Sandra Gail Lambert - Long Past Any Memory - 1528 excerpt

 

 

1528

 

 

My fingers press into clay.  I balance at the edge of my mind.  The excitement rises and wants to spill into bright colors and glare.  It whispers out of my bones and demands that I continue.  It says that I will not fail, that I know enough, everything.

I stop and stare into the morning.  The routine chores of waking will sometimes quiet my mind and keep the edges of things more certain.  Children race past the women pounding acorn meat and circle the fire keeper as he spreads last night's coals under the stacks of pots.  They've been drying.  Soon it will be time to heat the fire with pine.  The tall pines that sway over the meadow of a thousand flowers give the hottest fire, and after the summer storms, I'll send people to cut the hearts out of downed trees.  Across the work yard, my bed companion washes the sleep from her daughter's eyes.  "Little cat," the children call and she escapes her mother to run with them.  My clay workers come close and ask about the day's plan.  I stare.  I stare, and try to answer, but the space around me goes the watery white of the summer sky.  My workers ripple in the air.  I look down.  The bowl between my thighs is half-built.  Nothing else is important.  My fingers stretch over it. 

Each movement of my hands trails a line of sparks.  The work of muscles under tattoos flattens the light running along my arms and throws it into a second, flickering skin.  I remember when I was a child and small enough to hide inside a cypress tree.  It lay over a length of river bank, hollow, ready for the fires and scrapers that would make it into a canoe for my aunt.  My vision narrows and stretches like it did then.  Only now, in the circle of light at the end, instead of the builder holding a wolf jaw steady, ready to cut, I see clay form into coils.  The coils rise out of cupped palms, and fingers, on my far away hands, wind them along the rim of the bowl.  I lick the pad of my thumb to spread wetness on the walls and taste marsh and the smear of dead sponges.  The thumb smoothes the edges.  The structure is disguised. 

I know this clay.  I gathered it from our river.  I can stretch it higher.  I want light to shine through the bowl as if it were our spring water kicked through with sand.  The bowl is moving my hands.  It pushes palms apart and spreads fingers.  It widens inside to fit the shape of my fist.

"Teacher, may I help you?" 

He is the best of them, the most clever with design, this boy from the southern coast.  He wants to take my pot.  I ignore him.  The light is all glint and flash like the first sun after a storm, and I can barely see through it.  I feel the clay rise under my hands.   

"She's stretching it too thin.  It'll break."

"Go get her companion." 

The voices are far away until the boy speaks close to my ear. 

"Teacher, it is finished.  Let me take it to dry." 

Anything I do will hold in the fire.  I can bring the sides higher.  I know it.  The voice in my bones shouts it to me.  I smell the sweat of too many people.  Feet surround me.  They want to take my pot, but I wrap my legs around it.  I hear my companion's voice behind me.  She throws her words through the air and sounds harsher than I've ever heard. 

"You, take this skin and wet it in the river.  Bring it back.  Hurry.  The rest of you - move away."

I've kept her with me longer than any of the others.  I found her in my aunt's town.  She was holding her daughter's hand, matching her stride to the toddler's unsteadiness.  While I waited for the hide tanner to fetch my aunt's new cape, I watched their slow progress.  She was patient.  I am deer clan.  She is panther.  I could have taken her, but I gave her a choice, and she came with me to this small river with its headwaters that rush out from sunken caves.  The warm orange of her body is behind me, and arms reach around my ribs.  Yes, she can be part of this.  I push her hands lower until the heat between my thighs is as bright as holly berries.  It softens the clay.  I let go of her to reach for the pot, and her arms pull back over my belly and tighten at my waist. 

"I am sorry," she says and clasps me to her.  She lifts us to our feet.  She is moving us away.  The pot is taken. 

I can get it back.  I am not young anymore like they are, but I'm strong – stronger than anyone.  I turn in her arms.  The light swirls around me, hiding her, hiding them.  My fist is still closed, and I push it forward.  It hits with a soft give before it smacks bone.  The arms release, and I'm free.  Other hands reach.  One grips my girdle, but I twist it away. 

Now, we're all here in the dance of the light.  The boy from the south moves to my side, and the gold he wears shimmers.  I can see inside him, his past, the line that brought him here – a hot yellow wind filled with salt and sand.  In front, in collusion, to distract, my companion calls for me in a soft voice.  She carries within her the complicated shadows of my aunt's pole-protected town whose wide, tamed roads spread ambition.  

The boy is too close.  When he appeared this winter, travel worn, in my work yard, I knew he was a potter from the corded strength in his arms.  I mustn't let him get hold of me.  They both dart into the watery rainbows of color between us, and I back away.  Like the chatter of a spring flock, I hear the rest of my people. Their voices scatter over the yard. 

"Child, take your brothers and race to the river.  Then stay and look for clams.  Do it now."

"Move the fishing cages."

"Get that ax out of her way." 

They're too late.  I grab the ax and let the shell blade wave in front of me.  I spread my arms and sway one way before I sprint the other.  I am unreachable.

"Don't trap her against the fire.  She's going to step on the bowls."

My heels warm in the spent embers of last night's curing fires.  They hit clay.  I hear the pots breaking, my work, their work, and I laugh until the colors around me shake.  I will destroy every one.  My last piece is all that matters.  Everything before is inferior.  I turn and jump into the air, ax raised, and linger at the height of the arc.  Time stops.  I control it.  I flick my eyes in a signal for it to resume, and I drop, stiffening my feet for the best impact, swinging the ax down. 

The only warning comes in the rush of yellow just before the full length of the boy is against me.  His leap over the fire throws us to the ground.  The ax is knocked away, and we roll in the earth until I'm pinned.  His body covers mine.

"Release her."  My companion is here.  She will stop this.  The boy rolls off of me, but before I can spin to the side, a wet hide is thrown down.  It covers my face.  It is cold.  There is no air.  There is no light.

*

 

"Did you save it?"  I am not sure that I spoke aloud.  I'm inside lying on my sleeping platform, and the smudge fire under it tastes of sumac and snake root.  I'm not sure if it's been hours or days, but I remember the pot.  I try to wave the smoke away, and my wrists twist against the scratch of the palmetto cords tied around them.