-
The Moon on Their Breath
- Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 23, Number 2, 2002
- pp. 86-91
- 10.1353/fro.2002.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.2 (2002) 86-91
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The Moon on Their Breath
Diane Glancy
It was autumn, and her feet made noises in the leaves. She listened to her footsteps as she walked into the woods with her doll. She lived in a tract house on cleared land. The dirt yard did not make a noise where she walked, but in the woods, the leaves were brown, brittle, and noisy. She listened to the birds whistle. Somewhere a truck turned off the highway and bounced in the ruts of the dirt road. She could hear the tools rattle in the truck bed from the distance. The reservation houses had been built on an old logging road. A bed of logs lay crosswise under the dirt road. She felt the wind blow strands of hair across her face. The wind in the trees sounded like water in a shallow stream. It made the sound of pencil against paper she'd heard in school.
The land was flat, and pines, birch, and tamaracks lined up against the road. The reservation was on a moraine. There had been spirits in the old glacier, and the spirits had grown hair for warmth. When the glacier melted, the spirits shed their hair, and their hair became the trees.
Down the road, a stone church sat in another clearing. A few trailers and mailboxes were scattered along the main road that led to the clearing.
The girl bent forward to make her way into the clump of brush where she played in the summer. She carried her doll, and the doll was her friend, not just a toy. Someday the girl would have children. She knew it. There was nothing else for her to want. In the woods she made a bed of pine needles. She used twigs for pillows or whatever she and the doll needed. The clump of brush was shaped like a beaver mound. She thought of the old story of beavers, how they once had been big as buffalo, but their dams flooded the country. The Great Spirit had to rework his plan for the beaver and make him small. The brush clump seemed to move with the flickering light from sun and shadows. In places, flat slabs of granite sat on the ground, covered with moss and lichen. Once she tried to get some moss from the woods to grow by her house, but it died. [End Page 86]
Now as she walked along the road, the girl heard a car so she walked along the edge of a yard until it passed. All the houses on Vermilion Reservation Road had the bare necessities, including a gravel drive to a clapboard or shingled house or a trailer. Several cars, few of which would start, sat in the yards. She couldn't remember if her mother or grandmother knew where she went. Often they didn't know where her two brothers and three sisters were.
Farther along there was another road, a dirt road, and there was an old house that someone must have lived in. Behind it, there was an older hut no one used. It was a cabin of rotting logs, covered with moss and lichen, and there were more trees and clumps of brush. By then, maybe, she had left her doll at her house and had gone with her brothers and sisters and others to climb on the rotting cabin and in the trees. She remembered how the roof of the cabin swayed when she climbed on it.
She remembered her doll dressed in buckskin with its mindless, blank face; although the house was damp and cold under gray skies, the doll kept her warm.
She was older now, and a boy in the next grade stood on the road ahead of her. He asked her to a dance. Her parents wouldn't care, but she said she'd have to ask them.
"Have you asked?" He found her at school.
"No," she said.
The next day he asked again.
"Yes, they said I could...