Come In and Cover Me (18 page)

The day that Non came. Lynay always came back to it. It was the best of days, before she had lost anything, with everything laid out before her. This was the day that shaped all that followed. It was a sharp point inserted, and the rest of her life flowed around it, shifting and molding to accommodate the edges of the one day.

Her mother was still with her on that day. And she saw her man that day, the first and the best of them. Non's son. He was not a man then, not quite yet. His arms were too long and his waist too thin. She could see the stark lines of his ribs and thought he needed to eat, thought Non and the two thin boys must have stopped because they needed food, although later she realized that the boy was thin because he was always moving, running, throwing. She had drawn close to look at Non, but she could tell that the boy liked her, because he would not look at her while she looked at him. Still, she could feel the brush of his looks like blades of grass on her skin. She had no eyes for him at all. She had eyes only for his mother, who she thought had risen from the earth or from the trees.

Later she had eyes for him. Later the softness in his eyes made her lower her head to his hip bones and taste his skin. Later she would long to feel his hair drag along her shoulder blades and to feel his body press her into the earth.

Later still, she would press flowers over his closed eyes, flowers over his closed lips.

Perhaps that is how it happened. Perhaps that is the pattern hidden under the surface, waiting to be revealed.

Or perhaps she never really loved him. Perhaps she never even noticed him that day. Perhaps he accepted her later only because his mother pressed him to do so.

When things are written in the sand, the wind blows them away. And Lynay's story was written in the earth, hidden in the fickle dirt. So every piece of her story could be blown this way and that, a thousand different directions. Countless possible patterns.

What is true is the bones that lay in the earth. The bones of her man, the bones of her children. So perhaps the best story is the one that is the most pleasant to hear, the story that gives her back something other than bones. We'll say he had loved her from that first moment when she was smitten with his mother, had memorized her wide dark eyes and the fragility of her face. Her small face was far more delicate than her broad, strong shoulders and jumping-leaping legs.

This is what she remembered as her first conversation with him:

“Why did you come here?” she asked, fingering a bone bracelet that shattered only days later, when she went climbing to fetch sage.

He did not meet her eyes. “She said it was necessary.”

“Will you stay for good?”

“If no one argues. At our old home, no one could argue with her. She hopes it will be the same here.”

“You mean because she has power over the birds?”

He shrugged his bony shoulders, still not looking at her. “She does not have power over them. They share the same power. All the women in our family have it.”

“The women in our family are makers,” she said.

His eyes widened and met hers.

“What are you called?” he asked, and touched the cool hardness of her bracelet. She did not move her arm.

Or maybe that wasn't her memory at all. Depending on how the bones scatter, a different story is told. This also could have been their first conversation.

Non was surrounded by the elders, only the blue-red-yellow tips on her head showing. The boy was standing by himself, and no one noticed when she approached him. He was bouncing, up and down up and down, on the balls of his feet. This made his head swing forward and back, like a woodpecker's.

“She is your mother?” Lynay asked.

He stilled but did not look at Non. “Yes.”

“Where did you come from?”

He lifted his chin and jerked his head to the north. “A long way. Over the mountain. Twelve days' walking. We were very strong and fast.”

“She raises the birds?”

His chin was still lifted as he spoke. “They come when she calls. They follow her even when she doesn't call.” He was bragging. “When we left, dozens of them came after us. They pulled free of their tethers, and she had to sing them back to their pen. They covered the pen with five cloths so that the birds couldn't see her leave.”

She did not like this boy. He thought his mother's importance was his own. He was only a duckling tottering behind her.

“Do they follow you?” she asked. “The birds?”

He looked away and focused on his mother and the group of elders.

“My mother shapes the clay,” Lynay said. “She is the maker here, and no one else has the skill. She's teaching me.”

Of course the elders let Non stay. She could bring blessings to the village if she chose, and they needed more water. For as long as Lynay could remember, it had grown drier and drier, the creek shrinking smaller and smaller. Rain was a loved one who visited rarely. The most powerful songs and dances had not lured it home. The last crop of squash had been small and withered, growing like old men's toes on the vines.

And even if Non did not have her power anymore, or even if she chose not to intercede for the village, her boys were fast and strong and intelligent. They would be fine additions. They could work hard in the fields, run fast to catch the hard-to-find game. The older one—the one whom Lynay would choose—seemed serious and quiet at first, while the younger one could not stop smiling. He existed only on the edge of Lynay's days and nights. He was no part of her story.

Or perhaps she liked him better. Perhaps he ignored her and the lack of attention was more attractive than his brother's attentiveness. Perhaps she settled on her owlet only as a second choice, trying to make his younger brother jealous.

Non soon noticed this girl with clay on her hands, noticed the girl was always following her, either with her feet or with her eyes. The others in the village noticed as well and smiled or shook their heads, and even Lynay's mother noticed, although she was not offended. She was at first nervous that this new woman with the straight shoulders and strange tones of the north in her voice would be offended by a girl always lurking around. When Non, unexpectedly, welcomed the girl's company, Lynay's mother was proud and pleased by the attention shown to her daughter.

This is how Non first addressed Lynay:

“Do you want to come closer?”

Lynay could only move her head in an unsteady way. She had been watching Non feed the parrots nuts and chokecherries. The bracelets on her arm clicked together as the two beaks reached for food. Non was often alone—no woman came to grind corn on her rooftop or to weave strips of yucca by her side.

“What are their names?” asked Lynay.

“They haven't told me,” said Non. “But I call this one, the female, Early Waking. I call this one, the male, Empty Stomach.”

It had taken Lynay days of watching before she could tell the birds apart. Empty Stomach was the fatter of the two, and she thought she understood how he had earned his name.

Standing next to Non, Lynay had never been so close to a living bird, not one so still and quiet, where she could learn all the lines and curves of it. Their eyes were perfect circles like bowls, and the colors in the feathers shifted like wet paint in the sunlight. They had patterns of dots around their eyes like ants walking. Four curving toes on each foot, with skin more like lizard than bird.

“Would you like to feed one?” Non asked, and her voice was different from her face. Her voice was gentle, easing into the ears and pooling somewhere in Lynay's throat. She found it difficult to speak with Non's voice in her throat.

“Yes,” Lynay said.

“Hold out your hand and keep the palm flat,” said Non, and dropped four piñon nuts into her hand. Lynay watched Empty Stomach's eyes, how the dark circles inside the yellow swelled and then retracted, pulsing.

Non began to show Lynay the ways to avoid sharp beaks and curved claws. She showed her how to call the parrots, how to win them over, how to be quiet and calm and let them learn to trust her.

Lynay started making small parrots out of clay, playthings only. Her mother did not object; rather, she called them clever and correct. By “correct,” she meant that Lynay had captured the thing well. It was easy to shape a piece of clay to look like a parrot, but it was another thing altogether to capture what made a parrot a parrot. This basic parrot, in Lynay's mind, was about the movement of feathers and the brightness of color and sharp eyes and beak. That had to come through in the paint and the clay. She wanted to capture the softness of the feathers at Early Waking's throat and the lushness of her tail. She wanted to capture that the beaks looked like stone, not like living matter. And yet the beak and claws were always moving and reaching, always grabbing and pulling with the parrot in tow behind.

She was captivated by the birds.

It was Lynay's thirteenth summer when Non came with her two boys. The next summer was the summer that Lynay's mother lost her breath altogether. First she was too weak to reach for the clay. This was a very bad thing, because no one else among them shaped and painted the clay, and her mother had not yet taught her everything. Her mother could not be taken yet. The wise one came and laid his hands on her head, her heart, her belly, to see where the illness was centered, but he could not feel the place of attack. Her mother grew weak until her arms could not lift a water jar and her fingers could barely curl around a bowl. As her mother grew stiller, Lynay also turned immobile. Her mind could not spit out the thoughts that would tell her legs to walk or tell her body to lie down and sleep or tell her mouth to chew. She sat by her mother, and that was all. But by the end all her mother would drink was willow tea, and for some reason this request, this longing for the bitterness of the tea, loosened Lynay's feet from the ground. She and only she would brew tea. She thought of nothing but tea.

There was a skill to making it. She looked for tips with swollen buds and cut them off into lengths as long as from her elbow to her wrist. The buds held the strength of the tea. She ground buds and stems into a pulp, then left the willow mush soaking in boiled water. When the water was cool to the touch, Lynay would strain it through a tightly woven basket, letting it trickle into her mother's favorite drinking bowl, which was smooth and worn and easy for her mother to hold with two hands. She was careful with the straining, catching every bit of twig and greenery, and only a dusting of pollen floated to the top of the willow water. Her mother would drink it down, not very fast, over the course of an entire afternoon or a long uncomfortable night, and Lynay would watch her throat work.

Lynay could never again stand the taste of willow tea after those months.

The tea and all the months of praying and chanting did not work. Her mother went into the ground and on to the next world. Lynay picked the burial flowers. She chose the burial bowl, an old favorite of her mother's that captured the patterns of the wind, and she handed it over to the wise ones, who would place and punch the hole into it that would allow her mother's spirit to escape.

Her mother had told her that makers had been touched by the finger of the Creator, that his fingertip had rested on the top of Lynay's head as she was born and had left the indentation of her soft spot. That was why makers could see the patterns in things—the Creator had commanded the door on top of their heads to open wide so that his voice would be heard. His voice would sound inside their heads, and all manner of other things would pour inside—the way the ripples spread through the water, the lift of a hawk's head, the endless mica bits in a woman's eye, the whorls of a footprint. These things would all come out in the clay.

Lynay did not want to keep her door open. She did not like the sad voices in her head and the pictures they painted. She wanted silence in her head—it was too full. She did not want to let anything in anymore. As she walked down to the water three days after her mother was put in the ground, she remembered what Non had told her of parrots. Their feathers held their power, and if they were killed in a respectful way that pleased the Creator, those who took the feathers would then hold the power. The feathers were plucked from both the wings and the tail, and the power was plucked off along with them. The parrot would go into the next world as something other than a parrot. Its being had been changed. Its gifts had been taken.

Perhaps she could cut off her own gift. Perhaps she could deplume herself and change her being. Close her door.

She walked down to the water and found a sharp rock. Non found her, hair jagged, as she walked back to the village. She had felt relieved from the weight of her hair. Free. Non knelt beside her and called her a word in the language of the north:
multa
. Warrior girl, she said. And then Non brought her back down to the water and washed off the loose hair, passing her palms over Lynay's scalp as the water flowed over it and pretending she did not see Lynay cry. Lynay did not cry in front of anyone else.

“You cannot close the door,” Non said. “It always breaks open again. Eventually. Or you will break open yourself.”

No one mentioned her hacked hair, not even the sharp-elbowed boys who kicked dirt as you walked past, and she suspected Non had something to do with this circumspection.

Here was one question Lynay would have liked to ask the stars themselves—if her mother had lived, would Non have held so much space inside her? After Lynay's mother was gone, Non expanded and filled her whole chest and heart. Until Lynay's man carved out some space for himself in her chest.

Lynay's brothers were already joined to women, and her grandmother had died many years before, so Lynay lived alone for a short period of time in the two rooms she and her mother had shared. She visited Non often, and on one of these visits she saw the two bowls Non had brought from her home in the north. They were not everyday bowls, so they were not left on the roof filled with corn or beans. They were kept inside the storeroom, resting in their carved-out spaces in the floor.