Like her mother, I was well respected. A woman might come from as far away as the dunes or the dense southern woods to ask for help. She might have heard of the boy who had fallen from a tree, broken the bones in both legs, and who walked again the next spring. Another might have heard of the woman whose arm had swollen and bled white evil after a snakebite and who later returned to hunting, using the strength in that same arm to draw back the taut wire of a bow. Or a third might have heard of numerous children who one day thrashed with fever and who later calmly suckled their mothers’ teats so they could grow with hopes of one day suckling a daughter of their own.
I’s mother had taught her to behave as properly as a healer could. I always respected one’s solitude. She touched another only when touching was necessary, and this she did with great respect and, if possible, when the sick one was asleep. When she played the gzaet well, its music drove away those spirits that didn’t respect one’s solitude.
Still, no one truly trusted the healer. There were many things said about her, though no one believed all of them were true. It was said that she had not mated for a number of years. It was said that she ate well when others went hungry. It was said that she spent entire days playing the gzaet, her eyes empty while her fingers touched the keys. It was said that she cut open the bodies of the dead.
And no one trusted the music, no matter how often it healed. She may have sat at a good distance, the battered gzaet sitting upon the ground in front of her, her back straight, her eyes half-closed, but when her fingers reached out, when they pressed down keys, when they played songs that sounded much like the ones a mother might have sung, the sick one, the person lying there, would feel as if musical fingers were intruding upon the body, touching this part, soothing that part. Even though the healer sat at more than a respectful distance with her instrument, it still felt as if she used her music to get improperly close. This never bothered a son or a daughter who had yet to learn solitude, but it did bother each woman or man. One old man, at the season in life when he had too much love for solitude, found the music improper, if not frightening, and preferred illness to the healer’s musical touch.
Because I shared words with one woman or another, she knew what things were said about her, how someone who was healed would leave a generous gift for her and then complain to another. I longed for the day when she could give birth to a daughter, whom she would raise and teach the musics. As her mother gave to her, I would give to the daughter the gzaet; she would give to the daughter the knife made of the same material as the gzaet; and she would give to the daughter the healing beads. And then I would be free to move away from the river. Once the color of the setting sun had drained from her hair, I would travel south and find a place where no one knew her as a healer. She would gather and hunt like any other woman, and each woman would respect I. She would be seen as an elder woman who kept the proper solitude, who touched only a child or a mate.
As a youth, she had lived during the spring and fall near her mother’s hut, which had been built in a clearing that overlooked the distant lake. After her mother had left, I built hut and hearth near the Winding River, choosing a spot close enough to have water whenever she wanted, but not so close that she might cross paths with a thirsty nightskin or that the river, when it rose in the spring, would drown her fires.
Sour Plum had cleared the area. With his axe he had notched the bark, and several springs later the trees crashed down easily, wood ready to be fed into fires. He pulled up brush, removed heavy stones, and with smaller stones formed three circles: one for the fire inside the healer’s hut, one for the healer’s cooking fire, and one at the edge of the clearing for a waiting fire.
Roofer built her a large hut with one of his elaborate roofs.
The finished hut held up well to rain and wind, and there was enough room inside the hut so that on cold or rainy nights she could sleep on one side of the fire and a sick one could sleep on the other.
Soon after, when desire came, she mated first with Roofer, whose pollen had produced only boys; then, when the flower was ready for the pollen, she mated only with Sour Plum, whose pollen had given one woman and another daughters. I’s belly had barely begun to bulge when the child came out in a rush of blood.
The first winter that I used her mother’s gzaet to heal, she saved the life of Long Call, who never spoke, and in return he scraped out curves of dirt around where she lived so rainwater would run past on its way to the river. Long Call returned each spring and fall to dig out the gutters, which had filled with mud and debris, and he later laid flat rocks along the sides of each gutter in order to prolong its usefulness. Over the span of seasons the gutters had the carefully built look of the ones in the Many Huts.
Over the seasons the place where she lived had grown expansive as more trees had been toppled to feed up to three fires, and now there was enough open space that a chill wind or a burst of snow found an easy place to gather and swirl, making each winter harder than the last. During winter nights all I had was a fire and animal skins, and the winter wind slipped through the thatching easier than did the sun’s light. On the coldest nights a woman who lived nearby sent her eldest son to I’s hut. He was old enough that he wanted to prove his bravery to face the elements alone and young enough that he could lie against the healer as if she were also his mother.
When the weather was at its worst, when nights were so cold that the air tasted frozen or when snow blew between the trees like hard rain, a woman might seek out a man who had built her hut, carved her arrows, or mated with her, and take him into her hut for the warmth of the fire and her body. If it was cold enough, the man would remember what it was like when he had lived in his mother’s hut, when warmth was more important than solitude. This last winter there had been a night when the wind had pulled down trees. I had huddled alone by the dying coals of her fire, listening to the sound the trees made as they bent to the wind, and she wished she had braved the afternoon cold to find someone to share her fire. Days and days later, after the snows had melted, a woman’s eldest son found the remains of a man’s leg buried beneath a fallen tree, and he found scattered bones nearby. I thought often of Long Call, who never spoke, who had built the gutters that kept her hut and hearth so dry, because no had seen him since that night.
Now it was spring. The early masculine rains, which raised the river and broke down flimsy huts, had for the most part ended and had been followed by the feminine rains that came so softly that the ground and leaves had time to drink in the sky’s generosity. The leaves that faced the sun had taken on the colors of fire, so one woman and another had burned out the new brush to make way for grasses that attracted lightfoot and other meat animals. Fish swam away from the lake and up the river. Spring nuts were soft and chewy, and rock tubers could now be cut open and eaten. The days and nights were sometimes warm enough that fire was just for cooking food and keeping the night animals away.
But when summer came, there would be little to eat around this part of Winding River, and each woman and child would move away until the local berries ripened and the lightfoot and wetnoses returned to eat them. I would remain here so she could be easily found by those who needed her help. I did not know if she would find enough food on her own this summer or if she would have to wish for sickness so she could eat well. She would prefer to eat poorly rather than have such a reason to eat well.
One early morning, when these worries were so much in I’s mind that she played the gzaet to comfort herself, a woman and her daughter arrived. They stood by the scorched ground where I maintained a waiting fire during the winter months and cold spring mornings. The daughter was naked and pudgy, while the mother was thin, as if she hadn’t yet eaten her way out of winter’s lean time. The mother wore a pubic apron and a kaross‚ which she had draped over her body so as to cover her teats. Even though I did not recognize them, she gestured them forward, and the daughter, already waist high, sat right next to I as if the healer were her mother. The mother
sat at a more respectful distance. The folds of the kaross appeared empty of both fruit and child. I wondered who was caring for the infant the mother currently nursed.
The mother looked down at her feet and said, “Healer, my daughter and I used to live by the lake near the river’s mouth. We kept our shelter the proper distance from other shelters. We respected the solitude of each man and each woman and child.
“But by the lake there are one and two and three and four, and it was hard to show my respect and keep my distance. The daughter and I slept in a shelter built beside a springnut tree. I gave birth to a second daughter. After she died, my first daughter and I left the river’s mouth to head south.”
The mother looked away for a moment, then returned her gaze to the ground between her feet. “I speak too long,” she said. “My daughter and I moved to a respectful distance from the river two or three days ago. During the first night, an almost-a-man left fruit and thatched roofing for our new shelter. The thatching was not very good, but it had been done. Before my daughter and I left that morning to gather food, I laid out a lightfoot hide for him. When we returned, the almost-a-man was there. He used his knife to cut the hide into a kaross for carrying things. It was a gift. I am from another place, but it is not respectful for a man to make my gift into his gift.”
“That is also true here.”
“But this one does not act like another almost-a-man. He embraced me even though there was no desire. He embraced my daughter even though we had not mated.”
“One or two call him Hugger. He has lived as long as a man, but he has never grown into a man. He has too little solitude and hugs like a child. That is his way. Strike him several times, and he will leave.”
“Those who live by the river’s mouth do not strike.”
“Hugger was mating close when he hugged you. Strike him, and he will keep a respectful distance.”
“And my daughter?”
The mother was waiting to say more, which irritated I. Words flowed from her mouth like they did from the river into the lake. This huggable woman did not share a mother with I, but she talked like she did. I placed her fingers on the keys of the gzaet and played several musical patterns for her mind’s ear, the concentration soothing the tension she felt within. She wondered if the kaross the mother wore was the one Hugger had made for her. It was a fine kaross, and Hugger did not make fine things.
“I have spoken too long,” said the huggable woman. “I did not mean to be disrespectful. But I am a mother. I worry about my daughter.”
“Why?”
“She embraces each woman she sees as if the woman were her mother. She says she likes the almost-a-man who embraced each of us, and she says she dreams about him. There is too little solitude in her for one who is as high as my waist. I think the man one or another call Hugger took away her solitude.”
I looked away no. How could one person take away another’s solitude? How could Hugger, who did not have one evil bone in him? This woman seemed to be one who blamed another rather than herself for the things she had taught her child. The daughter had a sweet face and a smile that made I want to forfeit her solitude. “If you return the day after tomorrow,” said I to the mother, “with four large fish, I will play some musics that might return your daughter’s solitude.’”
The mother thanked her and promised her eight large fish and a basket of rootnuts. The daughter embraced I, and I, more than ever, wanted a daughter to worry about and to raise properly.
With the woman gone, I felt more troubled than usual. So she played the gzaet, listening carefully to the music and its resonances, working the music to distance herself from the world around her. She had been playing for a while, and she was so involved in her playing that she was not quite sure when the sound started. Her fingers stopped, the last resonances returned, and she listened. She had never heard a sound like this before. Worse, it became louder, like when one hears a waterfall far away, and the crash and flow of water becomes louder as one draws nearer. But I wasn’t moving, and this sound filled up the silences, until it was many waterfalls and I was scrambling into her shelter, until it was the sound of a thousand rainstorms at once, and I was wrapping her arms around the gzaet in her lap, enfolding it and protecting it as if it were her newborn daughter. Then nothing. Silence. Even the birds and the insects and the animals who talked their way through the forest were silent.
I sat perfectly still, drawing no comfort from the gzaet in her lap. The shelter would keep her dry except during the worst masculine rain; currently it offered her no protection from the giant sound or the giant silence that followed. Her fear was terrible, and she did not remember ever having felt so unwomanly. The fear that another might walk by and see her shaking prompted her out of the shelter. The clearing, the fire, the scorched land of the waiting fire, the clear, hard bodies of the trees, the roof of leaves above, the sprinkle of light—none of this had lost its everyday look. Insects, birds, animals: one by one the familiar sounds returned. It became easier to act as if nothing had happened.
Flatface called out her approach. Flatface and I’s mother had shared a mother, and Flatface was now as old as I’s mother had been when she had left the river. Flatface’s skin sagged with age, and her teats were withered with both her age and the drying of her milk. By the end of summer the skin on her chest would hang like the skin from her belly. Her face had inspired her name, but the creases, born of facing the sun and the cold, made her face look rounder. Across one cheek was a long, twisted scar. She was dressed in skins for a cooler morning, and she wore her kaross draped around her shoulder and tied off above her hips. Riding her shoulders was her knee-high daughter. Walking behind her was her youngest son, who still climbed trees with girls. Walking off the path, staring into the woods as if no one were nearby, was the eldest son. He was almost as tall as a woman and learning to enjoy his solitude. He was interested enough in women’s labia that he would soon be forced to leave for another part of the river. Flatface’s first child now had a child of her own.
With four live children Flatface was no longer one who’d wait by the waiting fire until I took proper notice. Today she wasn’t one to stop at a respectful distance, either. She took I by the arm and pulled her along, all the while saying between heavy breaths, “You have to come with me. There’s something new in the clearing. Many Wrinkles and Childless and Squawker are there waiting for you.”
I had lived the springs and falls of her childhood around this clearing. She had helped her mother and Flatface burn away the brush and leaves and had watched the grasses grow in their place. She had gathered berries and dug up tubers. Before she had grown to enjoy her solitude, I had played here with Flatface’s eldest daughter, who now had her own child. With the eldest daughter I had run between and around the trees; she had climbed the tallest trees to stare out at the way the land sloped down to the distant lake; she had plucked leaves in the spring and watched them slowly change back into the color they were the rest of the year; she had snuck up on animals drinking from the tiny stream that ran through the clearing; and she had hidden behind trees when a nightskin had approached the stream to drink its share of water.
One edge of the clearing overlooked the hills falling to the lake, and the rest was bounded by hills. The trees along the hillside had all faced the sun and were now bright with color. The slopes were bare of tree and brush, covered with grass, scarred where animals and people had skidded down to the flat land of the clearing.
In the center of the clearing was something else. Something big. The ground around it was black and broken, like someone had burned a fire there until the grass became smoke and the land became so hard that it cracked open in tiny jagged lines. The thing itself, centered in the blackness, had the wet sheen of a rock recently pulled from the river. It was bigger than any rock she had ever seen. Behind it, the tiny stream whispered quietly as if nothing strange had happened.
Why was this thing here, in the place where she had been a child
?
Each woman stood a proper distance from the other at the top of the hill. Each stood near a thick old tree in case there was a reason to hide. Squawker‚ who lived near the clearing, was telling again how she had heard it first, how she had come out to watch it fall from the sky. She was a squat woman with dark hair whose mother had been born far from the river. While she spoke, she held her infant daughter in her arms and let her nurse. Her son was clinging to her leg, his face turned toward the distant woods and its promise of safety. Squawker’s eyes were fixed on the thing in the clearing, and she told them how she had seen it falling from the sky and how she had run into the forest with her son and daughter so they would be safe. While she told this, Squawker called the thing The Reason I Will Move Away.
Flatface had given it a different name. She called it the Sun Boulder, for the way you could see the sun and some of its brightness on the thing’s surface. Childless Crooked, a thin woman whose skin was going soft again with approaching desire, called it the Slippery Hill because it looked like you would slip if you tried to climb it. Crooked said, “Someone has to touch it.”
“I would leave it alone,” said Squawker.
“You are leaving,” said Childless Crooked. She leaned forward, probably to ease the pain in her back.
“No one should tell another one what to do,” said Flatface, even though she, too, did not like Squawker.
The old woman whom Flatface called Many Wrinkles indeed had skin that sagged with the weight of too many seasons. I called the old woman Wisdom when she was there, and Talk Too Much when she was not. She liked to tell, at length, that she had been the first woman to build hut and hearth in this area.
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