. In the outland.”
“Were you able to get a clear shot then?”
She shakes her head. “No, no. It wasn’t like that. My fathers…They never would have done that.”
Eban doesn’t understand, but he can see she has more to say. He waits.
“I walked for hours,” Judy tells him. “I didn’t see anything. Not one thing. Not a bird, not a rodent, not a single living thing I could have brought back. You heard what he told me. I had to bring him something good enough that he’d tell us what he knows, and I couldn’t find even a squirrel.”
“And then?”
“I’d told myself I wouldn’t come back till I found something. I thought I’d walk until I starved before I came back empty-handed.” She rubs her belly. “But I felt ill, and the sun was high and I was exhausted. I sat down, just to rest for a little while, but I
fell asleep. I woke up and didn’t know how much time had passed, and I was so ashamed. And then I saw it.”
“The deer?”
“It came like it was looking for me. I swear I don’t know how else to tell it. It wasn’t even frightened. I thought at first it didn’t see me, and I sat up so slowly, so carefully. But it was grazing maybe a stone’s throw from me and all at once it looked right at me. Chewing, considering me, not afraid at all. It made it so much worse that it wasn’t afraid.”
“Judy…”
“Alphonse said there was a special dispensation for beautiful living things. My fathers wouldn’t have eaten that deer no matter how hungry they were.”
“It’s different,” Eban said. “Your fathers didn’t live up here.”
“It has nothing to do with the hills. It has nothing to do with how we live. I wasn’t hungry, or no hungrier than I ever am. I just was desperate to know what he knows. Whatever that man can tell us.” She drops her hands from her belly and they rest palm up in her lap like they don’t belong to her. “I shot it before I could think about it. I knew it was the only way I could.”
“It’s okay, Judy. I swear it. It will be okay. It’s how we always live, how everything does. One animal feeds another.”
A dark look spreads like weather over her face. “It walked for an hour before it fell. I followed it. When I got there, it was still alive. I shot it again, standing over it, close enough I could have touched it. Her.”
Eban is wondering whether it was the deer’s bad luck or their own that led it to cross Judy’s path, when Tristan rises to his feet.
“Mind if I interrupt?” He stands over them, his expression inscrutable—ironic or angry, Eban can’t tell. “If you’re done your chatting, Vi and the girls got the deer hanged, and we’ve got a few hours yet till we can eat. Time enough to put on the show.”
“Can we talk first?” Judy asks. “I want to hear what you said you’d tell us.”
The look on her face would have arrested Eban in any action, but Tristan barely glances at her. “Show first,” he says, without animosity. “And then we eat. Then talk.”
VI
The sky is fading overhead, and they sit in the shadow of the trees, seated on blankets the women spread over the snow. They face a rickety arch of steel rods and rails, hung with red cloth. The women have vanished and Dean stands in front of the arch, puffing soundlessly into his horn, while Tristan checks the deer.
“What is that?” Judy asks.
“What?” Dean looks up from his horn.
“The curtains, the poles. Is it another tent?”
He sneers. “It’s a stage, cave dweller.” He eyes the torn cloth and rusted bars as he blows air again into the horn, and then he drops the horn to his side in disgust. “I mean, isn’t it elegant? Our proscenium arch? Aren’t you transported by the artifice?”
Judy doesn’t seem to hear his scorn. “A stage? Like a theatre? Your show—is it a play?”
“No. You’d need talent for that. Brains and a plan. That’s not what this is.”
“But what is it?”
“Tristan flexing.” Dean glances at Tristan, his expression defiant, but Eban notices he has lowered his voice. “He insists on the stage. He likes to insist on things. He doesn’t like the horn, but he insists I play.”
“And the women?”
“The same. A game for him.” He hooks a curtain with one finger, and peers through the gap between it and the other. When he lets it go, his expression has softened. Saddened, Eban thinks. “Not Vi though. Vi’s the real thing. I mean, she could have been. Our mother was.”
“Let’s go,” hollers Tristan. “What the hell is taking so long?”
There’s silence and then a voice that sounds like Bethany’s. “It’s cold.”
He claps his hands together. “No more dallying. We’ve got a hot meal waiting. Open that curtain or I’ll do it for you.”
Hands appear between the curtains and slowly pull them to either side. The second curtain snags partway, and after two or three tugs, a sigh is heard, and the hand disappears.
Revealed by the open curtains is Vi, standing on a flat slab of stone with her head bowed, her bare arms bent and elbows jagged above her shoulders, hands dangling like leaves from a tree. Her ankles are crossed, her bare legs, muscular, vein-knotted and thin. Her hair hides her face, and there is something terrible in the eyes that can’t be seen.
“She’ll freeze,” whispers Judy, who has laid a hand on Eban’s own, digging her fingers into his palm. More loudly, she repeats, “She’ll freeze!”
Eban hadn’t even noticed, transfixed by her shape against the dusking wood. But she wears only a strange black garment that fits her body tightly, leaving her arms and legs uncovered. The thin cloth shows the line of her hips and hangs to just below her knees, unravelling there into rags and threads. She looks like something else. A dark bird, the bone remains of an animal, weather.
“Not if she hurries up,” Tristan retorts.
She looks like a streak of charcoal on a white page. And as still as that.
Then they hear the horn, and turn, startled, to remember Dean is there. He releases a long note that rises and falls, dissolving into a whisper. They look again at Vi as her left arm twists, snake-like, to the side, drawing her body with it, until she is bent at an impossible angle, head cocked like she is listening for something.
Judy’s grip on Eban’s hand tightens. “Oh Eban. Her feet.”
She wears no shoes.
The music suddenly speeds and swells, note following note, higher and higher, and there is no rhythm or melody Eban can discern, and it’s nothing like any music he has heard, which is almost none—the things his mother would hum to make his brother sleep, a peddler with a dented guitar.
How could anyone able to do something so beautiful do anything terrible or wrong? Eban thinks of Judy’s words, and of his brother, who used to sing without seeming to notice it, at the table, chasing flies around the yard, always in a nasal, atonal voice Eban found intolerable.
Vi slowly lifts a clenched bare foot like it’s something she has found in the snow. As her leg extends above her head, he stops breathing. And then she begins to dance.
The delicacy of Vi’s first movements yields to a savage grace. She spins from foot to foot, vaulting into the air again and again, rising higher above the ground than Eban would have ever guessed possible. She dances with a kind of frenzied glee that reminds him of the way he and his brother used to chase each other through the dust, arms wheeling. And yet, there’s something vicious to it that he can’t quite identify, something brutal about the way, after each soaring leap, she is yanked back to the ground.
The daughters appear behind Vi. Though they wear boots, they aren’t dressed for the season. Wrapped in loose rags dyed bright colours, they swing the tails of cloth as they turn and jump, but none of them has their mother’s gift.
Then Inge, who has stood slightly behind the others, her performance listless, approaches the centre and bends forward. Vi arches her spine until she rests, splayed, across her daughter’s back, helplessly paddling the air above her, and now they can see her bony, reddened feet, the shaking of her legs as she is flung to her feet on the stone. With a shudder that seems to pass through her whole body, she rises inches higher, standing on the very ends of her toes, teetering as she rotates in a circle before them. It is monstrous. And beautiful.
The horn music seems to circle around her. She is slowly lowering herself forward, her eyes staring straight out through and past all of them, when Judy stands up.
“Stop it,” Judy says. “Stop it. Please, please stop.” She bends over Vi, trying to help her to her feet, but the woman turns her face away.
Eban feels as though he has woken from a dream. He addresses Tristan. “If her toes freeze, she will lose them.”
�
�You. Keep playing,” Tristan orders Dean, who has lowered his horn and is studying Eban thoughtfully. “She’s fine,” he tells Eban. “The dancing warms her up.”
Eban shakes his head. “Not the toes.” He begins to unfasten his boot. “Have you ever seen someone lose a toe to frostbite?”
Tristan stares at Eban’s foot as he withdraws it and tugs at the end of the sock. Tristan looks for a moment at the quarter inch of flesh and bone that remains of Eban’s second toe, and then he looks away.
“Get your clothes on, girls,” he growls. “It’s time to eat.”
* * *
—
It worries Eban that they have made Tristan angry, and he watches him as they take their seats around the fire, searching for any warning of what will happen when they finish the meal. But as plates of venison pass around their small circle, the mood seems lightened.
They eat quickly, the meat still steaming, tearing it from the bone with burning fingertips. Though Tristan eats the most, he finishes first and heaves the stripped, shining bones into the trees. He catches Eban looking after the flung bones, and says, “Go and fetch them if it bothers you. I won’t stop you. Don’t know what you imagine might creep out of the trees and come after them. Seen many bears around these hills of late?”
“Never saw a deer either.” Inge continues eating, eyes on her food, showing no sign of having spoken, and Tristan seems, after looking at her for a moment, to doubt she did.
Eban doesn’t move, and Tristan appears pleased. He leans back against an ironwood tree and pulls a clay jug from his pack. “Juneberry hooch,” he explains, though the words mean nothing to Eban. “Did you like the show?”
“Yes,” Eban answers. Judy is cleaning her hands and doesn’t look up.
The Second History Page 9