Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Sahelm pointed: the old fat cat was approaching the catnip slowly from the southwest. Duhe threw a piece of bark at her, but she made a rush at the catnip nonetheless. Duhe got up and chased her down to the creek, and came back hot and sat down by Sahelm n the shaded grass again.

  He said, “How could a person go five ways at once?”

  “A person could go one way and four people could be lying.”

  “What would they be lying for?”

  “Maybe in malice.”

  “Has Kamedan done something to bring malice against him?”

  “Never that I’ve heard. But Modona is one of these people who tells where she went, isn’t he?”

  “I think Kamedan did speak of him.”

  “And besides malice there is laziness—it’s easier to explain than to wonder. And besides malice and laziness there is vanity—people can’t bear to admit that they don’t know where she went, so they say authoritatively: She went to Spring Mountain, she went to Wakwaha, she went to the moon! Oh, I don’t know where she went, but I know some of the reasons why people who don’t know would say that they do know.”

  “Why did she herself not say, before she went?”

  “That I don’t know. Do you know Whette well?”

  “No. I work with Kamedan.”

  “She is as beautiful as he. When they married, people called them Awar and Bulekwe. When they danced on the Wedding Night they were like those who dance on the rainbow. People watched in wonder.”

  She pointed: the old fat cat was sneaking along in the wild oats above the creekbed towards the catnip. Sahelm threw an oakgall which rolled between her front and hind legs, and she leaped in the air and rushed away down the creekbed. Sahelm laughed, and Duhe laughed with him. Up in Nehaga a bluejay screeched and a squirrel yelled back. Bees in the lavender bushes nearby made a noise like always boiling.

  Sahelm said, “I wish you had not said she went to the moon.”

  Duhe said, “I’m sorry I said that. It was spoken without sense, foolishly. A bubble word.”

  “The child too is Obsidian,” he said.

  Not knowing that Whette’s child was ill, she did not know why he said this. She was tired of talking about Whette, and sleepy after eating lettuce in the long, hot, late afternoon. She said, “Please keep the cats off for the next while, if you have nothing else you’d rather do, and I’ll go to sleep.”

  She did not sleep altogether, but sometimes watched Sahelm from within her eyelashes and under her hair. He sat still, without motion, his legs crossed, his wrists on his knees, his back straight as a fir. Although he was much younger than Duhe, he did not look young, sitting still. When he spoke he seemed a boy; when he was still he seemed an old man, an old stone.

  After she had dozed she sat up, rested, and said, “You sit well.”

  He said, “I was well trained to sit, to see, to listen. The teacher of my sprouting years in the Yellow Adobe heyimas of Kastoha told me to sit still enough long enough to see and hear every sight and sound in all the six directions, and so become the seventh.”

  “What did you see?” she asked. “What did you hear?”

  “Just now here? Everything, nothing. My mind wasn’t still. It wouldn’t sit. It was running here and there all the time like the squirrel up there in the branches.”

  Duhe laughed. She picked up a duck’s feather from the grasses, a down feather, lighter than breath. She said, “Your mind the squirrel; Whette the lost acorn.”

  Sahelm said, “You’re right, I was thinking about her.”

  Duhe blew the feather into the air with a puff of breath and it floated back down into the grasses. She said, “The air’s beginning to cool.” She got up and went to see to the drying herbs, heaping them onto basket trays or tying them into bunches to hang. She stacked the trays, and Sahelm helped her to carry them to the storehouse the Doctors Lodge was using. It stood southwest of the northwest common place, a half-dugout with stone walling and cedar roof. All the back room of it was stored with herbs drying and dried. Duhe sang as she entered this room. As she stored and hung the herbs she continued to whisper the song.

  Standing in the doorway, Sahelm said, “The smells here are strong. Too strong.”

  Duhe said, “Before mind saw, it smelled, and tasted, and touched. Even hearing is a most delicate touching. Often, in this Lodge, a person must close their eyes in order to learn.”

  The young man said, “Sight is the sun’s gift.”

  The doctor said, “And the moon’s gift as well.”

  She gave him a sprig of sweet rosemary to wear in his hair, and as she gave it to him, said, “What you fear is what you need, I think. I begrudge you to the Millers, man of Kastoha-na!” He took the sprig of rosemary and smelled it, saying nothing.

  Duhe left the storehouse, going to After the Earthquake House.

  Sahelm went to Between the Orchards House, the last house of the middle arm of town, where he was staying since Kailikusha had sent him away from her household. A Yellow Adobe family in Between the Orchards, having a spare room and balcony, had given them to Sahelm to use. He cooked dinner for the family that evening, and after they had cleared away he walked back inward and across towards Hardcinder House. The sun had set behind his back, the full moon was rising before his eyes, over the northeast range. He stopped in the gardens where he saw the moon between two houses. He stood still with his eyes fixed in a gaze upon the moon as it heightened and whitened in the dark blue sky, shining.

  People from another place were coming in along the southeast arm there, three donkeys, three women, four men. They all carried backpacks and wore hats over their ears. One of the men played a four-note finger-drum slung on a cord round his neck as they walked along. A person up on a first-floor balcony greeted these strangers, saying, “Hey, people of the Valley, so you are here!” Other people came out on other porches and balconies to see so many strangers going by. The strangers stopped, and the man with the finger-drum tapped it with his nails to make a hard clear sound, playing a rain piece, and called out aloud, “Hey, people of this Telina-na town, so you are fortunately and beautifully here! We’re coming in among you thus on four feet and two feet, twenty-six feet in all, dragging our heels with weariness, dancing on our toes for joy, speaking and braying and singing and piping and drumming and thumping as we go, until we get to the right place and the right time, and there and then we stop, we stay, we paint, we dress, and we change the world for you!”

  A person called from a balcony, “What play?”

  The drummer called back, “As you like it!”

  People began to call out plays they wanted to hear. The drummer called back to each one, “Yes, we’ll play that one, yes, yes, we’ll play that one,” promising to play them all, the next day, on the middle common place. A woman called from a window, “This is the right place, players, this is the right time!” The drummer laughed, and gestured to one of the women, who came out of the group and stood in the moonlight where it ran bright through the air and along the ground across the gardens between the houses. The drummer drummed five and five, and the players sang the Continuing Tone, and the woman lifted her arms up high. She danced a scene from the play Tobbe, dancing the ghost of the lost wife. As she danced she cried out again and again in a high faint voice. She sank down into a bar of darkness, the shadow of a house, and seemed so to vanish. The drummer changed the beat; the piper picked up her pipe and began to play a stampdance; and so calling and playing the players went on towards the common place, but only nine of them went.

  The woman who had danced went along alone in the shadow of the unlighted house until she came beside Hardcinder House, among the big oleanders, white-flowered. There in the white light a man stood still with eyes fixed on the moon. So she had seen him standing with his back to the players while they played and sang and she danced the ghost’s dance.

  She stood watching him watch the moon for a long time from the shadow of the oleanders. She went then, following shadows a
ll along, to the edge of Cheptash Vineyard, and sat down in the mixed dark and moonlight near the trunk of a long-armed vine. From there she watched the still man. When the moon was shining higher in the sky, she went along the side of the vineyard to the corner of the apricot orchard behind Generously Dwelling House, and stood awhile in the shadow of the porches of that house, watching him. He had not moved yet when she slipped away, still following shadow, towards the galleries on the common place where the others of her troupe had camped.

  Sahelm stood still, head now held back, face lifted, eyes looking at the moon steadily To him the blink of his eyes was a slow drumbeat. Of nothing else was he aware but the light of the moon and the drumbeat of the dark.

  Kamedan came to him saying his name, late, when all lights in houses were out and the moon was above the southwestern range. “Sahelm! Sahelm! Sahelm!” he said. The fourth time he said his name, “Sahelm!” the visionary moved, cried out, staggered, and fell to hands and knees. Kamedan helped him to stand up, saying to him, “Go to the Doctors Lodge, Sahelm, please, go there for me.”

  “I have seen her,” Sahelm said.

  Kamedan said, “Please, go to the Doctors for me. I’m afraid to move the child, I’m afraid to leave him. The others are crazy, they won’t do anything!”

  Looking at Kamedan, Sahelm said, “I saw Whette. I saw your wife. She stood near your house. By the northeast windows.”

  Kamedan said, “The child is dying.” He let go his hold of Sahelm’s arms. Sahelm could not stand up, but fell again to his knees. Kamedan turned away and ran back to Hardcinder House.

  He hurried into his household rooms, wrapped up Monkeyflower in the bedding, and carried him to the outer door. Shamsha followed, a blanket pulled round her and her grey hair over her eyes, saying “Are you crazy? The child is perfectly all right, what are you doing, where are you going with him?” She called to Fefinum and Tai, shouting, “Your sister’s husband is crazy, make him stop!” But Kamedan was already out of the house, running to the Doctors Lodge.

  No one was in the house of the Lodge but Duhe, who could not sleep under the full moon. She was reading in lamplight.

  Kamedan spoke at the doorway and came in, carrying the child. He said, “This child of the First House is very ill, I think.”

  Duhe got up, saying as doctors say, “Well, well, well, well, let’s see about this,” slowly. She showed Kamedan a cane cot to set the child down on. “A choking? A burning? Fever, is it?” she asked, and while Kamedan answered, she watched Monkeyflower, who was half-awake, bewildered and whimpering. Kamedan said in haste, “Last night and the night before he was in high fever. In the daylight the fever goes away, but when the moon rises he calls to his mother over and over. In the household they pay no attention, they say nothing’s wrong with him.”

  Duhe said, “Come away into the light.” She tried to make Kamedan leave the child, but he would not go out of reach of him. She told him, “Please talk quietly, if you can. That person is sleepy, and frightened a little. How long has he lived in the Moon’s House now?”

  “Three winters,” Kamedan said. “His name is Torip, but he has a nickname, his mother calls him Monkeyflower.”

  “Well, well, well, well,” said Duhe. “Yes, a little person of gold skin and a pretty little mouth, I see the monkeyflower. There isn’t any fever just now in this little flower, or not much. Bad dreams, is it, and crying and waking in the night, is that how it’s been?” She talked slowly and softly, and Kamedan did the same when he answered, saying, “Yes, he cries, and he burns in my arms.”

  The doctor said, “You see, it’s quiet here, and the light is quiet, and a person goes to sleep very easily…Let him sleep now; come over here.” Kamedan followed her this time. When they were on the other side of the room, near the lamp, Duhe said, “Now, I didn’t understand well, please tell me again what’s been wrong.”

  Kamedan began to weep, standing there. He said, “She doesn’t come. He calls, she doesn’t hear, she doesn’t come. She’s gone.”

  Duhe’s mind had been in the book she had been reading, and then her attention had gone all to the child, so only as he wept and spoke did she bring into her mind now the things Sahelm had spoken of in the afternoon under Nehaga.

  Kamedan went on, speaking louder, “The grandmother says that nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the matter—the mother gone and the child sick and nothing is the matter!”

  “Hush,” Duhe said. “Let him sleep, please. Listen now. It’s not good carrying him about here and there, is it. Let him sleep out the night here, and you stay with him, of course. If medicine will help, we have medicine. If a bringing-in would be good for him, we’ll hold a bringing-in, maybe for both of you; or whatever seems the right thing to do, in daylight, after talking and thinking and watching. Just now here, the best thing to do is sleep, I think. Since I can’t do that when the moon’s full in the sky, I’ll be sitting on the porch by the door there. If he cried out in dream or waking I’ll be here; I’ll be awake, listening and hearing.” While she spoke she was setting a mattress down on the floor beside the cane cot, and she said, “Now, my brother of the Serpentine, please lie down. You’re as tired as your child is. If you want to go on talking, you see, I’m sitting here in the doorway; you can lie down and talk, I can sit here and talk. The night’s cooling off at last, it’ll be better for sleeping. Are you comfortable?”

  Kamedan thanked her, and lay in silence for some while.

  Duhe sang in undertone on a matrix word, making an interval and place for his silence. Her voice control was excellent; she sang always more faintly until the song became inaudible breath, and then stillness. After a while then she moved in her place by the door, so that Kamedan would know the song was done if he wanted to talk.

  He said, “I don’t understand the people in that house, this child’s mother’s house.”

  Duhe spoke enough that he knew she was listening. He went on, “When a Miller marries into a family whose work is all in the Five Houses, if they’re conservative people, respectable, superstitious, you know, that can be difficult. Hard on everybody. I understood that, I understood how they felt. That’s why I joined the Cloth Art, took up weaving, when I married. My gift is mechanical, that’s how it is. You can’t deny your gift, can you? All you can do is accept it and use it, fit it into your life with the others, people you live with, your people. When I saw how people from Telina were going to Kastoha for canvas because nobody was using the canvas loom or doing much broadcloth weaving here, I thought, that’s the place for me, that’s work they’ll understand and approve of, using my own gift and my training as a Miller. Four years now I’ve been a member of the Cloth Art. Who else in Telina is making sheeting, canvas, broadloom linens? Since Houne left the lofts, I do all that work. Now Sahelm and Asole-Verou are learning the art with me, doing good work. I’m their teacher. But none of that does me any good in my wife’s house. They don’t care about my work, it’s Miller’s work. I’m not respectable, they don’t trust me. They wish she’d married any other man. The child, he’s a Miller’s child. And only a boy, anyway. They don’t care for him. Five days, five days she’s been gone without a word, and they don’t worry about it, they say don’t worry, what are you upset about, they say, oh, she always used to walk down to the coast alone! They make me a fool—the fool they want me to be. The moon rises and he cries out for her, and they say, nothing’s wrong! Go back to sleep, fool!”

  His voice had grown louder, and the child stirred a little. He fell silent.

  After a while Duhe said in a quiet voice, “Please tell me how it was that Whette left.”

  Kamedan said, “1 came into the house from working at the East Fields generator. They called me over there, there was a consultation; you know some work needs to be done there, and people in the Milling Art had to talk and decide about it. It took all day. I came home, and Tai was cooking dinner. Nobody else was home yet. I said, ‘Where are Whette and Monkeyflower?’ He said, ‘He’s with my wife and
daughter. She went up onto Spring Mountain.’ Pretty soon Fefinum came in with both the children, from the gardens. The grandmother came in from somewhere. The grandfather showed up too. We ate together. I went over up the Spring Mountain way to meet Whette coming home. She never came. She never came that night, or since.”*

  The doctor said, “Tell me what you think about this, Kamedan.”

  “I think she went off with someone. Some person that walked with her. I don’t think she meant to stay away, stay with them. Nobody’s missing, that I’ve heard about. I haven’t heard that any man is staying away somewhere or hasn’t come home from somewhere. But it might not be far. She could be in the woods, on the hunting side, in the hills. Maybe at some summer place, up high. So many people are up in the hills this time of year, nobody really knows where anybody is. She might be staying with some people at a summerhouse. Or maybe she went on from where they were dancing, went on a ways to be alone, and got hurt. People can trip and fall, break an ankle, in those canyons. It’s wild there on the south side and the southeast side of Spring Mountain. All those paths are bad, nothing but hunters’ paths, it’s hard not to get lost there. Once you get round on the wrong side of Spring Mountain it’s very confusing. I ended up once coming into Chukulmas, when I thought I’d been going southwest all day! I couldn’t believe it was Chukulmas—I thought I’d blundered into some town over in Osho Valley, a foreign town, and I saw Chukulmas Tower but I kept thinking what’s that doing here, I couldn’t make sense of it. I had got turned around. It could have happened that Whette did the opposite thing, she meant to turn back here and kept going the wrong way, she might be over there, outside the Valley, with the Osho people, not sure how to get home. Or what worries me the most, you know—if she hurt herself—if she broke an ankle, and is where nobody can hear her—The rattlesnake. I can’t think when I think of the rattlesnake.”

  Kamedan stopped talking. Duhe said nothing for some time. She said at last, “Maybe some people should be going up on Spring Mountain, calling out. Maybe there’s a dog that knows Whette, and would help find her if she’s there.”