“No,” Sahelm said. “Kamedan is without malice. But Modona…”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Besides malice,” the doctor said, “there’s laziness. It’s easier to explain than to wonder…. And there’s vanity. People don’t like to know they don’t know where she went. So they make up knowledge: She went to Spring Mountain—She went to Wakwaha—She went to the moon! I don’t know where she went, but I know some of the reasons why people who don’t know would say they know.”
“Why didn’t she herself tell anybody before she went?”
“That I don’t know! Do you know Hwette well?”
“No.”
“When they married, people called them Awar and Bulekwe.[9] When they danced on the Wedding Night, they were like those who dance on the rainbow. People watched in wonder.”
Again they sat in silence. Duhe pointed: the old fat cat was sneaking along in the wild oats above the creekbed, coming back towards the catnip. Sahelm threw an oakgall at her. It rolled between the cat’s front and hind legs, and she leaped in the air and rushed away down the creekbed. Sahelm laughed, and Duhe laughed with him. Up in Nehaga a bluejay screeched and a squirrel yelled back. Bees in the lavender bushes nearby made a noise like always boiling.
Sahelm said, “I wish you hadn’t said she went to the moon.”
“I’m sorry I said that. It was spoken without sense. A bubble word.”
“The child too is Obsidian,”[10] he said.
Not knowing that Hwette’s child was ill, she did not know why he said that. She was tired of talking about Hwette, and sleepy after eating lettuce in the long, hot, late afternoon. She said, “Will you keep the cats off for the next while, if you have nothing else you’d rather do? I want to go to sleep.”
She did not sleep altogether. Sometimes she watched Sahelm from within her eyelashes and under her hair. He sat still, without motion, his legs crossed, his wrists on his knees, his back straight as a fir. Although he was much younger than Duhe, he did not look young, sitting still. When he spoke he seemed a boy; when he was still he seemed an old man, an old stone.
After she had dozed she sat up, rested, and said, “You sit well.”
He said, “I was well trained to sit. The teacher of my sprouting years in the Yellow Adobe heyimas of Kastoha told me to sit still long enough to see and hear every sight and sound in all the six directions, so I myself would become the seventh.”
“What did you see?” she asked. “What did you hear?”
“Just now here? Everything, nothing. My mind wasn’t still. It wouldn’t sit. It was running here and there all the time like the squirrel up there in the branches.”
Duhe laughed. She picked up a duck’s feather from the grasses, a down feather, lighter than breath. She said, “Your mind the squirrel. Hwette the lost acorn.”
Sahelm said, “You’re right. I was trying to see her.”
Duhe blew the feather into the air with a puff of breath and it floated back down to the grasses. She said, “The air’s beginning to cool.” She got up and went to see to the drying herbs, heaping them onto basket trays or tying them into bunches to hang. She stacked the trays, which were triple-footed so they stood one on the other without crushing what was in them. They were light but awkward to carry, stacked up, and Sahelm helped her carry them to the storehouse the Doctors Lodge was using.[11] It stood southwest of the northwest common place, a half-dugout with stone walling and redwood roof. All the back room of it was stored with herbs drying and dried. Duhe sang[12] as she entered this room. As she stored and hung the herbs she continued to whisper the song.
Standing in the doorway, Sahelm said, “The smells in here are strong. Too strong.”
Duhe said, “Before mind saw, it smelled, and tasted, and touched. Even hearing is a most delicate touching. Often, in this Lodge, a person must close their eyes in order to learn.”
The young man said, “Sight is the sun’s gift.”
The doctor said, “And the moon’s gift as well.”
She gave him a sprig of sweet rosemary to wear in his hair, and as she gave it to him, said, “What you fear is what you need, I think. I begrudge you to the Millers,[13] man of Kastoha-na!”
He took the sprig of rosemary and smelled it, saying nothing.
Duhe left the storehouse, going to After the Earthquake House.
Sahelm went along to Between the Orchards House, the last house of the middle arm of town, where he was staying since Kailikusha had sent him away from her household.[14] A Yellow Adobe family in Between the Orchards, having a spare room and balcony, had given them to Sahelm to use; one of the women of that house was his cousin and had grown up with him in Kastoha. He cooked dinner for the family that evening, and after they had cleared away he walked back inward and across towards Hardcinder House. The sun had set behind his back, the full moon was rising before his eyes above the northeast range. He stopped in the gardens where he saw the moon between two houses. He stood still with his gaze fixed on the moon[15] as it heightened and whitened in the dark blue sky, shining.
People from another place[16] were coming in along the southeast arm there, three donkeys, three women, four men. They all carried backpacks and wore hats over their ears. One of the men played a four-note finger-drum slung on a cord round his neck as they walked along. One of the women piped a few notes of a tune now and then on a fife. A person up on a first-floor balcony greeted these strangers, saying, “Hey, people of the Valley, so you are here!” Other people came out on other porches and balconies to see so many strangers going by, and some children ran out to follow them. The strangers stopped, and the man with the finger-drum tapped it with his nails to make a hard clear sound, playing a rain piece, and called out aloud, “Hey, people of this Telina-na town, so you are fortunately and beautifully here! We’re coming in among you thus on four feet and two feet, twenty-six feet in all, dragging our heels with weariness, dancing on our toes for joy, speaking and braying and singing and piping and drumming and thumping as we go, until we get to the right place and the right time, and there and then we stop, we stay, we paint, we dress, and we change the world for you!”
A person called from a balcony, “What play?”
The drummer called back, “As you like it!”
People began to call out plays they wanted to hear. The drummer called back to each one, “Yes, we’ll play that one, yes, yes, we’ll play that one,” promising to play them all, the next day, on the middle common place.
A woman called from a window, “This is the right place, players, this is the right time!” The drummer laughed and gestured to one of the women, who came out of the group and stood in the moonlight where it ran bright through the air and along the ground across the gardens between the houses. The drummer brought up his dance-drum and drummed five and five, and the players all sang the Continuing Tone,[17] and the woman lifted her arms up high. The beat changed to four and four, and she danced a scene from the play Tobbe, dancing the ghost of the lost wife. As she danced she cried out again and again in a high faint voice. She sank down into a bar of darkness, the shadow of a house, and seemed so to vanish. The drummer changed the beat; the piper lifted her fife and began to play a stamp-dance; and so calling and playing the players went on towards the common place, but only nine of them went.
The woman who had danced[18] went along alone in the shadow of the unlighted house until she came beside Hardcinder House, among the big oleanders, white-flowered. There in the white light a man stood still with eyes fixed on the moon. So she had seen him standing with his back to the players while they played and sang and she danced the ghost’s dance.
10
The First House, Obsidian, is the house of the Moon. Duhe’s mention of “going to the moon” disturbs Sahelm because he believes the moon has something to do with Hwette’s disappearance and Hwette’s child’s illness.
11
We would say “the Doctors Lodge storehouse.” The Kesh language tends to avoid indicating permanent possession.
12
The Arts and Lodges, the societies that taught and practiced arts and crafts, taught songs and chants as an integral part of professional activity.
13
Sahelm is learning weaving, a craft taught by the Millers Art. Duhe is telling him that she thinks he has a gift for her craft, medicine.
14
This house stands rather isolated, being the last house of its “arm.” We know nothing about Kailikusha except that she had been married to Sahelm or living with him in her own household, evidently in Kastoha, from which he came to Telina to stay in his cousin’s house.
15
Sahelm is evidently entering trance. From here on, after moonrise, the narration loses some of its matter-of-factness and begins to become more elusive.
17
“Five and five,” “four and four” are terms for familiar drum rhythms. The Continuing Tone is a single unceasing note serving as ground-bass, a feature of much Kesh music.
18
This character remains elusive; she is apparently one of the actors, named Isitut, but she is more than once mistaken for or identified as, or with, Hwette.