That pipe you smoked from, in your Mbaba's room…
Yes. For a long time after it was learned to smoke it, hundreds of years ago, the pipes' mouths were made in the shape of St. Bea's head, her mouth open to receive it.
Her bread hissed and bubbled as In a Corner put match to it, hollowing his cheeks around the old chewed stem. The first rosy cloud billowed up. He gave the pipe to Once a Day, and she inhaled, and a thin rosy mist came out from her lungs, through her nose and mouth, and I shuddered with a sudden wonder at this odd consumption - odd though I'd seen it and done it almost all my life.
The first stars were winking on in the near blue sky. A breeze made the bowl of the pipe glow, and snatched away the smoke. One star, perhaps one we could see from here, was its home. But no matter how high the wind took it, it would never go there again.
Next morning was heavy with clouds, and the rafts came up the river from the south. All day the breadmen worked, pulling away the vast clusters from the strangled stems with their hooked sticks, and lifting them (on this cloudy day they weren't lighter than air, but almost as light) and maneuvering them to the rafts with shouts and directions, and tying them to the rafts with hooks and ropes through their skins. Once a Day and I weren't much help, but we ran and pushed and pulled with the rest as hard as we could, for they had all to be taken today, or they would collapse like tents and be unmovable.
When the last of them had been floated away to where Buckle cord burned maple for charcoal to dry it, and where it would be shattered then and sifted and packed to haul, and the whole glade stood naked, only the blue-green stems left, and the men from the rafts were left to cover those stems with sacks for the winter, and others were winding plastic and cloths around the planter to keep the mother-tree safe from snow, well, then the harvest was over; and Once a Day and I had helped; and we rode back on the next-to-last raft.
Exhausted, she laid her head in my lap, and we wrapped ourselves in a shaggy cloak someone gave us, for the wind was cold; blown leaves floated on the river's gray surface.
"Winter's coming," I said.
"No," she said sleepily. "No, it's not."
"It has to sometime."
"No."
"Well, if winter…"
"Hush," she said.
Eighth Facet
In a winter of rain, long after this, after my year with a saint, after my letter from Dr. Boots, a winter that I spent alone and often asleep, there was a trick I learned my mind can do: sometimes, halfway between waking and sleep, it would grow young again. How can I explain it? As though, for a brief moment, I would be a younger self; or as though a whole moment of my past would be given back to me, complete, no part of it missing, and so suddenly that often I wouldn't know which moment it was; before I could learn, I would fall asleep, or the effort of concentration would bring me awake and it would be lost.
Well, this was interesting, and I had time to practice it - in fact I had nothing else at all to do - and there were times I could do it for some time together, all my being reliving a past time, except for a small watching eye to marvel at it. I thought I was at the end of my life in that endless winter, and it seemed right that I should be allowed to review, in bits and glances, my short life, which seemed so long to me: like Mbaba going through the contents of her carved chests. I had no choice about when I find myself; I could be two or ten. I could be on the roofs in summer, my head thumping with heat under a hat and a veil, tending the bees with my mother. I could be deep in, in winter, in the stuffy warmth, learning Rings with Once a Day, my head full of that winter's notions, with that winter's flavor: because each season of each year - could it be each day, each morning and evening? - has its own taste, distinct, entirely forgotten, till you taste it again.
I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told.
And once I closed my eyes, and waited, and didn't move, and found myself in my tenth spring, sitting with the others at Buckle cord's door, looking out at the flowering trees that littered with petals the way that led to the south, and watching come up that way, stark in their black clothes against the pink and white spring, a band of travelers, come to trade for bread. Around me the translucence of Buckle cord's walls pale yellow in the sun; beneath me the dirt of the floor, laid with bright rugs; beside me in their figured cloaks Water cord's traders and the pale sacks of bread. And next to me, just then slipping her hand from mine, Once a Day. I came awake in winter, wide-eyed, cold, my heart beating; and listened to the cold rain falling.
For many weeks that spring Once a Day had talked of nothing but the traders of Dr. Boots's List, who were to come; when she wasn't talking of them she was silent. The traders of the List came every year in the spring, they were almost our only visitors, and their arrival was a great event, but to Whisper cord they were more than visitors. "They're my cousins," Once a Day said, a word I didn't understand; when I asked her what she meant, she couldn't explain, except that it tied her closely to them.
"How can that be?" I said. "They aren't truthful speakers. They aren't your cord. You don't even know their names. Not one name."
"My cord is Olive's," she said, "and Olive was of the League. So is Dr. Boots's List. That's what 'cousins' means."
"The League is over and dead," I said. "Olive said so."
"Don't talk," she said, "about what you don't know."
There were a dozen or more coming up the way now, mostly men in wide low black hats ringed around with flowers. As they came closer we could hear their singing: or perhaps not singing, for there weren't any words, and no tune either, only a low humming in different tones and volumes, a burr here and a rumble there, changing as one left off or another started, each with his own sound. The old men and women of Water cord went down the hill to meet them, and the younger after to take their burdens, intricately tied packs and cases and bundles. There were greetings all around, quiet and formal, and the black-hatted men and tall women came up through Buckle cord's door into the pretty rooms they make near the outside, where I waited with Once a Day and the others come out to greet them. The bells they wore jingled and they talked in odd burring accents and old blurred speech, and their bundles were laid aside till fruit sodas and winter nuts were brought. Once a Day wouldn't take her eyes from them, though if one in his survey of those sitting there happened to look at her she looked away; I hadn't before seen the smile she smiled at them.
From a distance, black and bearded, they had seemed severe, but when they were close it was otherwise; their long straight robes were minutely decorated in gold and colors, and caught in complex folds for show, and their bells were tied on at surprising places that made you laugh when they rang. In their jingling, slow-smiling midst, you felt them to be people of immense ease and comfort, with grace and energy enough to sit forever. They reminded me of Painted Red telling about St. Olive's cat.
Bread from the fall gathering was handed around by the Water cord traders to the visitors, whose bells and bracelets sounded as they passed the glittering handful of flakes from hand to hand to be felt and sniffed and looked at. Old In a Corner threw handfuls of it into the great brass mouth of St. Bea - almost as large as life - that topped a huge amber glass pipe, moved here to the outside on a tripod the day before in expectation of guests. It was hundreds of years old, and one of Buckle cord's chief treasures, even though it had no story about it except how old it was, so Palm cord wouldn't have thought it such a wonder.