Always Coming Home
Page 6
Condor messengers came down over the Mountain to the Commander of the Army of the Condor.
Kills said that night when supper was done, “We must go before your World Dance,* Willow.”
“I’m not going anywhere in this weather,” said my mother.
“No,” he said. “It’s better not.”
There was a silence. The fire talked.
“What’s better not?” my mother asked.
“When we start home—I will come for you then,” he said.
She said, “What are you talking about?”
They talked backwards for a while, he speaking about the Condor Army coming back from a war on the Amaranth Coast, she not acknowledging that she had begun to understand him. At last she said, “Is this true: you’re telling me that you are going away from the Valley?”
“Yes,” he said. “For a while. Against the Inland Coast people. It is the plan of the Condor.”
She said nothing.
He said, “A year—not longer than a year. Unless I am sent for to Sai. At the very most, two years, no longer.”
She said nothing.
He said, “If I could take you with me I would, but that would be dangerous and foolish. If I could stay—But I cannot. But you will wait for me here.”
She stood up from the hearthseat. The softness of the firelight fell from her and left her dark. She said, “If you won’t stay, go.”
“Listen, Willow,” he said. “Listen to me! Is it unfair to ask you to wait? If I were going on a hunting trip, or a trading trip, would you not wait for me? You Valley people, some of you leave the Valley! And come back—and their wives wait for them—I will come back. I promise you. I am your husband, Willow.”
She stood there between fire and shadow for a while before she spoke.
“Once,” she said.
He did not understand.
“Once, for nine years,” she said. “Not twice. You are my husband; you are not. My house holds you; it does not. Choose.”
“I cannot stay,” he said.
She said, still speaking softly and clearly, “The choice is yours.”
“I am the Commander of the Army of the Condor,” he said. “As I give orders, I obey orders. In this matter I have no choice, Willow.”
She moved away from the fire then, and came across the room.
“You must understand,” he said.
She said, “I understand that you choose not to choose.”
“You do not understand. I can only ask you, will you wait for me?”
She said nothing.
“I will come back, Willow. My heart is here, with you and the child, always!”
She stood beside the second-room doorway while he spoke. My bed was just inside the doorway, and I could see them both, and feel the pulling two ways in her body.
“You must wait for me,” he said.
She said, “You have gone.”
She came into the second room and closed the door, which had been open for warmth. She stood there in the dark. I lay still. He said, “Willow, come back!” He came to the door and said her name again, angrily, in great pain. She did not reply. Neither of us moved. There was a long time nothing happened, and then we heard him turn and stride across the hearthroom and go down the stairs.
My mother lay down beside me. She said nothing and lay perfectly still; so did I. I did not want to think about what had been said. I tried to go to sleep, and soon I did.
In the morning when I got up, my mother had rolled up the red rugs and put them with my father’s clothes on the balcony by the head of the stairs outside our door.
Towards noon my father came up the stairs and past the rugs and clothes. He came in the door. My mother was inside; she did not look at him or answer when he spoke to her, and when he stood aside from the doorway she left the house at once, going to our heyimas. He went after her. Some Blue Clay people came right out and kept him from going down into the heyimas. At first he acted crazily, but they quietened him, and Ninepoint explained to him that a man may come and go as he likes, and a woman may take him back or not as she likes, but the house is hers, and if she shuts the door he may not open it. People had come to listen because of the noise he had made shouting at first, and some of them I thought it was funny to explain such things to a grown man. Strength, a speaker of the Blood Lodge, scoffed at him. When he said, “But she belongs to me—the child belongs to me,” she began to do the Blood Clown turkey-gobble around him, shouting, “The hammer menstruates to me! They pleat the courage to her!” and a string of reversal-words like that.* There were some people in town glad to see the Condor humiliated. I saw this from the balcony of our house.
My father came back up the stairs. He kicked the roll of rugs and clothing in rage, like a child, and stood there in the doorway. I had gone back to the kitchen table, where I had been making corn-bread. I kept working there with my back turned. I did not know what to do, how I should act, and I hated my father for causing this uncertainty and misery. I was glad Strength had jeered at him, and wanted to jeer at him too, for being so stupid.
“Owl,” he said. “Will you wait for me?”
Not expecting to cry at all, I began crying.
“If I live I will come back to you here,” he said. He did not come in and I did not go to him. I turned around and nodded. When I looked up at him he was putting on the Condor helmet that hid his face. He turned and left.
Valiant had been weaving; her loom was set up by the windows in the second room. When my mother came back to the house, Valiant said to her, “Well, he’s gone, Willow.”
My mother’s face was pale and furrowed. She said, “I have gone away from that name. I will go back to my first name.”
“Towhee,” my grandmother said, in a soft voice, as a mother says a baby’s name. She shook her head.
The second part of Stone Telling’s story begins here.
NOTES:
I go there…
Except for the preterit “went,” the verbs in this verse and others in the same form are in a present tense used in telling myths, recounting dreams, speaking of the dead, and in ceremonial recitations. The English present participle translates this “timeless present” rather well:
Going there, going there,
Going where I went
Crying beside the water.
Going there, going there,
The log along the water.
So we walked in the arm of life.
The Serpentine Codex may help clarify some of this imagery. In the left arm of the heyiya-if, the symbol of the Whole, the five colors ran black, blue, green, red, yellow, into or out from the center; the right arm of the symbol was white. The left arm was mortality, the right eternity.
the Copper Snake…the Mountain Lion…
The Copper Snake may have been a treatment ritual for sufferers of rheumatism. The Mountain—Ama Kulkun, Grandmother Mountain—the Springs of the River Na, and the town at the springs, Wakwaha-na, were the most centrally sacred places to the people of the Valley. To go up on the summits of the mountain “in the tracks of the lion” or “on the hawk’s way” was a solitary spiritual excursion undertaken sooner or later, once or more than once, by most of the people of the Nine Towns.
Are they ginkgos?
The ginkgo tree is sexually dimorphic. Female trees are not usually planted near male trees, lest they be fertilised, since the fruit exudes a terrific stench. In Kesh literature the ginkgo is associated with homosexuality both in satire and in celebration.
“We must go before your World Dance.”
Imperfectly acquainted with the delicacies of Kesh verbal usage, Terter Abhao used the pronoun “we” which includes the person addressed, and a form of the verb “go” which implies going a short distance for a short while; so Willow understood him as saying something like, “You and I might take a walk together some time before the World Dance.”
…reversal-words like that…
In Clown impromptus langua
ge was deliberately dislocated for subversive effect (as in surrealist poetry and imagery). Abhao inadvertently made just such a dislocation by saying that his wife and child “belonged to” him; Kesh grammar makes no provision for a relation of ownership between living beings. A language in which the verb “to have” is an intransitive and in which “to be rich” is the same word as “to give” is likely to turn its foreign speaker, and translator, into a clown all too often.
The Serpentine Codex
This text, in an archaic calligraphy, is the only verbal element in an accordion-fold book of pictorial symbols in the Library of Wakwaha.
The nine Houses of the living and the dead are the Obsidian, Blue Clay, Serpentine, Yellow Adobe, Red Adobe, Rain, Cloud, Wind, Still Air. The colors of the four Houses of the dead are white and the rainbow. The peoples that live with human people live in the Houses of Earth; the peoples of the wilderness live in the Houses of Sky. Birds are from the Houses of Sky and come from the right hand and may speak for the dead and bear messages to them, and their feathers are the words that the dead spoke. When a child comes from the Four Houses to be born it comes to live in the House of its mother. The Houses of Sky dance the Earth Dance and the Houses of Earth dance the Sky Dance. The House of Blue Clay dances the Water, the House of Yellow Adobe dances the Wine, the House of Serpentine dances the Summer, the House of Red Adobe dances the Grass, the House of Obsidian dances the Moon. All the Houses of Earth and Sky dance the Sun. The Sun with the other stars dances the pattern of Return. The heyiya-if is the pattern of that pattern and the House of the Nine Houses.
This text provides a compact summary of the structure of society, the year, and the universe, as perceived by the people of the Valley.
The beings or creatures that are said to live in the Five Houses of Earth and are called Earth People include the earth itself, rocks and dirt and geological formations, the moon, all springs, streams, and lakes of fresh water, all human beings currently alive, game animals, domestic animals, individual animals, domestic and ground-dwelling birds, and all plants that are gathered, planted, or used by human beings.
The people of the Sky, called Four-House People, Sky People, Rainbow People, include the sun and stars, the oceans, wild animals not hunted as game, all animals, plants, and persons considered as the species rather than as an individual, human beings considered as a tribe, people, or species, all people and beings in dreams, visions, and stories, most kinds of birds, the dead, and the unborn.
Bear
The chart following (here) shows the Nine Houses, the color and direction associated with each, the annual festival for which each is responsible, and the Lodges, Societies, and Arts associated with each. The chart is schematic and the discussion that follows is simplistic. It may serve as a gloss to certain words, phrases, and unstated assumptions in the Valley texts in this book, and an introduction to their thinking and the themes of their arts. But it is important to know that there is no Valley original for this chart, or anything like it. Although the numbers four, five, and nine, and the representation of the Nine Houses, and their arrangement in the heyiya-if or hinged spiral, and the colors, directions, seasons, creatures associated with the Houses are constant motifs of Valley art and thought, and the division between Earth and Sky, mortality and nonmortality, is connected with a fundamental grammatical maneuver of the language (Earth and Sky Modes), still the actual listing and charting of the nine divisions and their various members and functions would strike the Valley mind as somewhat childish and—in fixing and “locking” the information—as risky and inappropriate.
The Five Houses of Earth were the basic divisions of the society, the Kesh equivalent of clan or moiety. Non-Kesh were called no-House people. The Houses were matrilineal and exogamous. All human members of a House were considered first-degree kin, with whom sexual relations were inappropriate (see the section on “Kinfolk,” here).
The Houses were not arranged in any hierarchy of power, value, etc., nor was there rivalry among them for status; they were called First, Second, etc., House, but numerical order carried absolutely no implication of ranking, rating, or importance. Some rivalry did attach to the festivals held annually by each House—not so much among the five Houses, as within them in the nine towns. The word I usually translate as dance—wakwa—may also mean rite, mystery, ceremony, celebration. The annual round of the wakwa constellates the Valley year:
Along in November when the hills begin to turn green the Red Adobe dances the Grass. At the winter solstice all nine Houses dance the Sun. At the equinox of spring, the Five Houses dance the Sky and the Four Houses dance the Earth, the whole dance being called the World. At the second full moon after this, the Obsidian dances the Moon. At the summer solstice and after it, the Serpentine dances the Summer. In early or mid-August, the Blue Clay dances the Water at springs, pools, and streams. At the autumnal equinox, the Yellow Adobe dances the Wine, or Getting Drunk.
These seven great wakwa may be found pictorially arranged as the heyiya-if, with the World in the center (the Hinge), flanked by Sun and Moon immediately to left and right, Grass and Summer next outward, and Wine and Water at the left and right ends of the figure. Such a nonsequential image of the year is characteristic of Valley chronography. And since the two-season climate did not lend itself to dating by season, in conversation events were usually referred to in relation to the wakwa: before the Grass, between Water and Wine, after the Moon. (The section “Time and the City” (here) pursues Valley ideas of time.)
The material manifestation of each of the Five Houses in each of the nine towns was the heyimas. Finding all such translations as church, temple, shrine, lodge misleading, I use the Kesh word in this book. It is formed of the elements heya, heyiya—the connotations of which include sacredness, hinge, connection, spiral, center, praise, and change—and ma, house.
The heyiya-if, two spirals centered upon the same (empty) space, was the material or visual representation of the idea of heyiya. Varied and elaborated in countless ways, the heyiya-if was a choreographic and gestural element in dance, and the shape of the stage and the movement of the staging in drama were based upon it; it was an organisational device in town planning, in graphic and sculptural forms, in decoration, and in the design of musical instruments; it served as a subject of meditation and as an inexhaustible metaphor. It was the visual form of an idea which pervaded the thought and culture of the Valley.
Puma
THE FIVE HOUSES OF THE EARTH
The First House
The Second House
The Third House
The Fourth House
The Fifth House
OBSIDIAN
BLUE CLAY
SERPENTINE
YELLOW ADOBE
RED ADOBE
northeast
black
the moon
northwest
blue
fresh waters
N, E, S, W
green
stones
southeast
yellow
dirt
southwest
red
dirt
The direction of movement associated with all Five Houses of the Earth is inward
The Inhabitants
Those who live in the Five Houses of the Earth are the earth itself, the moon, all the rocks and landforms, all fresh waters, individual animals and human beings currently alive, plants used by human beings, domestic and ground-living birds, game and domestic animals.
Domestic animals and birds: sheep, cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, cats, dogs, himpi, poultry, pets.
Game animals and birds: deer, brushrabbit, jackrabbit, wild pig, squirrel, possum, quail, pheasant, wild fowl; sometimes wild cattle, freshwater fish, frogs, crayfish.
Gathered plants: berries, seed grasses, roots, herbs, greens, edible fungi, nuts, wild fruit trees, timber trees, acorn & gall oaks, tule, cattail, wild flowers, etc.
Domestic plants: wood: olive, plum, p
each, nectarine, apricot, cherry, pear, grape vine, almond, walnut, orange, lemon, apple, rose, etc.
Domestic plants: not wood: beans, peas, legumes, corn, squash, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, okra, garlic, vegetables of the cabbage family, root vegetables, greens, melons, herbs; hemp, cotton, flax; garden flowers; etc.
The Festivals
The inhabitants of all Five Houses of the Earth together dance the Sky Dances of the World Ceremony (near the spring equinox) and the Sun Dance (at the winter solstice).
The Moon Dance
The Water Dance
The Summer Dance
The Wine Dance
The Grass Dance