Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

  The Dawn Land was so called because from there the great salt sea extended to where the sun rose every morning. The People couldn’t conceive of a big land beyond the sea, and more land beyond that, and then another sea and more land, until it all came back to this shore where they sat. Dar Oakley could: though even then, when years had passed since Kits had explained it, he still didn’t know if he believed it.

  “So the Crow had failed in all his attempts to get nothing,” One Ear told the others, “and at last he gave up and turned alone for home.”

  Killed, burned, fooled, robbing, robbed, humiliated—by then Dar Oakley’d heard the story many times in all the ways One Ear told it, and always complained that it hadn’t happened that way at all; but One Ear always said he liked it better so. It’s funnier my way, he said.

  In this telling of One Ear’s, the Crow was sitting by the riverside and feeling sorry for himself for his bad luck when he heard a voice coming from beneath a pile of rocks beneath a pile of yellow Beech leaves—a voice of distress, or anyway an unhappy voice. He went to see what it was, and when he had scattered the leaves and pulled away the stones he found a skeleton there, all jumbled up, his chest and skull filled with bugs and mice nibbling away. The Skeleton rattled pitifully until the Crow saw that he must put the jaw back with the skull bone, and when that was done, the Skeleton could talk more easily, and asked the Crow if he had any tobacco.

  Well, I do, said the Crow.

  I’d be grateful if you’d fill a pipe of it for me, the Skeleton said. So the Crow took his pipe and his pouch and his flint, and filled the pipe and lit it. He stuck it in the Skeleton’s jaw, and the Skeleton gripped it tight with his remaining teeth and took a long draw. The Crow was amazed to see the smoke fill up the Skeleton’s empty chest and float out between his ribs, while the Skeleton grinned with pleasure. Meanwhile all the annoying bugs and vermin fled away from the smoke, and the Skeleton pulled himself together and sat up.

  That’s better, he said. Thank you. It can get pretty uncomfortable lying here, year after year.

  Hm, said the Crow. I’d have thought you’d have long since gone over to the Other Lands, where everything’s fine, and left all this behind.

  Well, perhaps I have, said the Skeleton, but I don’t know anything of it. As far as I know, these bones are all of me there is.

  The Crow said that indeed it was all he could see; and the Skeleton replied that, really, bones ought to be treated better than his had been, and put properly under the earth in a pot or a wrapping, and wept over. They’re all that the living possess and can honor when the spirit’s gone.

  The Crow had never thought of it that way, but he saw that it was surely true. The Skeleton finished his tobacco and returned the pipe to the Crow, and said that if there was anything an old pile of bones like himself could do for the Crow in return, he should ask for it. Where had he been wandering?

  The Crow told him how he had had a dream of a thing, a sort of thing that if he possessed it would keep him from death forever. And if you dream of a thing you want, you are meant to have it, and so he had gone in search of it, with no luck.

  Well, the Skeleton said, I’m not the one to ask for help with that.

  It’s all right, the Crow said. I don’t think it can be found.

  Maybe not, said the Skeleton. But look at it this way. When you return home, you’ll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you’re dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you’ll speak and act and be alive again.

  And so will you, the Crow replied.

  I guess, the Skeleton said. And—well, here it is, being told, and we’re here to speak in it. And not for the last time, I don’t suppose!

  It’ll have to do, the Crow said.

  The Skeleton turned back to his hole, lay down, and drew up his leg bones. Just push those stones back over me, please, he said, and scatter those leaves over them. Gently now.

  The Crow did so, and then flew out over the river to his home. He was pretty sure now that no matter how long he lived, he was certain to die; but, you know, he’ll be back. Crows die, but Old Crow never dies. Not until stories aren’t told anymore, and Death itself is dead.

  “And that,” One Ear said finally, “is all of that story there is.”

  The People had made their Dawn Land camp well above the high-tide line, and lain down there to sleep. When they woke in the morning they saw, standing out on the bay and coming clear as the morning fog lifted from the water, a thing that had not been there when they arrived. It was as though a tall rock or a little island had crept in while they slept. All the People went down to the water to look at it. Rising above its dark bulk were great poles like bare trees, whose branches were hung with ropes and white cloths.

  People stood on it.

  The Crow clan warriors armed themselves, not knowing what this might mean or who this was, but One Ear said there was no reason to fear. With Dar Oakley on his shoulder he waded into the sea, as though he might see the thing better if he went a few steps closer. And now as they looked other beings appeared, seeming to come up from within: four-legged, brown and black and gray. One of these was prodded and pushed and whipped by the People until it leapt off and into the water. More beings were pushed off, forced to jump; they went down flailing and under the water, raising white foam; then they surfaced, snorting, and soon were swimming toward shore.

  The People ran back as the first one of these beasts to reach shallow water found footing and came up onto the beach. They had never seen such ones before.

  But Dar Oakley had. One of these had walked beside the first two People he had ever seen, in a land beyond that sea, two thousand years before. It was a Horse.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Debra couldn’t have known, when we parted, how difficult it would soon become for me to do even the simplest things, keep her grave from being overgrown with invasive vegetation or her stone from being thrown down or stolen. I’ve visited, when my aide Barbara can drive me there; I bring wildflowers and look down at the earth that lies atop her, and caught in that human paradox of death that she never acknowledged, I speak to her and listen for her voice. I don’t hear it. It’s Barbara, who knew her only at the end, who weeps.

  Barbara’s been with me now for two years, perhaps three—my sense of time’s passing grows uncertain the more time that passes. It was Debra who first hired her, when we still lived in the other place down in town, when Debra was getting worse quickly. Barbara was amazingly strong then; she could carry Debra up and down the stairs in her long arms, out to the porch in good weather. Twice a week now she cleans and prepares meals that I can warm up, does things around the house that probably I could do myself well enough but likely would not do if left alone. Strong still, even with the diabetes. I order firewood from locals; she chops it into stove lengths. She’s ashamed to go to doctors for herself, but she takes me, in her practically imaginary pickup, driver’s door tied closed with a belt, the road visible through the rotting floorboards. I can remember when cars and trucks had to be inspected by the state and proved to be roadworthy before they could be driven.

  Today she’s brought her baby. She used to be able to find someone to care for him while she works. More and more often now the child comes with her.

  I had hardly known Barbara was pregnant. I saw her twice a week, but she’d taken to dressing in wide flowered dresses without belts over her jeans, what my mother used to call muumuus, and Barbara was always fat. She was over forty when this child was conceived (where the others are that she says she’s had, what they do, I don’t know). I wondered if that was part of the reason for the child’s problems. But she said no, it was drink: drink before and drink during, almost up to the day he was born. And yes, I can see the thin lips, the lack of a philtrum between mouth and nose that makes him look like a brownie or pixie in an old picture: the dark skin and almond-black eyes, too: and so weirdly small and weak
. The father of the child is white, and gone.

  It was her fault, she says, that he is what he is, will never grow right or learn to think or speak like other people. Worst is, she knew when she was drinking what the effect could be; there are other children like hers among the Native American population still living hereabouts. Barbara was mostly raised in the lands around the lake, in one house or another, but hasn’t had much to do with the tribe, and doesn’t know who among them she belongs with. What little she has told me of the stories and beliefs that they retain seems to me rather haphazard, half pretend. I don’t know where she goes to when she leaves my place.

  There’s one thing that might link her to the long past of her people, or maybe it’s just the way her soul is made. She is very tender toward the dead: solicitous, even. It’s not something she talks about; it took me a long time to even take notice of it. When she recalls the things they said alive, it’s as though she is spoken to now. She knows she’ll be among them, and she doesn’t see it as a long or dreadful passage—it may not seem a passage at all to her but a simple turnabout, like changing places in a round dance.

  Since her pregnancy her diabetes has worsened, and her feet are twisted and lack feeling. We are now about equally fit, which doesn’t add up even to one fit person. More often than not now, when it’s time for her to go, I tell her she should sleep over in the spare room or on the screened porch, save tires, they won’t last even as long as I will. For a time then I lie in bed and listen to the child’s eerie, inconsolable wails. I get up and make my way with care (a fall would be the end of me) down to the shed, light the lamp, pick up my pen.

  The pale-white People who came ashore from the ships anchored off the Dawn Land wore coats and hats and boots; from their faces hair sprouted sparsely or thickly. Most were smaller than the Crow clan traders watching them from the beach, and several were fatter; Dar Oakley couldn’t say if they were uglier, but certainly they resembled the Small Ugly People. He wondered if the Small Ugly People, who had come daywise over broad lands chasing Kits and the Most Precious Thing, had begun in the same country as these: were their relatives, maybe, who had come by the other way and traveled darkwise over the sea as Dar Oakley had done. The Crow clan watched as they tied the hind legs of their beasts together with straps so short that they kept them from running away—how simple and clever that was.

  Somehow these People had known that this was the season for trading, and they brought things that most of the Crow clan had never seen, though other clans who lived along the Dawn Land shore were already using them: iron knives and hatchets of great power, fabrics lighter and warmer than Deer’s skins, and—most wonderful of all—beads of green and blue, transparent as sky, obviously imbued with spirit life: the newcomers gave them freely, laughing as though they were nothing. In exchange they took all the Beaver pelts, and by signs made it clear they wanted more.

  When business was done—it took a few days—the traders invited anyone who wanted to come onto the ship that had brought them (see? That, yes, that), and One Ear was among the four or five who accepted. Dar Oakley watched him wade out into the surf and clamber aboard the ship’s boat, and the oars drop, and he remembered the boat of the Saints going into the unknown.

  In time it would become clear that these People, though they came and went on their ships, meant to stay. They brought with them not only iron and glass and nails and swords but also Barley to grow, and in time beer made from that Barley. They brought no gold, or very little—gold was what they expected to find everywhere here, but there was none, as the Small Ugly People knew.

  And they brought Hogs, and Cows, and the Honeybee.

  Clover came along too, seeds on the feet or in the baggage of the newcomers, and it spread and grew; the Honeybees took pollen from it, as they had from the same plant in the lands from which the new People had brought them, and from Clover they made honey. The Clover spread fast, great fields of it, faster than the new People themselves spread, and the Honeybee traveled with it. The old clans, who were soon in flight from the newcomers or afraid of their arrival, would call the sudden patches of pink and white blossoms the white People’s footprint; the bad news of Bee sightings moved from clan to clan, People to People. Because Death—the other great gift the newcomers brought—was sure to follow after.

  One Ear didn’t return to that shore for many seasons, and when he did come back, in a coat like the coats worn by the new People, there was no one living there but the white settlers, squatting in thrown-up log shelters or in the empty dwellings of the seacoast clans. No People, none: the squatters told him that the People of the coastal villages were all dead; nine of every ten. The few left alive with strength to bury the dead had instead fled the newcomers’ awful power, only to be caught later as sickness spread.

  What had happened? The new People seemed to think—One Ear had got a bit of their mouth-twisting language by then—that the realm of spirits had decreed the sickness and death, so that they, the newcomers, could have the land without a fight. One Ear thought it more likely that the beautiful beads they had dispensed so generously had in fact been a kind of weapon, one as unlikely as their swords and the guns that blazed and banged rather harmlessly, only far more powerful; a poison, a curse.

  One Ear—immune, or lucky—tried to find and bury as many dead as he could, until he realized that he would be dead himself of old age if not something worse before he could even find them all. His tall frame was still erect; his hair now was streaked with gray. He turned West and North, toward the lands of the Longhouse People and the demesnes of the Crow clan. By the time he got there, the killing things, whatever they were, had already come; there, too, the dead lay unburied, and the villages were empty.

  There were many Crows, though.

  Nothing like it had ever befallen in the history of these Crows. Wolves and Ravens and Vultures too had never encountered such riches before. In the face of it, territories collapsed, feuds dissolved, the number and size of young increased. You could follow a faint scent and come upon a whole village of dead People, children dead in their dead mothers’ arms, healers dead with their drums and their herbs in their hands. There was no one who’d bother to drive a Crow off, and no need to defend a rich find until the corpse-openers, the Bears and Wolves, found it; if these dead ones were too whole to enjoy, nearby there were plenty of others farther gone.

  Dar Oakley explained to me how he convinced the Crows of his demesne—which over time came to include lands and families that reached nearly to the Beautiful Lake where Kits had reigned—that he himself was responsible for this bounty. I didn’t understand how he did this; his reasons, and their gullibility, lay too deep within Crow nature for me to guess at. But as territories went unpatrolled and Crows grew so numerous that calls and messages could be passed quickly and far, Ka became different from the old mobile association of families and smallholdings and momentary alliances disputing resources. Crow destinies had converged in the place where Death had for a moment conquered, and there became a nation, great, mighty, and numerous. In that nation Dar Oakley was honored, heard out, followed.

  One Ear was old when once again Dar Oakley came upon him, far from the place where they had come to know each other.

  “You aren’t dead, then,” One Ear said, looking up into the Pine where Dar Oakley and some close associates were gathered.

  “No,” Dar Oakley said. “Nor are you.”

  “Do you know what became of my wife and daughters?” One Ear asked.

  Dar Oakley had no answer he could give to that. He might have been in on the eating of them, or he might not. Many People hadn’t resembled themselves when dead, and Dar Oakley had little memory of most when they were alive; out of so many, there were plenty who got no attention from Crows, and were the spoils of others, almost unrecognizable by the time the Crows at length took possession. It had become a practice of some People clans to dress the dead in their best robes with their weapons or ornaments and bring them to the hi
gh rocks, or (if the mourners had the strength, and the dead one was small, or a child) lift them on pallets into the forest canopy. From there the spirits could be released—Dar Oakley explained this to the Crows, and what it meant for Crow-kind—thence to go West to the Sky Gate and the other world, where there was no sickness evermore.

  “That’s where I go,” One Ear said. “To follow Death, as far as my legs will carry me.”

  “We’ll go too,” Dar Oakley said, not knowing why he said it, or why he would want to go darkwise. But in fact the riches of this land were growing thinner now; the last People remains had mostly gone to dry bone and tendon, or been buried by winter heaves and melts. The incoming People arriving to take the emptied lands had come from places over the sea where Crows were feared and despised, companions of evildoers, blamed for the sudden deaths of children. They liked to kill a Crow when they could, nail it to a slab-wood door for a warning.

  So the Crows went west, darkwise, toward the night sky. Kits had said that there was no end to darkwise, that it only turned again to daywise if you went far enough, and Dar Oakley believed that now; but it was hard to explain to others.

  Years passed. A nation of Crows doesn’t travel fast, and One Ear was slow; he stopped for lengths of time in places where the dead could be examined, and those not dead could tell him their tales; for a time he settled with a female and gave her help and was himself cared for. Then he went on.

  “I’m the last of the Crow clan,” he told Dar Oakley. “Though I never was one of them at all.”

  The new settlers, moving faster, catching them up and passing them by in the rush to take land (land that they supposed, wrongly, had always been as empty of People as it was when they found it), would now and then see a tall, solitary Indian, unarmed, who seemed to have some power to draw Crows after him: when he appeared, so did they, numbers of them, taking what they could of eggs and chicks and sprouting corn, shrieking horridly in the trees, and then over a few weeks or months mostly gone again. Following, the settlers supposed, the Indian sorcerer.