Woman On The Edge Of Time (22 page)

“You must spend an awful lot of time in meetings.”

“Shalom. I get off here,” the old man said. “Make per bring you to Ned’s Point. I’m Rebekah and I live by the east side of the shul.”

Luciente waved goodbye. “How can people control their lives without spending a lot of time in meetings?”

“Don’t you get sick of each other?”

“Staling usually has a reason. But you can always leave, wander awhile, or find a new village.”

“All right, suppose I don’t want to go to meetings.”

“Who could force you? People would ask why you no longer care. Friends might suggest you take a retreat or talk to a healer. If your mems felt you’d cut them off, they might ask you to leave. If too many in a village cut off, the neighboring villages send for a team of involvers.”

“Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head
was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín … He got killed. I was young and naïve and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty … . But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us … idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up right back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off.”

“You lose until you win—that’s a saying those who changed our world left us. Poor people
did
get together.” Luciente rose and made ready to get out as the dipper settled into the grass. She spoke to her kenner. “Locate Sappho.”

“Sappho is located in tent near mill,” the kenner said.

They walked the river path to the south end of the village, where a big tent had been set up. The rain slowed to a fine drizzle and the wind came fresh down the stream. The river was eddying at the turn of the tide, not quite flowing in or out. On a cot under a low roof of canvas, the old woman Sappho lay. She wore deerskin leggings and tunic, large on her and aged, though beautifully decorated with quillwork in soft colors. Gaunter than ever, her face seemed to draw back from the beak of her Indian nose. Her lips were thinned almost away. The skull stood out through the scant hair, pressing the withered skin of her forehead and cheeks. Sappho’s black eyes were dull and Connie was not sure she could see, but still she turned her head from side to side to follow conversations, the heavy head turning wearily on the tiny neck like a seed head on a dried stalk.

“Sappho, here I am, Luciente, come to be with you. I’ve brought the woman from the past.”

“Luciente, child of earth and fire like a good pot. The other I do not know. Leave it.”

“Does she want me to leave?” Connie whispered.

“No, no,” Luciente said in her normal loud voice. “Person only wants not to be made to remember who you are.”

“Has Swallow come? Where is my child?” Her thin voice scratched the ear.

Squatting near the cot, Jackrabbit spoke to his kenner. Then he answered her. “Bolivar is in a floater forty minutes distant. Person is hurrying, Sappho.”

“I go with the tide. Swallow should hasten.”

“Bolivar, hurry up! This is Jackrabbit. Sappho wishes to die soon. Can’t you push yourself?”

“Ram it, my love, I’m coming faster than I can already!” The male voice sounded irritated. “You tell Sappho to wait. Person has no patience. I’m in heavy turbulence. I’m bucking the wind, and I have to keep climbing. Are you so sick of my sleek body you want me to scatter it all over the Berkshires?”

“Swallow is always late.” Sappho smiled into the ceiling of the tent. “Swallow believes nothing will happen without per.”

A young woman with a heart-shaped ivory face and long straight brown hair to her buttocks moved forward suddenly from her position kneeling by the cot. Laying her cheek against Sappho’s scarcely moving chest, she began to weep.

“Louise-Michel?”

“No, no, it’s Aspen! Can’t you recognize me?”

“Aspen? But I remember Louise-Michel and so many I loved … . Aspen, do not weep on me. I want to go out with the waters, quietly.”

“Don’t die! Wait. If you love me, wait!”

A flick of temper crossed Sappho’s face. “If you love me, cut off your hair. Yes, I’ll be buried with your hair.”

Aspen rose and said more composedly, “I’ll go at once and cut it.” She trotted off.

“Why did you do that, you witch?” Jackrabbit said. “That was mean.”

“Person was bothering me. It’s my dying.” Sappho lay breathing hoarsely. “Besides, will make per feel better. You’ll see.”

“Who was Louise-Michel?” Jackrabbit asked.

“Second lover. Good friend. Person had long hair too, but person was strong … . Died diving accident … . I should not have taken a pillowfriend so late. It was vanity. Had little to give … . Same with Swallow. Too late to put in for another child … . Vanity.”

“Not true,” Jackrabbit said. “The power in you has stayed strong. Bolivar has much of you inside that I love.”

“I have made some good tales, no?”

“They will outlive you many generations,” White Oak said from the foot of the cot.

“Luciente!” Connie tugged at her elbow. “If she’s dying, why is she out in the rain?”

“But Sappho is under a tent. Person wants to die beside the river.”

“But why isn’t there a doctor? If she was in a hospital, she might not die, Luciente. She might live longer.”

“But why not die?” Luciente stared at her, with incomprehension on her broad peasant face. “Sappho is eighty-two. A good time to give back.”

“You’re just going to let her lie here in the chilly air until she dies?”

“But why not?” Luciente scowled with confusion. “Everybody gives back. We all carry our death at the core—if you don’t know that, your life is hollow, no? This is a good death. I hope Swallow gets—Now Sappho’s got me doing that. Person’s so wicked and mischievous; Sappho insists today on using Bolivar’s childhood name.”

“Auntie Sappho!” A little kid was tugging at her slack hand. “I come to say goodbye.”

“Who is it?” Sappho’s eyes were shut and she did not open them. “What chipmunk nibbles at my hand?”

“It’s me—Luna. Won’t you tell us stories anymore?”

“Never! Somebody else. But not like me!” A light spasm shook her and left her with her mouth slightly opened.

“In hundreds, in thousands of children your stories have made strong patterns,” White Oak said. “Your stories have altered our dreams.”

Sappho did not speak for a long time. Then she said, “Take me nearer the river. I can’t hear it.”

Jackrabbit and White Oak carried her cot between them. White Oak asked, “Sappho, old darling, is this near enough?”

Sappho did not answer directly but twisted her head. “Take me nearer. I can’t hear it.”

They carried her cot as near as they dared, but still she complained. “Per hearing is gone,” White Oak said. “Lift Sappho carefully and we’ll dip per fingers in. Person will understand.”

Jackrabbit picked her up gently, with grave care, and then slowly knelt, still holding her, while White Oak brought Sappho’s hand down to the water and held it in the current. The
fingers unclenched, the hand slowly opened. “Ah,” she muttered. “The tide is going out.”

“Bolivar’s not going to make it,” White Oak said softly, although Sappho could no longer hear.

Jackrabbit sputtered into his kenner, “Bolivar! Sappho is dying now!”

“Ten minutes, comrade, ten lousy minutes!”

Aspen returned with her hair cut off. She knelt beside the cot, where Jackrabbit had stretched Sappho’s husk of body. Understanding after a moment that Sappho could no longer hear her, she pressed her shorn hair into the old woman’s lax hand. Sappho’s hand clasped about the hair and again her mouth twitched in a faint grimace of smile. “Aspen, child … plant a mulberry tree for the birds that love fruit.”

“Sappho’s not gonna last till Bolivar comes.” A woman’s low voice with the penetration of something worked to a lethal point. “Aspen, sit by that pole. Hush your crying—you cloud my cone.”

“Erzulia, you should have come sooner!” Luciente spoke with reproach. “You’re not in regalia?”

“Person did not send for me. I come only for the death. In respect. Sappho’s far, far into the past, the old loving.”

White Oak said, “Erzulia, can you hold Sappho till Bolivar comes?”

“Scamp to the floater pad. Put out a speed warning and bring Bolivar by zoomer. I gonna cone hard and try.” Erzulia did not watch to see if she was obeyed but sat on the cot’s edge and took Sappho’s fragile head in her long-fingered black hands. Erzulia’s hair was put up in dozens of narrow braids woven into a beehive on her high-domed head. She dressed in a long folded-over skirt of a blue cloth batiked into a pattern of snakes and flowers, leaving her breasts and lithe powerful shoulders bare. Her large eyes glazed over as she grasped Sappho and sweat started out on her broad forehead. Still, rigid, she sat with Sappho’s head clasped in her fingers. Sweat broke out and trickled past her cheeks and sweat ran over her conical outpointing breasts, sweat rose from her in a heat shimmer as if from the body of a long-distance runner.

Luciente spoke softly to her kenner. “Bee, you should come
to the tent. Erzulia holds Sappho by mind lock till Bolivar comes.”

Bee’s voice said, “Can’t come now. In the middle of a test run. I’ll set my kenner for alert when Bolivar lands and run all the way.”

“Watch out, then! Bolivar always overschedules. To do too much oneself all the time is a kind of arrogance.
That’s
why person is late again.”

“Luciente! If person were early, you’d read arrogance into that, Bolivar thinking Sappho could not die without per. Till when.”

“It all seems … funny to me,” Connie said. “A bunch of amateurs.”

“Who’s professional at dying? We each get only one turn, no practice.” Luciente put an arm around her waist.

“In my family in Mexico, people died this way. But in the city poor people die in hospitals. The attendants put up a screen. The nurse keeps an eye on you if she isn’t too hassled … . My mother died in the hospital in Chicago … so scared. Before when she was in the hospital, they took out her womb.”

“We don’t do much taking out. When we do, we regrow. We program the local cells. Slow healing but better after.”

“I haven’t met any doctors. How come there’s no doctor?”

Luciente pointed. “Look! Erzulia is a healer.”

“A witch doctor!”

“You mean that as an insult? Erzulia works in the hospital in Cranberry. They have the hospital for this township.”

“What does she do in the hospital?”

“Oh, person teaches people to heal themselves. Does surgery. Manipulating, pain easing, bone knitting. Erzulia’s skilled! Person has trained hundreds of healers and pioneered new methods of bone knitting and pain easing. There’s a way of setting pelvic fractures in the aged named after per.”

She looked at the tall black woman sitting cross-legged on the cot with sweat pouring down her muscular arms and big breasts and she could not see her as a doctor in a white coat in a big hospital. “How can anybody be into voodoo and medicine? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Each makes a different kind of sense, no? How not?”

She was lying in bed with the doctor going rounds and
cracking jokes for the amusement of his residents over the bodies of the women patients, mostly black and Puerto Rican, whom some female troubles had cast up on this hard white beach, this glaring sterile reef. They were handed releases to sign, carefully vague so that the residents could get practice in the operations they needed. In the bed next to her was a nineteen-year-old black woman on welfare who had been admitted for an abortion in the fourteenth week and been given a hysterectomy instead of a saline abortion. The woman had gone into withdrawal shock, which made her a quiet patient. Nobody bothered about her as she stared at the ceiling. The women with syphilis were treated to obscene jokes. All the doctors ever said to any complaint was, “We’re giving you some medicine that will take care of that.” They did pelvics and rectals seven or eight times in a row on interesting cases, so all the doctors and residents could get a look, all the time explaining nothing. “You’re a very sick little girl,” the doctor said to a forty-year-old woman whose intestines they had accidentally perforated in removing an embedded IUD.

Anger began to blur the scene and she moved closer to Luciente for support, feeling the ground solidify again beneath her. Suddenly excitement blew like a wind through the tent. “Bolivar is down,” Jackrabbit cried out. A bell began to toll.

“What’s the bell?” she asked.

“For death,” Luciente said.

“But she isn’t dead yet!”

“But person soon will be.” Jackrabbit frowned. “Pepper and Salt, it’s not always bad to die, is it? Who’d want to be built of steel and go on living after all the people born in your brooder in your time, all your mems and mates and mothers, all your sweet friends, had long gone down?”

Connie snorted and turned away. The bell tolled through the damp air in waves of heavy sound. Slowly more people began to drift into the tent, keeping away from the side toward the floater pad. Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak hopped out and a person—the voice
had
been male, she thought—about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the
other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia’s, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He wore a knee-length … she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias.

Luciente nodded curtly as he swept by. “Erzulia has been holding Sappho for you.”

“Why not you? You could have!” he rapped out.

“Not with the person from the past in tow.”

“Ummmm.” Briefly he glanced at Connie, his skeptical eyes pale gray and cold as rock. Then he rushed to the cot, embraced Jackrabbit briefly and then put his hands on Sappho’s head beside Erzulia’s hands. After a moment Erzulia seemed to come to and slowly her grip loosened. She rolled off the cot onto the ground. As Aspen supported her, Bee came forward.