Arilla Sun Down

by Virginia Hamilton

  “They are waiting for you. I’m going to let Arilla rest. They can come later for us.”

  “I got to go, then,” Shy Woman again. Friend of James-Once.

  “Shy Woman, you staying!” I saying, feeling cold and tired.

  “Oh, baby.” She rushing fast to me, kneeling. “I got to go, honey, but I’ll be back to pack up the things. See you then.”

  Crying, “You won’t be coming back!” And holding her hand.

  “Don’t think that, honey. Because of James? Hey, she’s all feverish. This child … this child is sick!”

  Mama coming. I closing the eyes. No more talking. Everything jumping in a my head. Hearing them moving and whisper. Bringing me something to swallow. And I swallowing. Never knew the taste before. Sweet, like cherry and medicine not bad.

  Someone rushing around and then out the door. Mama calling from a door, “You all go on. Go on. Arilla has a cold, tired out. We would just slow you down. I don’t want her in the wagon with It.”

  Wishing them wait. I wanna be going with them and old James. James, he coming talking again. I hear him coming.

  Wordkeeper?

  “Hearing you, too.”

  Think of a time, any time, and I will be with you.

  “But you going now?”

  Yes.

  “Can’t I going with you?”

  Yes, if you want to.

  “Is it far — going?”

  It is only going in a circle.

  “Then you coming back again?”

  I am here and now, then and there, in all things.

  “You just going around.”

  Yes.

  “Then I thinking to stay here.”

  Stay, then. Live with honor. And Wordkeeper?

  “I hear you.”

  Remember who you are.

  10

  Riding through November-dismal is about as dull and damp as anything can get. It’s so gray with wet everywhere. The horses stink; the ground and air stink. You can smell pig farms and cattle-breeding clear on the other side of the park, miles away. You can smell some perspiration — truth — from people in town shopping in overcoats of some kind of re-processed wool that, when damp, has an odor of awfulness like no other. All of the smells hang above the ridges and then seep down through the dark pines like a full-blown calamity.

  This is where I’d want to be, though, if and ever the world’s worst disaster hit. I don’t know what it’d be, but I’d like to be right here down below the ridges in what Sun likes to call his glade of a sweet glen. Not a soul is down here in this kind of weather but us. That’s what Sun Run likes best, having the whole sweet place to himself.

  They say it hardly ever snows in these parts before Thanksgiving. It never snows on Christmas, and there is never any brightness to Easter. What is even more peculiar, it can be dawn and zero degrees, with frost on your windows and folks scraping it off their cars. The ground, hard like a rock. But by noon, ice is melting from roofs, and dripping. Mud splatters your legs as you walk. Two o’clock and it’s forty degrees. They say weather happens like that — a quick-change artist — for fifty, sixty miles in every direction from this glen. Sun says the weather emanates from right down here, along the Little Egypt River where it comes up from underground. He says weather updrafts for miles from down here. That it climbs the ridges with a lot of warmish air and mixes up there over the ridges with cold currents. And makes some fast-changing weather for fifty, sixty miles, swooshing storms through flat valleys. He’s probably making it all up, too.

  Nobody ever bothers with this kind of weather. With all the reporting they do out here — the winter blizzard watches and the summer severe-thunder-and-wind watches, you’d think at least a few old farmers would pay some attention. Nobody pays it any mind. Because, I guess, it all changes too fast, so they go on and do what they had planned to do. Just like weather wasn’t going to happen to them or anyone else for half a hundred mile.

  I have seen girls wear their fur-collared winter coats to school, their new high-boots, their little wool hats and scarves, when they know full well it’s a January thaw and going to be fifty-five degrees by lunchtime. They don’t care to even notice. Or, end of October, the farmer will get on his tractor to plow under what’s left of cornstalks. The ground should be firm enough for him to good and well turn over the earth. You watch him sink down in the mud, but he keeps on fighting it and plowing until dark.

  “Let’s make it on over to the pond,” Sun says, all of a sudden. “It ought to be full up to level with all the rain we got. See what is wintering there.”

  “That’s another two mile,” I tell him. He doesn’t pay me any mind. Just going along on his grand horse. In the grayness all around, Jeremiah is some Technicolor space of rich brown in the shape of an animal. A peculiar mistiness down here today that don’t so much rise off the river as it seems to come out of the ground and out of the trees. Rising so’s you can’t really see the top of ridges. You can kind of see through it all up to a metal path of sky in the opening above the water. If I didn’t know my way out of here so well, I’d swear Sun Run wanted to lose me down here forever. ’Course, he knows I know how to get back. Just follow the Little Egypt. Or take to the ridge and follow it toward the sun.

  Jeremiah stops to take a drink of cold river water, and Running Moon comes up to do the same. That steams me up all at once, the way my horse will always follow Jeremiah. And every time I try to make her lead, she’ll fall back no matter what. She’s knowing pretty sure and well I’ll never dig her sides to hurt her. That kind of force just isn’t in me, though I know some girls are cruel with their mounts. Sun can dig into Jeremiah and that grand character will shoot out from wherever he’d been thinking of moseying along. But Sun won’t even have to dig in him. Just a movement of his wrists, his knees pressing and a sound of squeaking in his mouth. Jeremiah is gone in a black streak. If I tried that, Running Moon ud probably shoot out from under me to catch some weather five miles ahead. She can run pretty, but I have to be thinking in front of her every minute of the run.

  Brother takes out the green thermos from his saddle bag and pours us each a cup of steaming coffee.

  “Now, that’s all right,” I tell him. Nothing like pulling off leather gloves gone clammy on the inside but with hands still cold, to warm bare fingers around the hotness of coffee. There’s nothing I like better to drink than steaming coffee made just the creamiest brown with evaporated milk. And sweet with sugar. Sun gets Mom to heat up the coffee again once he’s added the evaporated. Or I heat it up, like I did today with it being a Saturday for us to be just out here for hours. While he messed around with little cans of oily deviled ham mixed with mayonnaise on some bread.

  I don’t mind us sitting like this. I’ve got my leathers on. My jacket and this real funny hat of Dad’s, so old that the leather can be molded tight around my face. Makes me feel like looking cute, almost. I have on the boots that are the best riding boots you could want. My Birthday boots.

  “Take it easy. Relax,” Sun says to me.

  I don’t bother to look at him, sipping at my coffee. He’s right, my leg muscles are quivering and jumping, since being mounted like this for so long.

  “What time is it?” I ask him.

  “Don’t worry about some time,” he says. “We got another good two hours.”

  Mercy. Well, I don’t actually mind, even when I get chilled all the way through. It’s not so bad once you can ride well. It’s probably colder out here than the dampness makes you feel. Something else, too. Going along downriver. Slowly, my hands aren’t cold anymore. Then, going along again for a time and I realize my hands are cold once more. Because of pockets of warm air and, next, cold air, in no kind of pattern. Probably, if I concentrated, I could feel it all over when it changes. The horses sure can feel it. They’ve not been so calm this entire ride. Sun has taught me that, when river-riding, stay alert for any sudden thing that might startle the horses. Small animals flashing across the path. Sna
kes maybe sliding along the rock bank. Even a fish jumping out of the water. They will do that sometimes. A lot of fish jumping out and flashing quicksilver, startling the tuned-up horses.

  My brother just kind of pokes his hand holding a sandwich against my arm. It’s a funny way he does it, all kind of formal and gentlemanly. Have to take the sandwich even though I’m not so hungry. I never am when I ride. I take it, I guess, because he’s gone to the trouble of making it, bringing it along and offering it to me.

  For sure, Sun and me are some different and going through something this November-dismal. It’s like when we’re riding side by side down here or maybe out in the grasses where it’s all flat in the park, I catch him looking at me. What I catch for real is the look on his face after he’d already been watching me. His face will look worried. Also, sort of weary.

  Or we are up there riding the ridges. This area is actually fifty or sixty miles of flat land, valley land, with ridges on one side of it. Like somebody taken a sharp blade making some quick, deep slashes, causing the ridges and some strips of deep land below them.

  Up there in the snow, along a ridge lip, is got to be the most dangerous game I’ve ever had to play. Although Sun tells me riding up there isn’t dangerous very much. I know it is, way up there, following the edge of a rocky ridge. In and out of trees with patches of snow all underfoot, with everything so slippery. I’m seeing myself fallen all the way down to here. Falling and killing myself. Lying crumpled down here, and dead. I’ll be up there with my mind full on the horses. Have to be, but I’ll also be watching every move of Sun in front of me. Keeping myself cool, but scared to death something will fright the horses and knowing I never have a total degree of control over Running Moon. She is such a quick and awake horse. I wonder if she is ever scared up there, too. But then it’s over. We come off the ridge with Sun starting in watching me, like he is hurt about something I’ve done.

  Maybe he’s tired of having to not like me all of the time. Tired of the habit of wanting me out of his world. He almost seems to enjoy being out here riding with me. Now that I know how to ride so good, he isn’t smart-aleck half as much.

  Maybe we both are bored with worrying over each other. School, and weeks of writing my autobiography has made me the sorriest girl anybody’d ever want to see. I get myself enjoying writing the compositions before I go to bed. It’s something sure different to do. Easy enough when I stay loose and don’t think about what I’m to write. And saying things in class I never would think to say.

  September 30 came and I just blurt out: So ends the Plum Moon. Everybody liked that. And come October, the kids have to say, Which moon is it now, Arilla? Up to the present — which moon is it now? And I tell them, as easy as anything: It’s the leaves fallen. The ice forming. It’s the hard face, the time of the Freezing Moon. November-dismal, which is what I always like to call it.

  Sun says, sudden in the quiet, “You’re awful mum today.”

  “Huh?” I’d been thinking so hard. I got embarrassed, like he can read my mind.

  He slides off Jeremiah to wash the cups. He smiles, taking mine. “Want some more? There’s some left.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Both of us stiff and formal.

  Watching him bending, hands swishing water in and around the cups. With a red bandana twisted into a band around his hair, he looks like the first Indian.

  Or the last.

  We are still brother and sister.

  And being he’s the Sun.

  Don’t get it in your head he’s changed.

  Watch him.

  Thermos back in the saddle bag, Sun mounts up and we start out again along the river. Water sounding cold, rushing. Branches are so still, not a creak. Me and Sun are side by side where the shore below the bank widens rocky and almost black.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” Sun says.

  It surprised me he would say it out loud. “What about me?” Just as ordinary as I can sound.

  “Not about being this or that,” he says.

  “But what?”

  “But that all of you,” he says. “Mom and Dad, too. All of you are so Midwest. You the most. A Midwesterner.”

  Now that leaves me blank; or it stuns me, I can’t tell which. “What do you mean by that?”

  “People in the same place have some clues about one another,” he says.

  “Clues,” I say. “You’re really wild today,” I tell him.

  “Well, I’m working it out,” he says. “See, people of a certain manner give off with some signals that they all understand.”

  “Signals,” I say. “Okay, I’ll bite. What signals?”

  “Okay,” he says. “The kids in school may not comprehend why you drag around by yourself all of the time. I mean, you won’t even try to get close with some certain kid. But the signal they get from you is one of thinking. Of the smarts.”

  Now I’m listening.

  “You get the good grades,” he says, “and that makes sense to them. They understand being alone when it’s a bright girl with an arty mom.”

  “Is that what they think?”

  “You know it,” he says. “You have the clues, the signals. So does Mom and Dad. Everybody has got the clue to the way all of you are. They accept Angel and her old man, too.”

  Sun laughs. “But they don’t accept me,” he says. “They think I pull the grades because teachers are scared of me. They think I’m a hustle. I ignore the clues, or I catch the signals but I refuse them. Something. That’s why I’m breaking out of here.”

  “What? You’re lying!”

  He looks hurt. “Wouldn’t lie to you, Moon,” he says, real quiet. “You watch if I don’t.”

  We veer up above the riverbank and Sun goes on ahead of me. The trees fall back from a path worn along the side of a clearing. We go single file with the horses trotting when they can. Sun’s shoulders are hunched high. I see that at the same time I feel my hands cold and stiff holding the reins. I can see some of my breath, but I pay no mind to it. I’m on Jeremiah’s tail, as close as it’s safe.

  “Sun? What’d you mean — are you really leaving here?”

  “Just what I said,” he calls back to me.

  That gets me really upset. “When? For how long?”

  “I made up my mind,” yelling over his shoulder. “I’ll make it through in three years. Be finished with school by June.”

  “This June?”

  “And then I’m leaving.”

  “What?” Running Moon gets jittery with my yelling and I slow down a minute.

  “You heard me!” Sun calls back, going off.

  “But what about me! Sun? Slow down!”

  Sun laughs. He slows to wait for me. Turning, he grins at me.

  I come up, just full of the worst scare I’ve ever had. “You were lying, too,” I tell him.

  “’Fraid not, Little Moon.”

  “Don’t call me Moon!” I can see some teasing on his face. We sit there with the horses close and us turned in the saddles to face each other.

  Some sound. Rising. We look up.

  “Sun …”

  “Shhhh!”

  It makes no sense because it’s so sudden. I just want to get back to all this new stuff about him leaving.

  “Sun …”

  “Listen.”

  It’s a confused sound. Not rising, it’s falling and it’s going.

  A wind comes up, like you open a barn door and what had been gathered there in the dark comes out. Easy, first, and then gathering and marching, fast. Up the river, westward comes this wall of smoke at us. Only it is wind with all of this wetness on us all of a sudden. You can’t see through it.

  It’s not rising, it’s falling all through the trees and all over us. We are pelted with it. Slippery, making dark wet hits on our jackets and sliding down.

  “Ice,” Sun says, “and rain.”

  “It sure is.” And something else. “What’s that … noise?”

  We are looking all
around and look up again. The slippery stuff is coming down in the funniest sound. Feeling like rain, only it isn’t. It’s cold and it gathers white along the edges of the path.

  “Sleet, too,” Sun says.

  “Man, we are a long way from home, too,” I tell him.

  We can’t see much up above us. But we sure can hear all the squawking.

  “Birds,” Sun says.

  “Are they ducks?”

  “Ducks or geese.”

  “Where are they going?” I ask him.

  “A lot of ’em get caught by the warmish weather,” he says. “Maybe ducks, all trying to make it to the pond. They got caught. And we’re going to get caught, too. Come on.”

  He turns Jeremiah and heads on, going fast. I follow fast with Running Moon moving easy, hardly any effort to her wonderful drive.

  “Shouldn’t we climb on out of here?” I call out as loud as I can.

  Sun motions his head over to our right. I look that way and up, through all the freezing rain and sleet falling. Man, I am covered with the stuff. The ridge along here is close up and steep. We’ll have to go on to the pond, where the highline breaks open into clumps. Another mile or so and we’ll be there.

  The first half-mile isn’t too awful. How tall pines do sway and sound! I’ve got Running Moon close up with the reins. Patting her often, she is being so slapped by the freezing wet and wind.

  I hunch down in my collar. Make myself smaller so I won’t be such a target for wind driving the stinging ice drops.

  The squawk-cackle of birds comes in waves.

  Wonder how many are there. Maybe hundreds. But that has to be too wild.

  I hold in Running Moon, feeling all her strength wanting to rip wide open.

  “Easy, girl. It’ll be over soon.”

  By the time we close in on the pond, every tree is wearing this slick of ice. Unbelievable. Each stalk of weed has a tube of cold coating around it. This storm is going to build into the prettiest winterland! But I won’t have the time to admire it.

  The Little Egypt has narrowed into rapids of small size. We’ve been on a downslope most of the way. Just the gentlest downward trend of land. And now it levels out and opens up into the pond. Too small for a lake, but it’s big enough for water birds to settle along the banks and to nest around it all through the seasons. Oval, the pond is like a huge teardrop. They say kids like to swim here. I was never much for swimming. It sure is just the quietest place when Sun and me come in on a Saturday. Today it is in an uproar.