Come In and Cover Me

by Gin Phillips

  Ren rose from her rock and walked toward the painter. She took a wide route around the fire, still flinching at the heat, and came up behind the girl. She could see the head of a parrot taking shape in the bowl, and the last pull of the brush had finished the beak. It was a style of beak Ren recognized instantly.

  She heard the clap of the other woman’s hands and jumped. The girl looked up quickly, nearly smudging the paint.

  A parrot flew down, from a tree or a rock or from thin air, Ren wasn’t sure. The woman held up her arm, and her two bracelets rattled against each other. The parrot landed between her elbow and her wrist. Ren again noticed the small scars along the woman’s arms.

  The woman whispered in the parrot’s ear. It squawked twice, then ducked its head.

  “Ly-nay,” it called out. “Ly-nay. Ly-nay.”

  Apparently, Ren thought, she could hear words if parrots spoke them.

  Now the girl laughed, showing white teeth, with the bottom row slightly crooked. It was a short, quiet laugh, let out on an exhale. Ren suspected the parrot had said her name.

  “Non,” said the parrot next, and the older woman tipped her head in acknowledgment. She turned her head to the side, mimicking the pose of the parrot.

  “Non Non Non Non Non Non Non Non,” chattered the parrot, steady as an alarm clock. “Ly-nay. Non.”

  Then the woman—Non, Ren assumed—placed two fingers under the bird’s beak, lifting its head. She said something to the girl, jerking her head toward the parrot, holding her forefinger close to her thumb.

  “You think she drew the beak too big, don’t you?” Ren said.

  Both women looked toward her. The woman made a shuft-shuft sound to the parrot, and it flew to a tall basket Ren hadn’t noticed among the rocks. The girl, Lynay, stood, carefully placing the bowl on the ground, and Non held out an arm toward her. Arms linked, they took a step toward Ren.

  Ren took a step back, bringing her closer to the heat of the fire. It was still bright daylight, but somehow the older woman’s face seemed cast in shadow. She knew they could see her. They were looking right at her, still walking toward her. If she backed up more, she would be in the fire.

  They were only ghosts. They were only shadows that she could see when the light fell just right, and they would be gone soon. But she was afraid nonetheless. She was not used to this attention. She assessed the dead: They did not assess her. When she met the stares of Lynay and Non, she felt less substantial.

  Lynay showed her crooked teeth, opening her mouth to speak. But the older woman placed a hand on the top of her head, and Lynay closed her mouth. They both stopped moving. All the women, living and dead, stood still.

  “What do you want?” Ren asked. She was pleased that her voice sounded strong and sure.

  “You will lose him,” Non said. The smoke circled her hair.

  “What?” said Ren. The fact that the woman answered her and that she answered in English kept the meaning of the words from penetrating. They were only sounds.

  “You will lose him,” Non repeated calmly. “There is nothing you can do.”

  THE PARROTS CAME FIRST. They were splashes of paint in the air. Lynay had never seen one until the day that Non came, announced by the parrots. They came as a pair, circling, and Lynay called to her mother and asked what they were, knowing they had too much red and blue to be hawks or eagles, were too big to be firebirds or jays.

  This is what Lynay noticed about Non: The air around her vibrated, as with heat. Years passed before she realized that not everyone found Non beautiful, that it wasn’t something undeniable like small feet or long hair. Non made no noise when she walked. Her thighs were long and muscled like a large cat’s. Her teeth were large, and she was missing none of them. When her wide mouth smiled, her teeth formed a white wall.

  It was not unusual for a woman with sons of the right age to make the journey to find suitable women. It was a helpful bargaining piece for a man to have his mother with him, to have some visible sign that he was of a good family, that he had connections of his own. It meant something to the women of a place to know the beginnings of a man who would be climbing down their ladder, laying his sleeping mat next to one of their daughters’. Of course, many men came by themselves, small clouds of dust announcing they were coming to Women Crying.

  What was unusual about Non arriving, other than the parrots, was that she came alone with her sons. The traveling groups were usually larger. Mothers needed someone to accompany them on the way back to their own people if their sons did indeed find women. No mother would stay with her sons. But obviously Non intended to do that.

  She came with her bright waving apron and her hair threaded with red and blue and green feathers and her jangling shell bracelets and a basket on her head and one on her back. She came with two boys and two parrots. After a few seasons, she would have only one of the four left to her.

  The men and women of the village, the older ones who always knew of things without being told because the wind brought all secrets to them, whispered that there had been trouble, that Non had been someone of considerable power in a large place farther north. But the water had gone dry, and even Non and her parrots and all the power their feathers brought could not make the water return. The elder men and women said Non had a daughter and the daughter had been chosen for one of the blessing ceremonies, the killing ceremonies, and Non had turned dark after that. She refused to intercede on her village’s behalf anymore. She had closed the door on top of her head, so she would no longer listen to the will of the Creator. But because of her power, her village was afraid to punish her. Instead they asked her to leave, which she was quick to do. She headed south with her sons.

  Now the elders in Lynay’s village were forced to decide whether to welcome this woman or to turn her away. Either decision had certain dangers.

  Here was the essence of Non’s power, as Lynay knew on that very first day: She charmed the parrots, and the parrots charmed the earth into blooming. Lynay had known colors as long as she could remember. She tried to capture the colors even in black and white, capture the movement of water and the blue of sky, but these birds were made of the most fundamental colors—sky, blood, sun. And this woman who could touch the birds also had her hands on all the rest. Lynay loved her immediately. She hungered for her attention, for the touch of her hand, for her strong-toothed smile.

  The day that Non came. Lynay always came back to it. It was the best of days, before she had lost anything, with everything laid out before her. This was the day that shaped all that followed. It was a sharp point inserted, and the rest of her life flowed around it, shifting and molding to accommodate the edges of the one day.

  Her mother was still with her on that day. And she saw her man that day, the first and the best of them. Non’s son. He was not a man then, not quite yet. His arms were too long and his waist too thin. She could see the stark lines of his ribs and thought he needed to eat, thought Non and the two thin boys must have stopped because they needed food, although later she realized that the boy was thin because he was always moving, running, throwing. She had drawn close to look at Non, but she could tell that the boy liked her, because he would not look at her while she looked at him. Still, she could feel the brush of his looks like blades of grass on her skin. She had no eyes for him at all. She had eyes only for his mother, who she thought had risen from the earth or from the trees.

  Later she had eyes for him. Later the softness in his eyes made her lower her head to his hip bones and taste his skin. Later she would long to feel his hair drag along her shoulder blades and to feel his body press her into the earth.

  Later still, she would press flowers over his closed eyes, flowers over his closed lips.

  Perhaps that is how it happened. Perhaps that is the pattern hidden under the surface, waiting to be revealed.

  Or perhaps she never
really loved him. Perhaps she never even noticed him that day. Perhaps he accepted her later only because his mother pressed him to do so.

  When things are written in the sand, the wind blows them away. And Lynay’s story was written in the earth, hidden in the fickle dirt. So every piece of her story could be blown this way and that, a thousand different directions. Countless possible patterns.

  What is true is the bones that lay in the earth. The bones of her man, the bones of her children. So perhaps the best story is the one that is the most pleasant to hear, the story that gives her back something other than bones. We’ll say he had loved her from that first moment when she was smitten with his mother, had memorized her wide dark eyes and the fragility of her face. Her small face was far more delicate than her broad, strong shoulders and jumping-leaping legs.

  This is what she remembered as her first conversation with him:

  “Why did you come here?” she asked, fingering a bone bracelet that shattered only days later, when she went climbing to fetch sage.

  He did not meet her eyes. “She said it was necessary.”

  “Will you stay for good?”

  “If no one argues. At our old home, no one could argue with her. She hopes it will be the same here.”

  “You mean because she has power over the birds?”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders, still not looking at her. “She does not have power over them. They share the same power. All the women in our family have it.”

  “The women in our family are makers,” she said.

  His eyes widened and met hers.

  “What are you called?” he asked, and touched the cool hardness of her bracelet. She did not move her arm.

  Or maybe that wasn’t her memory at all. Depending on how the bones scatter, a different story is told. This also could have been their first conversation.

  Non was surrounded by the elders, only the blue-red-yellow tips on her head showing. The boy was standing by himself, and no one noticed when she approached him. He was bouncing, up and down up and down, on the balls of his feet. This made his head swing forward and back, like a woodpecker’s.

  “She is your mother?” Lynay asked.

  He stilled but did not look at Non. “Yes.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  He lifted his chin and jerked his head to the north. “A long way. Over the mountain. Twelve days’ walking. We were very strong and fast.”

  “She raises the birds?”

  His chin was still lifted as he spoke. “They come when she calls. They follow her even when she doesn’t call.” He was bragging. “When we left, dozens of them came after us. They pulled free of their tethers, and she had to sing them back to their pen. They covered the pen with five cloths so that the birds couldn’t see her leave.”

  She did not like this boy. He thought his mother’s importance was his own. He was only a duckling tottering behind her.

  “Do they follow you?” she asked. “The birds?”

  He looked away and focused on his mother and the group of elders.

  “My mother shapes the clay,” Lynay said. “She is the maker here, and no one else has the skill. She’s teaching me.”

  Of course the elders let Non stay. She could bring blessings to the village if she chose, and they needed more water. For as long as Lynay could remember, it had grown drier and drier, the creek shrinking smaller and smaller. Rain was a loved one who visited rarely. The most powerful songs and dances had not lured it home. The last crop of squash had been small and withered, growing like old men’s toes on the vines.

  And even if Non did not have her power anymore, or even if she chose not to intercede for the village, her boys were fast and strong and intelligent. They would be fine additions. They could work hard in the fields, run fast to catch the hard-to-find game. The older one—the one whom Lynay would choose—seemed serious and quiet at first, while the younger one could not stop smiling. He existed only on the edge of Lynay’s days and nights. He was no part of her story.

  Or perhaps she liked him better. Perhaps he ignored her and the lack of attention was more attractive than his brother’s attentiveness. Perhaps she settled on her owlet only as a second choice, trying to make his younger brother jealous.

  Non soon noticed this girl with clay on her hands, noticed the girl was always following her, either with her feet or with her eyes. The others in the village noticed as well and smiled or shook their heads, and even Lynay’s mother noticed, although she was not offended. She was at first nervous that this new woman with the straight shoulders and strange tones of the north in her voice would be offended by a girl always lurking around. When Non, unexpectedly, welcomed the girl’s company, Lynay’s mother was proud and pleased by the attention shown to her daughter.

  This is how Non first addressed Lynay:

  “Do you want to come closer?”

  Lynay could only move her head in an unsteady way. She had been watching Non feed the parrots nuts and chokecherries. The bracelets on her arm clicked together as the two beaks reached for food. Non was often alone—no woman came to grind corn on her rooftop or to weave strips of yucca by her side.

  “What are their names?” asked Lynay.

  “They haven’t told me,” said Non. “But I call this one, the female, Early Waking. I call this one, the male, Empty Stomach.”

  It had taken Lynay days of watching before she could tell the birds apart. Empty Stomach was the fatter of the two, and she thought she understood how he had earned his name.

  Standing next to Non, Lynay had never been so close to a living bird, not one so still and quiet, where she could learn all the lines and curves of it. Their eyes were perfect circles like bowls, and the colors in the feathers shifted like wet paint in the sunlight. They had patterns of dots around their eyes like ants walking. Four curving toes on each foot, with skin more like lizard than bird.

  “Would you like to feed one?” Non asked, and her voice was different from her face. Her voice was gentle, easing into the ears and pooling somewhere in Lynay’s throat. She found it difficult to speak with Non’s voice in her throat.

  “Yes,” Lynay said.

  “Hold out your hand and keep the palm flat,” said Non, and dropped four piñon nuts into her hand. Lynay watched Empty Stomach’s eyes, how the dark circles inside the yellow swelled and then retracted, pulsing.

  Non began to show Lynay the ways to avoid sharp beaks and curved claws. She showed her how to call the parrots, how to win them over, how to be quiet and calm and let them learn to trust her.

  Lynay started making small parrots out of clay, playthings only. Her mother did not object; rather, she called them clever and correct. By “correct,” she meant that Lynay had captured the thing well. It was easy to shape a piece of clay to look like a parrot, but it was another thing altogether to capture what made a parrot a parrot. This basic parrot, in Lynay’s mind, was about the movement of feathers and the brightness of color and sharp eyes and beak. That had to come through in the paint and the clay. She wanted to capture the softness of the feathers at Early Waking’s throat and the lushness of her tail. She wanted to capture that the beaks looked like stone, not like living matter. And yet the beak and claws were always moving and reaching, always grabbing and pulling with the parrot in tow behind.

  She was captivated by the birds.

  It was Lynay’s thirteenth summer when Non came with her two boys. The next summer was the summer that Lynay’s mother lost her breath altogether. First she was too weak to reach for the clay. This was a very bad thing, because no one else among them shaped and painted the clay, and her mother had not yet taught her everything. Her mother could not be taken yet. The wise one came and laid his hands on her head, her heart, her belly, to see where the illness was centered, but he could not feel the place of attack. Her moth
er grew weak until her arms could not lift a water jar and her fingers could barely curl around a bowl. As her mother grew stiller, Lynay also turned immobile. Her mind could not spit out the thoughts that would tell her legs to walk or tell her body to lie down and sleep or tell her mouth to chew. She sat by her mother, and that was all. But by the end all her mother would drink was willow tea, and for some reason this request, this longing for the bitterness of the tea, loosened Lynay’s feet from the ground. She and only she would brew tea. She thought of nothing but tea.

  There was a skill to making it. She looked for tips with swollen buds and cut them off into lengths as long as from her elbow to her wrist. The buds held the strength of the tea. She ground buds and stems into a pulp, then left the willow mush soaking in boiled water. When the water was cool to the touch, Lynay would strain it through a tightly woven basket, letting it trickle into her mother’s favorite drinking bowl, which was smooth and worn and easy for her mother to hold with two hands. She was careful with the straining, catching every bit of twig and greenery, and only a dusting of pollen floated to the top of the willow water. Her mother would drink it down, not very fast, over the course of an entire afternoon or a long uncomfortable night, and Lynay would watch her throat work.

  Lynay could never again stand the taste of willow tea after those months.

  The tea and all the months of praying and chanting did not work. Her mother went into the ground and on to the next world. Lynay picked the burial flowers. She chose the burial bowl, an old favorite of her mother’s that captured the patterns of the wind, and she handed it over to the wise ones, who would place and punch the hole into it that would allow her mother’s spirit to escape.

  Her mother had told her that makers had been touched by the finger of the Creator, that his fingertip had rested on the top of Lynay’s head as she was born and had left the indentation of her soft spot. That was why makers could see the patterns in things—the Creator had commanded the door on top of their heads to open wide so that his voice would be heard. His voice would sound inside their heads, and all manner of other things would pour inside—the way the ripples spread through the water, the lift of a hawk’s head, the endless mica bits in a woman’s eye, the whorls of a footprint. These things would all come out in the clay.