by Angie Abdou
I don’t need her, I think. I don’t need Lucy. I have never thought such a thing before. Lucy needs me to need her. But then Lucy is gone, and my other life—about which Lucy knows nothing—comes at me in flashes. My boys standing beneath the stars. My Ursula at the stove, her hips swaying. My family prim in the church pew. Mary, on her bench in front of the hotel, knees together and back straight. Mary crouched in her small room on her dirty mattress. Mary spinning and singing in our daisy field. Ursula tangled in our sheets, her blue dress and apron flung across the night stand. The images come at me too fast. The swirl of them makes me dizzy and sick and I know I must light down into one of them. But where? Where and how? I don’t know. I flail, drowning in this rush of history.
Ask. Sahitya’s voice stretches toward me from far away, barely a whisper. I don’t feel her next to me on the chair. I cannot see the bright orange orbs of her fingertips against my eyelids. I cannot feel the clasp of Lucy’s hand at my elbow.
Ask.
I am alone—swirling, swirling, swirling. Too many faces. Too much loss. All those mistakes. I want to be in the daisy field, beneath the towering pine trees, to feel the smallness of my loss in the shadow of the eternal mountains. I want to smell the wild grass and flowers. I want to hear Mary’s song carried in the mountain breeze.
I want. I want. I want.
The urgency of my need makes me cringe in shame. My life has been one gaping hole of want.
***
When the swirling slows, I do smell mountain wind and pine needles and wild flowers, but it can’t be my daisy field. Not as I remember it. My back presses into stiff, cold ground, my head and neck rest against something smooth and hard and cool. When I roll to stand, I feel the slip and slide of frost beneath me. My joints ache, and I hug my arms tightly across my chest, my muscles rigid with the cold. When I turn, I see that my head has been resting against a large dark stone that stands in the middle of a clearing. In its centre, someone has carefully engraved words. I don’t need to read the words on that tombstone. I already know what they say. I carved each letter, every digit myself.
I sense Mary nearby. It’s not her song that alerts me to her presence. I strain to listen but hear only the wild rush of the wind, loud in the trees. But I know Mary is near. I turn around and around, searching. I cannot call out to her. I try, but I have no voice. I can only wait.
And then I see her at the edge of the woods, wearing her yellow dress. “Mary,” I want to say, “you will freeze. Take my coat.” But nothing comes from my mouth.
Listen. The word comes to me as if Tamara has whispered it in my ear. And then Ask from Sahitya. But there is no Tamara. There is no Sahitya. There is only Mary.
I must wait for her to come to me. She takes her time, but she can come as slowly as she needs to. I watch her meandering progress as she stops to examine some small thing on the ground that only she can see, pausing to look up as if she can see the wind in the trees. She walks slowly my way, but she looks everywhere except at me. Yes, she takes her time, but I do not move. I am patient. I would like to go to her and wrap my coat around her shoulders. I would like to pull her slight frame close to my body so we can share our heat. But Mary does not look cold.
I cannot speak—I must wait my turn—so I put my apology in my body, in the curve of my shoulder, the limpness of my arms, the downcast turn of my gaze. But when Mary finally stands before me, I meet her eyes. In them, I find a kind of home.
“You can call me Mary,” she says. “All the men call me that.” It has been our joke for decades, for generations, but neither of us smiles. “Oh, Elijah.” Then she smiles at me, but there is pity in her face. “You come to me with your eyes full of questions.” She steps closer to me. Warmth radiates from her body. I want to touch her. “I have questions too, Elijah. You and I, that’s why we stay here. Because of our questions. Remember? I was frozen and cold and you stood warm and alive beyond my reach. You left me your coat and went on without me, as if I never was. You went back to your real people. Your real life. Remember that, Elijah? Remember your promise? That’s what brought me there. That’s why I waited.”
I can’t speak, but I shift and squirm in my spot as if I might be able to wiggle my way into my chair at Lokya Landing. Crows have gathered on the trees near us. I hear their rough cawk cawk cawk.
“Mrs Knowles told people it was a suicide. It wasn’t, though, was it? I died waiting for you.” Her words aren’t spoken in anger. It’s their resignation that hurts me. “Why don’t you ask me your questions, Elijah? We can share our questions. That would be a start.”
I have to ask Mary a question, and I know the one to ask. Only shame makes the asking hard. Why haven’t I asked before?
“What did your mother call you? What’s your real name?”
This woman I have known as Mary steps closer to me until her warmth touches me. She leans in until her mouth nearly brushes my ear and whispers a word: “ʔinismin’ xa·xa.” The last part sounds almost like a laugh—ha ha—but it comes from somewhere deep inside her. “In-is-min,” she repeats, “haaaa-ha. The sound the crow makes. Haaa-ha.”
“Not Mary Gagliano.”
“Gagliano was my father’s name. Italian. Do I look Italian, Elijah?”
No, she does not.
When this woman I have known for so long as Mary Gagliano steps back, I take in her whole body and let the new name—ʔinismin’-xa·xa—attach itself to her. She grows larger inside it. ʔinismin’-xa·xa. She is not my Mary. Has never been so.
“ʔinismin’-xa·xa,” I say, trying my best to make my mouth do justice to the unfamiliar sounds. “Hello, ʔinismin’-xa·xa. I am honoured to meet you.”
“Hello,” she says, nodding her chin once. “Thank you. In your language, the name means rainbow crow. When you came to me with your wife’s baking, I resented you for feeling sorry for me. Thinking biscuits and a bag of garden vegetables could fix everything! I used the only power I knew, they only power they’d left me—my own body. I wanted to prove to you that I wasn’t weak, prove I could make you do what I wanted.” Instead of waiting for a response, she turns from me, taking in the rugged rock faces almost hidden in wispy clouds. She wants no reply from me, so I give her none.
I’m not ready for Mary’s question when it comes, even though she has told me that both of us have questions and this will be an exchange.
“And what, Elijah, did your mother call you?”
The question comes as a blow to my body, hard and fast to the space just under my breastbone, between my ribs. I almost cough with the force of it. What did my mother call me? I have not thought of that name in so long. I am Elijah. I made myself Elijah. I chose the name as one last deliberate act of arrogance against this new world. Elijah—the one with direct access to God. If I had to pick a name from their religion, I’d pick the best. Soon, I forgot it wasn’t my own. And Mountain—not even Montagne, my first idea—I would be fully of this place. But those names—our true names—remain, if we reach for them. What did my mother call me?
“Abdullah Fateh.” The syllables, so foreign on my own tongue, come out in a hoarse, weak croak. The wind grabs the forgotten name and scatters it to the trees. “Abdullah,” I try again with more force, shouting my true name into the wind, “Son of God.”
She watches me in my true name as I watched her in hers. I try to stand tall into the old sounds so she will see me as I saw her.
“Hello, Abdullah.” She smiles. “Welcome to my country.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”
ʔinismin’-xa·xa—I make myself think of her that way, even as I struggle with the sounds—takes my hands in hers, and her golden warmth runs through me. Her hair blows wild in the wind, but I no longer feel the wind’s chill. “Sometimes,” she says, “all you need to say is yes, this happened.”
“It happened, yes, and I am responsible. I am sorry, Rainbow Crow, I am sorry.”
“Sorry is only a word, but I am happy to hear it.”
<
br /> I am grateful I have found these words. I remember Coalton’s “grave mistake,” though, and I am confused.
“If your body is here, your”—I don’t want to say ghost—“presence has nothing to do with those graves, with the unmarked burial sites?”
“I wouldn’t say nothing, Eli. Proper burial is only one of the ways to respect the dead.”
I try to understand. “Why, then, are the streets of Coalton not full of souls as restless as yours?”
“Putting people respectfully to rest has to do with more than where the bodies are buried. Coalton has many unhappy dead. Those disrupted burial sites are only one of Coalton’s grave mistakes.”
“But I see only you.”
“You see me because I am your story. If people learn to open their eyes, they will see their own stories. These mountains are filled with stories, like me. Like you.”
Her hair blows in the wintry wind, her face set strong against its wet cold bite. I want to ask her a question about forgiveness, about how to move forward. It’s there, nearly taking form on my tongue, but then I am swirling, and I see the orange dots of Sahitya’s finger tips on my eyelids. I feel Lucy’s small, strong hand firm on the crook of my elbow. I try to give into its tug, to let it pull me close. But nothing will stop this dizzy, nauseous swirling. I cannot stay in Lucy’s grasp. Everything becomes wild movement. Inside of it, I am nothing.
I want to open my eyes and find myself at home in Coalton, in Elijah’s old shack. Nicholas will be there fighting with his iPhone. He will be arguing to save a domestic goat from imminent dispatch. Lucy will be circling the mistakes in this week’s Coalton Free Press and laughing about the swim team making a splash. I will be spreading my sheets of paper filled with squares across the table and organizing my collection of markers, choosing to do red first. Creatures of the Shade.
I almost get my wish.
I know I’m home before I open my eyes; I recognize immediately that I am in the place where I most belong. I hear Isaac and James playing in the woods out back. I have come home to their laughter, and I feel the tempting pull of that happiness. But then my shoulders grow rigid, for Ursula will be here. For the moment, however, I am alone in the kitchen. The house sits heavy in silence. Again, I must wait.
I sit in my chair, and the silence pushes against me. Soon I cannot even hear my boys playing in the backyard. I watch the clock above the kitchen basin. Its pendulum swings, but its hands will not move. Potatoes sit cold on the stove, congealed in lard. A bowl of uncooked eggs has been left on the counter. The ugly hand of jealousy grips my throat. Where is Ursula if not with me? My own betrayal makes me suspicious of her. A stack of plates has been piled on the counter for breakfast. I close my eyes, but I cannot sleep. I could warm the potatoes, fry the eggs, set the table, warm the bread—if only to busy myself with some task, to put an end to this interminable waiting. Maybe if I prepare breakfast, my family will come. But I don’t get up.
I do not know how long I sit there—time means nothing now—but when Ursula finally arrives, she smiles sadly at my stillness, my failure to act. She wears her best dress, which is trimmed in bright red. I know if she turns her back to me, I will see the red bow at her cinched waist. I so loved its satin tails trailing down her backside and blending into the folds of her skirt, the sway of them. But there is no happiness or love or kindness in her expression. The hard set of her features make it clear she comes to me out of necessity. There will be no celebration in this reunion.
I grow smaller and smaller in her gaze until I think I will disappear. Time passes—or does not, what is the difference?—and still Ursula only stares.
“You knew?” Those are the words I finally speak to Ursula. It is not a question exactly, but it is all I have.
“Of course I knew. You came home with her teeth marks on your shoulder. Her thumb prints bruised onto your hips. Her smell on your undergarments. Who does the laundry? It was exactly like you to want what doesn’t belong to you. Of course I knew.”
“Why ... didn’t you leave me?” It hurts me to ask it—to imagine what would have happened to me and the boys if she did. Before she answers, I understand the impossibility of leaving.
“The usual reasons. The children. Your job. Our position in the community. The church.” She pauses. Somewhere a clock starts to tick, but I look above the sink and the kitchen clock’s hands remain still. “Do you know where I buried you, Elijah? Everyone thinks we put you in the non-Catholic graveyard. We claimed a deathbed falling-out with the priest. People saw it as another odd request from an odd man. They went along with it. But the box in that ground—it contains nothing but sawdust.” I wish her gaze would soften or even waver as she talks. “I lied about the grave,” she says, her eyes hard on mine. “I buried you with her. In that place, the one she and you shared, the one that excited your interest more than your own family did. I didn’t care where you came from or what you chose to call God—God or Allah, it made little difference to me. But I cared about what you did with that girl. So I left you with her.”
For a moment, I feel relief—I didn’t abandon Mary in the cold field! I did not leave her there alone. I stayed with her, in the end—but then Ursula says, “I did not bury you with the girl as a favour. I did not forgive you, either of you. Quite the opposite. She can have you, that’s what I thought. Have each other.”
“You never forgave me?” I hear the childish, pathetic plea in my own voice.
Ursula shifts out of her statuesque pose in the doorway. Some part of the woman, the wife whom I loved, warms her face. “You never asked for my forgiveness, Elijah,” she says. “You never admitted you’d done anything to forgive.” She tilts her head to the side, assessing me. “Not once.”
In that calculating gaze, I taste my own inadequacy.
“You acted like nothing had happened,” she says. “Nothing at all.”
We both did, I want to say. You and I both acted like that. But for once I am wise enough to say nothing. I don’t know how to fix this. I shift in my seat again, hoping for Tamara’s wisdom to float my way or Sahitya to pull me back, but I hear no words, feel no fingers on my eyelids, no Lucy pulling at my elbow. Eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee.
When I hear the song, I look nervously around the kitchen. I do not want these two women together, not with me here. I remember ʔinismin’ixa·xa’s words: Sometimes all you need to say is yes, this happened. “I betrayed you, Ursula. I am sorry. I do not deserve an acceptance of that apology, I know. But if you can, please forgive me, for yourself.”
Ursula does not reach for my hands like Rainbow Crow did. Ursula says nothing. But she listens, and then she nods. Once.
It will have to be enough.
I expect the swirl to come then, but still we remain in the kitchen, staring at each other in our silence. I cannot think of what else we have to say to one another. But then I remember—the exchange.
“Do you have a question for me?” I say each word carefully, quietly, as if I have no right to ask even this of her.
Her stone face crumples. That’s when I finally see her—Ursula, my wife—full and alive as I remember.
“Why?” The one-word question comes out in a sob. “Why did you do it?”
Because I could. My stomach drops. I feel a bolt of fear and am glad to be in this chair; if I had been standing, her question would have knocked me to the floor. I can’t say, I pretended to be like them to belong. I pretended so hard I forgot I was not them. I was not white. I was not Christian. But I acted that way, acting until even I forgot it was an act. And like them, I took whatever I wanted, whatever I could. That’s what life here, life as the mine manager, taught me—that I could. I taught my sons the same, and they their children. I will not say any of that aloud. “I don’t know,” I say.
“I sent you to the girl myself, to help her, the help was from both of us, from our family. You went to her bearing my gifts. She was only a girl. Why, Elijah?”
I cannot say I don’t kn
ow again, but I’m unable to speak the truth out loud. I try to wear my apology in my face, in my shoulders, in my eyes. “I am truly sorry,” I say. But it is not enough. It will never be enough.
***
“Welcome back!” Sahitya’s smile is the first thing I see. “Jai ho!” She holds her arms in the air as if she herself has scored a touchdown. Whatever Sahitya thinks has happened, she imagines that it happened because of her. She will take credit, for her and for Lokya Landing. That’s okay. There’s so much she does not know. There is so much that none of us know. Let this be one more thing. Sahitya listens, she tries. Trying is rewarded.
I am back in my fragile body. I feel thin. No flesh cushions my tailbone from the floor. I am so tired. But the feeling of hot stones sitting heavy in my lungs has gone. “Black lung,” they called it, “miner’s lung.” I do not have it any more.
I understand the words of Rainbow Crow’s song, Hu qayaqanaⱡ hukⱡukni, now: “I am much too tired.” That is what it means. History, I think, has made us all tired. But Mary—ʔinismin’ xa·xa·—found a strength I did not have. She asked the right question, demanded a response. Despite my fatigue, I feel nothing but relief to know my own physical weakness again in my own ten-year-old body. If I speak, my voice will be my own.
Lucy hovers above me. My head rests in her lap, and her hands cradle my face. She has tears in her eyes. In Lucy’s eyes, I can see my face, but also Elijah’s and Isaac’s and Grandpa’s, and Nicholas’s. They are there in the broadness of my nose, the oval shape of my eyes, the hint of curl in the hair around my ears. “Eli,” Lucy says, stroking my hair. “Oh, thank God, Eli. Let’s go home.”
I am Eli Mountain. I am descended from Abdullah Fateh, who became Elijah Mountain, a Syrian Muslim boy who became, in the world’s eyes, a Catholic, an Italian, a mine manager. My people have made generations of mistakes in this new country.
“What mistakes?” a voice prompts me. “Say it, Elijah,” says ʔinismin’ xa·xa·’s voice. “What exactly did your ancestors do?”