It’ll have to do, the Crow said.
The Skeleton turned back to his hole, lay down, and drew up his leg bones. Just push those stones back over me, please, he said, and scatter those leaves over them. Gently now.
The Crow did so, and then flew out over the river to his home. He was pretty sure now that no matter how long he lived, he was certain to die; but, you know, he’ll be back. Crows die, but Old Crow never dies. Not until stories aren’t told anymore, and Death itself is dead.
“And that,” One Ear said finally, “is all of that story there is.”
The People had made their Dawn Land camp well above the high-tide line, and lain down there to sleep. When they woke in the morning they saw, standing out on the bay and coming clear as the morning fog lifted from the water, a thing that had not been there when they arrived. It was as though a tall rock or a little island had crept in while they slept. All the People went down to the water to look at it. Rising above its dark bulk were great poles like bare trees, whose branches were hung with ropes and white cloths.
People stood on it.
The Crow clan warriors armed themselves, not knowing what this might mean or who this was, but One Ear said there was no reason to fear. With Dar Oakley on his shoulder he waded into the sea, as though he might see the thing better if he went a few steps closer. And now as they looked other beings appeared, seeming to come up from within: four-legged, brown and black and gray. One of these was prodded and pushed and whipped by the People until it leapt off and into the water. More beings were pushed off, forced to jump; they went down flailing and under the water, raising white foam; then they surfaced, snorting, and soon were swimming toward shore.
The People ran back as the first one of these beasts to reach shallow water found footing and came up onto the beach. They had never seen such ones before.
But Dar Oakley had. One of these had walked beside the first two People he had ever seen, in a land beyond that sea, two thousand years before. It was a Horse.
CHAPTER TWO
Debra couldn’t have known, when we parted, how difficult it would soon become for me to do even the simplest things, keep her grave from being overgrown with invasive vegetation or her stone from being thrown down or stolen. I’ve visited, when my aide Barbara can drive me there; I bring wildflowers and look down at the earth that lies atop her, and caught in that human paradox of death that she never acknowledged, I speak to her and listen for her voice. I don’t hear it. It’s Barbara, who knew her only at the end, who weeps.
Barbara’s been with me now for two years, perhaps three—my sense of time’s passing grows uncertain the more time that passes. It was Debra who first hired her, when we still lived in the other place down in town, when Debra was getting worse quickly. Barbara was amazingly strong then; she could carry Debra up and down the stairs in her long arms, out to the porch in good weather. Twice a week now she cleans and prepares meals that I can warm up, does things around the house that probably I could do myself well enough but likely would not do if left alone. Strong still, even with the diabetes. I order firewood from locals; she chops it into stove lengths. She’s ashamed to go to doctors for herself, but she takes me, in her practically imaginary pickup, driver’s door tied closed with a belt, the road visible through the rotting floorboards. I can remember when cars and trucks had to be inspected by the state and proved to be roadworthy before they could be driven.
Today she’s brought her baby. She used to be able to find someone to care for him while she works. More and more often now the child comes with her.
I had hardly known Barbara was pregnant. I saw her twice a week, but she’d taken to dressing in wide flowered dresses without belts over her jeans, what my mother used to call muumuus, and Barbara was always fat. She was over forty when this child was conceived (where the others are that she says she’s had, what they do, I don’t know). I wondered if that was part of the reason for the child’s problems. But she said no, it was drink: drink before and drink during, almost up to the day he was born. And yes, I can see the thin lips, the lack of a philtrum between mouth and nose that makes him look like a brownie or pixie in an old picture: the dark skin and almond-black eyes, too: and so weirdly small and weak. The father of the child is white, and gone.
It was her fault, she says, that he is what he is, will never grow right or learn to think or speak like other people. Worst is, she knew when she was drinking what the effect could be; there are other children like hers among the Native American population still living hereabouts. Barbara was mostly raised in the lands around the lake, in one house or another, but hasn’t had much to do with the tribe, and doesn’t know who among them she belongs with. What little she has told me of the stories and beliefs that they retain seems to me rather haphazard, half pretend. I don’t know where she goes to when she leaves my place.
There’s one thing that might link her to the long past of her people, or maybe it’s just the way her soul is made. She is very tender toward the dead: solicitous, even. It’s not something she talks about; it took me a long time to even take notice of it. When she recalls the things they said alive, it’s as though she is spoken to now. She knows she’ll be among them, and she doesn’t see it as a long or dreadful passage—it may not seem a passage at all to her but a simple turnabout, like changing places in a round dance.
Since her pregnancy her diabetes has worsened, and her feet are twisted and lack feeling. We are now about equally fit, which doesn’t add up even to one fit person. More often than not now, when it’s time for her to go, I tell her she should sleep over in the spare room or on the screened porch, save tires, they won’t last even as long as I will. For a time then I lie in bed and listen to the child’s eerie, inconsolable wails. I get up and make my way with care (a fall would be the end of me) down to the shed, light the lamp, pick up my pen.
The pale-white People who came ashore from the ships anchored off the Dawn Land wore coats and hats and boots; from their faces hair sprouted sparsely or thickly. Most were smaller than the Crow clan traders watching them from the beach, and several were fatter; Dar Oakley couldn’t say if they were uglier, but certainly they resembled the Small Ugly People. He wondered if the Small Ugly People, who had come daywise over broad lands chasing Kits and the Most Precious Thing, had begun in the same country as these: were their relatives, maybe, who had come by the other way and traveled darkwise over the sea as Dar Oakley had done. The Crow clan watched as they tied the hind legs of their beasts together with straps so short that they kept them from running away—how simple and clever that was.
Somehow these People had known that this was the season for trading, and they brought things that most of the Crow clan had never seen, though other clans who lived along the Dawn Land shore were already using them: iron knives and hatchets of great power, fabrics lighter and warmer than Deer’s skins, and—most wonderful of all—beads of green and blue, transparent as sky, obviously imbued with spirit life: the newcomers gave them freely, laughing as though they were nothing. In exchange they took all the Beaver pelts, and by signs made it clear they wanted more.
When business was done—it took a few days—the traders invited anyone who wanted to come onto the ship that had brought them (see? That, yes, that), and One Ear was among the four or five who accepted. Dar Oakley watched him wade out into the surf and clamber aboard the ship’s boat, and the oars drop, and he remembered the boat of the Saints going into the unknown.