I didn’t look up. She repositioned the not-a-person’s leg so that the wound was not touching the ground. The leg moved in two different ways. The not-a-person groaned again. Her eyes didn’t open. Sweat covered her face. I touched first the blackened skin. The not-a-person groaned. I felt along the leg, pressing as softly as she could so she could feel through the burned fabric. The leg was broken. It was broken as neatly as dried wood broke; there were no slivers or sharp points of bone that she could feel. But she had no idea how the leg bones of a not-a-person were shaped. If she set the leg and tied wood to it, would the leg heal so this not-a-person could walk again?
She stepped out of the shelter. Squawker and Flatface’s eldest daughter had laid the Stranger by the cooking fire. “I would like him in the hut,” she said.
Flatface’s eldest daughter leaned forward to grab the Stranger’s shoulders once again. Squawker did not move. She said, “Each would be too close to the other. The Stranger deserves his solitude.”
“If it rains on him, will he deserve his death?”
Flatface said, “We can take the not-a-person out.”
“Each will sleep on the other side of the fire. I will play music for both of them. I need them close together.”
Flatface’s eldest daughter started to pick up the Stranger. “You don’t share a mother with him,” she said to Squawker, “so let’s do what the healer says.”
Squawker’s eyes went wide with anger. She looked straight to the healer as she passed by. She walked out of the hut almost as soon as she entered, and with no words to share, she walked away and disappeared into the forest. Flatface’s eldest daughter stood awkwardly in the opening of the hut and looked to her mother, then to the healer. She opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. She walked over to Wisdom, took the infant into her arms, and left. Wisdom said nothing to the healer. She followed Flatface’s eldest daughter.
Flatface remained, her daughter and son standing by the waiting fire.
I said, “You have words to share.”
“I have words to share, but I feel that I will say certain words and you will hear different ones.”
“I have always listened when you have spoken, but today I have two injured ones who need care. I will listen tomorrow if the words are ones which you can still share.”
Flatface looked to the hut’s opening. “Each of them must have played a part in Hugger’s death. Why heal each one? If one will live on its own, let it live. If it dies, let it die.”
I wanted to say that she was a healer, that her mother had healed, that her mother’s mother had healed. But such words would only make Flatface more angry, so I respected the older woman’s solitude and remained silent. But silence meant there were no kind words that made it possible for Flatface to leave now and return tomorrow. I realized that she didn’t long for such words.
Flatface must have sensed the change because she stepped forward and lightly touched I, her fingertips running across I’s collarbone. “Your skin is softer. It must be your time.” She withdrew her fingers and softened the look in her eyes. “Long Fingers, mate this time. Have a daughter. If you had a daughter to worry you, you wouldn’t be so worried about what goes on in the clearing.”
The words were soft and kind enough that Flatface could leave.
She examined the Stranger first. There was a wound along the side of his belly, but there was hardly any blood coming out. The same with the wound across his shin; it was much like a deep groove had been cut into him. There should be more blood from such wounds.
His breath was ragged. She placed palm on forehead to feel what music couldn’t. The skin was clammy. His eyes snapped open. He wide-eyed her. She was already rising to step away from him when his arm struck out. The blow did cause her to lose her balance and land on her behind, but the blow itself hadn’t been hard at all. The blow had been as weak as his breathing. The Stranger wasn’t terribly wounded. He was sick with something, and he was dying.
She didn’t know what to make of the not-a-person. Was her skin too warm? Was sweat for her the same as sweat for a person? How fast should the heart beat? Was the odd breathing normal? The not-a-person let out a soft sigh, and the fabric around her crotch darkened.
The Stranger had turned his head to watch I. He said nothing. I couldn’t leave the not-a-person like this. With the wounded leg, she couldn’t remove the leggings. She withdrew knife from sheath and slowly cut away the fabric. The blackened skin around the break was surrounded by skin dark with the color of the setting sun. A scar ran down the calf of the uninjured leg. She removed everything up to the not-a-person’s waist. She saw that the not-a-person was a man. Once the leggings were off, she covered his body with an animal hide. She walked out of the shelter, but her mind’s eye saw little else but the not-a-person’s penis.
She set the gzaet in front of the hut’s opening. She played several childhood songs, ones her mother had played to calm her, but the notes came out sour, as if her fingers had forgotten them. She stopped. She was very aware of the Stranger’s maleness; she kept seeing him enter Squawker from behind as she held his thighs and carried him here, the comment made by Flatface’s eldest daughter now a vivid daydream. When she played another song to take her mind away, she saw the not-a-person’s penis, and when she played another song, she saw Nightskin’s. She lowered her hands to the lower rows of keys to play music to cool the desire, to make it possible to concentrate, and once she could concentrate, she played music for the Stranger to try to ease his breathing and cool the very different fever that journeyed through his body.
Esoch heard the music, the very distant music, and he heard the closer music of his thumb piano. He sat in the shade one hot !gaa day, where the shade was cooler than the sun, but not much, and waited for the coolness of night. He pressed his thumbs against the keys, and the sound was clear. It didn’t jangle like the thumb pianos he and others had made with metal they had traded for at the reserve outposts. He heard again a song he had found, one note that sounded so right after the other, and he played it and played it, glad that the sun scorched the land so that no one would call him lazy for not hunting today.
And the distant music got closer, louder, and his own music became harder to hear, until all his notes were confused by a jangle, by something that couldn’t be called a song, that didn’t have much of a pattern, or did it? Several phrases sounded with terrible familiarity. But he had never heard such phrases before. They sounded again, and he heard the mother from the experience. I have food to share, the same singsong of slazan mother to slazan child, he was hearing it now, then it became something else and it was again a jumble of sounds.
He forced his eyes open. Above him was a thatched roof. It was shaped like a cone. Through the opening he could see blue sky. He tried to lift his head, but that hurt. He listened to the sounds. Who was playing? Was it Slazan N!ai? He tried to lift his head, but the pain was worse this time. Something moved nearby, to his right. He turned his head, and the pain wasn’t so bad. Near him were stones surrounding the remains of a fire. Across from that he could clearly see the face of the slazan warrior. The warrior’s eyes were open, and he was looking back.
This was too much. He let the pain overtake him; he let the sweet blackness return.
I saw music more than anything else, but when she heard the soft scraping of ground as the not-a-person moved, she lifted her eyes from the music. The not-a-person’s head was turned to its side. She stopped playing the gzaet and walked into the hut. The not-a-person’s eyes were closed. The Stranger’s eyes, however, were open, but they had a glazed look, as if he were half-asleep. His skin looked dark, feverish still. She smelled something that hadn’t been there before. She had tried to release the Stranger’s body of the fever, and all she had released was shit.
“Can you clean yourself?” she said.
The Stranger looked away. I wasn’t sure if he meant no, or if he was hiding his eyes from the embarrassment.
The healer said,
“Music won’t clean your behind.”
“Your music won’t do much,” he said.
“May I touch?”
“No.”
I started to walk away.
“Healer?”
She walked back and stood by the Stranger’s feet. She looked to his forehead, not his eyes.
“I can’t clean myself. I can’t ask you to clean me. I have nothing to share.”
“May I touch?”
“I won’t strike you.”
“Remember yourself as a child. This was done to you as a child before you loved your solitude.”
“I am not a child.”
“I know.”
The Stranger kept his eyes averted. The leggings were connected to the shirt, as they had been on the not-a-person. The Stranger could not sit up, so she had to do what she had done with the not-a-person. She sharpened the knife on her stone, and she slid it up the inside of the leggings, surprised at how easily the blade cut through the skin. Even so, the Stranger still groaned with each jerk of his body, and she did her best to move slowly. Along his legs were tiny welts, hard and the color of blood. They were a bit larger than the bites of an earbuzz. She closed her eyes, made the image of the insect, then the look of the bite, then the look of these bites. The memory came back to her, and she went to the wall and took down a string of memory beads.
She felt along each bead, feeling for shape, looking at color. A newborn, who had sucked from his mother’s teats only a few times, was brought to I’s mother—when I watched everything her mother did—and her mother had tried to play music for it, but the welts did not disappear; the newborn’s skin darkened the way the Stranger’s skin darkened, and he died. Another few beads, another memory, an older child, with bites like this, who sweated, who listened to the music and was fine. Might there be no earbuzzes where the Stranger lived, and might the Stranger be like a newborn, ready to suffer from whatever it was in the bites that made your skin rise and itch?
She returned to the Stranger and the leggings were whole again. It was as if she had never cut through them. She left the hut, walked back and forth, her heart striking at her throat, and considered leaving. She could pick up the gzaet, her memory beads, and head for Small Lake, where Lightfoot Watcher and other women would welcome her.
She placed her finger against the blade of her knife. It was still sharp. In the hut again, crouching by the Stranger, she sliced the leggings, cut away at them, taking advantage of the ease with which the skins parted. She tossed the remains at the hut’s wall and didn’t watch to see where they landed. She didn’t want to see what the skins did.
She cleaned him with water, taking longest with what had stuck to his scrotum. She found herself looking again at his penis, the way it lay smoothly against his belly. She finished her task, covered his body, and hurried away.
“Healer.”
His voice stopped her. “What?”
“Where I come from, no one uses music the way you use music. Healing is different.”
I said nothing.
“Near the clearing is the bag that I wear on my back. Inside it is the healing I need. Get it for me. Inside are things I can share with you.”
She said nothing. How could he have something to cure a sickness he’d never had before? Or was this a sickness he understood and she didn’t?
“Everything of mine is yours if you will get the healing.”
What could he have that she wanted?
“If you don’t, I will surely die.”
That was something she didn’t want.
When both were asleep, she made her way to the clearing. She didn’t like the thoughts that came to her mind, so she thought about the not-a-person’s broken leg and considered what to do.
She came to the hill that overlooked the clearing. The pointed-ears were nowhere to be seen. She rattled some bushes, and the nightwings flew into the sky. Hugger was meat and bones. His mouth spoke to the sky. His eyes had been plucked out.
She had to look hard. There were few signs of the Stranger’s spoor, and she kept thinking that she should hurry back. One of them might have awakened by now. She found the bag among some young berry bushes that would offer their fruit at the end of the summer.
It was the color of muddy water, and it seemed larger than she remembered it. She placed one fingertip atop it, pulled the fingertip away, then touched it again. Fingers glided over the smooth softness; it felt like the well-worn skin of an animal.
She lifted it up, and its weight took her by surprise. She almost dropped it on her foot. He had carried this until this morning, sick as he was. How did he have the strength? Or did he have some special healing that made him strong? The idea was an odd one, one that she didn’t want to believe, but she had seen enough to believe that each of these injured people could do anything but heal their own injuries.
But down in the clearing were Hugger’s remains, and she knew that there must be more than healing in this bag. She wanted to open the bag and see what it contained, but search as she did, she could find no opening. There were no strings to tie one piece to another. Worse, there were no seams, no sign that one part of the animal skin had been attached to another.
Perhaps it would be best to leave the bag here. But how could she leave it? If he didn’t get the healing, he said he would die.
It took her a while to figure out how to slide her arms through the straps of the bag, and once she did, the weight caused her walk to become a stagger. She wanted to walk quickly, but she felt as if she were carrying a lightfoot over her shoulders. It became only slightly bearable when the part of the bag against her skin, over time, seemed to mold itself to the curve of her back.
A long call sounded through the woods. I stopped, and she listened. She didn’t recognize the voice, but it was the deepthroated call of a grown man. Someone new was wandering near the river, perhaps seeing if a man who always built his nest in the area would call back to question his presence. No one called back. The man called out again. The call was near. She liked the deep music of his voice. If she wanted to look later, she knew it would not be hard to find where he had stopped to build his nest.
Each was still asleep when she returned. She played some music to calm the desire she felt, but when she stopped playing, she once again thought about looking for the man who had been calling nearby.
She also thought about the two objects in her carry bag. One was the color of the boulder. The other one was the color of sun and of the sky; that one had been held by the Stranger. She picked it up in her left hand. She did not know how to hold it, nor did she remember how the unconscious Stranger had held it. She tried to hold it in a number of ways, until she found one way that made such sense that she called herself stupid for not gripping it that way sooner. And soon the part she held became comfortable in her hand. Just like the hilt of the knife.
Fear overcame curiosity. She did not want to know any more. She carried the bag and the objects to behind the midden. With a thin digging stone that had been gifted to her mother, she dug a hole. She placed both objects into the hole and buried them. Nearby was a seedling, a softleaf she had planted to let grow high enough to make a new bow. It marked for her where she had dug the hole.
In the hut each one still slept, so she left to gather food. She wanted fruitnuts and flatleaves‚ but most of that had been picked away, and she did not want to offer sourleaves or flatseeds‚ of which there were plenty, because they were food she would eat only when she was hungry. One snare held a roundtail. She cut the carcass loose and placed the body in her kaross. Some meat would be good.
She made her way to where she, Flatface, and Flatface’s eldest daughter would gather. The paths through this part of the woods led neither to the river’s mouth nor to Small Lake, so it should still offer more food than other parts of the wood. I sang several healing songs, a way she had of recalling patterns to play, the voice in her mind reminding her that she had to play something to heal each one, and since she gath
ered where one woman or another might also gather, she every now and then took hold of a branch and snapped it.
Someone else was also snapping branches, and the sounds came closer. I considered turning back; she did not want to see Flatface again today. Instead it was Flatface’s eldest daughter, whom I used to call Clear Eyes. She carried her infant with her, who was kept by her side in a sling that also rested in the kaross. The child was making sounds, so as she walked, Clear Eyes used her forearm to lift her up and help her mouth reach the nipple to suck.
“I am here and gathering,” I said to her.
“I am here and getting a sore teat,” said Flatface’s eldest daughter.
Each walked, moving at a distance, but in the same direction, eyes stopping whenever they came to something worth picking. Each knew the area well, so when one turned, the other knew what leaves or roots the first was looking for.
“After I left your hut and hearth,” said the eldest daughter, “I heard a stranger call out, and this afternoon I saw that he was building a nest between where you and I live.”
“I heard him, too.”
“I saw him. He is large and well-shaped. Since Long Call’s death, we have missed having another pair of hands living nearby. And perhaps he can offer a woman in desire something more than his hands.”
“Did someone say something to him in passing?” I asked. “Is that why he is building his nest so near to where I gather food?”
“Is there another who gathers around here who does not give her teat to a child?” She looked to the healer with round, friendly eyes. “My mother once told me that a man who is a stranger is the best if you want to enjoy what you desire.”
“Your mother will also tell you that a stranger is the worst if what you desire is a child.”
“But when the desire is still early, isn’t it best to enjoy?”
“It is good to enjoy.” In her body she could almost feel how long it had been since she had felt such enjoyment. Such a strong feeling embarrassed her, so she said nothing.
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