فصل 01 - بخش 04

PART FOUR RIPENING MOON There is a dog on my island now, where in all the centuries there has never been a dog before. He looks like a wolf. His name is Pan.

It is high summer; the salt marsh is green, the sea deep blue. As time went by, the English farmers began to harvest hay for their animals from the marsh, and they dug drainage ditches among the creeks where my people had come in canoes to hunt and to fish. But after two centuries or so, in 1898 a great hurricane broke through the coast and gave the river a new estuary, out through the marsh, so that salt water now came flooding round the islands at high tides. This is the way of things.

The only grass that will grow in a marsh that is salt has no value for haying, so the farmers went away. The islands bear the names of their forefathers. Today, on the first island only the wild creatures live; but on the second there are a dozen or so houses, some occupied all the year, some only in summer.

On the third salt marsh island, where John and I talked so often, there has been for a hundred years or so a small house occupied only in summer. In winter, nobody has been there but the birds, the animals, and the trees, many of them overgrown with huge thickets of the vine called poison ivy, the plant we were careful to avoid. It is high summer now, and in places the poison ivy’s leaves are turning the brilliant red that overtakes them in the fall.

A little while ago the summer home began to fall down, and now a new person has come and replaced it with a sturdier house. It is a woman, in her middle years. She has dark eyes and hair, and her name is Rachel. She is a painter. She appears to live alone.

I watch her, and think sometimes that she looks as my grandmother Suncatcher may have looked at that age. She is tall and lean, and works often on the land, planting only the trees and bushes that belong here. “Natives,” she calls them. The dog who looks like a wolf lives here with her.

It is August, the time of the Green Corn Moon. Rachel is digging, pulling out a network of greenbrier roots. She keeps well clear of the poison ivy, but she has a helper, a big sunburned man called Gabe, who must be one of those who are not poisoned by it—he has spent much of this day hacking down its twining trunks and hauling up its roots. The sun is low in the sky now, but he is still pulling poison ivy out of the cherry trees, compulsive, unharmed.

“The tide’s coming in, Gabe,” Rachel says. “Better go home, or you’ll be stuck here for hours.”

“I’m going,” he says. “But look, here are the trees I brought from the nursery. On sale—and all native.”

He leads Rachel to his truck, and the group of little trees he has unloaded from it, all in pots. The wolflike dog, who has been lying in the shade, gets to its feet and pads after them.

“Two crab apples,” Gabe says, “two more junipers, a river birch, another arrowwood. And a little orphan guy, there’s not much demand for them—a bitternut hickory.”

“Great,” Rachel says.

“Oh, and there’s this,” Gabe says.

He reaches in through the front window of his truck. “My guys found it this afternoon when they were edging the driveway, just where your land starts. They thought you should have it.”

And he hands her the head of my tomahawk.

I did not expect this. For a moment I am lost in a sound like the sigh of the wind, the breath of the sea.

Beside Rachel, the wolflike dog barks suddenly, loudly.

“Shut up, Pan,” Rachel says.

“Looks like an Indian axe head,” Gabe says. “Should go to their museum, I guess, if it’s some sort of sacred object.”

“You’re right,” Rachel says. “Thank you.”

She holds the axe head as he drives away, running her fingers over it. The dog watches her warily.

Rachel goes back to the place where she was digging and sits down on a log, looking out at the salt marsh as the water is driven across it by the rising tide. The outer island is already surrounded by water, out there. Every tree along its edge stands out, in the clear light of the dying day. The dog lies down at Rachel’s feet and goes to sleep.

With the axe head in her hand, she sits there for a long time, thinking. She does this often, in this same place. Sometimes I think she is talking to the land in her mind.

Behind her the sun goes down. The water darkens, but for a little while the last rays of the sun linger on the outer island, and its trees are golden. Then the color dies and the sun has truly set.

As she turns back toward the west, she sees me, a figure through whom she can also see the trees and the sunset sky. She catches her breath, and is still.

It is only for a moment. My instinct at first is to hide myself. I am gone again.

Rachel blinks, breathes again, peers at the place where I was. There is nothing.

The sleeping dog beside her gives a great sigh.

“All right, Pan,” she says, and they get up and head for the house. Rachel puts the glimpse of me out of her mind as a trick of the light, and she walks to the house. But she looks back once more before she goes in.

The bottom half of the house is full of canvasses and paints, with two easels, and some of the pictures that Rachel has painted, here and elsewhere. They show the salt marsh in every mood and weather. Some include birds, and other creatures, though very few of them include people. She is a good painter.

She does not sleep well that night. Dreams flicker in and out of her mind, dreams of snow and summer, of a bow and a tomahawk, of deer and of a wolf like her dog Pan; dreams of a frozen pond and a slithering eel, a swaying cart and a crowded unpaved street.

She dreams of blood, and severed heads. Twice she wakes abruptly, her heart racing, certain that there is the sound of a gunshot in her ears—but each time Pan is sleeping peacefully on the floor beside her bed.

I am not giving her these dreams, but I can sense them, and I am sorry.

After the second waking, she lies there restless, and at length gets out of bed. It is early morning but still dark. There are no curtains at the windows of this house, and she looks out of the window at the stars.

Suddenly she sees a shooting star streak across the northern sky. Then another. Rachel knows the stars, and now she remembers the summer meteor shower.

“The Perseids,” she says to herself.

The dog gets to his feet, stretches, and makes an enquiring noise.

“All right, Pan,” she says, and she pulls on some clothes and goes downstairs and outdoors, with the dog following. As she passes the table beside her door, she picks up the axe head that has been lying there all night.

There is a wooden picnic table on the grass between the house and the trees. Rachel hoists herself onto this table and lies there on her back, looking up. She sees the dark sky flicker with shooting stars, one after the other, darting across the sky like sparks blown out of a fire by the wind.

“Look,” my father said, that first time, holding me in his arms and pointing upward. “They are your ancestors, Little Hawk. Every year at this time they leap, they dance. It is Manitou. They are saying to us, ‘Look, we are still here. We are watching over you. We dance for you, in our beautiful home.’?”

Rachel watches the meteors for a long time. Sometimes she sees one only from the corner of her eye, but still she sees. The axe head is still in her hands, warm from her skin.

She watches until the sky begins to brighten with the beginnings of dawn, and the meteors can no longer be seen, and then she sits up and swings her legs over the side of the table.

And she sees me standing there, looking at her.

She sees a bare-chested American Indian, in deerskin pants and moccasins, his hair greased up into a scalp lock—but the body has no substance, and through it the trees are still faintly visible.

The dog Pan sees me too. He gives a whimper that is like the start of a howl, a sound Rachel has never heard him make before, and he creeps under the table and lies there on his belly.

Rachel is afraid—I can feel her fear—but she doesn’t run, she doesn’t move. She sits there gazing back at me with the axe head in her hands, for a long time. Her knuckles are white, she is gripping the axe so hard.

But very gradually the hands relax, the fear loses its hold.

Then she takes a deep breath and lets it slowly out again, and she says, “Who are you?”

“I am Little Hawk. Of the Pokanoket tribe, of the Wampanoag Nation.”

“The People of the First Light,” Rachel says. “Of course.”

Since she can understand me, it does not occur to her that I am not speaking her own language, nor she mine. She is talking to a ghost, without fear now and without question; she is astonishing.

She says, half to herself, “I knew—I knew there was something. . . .”

Then she says to me, “You should be out there with the shooting stars, Little Hawk.”

“I wish I were.”

“What holds you?” she says.

She is a wise woman, even though she is not old. Before I can say anything, the memory of her dreams puts a shadow into her mind, and she shakes her head, as if to shake it away.

“Yes,” I say. “Those things, perhaps.”

She says, “You gave me those dreams?”

“You dream my memories, I believe.”

She holds up the axe head. “And this?” she says. “Does this belong to you?”

“It was mine. It belonged to my father, and to his father before him. It was buried on this land, in a place that we called a memory hole.”

“A long time ago,” she says. “When it still had a handle.”

“Of course. The day I was born, my father came to this island and tied twin stems of a bitternut hickory tree around that axe, to grow together as one and become its handle. And so they did, and it was my tomahawk, as it had been for my father’s father.”

Rachel sighs. “And used in war, to fight the invaders.”

“Not by me.”

But as I say that, I know that it would have been, if I had lived. Unless I had become someone like John.

“Was this your land?”

“The land belongs to no one. The land is.”

“Ah,” says Rachel ruefully, “that’s where we went wrong from the start, isn’t it.”

She slides down off the table. Pan still cowers beneath it, silent. “My dog is afraid of you,” she says.

“But you’re not afraid. Not now.”

“You don’t seem frightening. You seem sad. And . . . tired.”

Oh, I am tired beyond belief. Tired of the memories.

“You will see me only until the sun comes up,” I say, as much to the dog as to her.

Rachel glances out at the marsh. “So . . . the times between night and day, the times between tides. The Celts knew about those too. The hesitations in time, when it doesn’t rule everything. Like the moments that we paint.”

She looks down at the axe head, and runs her fingers over it again.

She says, “I’m trying to take care of this piece of land, Little Hawk. I’ll do my best.”

Something about the tilt of her head reminds me of Suncatcher again.

I say suddenly, “Are you Wampanoag?”

She shrugs. She says, “There are all kinds of tribes in me, most of them from across the ocean. And I don’t belong to any of them. If human beings weren’t so big on belonging to groups, I don’t believe they’d fight wars.”

“But you would fight for this piece of land, if someone tried to take it away from you.”

Rachel smiles at me. “Like you said, the land belongs to no one. The land is.”

It’s like Leaping Turtle throwing a ball back to me, when we were boys. I smile back at her.

The sky is growing brighter.

Rachel sits there for a long moment, looking at the axe head. Suddenly she puts it down on the table and strides over to the group of trees in pots, left by Gabe. She comes back with a small tree in one hand and a spade in the other.

She looks at me. “Is this axe head a sacred object?” she says.

“No. It is my tomahawk.”

“I think we should give your tomahawk back to the land, Little Hawk,” she says.

“It has been buried for a long time,” I say.

“But this time we free it from the memories,” Rachel says. “We plant a tree with it, to grow for tomorrow. This tree.”

It is the bitternut hickory.

As the first blaze of the sun comes up out of the sea, the first light out of the east, she slams the spade into the ground and begins to dig.

In the end, all it takes is one small action, by one person. One at a time.

Time breaks open around me, and all at once there is more light than a hundred suns, more light than I have ever seen.

From somewhere out over the salt marsh there is the faint cry of an osprey, the fish hawk.

Rachel looks for me, but I am no longer there.

She says softly, “Fly in peace, Little Hawk.”

And I am gone to my long home at last, set free, flying high, high beyond the world. High, high, into mystery.