by Gin Phillips
One morning, after they had all died, Non shook Lynay awake. This was not uncommon, because Lynay had stopped waking with the sun—she could not calm her mind at night and lay staring at the dark sky, and when her eyes finally closed, it was as if they were sealed with packed mud. She could barely pry them open. She rarely felt any awareness until she felt Non’s hands on her shoulder.
So she blinked at Non on this morning, trying not to remember the feel of Little Owl next to her. Non told Lynay that she would return to her own people. She said that Lynay should stay and find refuge with her brothers, marry one of the men among these families. Lynay was young still and pretty enough—strong, anyway, and from a good powerful line, and she would be sought after.
Lynay sat up, fully awake. She said she would not stay. She said she would go wherever Non went, that she would be her daughter now and would never leave her.
And then Non told her a story of what happened to her own daughter:
“The ones who hold the rain would not listen to me,” she said, the room still chilled from the night. “They would not listen to anyone. And so the wise ones decided that we must give them a child, must woo them back to us. And because my daughter was of the strongest blood, they asked me to give her with my blessing. And I did. She was seven years. She walked to the circle of men who had come up out of the ground, and two of them took her hands—she was washed and combed and wore a soft cloth that covered her, and she wore the pink stone bracelets she loved. They took her below, down the ladder, into the room of the chosen, which even I had not been allowed to see. I heard soft chanting. I couldn’t hear her voice, and I never heard a scream or even a cry. She didn’t make a sound. She must have been afraid; she must have felt alone. But she didn’t call out for me. The men came up after a short time had passed. I saw the stone knife with blood later, and I knew they had taken her head and buried her body only.
“I could not forgive myself. I went cold inside. I had handed her over. I had let them have her. We could have run, or I could have argued with them—I do not know if they would have forced me if I hadn’t agreed to give her to them. And even after her blood soaked into the ground, the rain still did not come. I knew they blamed me still. But they would not say so. They needed me. Men cannot understand the parrots. They need them for the offerings, but they cannot speak to them, cannot know them. And I lost interest without her next to me.”
“So you shut the door? You blocked out the voice?”
“I tried,” Non said. “I tried to block out everything. I tried to stop hearing and feeling the parrots. And there was no rain. So perhaps I did shut the door.”
“And then?”
“And then they asked me to leave. I was allowed to take only one male and one female bird with me, though they all would have come with me. You’ll think this is unfeeling of me, to talk of losing a bird now when I have lost so much more.” She ran a hand over her face, lingering at her mouth. “You must know that I adored my sons. I am empty without them. But the loss of Early Waking was more than the loss of a bird. I will never have the parrots surround me again—there will be no mating. I am no longer their keeper. It is as if someone took away your clay and told you to live in some other way.”
Lynay placed her hand on the floor. “But if you shut the door on the top of your head, you wouldn’t miss them.”
“You cannot shut it. If you try, the voice will come in other ways. And those ways are not always pleasant.”
Lynay did not believe her.
They were not the only ones talking about leaving. The creek continued to contract. The turkeys had vanished, along with the rabbits. Corn had grown tougher, and the kernels had no juice to give. A few—two family groups—had left already, headed south. In truth, the dryness and the hunger and the worry and even the sicknesses somehow comforted Lynay: She was not alone in her suffering. It was a widespread pain, even if the others’ pain was different from hers. In those months she could not have borne to see others contented and unscarred.
But most of the others still felt too bound to Women Crying to cut their feet loose from the ground and move on. Lynay and Non did not feel bound. Lynay felt sometimes as if she might float away like a strand of corn silk caught on the wind.
Sometime later, the two of them headed east, following the water for a little while, then filling their water jars and trusting that the trails would take them where they wanted to go. Non knew the way.
As Lynay left, the memories fell at her feet, the memories of her life at Women Crying. Bits of silver falling from the cottonwood, flashing. Spine from a cactus in the soft skin of her arm. The smell of sweet hot cornmeal as she unwrapped the folded husk. Mother’s hands washing her hair, rubbing at her scalp. Non’s hands on her face after the dirt was shoved over her mother. Clay on hands. The bowls—rabbit, trickle of blood, owlet locked with parrot, the parrots that were not only parrots but Non herself.
They walked and walked.
The bird added a new word to its vocabulary. He knew all the family names, as well as greetings and good-bye, yes and no—though these were often not used correctly—pretty and water and toy and nut. He called for Little Owl and for the baby girl and for his own mate. He is gone, Lynay would say. She is gone. Over and over, he asked for Early Waking, calling her name as if it were a question. And nearly as often, the bird called “Little Owl Little Owl Little Owl” as steady as water dripping drop by drop and hitting the ground. He had been a young bird when Little Owl was born, and Non said he considered the boy his hatch mate. Little Owl Little Owl Little Owl Little Owl. Lynay kept telling the bird that he was gone, that they were all gone. She thought the sound of the name would drive her mad.
Somewhere along the journey to the new place and the new water, the bird understood. He was silent for nearly an entire day. Then he landed on Non’s wrapped wrist and said, “Gone.” Throughout the long, dry walk over the canyon walls, he repeated Gone Gone Gone. And, as if reminding itself, the bird would announce Little Owl gone. Little Owl gone. Early Waking gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
And they walked. Lynay’s heels split open and bled, even though her skin was as hard as the ground they walked on. They talked as they walked, and Lynay realized that Non did not want to go back to her old home, even though her parrots were there, or at least they could have been. She did not want to walk where her daughter’s feet had walked and feel the absence of those footsteps.
Lynay understood this. She also had liked the idea of a place where she did not recognize any of the footsteps. She told Non she would follow her to whatever place Non chose. She did not care about place. She cared only about Non.
And Non chose a lovely place, a place she had visited before she was grown, where she had spent several seasons. It was a great ditch in the earth filled with all things green. Life was everywhere, and on their first day descending the mountain, Lynay saw a rabbit frozen still by a water shrub. The creek had enough force to knock the sandals from your feet. The people had welcomed Non, even without the possibility of more parrots. And they welcomed Lynay as well.
But Lynay proved Non wrong. You could close the door on the top of your head—you could close everything. You could prevent anything from getting in. She had twenty-one years when they took their first downhill step into the canyon, and she did not dislike their new home. She no longer cried. She smiled and nodded. A few men wooed Lynay—one who was tall, one who had a scar down his thigh, and one who never showed his teeth when he smiled. She agreed to join with the one who had the scar, because she liked how he looked at her. Over time she created a new person who looked like her and spoke like her, and she lived inside that person’s skin. She grew to think of the skin as her own, except sometimes at night when everyone else slept, she could feel her other self shifting and stretching and remembering inside her tidy, comfortable skin.
She did not let her new man or her new family inside that skin. She smiled and nodded, but her head was sealed tight. She had brought powdered clay in the bottom of her basket, clay from her mother’s favorite bend, where the tall grasses grew. She left the gray powder dry and untouched, hidden behind one of the two bowls she had brought with her. They were the bowls her mother had used for mashing and kneading. Lynay had taken none of her own work with her. She had no use for it. Her hands were clean here in the new place, with nothing but fine layers of cornmeal or dust darkening the creases of these brand-new knuckles.
ten
* * *
Representation vessels are rare reflections of Mimbres conceptions of society—as it actually was, or as an idealized version of what it should have been.
—From “Picturing Differences: Gender, Ritual and Power in Mimbres Imagery” by Marit K. Munson, Mimbres Society, 2006
* * *
It was parrots that brought them back to Cañada Rosa. Ed and Paul grew tired of waiting for Silas and Ren to return, and they started taking down a few of the outlying rooms, along the perimeter of the rooms where the parrot woman had been found. A few meters below the surface they found a handful of effigies—small clay parrots—three whole sculptures and pieces of another two. These were abstract, hastily formed pieces, but the shape was unmistakable. There were no bowls or sherds that pointed to Ren’s artist: Still, there were parrots.
Twenty-four hours after they hung up with Ed, Ren and Silas were headed back to the canyon. There was nothing that had to be finished at Crow Creek, nothing that couldn’t wait weeks or even months. They had reached the floor level of all five of the newly exposed rooms, had found what bodies there were to find, and had found the bowls that were with the bodies. They found another two bowls that Ren felt sure were Lynay’s, although these didn’t have macaws on them. Her style was still distinctive.
On the drive back to Cañada Rosa, something had settled between Silas and Ren that was neither comfort nor discomfort. They spoke and still made each other laugh, but the smooth rhythm they normally had, the ease in each other’s company, felt shaken. Ren wondered if all she needed to do to restore the rhythm to what it had been was to invoke Scott. If she opened her mouth and the right words fell out, would the tightness at Silas’s mouth loosen? She could tell him about when Scott tried to cut a hole in his bedroom window with their mother’s engagement ring while she was in the shower. Or when he gave her a rabbit for her sixth birthday. The dog killed it the next day.
On the other hand, she wondered if the canyon itself might smooth things between them. Perhaps mere geography, the creek and the soil and steep rock walls, would recenter whatever was destabilized. She would wait and see. Her own rhythms pushed her to wait.
The drive was not a long one, and time passed quickly. Ed must have heard the truck coming up the road: He was waiting outside as Silas pulled under the shade of a walnut tree. Ren opened her door before the truck had completely stopped.
“Welcome back,” Ed said. His T-shirt read “PETA—People Eating Tasty Animals.” His khakis were smooth, with crisp pleats.
Ren looped an arm around his neck. “I hear you’ve been busy.”
“Doogie Howser here found the good stuff,” Ed said.
Paul jogged through the doorway and stopped slightly behind Ed. “I don’t understand that ancient pop-culture reference,” he said. “Hello again.”
Ren smiled and reached out to lay her hand on Paul’s shoulder, and he stepped into her touch. He lifted his own hand as if he would return her gesture, but he stopped short of touching her, leaving his hand floating awkwardly for a moment. Ren was more interested in the hand that she couldn’t see—the one behind his back. Silas was beside her now, giving and receiving his own thumps on the back.
Ren kept her eye on Paul’s hidden hand.
“What do you have there?” she said, once the hellos were completed.
He looked as if he might like to tease her, to prolong the suspense—as Ed or Silas would certainly have done—but he couldn’t resist showing her. He uncurled his fingers, revealing a small clay parrot, no more than two inches long. It had no feet, and its tail was broken off. The point of the curved beak was gone. The shape of the bird was crude, asymmetric, and unsure. If it weren’t for the long lines of its body and the few millimeters of its tail, Ren would have wondered if it was meant to be a turkey or a wren or maybe even a duck.
“Isn’t this what you found at Crow Creek?” prodded Paul. “When you found the bowls?”
She lifted the tiny bird with her thumb and forefinger, dropping it into her own palm. The bottom of the parrot was smooth and worn, and seemed to fit her hand. She couldn’t help but imagine it had been held often, rubbed down by another set of hands.
“No,” she said. “It’s not like what we found. It’s similar in some ways, but this is smaller. And the wings here are painted on, not shaped into the clay. It’s . . . sloppy.”
“There has to be a connection,” said Ed. “Like Silas keeps saying, there’s no trace of parrots in the canyon. The only connection is that woman’s skirt and your artist’s bowls. Who else would be making parrots?”
Ren worked her lip with her teeth and brought the clay bird closer to her face. “Where are the others?”
“Inside,” said Paul.
They all followed him back to the lab. The parrots were sitting neatly together in a cardboard box, washed and dried. Ren held each figure in turn, studying the paint and the shape of the beaks, the design of the wings. None of the tails looked right—they didn’t hang properly from the bodies. They were shortened, fanlike, dropping no lower than the parrot’s belly. Nothing about the design looked familiar to her. But Ed was right: The chances of someone else shaping parrots in this canyon, meters away from Lynay, with no connection whatsoever, were unlikely.
Silas plucked one parrot from the bunch, cradling it in one hand. “Cute little guys, aren’t they?”
Ren picked up another parrot, and the movement took her closer to Silas. He did not lean toward her, didn’t reach for her hand, but he didn’t step in the other direction, either.
By the next day, after digging several more rooms, Ren was even more puzzled. She sat at the edge of the Delgado site, with the brown tips of her fingers aching for water. The sky was an unbroken sheet of blue. They did not fit, these parrots. There had been none around Non’s grave. None at the burials at Crow Creek. No direct connection except the effigies she had found with that first set of nesting bowls that started everything. And why weren’t there more bowls here? If Lynay had any hand in these clay parrots, where was the evidence of her other work?
They had found four more batches of parrots in four unconnected rooms—a harvest of clay birds from the dirt. Yet there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them: Some were crude, and some were surprisingly well formed. Some were painted down to the tiniest detail—multicolored eyes, wings with individual feathers, textured beaks. Others had two dots for eyes and a slash of paint for wings. Some were naked clay, baked and bare.
Ren had arranged them in groups, divided into separate boxes, depending on where they had been found. They were bizarre decorations to the site—cardboard nests filled with small birds pushed up against screens and buckets and tools. But Ren couldn’t see them in their neatly categorized boxes. Now she had the birds spread around her in the dirt, examining them en masse. Nineteen of them.
“Well?” asked Silas. He had found a piece of charcoal as big as his thumbnail. They could surely get a date from it and isolate when one of these rooms had been in use.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not her. It doesn’t make any sense that it would be her. Where’s the skill? Where’s the sense of perspective? These aren’t done by anyone with artistic talent.”
“Maybe her style changed. Maybe they were supposed to be abstract.”<
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She didn’t bother to answer.
He shook gravel from his glove. “Maybe your artist was teaching someone else. Maybe she had a daughter.”
“There are too many of these things, by too many different hands,” Ren said, noticing that he always said “artist” instead of “Lynay.” He could not dispute the existence of an artist. “It would make sense if she were teaching a child, but then why would we find parrots in five different rooms? And this many surviving figures? There could have been hundreds of them if this many are left.”
“Still looks like children to me,” Silas said.
“So she had five children, and they all lived in separate rooms?”
He dropped the charcoal into a clear plastic vial and snapped on the lid. He walked back to the stack of paper bags and fished for the black pen in his pocket.
“Fine,” he said, as he wrote. “Say it’s not her. Could be other people from her village at Crow Creek. Or even a completely unaffiliated group. Another group from the north, maybe.”
They’d found plenty of sherds, just no more of Lynay’s. Ren lifted one open-beaked parrot. A tongue was painted inside the beak. She liked these figures, liked the smallness and simplicity of them. You could fit two or three of them in your palm and feel them jostle together like marbles. They were solid and warm, as if they had tiny clay hearts beating inside them. And Silas was right—they undeniably had the feel of toys. She was sitting among a flock of children’s playthings. She stared at a particularly fat bird with stunted wings. It looked like a chicken. She tugged it through the dust by its stub of a tail, then spun it in a slow circle. These parrots could have taken flight, danced through the air in little hands. They could have had names and tiny rock eggs and nests of twigs packed tight by dirty fingers. She drew a line in the dirt, added branches and leaves, and sat the fat bird on its perch.