Nahoonkara

by Peter Grandbois

  We rise into the night on wings made only to fly, wings unable to carry sorrow, wings unable to touch another.

  We no longer know which is our real self, which our shadow. It no longer matters. Life and death fade one into the other. Like apparitions, madness and grief flicker before us and are gone. But how do we wake from this dreaming? We fear that we will always float in this gray sky, that this snow will never end.

  They say I didn’t wake for three months. They say that it took four men to carry me from the mesmerist’s tent, that Webb wouldn’t stop crying, that Henry Jr. hid the rest of the day for fear he’d be punished. They tell me that they tarred and feathered the mesmerist and ran him out of town before he put a spell on anyone else. They tell me that I talked in my sleep often, that I cried sometimes, that they had to force food down my mouth just to keep me alive.

  But I don’t remember anything except the white face of snow. Though I can’t escape the feeling that I’m floating, that I’m not really part of anything. The problem is I don’t know where or when I belong. It seems to me I’ve always been unfastened from this world, observing it as if through a dream. I want to reach out, to touch things, but all I grasp is the flapping of wings, the color of moonlight, and the keening of stars.

  THE CLARITY OF MYSTERY

  Eli | Wisconsin

  I was sleeping under the birch far from town, the summer of my seventeenth year, when I awoke to the hound’s baying. I followed the sound, until I came upon an animal hidden beneath brush so thick I’d have never seen her if it weren’t for the hound.

  A mare, gray as the sky. Nothing special about her, except her eyes. Eyes that watched me through labored breathing.

  The hound scampered off, but I remained. I watched as first blood and mucous dripped from the mare’s womb. I watched as that dark hole opened wider and wider, until I felt sure it would swallow me. I watched as a shimmering blue-white sac, a nearly translucent balloon, bubbled out, slimy and wet. Instead of popping, it got bigger and bigger until I was sure the mare was giving birth to the whale in Uncle Frank’s story. I wanted to run. But the mare’s eyes fixed me to that spot.

  The sac flopped out, viscous and alive upon the ground.

  I watched and waited. When would the mare rise and lick away the caul, tear away the fragments with its teeth so the foal could breathe? The mare’s nostrils flared, open and closed, open and closed—two more dark holes to swallow me. It raised its head, but not to get up. It was summoning me. But I couldn’t touch that quivering mass.

  I ran through sheets of morning light as it filtered through the trees, leaves raining down upon me, crumbling beneath my feet. Yellow birch and hickory curling in on themselves at my approach, the flaming red leaves of the dogwood, maple, and oak marking my track.

  The sac would burst. I knew it would. The foal would kick his way out from the inside. And I could not be there when it did.

  The hound bayed, and I ran. I resisted as long as I could, until, finally, I stopped before the banks of the Big Eau Pleine. Kneeling upon the ground, I rubbed handfuls of dirt into my face, my skin, covering myself. But when I looked up, the hound stood waiting for me.

  I tore open the caul, ripped it with my fingers, chewed it with my own teeth. The roan lay within, still as snow. I opened his mouth, cleared away the fluid that brought death as well as life, not conscious of the work my hands were doing, not aware of my self at all, except as I looked through the mare’s eyes. I could see my head nudging the roan to rise. I could see my long blond hair, a mane falling over my shoulders, my goatee a patch of white sprouting beneath. I looked into the wildness of my own eyes and wondered why the mare had chosen me. The roan lay there, shaking off the fragments of its caul, kicking at the thick, now white, skin that kept it from the world. And still the mare eyed me.

  I waited for the afterbirth, and when it didn’t come, I knew the mare was in trouble. By then, the roan was on its feet, nuzzling its head against me. I led it out of the woods, the morning sun now free of the grasping branches.

  I fed the roan cow’s milk from One-Eared Louie’s farm. Each day he seemed to grow bigger, more sure of himself. And I was his mother, I who’d never cared for anything before. Not like Killian who was always bringing animals home and taking care of them. I wouldn’t let Killian care for it, even if he’d wanted to.

  Killian watched me from the back porch each morning and evening when I fed the roan, when I took it for a walk down past the elms. It was like the mare watching me all over again. He never said anything, just stood there in his overalls with his hands in his pockets. I wanted to hit him for standing there, staring at me like that—like he was judging me.

  When I wasn’t caring for the roan, I kept it tied behind the shed. I never took him into town. Oscar Kepsky had been talking. He’d been telling people he thought the roan was his property. He said he’d found his dead mare out by the Birch groves. She must have run away to foal, he said. I’d run away too, if I had to live with Kepsky. He told people that he wanted to know where my horse came from. One day at breakfast, after I’d been caring for it for nearly four months, Father sat beside me at the cracked, oak table. Something he rarely did.

  “Oscar Kepsky says you have his horse,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “I found him in the woods,” I said. “He’s not anybody’s property.” I couldn’t look my father in the eyes. I just kept chewing on my bacon, turning my spoon through my grits.

  “Oscar says that if he doesn’t get his horse back, he’s going to come over here and take it back,” my father said, as if taking Oscar’s side.

  “Just let him try,” I said. “If he comes over here, I’ll kill him.”

  My father’s eyes remained upon me, daring me to look into them, his stare unlike the mare’s or Killian’s. I couldn’t see myself in it. It absorbed me, threw nothing back.

  I knew he was trying to determine if I’d really do it. Let him wonder, I thought. It’s time he considered me.

  He rose from the table. “You’re a man now,” he said. “What you do is your business. But, it’s just a horse. A dumb horse.”

  What did he know about animals? All he knew was how to skin them, how to prepare their hides to get the best price and most of all how to talk about the quality of the fur—its softness and thickness. What did he know about caring for something?

  Kepsky must have come while I was at school. It was my last year, and it was a Friday so I normally would have taken the roan to the river to fish, but Miss Hull had invited Father Blanchard to teach the Bible. The stories from the Bible made me feel good, fixed in place like I knew who I was. Mother always said she couldn’t get me to do much else, but I was the first one ready for church every Sunday. Those stories made me feel like I knew why things happened. Why the hound called me. Why the mare had died. Why my father rarely looked at me, and why when he did, I feared to look back.

  I knew my father was in on it. He was home, and he wouldn’t have let them on his land if he didn’t agree with what they were doing. He wouldn’t let anyone on his land unless he was in complete agreement. When I came home, I knew exactly what had happened. Kepsky had gone right up to our front door. He wouldn’t have wanted to sneak around like the thief he was. He would have told my father he was taking the roan, and my father would have let him, not because he agreed with Kepsky that the horse was his property, but just to spite me because I’d dared to stand up to him, because I didn’t cower like the rabbits and fox he hunted.

  Father Blanchard’s story that day told about how Jesus destroyed the temple, how our Lord grew angry and took away what the people desired.

  That night at dinner Father studied me across the table. Everyone was quiet; they all knew what had happened, and they waited to see what I’d do. “It was nothing but a dumb horse,” I said, the lie somehow giving me the courage to look at Father.

  Mother untied her apron and sat beside me. “Maybe we could get another horse,” she said. She’d heard Jake
Mulenbach’s horse was going to foal soon. “Maybe we could think about buying that one.” She didn’t understand. They thought I smiled because I might get another horse, but they didn’t know. I smiled because for once Father thought he understood, and he was wrong. Now I was going to teach him something.

  That night in the darkness of the new moon, I snuck into Father and Mother’s room and crept quietly beneath their bed. But as I reached for the rifle he kept hidden there, my hand became lead, my arm a dead weight. I couldn’t breathe. I lay there like that until I thought they’d buried me alive. I had to break the spell somehow, but there was only one way I knew. So, I lunged for the rifle and ran to Kepsky’s. As I ran, I heard the hound baying again, and I knew this was the real reason I’d found the mare. I slipped through his fence, and there was my roan. He was happy to see me, nuzzling and sniffing, looking for milk.

  I sat down on the fence beside the foal, stroking his mane. I told him the story of Jesus and the temple, so he might understand. I passed the night there with my arm around that horse, the rifle leaning against the fence. By morning, I wasn’t sure I could do it. Maybe I’d just lead the roan home, I thought, and that would be it. But then I heard Kepsky stirring in his house. I grabbed the rifle, brought it to my shoulder. The roan looked at me with warm, wet eyes.

  “Kepsky!” I shouted. “Come out here!”

  It didn’t take long. He came out scratching his behind, his overalls only half buttoned up. I turned the rifle on the roan, put the barrel to its forehead.

  “You crazy son of a bitch!” Kepsky yelled.

  I saw myself reflected in the roan’s eyes, the same way I’d seen myself in the mare’s. I turned away and pulled the trigger.

  “You crazy . . .” Kepsky went for me, but it was like I wasn’t myself anymore. I climbed casually over the fence, turned my back to him, and walked home. He didn’t dare follow.

  My father was leaving to meet with the trappers up north. He saw his rifle in my hands, the blood spattered on my face and shirt. But he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t afraid like Kepsky. He just knew the course of my life had been set. I was a man now, and no words would change that. He never asked for the rifle back, and I didn’t give it to him.

  Each day I feel those eyes on me, as if I couldn’t make a move without their judgment. Each night, I’m trapped inside my own caul, trying to kick my way out. And when the roan eats away the last shred covering my face, there’s nothing for me but to keep my eyes shut for fear of what I might see, the eyes that turn the world back upon itself.

  I slip out at night sometimes, when the baying of the hound or the dark eyes of my dreams wake me. I take the rifle and run into the woods to the birch grove, looking for I don’t know what.

  Mother got sick a week after Father left. She couldn’t stop coughing, like she had to get something out of her. I decided to leave the morning I first visited her in bed. She was sleeping, but when she heard me come in, she opened her eyes. She knew my sin, and I knew it had caused her illness.

  I ran far away. I took the rifle and my belongings and ran into the night without saying goodbye. But who will have me? And where can I run to where I won’t hear the hound, where I won’t have to endure my own image? We are punished for our sins. God is vengeful. He knows the greatest punishment is to hurt the ones you love. It’s no mystery. I knew that when I shot the horse.

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY

  Elizabeth | Colorado

  I slipped myself off each night like a dress. Tugged at the shoulder straps and stepped out of my skin. It was the only way to stop from falling.

  I fell away from my marriage. The roles Henry demanded showed me so many faces that were not mine. And most painful of all, I fell away from my children until all I saw in the mirror was a blur, a nothingness that made me sleep.

  And so I fell into bed. Not just my bed but many beds: Tom Thomas’ bed, Silas Cordley’s bed, Big Jim Leek’s bed, even Will Markey’s bed, among others. You know where you are in a bed, the geography is easy to map, the shoreline clear, and it lies on every side. I could lie on my back, on my front, whatever they wanted of me, and all I needed to do was hold onto the edge to feel where I was. At least that’s what I thought for the first year. But it’s never that simple. We can enclose ourselves in an easily definable world, chart the topography of our bodies, but that doesn’t mean we can see our faces any more clearly.

  I stretched myself upon my belly, lay myself down before Big Jim, my head pointing north toward the icy clarity that never came. I needed to be pinned to the earth, held firm to the four corners of my known world.

  Will Markey never took the goose-bone pipe from his mouth as I rolled upon my back. Instead, he took each of my thighs in his hands, spreading them gently, kneeling before me, taking the layout of my land.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, though I rarely talked at all during these times. It is much easier if you don’t talk.

  “Same as you,” he said, the pipe bobbing in his mouth. “Searching for a place to live.”

  I had to think about that one. If there were places inside, places that could hold others, then was it possible they could hold me, too?

  Until that point, my reputation had not been hurt by my wanderings. But now I threw myself at the miners with abandon, desperate to find that hidden place. And it was during this time that the townsfolk’s opinion of me changed. I was no longer the first lady, but the town whore. A special distinction in a place with so many women plying the trade already. I suppose the fact that I didn’t charge for my services only boosted my reputation. It certainly did among the miners. They no longer cared that I required them to take a room in Demings’ Hotel. At least the hotel had a firm mattress, they would say, which was more than could be said of the makeshift beds in their cabins and tents.

  I don’t know why I stuck exclusively to the miners. Perhaps because they worked for my husband. He controlled them in one way, and I suppose I wanted to control them in another. Husband and wife, we played on their two greatest follies: greed and lust. “Maybe they’re the same thing,” Will Markey told me one day. And when I thought about it, I had to agree. When I see their faces eyeing a dusty bag of silver ore just taken from the mountain, it’s no different than when they fix one of the women in town beneath their stare. I’d seen the same look a thousand times on my savior and benefactor, Bertram Wheeler, when he walked into his bank. And I noted it when he paid his nightly visits to me. Even when it was too dark to see, the gluttony of his gaze slavered my skin.

  It gave me great satisfaction to make the men look at me that way, to be the one holding the glass of water before them, the only one with the power to quench their thirst. It gave me satisfaction, but nothing more. I had no substance. I gave them what they needed, but no matter how much they gave back, no matter how much I took in, when it was over, I was an empty vessel.

  It was as if their seed was barren, unable to engender anything born from dead lust the way it was. By the last year of my fall, I no longer had any excuse at all. I’d become sure there was no place deep inside in which to live, much less to hide.

  I don’t know what salvation kept me from dying. Perhaps it was the songs of their little deaths. The songs and the frantic struggling that preceded them worked like a drug, their juice like the strongest wine, deadening me so that I could walk the streets without care as people I once called friends turned away from me, whispering obscenities under their breath. If I couldn’t see myself, it was fitting others shouldn’t see me as well. Only the stranger, Wallace, pierced me with a look stronger than the most furious of Big Jim’s thrusts, the sting of his gaze almost bringing me back to myself as I passed by the sheriff’s office. Oh, how I longed for that look, how I both longed for it and feared it.

  Henry’s eyes, when they looked at me at all, had no such effect. It seemed the further I fell, the more he ignored me. At first, I knew it was because his character couldn’t conceive of what I’d become. He rationalized m
e away. But when the evidence became all too clear, and he still didn’t react, I was at a loss to understand. His face became a blur to me as well. I do not pretend to know my husband, as he pretends to know me. I used to. No longer. I’ve learned better. Yes, I’ve learned many things.

  I’ve learned that you cannot run from gravity. It will always pull you downward. Not even a bed, not even a careful mapping of your world, an intricate study of the body’s geography can save you. Gravity will win every time.

  THE COLORS OF THE RIVER

  Killian | Wisconsin

  “Killian, your mother’s sick,” Doctor Apfelbeck tells me as we stand in the fur room, pelts from Father’s last trip piled high in the corner next to the piano. “It’s not polio,” he says. “It’s not like what Catherine had. This disease is going to be with her for a long time.”

  “Uncle Robert says she’s got consumption,” I reply. “Is that true?”

  “You’re her oldest,” Doctor Apfelbeck continues, not saying whether it’s true or not, but looking at me with eyes that want to tell me something, something he can’t say with his mouth. “She’s going to need your help to take care of the house,” he says instead.

  “Yes,” I say, as if in a trance. “Saturday is baking day, the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon; Sunday incense, get the kids ready for church; Monday lye, time to wash clothes; ammonia and bleach on Tuesday; can Wednesday; raspberry pies on Thursday; and Friday pluck chickens for the weekly tavern dinner. But what about the dandelions?”

  Doctor Apfelbeck gives me a sidelong glance. “You’re a strange man,” he says before too long. “But she’s lucky to have you.” Grabbing his coat and hat, he heads for the door. “It’s a shame your father’s away. Meg could use him right now. What with your Uncle Robert in Milwaukee, Henry at university, and Eli off who knows where.” He shakes his head. “There’s a dire shortage of men in your household,” he continues. “Your mother needs someone strong, Killian. And that will have to be you.”