His voice had grown louder, and the child stirred a little. He fell silent.
After a while Duhe said in a quiet voice, “Please tell me how it was that Hwette left.”
Kamedan said, “I came into the house from working at the East Fields generator. They called me over there, there was a consultation, you know some work needs to be done there, and people in the Milling Art had to talk and decide about it. It took all day. I came home and Tai was cooking dinner. Nobody else was home yet. I said, ‘Where are Hwette and Monkeyflower?’ He said, ‘He’s with my wife and daughter. She went up onto Spring Mountain.’ Pretty soon Fefinum came in with both the children, from the gardens. The grandmother came in from somewhere. The grandfather showed up too, though he doesn’t live with us. We ate together. I went over up the Spring Mountain way to meet Hwette coming home. She never came. She never came that night, or since.”
The doctor said, “Tell me what you think about this, Kamedan.”
“I think she went off with someone. Some person that walked with her. I don’t think she meant to stay away, stay with them. Nobody’s missing, that I’ve heard about. I haven’t heard that any man is staying away somewhere or hasn’t come home from somewhere. But it might not be far. She could be in the woods, on the hunting side, in the hills. Maybe at some summer place, up high. So many people are up in the hills this time of year, nobody really knows where anybody is. She might be staying with some people at a summerhouse. Or maybe she went on from where they were dancing, went on a ways to be alone, and got hurt. People can trip and fall, break an ankle, in those canyons. It’s wild there on the south side and southeast side of Spring Mountain. All those paths are bad, nothing but hunters’ paths, it’s hard not to get lost there. Once you get round on the wrong side of Spring Mountain it’s very confusing. I ended up once coming into Chukulmas when I thought I’d been going southwest all day. I couldn’t believe it was Chukulmas—I thought I’d blundered into some town over in Osho Valley, a foreign town, and I saw Chukulmas Tower but I kept thinking what’s that doing here, I couldn’t make sense of it. I had got turned around. It could have happened that Hwette did the opposite thing, she meant to turn back here and kept going the wrong way, she might be over there outside the Valley, with the Osho people, not sure how to get home. Or what worries me the most, you know—if she has hurt herself—if she broke an ankle, and is where nobody can hear her—The rattlesnake. I can’t think when I think of the rattlesnake.”[23]
Kamedan stopped talking. Duhe said nothing more for some time. She said at last, “Maybe some people should be going up on Spring Mountain calling out. Maybe there’s a dog that knows Hwette and would help find her if she’s there.”
“Her mother and sister and the others say that would be foolish, they all say she went down the Valley to the Mouths of the Na, or up to the Springs. Fefinum is certain that she went downriver. She used to do that. Probably she’s on the way home now. I’m a fool to worry this way, I know. But the child kept waking and crying to her.”
Duhe did not answer. Presently she began to sing under her voice, a Serpentine blessing song:
Kamedan knew the song. He did not sing with her, but listened to the song. She sang it very quietly and let her voice become fainter until the song became inaudible breath. After that they spoke no more, and Kamedan slept.
In the morning the little boy woke early and stared all around himself for a while, wondering. The only thing he saw that he knew was his father, sleeping beside the cot. Monkeyflower had never slept up on a cot with legs, and felt as if he might fall out of bed, but he liked the feeling. He lay still for a while, and then climbed down off the cot, stepped over his father’s legs, and went to the door of the room to look out. There was a woman he did not know curled up asleep in the porch there, so he went the other direction, to the inner door, into the second room. There he saw a lot of beautiful glass jars and bottles and containers of various colors and shapes, many ceramic bowls and holders, and several grinders with handles to turn. He turned all the handles he could reach, and then took down off the low shelves first one colored glass jar and then another, until he had a great many of them on the floor. There he began to arrange them. Some of them had something inside that made a noise when the jar was shaken. He shook all the jars. He opened one to see what was inside, and saw a grey, coarse powder, which he thought was sand. Another one had fine white sand in it. A blue glass jar had black water in it. A red glass jar had brown honey in it; that got onto his fingers, and he licked them. The honey tasted as bitter as oakgalls, but he was hungry, and finished licking his fingers. He was opening another bottle when he saw the woman stand in the doorway looking at him. He stopped doing anything and sat there amidst all the jars and bottles arranged around him. The black water had run out of the jar and soaked into the floor. Seeing that, he wanted to piss, and did not dare to.
Duhe said, “Well, well, well, well. Monkeyflower, you get to work early!” She came into the pharmacy. Monkeyflower sat very small.
“What’s this one?” Duhe said. She picked up the red jar. She looked at the child, took his hand, and sniffed it. “Sticky Monkeyflower, you are going to be constipated,” she said to him. “When you become a doctor you can use all these things. Until you become a doctor you’d better not. So let’s go outside.”
Monkeyflower let out a wail. He had pissed on the floor.
Duhe said, “O Spring of the Yellow River! Come on outside now!” He would not get up, so she picked him up and carried him out to the porch.
Kamedan woke and came out on the porch. Monkeyflower was standing there, and Duhe was washing his buttocks and legs. Kamedan said, “Is he all right?”
“He is interested in becoming a doctor,” Duhe said. Monkeyflower put up his arms and whimpered to Kamedan. Duhe picked him up and gave him to Kamedan to hold. The child was between them in the first light of the day’s sun, hinging them.[24] Monkeyflower held his father tight and would not speak or look at Duhe, being ashamed.
Duhe said, “Listen, brother, instead of going to the lofts this morning, maybe you could go with Monkeyflower somewhere, do some work with him. Stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, make sure there’ll be plenty of water to drink where you go. This way you’ll be able to judge for yourself whether he’s well or ill. I think he’s been wishing to be with you, since his mother is away. You might come back by here with him towards the end of the day, and we can talk then about whether we might want to hold a singing, or a bringing-in, and about other things. We’ll talk, we’ll see. All right?”
Kamedan thanked her and left, carrying the child on his shoulders.
After Duhe had straightened up the pharmacy, she went to bathe and eat breakfast in her household. Later in the morning she started across the arms to Hardcinder House. She wanted to talk to Hwette’s people. On the way, in the narrow gardens, Sahelm came to meet her. He said, “I’ve seen Hwette.”[25]
23
Kamedan’s rambling speech expresses his anxiety that Hwette has gone up into the wilderness, the uncultivated hills above the Valley, “the hunting side.”
Townsfolk often had traditional claim to small sites in the nearby wilderness where they put up a shelter, a “summerhouse,” and camped in the hot weather.
Wilderness extended, however, for very large areas outside the knowledge even of the Kesh hunters, and the possibility of a child getting lost was a real peril.
24
The “hinge” (íya) is a central concept and metaphor in Kesh thought. Duhe and Kamedan are connected, through the child, in this moment, in some permanent way.
25
The ensuing dialogue is formalized; all the sentences are of four syllables. Such passages, called “Four-House speech,” are more characteristic of drama than fiction. They constitute a sudden, deliberate break from everyday speech. The line “Hwettez—Hwette?” is translatable only by paraphrase; literally it means “Hwette in the Four Houses or Hwette in the Five Houses?” Duhe is asking, “Did you see Hwette’s ghost or likeness, or in dream, or did you see her in the flesh?”