Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  With a sweeping arc of his free hand, he bade me sit down, so I rested myself on the closed lid of the toilet, face-to-face with the old fellow, our knees nearly touching. Between sips of his drink, he took me in with his stare, and the more he drank, the clearer his gaze became, so that by the time he reached the whiskey bottom, his eyes were as blue as fire at the heart of a candle flame. He iced me with that gaze, froze my brain, locked my tongue behind the prison of my teeth. I could do nothing but stare back stupidly and wait, just as I had as a child, until he deigned to speak the first word.

  “The question is: are you feeling any better? That was a nasty blow to the brains.”

  I reached behind my left ear, but the wound had completely closed. Just old smoothness of skin and bone where once had been a hole. I strummed the spot, and it felt as if nothing in the world had happened. My father shook his head. The blood, too, had been cleaned off the floor, and only red spots on my robe left evidence of the assault. I pulled back my fingers and checked for blood, but they were as dry as bones. My day was becoming more complicated.

  “I’m feeling much better, thank you.”

  “Still,” he said, “quite a crack to the noggin. Are you sure?”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m not sure about anything. This whole day has been one inexplicable puzzle.”

  “The whole day, really? From the moment you woke till now? Until … what time do you have?”

  “I’m afraid my watch has stopped.”

  “No matter.” He poured himself another drink. “But you know, patience is its own reward, as you may have heard on more than one occasion.” A low chuckle followed his remark as if he celebrated an original thought.

  He had me there. Instead of stretching back in time, my power of recollection seemed cemented in place. I scratched my head, wondering if he had asked me a question. He poured himself another drink and said nothing. I thought to ask him how he came to be here, in my bathroom, a dozen years or more since we buried him, but I was afraid of his several potential answers.

  At last he spoke again. “What do you make of the naked women?” He frowned at my perplexed stare, shook his head, and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Surely you remember those naked women in your bed?”

  “Please don’t tell me there’s more than one.”

  “There’s seven,” he said, a randy grin curled across his face. “I counted.”

  “I counted eight, including someone that I may well know.” I shook my head slowly, indicating the nullity of my consciousness.

  “You seem to have forgotten everything.”

  All evidence pointed to just such a conclusion, but in reality, too many remembrances flooded my mind for any decent sorting and classification.

  “I can understand forgetting being brained from behind; after all, you never saw it coming. And I can understand forgetting your old man,” he joked. “But how could you forget the octet of naked women and how they got in your bed?”

  The question awakened some ancient memory. All at once, time itself did not stretch this way and that, but it was as if that very second divided in half and halved again until the images rushed into my head the way the blood had rushed out. The women, of course, show up, arriving perhaps on bicycles.

  “Today was an ordinary day in June, the kind that seems to exist permanently, coming around each year for centuries. Not too hot, not too cold. Harbinger of summer, last sweet fling of spring. When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the sunshine like mirrors to the sky.”

  The thin man appeared to have ceased listening to my story just at the twist in the plot. Instead he focused on a spot just above my right shoulder, and at the same second, the light behind me changed ever so slightly and the room cooled by one degree. A presence had entered the bathroom, and my sixth sense tingled. As I swiveled my neck to see what lurked over my shoulder, the old man sprang to his feet and positioned himself between me and my attacker. “Put down that club,” he ordered, and the raised arm lowered the weapon in a slow and resigned arc. He stepped aside and revealed one of the girls from the bed.

  She had donned a yellow cotton shift that clung to her like butter on a corncob, and her arms and legs shone the color of strong tea. Her hair hung down in a black braid thick as the club she carried, and her eyes, set in the dish of her face, shone blacker still. The vision of her, perspiring slightly from her exertions and panting from the effort required by the heaving and lifting of the weapon, set my memory in motion. One of those faces to remember married to a forgettable name.

  “My name is S’ee,” she said, as if reading my mind, but she spoke in a language that lived on a shore distant from the center of my brain. Her exasperation she expressed in a frown, but fortunately for everyone’s sake, she switched over at once to English. “But you may call me Dolly.”

  “A most unusual name in any language,” the old man said. “Kindly refrain from swinging about that cudgel of yours. Someone could get hurt.”

  As long as a baseball bat but much thicker at the business end, the war club was hewn from redwood, and on the protuberant bolus at the head, the maker had carved a stylized animal in the manner of the tribes native to the Pacific Northwest. The creature symbolized some manner of carnivore, judging from the rows of sharp triangles lining both sides of a curved mouth and the madness of the wide-set eyes. I could easily imagine the terror caused by such a face rushing to hammer down upon the forehead of its intended victims. One might die of fear before being felled. It was a humbling weapon designed for crushing blows from which little hope of recovery existed, and the mere sight caused my head to ache again. Dolly modestly withdrew the club and hid it behind her skirt, taking care to keep her right hand firmly gripped around the tapered handle.

  My father relaxed and collapsed like a marionette on his seat at the edge of the bathtub. I studied Dolly’s face in a vain attempt to match her becoming features with those stored in the hard drive of my head, and though the search resulted in zero matches, she seemed a long-ago acquaintance accidentally erased from the files. Her black eyes revealed nothing but my own image, and her lips were drawn in a hard, straight line. She did not smile or frown at my monkeyish attempts to elicit any reaction, some sign that we were once intimates or friends.

  From his perch, the old man said, “To what, may I ask, do we owe the pleasure of your delightful company?”

  With her bare arm, she wiped the sweat from her brow, and in that gesture released the scent of rain and cedars, of dried fish and a musky perfume that opened my olfactory remembrance of bygone time. The old man cocked his head so the words might flow more easily into the trumpet of his ear. “You have a story for us? Do tell.”

  Before his final daughter was born, a child he would never see, Yeikoo.shk’ lived like a fish. During the last months of his wife’s pregnancy, a steady, daily rain raised the waters over the banks of the creeks and streams. The trails flooded up to the village homes, and he laughed when the coho slapped their tails in the muddy pools at his doorway. Some mornings while his wife slept, Yeikoo.shk’ stepped out of bed and grabbed the nearest salmon swimming on the floor, took out his knife, and slit it throat to belly, the long strand of roe glistening like berries at dawn. He would slurp the viscous mess in one long gulp, the eggs rolling off his fingers and dripping down his chin, and then throw the rest of the fish through the doorway into the street, the gravest sin. Raven and bear and the poorest of the clan fed on the corpses that floated away.

  When the waters had receded, but still weeks before his final daughter’s birth, the father-to-be traversed the forests to the village of Hoonah in search of spawning fish. The salty memory of roe on his lips enticed him like the smell of a woman. A few men had built a stone fish trap in the sea, and late that night, Yeikoo.shk’ stole out under no moon, to borrow a few eggs. Even in the darkness, he could feel the slippery bodies wriggling in the rocks, and with delicate fingertips, he sensed the telltale bulge of a gravid female. H
e teethed his knife to free the huge fish. As he grabbed it by the belly, the fish snapped like a whip and with one quick blow from its tail, it knocked the blade deep into his tongue. Swearing through the blood and pain, he slipped and dashed his head against the stones as the salmon swam off. The men of Hoonah found him next morning, his blood and life drained through the mouth, running off with the tide.

  “A sad story,” the old man said. “Bad luck to the man who never meets his offspring, and sadder still for the daughter who never claps eyes on her old man.”

  I placed my index finger against my lips and indicated with a nod for the woman to continue uninterrupted.

  After her father left it, the world welcomed his final daughter. Dropped to the earth from between her mother’s legs, she was wet and slick as any fish. When wrapped and swaddled, she was perfect. Her parents had thought they were through with having babies and, in fact, had named the child that had been born before this baby Youngest of the Daughters. This child, when it came time to give her a name, was called Shax’saani S’ee—or Youngest Daughter’s Doll, for she looked just like a doll, bound in her cradleboard, eyes wide and searching the cloudy cold sky as if waiting for someone to return. The four older sisters and five older brothers always thought of her as simply S’ee, and they spoiled and babied her all of her life, becoming little parents themselves, so that poor S’ee had to contend not only with five mothers and five fathers, but with her mother’s people in the Frog clan, who treated her as a communal doll, perhaps out of sympathy for the widow with ten children. More than the others, she was a child of the village, but that does not belie the possibility that even villages can be as dysfunctional as a family isolated and on its own. She may have been better off with a little less attention.

  When she came to know the true story of her father, S’ee laughed at the punch line of the man caught by the salmon. She had no fond memories—not even the sound of his voice or the smell of his skin—so he was no more than an illustrative figure in a moral tale, and thus of no consequence to her. Days and nights were spent at her mother’s side, with her sisters hovering nearby and all the Frog clan at potlatch or beading blankets for their doll, a life in idleness, tempered only by the bitter rains of winter and the blackflies of short summers. As one by one the girls were married off, S’ee grew closest to Shax’saani Keek’, the next youngest daughter. They went everywhere together from the beginning, and through the years Shax’saani led her doll over the hurdles of childhood, beckoned her into adolescence.

  So it goes that these two sisters, young women of sixteen and thirteen, ventured forth one late summer morning to gather berries and talk of boys. A pair of dogs, Chewing Ribs and Curly Tail, accompanied them through the wilderness, trotting ahead to chase hares flushed from the brambles. The sun rose and brightened the sky to yellow, and the sisters soon wearied of their task and escaped to the shade, popping sweet berries into their mouths while they dreamt of their futures.

  “They say you are destined for Man-in-the-Moon, who everyone calls just plain D’is, for his face is round as the very moon,” S’ee teased her sister.

  “Like an owl with a man’s nose,” Shax’saani replied. “Like a plate with two eyes and a bump in the middle.”

  “The moon in the man. He’s not for you, sister. For you, someone handsome, but for me, someone strong.”

  “Someone like our father. Yeikoo.shk’.”

  Each girl fell silent at the mention of his name, as speaking of so foolish a man might disturb his spirit. Birdsong and the humming of insects relieved the silence. Far off Chewing Ribs barked at a passing curiosity, and had they been attuned to the other world rather than to their own emotions, they would have heard an ursine shuffling at the head of the trail.

  “What was he like? Besides strong and stupid?”

  Shax’saani glared at her and munched a handful of salmonberries. “Not stupid. He had charm. He would sing, and mother would swoon. How do you think we are five sisters and five brothers? Every time they heard that singing, the brothers and sisters watched for the furs and blankets to rustle, and if you counted the moons from the night of the song, you would only have to count nine months. And there you were, last time, little doll baby.”

  “So he was a great lover, but not so wise.”

  “Headstrong. Determined. When his father died, he stayed up three weeks straight to carve the totem. He would set his mind on a task, and it was done as he wished.”

  S’ee picked up her basket. “Like our brothers. Prideful.” She was speaking not only of her natural brothers, but of her aunt and uncle’s sons, the brothers of the clan.

  Her sister rose and straightened her skirts. “Like us all.”

  They continued to forage, searching for the telltale flash of crimson or yellow among the green leaves, not paying any attention to where they were walking, when S’ee stepped, barefoot, in an unmistakable softness. From the smell of it, the pile was fresh and ripe with berries.

  “Bearshit,” she screamed. “Stupid stinking bears. Why do they have to take a dump right where people are walking?” She scraped her foot on fallen pine needles and sank to the ground. “Do they think they own the world? Bearshit, wherever and whenever.” Snapping some leaves from a raspberry bush, she swiped at the excrement and swore under her breath. “Don’t you know there are people here?” S’ee shouted, and her voice echoed through the trees.

  Clamping a hand over her baby sister’s mouth, Shax’saani grunted for silence, scanning the forest for any movement and listening for the slightest sound. “You have no sense, Dolly. What if the bear should hear you?”

  “I hope he does,” she shouted. “Then maybe he won’t shit where people might step.”

  “Some respect, okay? It’s their world, too.” Struck by the moment, she giggled and said, “Come on, sister, we’ll find some water to wash off your stink, or our mother will think I’ve brought home a sow.”

  “Who are you calling a sow, you fat, lazy bear?”

  They ran off hand in hand to a stream, pulled off their clothes, and jumped in the cool water. Gnats circled in crazy clouds above their heads, and the sunlight shone in radiant waves across the rippling water. The two dogs came crashing through the brush, barking and yapping at the girls. From the bank, they whimpered and paced impatiently, not daring to jump in. Shax’saani yelled at them to scat, and S’ee splashed handfuls of water at the mutts until they gamboled away. Moments later, the leaves stirred again and S’ee thought the dogs had returned. But when the branches parted, she shrieked at the figure approaching out of the greenness, as if emerging from her dreams into the bright northern day.

  “Cover yourself,” she called to her sister, and they dipped in unison until the water rose to their waists.

  The man strode to the edge and showed his empty hands in greeting. He paused to consider them, as if he could not find his tongue or was perhaps fearful that speech might break the spell. The sisters watched him watching them, and he was a fine, handsome man. Young and naked to the waist as they were, his skin darkened by the sun, and his features carved like a totem. He did not seem of this world, not Tlingit at all, nor of any tribe they had encountered in their travels or those from inland who had chanced upon Hoonah. S’ee looked into his eyes and, for the first time, felt her heart betray her mind.

  “Don’t be afraid, sisters. I heard laughter and splashing in the water and only came to see what fun I was missing.”

  Shax’saani scolded him. “You’ve seen what there is to see, now go. On your way. We are not your sisters.”

  “Aren’t we all children of the earth? How is it that you bathe so early in the day?”

  Before she could be stopped, S’ee trumpeted her explanation. “My feet were dirty, and you know why? Stupid bear doesn’t know to leave the trail to take a dump.” She stood, water dripping from her body, and held out her foot so the man could better see where she had stepped.

  “A clean foot now, and beautiful. What is your name?
”

  “I am called S’ee.”

  “Come with me, little doll, for there is something I want to show you about that bear.”

  Her sister’s hand grabbed her arm, holding her back, but the man on the shore kept talking in the honey voice, and she was sorely tempted.

  “You can both join me. There’s nothing to fear. I’m as harmless as a marmot.”

  “I wouldn’t go with you if you were a marmot talking to us. Shoo. Go away.”

  “I’ll turn my back and you can put on your clothes. It’s just that I heard you before, shouting insults at the bear, and there is something you should know.”

  S’ee wrenched free from Shax’saani. “I want to go. Nothing ever happens to me.” Drawing near, she whispered into her older sister’s ear, “Besides, have you ever seen such a man before?”

  “A man is a man is a man. Don’t go, Dolly. What will I do without you?”

  “He has cast a spell—”

  “I will not let you go. I will send the Tlingit men after you.”

  “No need to send out the search party, for I will be back by nightfall. Aren’t you the least bit curious about the world?”

  They turned to the man, who stood with his back to them, as promised. He pawed the ground with one foot as if to keep his eyes from wandering back to the women. S’ee waded over and slipped into her clothes in one swift motion, the wetness of her skin already spreading patches where her body curved. From the cover of the stream, her sister watched, dumb and helpless, as S’ee climbed ashore and went to the man’s side, touching his arm to alert him to her presence. Glancing back once, she followed him into the brush, and when the leaves ceased moving, Shax’saani muttered a prayer that she might one day see her sister again. As she dressed and gathered their baskets, she heard Curly Tail and Chewing Ribs return from the opposite direction. The dogs worried the spot where the man had stood, noses mad at the scent, whimpering softly to each other.

  With the point of an elbow, the old man caught my attention through my ribs. “Do you know,” he whispered, “the single biggest regret of old age?”