stayed together; the kids didn’t get lost and kept from cliffs.
“Little Jon, you don’t have to come up this morning.”
“Well, Lobey, if you don’t think—”
“Go on, stay home.”
So Easy, Friza, and me went out with the goats.
The beautiful things were like the flock of albino hawks that moved to the meadow. Or the mother woodchuck who brought her babies for us to see.
“Easy, there isn’t enough work for all of us here. Why don’t you find something else to do?”
“But I like coming up here, Lobey.”
“Friza and me can take care of the herd.”
“But I don’t mi—”
“Get lost, Easy.”
He said something else and I picked up a stone in my foot and hefted it. He looked confused, then lumbered away. Imagine, coming on like that with Easy.
Friza and I had the field and the herd to ourselves alone. It stayed good and beautiful with unremembered flowers beyond rises when we ran. If there were poisonous snakes, they turned off in lengths of scarlet, never coiling. And, ah! did I make music.
Something killed her.
She was hiding under a grove of lazy willows, the trees that droop lower than weeping, and I was searching and calling and grinning—she shrieked. That’s the only sound I ever heard her make other than laughter. The goats began to bleat.
I found her under the tree, face in the dirt.
As the goats bleated, the meadow went to pieces on their rasping noise. I was silent, confused, amazed by my despair.
I carried her back to the village. I remember La Dire’s face as I walked into the village square with the limber body in my arms.
“Lobey, what in the world . . . How did she . . . Oh, no! Lobey, no!”
So Easy and Little Jon took the herd again. I went and sat at the entrance to the source-cave, sharpened my blade, gnawed my nails, slept and thought alone on the flat rock. Which is where we began.
Once Easy came to talk to me.
“Hey, Lobey, help us with the goats. The lions are back. Not a lot of them, but we could still use you.” He squatted, still towering me by a foot, shook his head. “Poor Lobey.” He ran his hairy fingers over my neck. “We need you. You need us. Help us hunt for the two missing kids?”
“Go away.”
“Poor Lobey.” But he went.
Later Little Jon came. He stood around for a minute thinking of something to say. But by the time he did, he had to go behind a bush, got embarrassed, and didn’t come back.
Lo Hawk came too. “Come hunting, Lo Lobey. There’s a bull been seen a mile south. Horns as long as your arm, they say.”
“I feel rather non-functional today,” I said. Which is not the sort of thing to joke about with Lo Hawk. He retired, humphing. But I just wasn’t up to his archaic manner.
When La Dire came, though, it was different. As I said, she has great wit and learning. She came and sat with a book on the other side of the flat rock, and ignored me for an hour. Till I got mad. “What are you doing here?” I asked at last.
“Probably the same thing you are.”
“What’s that?”
She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”
“I’m sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”
“Huh?”
“Is that an inarticulate way of asking what it is?”
“Huh?” I said again. “Yeah. What is it?”
“To kill whatever killed Friza.” She closed her book. “Will you help?”
I leaned forward, feet and hands knotting, opened my mouth—then La Dire wavered behind tears. I cried. After all that time it surprised me. I put my forehead on the rock and bawled.
“Lo Lobey,” she said, the way Lo Hawk had, only it was different. Then she stroked my hair, like Easy. Only different. As I gained control again I sensed both her compassion and embarrassment. Like Little Jon’s; different.
I lay on my side, feet and hands clutching each other, sobbing towards the cavity of me. La Dire rubbed my shoulder, my bunched, distended hip, opening me with gentleness and words:
“Let’s talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let’s you listen. We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love Maureen even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.” I put my head in La Dire’s lap. She went on. “Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45’s or 33’s from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love—in this version Eurydice—and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”
I said, “How could he go into the great rock and the great roll? That’s all death and all life.”
“He did.”
“Did he bring her back?”
“No.”
I looked from La Dire’s old face and turned my head in her lap to the trees. “He lied, then. He didn’t really go. He probably went off into the woods for a while and just made up some story when he came back.”
“Perhaps,” La Dire said.
I looked up again. “He wanted her back,” I said. “I know he wanted her back. But if he had gone any place where there was even a chance of getting her, he wouldn’t have come back unless she was with him. That’s how I know he must have been lying. About going to the great rock and the great roll, I mean.”
“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.” She picked up my machete. “Play something.” She held the handle out. “Make music.”
I
