Sunday Morning

By Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake… and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and wither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
… We live in an old chaos of the sun….
~ Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

The deer came crashing, through the close thicket of hemlocks, breaking the stiff fronds of fern blackened by the winter. In the high clear air of early spring the breathing of the animal seemed very near.

The girl Magda put her head to one side, listening. Her hands, which had been searching under the leaves for columbines and wood-violets, waited with the unthinking volition of one who sifts the currents of mountain air not as hunter or prey but as a tree would, patient and quiet. In her hands it remained a stillness without tension, an abatement of active expectation almost, a quantity transmuted from her dark mountain ancestors who had walked through forests far away and from another time where it was never winter, forgotten rainforests where the tropical changes of green called forth the kind of waiting that she now held in her hands.

The deer broke into the little clearing, its head almost level with the girl’s, where she knelt among the wet black leaves. It was the yearling she had seen around this clearing three or four times; once, she had left rock salt for it nearby on the stone beside the alder tree. Since then, it would stand half-expectantly at a distance of five or six yards from her when she passed.

It did not wait this time. In two thin-ankled leaps it bounded past her, close enough for her to touch the fur where the spots were just fading, its tail high and stiff and a little indignant, and it vanished higher up in the forest among the more closely-packed trunks of the pines.

The light thudding of the hooves receded, hut the girls thin brown hands did not move. She frowned thoughtfully across to the opposite ridge, where the early morning light touched the tips of the pine branches with shaggy gold. There was no sound except the hiss of water far below, where Muddy Creek slashed its white springtime path down Ragged Mountain.

A sudden clap of wings rattled the silence, the violence of the movement almost like a shout, subsiding into a whiffle of feathers as a wood-pigeon rose from the trees below.

There was a high quick humming just as the bird cleared the upper branches of an old tree, its still-bare boughs like claws; then the bird seemed to pause high above the branches, as though inviting the claws below to catch it.

The arrow sang, into the silvery-gray throat, and the bird still seemed to hang there, as if it were pinned to the pale air by the shaft impaling it. Its wings were spread, past alarm, and then it plunged into the stand of young firs below. Before it hit the ground a voice rose in a full-bodied sound of satisfaction, and this time came the sound she had been waiting for a moment ago, of feet crackling through the underbrush.

She stood up slowly, picking up by their thin white-green stems, the flowers she had already gathered and piled beside her. She scrubbed the rough gray wool of her skirt over her knees to wipe off the soil, trying to decide whether to go or stay. The area around the young firs was thinly planted, and she wondered whether it was luck or skill that brought down the pigeon where it landed. Her eyes searched among the lighter green of the firs, and she thought she saw a brief, faint streak of yellow that disappeared about a hundred yards down.

She put the flowers clown again, careful not to bruise the pale veined petals of the violets, and once more she started brushing away the dead leaves and the new green of the low bushes, looking for more flowers. She deliberately made the leaves rustle as she pulled them aside, and in her moccasins her feet trod noisily on a heap of bracken; she was not surprised when, after about a minute, she half-heard the quick, quiet footfall beside her.

She was kneeling by the roots of an aspen when the footsteps stopped. Her eyes went upward.

The legs of the hunter were long. The leather leggings extended beyond the level of her eyes. The pigeon dangled from one long dirty hand, and the knuckle of the middle finger was scarred and flattened. The other hand held the arrow; its head, pointing downward, was stained a dull red. The hunter moved the hand holding the arrow and stuck the shaft casually in the rawhide belt around his narrow waist.

She looked up into a pair of bright blue eyes. There were squint lines that fanned out from the corners, beyond the blond brows, but there were no other wrinkles on his face. He was young. “Hey, you an Injun, girl?” His voice was not low, but it was not sharp, either. Though it had a kind of lilt to it, there were no pauses, so that the girl did not know if the hunter was calling her an Indian girl or “girl.” Either way, it sounded quaint and strange because around here no one called her “Girl” except one man, the old mechanic in the house by the creek.

She knew he was looking at the thick shiny black braids that hung down in front other shoulders, and that he made his guess by the clear pink-brown of her bare limbs.

“Forty-ninth Sector,” she told him.

There was a pause in which the man considered this word, as though it were an echo of something he had almost forgotten. “Filipinese, eh? Wasn’t the Philippines one of those islands out near Hawaii?”

The girl Magda felt she ought to correct him, but since it no longer mattered these days, the whole issue having in one moment become obsolete, she only said, “Yes, it was.”

“Your people been here long?”

“In Colorado?”

“Well… here. Um. America.”

She smiled tentatively, “Three generations. I’m the fourth.”

“And what’s your name?” He grinned down at her, and a black gap showed between his teeth, where his first canine should have been.

Seeing the missing tooth as a sudden vulnerability, she became shy, and ducked her head. “Maggie,” she said to the ground.

“Maggie.” The tone in the high, soft voice was unmistakable, somewhere between surprise and amusement, and she dug the toe of her moccasin into the pine needles.

She looked up, a defensive edge faltering in her glance. “People call me Margie. Unlikely as that may sound. But it’s really Immaya. That’s what my father calls me. Where we come from, it means girl.”

“How come you got two names?” The simplicity of the question also made it unanswerable, and she stared mutely at the stranger, wondering again, as she did with the shooting of the bird, what random intelligence shaped this question.

“Hey, how come you got two names?” he asked again. “Nobody needs two names. Not these days. Not any more.” There was no bitterness in his laugh. It was a low, easy sound, and it was with the same easiness that he jammed his scarred hand into his rawhide belt. “Never mind. It’s nothin’. It’s just that you’re the first one I’ve ever met from that sector, I guess.”

“And probably the last. I know. My father told me. There isn’t any more Philippines. Since the oil ran out and the Black Wind came with the bombs….” she stopped, biting her lip.

“Was your father ever there?”

“Once. When he was small. But he was born in Arizona; my grandparents only took him back for a visit there. Soon enough. He doesn’t remember much.”

“Too bad.” His words did not sound unkind.

“That’s why I’ve not two names. One for here, and one to… to remember the other place by. I mean, its up to me, now, to remember for him what he remembers….” His silence made her incoherent. “Actually,” she said more matter-of-factly, “it really doesn’t matter, any more.”

“How old are you anyway?”

“Seventeen.”

The blond brows went up and the generous mouth curved down in a wry smile. His thick yellow hair glinted in the sun. “I was only teasing, you know.”

“I know. You’re the new hunter, aren’t you?”

“How come you know?”

“Is ‘how come?’ your favorite question?” She became bold.

He laughed again. “It should be yours, too, If you want to stay alive these days.”

“I guess so. That what my father says.”

“What’s your father do?”

“Well, he’s sort of the schoolteacher around here. Before we came up he used to be a doctor. He does some doctoring too.”

“Why’d he come up?”

“It was bad in the cities. You know,” she said simply.

“You ever been there?”

“No. I was born here.”

“I have, a couple of times,” he said.

She looked up eagerly. “Where?”

He jerked his thumb vaguely eastward. “Out past Rocky Mountain Way. As far as Uh-hiya.”

“Ohio? That’s far,” she said uncertainly.

“Yep.”

“What was it like?”

“Bad. Like you say.”

“Is it bad everywhere?” she asked.

He grinned. “Not on Ragged Mountain.”

“No. I guess not.” Looking up, she saw the way his eyes traveled lightly over the coarse linen other second-best blouse — it had been her mother’s — down to the thick, rather shapeless gray wool skirt, down her bare legs to the fine deerhide moccasins which her father had stitched up for her last winter. She said hastily. “I better go.”

She bent to gather the pile of columbines and wood-violets. The blond brows lifted, and his blue gaze was as light as blue butterflies. “Flowers?” he asked, and in his high clear voice the mild mockery was light as butterflies, too.

Magda’s own voice became defensive. “Its Sunday.”

“So?”

“They’re for the service,” she faltered.

“Serving who?” He was baiting her again.

She refused to be drawn. “Our Sunday service. At Deacon Carmichael’s. Are you coming?” she asked levelly.

“No thanks. That mumbo-jumbos not for me.”

She was shocked at what sounded like blasphemy, but not surprised, and behind her back she crossed her fingers in the ancient gesture against bad luck that Old Grandmother had taught her. “I have to go now,” she said.

As she ran down the slope towards the water-pasture she heard him call, “Goodbye, Two-Names. And don’t talk to strangers.” And he laughed.

Somehow she was not annoyed with him, only slightly embarrassed. She wondered how he knew about the Philippines, not many people even thought about it any more, and then she wondered about those green shores floating above a salty sea, where, her father said, it was always summer….

As she came to the edge of the hemlocks she saw the Heron Woman chasing after something on the far edge of the water-meadow. The Heron Woman’s white terrier, Christy, was at her heels, and Maggie herself momentarily felt like running across to find out, but she decided to head for home.

When she was very small she used to be rather afraid of the Heron Woman, who had long dark hollows in her face and narrow-set violet eyes that crossed and uncrossed. Like most of the other inhabitants of Ragged Mountain, the Heron Woman had another name, which everyone forgot — they only called her Veronica: but Magda called her the Heron Woman because she was long and thin, and the first time she had ever seen her was on the roof of her house, cleaning out the gutters. She lived off on the other side of the little lake, up in the clearing beyond the Engelmann pines, and she kept bees. She never said much, and this was why Magda was a little frightened by her. When one came to barter some honey she only nodded, and muttered to herself as she broke off the honeycombs. Once, Magda had asked her what she was muttering: “Is it a charm, Veronica?” The Heron Woman squinted down at her, the close-set eyes looking off to Magda’s left side, and suddenly she said, “Eh, what, child?” in a voice that was not terrible at all, but rather low and round, as evenly-shaped as one of her own hives.

The Heron Woman had not always lived on Ragged Mountain. But then people did not ask other people where they came from before they decided to live on the mountain; most of them straggled up from the lowlands, where, they said, life was still bad.

The great tall cities east of the Rocky Mountains were gone now, Chicago and Detroit swept away by the choking dust that covered the prairies from Kansas eastward in the wake of the Black Wind in ’93. It took longer, her father said, for New York and Los Angeles to go: they began dying long before that, the long slow death of cities that drank fifty thousand barrels of fuel a day, until there were fewer cars, fewer mills, only the shouts of people fighting in the echoing canyons of broken glass and peeling concrete, and fires…”I was there, Magda, when a helicopter chopped through the skies over the city. You could see it very clearly against the sky — the gray haze called ‘smog’ was already going then, and some of the blue of the sky was returning. The helicopter… here’s a picture of one, here, ‘egg-beaters,’ they called them then, choppers — … the one I saw landed on the flat roof of the Time-Life Building, and people stood in the streets to watch it. It was the last helicopter to land in New York. They set it on fire. I remember my father telling me that there were so many books that the makers of books even had a machine they called ‘The Claw,’ and it would tear out the first thirty-five pages of books which did not sell. More books than anyone could ever hope to read in three lifetimes….” And her father’s narrow, downward-drooping eyes would blink at the memory of all the blind abundance, and the small, shapely hands would gently close the volume of the 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which would have been precious as an antique even if they had still lived down in the city.

“Maggie, Maggie!”

She stopped just as she was about to turn on to the path leading to their cabin. The short, square figure running with precipitate ease down the slope toward her stopped with equally precipitate suddenness before her. Kyle was one of the towheaded eleven-year-olds who attended her father’s classes, the son of Katrine the Weaver. “Maggie.” he said breathlessly, “don’t forget. Simon Winternheimer told me to remind you. There’s a Listening tonight at his house.”

The boy’s hazel eyes searched her face expectantly. She did not reply.

“Maggie?”

“Yes, I remember. It’s Passover Sunday.”

“You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. I’ll be there, Kyle. Thank you.” She patted him on the head and turned homeward. When she looked back the boy was already bounding towards the water-meadow where she had last seen the Heron Woman. The woman would be there tonight, too, although she hardly ever went to the Meeting. She would be there, dark and unspeaking, her feet tapping gently as she sat straight and unmoving as a poplar’s shadow on a two o’clock afternoon.

Each year, on Christmas Day and at Passover, Simon Winternheimer called his neighbors on Ragged Mountain together for what came to be called “a Listening.”

Simon Winternheimer had arrived on Ragged Mountain some years after Magda was born: a big, clumsy man with thick black hair now turning silver. Among the few belongings he had carried up the mountain with him on his back was a collection of about two dozen records, and a small record player with a crank and a trumpet-shaped speaker.

“This is the oldest model,” Simon Winiernheimer had once told her father, “I brought it because the newer ones with transistors and tape decks and video-pictures — those need batteries, and they run down. I adjusted the speed on this one. But it’s still very hard on the records.” He patted the shiny ancient instrument; it was then almost ninety years old. Sometimes, said Simon Winternheimer, sometimes, in the end, the oldest things are best….

And so, each Christmas night, and on the Sunday before Passover, the neighbors would come down from the ridges and hollows of the mountain — among them were a few children — all of them came quietly, and they would sit on the benches and on the floor and in the loft of Simon Winternheimer’s log cabin in silence while with his thick clumsy hands he would slip Handel’s “Messiah” from its blue-and-gold jacket with painfully understated care.

He would then remove it from its yellowing paper envelope, and then he would take a small white square of felt, fuzzy with oldness, and polish the grooved black surfaces of the disc. Magda knew each time that he had already set the records out and shined them before his guests arrived; but somehow, polishing the record once again seemed to be the right thing to do.

Setting the record on the turntable, he would lift the needle, crank the handle, and set the needle down on the record.

After a tiny space, the warm sound of the record scratching would fill the silence, while the listeners released a small breath as one, and then the throbbing honey-golden contralto of Martha Lipton would open into the hot closeness of the cabin, the voice unfolding like the wings of a newly-born moth spreading in the still winter air: “O though that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee tip into the high mountain….”

Last winter Magda had sat beside Tom Stephenson at the Listening, and she felt a little ashamed because, at the opening notes, she felt, as she always did, the hot prickle in her eyes: an old voice long dead, singing from a Mormon Tabernacle now shattered, calling across the long years.

She looked up at the clear, sharp profile of Tom Stephenson, and he had smiled down at her, smiling past the sharp wetness, and after the Listening he had kept her mittened hand held tightly in his, until they reached her father’s cabin.

But last winter, something else had also happened. Simon Winternheimer’s heavy fingers had at last slipped, and the needle jumped ahead to the tenor recitative sung by Davis Cunningham: “… speak comfortably to Jerusalem.” Not a sound flow out from the narrow lips of Simon Winternheimer, and without a word he set the needle right again, to the Overture; but when it came to the “Comfort ye” solo, there was a little catch, as though the record itself had drawn breath at the small wound, and Simon’s black, deepset eyes sent an empty bright look across the room, the shiny plastic disc seeming to have transposed itself to his eyes, and then he quickly looked down.

Each year, after the Christmas or the Lenten rendering of the “Messiah,” one other record would be played. Sometimes several of the others would have requests, and Simon would quietly choose, all of them taking a long time in the selection; sometimes Simon would ask one of the men or women what they wanted to hear. At his invitation, last Christmas, the Heron Woman moved forward in her surprisingly light step, walking to the front, to the little table where Simon Winternheimer’s twenty-four records were stacked, and she held up the Brandenburg Concerto, Number Four. Magda looked for some sign of eagerness or discomposure in those violet eyes that were presently uncrossed, but she saw that they were expressionless, perhaps a little shy.

Over the past few years, it had also become a custom for people to file out as the last of the music was still being played; there was something painful about hearing the second, and last, record scratch to a halt, and watching the abrupt shyness descend upon Simon Winternheimer as his Fingers fumbled with the silent turntable. So Magda and Tom Stephenson left together, while the sunny notes of Bach’s Brandenburg poured out of the open door, making sudden springtime out of the snowflakes that swirled whitely around them.

Magda walked slowly through the open door of their cabin and set the flowers on the dining table. Her father was sitting bent over the corner table. He was shining his Sunday shoes with beeswax and he looked up as she came in. “You’ve been a long time,” he remarked timidly. “Hurry up and get dressed. You’ll be late for church.”

She looked at the hourglass perched above the fireplace. “Aw, Papa, I still have an hour.”

“You take such a long time getting dressed these days.” His eyes rested on his daughter and then he looked down at the shoes on his lap. “Women,” he said affectionately.

Magda turned around on her way to her room in the back loft, and on impulse she returned to her father. She knelt beside his chair on the finely-ground sand of the cabin floor. “Papa,” she said softly.

He looked up in surprise. “Well, what is it?”

“Papa, there’s a Listening tonight.”

There was a long stillness, then Pedro Aguinaldo’s hands returned to their polishing. “Well, what of it?”

“Papa,” she pleaded.

He looked up again, but the hands did not stop their careful, circular motion. “You know I’m not going.”

“Please, Papa. Incase. It will make you happy. It would make me happy if you went….”

Her fathers small convex face tightened, and the high narrow brow lowered as he said low and fierce: “I am not going back.”

“But it was you who first took me there,” she cried. “I never forgot it, and I’ve gone back there for you, ever since.”

The thin lips pursed and tightened, like a drawstring bag pulled shut, and he turned an obstinate silence toward her. After a long minute she sighed and stood up. “I don’t understand it,” she muttered. “I don’t understand you.”

At the door she turned again to the unspeaking figure hunched over the little table. “You, Papa, you of all people. You’re the schoolteacher here. You taught me to keep things, remember things, even those things I’ve never seen….”

Against his stillness her voice broke, and she said again, “I don’t understand why you won’t go. Last Christmas Simon Winternheimer looked for you. Don’t disappoint him again, Papa.”

Her father said sharply, “He can take it. Disappointment is nothing new to a Jew.” Seeing the startled hurt spring to his only child’s face, he added gently, “I’m sorry, Immaya. What I just said was cruel, and it was unnecessary. There are certain hurts which are cruel and unnecessary, and listening to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ would be one of them. Like Simon, I already know how much I can take.”

She rushed out of the room through the backdoor, blinking the tears away.

Outside, a large vat was burning on a fire beyond the line of the eaves, and the shadows cast by the heat reflected on the ground in waves of ripples, like water on a lake.

Old Grandmother was bent over the fire, stirring into the vat with a large paddle. She was humming tonelessly as she stirred the bear-fat into lye. “It was a mistake to start on the soap before church,” she grumbled softly to herself as the girl came near. “Now I’m out of water. Maggie, child, you’ll have to go down to the spring and fetch some.”

The girl touched the back of the old woman’s leathery brown hand to her forehead. Old Grandmother saw the tears.

“Its all right. Grandmother,” Magda said, answering her look. “I’ll go. You’re coming to the Listening tonight with me, aren’t you?”

“Don’t take it so hard, child. He’s having one of his bad days.”

“I know.” The girl bent over to pick up a pair of buckets and slung a wooden yoke across her shoulders.

The old woman had resumed her tuneless song even before Magda turned away. She was not really Magda’s grandmother, but in spite of her absent-mindedness she was nice to have around.

She appeared on the mountain when Magda was seven, dazed with fatigue and incoherent, her hair falling out in tufts from a recurrent bout of radiation sickness. She had come up from the old broken-down ski resort at Aspen, having learned that there was an Asian family, father and daughter, several mountains away; the father was a doctor…those two items were all she remembered as she stumbled up the mountainside, stopping only to ask were she might find the family. And so they had taken her in. Although the sickness sometimes came on, it was no longer too bad, and her hair stopped falling. There were gaps in her memory, and this was sometimes trying, but she never complained of the hard life.

Magda remembered how, once, as a child, the mists rolled down the slopes late one afternoon and came in through the windows. “Look, grandmother,” she cried, her little-girl hands clutching at the wisps of cloud, “we’re flying! We’re in the clouds!” And the old woman had suddenly whimpered and crawled about on the floor, a high helpless moaning breaking from her throat as she crawled away from the white clinging vapors. In the room the mist thickened like a white blindness, and all that they could hear was the thin wailing, like singing almost, and when the mist finally dissipated they found her under the bed, huddled in a pool of her own urine. Magda was always gentle with her after that, though it never happened again.

The spring where Magda drew the water was one of the small, needle-strewn pools that branched off the upper reaches of Muddy Creek.

Further upstream, half-hidden in a hollow with aspens and firs, was the hut of Cesar-and-Rosalie, perched crazily on its stilts about fifty yards from the riverbank.

As she hefted the buckets from the spring, she heard a curious sound drifting down through the pines from the house — like laughing or singing — and so, after she had adjusted the yoke on her shoulders, she walked cautiously towards the hut.

The hut belonged to the old mechanic and his wife, and they had lived here for some seven years now. Magda knew why they had chosen to build their home in that particular hollow. It was because deeper inside the hollow lay the enigmatic treasure of Ragged Mountain: from where she stood now, she could see it, crouching under its cover of patched oilskin and tarpaulin — a battered old ’51 Chevrolet pick-up which nobody knew how to drive, fix, or handle. Nobody, except the dark, laconic ex-mechanic who had migrated up the mountain and built his house beside the old wreck.

The truck had already been on the mountain when the first resident, old Ben Boggley, now dead, built his hut on Ragged Mountain. No one knew how it had gotten there, or to whom it had belonged. But on the rusty tailgate which used to hang by one hinge, there, in crude letters over the pale flaking paint which used to be blue, were the names CESAR AND ROSALIE.

Thus the truck had come to be called Caesar and Rosalie, and it lay under its patchwork quilt of canvas and tarpaulin until the Mexican-Indian-looking mechanic and his woman made their home on the mountain beside it.

And in time the mechanic and his wife came to be known as Caesar and Rosalie, as though they had subsumed into their collective selves the spirit of the ancient machine.

Cesar eventually became the handyman of the mountain. He was in his late fifties, a sad-faced man with heavy shoulders; he had the light tread of an Indian, and sharply-cut, sloping features that looked as though they had been carved from sandstone. Rosalie was about ten years younger. Her long, straight black hair was almost always in her eyes and she would toss it back with a quick throaty laugh. One did not see her much, except as a swift shadow tracking deer, or silhouetted against the pockmarked crags overlooking the lake. Some people said that she was part Cherokee herself, but she dropped her r’s when she spoke, and knew how to read.

Magda was not afraid of these people, only curious, and so she edged toward a pine-needled mound that afforded her a view into one of the cabins many high windows.

She had often wondered about them, why they never attended service with the rest of the neighbors, and why they showed up only occasionally at the Listenings. She peeped into the window and figured out that she was probably looking into the bedroom. She could not see their heads; she only saw a tatty pink-and-green wool blanket and four long lumps that batted restlessly up and down underneath the blanket: their legs.

Now she knew what the odd noise was — they were singing.

Or rather, Rosalie was singing in a queer off-key voice that was quite unlike her usual rather lovely warm-cool speaking tones; Caesar was providing the orchestral accompaniment,

“ ‘Fixin’ a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wanderin’

Where it will go-o-o’ “

Rosalie was chanting, and Cesar went poom, poom, po-oom, in a twanging sort of ulalation which Magda recognized vaguely from a record of Simons as being a combination of drum, percussion and bass guitar.

“ ‘… And it really doesn’t matter

If I’m wrong or right

Where I belong I’m right

Where I belong….’ “

And now and then, Cesar would break into harmony, and both their fists would pound against the side of the bed, keeping time.

It seemed the song came to an end. Now Rosalie’s voice wandered off to an indeterminate key, and she began singing, “ ‘Wednesday morning at nine o’clock as the day begins….’ “ when Cesar interrupted, “No, no, Tooty, that’s on the other side. After ‘Fixing a Hole’ comes… let me see….”

There was a dreadful, frantic moment of utter stillness, then some frenzied humming from both Caesar and Rosalie, and then Cesar apparently clamped his hand hard over his woman’s mouth, because he said impatiently, “Be quiet, will you, and let me think. I taught you these songs, dammit. Let me think. Oh yes, Baby, I’m sorry, you were right. O.K., let’s sing ‘She’s Leaving Home’… one, two, go….”

It was a sad-sounding song, and Magda stood listening to the two cracking voices, watching the nine o’clock sun creeping across the battered windowsill across the pink-and-green blanket, and she felt sad. She wondered what these songs were supposed to have been, with their wistful nonsense the memory of which was obviously dependent upon their being sung in order from some vividly-remembered record that she had never heard of before.

Then the two unseen voices began on a rollicking little melody with words that sounded like “For the benefit of Mister Kite….” with Rosalie frequently losing the melody, and Cesar abandoning the band accompaniment to lead her back on key.

In this song there were some mumbled words which they seemed to have forgotten, but somehow they found themselves back on track, triumphantly:

“ ‘In this way Mister K will challenge the world!

(pum-pa-pum-pa-pum-pa-pum-papum!!)

The celebrated Mr. K

Performs his feat on Saturday at Bishops-Gate

The Hendersons will dance and sing

As Mr. K files through the ring, don’t be late….

(mumble-mumble)… Their production will be second to none… “

It sounded hopeless, and then they both shouted on a bright golden note of certainty:

“ ‘And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!’ “

And a strong dance-like rhythm was thumped out alacritously on the wooden slats of the bed.

It was marvelously noisy, and when the song came to an end, Caesar’s voice shouted: “We made it, Baby! We made it to the end of the record!”

And Rosalie giggled and whooped a little too.

There was a sudden short stillness, and Caesar said, less boisterously, “And to think I was born the year they came out of Liverpool and changed twentieth-century music, changed the world. Did I tell you, Nina, how the rumor spread in 1977 — forty years ago this year! — that someone was paying the Beatles six million dollars just for one night of sinking together. Think of that, Nina, six million dollars for a song. And then it was only Paul who refused to come back into the group to do it.”

Rosalie’s voice said, muffled under the covers, “Mmm, tell me more. Tell me again how George played the guitar till his fingers bled, and… ow, I hate it when you rub your soles against my leg, I really hate it. Your feet are so clammy.”

From where she was standing, Magda could see the blanket undergoing still another upheaval and she abruptly became aware that she was intruding.

She picked up the buckets again and moved quietly away. As she cleared the stand of aspens and pines, from the distance she heard, miraculously and momentarily harmonious, the chanting strains of a delicate, plaintive line of song:

“ ‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Take these broken wings and learn to fly….”

But the wind had risen, and the ragged threads of sound came to her like shafts of sunlight under swift clouds, far and thin beyond the pines, until she heard no more.

She was late for service, although she ran all the way down the hill to the little chapel beside the lake. As she sped up the pebbled path she heard the sounds of the congregation echoing in antiphonal litany, and the snatches of words she caught told her that the litany was ending: “… take the wings of the morning… try me and know my thoughts….”

She slipped into the back pew and saw the flowers she had gathered earlier, already arranged on the chancel. She felt a pang of sharp sadness that her father had brought them for her, knowing he had made her cry; he had apparently arranged them himself.

“Now,” Deacon Carmichael was saying, “we call upon Brother Pay-dro to read the text of the morning lesson from the Good Book.”

Pedro Aguinaldo rose, the neat, shabby gray suit bagging a little under his arms. He looked gravely across the room and began to read. Although his soft baritone was the sound that Magda knew best, it took on a new hardness as her fathers voice shaped around the terrible old words of Eliphaz the Temanite: “By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed… and I heard a voice, saying, Shall mortal man be more just than God? …How much less them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth? They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish for ever without any regarding it. Doth not their excellence which is in them go away? They die, even without wisdom…”

Still the relentless verses rolled out, judgment without end; it was a passage that, over the many tiring seasons, had become familiar in a dreadful way to this little congregation. But to Magda, on this morning, coming as she had from witnessing that private, fey little celebration in the hollow, the great despairing cry from the Book of Job became unbearably oppressive.

“… My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind… What is man, that though shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?… I will say unto God, Do not condemn me. Hast thou eyes of flesh? Or seeth thou as men seeth? Are thy days as the days of man? Are thy years as man’s days?”

The anger rang through the little chapel, and still the ancient bitter words went on, in her father’s voice: “Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet though dost destroy me. Remember, I beseech thee, that though hast made me as the clay; and wilt though bring me into dust again?”

Her chest tightened as her father’s voice broke. She knew he was thinking of what lay beyond these quiet hills, and for the second time that morning, the tears stung at her eyes. The thin page whispered as it turned. Then her father’s voice, a little steadier, read: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

Pedro Aguinaldo paused fractionally as Deacon Carmichael rose, the sun glinting on the faded red of his thin hair, ready to give his sermon.

But Magda’s father turned the pages hack again, his eyes rapidly squinting until he found what he wanted. Then he spoke across the room to her: “…For enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers; for we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon the earth are a shadow….”

He closed the book and sat down, his hands cupped over each knee, and a wandering sunbeam touched him where he sat alone in the corner of the front pew, a stocky brown man with a stubborn convex face and hands quiet on his knees.

Deacon Carmichael shot a puzzled look at him, and then said gently. “Thank you, Brother Pedro. Yes, friends, ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’ And those words have a special significance for our congregation on this very day, because tonight we will be hearing them sung in Handel’s immortal music. Let us thank the generosity of Brother Simon….” Carmichael’s mild blue gaze turned benevolently towards the back row, where Simon Winternheimer sat quietly in his usual corner, the tallith spread carefully across his shoulders and the little black prayer cap perched on top of his graying head.

The Deacon’s rich Irish tenor launched into the sermon proper, for the third of April, the year of our Lord two thousand and seventeen, the Feast of the Passover, a week before Easter, which was also when in 1993, the bombs passed over Colorado on their way to the 12th Sector, and the 17th, and the 34th, and the 111th, and the 2nd, and the 73rd, and the 49th Sector, which was once Manila, Philippines. New York, Berlin, London, New Delhi, Washington, D.C., Johannesburg, the lost names of a broken age, whose pieces lay like a hulking shadow over its scattered peoples….

Magda looked at her father — seeing only the back of his head where the black locks, so neatly trimmed, were beginning to thin at the top — and she thought she started to understand why he would not go with her to the Listening.

She was seven years old when Simon Winternheimer held the first of the Listenings. That first time, it was held on a Thursday, not a Sunday, and it was the first day of the Feast of the Passover. Spring came late that year, and it had rained that whole day, the water poured down in runnels with melted snow from the top of Ragged Mountain, spring freshets made Muddy Creak roar, and it was only towards early evening when the rain stopped.

A blue webbing of twilight spread across the mountain peaks, where palest pink and gold washed thinly over the edges of the hills, bringing with them the ringing stillness that only comes with the abatement of rain.

As her father helped her on with her socks, he explained to her what records were. “I used to listen to them, long ago, when I was in medical school.”

“In the city, Papa?”

“In the city. I didn’t really care too much for that kind of music, then, but I had this teacher in one course. Fine old lady with a loud laugh. She taught me how to listen for the right sounds — as I will teach you some day, Immaya — this is the french horn, she would say, and this is the bassoon, like a duck waddling through the reeds… I’ll never forget that!… but best of all I liked the percussion, the roll of the tympani. like thunder in the hills…brrooom.”

He squatted on the floor beside her, and his face became thoughtful.

“Papa, what was that song you were whistling under my window this morning?”

It was a lilting melody, high and happy, with an odd lagging cadence towards the middle of the line, as though whoever had written the music did not want it to end so soon….

“What,” he said, “this one?” Pursing his lips he started whistling it, then he stopped. “It’s by someone named Schumann, and it’s called the Rhenish Symphony… Number Three, I think…. “

He frowned.

“Papa, what is it?” she asked timidly. “Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry, sweetheart. I just missed your mama.” He looked down at her and said briskly, “I met her for the first time at Miss Jacobs the night I first heard the Rhenish.”

“What is the ‘Rhenish’?”

“That means it came from a place near the Rhine river, in a country called Germany. Anyway, she was beautiful, your mother. And I’m still surprised that she agreed to marry me!”

“I don’t remember her,” the child said in a small voice.

“Of course not. You were only three when she… went.” He stood up, clearing his throat noisily, and he hoisted her to her feet. “Up you go. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”

The stars were beginning to come out, in the last of the light, as the man and the child walked up the hillside to the new cabin built by Simon Winternheimer. The dew clinging to the short hillside grass wet their feet, so after a while the man swung his daughter up on his shoulder and carried her the rest of the way.

On the final hill overlooking the slight hollow where the cabin stood, they stopped, and Pedro Aguinaldo set his child down so that they were both facing the northwest.

Large wet blue stars quivered in the sky, and the sharp wind that blew from the northwest seemed to set the stars rocking. “Look, Papa, they’re so many,” she said, pointing.

Out in the darkness, beyond her finger, were the desolate rangers where ruined cities lay in greater silence than the rocking stars; on a clear night like this, one might look past the mesa, past Book Plateau and the Green Mountains, northward to Blue Mountain, and beyond that to the unseen border of the State of Colorado, to Dinosaur National Park, where, it was said, the bones of dinosaurs were once found.

“Did you know, Immaya,” her father’s voice spoke above her in the flickering blue darkness, “some of those stars are dead now. It is only their light left which we see, coming across miles and miles of emptiness to light our night.”

“Like records, Papa?” she had asked with a child’s sudden random perspicuity.

“Like records,” he said, taking her small sticky hand, and they walked together towards the hollow, where warm yellow patches of candlelight shed a brightness just a little warmer than the stars.

And yet, Magda thought in the bright chapel, he never went back. Simon had asked him to select a second piece, and his hand had trembled as he chose between the Rhenish and the Eroica. He chose the Eroica, and as the martial strains filled the little cabin, she looked up, and there were tears starting down his face. It was the only time she had ever seen her father cry.

After the service, Magda helped Old Grandmother grind the corn for their noon meal. As she poured the grains between the smooth gray slabs of the stone grinder, a palmful of corn spilled from her hand and rolled down to the ground.

She gave a small exclamation of annoyance and bent to pick up the grains.

“Never mind, child,” said Old Grandmother in her gravelly voice. “Leave it be. The earth is hungry.”

She turned eagerly and asked. “Say that again, Grandmother. I never heard you say that before.”

“What? Say what?” said the old woman absently.

“About the earth being hungry.”

“Ah, that. Yes, my own grandmother in the Philippines used to say that to us when we were small. If food fell to the ground, she always said to leave it alone, because it meant that the earth was also hungry. But that was only if the food which fell was not too much, mind you, because then, that would have been gahá, if we left it lying there in big quantities.”

Magda understood gabá, divine retribution, or curse, but she was glad to hear about this particular thing. It was new. “And do the anitos, the ones you told me about before, remember, do they eat the food spilled on the ground?”

The old woman sighed, already tired of the conversation. “No, child. I thought I told you. Not the anitos. The earth.” And she would not say anything more.

Magda gathered up some of the chaff and carried it over to the pigpen, where two enormous Duroc Jerseys, the size of infant calms, lolled around in their immaculate sties.

The pigsties were neatly mortared with brick, and small gutters ran alongside each sty. The gutters were washed down daily, and the swine excrement disappeared into a large square tank. This tank was almost the only article made of metal on the premises, and it had been forged by the blacksmiths on the other side of the mountain ridge. A series of pipes ran from one end of the tank, and a length of pipe lead into the cabin. Inside the house, above the table in the main room, a large crude spigot marked the end of the pipe: attached to the tip of the pipe was a gas lamp.

Almost all of the cabins had this kind of contraptions. The methane gas, converted from the exhalations of the pigsty, provided enough light for one lamp.

Listening to the pigs grunt sleepily as she sprinkled the chaff under their huge pink snouts, Magda suddenly thought of the perverse ways of the created world: And God said, Let there be light, and there was light….

Light from swine, she thought, crossing her fingers hastily at the possibility of blasphemy. And yet this was true. As well light from pigs as from dead stars….

“Magda! Magda!” For the second time that morning, Kyle the son of Katrine the Weaver barreled down the slope towards her. His face was pale under the sprinkling of freckles, and she ran towards him in alarm.

“Maggie,” he cried, “get your father. An accident. Its Veronica….”

“What’s happened?” she shouted. “Papa, Papa, there’s been an accident! What happened, Kyle?”

“V — ronica’s dog Christy got into the fenced pasture of Karl Billings. There’s that bull of his, you know. She went in to get Christy, and the bull gored her instead. In the back.”

“Is she badly hurt?” she asked, frightened. The Heron Woman, she thought with sudden despair.

“She’s bleeding and she can’t move. Hurry, Mr. Aguinaldo, hurry,” the boy shouted, as Magda’s father appeared from the side of the house, pulling on his coat.

There was a crowd of men around the still, red form of Veronica, the Heron Woman. Pedro Aguinaldo cradled the thin body gently, and the violet eyes opened.

“I’m afraid I cannot do much for you, Veronica,” he said helplessly.

The quick, restless body was for once unmoving, but the eyes lightened, the pupils enlarging with the effort to move.

“There’s still a chance, though,” said Aguinaldo slowly. He looked up at the circle of men. “She’s paralyzed and there’s probably a lot of bleeding inside. We have to get her to Aspen.”

There was a profound stillness. Aspen was seventy miles away from Ragged Mountain. Although it was a broken relic of a town, it was heard tell that there was a clinic there, built back in the days when rich skiiers broke their limbs for pleasure….

“How do we get her there?” asked one of the men skeptically.

“Cesar and Rosalie!” cried Kyle. “That truck runs, I know it does. Because I’ve heard Cesar starting it. He can drive her to Aspen.”

“How ‘bout gas, sonny? Can’t get her to Aspen on pigshit.”

Quick anger flared in the black eyes of Aguinaldo, and he barked, “Call that mechanic. At least we can ask him.”

Magda looked at her father. None of the men had ever been down the mountain since they came up. Not even her father, when her mother had become so sick….

The tall mechanic strode unwillingly toward the knot of men. He eyed them warily.

“Cesar,” Pedro Aguinaldo said. “Is that truck of yours fit to run?”

“Well,” he said grudgingly, “It can run. But I don’t know how far.”

“You got gas?”

The old mechanic did not reply.

“I said have you got gas?”

He looked away, running his long-fingered hand through the thick dark hair that grew like leaves in piles. “Barely half a drum. Look, men, I haven’t driven in years. Besides,” his dark soft eyes moved around the circles of faces pleadingly, “please don’t ask me to go down there. I… we can’t.”

“Cesar.” The hoarse whisper came from the figure lying at their feet. A gout of blood ran down from the Heron Woman’s mouth with her effort at speaking. “It’s all right. I know. All right….”

He knelt beside her, looking down for a long time. Then a great breath lifted the heavy shoulders, and when he released the air in his chest, it seemed as though something had flown away with the air. “All right,” he said tiredly. “I can only try.”

As he turned to go toward the house on stilts beside the stream where a battered old ’51 Chevy stood waiting in the hollow, Magda reached out impulsively and touched Cesar on the arm.

They looked wordlessly at each other. Then he gave a small, a very small, smile. Softly he said, “It looks like the daytime girl will have to spread her wings some other day.” Then he walked away.

The long shadows were starting to cut great swathes of green and gold across the water-meadows when the girl Magda came down the slope from the forest near Simon Winternheimer’s. As soon as she had entered his cottage, he had offered to postpone the listening until the two men were back, Cesar and her father.

That noon her father rode away in the back of the pickup, where a blanket canopy sheltered the Heron Woman who was wrapped in blankets for a long trip down to the last town in that part of Colorado.

A few minutes before they heard the growl of the old Chevy, Pedro Aguinaldo spoke to his daughter. “What did he mean, that thing he whispered to you?”

“Oh, something he told me long ago.”

“Didn’t know you knew him,” said her father curiously.

“I don’t, Papa. No more than I know….” she stopped. “Someday I’ll tell you.”

There really wasn’t very much to tell, she thought. There wasn’t much that people knew about Cesar and Rosalie. Everybody knew Cesar hated fire: someone, his daughter or his sister, had burned, they said, the last time he was ever in a town. But there was something else she knew, and that could wait.

Just before her father left, she told him gently, “Papa, you knew that he was saving that gas for Rosalie, didn’t you?”

Her father gave her a level look. “She may never even need it,” he said crisply.

“I don’t think she will. She seems well enough now,” she said, “but there’s another reason he didn’t want to use the truck. I’ll tell you when you come back.”

She thought about it now, watching the shadows go down behind the mountain, behind the mountain where Aspen was, and her father, and the Heron Woman, and the strange man called Cesar, whose true names she did not even know….

Early one morning last autumn she met him in the forest. The oaks and maples were flying the last noisy banners of Indian summer, and the singing colors of the trees against the pale sky made the early-morning silence more pointed than it really was. The girl poked around under the still-wet tree trunks and the piles of leaves looking for morels, when she heard the low roar of an animal she had never vet heard before.

She looked around in alarm, but the sound did not seem to be getting any nearer, it was only increasing in intensity. It settled into a low throbbing, as though it had found its pulse and was beginning to truly breathe — not human, not animal. And then she knew: it was Cesar and Rosalie, the machine. She had never before heard the voice of a machine.

She followed the sound through the woods, until she came to a little clearing above the creek.

The man had his great graying head inside the hood of the truck, but he straightened up when he came near. “Hello, girl,” he said. “You’re up early.”

With a flick of his wrist he cut the engine, and the forest quietness crowded back into the air where a moment before it had been filled with the inhuman sound of the Chevrolet. “Can you really make it run?” she asked shyly.

“Yes, I guess that’s the only thing I really know how to do.” He wiped his hand alongside his thigh, and gave a short letter laugh. “It’s kind of a narrow world for a machine man, these days. I fix things, you know, even if I can’t get them to run any more.”

“Can Ro… can your wife fix things, too?” The question was hardly audible.

He laughed, a real laugh this time. “Rosalie?” he said. “That’s the name you’ve given her here in these parts, isn’t it? Pretty, too, though I never figured we’d be named after a machine. Naw, Rosalie doesn’t fix things, she’s just… Rosalie.” The wistfulness which had been softening the edges of his voice now roughed it altogether, and he abruptly bent and picked up a red-and-gold maple leaf which was skittering by Magda’s foot. He straightened and held the leaf up with a surprising delicacy between a grimy thumb and a forefinger. “This is Rosalie,” he said. “The last bright colors of… of fall, that the tree gives from itself before it goes.” A light wind came by and made the leaf wave in his hand. He released the leaf and it swept soundlessly away. “You wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her, would you, the way she runs after the deer, so fast and quiet and all… Sometimes I just tell myself she’s going to be all right now. But you never can tell. Can you?”

He said in a more matter-of-fact voice: “Me, I’m a make-do man. Always was, even back in the days when we didn’t have to make-do, the way we have to now. Hey, you want to see what I dug up, girl, not so far from this here old pick-up?”

He led her to the back of the truck and listed the tarpaulin. A big metal canister glinted dully under the folds of canvas, and he rapped on it with his hand. It rang hollow. “Smell it.” He unscrewed a small round lid. She bent to sniff it. “Gas. That’s what all that fighting was about, why the world ended. That’s why they bombed the Middle East and the Holy Land, so no one could get at it. Hey, were your people from out there? Bag-dad?”

She shook her head. “Forty-ninth Sector,” she told him.

“Hmm. I sometimes wonder what’s going on out there. I’m Asian too, you know. Or used to be, once upon a time. My mother was Arapahoe. They say us Indians came from out there, way, way back. Well, nobody knows. They’re all just sitting around waiting for the black clouds to clear over the Middle East so they can get at the gas again.”

“How long will it take?”

“I hope never,” he said with unexpected viciousness, and closed the lid of the drum. “That’s a funny thing for a machine — man to hope for, isn’t it. That the world will never get back on wheels again.”

“What are you going to do with the truck?” she asked timidly.

He became gentle again. “I tell myself that this gas — it’s just enough to get to Aspen — that’s for Rosalie, when the pain comes again and she’s about to go… But there’s another reason. I keep this here Cesar-and-Rosalie thing running because it’s sort of a dare. Sort of daring myself not to go back.” He rapped the bulging sides of the pick-up where some of the blue paint hadn’t peeled off yet. “This is all the old life…what I was taught to do, the only thing I can do best. And I can go back, you know, watch the last of the machines run down, in the farms and the cities, be in on the dying. I keep thinking maybe there’s something I can do to help hold things together, just a little longer. But I’d rather not, and this is my reminder. It’s hard, you know, when your fingernails suddenly start wanting the taste of grease, and the feel of everything in place and humming under your hands… I had a Suzuki 500 motorbike once, when I was young. That was the closest I ever came to flying.”

He looked down at her, and she saw how the hair on his head grew in soft layers, like the leaves of autumn.

“You don’t fly backwards, you know,” he said cryptically. “You have to move on.”

“Isn’t it hard for you?” she asked, feeling inadequate.

“Oh sure,” he said briskly. “Me, I live with one foot in the past. Can’t help that. But you travel light, you carry everything you need here,” he tapped his fingertips together, “and in here,” laying a finger against his forehead.

“What was it like, flying?”

He bent towards her suddenly. “I’m going to do it again, girl, someday. That’s the other reason I keep this old thing running. Because some day I’ll just feel like packing Rosalie and me into this thing and making her go as fast as she can go. Then we’ll be flying, and as we go over that bend, into the air, we’ll be singing ‘Here she comes, my daytime girl, spreading her wings like a high-flying eagle’…. Just Rosalie and me, until the truck comes apart in Muddy Creek.”

“What was that song?” she asked curiously.

He sighed and turned away, rummaging again inside the hood of the truck. “Oh, I can’t remember. The rest of it’s lost now.”

He looked up again and winked at her, the unexpected gaiety floating above the sad dark eyes. “But I remembered the best part, girl, I remembered the best part.”

Sitting in the lengthening shadows of the day, she looked down at the little gray book on her knee. How strange it was to have to live in the long shadows of a dead world, scavenging for memories of things one never even knew….

On the margins of the pages of the book were little notes written in a precise and tiny hand. They were the only voice she had left of her mother. She did not understand what some of the words meant.

One poem had a lot of notes. She opened the book again. It was a poem written in that old lost time. On the yellowing page, in faded ink, an arrow led from the name of the man who wrote it; the mother whom she did not know, had written: “He was a banker?!” Magda was not sure what that meant, but it seemed she heard, in the double punctuation, a small ring of fun, and disbelief.

The poem was a long one, about a woman. There were lines in it that she felt belonged to her, more than they had to her mother. It was as if that man from that shining, hard, and impossibly efficient past had known what the world would one day come to:

… Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness….

A long shadow fell across the book, and she looked up. The young hunter of the early morning grinned down at her, as he sat down beside her.

“Big doings on Ragged Mountain,” he said.

“Oh, you mean about this morning,” she said. “It’s been a strange day.”

“No stranger than some I’ve lived through,” he said callously. “Hey, are they going to have that Listening thing tonight?”

“No, Simon put it off until Passover, on Thursday. That’s the way he first had it. And he always has one Christmas Day, too.”

“Why not on Christmas Eve?”

“That’s odd,” she said. “Someone asked him that, once. He’s a Jew, you know. And he said he held the music on Christmas Day because the Savior had already come, and we must stop waiting. Something like that….” She looked up at the hunter. “Are you going to live on Ragged Mountain?”

“No. I guess not.” He drew a long breath and stood up. “I don’t know where I’ll live. I’m moving on. That’s all I know.” Without knowing why, she felt she understood, and she was also a little sorry, as she looked at the long, strong, lithe figure, this man who was of her age, hardly older than herself, seeing him as a running shadow, gold among the trees, tracking, because he had to, the path of the ruthless arrow. “Hunting?” she asked slowly.

He looked down at her, and then he stretched his arms upward, his whole frame reaching upward, holding his arms against the sky. “Hunting for things doesn’t always mean killing them, you know. No, I’m moving on. Only way to go.”

He waved to her once before the bright gold of his head disappeared among the tall grasses. A high whistle floated down to her, and she thought of her father, and the pain and fear which she had been keeping at bay as she waited there on the hill for them swept over her. They would not be back yet, if ever they did find a way back, but still she waited, hoping for the merest sound from the other side of the mountain.

Before her father left, he leaned out of the pickup, of that relic from the past which the folk had named Caesar and Rosalie, and he told his daughter, Tell Simon Winternheimer to put off the Listening, until… until Passover.

The old truck roared once more and then it faded in a dust cloud. She stood watching it go, somehow sad that her father should offer this promise to her now, when they did not even know how they could return.

It seemed so far away since this morning, when her father had read across the room to her: Our days upon the earth are a shadow, for we are but of yesterday….

No, she thought, remembering what Cesar had said of flying; to live in the long shadow of yesterday took too much pain. Her father had also once told her: The past of our people has been wiped out before, Immaya, but we kept going, we received what was given, what was put in place of what we lost.

She thought of the new thing she had learned today, to add to her tiny hoard of things Philippine: of the fallen grains of corn, and the hungry earth, and the odd relinquishing grace that was once practiced by her lost race.

As her ears strained for some sound of the truck, a flock of wood-pigeons swept upward above the tips of the pines. She waited for the sound of the hunter’s arrow. It did not come.

She stood up to go, looking across the top of the trees, seeing how the mountain changed its face with the colors of the aging day. There was only one thing harder than having to remember what one had never seen, she thought, and that was to learn not to wait for what one knew might never come.

As she turned away, the flock of birds, following some secret signal all their own, made a slow wheeling turn high above the trees.

For a long moment it seemed to the girl that there was nothing else on Ragged Mountain but the sound of wings, the long flight downward — only a swift wind and a shadow, held against the isolation of the sky.