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To that rape her third child chose to come to be conceived. That was the hinge of the door of Hwette’s life.

People would talk, seeing Shamsha pregnant and Geseta gone off to Madidinou; they might well speculate that she had not consented to this pregnancy. Shamsha was chivalrous. Knowing Geseta was unable to endure real shame, she did not tell even her mother that she had been raped. She longed to, but felt that even so much solidarity would give her unfair advantage over Geseta, who knowing her strength would founder in his weakness. But it may have been that her strength and his weakness grew in that silence.

To her the rape was one thing and the conception another thing; they were facts of so different a nature that she could connect them only artificially, not in feeling. Justification was irrelevant. What she felt was that this child had chosen to come into her in pain.

The birth was a deliverance, setting free Shamsha’s own soul. At Hwette’s birth and all through her babyhood, Shamsha knew she had given this child more than she had given the others. They were themselves, but this one was herself given away, set free, not known. She called the baby Sehoy, a common name, but to her holding in it the flight of the swallows at dusk over the River, quick, many, scarcely to be seen, voices veering and disappearing, all but disembodied by swiftness and twilight.

Geseta came back to Telina and fell in love with various women. These days, now that he and Shamsha were getting old, he liked to come around Hardcinder House and indulge in nostalgia, always telling that same old love story though it had become a lie. She did not care if he came or not. Where his passion had touched her was a burn scar, thick and nerveless, an ugly thing but not crippling. Her only feeling towards Geseta was an intense distrust of him with their daughter. Once when Sehoy was four or five Shamsha had found him in the Narrow Gardens with her, picking her honeysuckle flowers to suck. Shamsha had come between him and the child and said to him, “Never touch her.” Something terrible in her face or voice made him obey. He sometimes made feeble efforts to disobey, to charm and win over the child or to win sympathy for himself in the family, complaining how his heart ached for his daughter and how she was deprived of the simple warmth of his fatherhood by the mother’s possessive jealousy. Shamsha ignored all that. But if he made any bodily move towards the child, Shamsha was between them, like a heavy, silent dog with its head and tail down, watching him sidelong.

When Sehoy was grown and had given herself the name Hwette, her begetter laid claim to a superior understanding of her heart and mind, an intuitive link with her. He argued with her against her choice of a name; to call oneself Scrub Oak was self-denigrating, too humble, too scrubby, he said. She should call herself Isitut, Wild Iris: something delicate, beautiful, like herself. When Kamedan began to come to the house, courting Hwette, Geseta talked against him all the time. His jealousy and envy of the young man was so apparent that Shamsha felt a queasy pity for him. He insisted that he was thinking only of Hwette’s wellbeing. “Kamedan will destroy her,” he said.

“You should know,” Shamsha said.

“I do know. I know his type. He’ll love only one woman all his life. He’ll demand everything of her—that she be the world to him, and he the world to her. He’ll smother her with love, he’ll tie her down with giving. He’ll be jealous of anyone or anything that touches her, so he’ll keep touching her all over, all the time. She’s a wildflower, she can’t thrive indoors. She’s a hummingbird, like me—she needs to move, move. She’ll die if she can’t go from flower to flower. I used to resent your not letting me touch her, but I see now that you were right; you knew we had to keep hands off her. She’s very fragile. She can’t take pressures on her, claims on her. Her strength is in her freedom.”

Disgust with his assertion of complicity and distaste for his sentimentality did not quite keep Shamsha from agreeing with him; but she shrugged and said nothing. Hwette and Kamedan were going to marry. And in her beauty of sexual delight, fulfilled desire, pregnancy, motherhood, Hwette was radiant, like a hummingbird indeed, not for fragility but for intensity of life.

Yet that vitality flashed out less and less often. Scarcely at all for how long now, a year? or more? Kamedan was as all-loving of her as Geseta had foretold. He adored her and seemed to depend on her for his being. Neither Mehoia nor Geseta himself had ever drawn from Shamsha, drained her, demanded her as Kamedan did Hwette. It’s all very well for a lover to say he’d die without you, but unfair to make it your unremitting responsibility to keep him alive, Shamsha thought. Then she thought, What about Hwette’s own life?

The answer was a jolt, a blank. What was Hwette’s life?

To Fefinum just now she had said, “housework, garden work, bringing up her son and niece, working at the heyimas”—Well, wasn’t that a life, anybody’s life? The household, the heyimas; one’s family, other people; the obligations and responsibilities, the network of reciprocal and mutual work, observance, care, and celebration: what more was there?

A swallow in a net. Kamedan claiming her attention, desire, constant companionship; little Torip and Bolekash needing her attention, care, companionship, teaching; Fefinum demanding that she perfect herself spiritually to fulfil her sister’s ambition; and she, Shamsha, the mother, what did she ask of Hwette? To be good, not to bother, be competent, let me get on with my work, my head stuck into the empty spaces between written words all the time. She’s the hinge of the household, not I. It all depends on her being here, and she’s being pulled to pieces by us all pulling her different ways. She should leave. Take little Torip and go. Where? To her brother’s house in Kastoha, there wouldn’t be pressure on her there. Or up to Wakwaha, by herself, leave the child with us, go by herself, go alone, that’s what she should do. I’ll tell her that, Shamsha thought. First thing tomorrow.

Chapter Two[1]

THE DRY SEASON was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take the light away, mamou! Please, mamou, take away the light!” The child’s father went across the room on hands and knees and held him against his body, saying, “Mamou will be home soon, Torippi. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. Whe the day began, Torip was hot and weak and dull-witted.

Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that. Don’t fuss. My grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.

Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you’re here, Hunter.” Modona said, “So you’re here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife Hwette is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew they said Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking she’s hurt and not able to make her way back.”

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1

The first chapter was told from the point of view of one person, Shamsha. So we are given what Shamsha perceived, felt, thought: the truth according to Shamsha.

This second chapter offers a great many truths, or untruths, as it “hinges” or turns continually from the point of view of one character to another; from Kamedan to Sahelm to Duhe to Sahelm. Then as the night comes on we no longer are inside anyone’s mind for long, if at all, and perceptions are obscure. In the scene between Kamedan and Duhe we know only what they say, not what they are thinking. When three-year-old Torip, Monkeyflower, wakes up in the morning we see the world as he sees it for a while. Then we move without identification from Kamedan to Duhe to Sahelm to Isitut to Modona to Shamsha’s household, until the chapter ends in the point of view of Monkeyflower and Moondog.