by Sean Wallace
Faye wanted to ask what had happened, but her throat was dry.
Through the window she could see down the flats to the horizon. She’d watched that open line a long time.
“They’re debating if it’s legal to interfere,” Maria said, as if to Frank, before she left.
“You don’t have to stay,” Fa Liang told Faye, when it was his turn.
That was cruel, she thought; he had to know how hard it was to part from a brother.
There should be something, she thought, when the others had gone. There should be someone here who could prepare Frank for a good journey home.
But there wasn’t. Grant and his men would be back. There was no time, even if she knew what should be done.
She couldn’t even dress him the way he should be dressed; he had only the one necklace. The rest of it was any man’s clothes.
She sat beside him for a long time, wishing she could cut her hair.
Frank had made her promise never to, after they cut his at the school. She’d given her word. He’d grown his hair out, since – it was as long as hers – but still, she’d never touched it.
Her hands ached for a pair of shears.
She thought about the people in River Pass, who wanted the railroad, and worried Frank would raise the dead against them.
To the north, if she could swing wide of prospectors, she’d be free. Shoshone territory had been eaten whole, but if she left this behind, she could look for land they might not yet have thought to steal.
All that had kept her here was Frank – his hope of making a safe place, his belief in holding firm.
It seemed a betrayal to go on alone.
She sat beside him, thinking about what it meant to stay here, about how much she was willing to fight.
Then she rose, and took what she needed, and kissed him goodbye.
* * *
What Grant and the Union Pacific see, when they come to lay claim to Elijah Pike’s lands, is a campfire burning high behind a six-legged metal dog, front legs raised with blades out, bearing a single rider.
They see they’ve raised a ghost, an Indian come back to guard his land.
Their gun wrists get cold, suddenly; suddenly, their teeth are chattering.
Grant and one or two others struggle for reason. They think, it can’t be him, it can’t – they look around for any other person who can make a lie of this horror.
But the dog moves forward, impossibly nimble, and they see the man’s face in the first streaks of dawn, and the breastplate of his necklace, missing strands and spattered with his blood.
“God save me, it’s Frank Clement,” Grant whispers, and the tremor under the name is the sound that sucks the fight out of them.
When Frank keeps coming, his jaw set and his dark eyes fixed on them, the monstrous insect moving underneath him with its engine shrieking, with his open mouth shrieking, with the thunder of the fire behind him, they run.
Less than an hour after Grant and his men had gone, Susannah Pell arrived with Lewis the sheriff and some deputies with guns.
When they came, Fa Liang and Joseph were gone – they’d taken the cart to fetch the broken dog – and Maria and Faye were sitting on the porch, flanked by loaded rifles.
The sheriff told Maria they’d found her claim legal, and the railroad in the wrong. Michael Grant had been formally accused of killing Elijah Pike, and the town would be suing Union Pacific for his murder.
It was the easiest way out, Faye thought, if the town was waking to a conscience. Grant was a good man to blame; he’d just been passing through on land that wasn’t his, and that sort are easy to hate.
“The mayor’s going to tell the railroad that God-fearing people won’t condone that sort of thing,” Susannah told Maria, in the tone of a sister. “You’re free to stay – of course we’ll stand with you. Poor Elijah.”
* * *
Faye waited until the last of the River folk had passed beyond the horizon.
Then she said, “I’m going to bury him. Alone.”
When Joseph moved to argue, Maria put a hand on his arm, and he looked down at her and reconsidered.
Stay here, Faye thought. Take whatever moments you can. They’ll be far between.
They’d all be watched more closely, now, as long as they stayed here – the railroad and the town would both be waiting to see if the folk of Western Fleet had been worth their notice.
The price of a homestead, for their kind.
Fa Liang brought Dog 2 from the barn to the door, and she saw he’d lashed a shovel to the front of the seat.
“Call if you need us,” he said, in the tone of a man who knew what it took to bury kin.
She didn’t call.
All the while she dug into the earth nearly as tall as she was, and covered him with the soft dark dirt, she didn’t make a sound.
When it was over, she sat beside the grave and looked out across the wide horizon, where it curved to meet the deep blue sky.
At dusk, Maria brought wildflowers to the grave.
Then she knelt beside Faye, and said, “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing.”
“I know how it is, to let someone go who you loved.”
She hadn’t let him go, Faye thought, her stomach tight; that was half the grief.
“I wore his clothes,” Faye said. “I wore his name.”
Maria nodded. “It’s strange, the things that happen. I had a husband I didn’t love. I’ll be his widow the rest of my life.”
Faye smoothed her hands against her trousers.
(Some sorrows you carried alone.)
“Come in soon,” Maria said. “It will be cold tonight.”
Then she was moving across the rise and down the hill, sure-footed, all the way to the big house she owned, where she had made a garden grow from nothing.
Dark was rolling in above them.
Fa Liang was probably still on the porch, mending dogs’ legs by candlelight. Maria would be in the kitchen by now, forcing a meal together, and Joseph would be seeing to the horses for the night before he came inside, to watch Maria and not say a thing.
There was no moon, no stars – clouds covered them, the sky was grieving. In the dark, she could see Green River, a dim candle flame across the basin.
Amazing, how far away light could be.
The train would come to Green River; the train would lace the land tight, a faster road to cross the plains.
She didn’t want to see it. She would rather take a tipi and a horse and wander into the badlands, or die free in the first bitter winter.
But Frank was here; just now, she couldn’t leave him.
A lamp went on in the front room. It swallowed the lights of Green River, flooded the whole place like morning – the half-standing barn, the shadows of dogs in the bunkroom, the path to the cabin that was hers and Frank’s, their footsteps worn into the land.
Faye rose from the graveside, and started for home.
I Stole the DC’s Eyeglass
Sofia Samatar
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
The termites listen. Their hearing embraces all sound, even the smallest. They hear the future. They chew the present away as the dark devours the moon.
I don’t mind if you want to consult the termites first, old man. Ask them: Should I help this hard-eyed child?
I’ll wait.
You probably think I’m funny, with my skinny body, my big ankle bones, the spots on my legs where bites have festered and left sores. Sickly, you’ll sigh, and weak. You’ll think of my sister Minisare who could carry a young tree across her back. Tall and lively she was, and when the chance came to work at the DC’s house, when a relative of my mother’s who cooked there said, Send one of your girls, it was Minisare my mother wanted to send, not me. But Minisare refused. Let the white man clean his own dirt, she said.
That’s how I came to work at the DC’s house, to wear a c
otton dress and collect chits my mother could spend at the company store. I carried water to the house, so you see I’m strong even though I’m little. I swept his room. He keeps his wife and children in there, framed and pegged to the wall.
When Ture went to the sky he stole a thunderbolt, and when I went to the DC’s house I stole an eyeglass.
It was lying on the table in his bedroom, a flat disc like a stone from the river. He’d forgotten to take it with him to the Site. I squinted through it, then dropped it into the pocket of my dress, chain and all. Afterwards, I told the head cook I’d broken it.
The cook slapped me hard, but I didn’t care. I took the eyeglass home, and that night, secret by the fire, I gave it to my sister. It shone in her hand like a snail track. It was beautiful like her, and strange like her, and she gripped it and kissed me so hard I winced. We could hear my father groaning from his bed: my mother was laying hot stones along his back to ease the pain. The pain of working since dawn at the Site, digging for the DC. I wasn’t like him, I thought; I was a thief. Reckless and clever as Ture.
Ture climbed to the sky on a spider web. When he got there, the clouds were locked. “Hey!” he shouted, pounding on their shining undersides. Rain fell hard, but the clouds didn’t open. Ture began to sing, and his magical barkcloth hummed along with him in the rain.
Door in the clouds, open-o
See the fresh meat I’m bringing-o
Sweet as the oil of termites-o
Cooked by my wife Nanzagbe-o!
Then the clouds opened, and that’s how Ture got in and stole the thunderbolt, bringing fire back to earth after all the coals had gone out. In our time, although you should always try to keep your own embers alight, you can be sure of finding a coal at a neighbor’s house to start your fire. My mother used to send me out with the coal pot if our fire died, and I’d sing at the edge of a neighbor’s place: “Door in the clouds, open-o!” Minisare taught me that there were other ways. “Here!” she whispered, commanding. “Watch!” She held the eyeglass on a stick.
I squatted beside her. The world was full of Sunday-morning quiet, the diggers sleeping, voices coming faint from the church. Sweat dripped down my neck. Minisare glared with terrible concentration at the pile of dry grass she’d made on the ground.
The eyeglass glittered, fixed in the twisted wood.
Sun filled the forest. I yawned.
Then something tickled my nose: the smell of burning.
“See!” Minisare breathed.
I stared. A thread of smoke uncurled in the air, and a tiny flame cracked its knuckles in the grass.
Sorcery, then.
For a long time I waited for something to happen: for the DC to shrivel and fade, for the Site to collapse, for the diggers to stop their pounding. But it seems the eyeglass was only a minor magic, for nothing stopped, as you know, you can hear the roar of the diggers even here. That endless roar, and the thunder of flying machines rolling overhead, manned by slave-soldiers from a foreign land. People say the noise chased the game from the forest, once, but then the animals got used to it. We’re used to it, too. Show me a child who can’t read lips.
Nothing changed at all – except my sister.
At first, it seemed only a stranger form of her usual stubbornness. She wouldn’t go to the farm. When I went home at night, I heard my mother complaining: “Why did I marry from the west? This is their blood showing, this worthless girl!”
She said this because my father’s people came from the western forest: my grandfather had gotten trapped on our side during the Breaking of the Clans. When I got close to the fire I saw her slapping her palms together as if in grief, and Minisare plaiting a mat.
Minisare plaited with tense, quick movements. She’d split the reeds into narrow strands. Firelight streaked them. “You’ll ruin your eyes,” I said.
She only jerked the reeds harder.
“Her eyes!” my mother said. “If that’s all she ruins, I’ll consider it a blessing. What she needs is a husband – one with hard hands.”
The words chilled me, and later I told Minisare: “You should help our mother on the farm.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I have to do something else.”
“Something else? What else?”
The darkness was soft, complete, I couldn’t see her at all.
“Out in the forest,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
On Sunday, when I’d washed the dress and spread it out to dry, I followed my sister deep into the forest. Walking before me along the path she was still my own Minisare, cool, long-striding, pushing the grass and branches aside with the ease of a swimmer. Several of the neighbors’ children trailed us, chattering in high voices. We entered a sunny space where the growth had been cleared as if for a farm. A jumble of objects littered the short grass: pots, blankets, barkcloth, cooking stones. It was like a house shaken inside out.
She turned to us, the little children and me. “Now.” She smiled, pointing. “You fetch grass. You find me some nice long, hollow canes. The rest of you run to the charcoal burners and beg whatever you can. Pai-te, stay with me. I want you to check my stitches.”
Her eyes were red. She hadn’t washed her face. Her hair needed rebraiding. But her energy was the same as ever, her laugh as the children scattered, her taut jaw as we leaned together over the patchwork she wanted me to see, a swollen thing like a dead calf.
“What do you think?” she asked. “You’re good at stitching – will these hold?”
“What is this thing?”
“I’ll put oil on it afterward, of course, to keep off the rain. I think the oil will help the stitches too, it’ll keep the air from getting through.”
“Minisare.” I put my hand on her arm. “Tell me. What is it?”
She looked at me. And I saw for the first time what my mother saw, what other people saw when they whispered about my sister: the chameleon eye. One of her eyes was a spirit eye, flecked with cloud, the whole forest trapped in it. Ghosts hung in the trees.
I only saw it for a moment.
“I can’t tell you yet,” she said.
“You said you’d tell me.”
She shook her head. “I said I’d show you.”
I looked at the stitches. She’d put pieces of leather and barkcloth together, goat-hair blankets, near-transparent bits of bladder.
There were also scraps of cotton. “Where did you get these?” I demanded.
Her face went stubborn, closed. “Just tell me about the stitches.”
I sighed. “They’re fine.”
“Thank you.”
She stood up, the chain I’d given her swinging at her skirt. In place of the eyeglass it held an ugly iron spike.
* * *
Minisare speaks of iron.
She weeps for the lost arts. There were smiths among us, once. They made leaping knives, the sight of which killed hope. The women plucked gold from the rivers and the smiths fashioned it into bangles, hot metal dashing into the mold like a young snake. Now smithwork is against the law, like carving, like drum-talk, like kingship, like the intricate and half-remembered varieties of marriage. You can find old pieces of iron in the forest, native iron it’s called, black lumps like tree gum chewed up and spat in the weeds.
Minisare talked all the time when she was at home, sometimes so fast she stuttered. She spoke of going to visit our father’s people on the other side of the line.
“You’ll never get there,” I said. “They’ll put you in prison.”
She laughed and cuffed my shoulder, throwing me off balance: her arms were heavier than she knew. Heavy with muscle, and ornaments too: wires strung with chunks of iron, battered metal cuffs, strings dangling bags full of something that clacked whenever she moved. She wore iron sticks in her hair and she kept a coil of string there for emergencies and her face was strong and preoccupied and filthy. But she could still sing in a voice as gentle and blue as the mushroom season
:
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers,
Strangers are eating oil there.
And sometimes, though less often now, she looked at me and smiled. “Little one,” she’d say, and stroke my cheek with a bruised fingernail.
My mother’s rages brought the neighbors running. “Look at you!” she screamed. “A brute, a beggar, a sick dog covered in filth from the white man’s rubbish pits.”
She ran at Minisare, one hand still clutching a lighted tobacco twist, a whorl of dried stuff like a smoky flower. She tried to pull off Minisare’s strange ornaments, and Minisare let her try. After a while my mother gave up and sat down on the ground. Minisare walked away toward her place in the forest, leaving deep footprints. When she came back she wore a burn down the length of her arm.
“You have to stop,” I said. But she couldn’t stop. Even at night she couldn’t rest: she worked on her mat because her fingers would not lie still. I found her plaiting by moonlight and she turned her head to look at me, the souls of the dead awake in her spirit eye. Sometimes I couldn’t find her at all: she was prowling at the Site, risking the guards, or sneaking off to see the old witch woman of the lake. She begged me to come with her. The witch was teaching her the old drum language, she said. She seized my hand and tapped out a crazy rhythm.
“No!” I snatched my hand away.
Minisare stared, gaunt in the firelight, her beauty in chains. “But it’s important,” she whispered. She took my hand.
My eyes grew hotter and hotter, until the tears came. She didn’t notice. She kept on tapping, insistent, my palm the drum’s belly, my fingers its liver and heart.
Do you know what the world looks like through the DC’s eyeglass?
I do. It’s a blurred place; you can’t tell the real things from the shadows.
People call you the Old Man of the Wood. You were a carver, once, but life in the mines made you bitter, and now you live alone. Still, I know you’ve heard of Minisare. Stories like hers travel everywhere, noisy and eager as the drone of the diggers. Stories like hers fall over the world like rain. Minisare, the girl who cooked iron. The girl who could carry a young tree. Big stories, and all of them true. But the small stories are also true. There’s the story of how I went to the Site every day to deliver the DC’s lunch. The story of how he gave me a chit as a tip, and I grasped that soft scrap of paper and shouted out as the cook had taught me: “Thank you, Commissioner Sir!” The story of how he seized me in the bedroom one cold morning, his enormous thumbs making my hipbones crack.