The Last Shepherd

27. HOGEITA ZAZPI

| 157 »« Of all the Basque tales Aitatxi and Oxea told me, the one that made the least sense was about the lamiak—the little people who came into houses at night and tried to clean up the messes left behind by the humans they dreamed of being. But always the lamiak would break something, their hands too small for the things of humans. And they would run crying into the night. What I couldn’t understand—what made no sense—was why the lamiak wanted to be human in the first place. “I would rather live in the wild than a house,” I told Aitatxi and Oxea as we sat on the porch. Oxea was talking about different Basque creatures. He’d already told all his Mamu stories and was now onto the lamiak. It was late autumn. Streams of cool air slid through the warm dusk. Dad was in Detroit. He had called before I left for school that morning to tell me he wouldn’t be home for a few more days. And so I set fire to the oleanders out behind my sixth grade classroom and was expelled for a week. “You live in wild,” Oxea said, “you be in coyote belly by morning, Gaixua.” “Don’t call me that,” I said. “And I would eat a coyote.” “Ez, no taste so good,” Oxea said. “You ate a coyote?” I asked. Oxea just laughed. “Sure, no, why you want to be lamia, Mathieu?” Aitatxi asked. “It would be better than being human.” “Lamiak no know how a use match,” Oxea said. “Maybe you lamia, it better for all.” “How about you—” “Tell me,” Aitatxi interrupted my comeback, “why you no like being human?” 27 h o g e i ta z a z p i | 158« » “I don’t know,” I said. “Because . . .” And then the last of the day’s light slipped away and darkness fell, so that when I turned from where I sat on the porch steps, I could no longer see Aitatxi or Oxea’s faces. But I could feel heat coming off of them, like from the fire I’d started earlier, as if it were still burning, flames licking my skin, pulling up the anger in me from its dark hiding place. “. . . because humans are stupid.” I looked out toward the pasture where the oak tree stood in the moonlight. “And they lie and they are full of things that shouldn’t be inside them—things they don’t need, things that make everything worse.” “What things?” Aitatxi asked. “Things, things, you know, organs, stuff—hearts,” I said. And there it was. I had said it. The thing that I didn’t want to have. A heart. “Your aita, he will come home soon,” Aitatxi said. “What do I care? He can stay gone forever.” “He will come back—” “I hate him,” I said. “I hate every—” And then I was grabbed from behind. Heavy arms wrapped around me. “What the—get off—let go!” But Oxea wouldn’t let go. The smell of sour sweat covered me as the rough stubble of his face scratched my cheek. I kept struggling to get free, but Oxea held me firmly to his chest. The pounding of his heart filled my head. There was no escaping him. I quit struggling. Started to cry. The fire in me went out. Oxea’s arms went soft. He kissed me on top of my head. “There, Gaixua,” Oxea said, “now you human for always.” As I stood looking out Gorrienea’s kitchen window at Isabelle holding a letter from her mother sent almost fifty years ago, I was again puzzled by the desire of the lamiak to be human. It didn’t make any sense. Not when humans had hearts that were so easily broken. When Isabelle returned from the pasture, neither the letter nor the fact that she had been crying was visible. She went to the stove and began preparing a lunch of blood sausage and potatoes. But her hands trembled as she cut the potatoes into quarters and dropped them into a pot of water. And her fingers were drawn over and over to the letter whose corner peeked from the pocket of her dress—like an open wound she couldn’t help but | 159« » touch. And even though I was burning to state the obvious—that someone had sent the...