Does the older woman understand the question? Her face burns. As she sinks dizzily onto the earth beside her daughter, she feels compelled to give her the name that brought her back. Other Side of the Earth, she says, teeth tapping. Hotter, hotter, first confused and then dreadfully clear when she sees, opening before her, the western door.
She must act at once if her daughter is to survive her.
The clouds are pure stratus. The sky is a raft of milk. The coyote gray dog sits patiently near.
Blue Prairie Woman, sick to death and knowing it, reaches swiftly to her left and sets her grip without looking on the nape of the dog’s neck. First time she has touched the dog since it drank from her the milk of sorrow. She drags the dog to her. Soft bones, soft muzzle then. Tough old thing now. Blue Prairie Woman holds the dog close underneath one arm and then, knife in hand, draws her clever blade across the beating throat. Slices its stiff moan in half and collects in the berry-filled makak its gurgle of dark blood. Blue Prairie Woman then stretches the dog out, skins and guts it, cuts off her head, and lowers the chopped carcass into a deep birch-bark container. She heats stones red-hot, lowers them into the water with a pair of antlers. Tending the fire carefully, weakening, she boils the dog.
When it is done, the meat softened, shredding off the bones, she tips the gray meat, brown meat, onto a birch tray. Steam rises, the fragrance of the meat is faintly sweet. Quietly, she gestures to her daughter. Prods the cracked oval pads off the cooked paws. Offers them to her.
IT TAKES SIXTEEN hours for Blue Prairie Woman to contract the fever and only eight more to die of it. All that time, as she is dying, she sings. Her song is wistful, peculiar, soft, questing. It doesn’t sound like a death song; rather, there is in it the tenderness and intimacy of seduction addressed to the blue distance.
Never exposed, healthy, defenseless, her body is an eager receptacle for the virus. She seizes, her skin goes purple, she vomits a brilliant flash of blood. Passionate, surprised, she dies when her chest fills, kicking and drumming her heels on the hollow earth. At last she is still, gazing west. That is the direction her daughter sits facing all the next day and the next. She sings her mother’s song, holding her mother’s hand in one hand and seriously, absently, eating the dog with the other hand — until in that spinning cloud light and across rich level earth, pale reddish curious creatures, slashed with white on the chest and face, deep-eyed, curious, pause in passing.
The antelope emerge from the band of the light at the world’s edge.
A small herd of sixteen or twenty flickers into view. Fascinated, they poise to watch the girl’s hand in its white sleeve dip. Feed herself. Dip. They step closer. Hooves of polished metal. Ears like tuning forks. Black prongs and velvet. They watch Matilda. Blue Prairie Woman’s daughter. Other Side of the Earth. Nameless.
She is ten years old, tough from chasing poultry and lean from the fever. She doesn’t know what they are, the beings, dreamlike, summoned by her mother’s song, her dipping hand. They come closer, closer, grazing near, folding their legs under them to warily rest. The young nurse from their mothers on the run or stare at the girl in fascinated hilarity, springing off if she catches their wheeling flirtation. In the morning when she wakens, still holding her mother’s hand, they are standing all around. They bend to her, huff in excitement when she rises and stands among them quiet and wondering. Easy with their dainty precision, she wanders along in their company. Always on the move. At night she makes herself a nest of willow. Sleeps there. Moves on. Eats bird’s eggs. A snared rabbit. Roots. She remembers fire and cooks a handful of grouse chicks. The herd flows in steps and spurting gallops deeper into the west. When they walk, she walks, following, dried berries in a sack made of her dress. When they run, she runs with them. Naked, graceful, the blue beads around her neck.
Chapter 2. Wiindigoo Story
The Cracker Tin
Scranton Roy touched the dirty brown hair of his beautiful son, Augustus, and said, “I am tired of my numb heart.”
Augustus looked down at his feet, knowing he would hear more.
“I thought when I loved your mother my heart had come to life, but then her death killed my heart again. Even watching you grow hasn’t brought it back. I have been reading the ancients.”
Augustus looked at the pile of books. He was twenty-three years old and had read most of them with his father, who admired the Greek philosophers. Anaximander viewed time as a judge, and Scranton Roy had meditated on this concept until its truth came clear. Time had judged and sentenced him in the form of an unforgettable word.
“As a young man I committed a crime in the fever of war. Although I have tried to absolve myself repeatedly — I even took up self-scourging for a year — I still see the old woman’s face and hear her say that word. The word wakes me up at night. It is written in my brain. As you know, it is carved into my arm.”
Augustus looked at his father’s arm, the white scars, the letters carefully blocked and scored. The word was a long word. The word reached up past his elbow.
“I still see the children who fell,” his father continued. “Especially them. I still taste on my tongue the smoke, powder, blood, and burning fat.”
Augustus had grown up in the shadow of his father’s ever more complex grief, and although he had few other adults to compare him with, he did think his father was lost. His father wandered in the dark. But Augustus himself grew up in wind and sun. He loved perpetual change and was glad it was the law of the universe. Heracleitus had also declared there to be a balance of opposites, and so Augustus was the balance of his wracked father, a happy child who ran boundless, hunting prairie chickens, stealing the blue eggs of robins, caring for descendants of the agile guinea hens his mother had laughed at. He walked overland to attend the same school, set in the center of the township, where his mother had taught.
At home, he read with his father, and both agreed with Pythagoras that the essence of things was to be found in numbers. At school, Augustus’s best subject was math. He collected numbers until they made him dizzy. He counted everything around him and totaled it up with other countings and subtracted or divided those countings just to have the numbers in his head. Each number had a color and some had a sound or taste.
“We are going to search out the people I wronged and give them the cracker tin,” said Scranton Roy.
Augustus knew the tin well. Once very light, it had contained Christmas crackers sealed against moisture. Now the cracker tin was very heavy and contained gold and silver money. Exactly $438.13. A bright purple number. A noble number, scraped of sacrifice. When Scranton Roy felt the sad heat come on him, he put a bit of money in the tin and it helped to ease his burden. When Augustus Roy felt slightly morose, he took some money from the tin and it helped to ease his burden. It was hard caring for a father who raved of smoke and blood and carved into his arm the letters of a word he did not understand.
I hope I don’t have to carry the cracker tin, thought Augustus. But of course he did, and it made his back sore, or his arms when he hefted it before him. Sometimes he made a pillow of his shirt and carried the tin on his head. As they walked on and on, Augustus was increasingly grateful that he had lightened the tin and he smiled to think how he’d spent the money — on home-brew fire. As he walked toward the place where his father had killed the woman and perhaps the children, too, Augustus counted the clouds until they blended together and there was just one gloomy sky. He counted trees until they turned into a crowded woodland. Where were they going? They were going backward, out of the good simple world he’d lived in so far and into complex rolling prairie. Every so often the land dipped and the trees stood thick. Sometimes they towered in lightless stands.