A Good High Place

Chapter 32

c H A P T e R T H i R T Y - T W o other people’s words, as Uncle George referred to them, poke at me. They drift along on the surface of my brain like jagged pieces of rotting driftwood. it’s not the uttered words that stink; i can always skim those off and discard them like globs of congealing fat. it’s the unuttered words that settle, the sedimentary words. How is it that “un” things take up space the way they do? crazy dots in a dot-todot puzzle no one bothered to finish. it’s all about what gets left out. like i said before, Kachina and i didn’t choose to be friends. But maybe choices are an illusion after all. Maybe our decisions are made on a primitive, cellular level, centuries before, a fateful blend of circumstance and heredity, all tied to a preexisting event or state of being like a link in some obscene collective chain. No free will. No original thought. Nothing. PaulRee,introductiontoPhilosophy,sophomoreyear,University of Michigan. Anyway, it would be nice to know a pivotal day in the chain was coming so you could be ready for it. The day Keane got bit was a pivotal day like that. 172 L.E. Kimball i WATcH AS eVeRY MUScle in Kachina’s body is flexed, poised, but on her face is a terrible calm as she waits for Keane to give her permission to end the dog’s life. Kachina is like the wind and rain, the sun, the moon, the earth, and the sky all wrapped up in one, a force every bit as terrifying as that dog, because they’re part of her. They are all bleeding, even the dog, and they are in it together, the three of them. i can only watch. Should they invite me into their private battle, someone would still need to comfort Topini. She has become cold and confused, and there is nothing for me to do but pick her up. Her feet feel like ice, so i pull my coat around us both, hoping that will make her feel better, but the snarling dog frightens her now, and she continues to cry, her hands pushed tightly over her ears. Topini has flat, undeveloped facial features, short wide hands that are dry and rough, like sandpaper against my skin, and as i enfold her in my arms, her limbs flop every which way. i try to gather her together, but it’s like trying to gather up loose rubber bands. i notice her skin is fairer than mine, her eyes a nearly colorless gray with no depth to them, not so much an emptiness like you would expect from a lack of intelligence, but a quality produced by a sheer lack of color, whiteflecksaroundtheedgeoftheirises.Herhairisamediumbrown, brittle and stringy, so different from Kachina’s. i wonder if she’d been born with errors in her pigment like Ghost, an albino mare Uncle George had a few years back, and i think that’s part of it. All at once i find my legs won’t support me. i slide down in the mud, lean up against the tree so that the bateau keeps the rain, which has begun again, off our faces. it seems as if the struggle lasts forever—most of it going on between Keane and the dog, an interactionidon’tunderstand,butKachinaseemsto.Finallythedog gets up and moves away without Kachina having to slit his throat. Have they both lost too much blood? i wonder if i’ll have to go for help, but we start back, Kachina supporting Keane, me carrying Topini. it’s over a mile and a half back to Kachina’s village, but we have to get Keane to a doctor, which means another half mile farther. As we walk, i think about losing Keane or sharing him. i’ve never had to do that before. i want to keep thinking about Keane and Kachina because i need to find a place to store my thoughts, but i can’t. Because i think about cap. ithinkaboutwhatmakespeopledowhattheydoand iremember Uncle George talking about paying the price. Mostly i think about tintypes. i have one of all of us that i keep in Mama’s desk. Mabel, cap, Mama (obviously pregnant), and me, standing in the front yard. Six, i might have been, so that would...