THERE · The first winter · eight
The last thing my mother said to me was that she needed ten minutes without me. She was on the lake path with my sister on her hip and the afternoon sun on the water behind her, so that I could not see her face, only the shape of her and Pip’s feet kicking. I asked if I could come. She said go back to your dad. She said I need ten minutes without you. I said that I wished she was not my mother, which was the worst thing I knew, and I turned around. I looked back once, at the split cedar. She was already walking.
I went up the path toward the camp, and before I came to it I heard the whistle. It came down through the pines from above the campground, thin and high and then low, like a bird inside a bottle. I had heard it the day before with my father, and he had said that is the Whistler, and it is only wind in a cave. I went toward it. I wanted to find something up there to show her. I wanted to find a thing so good that she would have to come and find me to see it, and I thought about her face when she came, and I walked faster.
I had the flashlight. I had carried it the whole of that weekend, in the day as well as at night, because it was mine and my name was on it.
The trail went up over black rock that rang under my shoes, and the whistle grew louder, and then there was the mouth of the tube, low, with cold air coming out of it like the air from a cellar door. I went in. I was not afraid, because I had a light and because I was angry, and anger is a kind of light when you are eight. The tube went back a long way. There was a round room where the whistle rang all around me like a struck pan, and past it the roof came down, and down, until I was on my knees and then on my stomach with the flashlight pushed out ahead of me and the rock a hand above my back. I was small then. I fit.
Partway along there was a place where the air changed. I did not see it. I went into it the way a man goes into black water, all at once, and it closed over me. There was a weight on my chest like my father kneeling on me in a game and not getting up, and a roar in my ears, and a cold that went into my teeth and stayed there. My nose began to bleed. It lasted as long as it takes to say it. Then it was only rock again, and I was on the other side of something, and I did not know it.
I will tell the next part plainly, because there is not much in it. I tried to go back, and I could not find back. The tube I was in split, and I chose, and it split again, and I chose again, and each time I was certain and each time I was wrong. This is the place I learned later to call the Mother’s Rooms, which is a long seam of caves in the side of the mountain, and I do not know how long I was in it. Long enough to stop crying and start again. Long enough for the blood to dry on my lip and crack when I talked to myself. The flashlight was on the whole time. I did not think about that. I thought about my mother at the bottom of the trail, looking up.
Then there was a cold that was not the cold of rock, and a smell of snow, and I came out of a hole on my hands and knees onto the side of a mountain in the dark, and snow was falling through my light.
I had on shorts and a shirt with a shark on it and my sneakers. The snow was coming down slow and thick and without any wind, the first snow of that winter, though I did not know that then. I could not see anything past my beam but snow falling into it. I could not hear the whistle. I could not hear the lake.
My mother had told me what to do. If you get lost, stay put. Somebody comes. I will come. So I sat down just inside the mouth of the hole, where the snow did not reach, and I held the flashlight up in both hands so that it would show, and I stayed put. I shook for a long time, and then I stopped shaking, which I know now is the bad sign, and I held the light up.
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It was the light they saw. Old Ines and her granddaughter were coming down late from the beech wood below the Hem with a sledge of deadfall, because the snow had come early and caught them out, and the girl looked up and saw a small sun on the side of the mountain where nobody lives.
Ines was not a big woman. She was bent and brown and her hands were brown to the wrist, a dark walnut brown that I thought at first was dirt, and she came up the slope through the snow with her skirts tied up, talking the whole way in a voice like a gate on a bad hinge. She did not touch me at first. She crouched and looked at me, and at the hole behind me, and she said something short and hard to the mountain, and then she took off her shawl and put it over me and lifted me onto the sledge on top of the wood as if I were more wood. The girl took one side of the rope and Ines took the other, and they pulled me down the mountain, and the girl complained the whole way down. I did not understand one word of it and I knew exactly what it meant.
That was Senna. She was seven.
The house was at the top of Hessary, the last house before the orchards. The ground floor was stone and the upper floor was timber, and I know now that the upper floor sat on walnut beams too thin for their span, and that whoever built it had been in a hurry and had never come back to finish it properly, but that night I only knew it was warm. There was a long low room with the fire in the middle of it on a raised hearth, and smoke going up through a hole in the roof, and a tall woman standing up from a stool with a spindle in her hand. That was Wenna, Senna’s mother. She looked at me, and then past me at the door and the dark where the mountain was, and she put her hand over her mouth. There was a small boy behind her who had to be held back by his shirt to keep him from touching me. That was Tam.
In Hessary a fire is not a thing you have. It is a thing you are part of. Ines did not ask my name or where I had come from or why a boy in short sleeves was sitting in the first snow on the side of the Mother with a small sun in his hand. She put me by her hearth and wrapped my feet in a fleece and fed me barley bread hot off the stone and the fat off a smoked eel, and she watched me eat it, and when I stopped she gave me more. Only when I had eaten did she crouch in front of me and ask the question they ask everyone, the question that is also hello.
Ost ta fael?
I did not know the words. Senna, who was already bored of me, said them again slower, and pointed at the hearth, and then at her own chest, and then at me.
So I told them my address, because that is what you tell a grown-up when you are lost. One one four seven Larch Street, Calder, Oregon, and the five numbers after it, which I have since lost. I said it twice. Senna laughed at me. Her laugh went up at the end, the way it always would, as if it were asking something.
Ines did not laugh. She picked up the flashlight from where I had put it down beside me, and turned it in her hands, and found the place on the barrel where my name was, and ran her thumb over it. I showed her the switch. When the beam came on she held it away from her and looked along it at the wall and the smoke and the beams, and then she turned it off and on again, and she said one word, and pointed at the light, and then at me.
Kell.
I thought it was their word for flashlight. It was some days before I understood that it was the word for any lamp, for the clay ones with a wick that they burned in the windows, and that it had become the word for me.
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That first night they put me to sleep in the box bed with Senna and Tam, because that was where children slept, and in the dark I cried. I tried to do it without sound. Senna lay beside me with her back to me for a while, and then she turned over and hit me on the back with the flat of her hand, not gently, and said a word, and hit me again, and said it again, the way Ines settled a goat that would not settle.
Sessa.
I stopped, mostly so that she would stop. She turned back over. After a while I said the word to myself in the dark, under my breath, to have something that was mine in that language, and it was the first one.
That night or the next I saw the Naming for the first time. When the house had eaten, Ines sat on the stone lip of the hearth and held her right hand out flat over the fire, low, where it must have burned, and she said a list of names into it, slowly, one at a time, with a space after each one as if she were waiting for someone to answer from the dark. Some of them made Wenna look at the floor. Then Ines looked at me.
I did not understand. Senna did it for me. She pointed at the fire, and then at the door, at the night and the snow behind it, and then she opened and shut her hand beside her mouth like a mouth talking, and pointed at me. I understood that I was to say who was out there.
I said Mom. I said Jo, in case Mom was not her name in that place. I said Pip. I said Dad.
Ines said them after me into the fire, all wrong, and nodded, and put her hand down.
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Every morning after that I went up to the Hem to find my hole.
The Hem is a seam in the side of the mountain where the rock folded over on itself when it was hot, and all along it for as far as you can walk in a day there are holes, and some of them breathe. I had come out of one of them. I could not tell which. The snow had taken my tracks the first night, and in daylight every hole looked like the one, and none of them were. I went into the first one I came to, and ten steps in it ended in a wall.
Wenna came after me that time. She took me by the back of my borrowed shirt and walked me down the mountain the whole way without letting go, and she did not say anything, and her hand was shaking.
The second time it was Ines, who hit me with a wooden spoon she had brought for the purpose. The third time it was a man from the eel sheds whose name I never learned, who carried me down under his arm like a sack of meal and talked to me the whole way in a low hard voice. I did not know the words. I knew the faces. They were the faces of people watching a child walk out onto river ice at the thaw. I learned later that the living do not go into the Mother. That is what the dead do, and nobody who goes in comes out, and nobody in that valley had ever seen anyone come out, until me.
After the third time they did not let me go up alone, and there was always someone near me, Senna most of all, who had been given the job and hated it.
So I could not stay put where I was supposed to stay. I did the next best thing. Every night when it was full dark I went out behind the house to the bottom of the garden, where you can see the Hem against the sky, and I turned the flashlight on and pointed it at the mountain, and I counted to sixty. I counted the way my mother counted when she timed my brushing, with the name of a long river between every number, so that it would be a true minute and not a cheating one. Then I turned it off. I did it so that if she came out of the mountain in the dark she would see where I was.
I kept the nights in a row of pebbles on the windowsill by the box bed. Senna moved them around when she thought I was not looking, to make me angry, and I put them back.
Each night the light was a little more yellow. By the eighth night it was the yellow of butter. On the tenth night I could hardly see it on the snow at the bottom of the garden, and I pointed it higher so that at least it would be on the mountain, and I counted slower. On the eleventh night I turned it on and it was orange, the orange of a coal when you have stopped blowing on it, and I counted, and at twenty-six it went out.
I shook it. It came back, dimmer, and I counted, and it went out again, and I shook it and it did not come back.
I stood at the bottom of the garden with the snow coming down and the mountain gone in the dark. I did not think that you had stopped. I thought that you were dead, because nothing else I knew of could stop you.
When I came in Ines was sitting on the lip of the hearth with the others, and Senna was beside her, and Wenna was feeding the fire. They looked at the flashlight in my hand, and at my face. Ines held out her hand to me, and I went, and she put me between her knees facing the fire, and she leaned down and asked me again.
Ost ta fael?
This time Senna did not say it slower. She looked at me with no expression at all, and then she leaned over and put her mouth by my ear and said two words into it, and pushed me in the back with her knuckles to make me say them.
Nae fael.
I said them. Ines nodded, the way a teacher nods at a right sum, and she put her hand on my head. It was a long time before I learned what I had said, which is what the Given say, the ones the Mother gives and does not give back. I have no fire.
That night at the Naming, when Ines looked at me, I held my hand out over the fire the way she did, low, where it burned, and I said my mother’s name into it.
Ines took the flashlight out of my hands afterward and put it on the high shelf by the salt crock, where that house kept the things it did not use and would not throw away. It lay on its side up there in the smoke, with my name on it in my father’s scratching, and nobody in that house could read it.