was dreaming . . . no, I wasn’t dreaming, how can I explain it, I was dreaming that I wasn’t dreaming because I was dead . . .”
“It’s the fever! Go back to sleep!” Margaret, annoyed at having lost the thread of her own dreams, turned to the other side and pulled the covers up over her shoulder.
The cold darkness seemed to solidify the way water freezes. It was necessary to open the door to let in the heat from the stove; but Kate no longer had the strength to get up, it even seemed to her that she could get lost in what, similar in almost all ways, was another world. When closing her eyes, the ground of reality grew unsteady inside her. What meaning should she give to this tiny chaos of gestures and feelings? Did there exist, behind that door, something other than a magma of earth, air, and water ready to take on every aspect of fire? The world was out of balance because in it one could die. The image of a hovel of cloth and boards substituted for her little brother’s ivory face. There a black wind roared, heaping on confusion. Everything was flying above and below, parents, cows, her sister Maggie, and even the Redskin with forest-green glasses in the middle of battens and sheets unfurling from the armoire, under a beating rain of drops more enormous than the wet kisses of all country women. The dress and flounced petticoat of Miss Pearl fortunately protected her under a bell of pink and black organza. It was necessary to distract herself from the demon singing with a closed mouth:
O sister, O sister, come go with me
Go with me down to the sea!
In the Abyss Where We Got Lost
Winter lingered in the frosts of March. The glacial wind kept turning from the north to the eastern sea. Uncertain snows of glass and feathers continually swept over the first blooms. But there was always an hour for escaping under a spot of sun before night fell. After having walked half way up Long Road, Maggie and Kate usually parted ways at the fork on the farm’s path, each one heading toward her own curiosities.
That day, the presence of Samuel a hundred steps away, also returning home after school, invited them to be more circumspect. He had taken the time to drench himself up to the shoulders in a tub at the public fountain; inundated, he went along like a rain cloud. The adolescent could very well want to take something out on one of them, toss rocks at them, threaten them with the scout knife he’d inherited from his father, or simply pass on his way while throwing them some furtive glances. Despite his size, Kate was not afraid of him; quick to compare him to those prankster coyotes lurking around farms, she didn’t hesitate to defy him. As pusillanimous as he was unpredictable, the High Point widow’s son would only bite out of necessity or surprise. An intent look alone was enough to disconcert him. As he approached, muzzle down, at least twenty steps behind them, his obscene barking frightened the older girl while the other would’ve almost been amused if the words he uttered didn’t rouse in her a sort of emotion close to disgust. What did this mixture of insults and flattery registering in the hidden parts of their bodies mean? In his blue lumberjack coat, arms too long, and with a pointy head, Samuel grew louder and more worked up, a cruel tone in his voice, until the moment the girls’ mother appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden or on the edge of the farm’s property. The idea of complaining never occurred to either of them, so impossible did it seem and surely grotesque to repeat such things to an adult. Likewise, the Fox sisters wouldn’t tell anyone about Pequot’s naughty acts, some nights, as he was leading the goats and ewes back from the high pastures. The difference between him and his dog, a Great Shepherd with red fur, was more in their posture than in their behavior. It was said that he had been taken in as a child by Mohawk Indians after being abandoned by his family, degenerate colonists who left in a caravan for the West, and then that once an adult he’d been chased out of his adopted tribe for unknown reasons. Pequot lived like an animal among animals. No one ever complained about him; he brought the livestock back home and required little. When they heard the cowbell from the hills outside of town, Kate and Maggie quickly turned on their heels to flee from the demon or else climbed up a tree. It was almost a game. The countryside next to their farm was full of natural refuges to share with the martens and squirrels.
Behind the leaning barn, beyond the field of reeds and ferns where wild geese love to fly through, the black pond deeply hidden in the conifer forest was more disturbing than any encounter with Pequot could be. On the alert, Kate paced up and down its edges, attentive to the least trembling. The tall firs packed together on the other side threw down their shadows that were enlarging with the setting sun. That the mother of Miss Pearl had entered these dark waters of her own free will fascinated her to the point of dizziness; she couldn’t take her eyes off those ripples of sickeningly floral scents sometimes agitated by gurgling and hiccups of air bubbles. It curled itself up there like an informed intention, ready to expand in tentacles of steam. How could one have existed, and then no longer? Obviously death was hiding a big secret.
Along the bank, Kate entered almost unwittingly into the prodigiously tall conifer forest. Sprung from a tapestry of needles arranged according to a mysterious order, endless colonnades were topped with an immense vault of branches with multiple domes and continuous stellations from which still filtered, by spears and hatches, broken beams of sun. The creaking of a branch, the belated cry of a bird or, more frightening, from the depth of those colossal galleries vaulted by centuries of sap and weather, the sad echo of a moan, the bark of a wild dog or call of a wolf, startled Kate awake with a shudder after the fascinated torpor in which she contemplated the pond—as if the scattered forest spirits were trying to give her a sign. One time, the Redskin with green glasses reported to her the words of a very wise man of the woods: “Nature does not ask questions, neither does she answer the questions of mortals.” No need for interrogation, an attentive silence was enough. The myopic Indian was able to learn from a broken twig, a dragonfly’s flight, or the shape of a cloud.
Just as Kate reached the stable in the tawny evening light, she bumped into her father who, holding onto Old Billy’s reins with one hand, had just stepped out of the stirrups.
“Where are you coming from, you little devil?” he cried in a voice hoarse from alcohol and tobacco. “You should be close to home at this hour!”
“I was out walking not far from here.”
“At the edge of that cursed pond? In the forest! There are bears, wild boar, even wolves . . .”
“I’m not afraid . . .”
“You’re being foolish! Does the chicken’s courage stop the fox? Now go dress the horse and change his bedding!”
Kate took the bridle without saying a word. In the half-light of the loose box, she bustled around his long head. It was an unrivalled relief for Kate to rub down Old Billy, brush his dress, unravel his mane, make him eat and drink, while the darkness streaked with gold from the interstices of boards deepened and the penetrating odors of the night were being exhaled from the beaten earth. Old Billy watched her with one big brown eye, lip hanging. Instead of unsaddling him, she could run away with him, gallop far from Hydesville, reaching bright clearings beyond this world, discovering the coolness of water and the stars when solitude is merged with immensity, to reach large prairies of honey described by the Redskin with glasses, there where memory is torn off like an old coat, forgetting her father and fellow creatures, all bitterly clinging to the stinking air of stables and the land of the dead, with no regard for the trees, mountain crests, the sparkling water of rivers, the hidden fountains of wind. “It’s through the murmuring of streams, rivers, and rain that my ancestors speak,” the Indian had told her. Where could her own ancestors be, aside from Grandfather in his plot in the Rapstown cemetery where, later on, her family had slid in her little brother to save the money of digging another grave?
Old
