Having Everything Right. Kim Stafford

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СКАЧАТЬ The ribbons knotted at eye level swung new in the breeze, and between my feet a single strand of older ribbon had fallen, bleached white by snow and sun. The age of this custom made me dizzy. The five ribbons on the limb were new as the soft needle-growth sprung from the pine candles. The faded ribbon on the ground lay among sun-bleached needles. The sun-white ribbon on the ground took me back to the hopeful recollections of bead, fur, and photograph cased in glass at the museum, while the five new ribbons conveyed me to the ceremonies of night. I stood so long the sun moved, and a cool shadow rose out of the ground.

      Beside my left foot a red ant carried some white crumb by an intricate path: all the long length of a pine needle, careening impossibly over a shattered cone, then up a thin tongue of grass to tumble and rise and struggle on. Following the ant, I saw flecks of blue in its path, and then I was lying down to see tiny blue glass beads strung out along the path of the thread that had held them until it rotted to nothing. So. Before the ribbons marked this place, an older ribbon. Before an older ribbon marked this place, the beads. And before the beads? The ant was skirting around a gray sphere half-sunk into the ground: a round musket ball of lead.

      A century collapsed into this moment of ground, where generations of private celebration grew outward from one story. This square yard of pine duff bound a guest register that could never be tallied, only renewed, only inhabited by the night-faithful memory that walked in the form of the people. Twenty steps east from the tree with the ribbons a ton of granite, hewn to a block and polished, was carved with the story as the U.S. Army had lived it through. That was one way to remember 1877: carve the truth in stone and draft a platoon of guardians, write books and print brochures and script slide shows and build a hall to house them all, then carve a trail with numbers like a tattoo on the hill. I was grateful for all that. All that can make a visitor ready to know. But that public way is not knowing in itself, only a preparation for knowing. Knowing is a change of heart, physical, slower than the eye’s travel across a page of text, or across a stone dressed with words.

      The books, the message on stone, the trail’s configuration would all have to be revised by an act of will; the ribbons were either renewed or lost by the very nature of their fragility. Sun and rain destroyed them. Pine budded, and grew. Flowers withered, and the ribbons.

      Suddenly in the heat a kind of fear chilled me—fear about my fellowship with the sometimes acquisitive tribe of patriots named America. Even in small things, we wish to map our conquest of the planet and the past. My own childhood collections flickered through my mind: stamps, stones, leaves pressed in a Bible, insects stilled by cotton soaked with alcohol and pinned to styrofoam in a box. And arrowheads. Smoky obsidian and blood-red flint. Modern habit is to lay such things away safe behind glass, and I had learned that habit well. I knew how to lift each bead with tweezers, plot and take each bullet up, sift them all out from the dust and alter them from a part of the world to an illustration of it. Could I leave the bones of the story still, and carry only its breath away in my mouth? Or would I thread five beads on a pine needle souvenir, saying softly to myself no one would know them gone?

      I heard the girl’s voice reading along closer through the grove, as she led her family toward the story of Five Wounds. His promise to Rainbow, sworn brother, to die the same day in battle. If one died, the other would die before day ended. And Rainbow had died. The ribbons were a part of Five Wounds’ promise. He was a hundred years dead and they were new.

      From wooden hats staked to the ground I could see where soldiers lay flat to earth in knots of two and three across the slope. The thin grass of pine shade moved, and wind made the trees glisten as sunlight shifted in them, but the hats held still as skulls, each where a soldier lived out his one day’s bright terror or luck. But then Five Wounds came sprinting out from the willows into the slot of a shallow ravine, dashing his death-alley straight into the guns of these little hats in crossfire. He knew they had him before the one long breath of his run turned to blood in his mouth, but he lurched to the brow of the ravine to fall at my feet beneath these ribbons, beneath the bullets scattered later by night to heal his name, and now beneath the low voice of this girl practicing the ceremony of literate culture with a paper in her hands:

      “Five Wounds charged up the gulch and was killed without a doubt. . . .”

      “What are the ribbons for?” her little sister asked, interrupting. Leaning on each other, the parents stepped back, gentled by fatigue. The girl stopped reading and looked up.

      “What ribbons?” Her eyes squinted for distance, then focused on the paper again. “It doesn’t say.”

      Driving on, I was tipsy with gratitude. Fenceposts passing fast out the open window were pine with the bark left on, and they chirred like insects—whisp, whisp, whisp, whisp—down the long straight road heat blurred. The mountains stood up in a blue ring distant around the valley. Sage entered me, then a hint of cut hay, then the wind-twisted fragrance of smoke and manure from a little clutter of ranch buildings at the long, tapered end of its drive. After a few miles, Wisdom itself was a truck filled with horses saddled and stamping fitfully, a wall of deer antlers below a TV satellite dish, country music aching from loudspeakers nailed to the trading post façade, and a poster at the bar advertising a rodeo memorial for two teenagers killed in a car wreck: “Only working cowboys within a hundred-mile radius of Wisdom will be eligible for the purse.”

      Then Wisdom was behind, and I was sailing out the highway banked on the long curves the river led east, past fields where ponies put their ears forward to the passing snap of my fingers in the wind, and on into the open country that somehow forgot to get changed from plain gray sage and rocky bluffs, from ravines dark with willow shade and stone litter glittering down a hillside where hard rain scattered it, and the trees getting scarce for the long dry of days like this.

      I was changed. The ribbons had pulled the sky right down to the ground, and tethered my soul to a story. If I was not changed, not wise, I had a way to become so. I possessed a vision-book of one moment, a story small as the pitchy pith of juniper seed to nibble for the rest of my life.

      Then I saw the bear, and stopped the car. It was a young bear, about my size and black as lightning’s footprint, rambling northeast along the south-facing slope of the river gully, in the direction the Nez Perce survivors of the battle had taken toward Canada, toward the place called Bear Paws where they were finally stopped. When I climbed out and the car door made a sound, the bear didn’t shy suddenly off to the side like I’ve seen bear do, or coyotes feeling the bullet-blast of human sight graze their shoulders. Wind riffled the bear’s fur, and it turned slowly to look over its shoulder from about a hundred yards off. Even at that distance, I could see the close squint of eyes, the nostril-flare of pertinent curiosity. She lifted her nose to know me by the thin ribbon of scent wind trailed out. Not in haste but not wasting daylight, she turned away, head swung down, and she ambled away over the open slope of sage, climbing toward the bluffs at the crest of my sight.

      The afternoon still: a wisp of wind-whistle in sage, and the little rattle of stone where the bear’s paws swung along. I felt history receding with the click and scatter of her steps, as if I saw the last run of a river trail away down the geologic trough of its bed. What made seeing not enough? What made me want to meet that shaggy woman, not merely see her sip the wind over her shoulder and turn away?

      In the car I stared at the choke, the odometer, the radio. The paltry pleasures of speed and distance were mine. How had exhilaration evaporated so fast? The dwindling hummock of the bear was approaching the ridge as I turned the key and swung out, cruised a half mile out of sight around the bend, killed the engine and coasted to a stop, left the white car’s pod, the road’s gray vine, and climbed on foot toward the ridge. A need for quiet now—now that the bear’s scent would follow the wind toward me as her path met mine. She would not know I was there. Now she would come close enough with her poor eyes to see my shape rise up.

      At the brow of the ridge, along her natural way, I crouched breathless among sage scrub abuzz with СКАЧАТЬ