In the Blood Lodge one day they told me that Milk, who was now truly an old woman, had had a stroke. My son came with me to see her and helped her in her recovery; and since she was alone, I went
to stay with her while she needed help. It suited her to have me there, and so I lived with her. It was comfortable for both of us; but she was looking for her last name and learning how to die, and although I could be of some help to her while she did that and could learn from her, it wasn't what I wanted myself, yet.
One day a little before the Summer I was working in the storage barns above Moon Creek. The Art had put in a new generator there, and I was checking out the wiring to the threshers, some of which needed reinsulation; the mice had been at it. I was working away there in a dark, dusty crawl space, hearing the mice scuttering about overhead in the rafters and between the walls. Presently I noticed with part of my attention that several people were in the crawl space with me, watching what I was doing. They were grayish-brown people with long, slender, white hands and feet and bright eyes: I had never seen them before, but they seemed familiar. I said, while I went on working. "I wish you would not take the insulation off the wires. A fire could start. There must be better things to eat in a grain barn!"
The people laughed a little, and the darkest one said in a high soft voice, "Bedding."
They looked behind them then and went away quickly and quietly. Somebody else was there. I felt one little chill of fear. At first I couldn't see him clearly in that twilight of the crawl space; then I saw it was Tarweed.
"You never ride horses anymore, Flicker," he said.
"Riding is for the young, Tarweed," I said.
"Are you old?"
"Nearly forty years old."
"And you don't miss riding?"
He was teasing me, as people had teased me once about being in love with the roan horse.
"No, I don't miss that."
"What do you miss?"
"My child that died."
"Why should you miss him?"
"He is dead."
"So am I," said Tarweed. And so he was. He had died five years ago.
So I knew then what it was I missed, what I wanted. It was only not to be shut into the House of Earth. I did not have to go in and out the doors, if only I could see those who did. There was Tarweed, and he laughed a little, like the mice.
He did not say anything more, but watched me in the shadows.
When I was done with the work, he was gone.
When I left the barn, I saw the barn owl high upon a rafter, sleeping.
I went home to Milk's household. I told her at supper about Tarweed and the mice.
She listened and began to cry a little. She was weak since the stroke, and her fierceness sometimes turned to tears. She said. "You were always ahead of me, going ahead of me!"
I had never known that she envied me. It made me sad to know it, and yet I wanted to laugh at the way we waste our feelings. "Somebody has to open the door!" I said. I showed her the people who were coming into the room, the kind of people I used to see when I was a young child. I knew they were indeed my kin, but I did not know who they were. I asked Milk, "Who are they?"
She was bewildered at first and could not see well, and complained. The people began to speak, and after a while she answered them. Sometimes they spoke this language, and sometimes I did not
understand what they said; but she answered them eagerly.
When she grew tired, they went away quietly, and I helped her to bed. As she began to go to sleep, I saw a little child come and lie down beside her. She put her arms around it. Every night after that until Milk died in the winter, the child came to her bed to sleep.
Once I spoke of it, saying, "your daughter." Milk looked at me with that whipping look in her one good eye. She said, "Not my daughter. Yours."
So I keep that house now, with the daughter I never bore, the child of my first love, and with others of my family. Sometimes when I sweep the floor of that house, I see the dust in a shaft of sunlight, dancing in curves and spirals, flickering.