by Linda Hogan
As death grew to fit my mother, to fill her, it was like a seed of something that opened and grew inside her, as if it had known the territory for a long time, plotting its way through flesh and bone, waiting for the moment of its unfolding. Its eyes opened inside Hannah’s, then it inhabited the arms, the hands that clutched at air, then, finally, its stopped heart stilled hers. At last, there was only one thing and she was filled with it.
What possessed her was now gone. It was now ordinary as air in a room, no more than dust, and with quiet footsteps. Perhaps what stole inside a person disguised itself, themselves, as everyday things, daylight, ordinary words and common rooms. Now she was humble, her body without its person. No wings to spread. Nothing.
It was death, finally, that allowed me to know my mother, her body, the house of lament and sacrifice that it was. I was no longer a girl. I was a woman, full and alive. After that, I made up my mind to love in whatever ways I could. I would find it in myself to love the woman who had given life to me, the woman a priest had called a miracle in reverse, the one who had opened her legs to men and participated in the same life-creating act as God. Yes, she tried to kill me, swallow me, consume me back into her own body, the way fire burns itself away, uses itself as fuel. But even if she hated me, there had been a moment of something akin to love, back at the creation. Her desperation and loneliness was my beginning. Hannah had been my poison, my life, my sweetness and pain, my beauty and homeliness. And when she died, I knew that I had survived in the best of ways for I was filled with grief and compassion.
BUSH WOULD COME SOON, I knew. The women summoned her on the citizens band. I was uneasy about being in the house with the body, so I looked at Hannah one more time, at the skin of my skin, the face that had given shape to mine, and then I covered her, took the baby, and walked with her to the place where there’d been a cluster of houses around a general store. I was anxious to leave Hardy. Now there were the living to think about. In another day or so, Husk would arrive, and I wanted to go back to Holy String Town to meet him.
I went toward the town, past the closed-down school which was housed in just a Quonset hut. The playground was littered with paper and bottles and cans. A breeze moved the tire-seat swings. Hardy was a little town, of sorts. The store itself had once been a post, but now it sold packaged food, fish bait and tackle, and beer, powdered milk, canned goods, and boxes of cereal. Nothing was fresh; there was not even an apple. Just Jell-O and Levi’s and hard-toed boots.
The baby liked to be walked. She slept while I walked and she cried when I stopped, so I carried her until Bush arrived. In places the land was dried and white-edged, like the alkali flats in Oklahoma. Oil drums sat outside little buildings. Everything looked temporary. Nothing was planned to be permanent, but had become so by accident.
When Bush finally arrived, I met her at the road. With the baby. “My sister,” I said, smiling.
Bush was solemn.
“Hannah’s already gone,” I told her. “Before we go in, let’s go to the store and make arrangements for a burial.”
“So that’s the baby Dora-Rouge heard crying,” Bush said. “We should learn to believe her. She’s never been wrong.”
In spite of the occasion, she fussed over the baby as we walked.
When we asked the storekeeper about burying Hannah, he told us a man, Saul Talese, had a backhoe. “He lives right up at the turn-off,” he said, pointing out the way.
We went to Talese’s place. Bush offered him her last fur; Talese saw the value of it. Without bartering, he went over to Hannah’s and began without delay to dig a hole in the clearing beside the house where Hannah had lived and died.
WHEN WE RETURNED to Hannah, the room, with its smell of tea and fat, was still and quiet. I unbuttoned the green cotton blouse my mother wore, and we began to prepare her body for the burial no one else would attend. I looked for the first time at my mother’s body, her arms so like mine, her bones familiar. She was covered with scars. I remembered Bush’s story about the bathing of Hannah as a child, and my heart broke for her. I leaned over her and unbuttoned her skirt. Hannah was thin, her body already stiffening, her bones jutting out, her pelvis like an empty bowl. She still had on her worn-down boots. She had been lying in bed with them all along and I hadn’t known it. They were the in thing for those years, pink go-go boots with a fake concho button and a fringe. I removed the boots. Inside them, her feet were bare, her toenails painted red, and chipped. And there were burn scars on the tops of her feet.
Bush wanted her arms to shelter Hannah, she said. “She looks so vulnerable now. And you can see how she was tortured.” I knew Bush had loved her. “Sometimes, when Hannah was a girl,” said Bush, “she would talk about the stars and I’d forget all the things she’d done and my fears about what she would do one day.” Bush cried.
Together we bathed Hannah with soapy hot water, more comforting to us than to the dead. There was little cloth and we needed it for wrapping her body, and for the baby, so we first laid Hannah out on newspaper. How appropriate it was to place her on words of war, obituaries, stories of carnage and misery, and true stories that had been changed to lies. It seemed like the right bed for her. Some of the words stuck to her body, dark ink, but we did not wash them off; it was a suitable skin. Then Bush took down the cloth curtain partition and we wrapped my mother inside it. She wound the sheet around that, rolling Hannah from side to side as if she were merely a bolt the fabric had been wrapped around.
THE TWO WOMEN who had visited made fish-and-lard soup and brought it to the house. The tall one looked out the window at the machine. “They didn’t use to bury them in the ground in the old days,” she said. “They were aboveground then. It seems like we’ve got everything all mixed up.”
They said that when Hannah died they had smelled a wolverine pass by. “There are even wolverine tracks all around Hannah’s house,” the tall one said.
“Where?” I said, going down the step.
I went out to look, and it was true.
Some people say Wolverine had things mixed up, too. At times it was said he was a human returned to his animal shape. At other times, he was animal inhabiting a strange, two-legged body, wearing human skin. Whichever he was, Wolverine had come to despise humans and they didn’t feel so good about him either. But he knew them, and he knew everything about them. That’s how he knew to steal the flints and other things of value to human beings and to spoil the things they needed to live by. I wondered if he was the one who stole my mother.
The people there needed the snowshoes and coats. There was little of nothing for us to take away, although when I opened one of Hannah’s drawers I found the piece of amber I had carried, the frog inside it. I hadn’t even missed it. She’d stolen it, taken something else away from me. And she had broken into it, tried to chip the frog out. It must have terrified her, such suspension. I think she wanted to get to the heart of stilled life, to what was held captive in the yellow blood of a tree.
As we left, I knew I was leaving something behind me, perhaps forever, and as we walked away from the house of Hannah, death closed the door, darkened the windows like smoke. The nails of the house, driven through the walls, would rust, the slow fire of oxidation would take place, and finally all of it would fall. No one would ever live near Hannah’s dwelling place. They feared her still, all of them. In eight years it would be under water, the forests rotting beneath the muddy waters, the store and school floating up to the surface in pieces like rafts, the rusted machines at the bottom, unnatural and strange, and the animal bones floating, white, in the dark, cold waters, like ghosts or souls in the hereafter.
ON OUR WAY BACK, curious, I asked Bush, “Where’d you get the money for the plane?” I knew Tulik had none left. Mikky had made a special trip for her, for which she’d paid a hundred dollars.
Bush told me that at Two-Town Post she’d laid two of the prime beaver furs on the counter and asked Mr. Orensen what he’d give for them. She imitated him, telling
me, “Well, they don’t look like much. The hairs are uneven.” He showed her what he meant, but she gave him the hard, gritty, angular look I knew so well, her eyes not wavering one bit.
“I’d say they’re worth about, oh, thirty, in trade,” he offered.
Bush knew traders. She wasn’t fooled. “You know that’s the best way for the hairs to be. So I’ll take what you offered, that much for each one. That and more besides. I’ll take three of those cured hams over there. And two pairs of Levi’s.”
When the deal was finished, she’d bargained for needles, thread, cloth for Auntie’s and Luce’s quilts, “and part of the money to get to Hardy, too,” she told me. “And Levi’s. One in size 26-30, one 29-31.” She laughed about how his face changed expression. He could see that she wasn’t a novice. He took the jeans from the shelf and placed them in a bag. He was so surprised, he didn’t even haggle. Like Dora-Rouge, Bush drove a tough bargain.
BY THE TIME we returned to Tulik’s, I’d named the baby, my sister, “Aurora.” I gave her to Dora-Rouge to hold. Beaming, she said,“New skin, straight from mystery. I’m glad I made that deal with water, after all.
“What deal?” Bush said.
It was only then that we learned about Dora-Rouge’s bargain with water. She had told it that if it gave us safe passage down the Se Nay River, she’d give up her so desired death to fight for it. She’d pledged her soul. “But I didn’t know what I was in for.”
I thought, so that was why Dora-Rouge blamed herself for Agnes’ death. She thought there might have been a part of the agreement she had not understood, loopholes in the legality of the arrangement.
We heard the low howl of a wolf, so low it could have been mistaken for the wind. It lay down across the wet earth. Tulik’s dog answered, remembering the wolf blood that still lived inside it, no matter how it had been bred out, no matter how people wanted to make of the animals something they weren’t, as they’d tried to do with the people, as they were doing with the land. And so the events that followed were tribal cries, the old wailing come to new terms.
And then we heard the train from a long ways off. It was how sound traveled there, where sometimes a sound from miles away seemed close at hand, and at other times a person in the same room sounded far away, distant and remote. Its sound drowned out the voices of wolves.
SEVENTEEN
THE FAT-EATERS BELIEVED the ancestors returned in the new bodies of children, so for several weeks Tulik, Auntie, and the woman named Luce studied Aurora’s features to see who she might be.
They pondered her, but there was great disagreement. “Look. That birthmark at her hairline is just like Ek’s,” said Auntie.
“No, Ek’s was on the other side of her forehead.”
Tulik said, “Ek was her own grandfather. Remember?”
“But her expression is just like that of Ek’s. Isn’t that so, Dora-Rouge?” Auntie tried for support. “Doesn’t she look like your mother?”
“Leave me out of it,” said Dora-Rouge. “I love her whoever she is.”
But the arguments over Aurora continued. Luce, who wore a calico dress, favored Auntie’s opinion. “She’s just like Ek. Look how she keeps crawling toward Ek’s book. See? She’s doing it now.”
This was the first time I’d heard of Ek’s book. “What book?” I asked.
“Yes, I have her book. But it’s yours. It’s for you women.”
The book’s pages were made of thin birch bark cooked into a stew of salt and ash, then flattened and dried. In it were diagrams of plants. Arrows pointed to parts of them that were useful for healing a root, a leaf. Also there were symbols for sun and moon which depicted the best times of day to gather the plants.
IT WAS TRUE that Aurora went often to this book written in another alphabet. She would put out her hand, reaching toward it, the little table where it rested, chattering in innocent baby talk, speaking the before-language words.
Personally, I didn’t like the notion of returned souls. I believed in newness, in the freedom of a beginning outside the past, outside history. Maybe it was because I had fallen into my own life so late or because I had grown up in the white world and only come home so recently.
But out of plain stubbornness, Tulik began to call Aurora “my grandfather,” and he named her privately after his mother’s father; Totsohi, which meant Storm. Totsohi was a man revered for his intelligence, generosity, and kindness. He had been a keeper of peace.
While it was true Aurora had peaceful, knowing eyes, like those of an older person, I complained, “That’s a big order to fill when she doesn’t even know how to walk yet.” But they all turned a deaf ear to me.
Sometimes when Aurora’s eyes sharpened or looked especially wise, Tulik would say, with pride, “See? There he is. It’s Totsohi himself!” Or if Aurora was very serious and took him in with a long look, Tulik would say, “Totsohi is always such a thinking man.”
Once Aurora said something that sounded like Tulik’s name. This heartened him. His face lit up. “He remembers me!”
Finally, I found a way to break him of this habit. When he told me one day, “My grandfather has a wet diaper,” I took hold of the opportunity. “You’d better change him then,” I said. “I don’t want to see an old man naked. It would embarrass him.” I handed Tulik the cloth.
After that, Tulik called her Aurora whenever I was around, but when he thought I wasn’t listening, the times when I was in “my” corner of the room, or sitting outside in the white chair, I heard him speak with her. “What do you think a human is, Grandfather? I’ve been wondering this all my life.” Or he’d speak about the old times, or ask if Totsohi remembered the time the horses froze standing by water. “I still can’t get it out of my mind,” he said.
Because of Aurora’s ancient history, she was treated with great respect, as if she were an elder. It was good, I thought, when I cradled her and looked down into her small, round face. It would help her grow into a strong woman. She would be what I was not. She would know her world and not be severed from it. Whoever she was, it was a kind of beginning, I reasoned, because all the parts of her were new and fat and laughing.
Tulik tied the old man Totsohi’s flint, what Totsohi had called a living stone, around her neck. That was how Aurora, my baby sister, became the man who had dreamed sickness and foretold the measles, who had warned the people that these diseases would kill them. She became the man who knew the songs of the water and beaver. And maybe she was part Ek, too.
I HAD A FEELING all along that Husk would not come, but I hoped I was wrong. On the night before he was to arrive I prepared for his arrival. I put pictures on the wall. He liked that, Husk did. Tulik cleaned the floors. I washed the small windows until they were invisible and streakless. Then, on the morning of the fifth, I put the bedding out on the whalebone fence to air, picked wildflowers and arranged them in jelly glasses to spruce up Tulik’s house. Everything was bright. I was excited that John Husk was coming and that Tommy, I hoped, might come with him. I still thought of Tommy daily, and sometimes at night I pretended we were together in each other’s arms.
On the morning of the fifth, Dora-Rouge and I went to the String Town depot, a little wooden building with coal still sitting in a bin outside the door. But noon arrived and no train appeared. The day wore on. No Husk or Tommy arrived. My heart fell.
“What do you think?” Dora-Rouge said, frowning. “It’s not like John. He always does what he says.”
“But maybe it’s not him. No trains at all have come in, just that empty one.” It sat, its cars empty with waiting.
Soon we learned that a security force was being sent in. By now, we knew what that meant. It meant there were plans under way to begin blasting and construction once again. The only people who were able to pass through were what Bush called the soldier police, already prepared for our resistance. A roadblock was in effect. No one could travel Highway 17. And no one could come by train. The trains were carrying only freight and emptiness to be
filled, and they were guarded carefully against human travel.
I cried, “I hate this place.”
“Shh. It’s all right, Angel.”
Later that same day a light rain fell on the bedclothes laid over the whalebones, but I was too depressed to care.
That night I could not sleep. I held Dora-Rouge’s sleeping potion in my hand wondering if I should swallow it. I’d preserved and guarded what was left of the concoction. I looked daily at the amount left in the brown glass bottle, afraid to use it, saving it for when my insomnia might worsen, afraid it would evaporate or I would drop it, afraid it would lose its strength. It seemed selfish of me to use it; the plant that went into it, like the one for headache, was beneath water now. Dora-Rouge had sent several people searching for it, but it was nowhere to be found and this added to Dora-Rouge’s heavy grief that one more sacred thing was missing from the world.
I lay there listening to the rain, smelling it. I was lonely. In a house filled with the snores and breathing of others, I was all alone.
We learned later that Husk and Tommy, reaching the roadblock, were turned back. They tried to take to the waterways in order to reach us, but were intercepted.
During the few times I slept, when a few hours of darkness went through my thoughts, I entered a world of green, a tangled-together nest of growing things. At times now it was an autumn world I saw, with white seedpods and silver filaments flying into warm air, desperate and urgent, seeking a resting place, a place to grow. There were burrs carried to new places in the fur of wolves and other animals, seeds dispersed by birds. At times I’d see the ancient lichens awake on rocks, and green mosses, soft as clouds.