Paula Gunn Allen - The Woman Who Owned The Shadows [Excerpts]

________________________________________

The sun was gray that morning. The color of bored conversation.
________________________________________

Ephanie. Too strange a name, deranging her from the time she first understood its strangeness. Her body, choppy and short, sturdy, was at odds with her name. Ephanie was for someone tall and serene. Someone filled with grace. But like her it was a split name, a name half of this and half of that: Epiphany. Effie. An almost name. An almost event. Proper at that for her, a halfblood. A halfbreed. Which was the source of her
derangement. Ranging despair. Disarrangement.
________________________________________

Turn out the bedroom light. (Among.) Turn on the hall light. (The litter.) Go downstairs. (Of my.) And begin again. (Own things.)
________________________________________

It is dark. But is it night?
________________________________________

"I must wake up completely." Ephanie sat up. Her eyes were huge in the halflight. "I've been asleep for years."
________________________________________

There's a book in front of me filled with pictures of silent tombs and chipped statues and jungles. Like live and dead ideas trapped in a senseless time warp. No wonder jungle people hate the pictures of their worlds. Here and there the faces of Mexican and Central American Indians look out at me. I think I see a sense of knowing on their faces and, of course, resignation. And a nagging sort of shrewd understanding, like Grandma used to have when she told me a story or made supper or helped Grandpa take off his boots. Do they know something I don't? They seem to, and I feel troubled by that look. I peer at it as if I could also know if only I could look hard enough, see clearly, clear my head. If I could remember something. Forget something. Figure something out.

I look again at the pyramids and statues, what's left of them. I read the text that describes the intricately carved walls, those temples of the Ancient Sun.

On the beach near Malibu I once saw their brothers, the new sun worshippers. I found myself studying as intently their bronzed faces, gestures, looks. There is no reason that I can see for that irratating knowingness on the Indian peasants' faces to be found on the others here.

Sun worshippers?

Heliotrope.

My thoughts pause, bound, questions rise to silence and pollute my mind. What in me can possibly meet memories without renewal, can ever disperse the original wind of that mind built into me by my people and my time? Thoughts of broken g-ds don't lead anywhere. They only tell a tale bound to questions. They leave me restless, stupid, unsatisfied, longing for a good still drink.

Oblivion.
________________________________________

Still clear the center of cool that frightens those who do not know the streets of now, that place of solitude and silence possessed of its own deep light. And I, Ephanie, know it is the place that the earthbound call the dark. Yellow and red is the light there. The dance is like that of a petal fall. The way there is by the self-extruded thread of beckoning Old Spider, she who is the guardian of my life, who takes me into memory, into mind. I will not betray that beckoning, whatever it means.
________________________________________

They took oranges. For the juice. They knew how to use them, slit the rind with a toughened thumbnail, in a circle. Peel the small circle of rind away from the flesh. Press finger into the fruit, firmly, gently. So as not to lose too much juice. The juice was precious. It would sustain them. Then put the opening thus made to their mouths. Sucking. When all the juice was thus taken, they would split open the fruit and eat the pulp. And the white furry lining of the rind. Elena said it was sweet. That it was healthy.
________________________________________

Ephanie imagined that climb. The woman finding places to put her hands. Her feet. Tentative, climbing. Tentative but sure. Shaking. She climbed to the place where the rock was narrowest. Where the drop was straight and steep. Dizzy she had stood there, thinking perhaps of her anguish, of her rage, of her grief. Wondering, maybe, if whether what she contemplated was wise. No one knew what she had been thinking. They must have wondered about it. They must have told themselves stories about what had gone through her mind as she stood, wavering, just on the edge of the narrow rock bridge that connected the two slightly taller peaks of the formation.

From there she could have seen the wide sweep of the land, barren, hungry, powerful as it raised itself slow and serene toward the lower slopes of the mountains to the north beyond Picacho and was there lost to the wilderness of tabletop hills, soaring slopes, green grasses, flowers, shadows, springs, cliffs, and above them the treeless towering peak. Where it became wildness. Where it came home.

She could have seen that, looking northward. Where the mountain called Tse'pin'a, Woman Veiled in Clouds, waited, brooding, majestic, almost monstrously powerful. Or she could look southward, eastward, towards the lands the people tended, that held and nurtured them. But probably she had not looked outward. Had not seen the sky, the piling, moving thunderheads. The gold in them. The purpling blue. The dazzling, eye-splitting white. The bellies of them pregnant, ripe with rain about to be born. The living promises of their towering strength. For it she had seen them, would she have jumped?
________________________________________

"A person like her must be lonely," she had heard someone say. And that was half the problem. The other half was secret, hidden dark in the half light of a star.
________________________________________

Abruptly she stood and left the room blue behind her as though pine smoke had veiled his eyes.

"If I could simulate Venus rising. If I were Fortran in three dimensional tones. To be duplicated only symbolically, a half turn executed, a dance that betrays the expectation blooming in my hermano's eye. If only I could be as certain as whatever caused Her creation. And things didn't disappear while I looked at them."

Yes, that was half the problem, she thought. And her name. Ephanie. That stood before her like the emblem of a delphi that in this world could not exist.

"Oh, am I bored with ideas of destiny," she said out loud. "It fills my mouth with the taste of dust. I'm going to get my kids."
________________________________________

She learned to distinguish between confusion and the light. Unwilling yet to betray in any movement the half forgotten message of her mind. Knowing only that if she should walk the unseen path below she would be courting disaster, as when somebody unprotected walked near Old Spider, The Woman's house. But she did not quite believe that disaster could hide behind those dream awakened enchanted eyes,
________________________________________

She wandered through the days like the seasons wandered through her yard, a gift of shadows, wings, dropped suddenly after each hesitance of shadow into shocking clarity. This sustenance, this madness, she countered by turning backwards in the light at evening and speaking to Stephen through half-closed eyes. She made of yesterday a motif, unconscious of this arrangement. But in this way she turned telephones and unmade beds to her advantage. Not exactly a shriek, a terrified scream, but going always in that direction, never hurried, never sure, going as the clock goes, because it has been set that way, a circle. So she tried to make sense out of her days, significance of her nights. To tell time.
________________________________________

As each day paragraphed its way into her mind, he penetrated the cover she had put over her thought.
________________________________________

"You don't understand the finer points of keeping in psychic disequilibrium." She said. Thinking this would reveal to him what many months, movement, silence, had hidden. "I've seen the Thunders," she said. "And they were gold. Their dwelling is the hollowed sky. I saw their chariot. I mix my metaphors with care. Take care to listen to me." Not knowing that what she said made no sense. Filled suddenly with rage that went beyond her fear. Knowing that what she had seen was true.
________________________________________

By day Ephanie dreamed of roses and yellow leaves. She smelled crisp smells that were not always in the room with her, but part of her life. She saw that garden as held in the hollow of the hand of rain. Immanently. Could nearly see how the rainsmell would circle roses like a wall. And that the avenues of sensing she wandered in had no counterpart in the books that walled her. They merely offered the possibility by negation: the null hypothesis. Too well read for her hands or comprehension, she uttered strange sounds. Pretended to be bird calls and jungle light. Bright pain and unutterable wish. In early winter the sunset was dark. The bird people slept early. They were very quiet.
________________________________________

And in the long shade of winter she too saw her own death. "How earth pulls at us. Makes mockery of attempts to move beyond." She saw the resemblance and the significance and the futility of that realization.
________________________________________

Something was out of time, off-paced, as though her heartbeat had developed a trick of beating that echoed itself.
________________________________________

Circles, circles, described on air, beginningless, endless but definitely, each singing its own song, humming its own tune. Stephen did not see the necessity for this rambling, circular, through eddies and swirls of time, politics, astronomy, the moon, all patterned perfectly she knew, though inexpressibly. And listening to that voice, Ephanie understood the ancient nightmares, felt the great slab lowered on witches to unbend their maniacal minds. Longed for such a stone pressing on her own chest, to stop the ache centered there, longed for the certain recognition of her own death in that condemnation. Objective events. Mythic reality. Pied Piper and Buffalo gone to the same place, left only as legendary tracings of other times, less ordered than these, less closed. And maybe still the buffalo would return with the circles hidden now in the sacred secret cave of the four winds somewhere on the eastern plains.

Blindly, then, the object had been to die quietly on the snow. She could understand the necessity of that, but not of Estebanito's refusal to regard her real.

She thought of her body, pictured it painted with the waxen blue of death, of the west where that blue lived. Of blue itself. Sky. Song. Veins. Death. And of cold. How snow shone blue in shadow. And knew the melody of blue. Of wax. Of a body lying inert on the mind of snow. Of how snow took over everything. Possession with a quiet finality. A certainty. An assurance that was not quite allowed in her own life.

I should go west for awhile. Toward the blue. To live with it and come to peace that way. Or to some understanding of the body I knew so clearly in the snow, friend, brother, twin, life that is an echo right now. My life is its own echo. I can't find the source of the sound.

She finally got out of the chair that was at an angle from Stephen's accustomed chair. Got dressed. Went out. This time she locked the door.
________________________________________

Mesas flinging themselves in studied abandon skyward.
________________________________________

Her eyes were shocked by the empty glare that echoed sight.
________________________________________

She stopped and sniffed the air and felt herself grow outward to reach the tuny particles that flowed around her skin. And in the expansion sensed her need to hide. To contract. To wither and blow across parched hills. Mute testimony to a history, a meaning beyond her. Beyond understanding.
________________________________________

If she could slide away gentle into the fog mocking her headlights. Get beyond the tip of the vanishing point, where everything was the opposite, the obverse, the converse, the convection of here. Where the buffalo were. And the children who were danced mysteriously away. Where she could see water. Step into the underworld, undeclared world, or whatever passes for it in this humourless time. And though carandbodyandfeelinglights moved north and west, she was stopped with foot extended on the edge of reaching, of flowing into the fog, Water being just beyond release.
________________________________________

In my mind I run away endlessly away, a charge of energy, a pulse neither thing nor process, but going always, never getting anywhere, like the ocean, I suppose, like the wind.
________________________________________

But over the months she grew to believe that the world was like they described it to be. That it was mostly safe, mostly within her control. How she longed that it be that way, and the rest just her interpretation, her bad dream.
________________________________________

It moved in and out like their languages and their minds, in and out like the belts and kilts they wove, in and out like the clans and families in their relationships, in and out like the dances, the pottery designs, the rugs, in and out like their stories and their lives.
________________________________________

She was obsessed by language, by words. She used the words she had lavishly, oblivious to their given meanings. She did not give them what was theirs, but took from them what was hers. Ever she moved her tongue, searching for a way to mean in words what she meant in thought.
________________________________________

And she'd remember the people she would see in Guadalupe, by the highway, at a bar that was there. They would be out back of the bar huddled around a fire in the trash barrel. Even in the cold they'd stand around, laughing, drinking, having a good time. She knew the city wasn't remarkable for its dark alleys. They were everywhere.

And all around her she sensed what was growing, south, north, west and east joined together, fused together in fear and rage, the mute twin angels binding them above and below. And sleep became a tightening band around the eyes of all the people who could not see, who loved the pain, their eyes open forever, unseeing.

And all around her in that city of pain and grief and foolish, futile, destitute hope, everything was moving, always, always moving. The pall crept eastward across the bay toward the mountains, the deserts, the plains; south through obliterated pastures, hills, forests, crept into the once fertile valleys; slunk across the coastal range and into the sea; and north into the rivers, and southeast. Alongside and over. Beneath. The pall of despair that like a curse shrouded everything of brightness, of clarity. All over the land it grew and hovered. And over and within the sea.
________________________________________

Ephanie wondered if selling out your enemy made you a traitor.

And Ephanie's people weren't exactly her enemy. They had not enslaved her in any noticeable way. They just took care of business, and it that business included her exclusion, well, that was only right. They had to draw some lines somewhere, she supposed. And she wasn't sure she wanted to be part of that rage and destruction that was the full measure of their lives. I have enough of my own, she would think, pondering.
________________________________________

She was determined to make another kind of life. To avoid the pain, banishing. The nightmares, the anger, the fighting, the blood, the silences that shaped her days. She would find life and live it. She wanted that. And death hung like dirty air over the land where once had walked the peaceful ones in the land of California, the golden land rumoured to have been the last dwelling of the Mother, the Grandmother, Earth Woman. Star Woman. The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Where the ancient ones had set their eyes westward and the white ones, the strangers, had followed, destroying everything in their path. For two hundred miles in front of them they had spewed death. Of the animals. Of the birds. Of the reptiles. Of the insects. Of the plants and the herbs and the grasses and the trees. Of the people who died, who still danced and sang and fished. Who gathered wild grass seed. Who lived there still, though in another space. Not this one where the pall crystallized into asphalt and concrete, blood on the sidewalk, blood pouring from hands and faced, from arms and eyes.
________________________________________

Riding the high wind on a sunspun morning
________________________________________

In one of those dreams she saw her mother, walking along the corridor near the wall. Agnes and Ben were with her. They were talking and laughing as they walked swiftly along. Ephanie tried to cross the corridor to them, but there were too many people and they were all walking toward her. She called to her mother, but she didn't look in Ephanie's direction. She called Agnes, she called Ben, but they kept walking toward her and never looked her way. Then they were past her. She turned, looked after them, tried to go after them but they had vanished as though they had not been there at all. She woke then, tears pouring from her eyes. Nobody knows my name she thought. And arose in the fog-chilled early light to enter a kitched she did not recognize, to wander through a flat she did not recognize, to stare at bowls and cups, pottery and photographs she did not recognize, to gaze long into the bathroom mirror under the hard, brittle light at a face she did not know.
________________________________________

But how could she protect him from the years? The pain of knowing that his face, his blood, had kept him from eating food his hands had planted, had picked?
________________________________________

What words were there to describe people who would damage a child beyond repair and at the same time eat the food the scorned scarred one had picked?
________________________________________

She would wake in the middle of the night, calm for awhile before remembering, wondering how she had found her way into a world so cruel, so wrong. And would mock herself for running in her mind from the world they all had made, aping in her sorrow and confusion the tactic taught her by those who used torment as a way of life, a method se had learned all too well, that sucked her courage and denied her its sustenance. That made her forget the ancient secret knowledge of balance between opposing things.
________________________________________

Once she watched blackberries turning ripe on the bush and understood the pain of deepening. The river ran still and silent at the bottom of the yard behind the house she stayed in, and strange flowering plants whispered their profusion around her ears.

She lived then in forests and tangled underbrush, watching the endless rain become an endless blossoming. She saw mountains a few miles away as towering on the edge of vastness. During that time she grew, silent, unaware of the growing, drunk or stoned much of the time, fat, mothering, uncomprehending, stupid and stupefied in her need not to know what it was she was knowing all the same, all along.

The tall trees comforted her slightly, and the enshrouding fog that curled around the forests and the hills making distance a surreal memory not to be believed. Regularly, there was the moon, lost early to the clouded and fog-shrouded sky. There was summer, rain, and little more. There was death. Everywhere. There was longing, carefully kept in the still private place she knew about but never touched.

Teresa came to see her. They played their special rituals through, the blue-eyed woman and the brown-eyed one. They practiced exploring other spaces not known to the streets and the walls. They traveled beyond clocks and any necessity for them. They journeyed in ancient ways, and along new edges of mind and being, hesitant and sure, open and closed to the fog and rain, to the befuddled stars.

And Sally came to see her. To see Ben and Agnes, who grew predictably enough, alive and vibrant, silent and shadowy, spindly and sturdy, growing into distance, into own self's being, away from her understanding, away from her complicity. Each child grew, learning to knit the stories of their lives into something that might be whole, might not shatter with the first tough of monstrous isolation that passed in her time for life.
________________________________________

I'm so scared because it's waiting - something I can't talk about is waiting. It's always been there, in the corners of the room. Everyone knows it's there, and they all just wait for me to do something crazy. Everybody. All my relatives, everybody, just waiting. They're so smug, waiting for me to do something shameful, I know what they say, what they're thinking, my mother, my father, my husband, my brothers, my aunts, my children, everyone. They say that I'm crazy. That I'm no good.
________________________________________

Naotsete said, "Let us have a test to see which one of us is right. Tomorrow, when the sun rises, let's see who it shines upon first. I say it will strike us both at the same time, for we were created equally."
________________________________________

The apple tree had taken much of their attention as Ephanie told Teresa about the hours she and Elena had spent secure within its sturdy branches, dreaming away the hours as girls will, pretending to be warriors or stolen children, or just lying quietly along some thick branch's length, amiable in their long summers. The tree was almost dead now. Only some parts of it still leafed. Ephanie felt fury rising in her at the thought of it lying against the ground, split in two. She remembered the sweet blossoms it had borne, pale and rosy like shells once. Now the old tree could bear no blossoms, no frit. The sight of it made her rage, want to weep. She became enraged at whatever Teresa said, irrationally, a breath taken, a swallow of coffee; a knowing what she was rose in her like lies, like filthy, like the once clean air now burdened everywhere with death.

She knew that she was little more than a complex of molecules, like Stephen had so long ago said, and that those dancing elements were subject to all the vagaries of what she ate, what she breathed. That she was at the mercy of the air, that her thoughts were no more than the after effects of molecules combining and breaking down. A tape, she thought, a program. A biocomputer. A charade. And felt her thoughts leering and jeering at her, a vicious clown within that would not accept her rage, the pain of her grief.

She felt rise within her words and pictures, understandings and interpretations that were not hers, not her, alien, monstrous, other than her, in her, that wanted her dead, wanted her to kill, to destroy whatever was of meaning or comfort to her, like Teresa sitting here, like home, left behind.

She wished she could tear out the monstrous other in her, reveal or find the one within that matched her, loving, passionate, wild and throbbing, but the stiffness in her chestbackarms, anger and contortion face, waves of imprints not so like a machine that they could be changed like a tape, like a record. They were too familiar and warm for mechanical transposition, disorienting her somewhere in the lost space between eye and nerve, sympathetic gaining over parasympathetic, she supposed, but no remedy applied - mechanical, medicinal, or otherwise.

Certainly there was no cure, no rewiring possible to change this lifelong duality, dichotomy, twinning of her own self with a monstrous other. They were so completely intertwined. She hid carefully behind her eyes, suddenly cunning, sly, wary of Teresa's worried regard. She lowered her lids like shutters are lowered during bright day, blinds drawn so she couldn't see herself looking openly through the alien eyes that sometimes took over hers, looked through them. What was wrong?

Within her, no new words, no soft feeling, no magic lens to change, nothing that would diffuse the spasm-intestine coiled in her belly and weighing on her tongue. She could feel her feelings, the ones that were calm, clear, sweet, only like far dim echoes that were rapidly drowning in the waves of unwanted, terrifying, alien rage that surged through her round, round body.

She sat, frozen. Told Teresa that this was happening. Saw herself lost, Ephanie, moving away, clear away from the table they sat at, but fighting panic reaching with her hand and body across it with her eyes, "I am angry, I am furious with you. But it's not with you, this isn't about you, it's what happened when you didn't understand what I said a minute ago, what happened to me at the apple tree, what happened at the spring, about how it's all dying, all filthy and rotting and dying. I'm furious with you. It seems like with you. But it's someone else who wants me to be mad at you - only it, whoever, feels like me. Someone, something, trying to turn my mind, my eyes away from what I saw, we saw, what I said, what I know, about the dying apple tree." Begging Teresa with her silence to understand, to explain what was happening to her now, as they sat, facing each other across the table, the familiar face of her friend so alien, so strange. Teresa, help me. Ephanie prayed silently. Say something I can understand. But did not say that, could not make those words out loud, silently begging, desperate to be understood. She could not speak, could not shape the terror building in her in this strange, strange place. Knowing what she was saying could mean she was losing her mind, was disassociating, projecting, denying, that it was true, but not the way it seemed, that she was losing her mind, her safe fitting within it, it being taken over by something else, something that didn't want her to know the truth that she couldn't fight, she didn't know how.

Thinking, I'm not even sitting here. Someone else is. Then who am I here. Who is she across the tablecloth from me. The panic rising in her lashing her in waves over the length of her body. Because they have taken my body. They have taken my mind. Just like Thomas said. Because I don't live here in me. Because I have nowhere to go. Because I can't get out of here. Because you can't here me, can't understand the danger I'm in. Because it is so real to me here, and it was as real in the apple tree, and in the spring and in the doorway of the house that wasn't there anymore, because they have stolen my name.

And that's what I don't want to know, to see, to say. I am possessed by someone who sees through my eyes, enraged. Someone who wants me to die, to kill. Someone who wants you to leave me to them. She said that to Teresa who sat regarding her with troubled eyes. Ephanie struggled to make clear that all of this meant so that Teresa wouldn't confuse her words with what a psychiatrist would say about her, her fear, with what a psychiatrist had said to her about this same event when it had happened in other times. And as she talked, the room seemed to grow darker, the shadows along the wall moved in to surround her, suffocating. "Let's get out of here," she said. "I can't breathe."

And let the way out, paying for the coffee on the way to the street and open sun, carefully not looking directly through the darkened edges of her eyes, looking instead at windows, ways to buy something shiny, to anchor herself securely to the street she was walking. She and Teresa agreed that Ephanie should be as deeply in this whole experience as possible later, perhaps when they were safely private, because Ephanie did not want to say, there in the face of red and white checked tablecloth and moonfaced strangers, those terrible words of accusation that were clamoring at her tongue, twisting her mouth and throat in the frantic raging efforts to escape her lips. She bit down hard, bringing blood, bringing tears.

Which were not hers but which would be in her mouth, powered by her breath, driving Teresa away, destroying and destroying and which she must never say except in a way that made clear to both of them why they had to be said. Those words that were not about Teresa, never about her, but that came toward her anyway and would fund release one way or another. Better some other way found to say them. Like with the shrink. Who was so far away.
________________________________________

If my own dear mind, the words, the memories, the beliefs, the understandings, if the mesas I see in memory, the water my skin recalls, the food my tongue thinks it tasted, the painful, tearing, ugly, beautiful, loving, tender words my ears think they heard, my mouth thinks it ever spoke are not true, not mine. If I cannot believe that one single thing in me, in my mind, in my body, my brain, is of me, is mine, then how will I know which is me and which is the other, the others, the not-me?

Which is I. Which them. And wondered how she had come to believe herself possessed, how she had known, decided the possession was final. I must be psychotic, she thought. I must be mad. They don't burn witches anymore. Possession does not, cannot exist. That's what the shrink says and I must believe her. Or I'm lost. I'll never be able to live.
________________________________________

I don't know who to be, how to judge anything, I can't come to easy solutions. There's always someone or something in my own life that contradicts any judgment I ever make.
________________________________________

And pondered these things in the night watching the shadows move along the walls, dark on dark, questing in her mind the course of these things, not comprehending what it was she understood, seeing in the light of remembered fires that flickered on midnight mysterious hills around the longago village, some necessary counterpart of home and daylight, of comfort unseen but not less known.

And that was far different from what she had been taught all those years inside a dark box on her knees trying to find comfort in heavy velveteen curtains and knowing joy on mesa, on treetop perch, where she sang to the sun and the clouds, the very sky singing with her, a counterpart to her joyous pealing. Or from the confessional to run behind the convent where she lived as a little girl, to run behind it to the alfalfa field and throw herself down among the sweet blooming stems to hide and watch the sky, the clouds, wheeling. To weep. How foolish I have been, she whispered as she realized what had been done. To her. To all of them. They made me be like this. The sisters at the school. The priests in the box. And clenched her fingers tight against her palm. Helpless with grief. With rage.

As a child there in that alien place, she had learned to believe that the g-d of the boxes would sing, would bless her when she knelt down within their musty velvet to confess and to pray, crossing herself with the sign of disease: "Bless me father for I have sinned." Shrinking inward. Closing off her body like spoiled fruit, trying to feel the sinning, herself in the act of sinning, the accompanying thrill of hot intense shame, of guilt, of release, that she would ever after experience in the arms of her lovers. hoping then that in that progression of emotion, of sensation, would come blessing. Which later she recognized to be what it was, the terrible infestation that had taken place in her own only beloved body's soul.

Kurena, sunrise. Fingers touching thumb. Spreading. Blessing another. Saying, "The sun." Shiwanna, the people who live in Shipap. The rain.

"Bless me, Naiya Iyatiku, for I have been wronged. Make me remember to understand. To send the evil away."
________________________________________

Silent white faces of women whose whole heads and bodies were encased in black heavy fabric. Whose rosaries hanging dark and heavy down their legs clinked with every quiet step they took. Of those white faces, almost always unsmiling. Of those white hands that never touched a child. Of those white faces smiling, tight and stiff, as though that simple expression caused great pain. Who said she must pray. Must ask to be forgiven. Must remember to walk quietly. Never to run. Never to climb a tree. Never to have messy hair. Or a dirty dress. Never, never wear jeans. Must sit quietly at the table. And never ask for more. Who must eat when told, sleep when told, wake when told, play when told, and must never use too much paper to wipe her butt.
________________________________________

Dear Agnes,

I am writing to you to tell you some stories. I hope you will understand what they mean. They are concerned with some things I have been thinking about. And with some of what I have been reading.

You know the joke about how when the whiteman came he had the Bible and the Indian had the land, and now the Indian has the Bible and the whiteman has the land? Well, I've been thinking about that. About what it means. We always laugh when we tell it. And we always know it isn't exactly so. Certainly the Bible isn't ours. Or if it is, it's ours to prove that G-d likes whites more than Indians. We aren't even in it, like the old Duwamish chief Sealth, the one they call Seattle, said.

Anyway, I was thinking about the land. And the food we eat, we used to eat. Before you were born. In a lot of cases, before I was. The way I figure it, they took the land, then they paved it. Cut down the trees. Plowed the plains. You know the story.

They took away our food, and gave us their food instead. Sugar, white flour, macaroni, rice. They took our corn and squash and beans, our herbs and condiments and meat. They tied it all up one way or another. But the strange part is this: they took it and they didn't keep it for themselves. They just lost it.

They don't eat good corn or potatoes or meat or fish. They eat another kind of these things, a kind that can't feed anyone All the nourishment has been taken out of it, one way or another. And that's not all.

After they took our good land and food away and gave us their Bible and their idea of food - sugar, flour, macaroni, canned beans, they came back and scolded u. "Why are you eating that lousy food?" they said. "Don't you know it isn't good for you? And why do you drink so much
booze? Don't you know that Indians can't handle booze? You better learn how to eat right and lay off the bottle!" they say. "We only want to help you so you won't get sick. So you won't keep dying young like you do."

I just want you to know this. So you will be able to understand what's going on. When one of them decides to save you. From themselves.

And, my sweet, that's the history lesson for this week. Are you having a splendid time? I hope so. When you guys come here we'll go to the museum. The natural history museum. That's where they put Indians.

Love to you my dear one,
Mom


So she understood them. The people like Teresa's friends. Who could never replace within what they had lost. When they were tiny. Infants. Toddlers. What she had always known, in spire of pain and terror. For she had been given food. It was not she who was starving. And she understood that they looked out of their starvation eyes and saw Indians. And not really did they see Indians. They saw only their own hopeless fear. Their own unowned rage. Their own unfelt grief. So they hated Indians. Or petted them. Her. Nodding and winking. Cursing and making fun. Scolding in cold, sharp tones. Talking of the victimization they would not own. Themselves who forever died on the bloody, torturous cross. Which in their minds they forever nailed to someone else. Her. Her people. All others who had known real food. Of body. Of heart. Of mind. Don't pity me, she thought. Pity, pity yourselves. Who have always tried to make us believe that only in pain and sorrow, only in rage and weakness, only in selfdestruction and selftorture would we be free.

"They're always telling me what victims we are," she said then to Teresa. "Don't they see that they are even more victims than we are? Do they call us victims over and over so we will believe it? So we will believe that there is no hope, that we are forever and forever helpless, maimed? They tell us over and over how we have been destroyed. Isn't that how hypnosis works? They always should so sure. They write books and make movies about it. How can we escape the snares of pity? Or smiling, gentle eyes? Of sweet, giving, generous hands?"

"Yes, I see what you're getting at," Teresa said. Frowning slightly. "But Indians have been slaughtered, destroyed, forced into being like white people, Christians, slaves, workers. Their land has been stolen, with pitiful amounts left to them. That the government, in its largess, has reserved for the Indians' use. And taken all the rest."

"I know, I know." Ephanie drew a breath. Let is out abruptly. Lit a cigarette. "Of course we are victims. Who isn't? But we have a history too. We didn't just stand there and have all of this done to us. We helped the cause along. We are not victims. We are co-creators. They make it sound like we're poor noble idiots. Who couldn't do a damn thing. But we could have done a lot. Only we didn't understand that there were so many of them. That no matter what they said, they'd wind up with everything. And that's just what's still happening. Now they've got our land and our water and our air, they want all of our power, all of our dignity, all of our ideas, all of our rage, all of our grief. First they said we had to be Christians. Now they say we have to die, to save what's ours. Don't you see?" She looked pleadingly at her friend. Who looked stony at her. Who tried to look friendly. Who couldn't. Who smiled and said, "Of course. Sure. Yes, I see what you mean." But who didn't see, not really. And you shortly after that put on her coat. Saying, "Well, it's been a long evening. I guess I'd better go home." And who left. Shutting the door behind.

Ephanie sat. Still. A long time. Staring at the closed door. Numb. She tried to think, to read, to write something in her journal. But her thoughts were only colors, red and grey, roiling, tumbling, like clouds in the summer at home used to be. Just before a storm. Piling and piling. And she couldn't see the pages of the book she picked up, held stony in her lap. And the pen was a dagger that she stabbed the notebook with, leaving gouges several pages deep.

All that she could hear herself saying, somewhere off in the foggy blue distance of some corner of her mind was that it was hopeless. She could not make Teresa, could not make herself, could not make anyone. Understand. How it was. How it had been. What had been stolen. Taken away. Destroyed, abandoned, poisoned. So that, no matter what, the people would never return to the old ways. The earth, the water, the sky had been stolen away. The dreams had been colonized. Now even Teresa had gone away.

She began to pinch herself brutally on the thigh. Began chanting, almost out loud between clenched teeth, don't let them know, don't let it show. And the words grew and grew in her mind.

Promise Her Anything

Dumb Indian.
Stupid Indian.
Flesh slashing Indian.
Savagebrutaldrunken Indian.
Dirty Indian.
Dirty savage Indian.
Dirty vicious hostile heathen savage drunken stupid Indian.
Injun.
That was what they said. Those were the words. Some of them. The others were nice words. Said with friendly, warm, sympathetic smiles. They worked as well. Perhaps better.
Noble Indian.
Earthloving Indian.
Wise old Indian.
Ugh. Indian,
Who guards the earth.
Who waters it with blood.
Good Indian. Dead Indian.
The First American.
The Vanishing American.
Our Indian.
Exotic quaint American.
Indian,
Thinking about it. About the picture postcard people. They were. They had become. Seeing herself, moccasined, shawled. What it meant to tourist friends. Who only cared for what they had created. Because that was all they would ever see.
Vicious.
Hostile.
Bloodthirsty.
Savage.
Yes. Her blood was thirsty. She was dying of thirst.
"Well," she said to the spider in the corner by the stereo, "one thing's for sure. When that old woman Gayo Kepe cursed, she didn't fool around."
The spider sat. Dreaming. Still.

She Dreams Another Dream

The words rose in her ears, loud and precise, in spite of her efforts at humor. She found herself cringing. Blushing. Skin hot and tight. Smile fixed against her teeth. Must not let them know. I must tighten every inch of flesh to avoid touching anymore, anything. So I won't get anything dirty. Like Sister said. Like all the sisters said. Their pursed lips. Bloodless faces averted from mine. So they won't have to see me. So they won't know.

She finally saw it. Finally heard, loud and clear. What had been done.

And mouth opened wide she began to howl. Wondered where the sound came from. Did not recognize it as her own. Thinking only, filthy, filthy, I will never be clean. I must die, I must kill myself, I must die. Thinking that only by her death could she be veryvery sure not to pollute anyone, anything. My poor babies, she wept. My poor babies. I must die so I won't get them all dirty, With my love. With me.

The wailing went on and on. She wondered who it was, making an un ung-dly noise like that. Did not notice her arms clutched over her belly. Her body bent almost double. Did not notice the water pouring from mouth nose eyes. Did not notice any longer the terrible crashing torrential anguish of muscle, chest, heart, bone. She had a focus, finally, for her grief. For her shame. She knew what she must do. Now.
________________________________________

She lowered the loop over her head, drew it snugly around her neck. Kicked the stool out from under herself with her moccasined toe. Felt the jarring jolt, the knot cutting off her breath. Oh, g-d. What have I done.

Tried to hold onto the rope with her hands. Brain clearing, the red, the fog, moving suddenly away. Suddenly awake, aware of her peril. Oh g-d, oh g-d, help me someone. Tried to wedge herself between the narrow walls, but they were too wide for that. Reached up and held on to the rope, trying to raise herself up on it, like she had when she was a child. Tried to reach the pipe, but it was just out of her reach. Saw out of the corner of her eye a large spider lodged in the far corner of the closet. That seemed to be watching her. I'm hung, she thought. Wanting irrationally to laugh. I can't get down. I can't breathe. I'll die here, alone. Panic rising in her chest, toward her throat. Her almost windless throat. Unless I can hand on until someone comes.

Knowing no one would come. Or not for days. You stupid. Stupid. You dumb woman. Dumb Indian. Now what are you going to do? Die? In such a stupidstupid way. Well, at least they won't bury me a Catholic, she thought. They don't bury suicides in consecrated ground. Maybe they bury us in savage grounds. In the wilderness. In the ocean. In the sky.

She closed her eyes. Trying to be calm, now. Trying to think. How to get down. How to stop what she had started. And remembered the knife.
________________________________________

After she had lay and recovered her wits. Contemplated her actions. Her crazy need to finally do something. Do something final. Something certain, absolute, clear. Realized how close she had come to finality. After she had begun to weep, quietly, with relief, with sorrow, with comprehension. Of what had driven her. The grief, the unbearable anguish, the loneliness. The rage. She realized how grateful she was. For air. For life. For pain. Even for the throbbing pain in her throat.

I did it, she thought. With luck and determination. With intelligence. I almost did it for good. Maybe in a way I did. She turned finally on her back, letting her arms and legs stretch out, and as she looked up she saw the spider, sitting unconcerned like spiders do. It seemed to be approving of her. To be nodding, maybe even smiling. She smiled up at it and said in her husky voice, her first words since she's fallen from her near death, "Thanks, Grandmother. I think I'm going to be all right."
________________________________________

And in the supernal gleam of Her midnight eyes, you will sink, you will drown. You will forget that you have walked on earth, in the haunts of humankind. You will follow Her into Her cavern, into the deep, dark, shimmering hole of Her nest, and you will want to stay. You will never leave. For Her beauty is like that between the stars. It is heavy and sweet. It is crystal and night. It is a blinding light that will enable you to see.
________________________________________

For if such things as she surmised, half glimpsed with the part of her brain that dwelt best in shadow were true, then nothing at all was alive. Not even the sun itself could shine except mercilessly. He had said that. Nothing is alive. How to keep reason in a reasonless world.

What am I doing here? She would rage, pacing, clutching her arms tight across her breasts. What kind of world is this anyway! And fearfully thought she knew.

It's not so bad, she would argue to herself other times. Stephen had been so convincing of that, showing her sunlight, calling it joy. She had thought she hadn't listened, but deep vein and bone had heard. And learned what passed for hope, so. Against her will. Forsaking in his golden eyes the sure knowledge of her own mind and sight.

Within which she no longer dwelt. Marble halls and adobe walls lost, crumbled away. Cold silence of stone. But not living network of flesh and nerve. Not incoming outgoing breath. Even these she understood were not her own. Someone forever else lived within them. But she said nothing about this, not to Teresa, not to herself.

The man had said as he hit her, "Why are you making me do this?" The weight of him. Pressed on her. Her screams making no sound. "Don't let them know," Grandma, Old Woman, had admonished, pinching her leg hard as she fought not to cry. "Don't ever let them know." Fiercely she had said it, and as fiercely Ephanie, the granddaughter, had obeyed. "Bless me father for I have sinned," she so long longed to pray. I don't know how or why, but he hit me and said I'd sinned. Suffocating her, his weight, her words, the ones she never said. Forced between her legs. Hitting her he said, "You'd better smile. Smile now, baby."

Such things did not happen. She knew that. But her heart pounded each time she heard someone on the stairs. She thought instead about coronaries. Often held fingers to wrist, counting, seeing the seconds ticked off through out of focus eyes.
________________________________________

Cool and clear that blue. The sky over. The voices calling Distant that bell and true. Sound of light in the day. She would heed it she said to herself. One fine spring morning.

It was the air. Wet and free. She raised up in hope. Rose each dawn to watch eastward, make an offering of golden corn meal to the dawn. She held it to the sun. She gave it to the wind. She wondered if birds found it later. That nourishment.

The spirit people came and went in the deep of the night, in the bright of the dawn. Ephanie's true name, they said, was Yellow Corn Woman. To feed the birds. To make bright and nourishing the day. She was never sure that they had said that, later, when they were not there. Or was it Stephen. Or the body that groped, pressed on her. Or the dark.

At night, at dark, she counted moons. Crescent to half to full to dark. She wanted to plant at the right times. She did not know how. Often she thought she saw water jars lying broken on the floor. Sometimes she imagined she lived near a spring, in deep, cool shade.
________________________________________

Things not wished for piling up, suffocating, in corners. No entry for the wind.
________________________________________

She knew it had to come together. To knit in an invisible seam. To become whole, entire. In her thought. Her mind. Separation was against the Law. The one that the sun rose by. The one that let water sing. Inside and outside must meet, she knew, desperately. Must cohere. Equilibrate. No one mentioned it. They said it was all within. They said it was all outside. But she was the place where the inside and the outside came together. An open doorway.
________________________________________

Never of Uretsete and Naotsete.
Utset and Nausity.
Iyatiku and Naosete.
Thought and Memory.
Sunlight and Shade.
Town and Country.
Home and Away.
Mind and Flesh.
Me and They.

And so she was locked in. Land locked. Stuck where the waters of the lake long since had been. Where the reed boats long since piled. Locked. Away from light. As she had been locked in musty boxes. Had locked her house against Stephen, fair, light, loved, abandoned, Stephen who did not go toward caves or shadows, who moved within his life like the spirits of the lost Indians she had seen moved within their boats. Gathering.

She had not known when she locked that door what she knew now. Or did it matter. Did anything ever matter. More than that, the spider around her once again grew. Twins. Twins of twins. Drums, heartbeat, pounding. The cave near the path, forbidden. An open door, slanting into a darkened hall. Spiders silent and waiting. Spinning. Spinning. Only she would ever know what it was they spun. They spun it for her. She ached for the cave, for a Grandmother hand, voice, to guide her. For the low sweet singing that would call her into deep, into darkness, home.

And no one would break a waterjar on her grave, either. And there was no knowing where she would go.
________________________________________

Sometimes impatience would overwhelm her. At such time she would grasp the books, piles of them, shout and fling them against the walls. She knew the exercise of painstaiking hunching over undecipherable words, eyes coming unfocussed and following somehow the tangled texts, was senseless, foolish. She already knew, in the secret places in her mind, what was true. But she needed to see some confirmation in the books, from the printing machines, so like a factory had she become, so unlike a cornfield in the wind. In spite of herself she kept on, hunting, dogged, reading each sentence, each word, writing some of them in the slick spiral notebooks she stacked on the floor near her chair.

She seldom wandered far from them. Seldom wandered anywhere. Intent. A hawk readying herself for the kill. She was herself like that, felt the feathers covering her head, felt the piercing dartings of her eyes.
________________________________________

She would at those times feel the fear rise in her. Would beat it down into the place just behind her heart. Sometimes she sang to the empty room, or scattered crumbs from her window for the birds. Much of th etime she slept. And ever, reading, musing, singing mindlessly, praying, feeding the birds, knowledge grew within her like the sun, like the night, growing fat and glowing, growing steadily and serene.
________________________________________

She had never meant to be alone, never intended it. Though others had tried to convince her that alone was her place, she had resisted, fought, bitterly enough sometimes, and always failed. She had finally acquiesced, given in to what she had come to believe was inevitable, had learned to be alone, to love her isolation. She suspected that it would drive her mad, more mad, but she persisted because within the isolation she felt secure. Somehow comforted. Safe. No longer needing to fight anyone, to confront her strangeness, her estrangement, a world in which she did not ever make sense, that did not, to her, ever make sense, a world that was safely confirmed to memories, dreams, ghosts and pages of prints.

Of which she could make whatever she chose. They did not tell her she was wrong, those silent pages, They did not sneer. They did not smile or pat her head, making in their silence opening for her blooming, belladonna, tobacco, nightshade, her blossoming within the shadows of isolation, calm at last, safe utterly beyond tears.

But so long before, she was a child, even while she as young, she had wanted to be together with them all, all the people around her, all she knew, all she saw only in the stores, on the streets, to love and to be loved, but it had never quite happened that way. Because of her perversity, she supposed, because of her shame. Sometimes the longing, the old need so painful that ache, a torrent, a forever rising crescendo would shake her to her bones, the thirst for company, for companionship. But she had given into that need many times, walked that darkling path many times. She knew that it lead to disaster.
________________________________________

She had battled every thought that moved her brain, smiling in the face of everything, conciliating, mediating, trying to think only good, only hope, only bright. Once she had so tried, but no more. She had lost anyway. She did not have the power to resist whatever it was that stalked them, held them hostage to bitterness and to pain. Some things were like that, and nothing could make them change.
________________________________________

For her the sun was a clock, a calendar, like her body, like her eyes that were the meeting place of light and flesh, were circular. Like the winds. Like the sky. Like the entire galaxy that wheeled, holding the earth in her outflung arm. She thought in accretions, concretions. Like pearls grow. Like crystals. Like the earth. She gave up talking.

The curse laid upon her flesh was her gift as well. She knew that with certainty. That was she was always, unendingly, aware of the pain. Of the people. Of the air. Of the water. Of the beasts and the birds. She could not escape that knowledge. In every eye, in every mind, the pain lay, blossoming in bewilderment, in blood. They never knew why they suffered. Nor did she.

All she knew was that they were always dying. And that she was exhausted with the torrential urge, frantic, to make the dying, the senseless, brutal, meaningless, terrible, unending pain stop.
________________________________________

All the ways of fighting [fighting destruction] played into the destruction.
________________________________________

It was just a matter of time. What Grandmother spider had taught, had left them to study in the full measure of their lives. At Guadalupe, recognizing the nature of her silent instruction, they called her Thinking woman. She who is thinking. She who is waiting. For them to understand, to come in their hearts and minds to peace.  The only possible hope. The only possible help. Which was why they waited, that long line of women who had gone before Ephanie. Within the walls, on the cliffs, beneath the mesas, beneath the ground, among the stars. They were waiting for the time when the people would recognize the causes of death, would come to understanding through thinking on the meanings of the stories, of the lives. But the thinking had to be intertwined with open hearts. And not ever with any sort of death.

What made good thinking hard was the lies. That were bonedeep. Every story had been twisted. Even her own. Especially her own. If she could control her tongue. If she could re-occupy her own mind.
________________________________________

The only words she had. The only containers for the food, the water, the soil of recovery, uncovery, discovery. To re learn. To re member. To out back what has been shattered. To re mind. To re think. The beginning so as to grasp the end.

So that stories, similes, piles upon piles of slick, wet, shiny metaphors that would breathe on their own, within themselves, among themselves. had to be made. And all the fragments of all the shattered hearts gathered carefully into one place. Tenderly cared for. Would grow. That truth. The one where all the waters would come together.
________________________________________

She remembered the tale, all of it. The woman who in her arrogance and brightness had taken a fall. From which she had never returned. From which had come the earth.

After she fell, after the birds caught her, after they made land for her, making it secure on the back of the Grandmother Turtle, she had lain, swooning for a time. Then she had awakened and moved around, exploring the land she had caused to come into being. After a time she had given birth to a child, a girl, who, many turns later had also given birth, to twin boys. The daughter had died during labor because one twin would not be born second to his brother, would not be born in the usual way but forced his way into life through his mother's side, killing her. He had lied about it to the grandmother, the woman who fell from the sky, saying his brother had killed their mother, and she had believed him.

Believing him she had taken him with her to her lodge. Had returned for the body of her daughter, leaving the other child, the innocent one, in the forest alone. To live or die as he might. Taking the body of her daughter, she flung the head into the sky, where it became the moon. She hung the body from a tree that stood near her door, and it began to shine, giving the light that in later times would be called the sun. And having done this, she went inside and nursed the baby she had accepted, raising him.

Was it the sorcerer-chief's jealousy, his fear that betrayed her? Or was it her own arrogance, her daring, leading her to leap into the abyss from which there was no return? Ephanie wondered about that, turning the question over and over in her mind. In her mind laying the question against many memories, against the history, against the tales, against the myths. Against her own life. Hours she pondered, slowly growing stronger, more clear, as the light in the room turned to shadows, to twilight, to dark. Still she sat, re membering.
________________________________________

Waiting, she let the light and the tree's blossoms flow into her, the song they made together swell into her chest, into her leg muscles and arm muscles. Into her brain.
________________________________________

Until now, some quality of the light, some sound in the wind. Some freshness, perfume on the air, reminded her, brought back the memory she had for all these years held back, refusing to remember, to see. The tree. Stephen. Elena. Falling from so far. Crashing to the ground. Hearing her mother saying, "Don't climb those weak branches, you'll fall." Hearing the nuns say "Don't race around like that. Be a lady." Punishing her when she forgot the rules and ran, yelled, jumped on the beds and broke the slats. Sending her to confession to tell the father her unruly sin. "Bless me Father for I have sinned. I jumped on the bed. I fell from the apple tree."

"All those years," she said to the deep shadows that clung to the room. "All those years and I never realized what had happened." And now she knew. That what she had begun had never been completed. Because she fell she had turned her back on herself. Had misunderstood thoroughly the significance of the event. Had not even seen that she had been another sort of person before she fell. "I abandoned myself," she said. "I left me." And began to laugh, realizing. To laugh as all the memories came flooding back. Herself cartwheeling through the village. Whooping and hollering as she and Elena galloped their horses along the dusty road, practicing with their ropes to send the whirling loops sailing over the heads of the placid cows who wandered freely on the reservation lands. I was going to be a hero, before I got sidetracked, she thought. I was going to be full of life and action. I wasn't going to be the one who lived alone, afraid of the world. Elena and I, we were going to do brave things in our lives. And we were going to do them together.

And what had happened to all of that? A fall, a serious fall. A conversation a few year later that ended her friendship with Elena. A fear, a running away, an abandonment. But I had already left myself before Elena abandoned me, she thought now. Because I thought I should have smarter than to listen to Stephen's dare. Because I was hurt. Because I was in the hospital for a few days, alone and scared and feeling so guilty. So guilty I never trusted my own judgment, my own vision again. "Yes, my dear," she said out loud to herself, "you took quite a fall." And felt pure amazement at the long time it had taken before she had finally found again the ground.

And how she had tried over all that time to evade the truth of it. Of her arrogance. Of her bravery. Of her pride. Of her attempts to make Stephen responsible for her sanity, her children, for her life. Of his misjudgment of her ability. Of his anger and fear. Of his guilt, that had held him bound to her over all of these years. And of Elena. Of the long buried conviction Ephanie had harbored that Elena had made her fall. Believing that Elena had commanded her to fall when she had shouted that last warning that Ephanie had barely heard and would never forget hearing. All of it flooding through her now, through her mind and through her body. The terrible pain of her chest. The confusion, the fugue she had fallen into for days, for a lifetime, after she fell. She felt them again. And the rope searing her hand as she leapt into the air. And the sharp wrenching of her shoulder as her body jerked against the rope, when the full weight of her jolted along its length. And she heard again the loud snap. The branch split. The branch the rope was tied to had split, spilling her from her height far up in the huge tree onto the ground. Where something had broken, something that had taken her lifetime to mend.
________________________________________

"Sister. Sister. I am here."

Ephanie opened her eyes. Looked around. Saw someone, shadowy, at the bottom of her bed.

"I have come to tell you a story. One that you have long wanted to hear."

Ephanie say that the shadowy form was a woman whose shape slowly focussed out of the swirl of vapor she was cloaked in. She saw that the woman was small. There was something of bird, a hawk perhaps, about her. Her eyes gleamed in a particular way, like no shine Ephanie had ever seen. The woman was dressed in the old way and her hair was cut traditionally, so that it fell in a straight line from crown to jaw. The sides formed perfect square corners on either side. Straight bangs fell over her forehead, almost to her eyebrows in the ancient arrangement that signified the arms of the galaxy, the Spider. It was another arrangement of the four corners that composed the Universe, the four days of sacredness that women remembered in their bodies' blood every month.

The woman wore a white, finely woven manta and shawl, each richly embroidered in fine black wool with geometrical patterns that told the story of the galaxy. Ephanie recognized only the spider among the symbols embroidered there. She saw the woman's thick, snowy buckskin leggings, wrapped perfectly around her calves. She raised herself to a sitting position and with her hand made the sign of sunrise, the gesture of taking a pinch of corn pollen between fingers and thumb, then opening them as though to let the pollen free.

The spirit woman began to speak, chanting her words in a way that seemed so familiar, that brought Ephanie near tears.

"In the beginning time, in the place of Sussistinaku, The Spider, Old Woman, placed the bundles that contained her sisters Uretsete and Naotsete, the women who had come with her from the center of the galaxy to this sun. She sang them into life. She established the patterns of this world. The pattern of the singing, of the painting she made to lay the spirit women upon, the pattern of placing the bundles that contained their forms, of the signs that she made, was the pattern she brought with her, in her mind. It is the pattern of the corners, their turning, their multidimensional arrangings. It is the sign and the order of the power that informs this life and leads back to Shipap. Two face outward, two inward, the sign of doubling, of order and balance, of the two, the twins, the doubleminded world in which you have lived," she chanted.

And in the living shadows that swirled around the spirit woman's face, Ephanie saw moving patterns that imaged what the woman was saying. Saw the corners lying flat, like on paper, then taking on dimensions, like in rooms, or on the outside of boxes and buildings, forming the four-armed cross, ancient symbol of the Milky Way, found on rocks and in drawings of every land. Saw the square of glossy, deeply gleaming blackness that was the door to the place of the Spider. Saw held within it the patterned stars, the whirling suns, the deep, black brilliance of the center of the sun. Saw the perfect creation space from which earth and her seven sisters had sprung at the bidding of the Grandmothers, long ago so far, before time like a clock entered and took hold.

She understood the combinations and recombinations that had so puzzled her, the One and then the Two, the two and then the three, the three becoming the four, the four splitting, becoming two and two, the three of the beginning becoming the three-in-one. One mother, twin sons; two mothers, two sons; one mother, two sons. Each. First there was Sussistinaku, Thinking Woman, then there was She and two more: Uretsete and Naotsete. Then Uretsete became known as the father, Utset, because Naotsete had become pregnant and a mother, because the Christians would not understand and killed what they did not know. And Iyatiku was the name Uretsete was known by, she was Utset, the brother. The woman who was known as father, the Sun. And Utset was another name for both Iyatiku and Uretsete, making them three in one. And Naotsete, she with more in her bundle, after whom Iyatiku named her first daughter Sun Clan, alien and so the combinations went on, forming, dissolving, doubling, splitting, sometimes one sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four, then again two, again one. All of the stories formed those patterns, laid down long before time, so far.

The One was the unity, the source, Shipap, where Naiya Iyatiku lived. The two was the first splitting of the one, the sign of the twins, the doublewoman, the clanmother-generation. From whom came all the forms of spirit and of matter as they appear on earth and in earth's heavens. Which could only come into being in time, the counting, pulsating, repetitive, cycling beat, held in its four coordinating patterns by the power of the three who become seven in all the tales eventually. The forms of flame. The dark flame. The gold flame. The flame of white. The Grandmother flame. The sister flame. The flame of the sun. The fire of flint. The fire of corn. The fire of passion, of desire. The flame of longing. The flame of freedom. The flame of vision, of dream.

In the patterns before her eyes, within her mind, that pulsed and flowed around and through her Ephanie found what she so long had sought. The patterns flowed like the flowings of her life, the coming out and the going in, the entering and the leaving, the meeting and gathering, the division and separation, how her life, like the stories, told the tale of all the enterings, all the turning away. Waxing and waning, growing and shrinking, birthing and dying, flowering and withering. The summer people and the winter people, that ancient division of the tribe. The inside priestess and the outside priest. The mother who was the center of their relationship to each other and to the people, the things of the earth. What was within went without. What was without, went within. As Kochinnenako returning home stepped four times up the ladder, each time calling, "I am here." And on the fourth step, at her words, her sister and cried with relief. And Kochinnenako vanished, could not therefore return. Ephanie understood that Kochinnenako was the name of any woman who, in the events being told, was walking in the ancient manner, tracing the pattern of the ancient design.

Ephanie looked at the face of the spirit woman, eyes drawn there with undeniable force, and saw that powerful, gleaming hawk beaked face changing, changing, growing old, old, until it was older than time. The face of Old Woman, of hawk of butterfly, of bee. The face of wolf and spider. The face of old woman coyote. The face of rock and wind and star. The face of infinite, aching, powerful, beloved darkness, of midnight. The face of dawn. The face of red red flame. The face of distant distant star.

And from that great distance, the voice was saying. In a whisper that held the echo of starlight in its depth.  That a certain time was upon them. That Ephanie would receive a song.

"The time of ending is upon the Indian. So few, so few are there left. So many being killed. So many already dead. But do not weep for this. For it is as it should be.

"My sister, my granddaughter. A door is closing upon a world, the world we knew.  The world we guide and protect. We have ever guarded it. We ever will protect it. But the door closes now. It is the end of our time. We go on to another place, the sixth world. For that is our duty, and our work.

"But we will leave behind in this fifth world certain things. We go so that the people will live.

"Each spirit has its time and place. And it is a certain spirit, a great one, which calls to us now. We go on. The others come behind us. As we go, they take our place. And when they are ready for the next step, others will replace them. For that is the law of the universe, of the Grandmother. The work that is left is to pass on what we know to those who come after us. It is an old story. One that is often repeated. One that is true.

"It isn't whether you're here or there. Whether the people are what you call alive or dead. Those are just words. What you call dead isn't dead. It is a different way of being. And in some cases, in many, the new place, the new way of looking at reality and yourself, is far more valid, far more real, far more vital than the old way.

"I am not saying we want to die. Only that one way or another we live. And on another earth, just like this one, in almost the same place as the one you are lying in, talking with me, the world where your room is, where the city you call San Francisco is. I am also in San Francisco. But it is a very different version of the place from the version you inhabit.

"Come. See my city. Visit me. I think you will like it here. I think you will be surprised to see that death is not possible. That life and being are the only truth.

"Long ago, so far, the people knew this. That was wen they could see the person leave the flesh, like you can see someone take off their clothes. They could see the change. Then old Coyote said there would be death. The people would no longer see the whole of the transformation in its entirety. They would only see the body, first vital, then still. So that they would want to go on from where they were. So they would have reason to think. About what life is, about what their flesh is. So they would learn other ways to know, to see. The katsina withdrew so that you would know their true being in yourself. Iyatiku withdrew so you would put her thoughts into your own hearts, and live them as was intended by All That Moves.

"The story of the people and the spirits, the story of the earth, is the story of what moves, what moves on, what patterns, what dances, what sings, what balances, so life can be felt and known. The story of life is the story of moving. Of moving on.

"Your place in the great circling spiral is to help in that story, in that work. To pass on to those who can understand what you have learned, what you know.

"It is for this reason you have endured. That you have tried to understand. When you give away what is in your basket, when what you have given takes root, when it dances, it sings on the earth. Give it to your sister, Teresa. The one who waits. She is ready to know.

"The stories of the old ones, of Utset, Iyatiku and Naotsete, of corn sister and sun sister and of the Spider, shadow sister, is just that. Each gives over what she has and goes on.

"Pass it on, little one. Pass it on. That is the lesson of the giveaways that all the people honor. That is the story of life here where we are and where you are. It is all the same. Grow, move, give, move. That is why they are always leaving. And always coming home. Why it is so that every going out is a coming in. Why every giving is a getting. Every particle in creation knows this. And only the human beings grieve about it. Because only the human beings have forgotten how to live.

"Jump.

"Fall.

"Little sister, you have jumped. You have fallen. You have been brave, but you have misunderstood. So you have learned. How to jump. How to fall. How to learn. How to understand.

"We are asking you to jump again. To fall into this world like the old one, the one you call Anciena, sky woman, jumped, fell, and began in a world that was new."

And the corners grew endless to fill the room. To surround Ephanie and the woman who sat near her on the bed. They grew larger, somehow brighter but with no more light than before, growing, filled, filling her mind and her eyes, her body and her heart with dreams.

And There Was The Spider

And she dreamed. About the women who had lived, long ago, hame haa. Who had lived near caves, near streams. Who had known magic far beyond the simple charms and spells the moderns knew. Who were the Spider. The Spider Medicine Society. The women who created, the women who directed people upon their true paths. The women who healed. The women who sang.

And she understood. For those women, so long lost to her, who she had longed and wept for, unknowing, were the double women, the women who never married, who held power like the Clanuncle, like the power of priests, the medicine men. Who were not mothers, but who were sisters, born of the same mind, the same spirit. They called each other sister. They were called Grandmother by those who called on them for aid, for knowledge, for comfort, for care.

Who never used their power to coerce. Who waited patient, weaving, silent. Who acted when called on. Who disappeared. Who never abused. Who never allowed themselves to be abused. Who sang.

And in the dream she opened her eyes. Hearing a bird sing. She looked out of her window. Believing she was home, in Guadalupe, that the golden sun was in the window, that the tall trees were singing to the birds, that the birds were singing to the trees.

She sat up, gazing at the window. From which foggy light streamed. She brushed back her untamed hair with a strong, thin hand. The turquoise ring on her finger shone, dully it gleamed. She saw a white, hand-woven shawl, heavily embroidered with black and white designs lying crumped on the bottom of the bed. She stared at it for a moment, hearing the birds, hearing a chant in her mind, feeling it throbbing at her throat, feeling the drum resonant and deep in her chest. She leaned forward and reached for the shawl. Wrapped it around her shoulders and chest. She lay back down on the pillow. Eyes wide open she lay. Remembering her dream.

Re membering all the wakings of her life. All the goings to sleep. Re membering, humming quietly to herself, in her throat, in her mind she lay. Understanding at last that everything belonged to the wind.

Knowing that only without interference can the people learn and grow and become what they had within themselves to be. For the measure of her life, of all their lives, was discovering what she, they, were made of. What she, they, could do. And what consequences their doing created, and what they would create of these.

And remembered the voice of the woman, who sat in the shadows and spoke, saying "There are no curses. There are only descriptions of what creations there will be."

And in the silence and quieting shadows of her room, in her bed surrounded by books and notebooks and silence and dust, she thought. And the spiders in the walls, on the ceiling, in the corners, beneath the bed and under the chair began to gather. Their humming, quiet at first, grew louder, filling all of the spaces of the room. Their presence grew around her. She did not move.

And around her the room filled with shadows. And the shadows became shapes. And the shapes became women singing. Singing and dancing in the ancient steps of the women, the Spider. Singing they stepped, slowly, in careful balance of dignity, of harmony, of respect. They stepped and they sang. And she began to sing with them. With her shawl wrapped around her shoulders in the way of the women since time immemorial, she wrapped her shawl and joined the dance. She heard the singing. She entered the son.

I am walking  / Alive
Where I Am / Beautiful

I am still / Alive
In beauty / Walking

I am / Entering
Not alone
________________________________________