Beneath Ceaseless Skies #124

by Gemma Files

  At first, I thought about going home to my father and my sisters. But I’d gotten shy of that smell, and I didn’t know what I would say. I couldn’t sit by the fire and mend holes, now. I would only think of him and how in the daylight his eyes looked so completely different from human eyes. How they held another universe, black and gold. How his head swung back and forth when he walked, low to the ground, as if he were reading the brush and rabbit droppings. The twitches under granite and dust, where the earth was breathing. If I went to them, I would only think of the bear trails he took me on, sitting on his back through the quiet and ruthless wilderness of butterscotch-smelling pines.

  I saw, from that broad back where I felt safe from all the world, a mother bear leave behind a cub whose back legs had been smashed by a fallen Jeffrey pine. He squealed for her like a piglet. He tried to walk. She moaned and howled for him to come along. She paced and nudged. Soon enough she knew he couldn’t move. She knew she had to leave. I wanted to go to the little cub and take that broken body up in my arms, but he wouldn’t let me down. He batted me back with his teeth. He did it himself, the man in him did it, felt obliged. It only took one slice of claw to slit the cub’s throat. I covered the body in orange poppies.

  I saw my bear-husband sniff out newborn elk calves in the grasses and break their necks. He brought them home to share. I saw him dig young pocket gophers out of their tunnels and swallow them. Sometimes he plundered their stores of onion-grass bulbs too. He brought these to me in his teeth. I made thin soups with alpine water, and he drank them in the dark through human teeth. At first I hated him for those kills; even the cub whose suffering he ended. I hated him for the broken bodies of soft calves, downy and long-lashed. I cried in my room. I cried for my sisters, my mother, my father before the gold took his heart away. I cried for our faraway farm, which seemed from that vantage so peaceful to me. I could only remember it in two images: a sky blue and crisp and comforting as a sheet drying on a line; my mother’s brown eyes full with a gentleness that cushioned me.

  But there was a day I saw men—men like my father or the clerk at the grocer’s, the man at the post office desk, the one who published the newspaper or delivered the sacks of oat grains; normal sorts of men who used to tousle my hair and bring me carved horses and dolls and other trinkets because the sight of a child moved them so—I saw them chase down a group of Indian men. There was talk of cowhides stolen. The Indians had one gun between six of them. The men who all looked like my father killed the Indian men. They cut off scalps. They all raped the Indian woman who was with the men. One by one. Scalps piled on the ground. Laughing and talking the whole time as she screamed.

  These men weren’t so far from our den. I watched from a warm granite rock, and I couldn’t move. I didn’t know that this was truly how the world worked. My bear husband was watching from the trees, too. He stalked them all down. He was a strong bear and a ruthless man that day. He left their bodies in the dirt, and all he said that night, in the dark, was “they can’t haunt a man who is also a bear.”

  I began to understand a few things then. Evil. Balance. Mercy. Necessity. A clean heart.

  * * *

  So when he left me that morning, after I ruined everything and peeked at him in the night by the light of a tallow candle, I didn’t know what else to do but follow. I knew places to find berries and sweet tubers, because he had shown me. I avoided human settlements. I didn’t trust them. I wondered what they would make of a young woman alone. How many would really want to help me; how many would know exactly how to use me. I followed the San Joaquin River, sneaking in the cover of alders, wild grape vines and cottonwoods.

  It was on the bank one evening, as I washed, that I met the Lady of Gold. I couldn’t help myself, faced with a creature part-sandhill crane and part-woman, tipped everywhere in gold. I had to ask.

  “Can you help me, ma’am?”

  “And a fine evening to you too, little one,” she said, and her neck quivered and her eyes gleamed. “You people never do know how to ask for anything politely. But at least you’ve stopped to ask, rather than try and knock me down into the mud and rifle through my skirts for gold.” Her voice felt sharp in my ears.

  “It’s just that I’ve lost something important, and I don’t know where it’s gone.”

  “As a rule one generally doesn’t, with lost things. Hence the definition, the state of lost-ness.” Her beak clicked. The place around her neck where feathers became flesh glowed in the sun. “Are you hungry? I was just about to fish up some dinner. Hard to talk over serious matters on an empty stomach.” She walked toward the river and bent her bird’s head, breasts moving heavily under a strange, mineral-sharp dress.

  * * *

  X. Lady of Gold

  I speared a spawning rainbow trout. I had the girl make a fire for me. I liked to play with her a bit, see what she was made of, treat this whole thing like a fairytale with tasks and old persnickety crones and blocks thrown up in the roads to make things more interesting. She made us a stingy fire, the product no doubt of a childhood in a mining town with a broken-down dad. I criticized it all I could, and snapped my beak at her, and caught her staring at my shadow. It moves independently of me. Sometimes it takes on the silhouettes of other creatures than the body it should be casting, because things are more fluid than you would think, particularly in the slow realm of minerals, waterways, tectonic pressure. At the moment, it was a bear. Her bear. It was playing with her.

  I finished eating my fish slowly, before mentioning him. I washed the oil off my hands in the river. I reached into the silt bank and sifted out handfuls of gold pieces. They come up to me when I call for them. Slivers rained down between my fingers.

  “Listen, I know everything about you,” I told her. “I know the pockmarks on your father’s hands and the faces of the Maidu men he’s killed.” I watched her sweet face go red. “Oh, don’t look so innocent and hurt, girl. It’s no surprise. He isn’t special. It’s what happens to the men of your kind when they come to a place like this where something they call ‘money’ tumbles down the riverbeds. I know your husband is a bear. I know his curse. I know the scars on his shoulders between that huge ridge of a back.” I watched her face turn redder. “I know what his fingers tasted like in my rivers, when he was only a man. I know you’ve ruined the whole thing, silly pet, all because you were messy with a candle, and now you’re after him because you can’t think what else to do. You’re brave enough, I’ll give you that.”

  She looked a little dazed, uneasy, as if my appearance wasn’t enough to begin with. But a good meal after weeks on roots will steel you, and she smiled, and then she laughed, and then continued to pick meat off the trout bones.

  “I’ve been held on the back of a bear,” she said. “I can’t go back now. I want to be one too. I’d rather be one than a person.”

  “A bear?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is peaceful, a bear’s world. It is. But there’s no coming back again. It’s not what you think. I can say that for certain.”

  I gave her three things out of the river, then. Sluiced them up in my woman’s hands. A hard little apple, all of gold. A golden carding comb, for smoothing wool. A golden drop-spindle.

  “An apple for changing, a carding comb for straightening and path-making, a spindle for twisting and for strengthening.” I said. “Such things are necessary, when dealing with trolls.”

  I did it because I liked to watch a good story unfold. We are all weak to the appeal of a curse. I couldn’t resist playing my part, pointing her in the right direction, filling up her gunnysack with talismans and charms. She put them in her bag, and they weighed it down to the ground like rocks.

  “Don’t sell those. Your bear, he’s in the place East of the Sun, West of the Moon. A very ambiguous direction, I know. You’ll have to ask the winds about it. I deal in mineral and stone, the earthen leaden things and the currents that carry fish through streams.”

  She couldn’t sit stil
l after that. I caught and cooked her another fish, wrapped it up in dock leaves, slipped it into her pack now heavy with gold. She set off again, following the river. She hardly looked back to thank me.

  * * *

  XI. Girl

  I walked away from her. I will never forget the way the sun caught in her neck feathers, right where she went from woman to bird. My back ached within minutes from the gold. I ate the fish the next morning, and was hungry. I’d forgotten how to carry hunger in me, and it lashed around like a caught bird, all feathers and beak.

  Whenever I felt a breeze touch my back, my check, ripple my hair, I talked to it. Hunger will do his. Desperation and the love of a bear will do this. It’s alive, the world. I never did know it until I left my home, that clapboard town.

  I asked the breezes about the North Wind, where he was. That I needed his help. That a crane-lady told me to look for him. I walked on and on, talking to the little gusts off the river, the unfurling breezes that leapt from the cottonwood leaves, that had touched the necks of coyotes in the thickets, goldfinches and marsh wrens in the tule grass.

  Near towns, I slipped along in the vegetation on the river bank. I smudged my face in dirt and tried to look as orphaned and uninteresting as possible, then walked barefoot past the general stores and feedshops, the saloons and the houses. I didn’t trust men when women were scarce; not anymore.

  I met a young Indian woman digging in a sedge bed, making a basket. She had strong smooth hands. We were startled by each other, then calmed to see that we were both female. We didn’t know how to speak to each other, but I sat in her company for a whole afternoon; I hadn’t sat down next to a woman and felt that certain strong warmth in years. Since my mother. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it.

  I saw riverbanks carved out and raw from the mining hoses. Tree roots exposed. I saw the levees built recently to keep the towns from flood. I saw the sluices and channels diverting streams for drinking water. I saw three men shoot an Indian boy in the head when they encountered him at the riverbank. They left him where he fell. I ran and ran, the bag of gold bruising my back.

  When the Wind finally did come, I was so hungry I walked only a couple miles each day, then lay in the shade and slept.

  “So you’re the little thing I’ve heard whining my name like a wasp to the breezes?” a voice said behind me, smooth as a bell wrapped in silk. “I wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known you were so small. Fit a lot of desperation into that little skeleton of yours, don’t you?” He looked at first just like a man to me, in a blue velvet coat, as traveling musicians wear. There was a harmonica attached to a cord around his neck. But it was hard to keep my eyes on him, as though the edges of his body weren’t clear, as though they leaked out breezes every direction. His face had the look of a skinny coyote, almost handsome, long.

  “It was the Lady of Gold who told me you would help,” I said, trying to look him in the eye, but unable to find its center. “Clearly she had a different wind in mind. I’ll walk, sir. I’ve been walking, I’ll keep walking, I’ll find my way eventually.”

  “Isn’t that what you all say to yourselves?” His voice seemed now to come from the harmonica, three-toned. “Let me just take a good look at you, see what I can do.” He leered at me like an old creep. He didn’t touch me with hands, but a breeze did; picked up my skirts, swept under my shirt, stroked my hair.

  * * *

  XII. Wind

  I was only toying, playing with her. That’s all there is, in the end: playing, against the sea, down along the coast; playing the branches of cypress trees like a harmonica, playing with the warm inland airs until they bend under me or slip up over me.

  “You feel well enough against my breezes,” I told her. “You smell about as bad as a young raccoon but your hair rustles like a varied thrush singing in the summer. Even I envy her that sound, and I’m the one who makes all the whistles and rustles and the moving of tree limbs. I’ll do it, I’ll buffet you over the sea.”

  She stared at me with that look of a girl cornered, about to be ravished. I wanted to oblige her fears, really I did, but, well, a Wind must keep up a thin veneer of decency, after all.

  “East of the Sun and West of the Moon, that’s where he is. It’s a very clever name. That’s just like them, to try at poetry and come up with something so completely useless. They’re just playing, girl—if you really tried to get there I think you’d find yourself fallen straight into a crack in the earth, or on the ocean floor where the plates spread and magma leaks out.”

  “The plates, sir? How do you know I’m going there? Who are they?”

  “Eager questions!” She was as fresh as any schoolgirl; she made the breezes in all my veins rise up. “I pulled the name right out of your mouth, between your teeth and off your tongue, just now. It’s sitting with you like a tattoo, blue across your hands. Anyone who’s actually looking would see it. Let’s get moving, I can tell you about tectonic plates on the way. You’re going to come with me the way winds travel, not on foot like this, scraping through the alder trunks and the wild grapes, getting ourselves muddy. We’ve got to dye you first, so you match the sky, so she doesn’t notice you’re just a human girl with soft lungs and squash them like two pumpkins.” And without asking, I grabbed her in my arms that are also wide as skies, pressed her closer to me than was entirely necessary, and blew upward.

  * * *

  XIII. Girl

  When he carried me, I was weightless. I didn’t want to be held like a baby or a sack of ryeberries but there isn’t really another way when travelling with the wind. It has to hold you, buffet you. His arms felt like air currents buoying, not like arms, even though that’s what they looked like. They didn’t hold or clasp, just lofted me. The bag of gold clanked at my shoulders. We went up toward clouds that were wisps and strands. They looked thin from far away, but as we got closer, I saw that they were beams and footpaths, sturdy and silver. They made a vast landscape that was open and flat as a prairie. It shifted under our feet but never gave way.

  Two women were there, although I don’t know what to call anyone now, but they looked like women to me, older than anyone I’d ever seen; they were so wrinkled that the lines, stretched out, could have woven a blanket. Their skin was entirely blue, their hair black despite their age. They sat by a wide Vat and stirred it with two wooden ladles. Except at the mouth, they were identical—one had teeth, one didn’t. Up close, I could see that the wrinkles weren’t blue but skin-colored. Their bodies made blue and cream maps. I wondered what they led to.

  “Home,” the two women called Chi Nu said at once.

  “What?” I said.

  “Home. They lead home.” Their voices were gummy and round.

  “Dunk her in the Indigo, will you?” said the Wind who carried me, impatiently. They laughed. It was a terrible sound, crows and gunpowder and bones breaking.

  ”We’ll ruin her pretty soft skin! Take away that bloom of youth! Those days of frantic love. I used to skin my knees and blister my feet to get across the Big Star River to my lover, once a season when the light was right and open. Wasn’t allowed otherwise. The bans of the universe. I always made it rain for days after. Wove squares for this quilt that will never end, this net to hoist him up here with me.” They both gestured toward the cloud-plain around us. Up close, I could see it was like a great net, regular, geometric, streaked blue.

  “It’s all very said, my loves,” said the North Wind, harmonica-voiced. “I know this, the woes of thwarted desire.” He threw me a leering look, then winked. “But madams, I need to get this girl over the sea without bursting her rosebud lungs, so if you don’t mind terribly, I’ll come up for a chat some other evening.”

  “Oh yes, of course you’ll remember me, you hideous cold wind,” Chi Nu said, clasping together four hands in a blue tangle, one’s left to the other’s right. “You’re the only one who does. Everyone else down there has forgotten. Brought me here in their damp little dreams and cramped ship-bowe
ls over the Pacific, saw gold in the rivers and let me fall out of their hearts like bean husks. But why should I bother with her?” They paused, leaned in closer. “Why, by the way, are you?”

  “I’ve nothing of the resentment you forgotten daemons possess, brought here and abandoned. I was always here. I’m only carrying her because it’s not something I’m often asked to do, hoist a human girl over the sea in my arms. I like to do a new thing, to carry something so much heavier than birds, to break the rules of sky and ground. And, let me tell you, is she a hot bundle of flesh to hang on to—gets my cold limbs going, truly.” Chi Nu cackled and licked their lips at me.

  “But you might be interested,” the Wind continued, “that she is going to where the trolls live, because they turned a man into a bear and she is his lover.”

  “Oh, the poor thing, I know all about thwarted love.” They sighed, one sound. “I would have scorched my bare feet on all the stars for him, my cowherd, my Niu Lang. Come close, my dear, I’ll have you blue and ready to follow his tracks in no time.”

  They grabbed me with their blue hands. It felt like being held by spiders. Their bones were thin and light through their skin but strong as steel rope. They wrapped me up in those weaving hands, suddenly big enough to twine me like a moth in a web. Their Indigo Vat smelled foul with a tinge of sweet. A blue crust, around the edges. They plunged me under with their four spider’s hands. They kept me there until I knew my lungs would burst, that this was murder, and then longer. Until it had seeped through my skin, all the way to my lungs. When they pulled me out, I was almost unconscious, with rot and leaves in my teeth and hair. I looked, and found myself entirely blue. Even my toenails.

  “Well now, you look fine!” said the Wind in my ear, and his breath was cold. “You look like my kind of woman, blue as my vast home, my queen, my slave-mistress. I’ll pay you, ladies, I’ll pay you kindly for your service, in rare laces from the snows of the Sierras, in baskets made from Klamath River fog. I’ll sweep them up here for you, one of these days.”