She sat back down in the same corner spot beside her notebook and called a woman named Tadi over. I settled against a beam a few feet away. The cards were like everything that has spent time in this climate: faded, fraying, damp, and molding. Each card had the same dent at the bottom in the middle where she held it between her thumb and first two fingers, waiting for a response. And it was a long wait. Tadi stared hard at the card with the foxes holding the urn. She had seen neither a fox nor a Greek urn, so she was stumped. She stared with exaggerated concentration. She was a large woman, a mother of many children by the look of her long nipples and stretched stomach skin, which lay in neat folds like a stack of bedsheets in my mother’s linen closet. She had only three fingers on her left hand and four on her right. She wore little decoration, just a thin tulip bark ribbon around a wrist with a single cowrie shell strung through it. Like the other women, she had a shaved head. I could see the quiver of her pulse in a vein on her crown. And when she caught me looking at her, she held my gaze for several seconds before I looked away. The only Kiona females who had ever looked me in the eye were the very young and the very old. For the rest it was taboo. Nell lowered the card and Tadi blurted out something, koni or kone. Nell wrote it down and held up another.
After Tadi came Amun, a boy of eight or nine with a wide smile. Amun looked all around to see who was watching and then he said a word that made his friends laugh and the elders scold him. Nell wrote down the word but was not pleased. Even before she lifted the next card he shouted out another naughty word and she quickly called over a woman who was smoking Fen’s Dublin pipe to take his place. Amun crossed the room and draped himself in the lap of a girl who shifted but did not stop her mending of a fishing net to receive him. Nell had the woman, just like the rest, sit right beside her, and she showed her the cards like they were looking at a magazine together.
Their boy Bani brought me a cup of tea and a mound of biscuits. I thought it was far too many until nearly every child in the room leapt up and hovered round me making identical moaning sounds. I broke the biscuits in as many pieces as I could and passed them around.
When she was done, Nell stood up and shooed them all out quite unceremoniously, paddling her hands toward the door. On their way out they put everything back in boxes and the boxes back on the shelves, and within minutes the house was put to rights and the floor was shaking from all the feet going down the ladder.
‘You have quite a system.’
Though she was looking at me, she hadn’t heard. She was still with her work. She was wearing a tulip bark ribbon, too, just above her elbow. I wondered what they made of this woman who bossed them around and wrote down their reactions. It was funny how it all seemed more vulgar watching someone else do it. I felt like my mother, with this sudden distaste for it. And yet she was good at it. Better than I was. Systematic, organized, ambitious. She was a chameleon, with a way of not imitating them but reflecting them. There seemed to be nothing conscious or calculated about it. It was simply the way she worked. I feared I’d never shake my Englishman Among the Savages pose, despite the real respect I had come to feel for the Kiona. But she with only seven weeks under her belt was more of the Tam than I ever would be of any tribe, no matter how long I stayed. No wonder Fen had grown discouraged.
‘Let me just put these back,’ she said, holding up the cards and her notebook. I followed her, wanting to see her workroom again, not wanting to miss a step of her process.
She put the cards on a shelf and the notebook beside it. ‘Sorry. Hold on,’ she said, and flipped open the notebook to add a few more thoughts.
Behind her, on the bottom shelf, were over a hundred of these notebooks. Not fresh ones, but battered ones. A record of all of her days since July of 1931, I imagined. For some reason I felt ill again, hot, with a spray of lights dancing at the edge of my vision. I didn’t want to vomit onto her notebooks. I stepped back and heard myself ask a question.
‘In the mornings,’ she said, but I was no longer sure what I had asked. She described her afternoons visiting all the houses on the women’s road. She said she also visited two other Tam hamlets nearby. I asked if she went alone.
‘There’s no danger.’
‘I’m sure you heard about Henrietta Schmerler.’
She had.
‘She was murdered.’ I was trying to be delicate.
‘Worse than that, I hear.’
We were outside by then, on the road heading away from the lake. The nausea had passed but I was still not quite myself. The sweat that had covered my body a few minutes ago was now ice cold. ‘A white woman is confusing to them,’ I said.
‘Precisely. I don’t think they think of me as entirely female. I don’t think rape or murder has ever crossed their minds.’
‘You can’t know that.’ Not think of her as female? I wished I could manage that. ‘And murder is one of the first natural impulses any creature has to the unknown.’
‘Is it? It’s certainly not mine.’
She had fashioned a walking stick for her ankle. It struck the ground beside my left toe with particular force.
‘You seem as interested in the women here as in the children, maybe more interested.’ I was remembering how quickly she had dismissed Amun.
She and her stick stopped abruptly. “Have you noticed anything about them? Has Teket said anything?’
‘Nothing. But I did notice that woman Tadi was free to hold my gaze, and that boy—’
‘Didn’t have the usual self-possession that you see in boys of that age?’
I laughed at the speed with which she finished my sentence. She was looking at me fiercely. What was I going to say about the boy? I could hardly remember. The sun seared the road, no shade, no wind. The curve of her breast through her thin shirt. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
She tapped her stick rapidly on the hard dry earth. ‘You saw this. In less than an hour you saw this.’
It had been two and a half at this point, but I didn’t quibble.
Someone shouted out to her from down the road.
‘Oh,’ she said, racing on. ‘You have to meet Yorba. She’s one of my favorites.’
Yorba was hurrying, too, pulling a female companion with her. When we all met up, Nell and Yorba spoke loudly, as if they were still separated by the length of the road. Yorba had the unadorned look of Tam women with her shaved head and one armband, but her friend wore shell and feather jewelry and a hairband of inlaid bright-green beetles. Yorba introduced her to Nell, and Nell introduced me to Yorba, and then the friend, whose name was Iri, and I were introduced, all of which required saying baya ban about eighty-seven times. The friend did not look up at me. Nell explained that this was Yorba’s daughter, who had married a Motu man and was visiting for a few days. We were still in the full sun and I assumed we would move on to find Fen, but Nell drilled them with questions. The daughter, who could not have been a real daughter as she looked several years older than Yorba, did not conceal her delight in Nell’s abuse of the language, her long pauses as she searched for words, then the cascade of them in her toneless accent. Nell was most interested in Iri’s perspective on the Tam now that she had lived outside the culture for many years. But both women were carrying large ceramic pots in bilum bags on their backs and pleasure soon gave way to impatience. Yorba pulled at Iri’s bracelets. Nell ignored their growing discomfort until Yorba raised both hands as if she were about to push Nell straight to the ground and shrieked what seemed like expletives at her. When she was finished, she took Iri’s arm and the two women slid away on their bare heels.
Nell pulled a notebook from a large homemade pocket stitched onto her skirt, and without even moving to a shady spot made four pages of her small hieroglyphs. ‘I’d like to get over to the Motu sometime,’ she said after she put the notebook away, completely unbothered by the way the conversation had ended. ‘I never knew Yorba had a daughter.’