A Good High Place

Chapter 25

c H A P T e R T W e N T Y - F i V e ThereisanotherdayKachinacan’tforget.dark—1913or1914— she isn’t sure. Before the windigo dog. She’d seated herself down by the bay in the shadows of the gijik, the great medicine tree she likes to sit under to gather her strength. Hototo told her how the roots of the gijik extend to the underworld while its very tip breaks through the heavens. it has great power of health and knowledge. A storm is forming over the bay. Some say Motchi Manitou is trying to get out of the water. But Kachina isn’t afraid of drowning and not going to heaven. Kachina knows that storms are part of The day’s message. She can feel the power and stays to feel it swell to its full height. She’s surprised to see luella and Keane sitting on the beach. They seem to be playing with sand and talking quietly. concealed in the shadow of the tree, Kachina knows she is stealing something private between them but can’t stop herself. The storm grows nearer and stronger, but it doesn’t chase luella and Keane away. Time passes, and she sees them run for the water and swim for the rock. She can tell they are racing. When they reach the rock together, she sees Keane pull luella toward him. lightning flashes, and the sky lights 130 L.E. Kimball up, and she sees their bodies close together. She hears the thunder echo across the bay. Kachina stands. She walks out of the trees down to the water, the manitou wind whipping her hair from its braid and tangling it in the beads around her neck. Her feet are bare, her skirt dragging in the water. They don’t see her. At first. He bends toward luella and presses his mouth to hers, and when he does, Kachina feels the power and balance leave her, the emptiness invade, a void like the one she’d seen in Hototo’s eyes the day he’d gone to the school, and for a moment she wants to keep walking into the waves. it seems the nothingness lasts for an eternity. But then—finally, thankfully—the pain enters, as strong as the emptiness had been an instant before, and that is all right. She can live with the pain but not the emptiness. Pieces of a canoe, a two-forked stick, and the wing of a dead gyashk-gull catch in her skirt. She lets the debris build up in front of her like a dam. She doesn’t move, standing to her knees in water, the waves, and the debris. luella’s back is to her, but Keane raises his head. She knows it’s too far and too dark for him to see her face, and she can’t see his clearly, but she knows he is watching her. luella is close against his chest, but Keane continues to stare over her head at Kachina. No one moves for several minutes, and the agony, like exquisite piercing needles, intensifies with the storm. Kachina stays until she sees Keane pull luella on top of the rock, and then she turns and walks back into the trees. ...