Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  They say it has been three centuries of their walking that one peak called Beatrice. They say their walking has made the glacier stay alive, because when they arrived it was melting, and now it has stopped.

  I know all these things because this winter—our eleventh, oh, time—I asked. I set down my pride at last at the foot of the glacier in October when we were nearest it, picking the last wildflower seeds in meadows above the treeline, running after the pikas that now teem amongst the talus rocks. My little furred great-grand children. I set down, forever, my Ambitions—you know the ones we’ve had to Teach, to be Models. I asked—who are you? How did you come to be here?

  To my great alarm, all the men began to weep, and the women soothed them with strong hands on their backs. I learned that they kept tallies, in their memories, of every creature lost across the centuries. Every one extinct. Every one gone. And they walked to keep the glacier from melting. And they walked to mend what they called the Hole in the Sky Which is in Each of Us. We have kept the waters going, they told us. We have held the sky up. We have kept the names of all the wild ones who have come and gone—

  “Wild Ones! Oh, yes—” I began to say, I began with the egret women, the squirrel ladies, my buckeye father, my spider grandfather, on my tongue.

  “No,” the women said to me, straightening their fur and felt hats, rubbing their noses at the cold. “No.”

  “It is we who go to meet them, in their skins,” said Susannah, for the second time in a decade. Susannah was always the kindest to us. “It was the only way to survive, for our First People. Learn to be like the coyote as she hunts voles. Learn to find sweet roots like the brush rabbit and the ground squirrel. Learn to make a home like the woodrat and the magpie. Learn to move on, and move on, and move on, like the black bear. Our side of the world was too ravaged by the poisons that drifted from your Cities, over your Bay and up our Rivers, for there to be any women with the faces of foxes to reach out their womanly hands and hold ours. Under our skins we each must learn the Way of one creature. I the newt. She the deermouse. He the gray fox. He the crow. That is how we can carry on, year by year, and let the Terror Known in that Valley slide away and evaporate. That is how we have learned again of all the mountain food. That is how we have kept the Hole from opening more, the Glacier from melting. We’ve gone to the middle to meet them. Reached out a hand like this—” the midwife reached her hand to Martin as Susannah spoke. “—said I am Susannah. I need you. I need to be part of your family or I will die. I need to be forgiven. Will you forgive me? Will you forgive us? And then you sit down in the dirt, and you wait, maybe for three whole days, until an animal walks by. He is your brother. He is the one you will learn from. You will call him brother. You will not be so needy or so weak as to make him turn from skunk into a man in order to understand each other. Beneath your skin, you make your soul grow black and white fur, you learn to let off that smell, you give him your hand. You are his brother. This is what we are made for. We tell stories and become new creatures. A skunk, he is a skunk, purely.”

  SEVEN

  To walk the Road around Beatrice Mother of Waters is a worship.

  Martin is the one of the two of us who finally found the way in. He learned before me what it is that keeps them, and therefore us, circling, circling, walking that Road close to the bone of the mountain, like homing birds, like if we stopped the sky would fall all blue on our heads. A joyful walking it is. We carry the long-haired rabbits now in boxes with wheels that seven big-horned sheep pull along with us. Each month we gather different wild herbs to keep us strong—yerba santa, sagebrush, yarrow, o’shalla root, manzanita leaves, mountain sorrel. We are learning to wheel just like the stars know how to wheel, lighting fires each night.

  Nineteen years on this Road now it’s been, wheeling, dropping little flycatcher chicks, golden beavers, kit foxes, like buckeyes, along the way. I have learned to relax and give birth like a tree. It took that long to learn to see what it is they see, what it is they know.

  One morning, in mid-June, we were passing my favorite place, a flat high meadow above the trees, just granite, grass, a still lake, snow still on the ground. Martin saw the men moving off to go hunting for deer. They’d never invited him because he had Too Many Thoughts, apparently. That’s what they told him. Loud Thoughts. This time, he looked up and saw them going, and in the dawn before his eyes they had short tails and the shadows of antlers. Not props or decoys, but real, like learning to see all over again, Martin told me. He followed them, quiet as a mole in the underground.

  I think now that they chose to show him their deer tails and their antlers that morning as we woke, stretched, washed our socks in the lake and touched one another’s cheeks over a breakfast of sheep’s milk, pinyon pine nuts and alpine strawberries. I think they knew that he followed, and wanted him to. Nineteen years—now that is a truly long apprenticeship. The moon is again amidst the stars of the Northern Crown, like the first summer we walked their Road.

  The men did not go hunting at all. They went straight up the peak of Beatrice Mother of Waters, climbing on black hooves, even though they stood up like men. Martin hung back, and from a distance it was impossible after a while for him to tell what parts were man, what deer, or if, after all, there were stags among them too—and had there been all along?

  They went straight up and in. Yes, right into that glacier. Big cold tunnels narrow as a man’s shoulders, blue with icicles, creaking and singing their ice songs, my Martin told me. When he told me he wept for what he had seen, for what he had heard, that glacier creaking and moaning all around him the ice-melodies of its old, cloud-made heart. Down under the ice there were tunnels and cavern soft granite. Dripping slick places. The antlers of those men glowed along the way and my Martin knew how to follow, feeling with his hands and knees, lost in a dizzy place where he was nine years old again and following the glowing tails of Seven Hares, his only friend the Handless Fool, the bones of Frances and his Chinook ash-smudged in his backpack. He told me he was that boy for a timeless crawling span, eyes wet with fear and longing, for his father, who he never saw again. It was as if time itself had collapsed around him in that peak, below its glacial breast of snowmelt. Eyes full of the memory of the fire where Frances and his Chinook were burned—that single miracle, that final Salmon, that final Saint.

  The tunnels widened into one cave. Huge, my Martin told me, some great hall or cathedral of stone, neither of which we’d ever seen but had imagined. Bigger than my mother’s Court of Webs. The walls were covered in red and black paintings of animals. A dance of them. Herds, circling the walls, shifting by the light of the candles the hunters lit, the wicks of juniper fuse lanterns. Amidst all the animals, Martin saw the big-wheeled beast of all the old stories, Lyoobov. Trunked, graceful, wide. He cried aloud, but no one looked back at the place where he hid.

  The men were beginning their own dance. Martin said that first it looked like a hunt—arms thrusting and parrying, as if with spears or arrows, then a frenzied closeness of bodies. Stag, man, doe, like some vast and illuminated lovemaking. The air got thick, ghost-filled, shadows of salmon flickering on the ceiling, wolverine and red fox, willow flycatchers, condors, goshawks, fishers and yellow legged frogs. Shadows of martens, bighorn sheep, flickering newts and woodpeckers and spotted owls, grizzly bears. One man played a strange, small bone instrument against his teeth that created a humming and a twanging so strange it shook Martin in his blood. The other men chanted, in harmonies, layered and lilting, these words: olive-sided flycatcher, great gray owl, black backed woodpecker, pika, marten, wolverine, coho, Chinook, yellow-back marmot, Yosemite toad, foxtail pine, incense cedar, California nutmeg, wooly sunflower. And on, and on. My children were in those names, and many more. Ones who were or had been extinct from the world, culled.

  As the chanting and the twanging quieted, the men became all-the-way bucks. They began to lick at the walls, as if for salt. One man remained a man, and he said, as if he wanted Martin to hea
r, though no one so much as glanced toward the place where he crouched: “We are all the Animals Under Our Skins. We are the Wild Folk. It is a matter of dreaming into your cave heart, and calling up the one who is ready to return. Willow flycatcher. Ice. Chinook. Lady of Rivers. It may take a long, long time.”

  I gave birth to a clutch of tiny eggs three days later. Willow flycatchers, they all crooned, touching my belly, looking at their glacier, unsurprised.

  And so it is simple, this act of being forgiven. As simple as giving your hand to a lover, and as terrifying, saying—I leave my heart here, underground, with yours. It was never mine, was it, but yours?

  ALL AT ONCE THE JUNIPER, WITH ANJA IN HER, WAS FINISHED. OUR cups empty. We both sat in the smoke of the fire as it hissed to embers.

  “Do you know what it is to be heartbroken?” said that old dusty woman, folding her dozen arms into a knot. I, with tears all down my face, only laughed.

  “The only other piece I can tell you, the only one I can pull out of all these rings of mine like a gold wedding band from Before, is this. It is said here, whispered by the dead bodies of the fish who rotted and were eaten by bears, who excreted them at my roots and fed me, that Martin found, under his skin, the Chinook he’d always sought. One morning when Anja woke up he was gone, not beside her. Instead of him the streams were thick with spawning Chinook, all red and silver, egg-laying, dying. He was one of them. He didn’t know it would be so easy, and he also didn’t know he would never hold his Anja again. It is said that amidst all those fish was a small man, Frances, on a wooden Chinook, and it is said the grizzlies who had grown up, who had once been the Children of Anja and Martin, they gathered at the banks, growling up some ancient glee. This, their favorite worship, their favorite dance: to eat the salmon all along the banks, expired from their final loving. It is said that Frances and his wooden Chinook were swallowed whole, and maybe Martin too, after those first bright red eggs in a lifetime were laid.

  “And it is said that Anja could not live without her Martin, her last, first and only friend. If you were to look, you’d find a single, impossible buckeye, huge and broad-hipped, growing at the base of the glacier called Beatrice Mother of Waters. Against all odds, all laws, with her roots in ice which some say is really the Milk of the World. Every year though, that buckeye loses her leaves, then drops her glossy nuts, then regrows her leaves and the intoxicating spires of her flowers. When she drops those buckeye nuts in the thousands across the stone, the ice, they roll down to the alpine fields. I could not tell you what is inside each nut, for they cannot be leeched and pounded like normal buckeyes. Some say they are the Fertility of the World, and when you bury them, Lost Things grow there—languages, songs, sage species, passerines. Her roots grow down into a cave, that cave, where People learned again that they are Animals, and must reach out their hands.”

  The old Juniper woman looked tired. She grew sad, and I saw all at once that the smoke had grown because her dry bark was on fire above us, a dark smolder. I jumped up. I yelled out. I began to run for water. The smoke thickened in my eyes, but I saw a last glimpse of her, smiling, serene, sad, dozen-armed, the colors of her berries, fading slowly into the bark.

  The fire was enormous. I, small Poppy, screamed out like the little pikas, the bears, the woodpeckers—Anja’s great, great, great a dozen times grandchildren, I suppose—who’d come to see. In the end only a big pile of embers remained, and the whole Camp, led by Sare, stood behind me, staring.

  It was Lyoobov who made it all right. She rolled up. She put the embers one by one into her mouth, below her gentle trunk, grunting softly. Sare held my hand but did not say, “What have you done?” She seemed melancholy, but not mad.

  We all watched Lyoobov eating the embers of the juniper tree where Anja had tucked her Seven Memories, where all the stories of Before, and Fools, and Wild Folk, had gathered in constellations, hypnotized. They glowed as they went down her throat. She grew hot as a bonfire. Sare’s people smiled at each other from beneath their tall fur hats. I felt sad, remembering that old dusty lady, the sound of her voice, the cups we shared.

  “Do you walk the Road?” I whispered to her, not wanting her to ever let go of me. She nodded.

  “Yes, yes, and underneath I am Ursa, and in our walking we keep the waters clean. Did you ever wonder? We are a giant Water Wheel, a giant Wheel where the animals can again come from the places they hid, and trust that in the world they again have brothers and sisters. They are not alone. We remember their names as precious as our names. Sare. Poppy. Black bear, gray fox. My heart—it’s bear-swallowed, see?”

  I could only nod, and gulp, and grow red in the face.

  “Nobody expected you’d be so little and odd,” Sare whispered to me. “It’s been such a long time, waiting, for the one to thread the needle and stitch the mountains back to sea, make the Road for the Animals and the Waters again. They’ve been so scared, see, thinking you won’t know them, thinking you’ll do what you’ve always done.”

  That afternoon, we sat around the last smolder of the juniper and cooked rabbits for lunch. I put a few final embers and ash, mixed with water, in my coffee­­pot, and let it simmer, then poured everyone a cup. They chuckled, thinking I was mad and pouring them wet, dirty tree pulp. Out came something pure white and steaming. They lifted wooden cups to their lips with shock and drank. Sweet milk, juniper or rosemary or sage spiced, maybe all of those flavors together. None of us could decide. We closed our eyes as we sipped.

  “Some change is coming,” said Sare’s father, who had been smoking the fish when we arrived. He took a long gulp and eyed me, not unkindly.

  “Can I keep this?” Sare murmured to me, pulling the little goldfinch from her many ragged skirts—skins, red nettle fabric, yellow dyed rabbit wool. Inside, the map was different. Now it led in white lines like milk, from that glacier-peak, Beatrice Mother of Waters, to our Bay. “In case I ever wanted to visit.”

  I didn’t even know what to say. I got a big lump in my throat and tried not to cry. “Nobody’s ever been nuts enough to do such a thing, to leave our safety here, but maybe that will change,” she continued, taking my silence for a yes. She did not know that what I wanted to say was—I would stay here forever if you’d be my friend, always. Nobody, no person, has ever looked me in the eye and seen me there. Or maybe she did know that. She had yellow eyes like a bear, and her skin dark as pine bark, and she grinned.

  We left the next morning. I wanted to stay. I wanted to walk their Road dressed in furs, and hold Sare’s hand, and see the buckeye growing at the base of the glacier. I wanted to remain amidst that spare peace. I wanted to see Anja. Lyoobov, though, she told me you can’t always get things just the way you want them. She knew something that she wouldn’t tell me, and so did everyone else. She pushed me along. I left weeping just like a child on her back, which was warm from all those embers. Sare gave me one perfect buckeye in exchange for the goldfinch. I knew it was Anja’s. I carried it like a star fallen to earth in my pocket, wondering what it might grow. My hands were dark-smudged with juniper ash and chapped with cold.

  The air got thick again as we descended, rolling, to that dead Valley, which Anja had wept for in all of her Seven. Dust, cement, scraps of ghost-house and steel. That Valley which had made the People flee, and throw their arms into the ice and the cold peak.

  You will not believe it when I tell you the next part. The last part. Not until you see it with your own eyes, not until you go to the Bay and the Straits and see it coming, all froth and sediment.

  When we reached that big Valley it was night again. Stars made their milky river overhead. I thought of all the stories, those ghosts with starry edges. I climbed down and into the trapdoor of Lyoobov’s belly to sleep, thinking I would sweat all night with the heat. I was looking forward to it, to the feeling of my whole body crying out its salt and with it my sadness at leaving that place pure as the snow peak, where people were odd and fox-swallowed, like me.

  Inside, I fou
nd that Lyoobov was full of bells the color of embers, warm to the touch but not painful. Round and fluted bells, big as my head or bigger. They were not perfect and glossy but cracked, re-soldered, lined, like they had seen the Beginning, the Middle and the End of the World As It Was Before, and had come out again the other side. Cracked, re-stitched. Like all of us still here. I took a bell in each hand and rang them together, gently. The sound broke my heart like it was nothing but a leaf, torn to tatters. The sound ran through me like blue river water, like a mother’s milk, like the first time I saw Lyoobov and put my hand to her skin, like the night when it falls, like the flight of owls, like the memory of my human mother, my Molly, and Sam sitting by me with a fishing pole, not knowing how to speak to me, nor I to him.

  Lyoobov started to make a strange sound, a purring. It rumbled. I heard something enormous crack, heave and sing the way you imagine planets singing up there in the spheres. The ground was moving. I rang more bells, unable to stop myself, intoxicated with the sound, exhilarated that it seemed to be shaking the very earth. The cracking grew louder, and Lyoobov’s purring did too, and then a rushing began, just like water. I felt afraid but couldn’t stop that ringing. I went round and round ringing those bells, one by one.