Authors: Melanie Rae Thon
He knows what his sister would do, knows she would walk in silence with this woman and her seven skinny children and her six scrawny dogs and her multiplying chickens, knows Helen would walk side by side along the tracks to the Rio Sonora. His throat is too parched to speak of God and salvation. Even the chickens refuse to squawk. It is better to go home with the woman and her children, to offer the rice and beans and corn he always carries, to drink their water unafraid, to trust, to keep his faith, to help them cook this food over an open pit, to sit, to eat, to share this meal.
Jay Kinderman knows he will do this—for Helen, with Helen. He will dance with enchanted legs. He will learn every song the children want to teach him.
And he will be the one swayed; he will be the one converted.
My children! Let the night begin! May you all forgive me!
Davia opened the door, and here they were, alive, both of them, home, my precious ones, to help me slice pears and crack coconuts. I touched their faces, and they understood everything had changed, though I dared not tell them what had happened. I imagined how it would be if Helen were their sister, if she’d died today, but they didn’t know it, if they’d been conjugating verbs in French or memorizing the names of tribes, learning to spell, to say, to imagine
Hohokam, Tutsi, Zapotec, Yaqui, Eyak, Gwich’in, Kuna, Maasai, Malagasy
—if they’d been watching a film about birds: snow geese in flight, dancing cranes, emperor penguins emerging from the ocean. Oh, if they heard now, how foolish and blessed it would seem, this life, all of it!
Liam returned to us, just in time, just before dusk, in the hour of twilight. We blessed the wine of every season: white, pink, rose, red. We drank it down, the year to come, the year behind us. We blessed each fruit. We ate because God needed us—our human love, our frail bodies—to restore Him, the Tree of Life, to give God life in the world.
Everything I have is yours!
How slow we are to learn it. We ate pomegranates with shells because on this perilous earth we need protection; we ate dates, plums, olives—fruit with pits—because fear makes a stone, sharp in the belly. We ate figs and grapes—we devoured them whole because God longs to enter us whole, to become one with us.
We sang as trees sing:
Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am what I am becoming.
And the silence between words, our breath, was the fruit of God unseen, too sweet to taste, the fruit of life, ethereal. Three deer came to the back porch and stared inside and were not afraid of us.
Later, our children passed some secret sign between them. Davia rose and Seth followed. Our daughter began to play the piano, low and soft, in a rhythm impossible to repeat, moonlight through fluttering leaves—the wind, and then the water. I was hearing notes, but Davia was listening to the space between them, hearing the song inside her song, the first words of unborn children. Davia was waiting for the one word, the note before the note where she might join them. I was afraid to lose her, but she trembled with pure joy, the bliss of finally going. And then it came. I don’t know how she did it. A single bell rang clear and high as one by one the low notes faded. Davia dove. Davia concealed herself as water.
Imagine the song you would sing if you loved silt, weeds, rocks rippling you. Imagine your joy if you reflected stars, then swallowed them. Imagine if you had no choice as creeks entered you, if you wound slowly through silent woods, then with delight roared down a narrow canyon—imagine the wonder of it all, how you’d laugh and leap as you ceased to be, as you emptied yourself into the ocean.
Never again, never again I, never will I on this world be walking.
This was Davia’s voice, life beyond hope and fear, proof of love, God unfathomable. Seth brought his fingers to the keys in a jubilation of sound, three times Davia’s speed, but with astonishing lightness.
Rain, brilliant rain, water bouncing off water.
I looked at my husband’s hands, the hand that holds the knife, the hand that slips a rib into a child. I felt them here, the children whose lives he’d saved—Sophie, Joseph, Daniel, Remy—Nina, Dorothy, Matthew, Eric—I saw each one of them and all their children; I saw fathers and mothers spared, sisters and brothers not abandoned.
You lived because you chopped fallen trees in a nearby forest. One day you prayed as you walked: Please come, please come. You meant God, death, your mother, your father. But instead you saw blue butterflies, a quick fox, three rabbits; instead, white flowers bloomed along the path, white, with scarlet anthers. Everything here seemed kind. Nothing here wanted to kill you. This was how wind through pine answered: If the butterfly survived the night, why can’t you live one more day, one more hour? If the clouds are part of God and part of you, why can’t they be good? Why can’t they be sentient?
Thirteen hours gone, and Jay Kinderman is learning Yaqui Deer Songs from the children, songs to carry them from here to over there, from this world to the flower universe.
The deer looks at a flower.
The bush is sitting under a tree and singing.
With a cluster of flowers in my antlers I walk.
This is the truth you asked for.
Dressed in flowers, I am going.
Never again I, never will I on this world be walking.
Somehow he has to get back to Hermosillo. Surely Elder Mattea has exposed the depth of his betrayal. How will he explain what he saw here in the wilderness?
I have ears to the wilderness, as I am walking.
Whether I turn to the right or to the left, I hear a voice behind me saying, This is the way, walk in it.
Is this the truth they’ve asked for?
Here in the wilderness, I am killed and taken.
The four boys who have all become little deer brothers laugh at him, his stiff attempts to dance as deer dance. There is a song for his failure:
You who do not have enchanted legs, what are you looking for?
There is sorrow:
The fawn will not make flowers.
There is consolation:
White butterflies in a row are flying.
Helen, if the butterflies survived the night, why can’t we live one more day, one more hour?
My children climbed the stairs, and their enchanted father followed. But the music did not cease. The song surged through wood and wire, a wild river of blood, the throbbing pulse in my skull and pelvis.
I had to rise, or die there.
I came to Seth and Davia in their dark rooms to kiss their mouths and eyelids. They allowed it; they indulged me, my generous ones, my children who are not mine, who do not belong to me, these two who belong to God and rain and river, who saved me with a song, who found the secret chord, who held me even now, floating on the surface of their music.
I kissed them, and I left them; I let them go, my darlings.
I came to my own room, the room where my husband lay on the bed, not undressed, not sleeping. I opened the window to feel snow fall: everywhere, snow—six inches since morning, feathery and light, merciful snow, silent snow, snow that would be fast to melt, snow that in the dark seemed endless. Liam rose and stood behind me, and I leaned back; I let my weight fall against him; I let my husband gently rock me. And in the hour that came at last, in the new day just beginning, I began to speak, and he began to hear me.
My mother was alive again today, but dying, and my father fell as light on the tree where Datiel is hanging. Edith, Efron, Tzili, Judit. Helen drowned today with Seth and Davia, and I couldn’t climb the stairs to save you in the shower. Then you all came home with Amiela and Éva, and three deer stared inside to bless us. Davia played cello and piano while the wind played violin and zither. Seth sang Hallelujah as he walked into the fire. Children with metal ribs climbed trees and leaped to the ground without breaking. Samuel eased Violette into the water, and my father walked in the water beside them. God appeared as Louise Doren. God appeared as hidden sparrows. God appeared as a starving woman who offered her soup and bread to my mother. God became wine, and we drank Him. Edith Spier became herself and bore three children. She called them El Shaddai, El Olom, El Khai. Bertók Spier made a coffin for himself without wood or grief or nails. Lilike saved the son of a stranger, and Juli Kinderman crowned herself Prince of Denmark. Karin answered every question: I’m not afraid; I’m not hungry. We ate pomegranates and plums and apples, and God as fruit sustained us. Karin said, Cecilia is my favorite saint. My mother played her violin while a burned boy slipped free of flayed skin to emerge as owl, and pig, and peacock. Vonda Jean lay down naked on a black sand beach so hot her whole body melted, and the ‘apapane birds sang her name and the dark-eyed man ate fire. Peter Kinderman saw Clare as she was before she knew, before she imagined, and their daughter Helen came home with open eyes to comfort them. Hevel Lok pressed his ear to a child’s chest and heard the boy’s blood roaring. All the hungry birds of Europe landed at Éva Spier’s feet, and she fed them, and she laughed, and my father swore he’d never leave, and then he left us. My mother’s bones washed away in an icy river, but we were not afraid because the twilight came, and the song, and the angels, and we had survived; we had lived through it, and the doll named Anastasia split her own skull to spill her secrets. Our children heard the first word and laughed like God as they became water. They held me, they gave me strength, and I took Helen Kinderman in my arms, and I kissed her leg as she rose, and all her people, all their love and grief, poured into me.
Now, even now, Jay Kinderman begins his long walk back to Hermosillo.
With a cluster of flowers in my antlers I walk. I hear the wilderness as I am walking.
Late, so late. There will be repercussions and restrictions, the ritual of repentance or even a return home—depending. And if that, how will he explain and who will understand him? Only Helen. He was called to go, and made to follow, and the children taught him a song, and the woman built a fire, and the food they shared gave life to God inside them, and they danced with enchanted legs, deer with flowers in their antlers. Helen will understand when he says:
Nobody wants to die, but sometimes little deer brother offers himself to the people. In the wilderness, I am killed and taken. I am not afraid. I am joyful. The bush under the tree is singing. There is no such thing as “I.” Oh, sweet sister! This is the truth you asked for.
Please note: the translations of lines from Yaqui Deer Songs appear in
Yaqui Deer Songs
, by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina, and come from numerous songs. The phrases have been rearranged and juxtaposed (and occasionally altered) in Jay Kinderman’s mind to create his own deer song, a prayer of praise and wonder. He hears the words of the prophet isaiah, too, strikingly in tone with the deer songs.
I am grateful to the Lannan Foundation for providing sanctuary and support in Marfa, Texas. I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts; the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; Corby Skinner and the Writer’s voice Project in Billings, Montana; Bob Goldberg and the Tanner Humanities Center; the University of Utah, especially Dean Robert Newman and the College of Humanities; the New York Foundation for the Arts; The Ohio State University; the Utah Arts Council; the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston; the Massachusetts Artists Foundation; the Ohio Arts Council; and the Centrum Arts and Creative Education Residency Program in Port Townsend, Washington. The faith of these individuals and the support of these institutions have made my work possible. The Avery and Jule Hopwood Award and the Virginia L. Voss Memorial Award at the University of Michigan gave me the courage to begin and the will to continue. Thank you.
I thank my family for their unwavering belief, their extraordinary contributions to research, their joyful reading, and patient listening. Dear Gary, Glenna, Laurie, Wendy, Tom, Melinda, Kelsey, Chris, Mike, Sam, Brad, Hayley—Dear Mom, dear Father even now—Dear Cleora, Randy, Alicia, valerie, Kimmer, Kristi—Dear Jan and John: without your love, there are no stories. Thank you.
To my students who shatter all opinions and challenge all assumptions, thank you.
The blessing of my agent Irene Skolnick’s friendship and dedication has upheld me for twenty-five years. I am also indebted to Erin Harris for her generosity and commitment. Thank you.
To the editors of the journals where these stories first appeared—
Antioch Review, Agni, Paris Review, Antaeus, Granta, Ontario Review, Bomb, Story, Southern Review, Hudson Review
, and
Drumlummon Views
—thank you.
I am grateful to my friend and editor, Fiona McCrae, to Steve Woodward, and to the entire staff at Graywolf Press. Thank you.
Many friends have sustained me through the journeys of these stories. Kate Coles, Christine Flanagan, Caz Phillips, Mary Pinard, Miles Coiner, Antje Lühl, Matthew Archibald, Eric Shapiro, Don Engelman, Janet Kaufman, Diedre Kindsfather, Leigh Gilmore, Lauren Abramson, Michael Anne Sullivan, Alice Lichtenstein, Andre Dubus, Michael Martone, Vonnie Mahugh Day, Glenn and Ginnie Walters, Georgina Kleege, Nick Howe, John Vaillant, Erin McGraw, Roy Tompkins, George Lord, Margot Rogers Calabrese, Bruce Hilliard, Ruth Anderson, Annea Lockwood, Sheila Moss, Diana Joseph, Beth Domholdt, Margaret Himley, Jane Marie Law, David Gewanter, Dev Lerman, Reesie Johnson, Barbara Painter, Mark Robbins, Mary Tabor, Betsy Burton, Matthew and Jenae Batt, Bruce Machart, Randy Schwickert, Larry Cooper, Halina Duraj, Katy Ryan, David McGlynn, Stephanie Matlak, Matthew Pelikan, Ken Miller, Jill Patterson, Megan Sexton, Joel Long, Lance and Andi Olsen: dear friends, for your love and companionship, inspiration and insight, for reading with joy and contributing to research, I thank you.
Melanie Rae Thon is the author of two collections of stories,
First, Body
and
Girls in the Grass
, and four novels. She was named a Best Young American Novelist by
Granta
, and has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Writing Residency from the Lannan Foundation. She teaches at the University of Utah.