Silent Girl (21 page)

Some don't want to live on that street anymore and accuse Mother of having taken the “good” houses. They say she's greedy for disaster, callous for accepting the loss as inevitable and even necessary.

Zunar carves
Death Will Be Our Guide
into a board and nails it above his front door. His parents take it down.

A sense of desolation overwhelms Akin. Everybody is hungry and uneasy, waiting for something, if only the end of waiting. For the first time, he thinks he might die before his life has meaning.

He dreams of the canoes again. Dreams he sits in one, behind a young woman who turns and smiles at him. He hasn't seen her before but he recognizes her, all the same, from a place deep inside him. Her face is narrow at the forehead, wide at the centre, and her dark eyes slant upward. She has wide, frank lips. “Does freedom mean only death?” he asks, but she doesn't answer.

46 AGM
. Akin is alone under the wide, night sky, the only sound the wind – always the wind – as he makes his rounds of Selaville. He circles each house, peering for thieves between rows of parched corn. He and Zunar take turns on guard. They've given each other code-names: Zunar is Fire, and Akin, Water.

His skin gulps down the cool air after the day's heat. Two months of drought, not a cloud to obscure the stars that flicker like the tiny candles Mother leaves in the window when he's on night shift. He tries not to walk a straight path. Randomness is the key, Mother says. Don't be predictable. He and Fire have “brilliant” night vision, can spot a figure, silent as a shadow, creeping in for a beet or a potato.

“If they take it, it's because they need it,” Aapa says. He doesn't approve of policing the gardens, of neighbourhoods hoarding water, food, and firewood.

But it's too difficult to share with everyone without rules in place. Easier to stick to your own neighbourhood and work things out there. The work is relentless and tedious. Once you get a good crop going and apportion the water to last through the summer drought, you want to guard what you have. Not all are as good at growing crops as Mother. They don't mix their fire ash into the soil or compost their piss and shit, even though Mother went from house to house at first, teaching the ones who were interested. Some don't know how to make their water last, either. Selaville is the best place to be, for sure, if you don't mind shaving your head. Mother insists on it so there will be one less haven for lice. Fire says it makes them look tough, like guys you shouldn't mess with. Guys with newly deepened voices and carrot breath.

A scraping noise stiffens his spine. Wild dogs are rumoured to run in packs up island. Fear of them keeps the Snows from venturing out of the city. What keeps the dogs from venturing in? But the noise is human, not dog, from a murky shape leaning over the water tank on a roof across the street.

“Hey,” he says, sprinting toward the house. He doesn't see the one stepping out of the shadows, doesn't see the knife until it slices the side of his face. It takes a moment for the searing pain to register. He puts his hand up to where it burns and pulls it away covered with blood that looks black in the dark. Yanks off his shirt and presses it to the wound. The intruders are getting away but he's too clammy and dizzy to pursue them. He stumbles a few steps and passes out.

“Was the knife clean?” The first words he hears when he comes to, sticky with sweat. Mother, bathing his wound with warm water that stings and comforts at the same time. He's on a mattress on a floor, a fat white candle in a brass holder to his right. The flame fades in and out, making him nauseous. He closes his eyes.

“I didn't get to inspect it,” he says.

“Ha!” Mother said. “You'll be all right.”

“Thank mercy,” Ada says. He opens his eyes to her frothy hair drifting in and out of focus in the wobbly light thrown by the candle. “Don't put any goop on it until I've stitched it,” she whispers.

“He knew what he was doing,” Akin says, “the guy with the knife.”

“Shh,” Ada says as something sharp pierces his skin. His body jerks and he yells.

Mother takes his hands. “Be brave, little boy.”

The feel of the thread passing through his flesh is as hard to bear as the needle but Ada is the one who weeps. “That beautiful face,” she says.

“Ah, it'll give it some character,” Mother says. She kisses his forehead. “I'm proud of you.” He's never fallen and cracked his head open like some children, never stepped on a nail in his bare feet, never given her that until now.

She stays with him until morning light, holding his hand and talking, her words rocking him into a kind of surrender. The wound's slightly sweet and rotten smell lurks beneath the scent of lavender salve. Her voice becomes that of the woman in the canoe. Chloe, of the Mountain People. She hated being tall as a child – no, that's Mother – hated being so white, tried to dye her hair black once but it came out purple. Chloe's hair is black. White is a sacred colour, Chloe says. It represents the direction we pass through to the spirit world, a completed cycle. Having children changes you, Mother says. You forget what you once dreamed of being. We invite you to travel to our land and live with us as equals, Chloe says. I'm out of exile at last, Mother says, and Akin feels lighter. He's not all she has, then.

His face heals into a jagged raised scar that throbs when it rains and makes some turn their heads away. “Because you're thieving handsome, now,” Fire says. “All the girls want you to poke them.”

Akin isn't interested in girls. Dreams of Chloe fill his nights and thoughts of her consume his days. At times he lives in two worlds at once, hearing one voice over his left shoulder, another over his right.

He begins slipping away afternoons, walking the kilometre or two to the edge of the watery lowlands where the sunken city begins. He stares at the deeper, heaving ocean in the distance, searching for the speck that will be Chloe's canoe cresting a wave. He sees only the occasional ship from otherwise invisible
CONAV
, unconcerned with the Snows as long as they stay clear of the base. Zunar comes with him, at first, but staring bores him. As fall dissolves into winter and the surf smacks against the roofs of swamped buildings, Akin goes alone with an urgency to prepare for whatever is to come. Not what Mother groomed him for from the time he was five: the need to fight side by side with her for Snow rights vanished when they won the city by default. Chloe needs him now.

Mussels anchor their crow-black shells to moss-slicked sidewalks at the edge of flooded areas. Akin pulls a few from their bed, pries them open with a knife and scrapes out the meat, exposing the shell's pearly inside. Thank you, he whispers to the mussels. He removes his shoes and shirt, rolls up his pants to the knee, and wades into the tidal pool. Crouching, he splashes water onto his arms and scrapes his skin until flakes drop into the water. Day by day he removes more clothes until he can stand naked in the water and not shiver. All his senses are heightened, the feel of the air he inhales almost overwhelming. Day by day more cells flake off, exposing new and clean pink skin. He won't stink when she arrives. He'll be pure and respectful. No wild dog will catch his scent.

“The salt water is drying your skin,” Mother says.

“Mercy knows what poisons are in there,” Ada says.

Stay out of that water, they both say, as though he's an ignorant child. The word
No
rises from his gut into his throat but he's unable to set it free.

The rain flings itself in gusts against windows and roofs that winter, and food stores are insufficient to get anyone beyond hunger. So many suicides make it hard for even Mother to take solace in there being fewer people to feed. Sometimes at night, Akin catches the loose skin on his arm with his teeth and sucks on it. Thievery of winter crops is high, but Water and Fire don't have the heart to stop anyone from yanking a parsnip out of the ground. Snow Nation is fractured, little pieces of despair among ashes of confusion and fatigue. Chloe takes him to The Land where he lies on a soft mattress of earthy smelling fern leaves, listening to the distant sound of drumming. If, as Aapa says, prayers are visits to a peaceful, still place, his dreams are prayers.

In early spring, Akin catches the flu that spreads like a blaze among mostly the young. His body shakes with fever, his dreams a cacophonous torment until Mother – or is it Chloe? – curls up beside him, pressing cool fingers on his forehead and behind his ears, humming in a soft, low voice.

“The wild dogs have stolen your children,” Chloe says. “You can steal them back with music.” Her words don't make sense. The only missing children have been taken by starvation and disease. Is she scolding him for stopping his ritual cleansing? As soon as he's well, he seeks out his grandfather.

“Dreams are like curtains drawn against a too-bright sun,” Aapa says. “You have to look behind them for the meaning. If my mother, your great aaka, Pilipaza, were still alive, she would help you look behind yours.”

“When the whalers sang their secret songs, did they play instruments?”

“Yes,” Aapa says, surprise lifting his voice. “I'd almost forgotten. Although I never heard them play, they took water drums with them and flutes, rattles. We all sang, you know, not just the whalers.”

“She'll want to hear our songs and see our dances,” Akin says, “and we don't have any.”

Aapa fills an empty can with water and covers it with a piece of a boot. He and Akin carry it down to the water's edge, take turns beating it with their hands and letting out whatever sounds want to escape from their throats:
ah-oh-oh-oh, ay-ay-ay-ay, ah-oh-oh-oh, ay-ay-ay-ay.
Aapa says the sounds have remembered themselves after so many years.

Aaka Katsi and Aapa both come the next day, carrying metal spoons to beat together in time with Akin's drumming. “The visitors will bring smoked fish,” Akin tells them. “They will expect us to hold a feast.”

Aaka Katsi studies him with her tired, patient eyes and smiles. “Will they, now? My mother used to smoke fish. A few elders might remember how. But when was the last time anyone here caught a fish?”

Aapa leaves and comes back with Einar, Narberi, and a canoe. “These young men have never been fishing,” Aapa says, “and I've been too lazy to teach them before. Narberi says he knows where we should look.”

Asalie brings Tandrea to see Akin who has begun dancing while he sings and drums. He dances like the seagulls that gather around him, strutting and moving their heads stiffly from side to side. He mimics the eerie shrieks they make when they circle the air, cries of pain and warning. Tandrea spins in one spot, whirling with her arms in the air until she gets dizzy and falls down.

More and more people show up each day with homemade drums and rattles. They try their own tentative dances, stomping their feet and twisting their dwindled bodies, self-conscious at first. Their voices are pocked with suffering. The songs they send up into the clouds sound like cries to the dead. They ask Akin why the Mountain People would choose the Snows to visit. He most wants Mother to hear the answer, but she won't come down to the water.

“Some say the fever took your mind away,” she says one morning as he slowly pours water onto a porous, old cloth she holds over a large pot. The cloth is folded into eight layers.

“Too thick,” Akin says, his arm aching from the water jug's weight. It takes forever to filter the water and they have to do it every day.

“Just thick enough for the lesson in patience I need,” she says. “I've decided to give you some of my rations. Hunger can cause delusions.”

Her hands are so bony they could be claws. “Then everyone must be deluded.”

She looks up at him with such exhaustion in her eyes he wants the Mountain People to come now, to take Mother back with them and let her rest.

“These people,” she says. “When will they arrive?”

“Soon.”

“And if they don't?”

“Then, they will come later.”

“How can you believe in people you've never seen?”

He shuts his eyes briefly against a sudden sting – she thinks he's crazy, too – and says with more bravado than he feels, “I've never seen the wind, but I know it exists.” He cannot wait for her.

The next day he reveals what Chloe told him to those who come to the water's edge. Recites it, afraid to put it in his own words and get it wrong: “The Mountain People seek the one who will fulfill a prophecy. When the White Wolverine Woman's spirit comes to stand upon the earth, they will find the brothers and sisters from whom they were separated thousands of years ago. It will come to pass at the birth of a white wolverine.”

No one says Akin's mind is missing. They want to know what a wolverine looks like. Akin doesn't know. Some guess wolf. Narberi is sure it lives up island even though he's never been there. Akin visits each neighbourhood, seeking out those tending gardens and feeder fires and those too weak to work. He tells them of the prophecy and asks if they can describe a wolverine. No one can. He invites them to bring songs and dances to the edge of the sunken city. So many show up, it gets too crowded, so some begin gathering on their own streets. Then several neighbourhoods get together to sing, dance, and share food. People begin sitting in hoops again, talking about what this prophetic wolverine might look like and where they might find it. Many shave their heads in hopes it will show the Mountain People how worthy they are.