A Good High Place

Chapter 19

c H A P T e R N i N T e e N The rain stops now, and the sun peaks through the east window. She pulls off the rug, opens the sash so she’ll have air while she works. She lives alone in this cabin Keane built for her. Rather it is she and Topini. Here in the river bog that speaks to her, the place she can feel The day best (or could feel it). People call her windigo and stay away from her most of the time, except the desperate ones— red or white, it doesn’t matter—the ones with nothing to lose, the ones who will try anything. They shun her due to that colossal log sawyer Henry who raped her one night in the spring of 1920, down at Kingman’s slough. Henry hadn’t been alone. other logmen were watching, and Kachina, who had left her knife at home, had known there was no stopping him. She had deserted her body to the leftover winter ice, abandoned it to Henry and departed to the steaming heat of her mind. The other men could see it, and they said that afterward she’d taken Henry’s mind along, too. They said his saw whined war cries from then on whenever it sliced through the flesh of a tree and that he lost flesh himself and sat in bar corners stupefied and dribbling whiskey down parched gray lips and a quivering chin. That accounted for the whites. The Anishinaabek had their own reasons for considering her windigo. But they all knew she had the touch. Topini isn’t awake yet. She’s always been a late riser unless you root her out with more thanabitofforce.Sinceshe’sstillsleeping,KachinaborrowsTopini’s red apron as it’s larger than her cooking one. She knows Topini will complain, but she ties it on anyway, pushes the sandpaper along the old maple top, careful to move with the grain, moving slowly so as not to strain her shoulders. There were never children of her own, as she knew there wouldn’t be, though once she had carried Keane’s for a short time. He never said anything, but she saw the accusation in his eyes. She knew he wondered if she’d used her emmenagogue concoctions or willed her womb to empty with what he suspected was the strangeness and relentlessness of her mind. But she hadn’t. She’d simply known her body, and the red road would not support a child of her own issue. Topini had been child enough. The only time in all her sixty-two years she wasn’t with Topini was when she went hunting. The odd hour in the evening when she’d gone searching for sweetgrass or dandelion root or comfrey and izusa had taken over the watch. consequently, Kachina couldn’t do anything Topini couldn’t do, go anywhere she couldn’t go, and the child’s every struggle had become Kachina’s. As the seasons passed, their hours meshed: Kachina knew what it was like to swallow corn stew with a tongue that flapped like a blubbery lump of deer liver, what it was like to try to sit straight with a backbone like saltsoaked cartilage, to walk uneven trails with floppy joints and legs like conflicted rubbery snakes, knew what it was like to live in that swamp fog that kept Topini from being aware of how and where her body took up space. Kachina knew the warmth inside when these adversities were finally conquered. But she knows what it feels like to deal with the things that never can be. She strains sometimes, still, to hear intricate sounds with what feels like warm honey poured in her ears. She’s jarred with hypersensitivity to sound the next moment. She knows what it’s like A GOOD HIGH PLACE 97 98 L.E. Kimball to communicate a vast Sky Vault of ideas, even the simplest of wants and needs, with no more than a dozen words in her head, knows what it’s like to focus on an object with her eyes roaming crazily in her head like darting fireflies, to struggle for domination over her fingers sufficient to eat with a utensil or weave a basket. And she’s lived—what—nearly fifty years?—with the knowledge of what it’s like to have...