I Am the Clay (10 page)

The boy woke and remembered his name and where he was. Raising his head and looking about, he felt immediately the pulsing in his chest and chose to disregard it. The wound has healed. How can what has healed become not healed?

He then realized that the woman was not beside him and, feeling a flutter of alarm, rose from the quilts.

The cave was bright with sunlight reflected off the snow. On the cart lay the old man, asleep, his face reddish brown from the fever, his lips and eyelids quivering. The boy saw the black craggy walls of the cave and the opening at the far end and the small furry winged creatures clinging to the ceiling and the walls. He shivered at the sight of them and hurried from the cave.

Where was the woman?

Snow covered the valley and the mountains; a hushed landscape of gleaming white beneath a morning sun in a brilliant blue sky. The valley, about half a mile in width, ran in length for about three miles until it reached the far range of mountains. With a shock the boy noticed the tracks less than thirty feet from the mouth of the cave. Then he saw other tracks. A dog has been here too. Where is the old woman?

Nearby sounds startled him and he jumped back into the cave and poked his head out cautiously and saw the woman emerge from behind a clump of tall brush, the A-frame on her back half laden with brushwood. He rushed forward to help her and felt again the odd throbbing of the healed wound in his chest.

They piled the brushwood near the firepit she had dug the night before outside the mouth of the cave. He asked, “Who made the tracks in the snow?”

“Soldiers. Can’t you see? Those are tracks made not by rubber shoes but by boots.”

“And a dog was here too.”

“Do not let wild dogs come near you.”

“What are those things on the walls inside the cave?”

“You must not go near them. They are the spirits of the cave.”

The boy shivered. After a moment he asked, “Will the man live or die?”

She said impassively, “He will die.”

The boy glanced at the cart and then lowered his eyes.

“There is a small stream on the other side of that clump of brush,” the woman said. “Between the brush and that line of boulders. But it is entirely frozen and there are no fish in it. Even the banks are frozen.”

“What will we eat?” the boy asked.

“There will be something. Under a rock or in the earth. I will find something.” And she set about making a fire.

She put water on to boil and was gone awhile from the cave and returned with things in her closed hands and made a soup of some kind and afterward she and the boy worked a long time gathering brushwood and piling it in front of the cave, leaving enough space between the brushwood and the cave for the firepit but effectively concealing its mouth. Then the woman tried again to feed the old man but he could not keep down the food. She squatted by the fire with a quilt over her shoulders staring into the flames and listening to the soft moans that came to her from the cart.

The boy wandered off in the direction of the stream and found it a few yards beyond the mouth of the cave: a narrow cleft of solidly frozen water that ran from a line of tall boulders at the base of the mountain wall and disappeared into an impenetrable clump of thornbushes. Here the morning sun was concealed
by an outcropping on the mountain across the valley and though the wind had died the boy shivered in the shadowy air.

He approached the mountain wall and found he could slip through the crevice that lay between two of the boulders. Prickly frozen snow covered their surfaces and scratched his hands. Almost to the other side, he bumped his chest and gasped at the stab of pain that ran through him from the point of the wound. He placed a finger over the tear on his jacket and gently pressed down and felt the pain in his neck and head and deep into his chest. It is almost like the first day of the wound. How can that be? Then he forgot the wound, because he had found the point where the stream entered the valley: an ice-covered pool like a small pond at the very base of the mountain wall, not more than a hundred feet from the mouth of the cave.

He looked around carefully and waited, listening. Was that the beating of his heart or was there in the distance the thunder of war? No, it was his heart drumming and thundering in his ears and causing the strange pulsing of the wound. He shivered and approached the edge of the pond and squatted beside it and looked down at its surface of ice that glinted white in the shadow of the mountain. With trembling hands he cleared the snow from an area near the edge of the pond and found a large sharp-edged stone. He held the stone in both hands and stepped carefully onto the ice, which held firm.

He moved cautiously to the center of the pond, where he squatted and began to chip at the ice with the stone.

Thicker than he had thought at first; it took a while to break through.

The coldness of the water stung his fingers and sent a shock through him. His teeth chattered. He could see the pale gelid flow beneath the ice: half-frozen liquid like a thick gray-green soup through which moved sluggishly a nearly dormant six-inch-long silvery fish.

He chipped at the edges, widening the hole. All the time he worked he felt the throbbing of the wound.

Near the pond was a clump of brush. He broke off a long thickish branch and, hacking at it with the stone, managed to split one end, which he then separated into two prongs for the length of about three inches. This he took to the edge of the hole, where he squatted and waited.

A thin silvery fish slid slowly into view, carried more by the tiny eddies of the pond than by its own motions, and the boy speared it deftly and left it beside him flopping about on the ice and then quickly speared two more. He picked up the fish and, holding them still alive in his hands, turned to start back to the cave and found himself facing three dogs.

They stood between him and the boulders. Two large dogs and one small one. Long-nosed, brown-haired, red-tongued, hungry.

The boy, more startled than frightened, remained very still. The dogs did not move. He could hear their short rapid breathing. After a moment he scraped snow from the ground with his shoes and found some small stones which he tossed at them. They dodged the stones agilely but did not move from the boulders.

The boy held one of the fish over his head and one
of the big dogs barked and started toward him. The boy threw the fish as far as he could, feeling as he did a tearing pain in his chest, and the dogs scampered after it. He made his way between the boulders and returned to the cave.

He gave the remaining two fish to the woman, who took them from him without a word. She put snow into a pot and brought it to a boil. She did not clean the fish but put them whole into the boiling water.

The boy squatted by the fire and thought of the small dog on the other side of the boulders. He is not like my Badooki; he has only one color. But he is the same size. Is the spirit of Grandfather speaking to me through that little dog?

The woman let the soup cook a long time and then she and the boy ate it as a hot jelly. But the old man would not eat.

In the late afternoon the woman said matter-of-factly to the boy as she squatted in the mouth of the cave, “We will wait until he dies and then we will cover him with stones in the cave.”

The boy said, “But the dogs.”

The woman said after a moment, “The spirits of the cave will care for him.”

“And what will happen to us?”

“We will go through the valley and the mountains and try to find the camp for refugees.”

The boy raised his eyes and looked out at the narrow valley. “And if there is a snowstorm on the way?”

“The spirits of our ancestors will not abandon us.”

The boy squatted in the mouth of the cave watching the sun disappear behind the mountains and deep shadows gliding across the valley floor. Then he looked in the direction of the stream and there was the smallest of the three dogs standing near the dense growth of thornbush and gazing at him, red tongue hanging from its mouth, tail slowly wagging. A small lean brown part-shepherd dog. The boy could not see the other two dogs. Perhaps they cannot come between the boulders. Am I thinner than those dogs? Only the little one can get through?

The fire had burned down to a bed of reddish-gray ash. The boy looked into the pot. About an inch of the jellied soup remained in it: what the old man would not eat.

Squatting near the mouth of the cave, the old woman watched without a word as the boy took the pot and left it about ten feet in front of the dog and returned to the cave.

The dog approached cautiously, backed away, came forward again, warily sniffed the pot, buried its nose in it, withdrew a few feet, looked around, loped back to the pot, and, knocking it over on its side, swiftly devoured its contents. Then it barked twice and turned and ran toward the boulders and disappeared.

The boy cleaned the pot with snow and returned it to the firepit.

Before dark he went back to the pond and caught four fish. The three dogs were there again and the two large ones scampered after the fish he threw them. The little one remained behind and he tossed it a fish,
which it deftly caught in its mouth and began immediately to devour.

The boy gave the two remaining fish to the woman, who buried them deep in the snow outside the mouth of the cave and in the morning once again cooked them to a hot jelly which she and the boy ate. She held up the head of the old man and tried to force the food into him but he spat it up and moaned. His eyes were red and dry with the fever. She melted snow in a separate pot and some of that he drank.

“He will die tomorrow or the day after,” she said later to the boy as they squatted near the fire. “How strange. I thought the spirits would take me first.”

The boy responded with an odd choking sound.

The woman turned to look at him.

“My head,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Hurts.”

“Where?”

He began to raise a hand, and stopped. His face was strangely flushed. The woman saw him fall slowly sideways from his squatting position, pupils rolling into his upper lids and only the whites of his eyes showing. He lay near the fire in a dead faint.

Trembling, she washed his face with water from the pot. He is burning with fever. From what? The boy opened his eyes and moaned.

“Head,” he whimpered. “Head.”

She carried him to the place in the cave where the quilts lay. As she spread the quilts over him she
brushed against his chest and he stiffened and cried out. Gently she opened his torn coat and wadded jacket and shirt and undershirt and searched for the wound.

She saw it with a shock. Under the right clavicle. Red and puckered and jagged. A foul sickly-sweet odor rising from it. Red streaks radiating from the lips of the wound, and parts of the wound whitish gray and crusty. She pressed gently with her fingers along the ridge of the wound: gray-white gelid fluid spurted through, a thin jet nearly striking her face.

She looked in horror at the wound and put her hand on the boy’s chest. It seemed on fire.

She covered the boy and bathed his face again. He moaned and talked incoherently of the pond near his village turning into a river and Badooki lost in the forest and becoming a small red bird and his grandfather lying in a field of grass gazing through his spectacles at a flying gray mouse-shaped furry spirit. She put more brushwood on the fire and squatted near the flames, a quilt over her shoulders.