A Good High Place

Chapter 37

c H A P T e R T H i R T Y - S e V e N Final day of the festival. We stop, Kachina and me, next to a small tent the color of unbleached muslin, one of many located behind the larger chautauqua performance tent. A woman of about forty is sitting behind a dark mahogany table, and on that table rests a large doily, and on that sits a white, androgynous bust of the human head sculpted of clay and elaborately mapped out in a convolution of black intersecting lines. The woman isn’t dressed in scarves and bold-colored peasant clothes like the fortune-teller in the adjoining tent but is wearing white—some type of Red cross attire, minus the cross. Her blond hair is knotted severely, an affect suggesting things medical.Abaldmansitsinthechairontheoppositesideofthetable, and the woman is talking about “the moral sentiments—imitation and mirthfulness.” The woman gives us a glance, so Kachina and i back away from the entrance, giving the little man privacy. We’ll wait a minute for him to leave, i say. Kachina stares at me. She’s close enough i can reach out and touch her cheek, but i’ve come to recognize this separation that appears out of nowhere, like she’s standing behind a curtain of cascading water. 190 L.E. Kimball We’ll wait, she agrees. i kick stones around in the dirt with my shoe, but Kachina is motionless. Head tilted. listening to The day, as she calls it. i suppose she hears nothing less than the murmured confidences of God pouring from the sky. i tilt my head, too. i hear children screaming and the sound of wagon wheels sliding in the gravel. A boat whistle squalls from the direction of the harbor, and the band, which i’d seen earlier on the platform at the depot, is playing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” again. Someone in the brass section misses a note, and it collides in my head with the sound of Kachina’s waterfall. But i hear no murmurs from God. i glance up. The sky is enigmatic—shifting clouds one minute, brilliantsunthenext.Weshareseparateness,Kachinaandme,butwe share oneness, too. We share March winds and slow-flowing maple. Spring floods and August droughts. Bad medicine, good fishing. We share the knowledge of how difficult (and exquisitely beautiful) a day becomes for someone who struggles even to hold a spoon. The steady accumulation of days that in the end can only add up to zero. But have we become friends, i wonder? Kachina and me? comein,theladysaystous.Themanisgone,butitseemsthatinstead of the false head, the man has left his bald dissected brain sitting on the table in front of us. Next to that sits an enormous fishbowl crammed full of quarters and dollar bills. i add one dollar bill more. The woman owes me seventy-five cents but makes no attempt at restitution. We sit in the wooden folding chairs in front of the table and wait while the woman pulls out a couple two-dimensional maps of a head neatly drawn on pieces of white paper. Kachina pushes her chair back fromthetableandisleaningawayfromit,watchingthewomanasshe runs bony fingers over my head, examining the contours of my scalp. Kachina catches my eye. The waterfall is gone, and her expression has the effect of a hard shove in the chest. i’ve miscalculated; i can feel it. it would be better, i think, to stand up and leave, but i can’t move. Kachina mesmerizes coyotes and deer and people and the occasional reptile into compliance or, more usually, robust good health. it’s a gift that terrifies me but leaves me transported, while i have a gift as a storyteller, a modest gift at that. in order to tell someone else’s story, you must disappear in it, Kachina would say. You must be willing to drown in it. let go, she’d say. let go of the edge. i can hear her saying something similar in my mind, and she seems to have me pinned in my seat by the sheer force of her will. Aptitudes, the woman says now. Phrenology is particularly useful for discovering what strengths a person possesses. The bumps in the skull correspond to the development of the brain, which governs each personality characteristic. Three major groups—the propensities, the moral sentiments, and the intellectual faculties. At no point does the...