Having Everything Right. Kim Stafford

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СКАЧАТЬ to meet me. If she turned, I would see her on the open ground to either side. From here, I would see first the black hackles of her back like a ruffled wave over the sage horizon, then the bobbing rims of her ears, then her small, close-set eyes, her lips pulled back to pant—and then I would stand up slowly.

      My fear brightened the hillside as with sweat. Every tongue of sage leaf glittered, and the sand before me was exact with sunlight. I faced west, where the breeze at my face trembled cool with rumor and scent: the smoky scent of bruised stone, the thin sweet fragrance of crushed grass. Soon, it would be bear. Soon my heart would stop its percussive haste. I would stand, and speak. Some compliment. Some respectful word.

      Wind rattled the dry sticks of the sage. My bones held an old juniper’s arthritic stance. The sun moved, and an ant came toward me, crossed a fathom of epic sand, and disappeared into the shade I cast. Blank wind chilled my face. Somehow, the bear slipped past my vision by some private tunnel of her own power.

      The risk I took to meet the bear was a responsibility greater than being husband, father, or son. But it was not enough. I was no true citizen of wisdom, but spent all I had on being afraid. So busy with fear, I had not enough hospitality for danger and change. There was only dwindling light on the place itself.

      I stood up dizzy with regret, stumbled back to the car, slid in the key, drove on, drove two hundred miles east by a path of dash-lined curves, of skid marks and guard rails dented with rust, of gas-stop exits numbered monotonous, of passing and being passed by wind-tailed trucks made brazen by their size, drove miles of signs promising greater distances to Bozeman than Butte, to Billings than Bozeman, and miles of travel without change. And Change was my sworn brother—that we would die the same day, as Five Wounds swore to Rainbow, and fulfilled.

      The day ended in Billings, where the librarians were meeting. They had come by air and car from Missoula, Boise, Seattle, Portland. They talked about change, and tradition. After the banquet, I stood at the podium, the microphone one breath’s distance from my lips, and spoke: The Role of the Humanist in a Technological Age. I was not able to tell what I was learning, only what I had learned—too long before to be true. There was kind applause, and draining of the last wine. At the end, at midnight in the twenty-third floor conference suite, among the swirl of my smart companions, good people of my tribe holding their drinks in clear cups that tingled with the buzz and din of talk—at the end I saw the crowd divide when lightning began to play over the city below us. Some drew back against the wall. “Should we really be up here? Is the basement safer now? The stairwell . . .?”

      But some set down their champagne cups to press outward against tall windows, as lightning came faster toward us over the grid of streets, the jagged light that started fires that night all over Montana. I stepped toward the bright hot ribbons hanging down, and the din of our talk was hushed. One light on every thing: antenna, automobile, hilarious newspaper debris rolling through the streets below, the dark distant hills. In a flash our party’s reflection in the window eclipsed—the ribbons hanging down, and a girl’s voice telling the story, the burnt ozone scent of change come through sage to meet me.

      Still, I am afraid. A man of my own tribe trusted me with the story of the ribbons, and I trust you with the beads. He may have been wrong, and I may be wrong. I would let the place alone, but it will not let me alone.

      They say in Japan stands a building filled with national cultural treasures so valuable no steel door, no lock is strong enough to protect them from thieves. Instead of such a door, the state has hired an old man to watch the building in case of fire. He slowly walks about the building, then rests in the shade. Tied by thread to the simple door-latch, a note from the Emperor explains the supreme value of the treasury inside. There is no other lock.

      I would make such a note for a square yard of ground in Montana, a few miles west of Wisdom.

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