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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1971, 2012 by Bruce McAllister
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Caroline:
“these changing leaves...on the
stem of the eternal tree”
CHAPTER ONE
Waterjoyup is the name of my woman. Waterjoyup is the name of her soul.
When each child is born in the shadows of towering yau—high in their broad wrinkled leaves, near the surface where ocean meets dryness—the mother takes a deep first look into her child’s soul, reaches the strongest image of rhythm there—not at darkest depths, but at deepest rim of light. And that vision is the child’s name, the truest truth of naming.
Her mother found her soul a rushing, contented, rising current. So her name is waterjoyup, veined with light, and her name’s image drew me to her when I was young, needing currents to ride against slow dark dreams of death.
And above waterjoyup’s deepest light are delicate rivers of soft coral colors, which attracted me too at our first meeting.
And above her unspoken streams, precisely webbed thoughts find ordered dance, and those added to my pleasure, as they still do.
And embracing all of these in the solid world—her rushing rivering colors under tumbling feeling thoughts—lives her personal flesh, which is simple to love as the cupping hand of the deeper her.
(Do not hide in the past.)
...But this is not the moment of waterjoyup’s birth, nor our long first meeting.
She is dying.
Never alone in her desire, she has always wanted death. But her soul now gives neither the brightest blue of dancing joy, nor pale flow of a single comfort. Were I another man in this moment, her name would seem allpain, closedead, darkdowndim.
I look with my face’s eyes to the skin, flesh and bone of her face, which twitches now like a fish’s tail, twists and bobs among the wrinkled brown leaves waving and weaving around us. No healthy color remains now to any part of her trembling body.
She is pained by the white moss of sickness on her skin, and by the nearing birth of our child.
My soul opens itself to swallow hers, and in turn she swallows me.
My body twitches in our twisting bobbing, and my soul shakes in our sharing screaming.
The white moss began seven days ago. To our faces’ eyes it first appeared in the fine creases of webbing between her fingers. It went on to cover her arms, her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs, down to the ends of her tails, which slowly began to shrivel as the pale growth covered her.
To the ignorant eye alone, she might seem beautiful white coral in the shape of a woman—but the jagged moans of her darkened soul—
“I am sorryyy...,” she cries, and her coral rivers harden, black teeth now, crying, “Darksparklepains, sageragingdark, makingmetakeme...”
“The crawwwwling pain of skin,” she cries in her fading web of thoughts, “hides the good pain of the child’s coming. It is wrong not to feel its birth. It won’t be born tailless, will it?”
“No,” I say as I sink with her, “it will be all right.”
But our first child was born without tails.
Old poundgrayly took the child away.... We both hinted to our euyom friend—we could not do it ourselves. Poundgrayly took the infant far away from us and pressed his ancient scaly limbs over the tiny nose and mouth.
That is all I know about it, because poundgrayly was kind. He received it himself, but he never let the child’s moment of death slip from his memory to our two souls.
(The screaming again.)
“No, it will be all right,” I repeat, urging her.
“I am so sorrryyyy....”
Our leafy shelter of swaying yau is but a day’s swim from the territories of neighboring souls, but they seem so far away now—the truest truth of lonely loss, another’s dying...when mine would be the good one, long desired.
(Hide in some shallow truth.)
We worked together to weave the living yau stems, for a basket to hold our second child. Such stems are thick, slippery, but weaving and knotting them seemed easy for us together—even in her sickness, which is—
(No, hide!)
When the basket was finished, my body’s work was too. The work yet ahead for my soul would be simple. (“A father,” every father tells his son, “must guard his soul against involvement with the mother’s pain, to leave him free, to let him watch for any hungry jaws attracted by birth’s agony.”)
But it is difficult to keep my soul from touching hers. The pains of white sickness have been calling for a long time. I have shared them without will. To leave her alone now, to deny a bond of pain, is the dark of wrong.
“Is it my fault?” she cried. “I ate wrong things? I did not eat enough? Would finer sponges or fish or shell’s meat have ended this sickness, made me ready for the second child?”
“No fault,” I say. “Sickness is never one soul’s fault.”
(Whose fault?)
(Hide in blaming!)
I do blame! Her? The mother of us all...never letting us leave...never giving birth...one body of darkness, wetness hold....
(You cannot hide.)
Her pains run deeper now. The muscles of soul, black hardened reef, chum shoals of deepest night.
My own muscles of back, arms and legs twitch in sharing pain, echo in quiver of tails’ ends.
(Now!)
“Comes the child!” she cries, I cry. Her body curls up, her soul curls down.
Sickness pains swallow screams between thighs, and soul’s voice screams to me, screaming me. Screaming.
Our child leaves her, slips out, floats away from her. The brown leaves wave around them both. The currents are calm, leave them alone.
He floats inside his glistening sac. It is thin, and my eyes touch him faintly, twisting, turning.
No blood flows from her. It is all inside the sac, which the child attacks with tiny fists, with nervous light of his simpler soul.
He breaks through.
Blood flows out, red, ocean’s gray
