Stillbird
Page 3
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Abel sat in the rocker that Jamie had made for Rosie as a wedding gift and rocked slowly back and forth, saying nothing, forming the words in his mind, discarding them, re-forming them, until he stopped trying to figure out how to talk to Rosie and allowed himself to be lost in memories and fantasies.
Rosie sat on the straight back chair behind the supper table and watched him. Once she asked if he would be wanting some supper. She had rabbit stew and began to build the fire in the cookstove, but Abel only muttered that he was not hungry, and she realized that she wasn’t either. Nonetheless, she lit the fire as the sun was setting, and a chill came over them. She lit the lamp at the head of the table where Jamie last sat and left her own face in shadow. She sat back down and watched Abel, not talking.
As the sun sank lower behind the mountain west of the house, a boy came toward them on a pony, a sturdy mountain pony plodding up the steep hillside from the south. Rosie went out on the porch to watch his progress and to once again watch the dusk embrace the trees and the river. She had missed this time of day, the most beautiful after the dawn, when the mists lifted to reveal the landscape. She had been holding Jamie’s hand in the constant dusk of the upstairs bedroom, nothing more than a loft really, with a quilt hung over the one window because the light hurt his feverish eyes, or perhaps because he couldn’t bear to see the mountain that he was leaving.
Now she let herself be carried into the mystery of the evening, listened for the birds in the forest and watched the boy approach as if she were alone. Abel had followed her out but said nothing, waiting for the strange visit to be over.
The boy, named Peter, brought food: bread made with honey, apples, onions cooked in butter until they were sweet; all this from his mother who was also a new widow, who remembered that when her man had died that summer, it had been Jamie who helped her get her hay in, and now she wanted to help his widow. Peter was to tell her what Rosie needed. Peter recognized Abel, and they spoke briefly. Then Rosie thanked him and he promised to come by soon again, but Abel told him that would not be necessary, and they watched Peter’s pony plod back down the mountain. Then Abel found the words to tell Rosie he would protect her.
By now the sun had completed its disappearance and the moon had begun its ascent, lighting Abel’s large, powerful figure. Rosie knew better than to reject him outright and told him only that her mind and soul were still with Jamie in the grave and she could hardly think. She asked for time to sleep, and Abel went silently down the mountain after Peter, leaving her to grieve. But Abel had nowhere he wanted to go and walked only as far as his brother’s grave, not to remember his brother, but to remember the first time he had seen Rosie and to wait for her there.
There was a sheltered spot between the trunk of the oak and the rock where a man could wedge himself and escape the wind, and there Abel sat still watching the moon and waiting for the dawn. He expected Rosie by the dawn, but even her light and quiet footsteps on the autumn leaves near midnight woke him, and he accosted her there at the site of her dead husband’s grave.
Abel had never been a man to squander his virility on a woman he didn’t want for the mere pleasure of it. His was the passion of a man who had saved himself in every way for this woman. He would make her understand later that this rape was a gift to be cherished, and he was convinced that he would give her a son and then she would love him. He could not charm her with words and eyes that easily expressed his love. His love was deep inside him in a dark place, and he knew no other way to win her than to force her, and he was desperate to win her. If she disappeared back into the forest, she’d be no more than a magical vision he’d never be able to hold onto. This was the only way.
Abel hurt her more, the more she struggled, and Rosie finally stopped fighting him and waited for this invasion to be over. She prayed that he would fall deeply asleep, and long enough for her to escape. As soon as she was certain that his deep and even breathing was not a trick, she rolled quietly away, then crawled down the hill until she was sure that he could no longer see her beneath the scrub and brush. The moon still lit the night, and she prayed for mist and rain to hide her, and slowly, wisps of clouds gathered over the moon, and soon there was a drizzle.
By the time the sun had risen high enough in the sky to burn off the morning mist, Rosie was nowhere to be seen. Abel was sluggish, had slept through the light rain of the night, but he was startled awake by the urgent call of a crow that dipped its wing close to his head and then soared off out of sight. Hundreds of tiny blackbirds that slept in the branches of the old oak tree fluttered awake at the same moment and flew as one, lifting off effortlessly, as if thrown into the air by the invisible hand of the wind, and then settled silently back down into another tree farther up the hillside to bask in the warmth of the mid-morning sun. Geese flew in arrow formation high overhead, and Abel watched them as far as he could see and waited for their barking and screeching to quiet down, so he could listen for Rosie’s footsteps. But he could hear nothing after the frenzied morning noises of the birds.
After a while, Abel detected the whisper of a small creek running down the hill and went there to wash, wishing Rosie would be there. He imagined her, a vision of water, transparent and shimmering, her hair floating out around her, a rainbow to his storm. As he walked, disturbing the autumn leaves that rustled and drifted beneath his heavy feet, he remembered watching Rosie and Jamie lying beneath the oak tree that last summer. Jamie lay on a blanket asleep and Rosie, with the hem of her long, full skirt in her hand to make a sack, collected petals of wildflowers all over the hillside and then she stood over Jamie and let her skirt fall, and all the petals of wild roses and laurel blossoms fell, burying Jamie in softness and scent. And then she dropped to her knees as Jamie sat up to embrace her, and they made love, and Abel knew that he should look away, but he never could take his eyes off Rosie. Rosie herself never could look at Abel, looking always past him or down; and she never addressed him by his name, and flinched ever so slightly when he said hers.
Rosie had been born to a mother who had lived her entire life in hiding, and Rosie was brought up to live in hiding. Secrecy saved them from the trail of tears where thousands died en route to the barren lands of the west and secrecy saved them over the years while they acquired land through a white trader who was allowed, as they were not, to purchase it. Secrecy and a will to hold on tightly to one another and the traditional ways saved them from extinction. Knowing this, Rosie knew also that her defection for love of a white man would be viewed as treachery, and she did not expect a warm welcome home over the mountains to North Carolina. She would approach the elders with humility and had already given herself the name “No-name,” discarding Jamie’s name for her even as she had discarded her parents’ name for her when she married him. She knew she would have to earn a new name and the new name would come to her when the time was right. Now, as she crossed from one life to another, she was an empty vessel, waiting for the gift of soul and identity. It was a two-day walk up and over hills following the crow, and she sang most of the way so the days passed quickly. Joy and anxiety mingled and made her heart beat far too fast and hard when she sighted cabins and the smoke of fragrant fires. She fainted there in the woods at the edge of the village and was found like that: near death, it seemed to the women who exclaimed over her.
There was no question of abandoning No-Name, but her return had created a moral dilemma that was resolved by requiring that she continue the exile she herself had chosen when she married Jamie. There was a cabin by the river a day’s walk from the village that had been abandoned by white settlers, and No-Name was escorted there and given supplies she would need for her survival. Three of the oldest women of the tribe promised to visit her in a month to see how she was doing, but No-Name knew that she would be watched over from a distance, deprived of company but not of sustenance, and she looked forward with relief to her month of solitude.
In th
e cabin some things had been left behind: kerosene lamps and some books on a table, two chairs and a bed, almost as if someone had been expected. No-Name looked at the books, remembering how Jamie had enjoyed teaching her to read. She sounded out the English words, taking no meaning from them, but the memory of Jamie’s voice breaking the words into separate syllables so they might have been any language, and it occurred to No-Name that rhythm was the secret of language as it was the secret of music, a subtle trick of transformation. Then she went out to watch the sunlight fade over the river and listen to the evening birds. It was such a lovely starlit night that she decided she wanted to sleep right there by the river with its song loud in her head and she dragged the feather mattress outside and lay it over a bed of leaves that she pushed together. She nestled into the leaves and slept soundly without dreaming, but sometimes she awoke and watched the stars, and when she woke, it seemed the birds did too, and they spoke to her, and she got her name that night: Stillbird-by-the-River was how she would call herself in her heart.
The next day, Stillbird built a fire outside her cabin and boiled river water in a large kettle the old women had given her so she could cook some beans. While the beans simmered in the pot, she walked along the river, stopping to examine everything and listening carefully. She thought she heard voices back by the cabin, whispers that carried on the clear air, and she recognized the women. And when she returned to the cabin, she found an iron stove there and wondered how they had carried such a heavy thing all that way. Then other things began to appear at the cabin that only men could have brought, but she neither saw nor heard a man even when she hid in the woods and spied on the cabin at random times of the day. Jamie had told her that in Scotland the people told stories of fairies that lived in the woods, but he didn’t believe in them. And she knew they didn’t live here, or she would have heard the same stories. The stories she had heard from her mother were stories about animals and birds and even the river itself, but none of these had been known to cause a sack of flour as heavy as a man to be wafted into a woman’s home, nor did they carry things made of iron by the hand of man. Stillbird knew that it was human beings who tricked her so kindly.
The days grew shorter and shorter, but as long as Stillbird could see the gleam of the river in the night, she was not afraid of the darkness. Some nights when she slept, she saw the darkness in Abel’s eyes and awoke afraid and looked around to see where she was, and had to work to remember everything that had happened since the rape, to know that she was safe now in the solitude of the woods. She had not told the women about the rape, believing that they would blame her all the more for leaving them in the first place.
As the month drew to an end and Stillbird expected the elders to visit her, she began to burn the books with the English words, page by page, reading them as she tore them out and remembering Jamie, and then forgetting him, for she had crossed over into another life and was waiting to see what would happen to her.