Chapter One
Spring 1741; Spring 1961
World was Moving
I felt the edge slip sometimes. When I was there. Nothing obvious, just
the disquieting feeling that something had come loose, something had
shifted and reassembled itself beneath me. There are places like that.
Places that fall apart and re-form right under your boots. Places that can
remake you. I think now it’s because these places themselves are still
undone, still being formed.
The Pacific plate began its slow plunge under the American plate,
revealing the red meat of the earth. Along the wound, volcanoes rose like
cysts, spewing molten rock into cool water, creating the Aleutian chain
seventy million years ago. Strewn like stepping-stones, the 1,400-mile
island chain arched from the Alaskan Peninsula to the doorstep of Siberia.
And then the winds began, so persistent, so fierce, the islands became the
Birthplace of the Wind and the Cradle of Storms. The winds erode from
above; the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean wear from below.
These islands are at once being born and dying. The battle of fire and
water is old and living. Both will keep killing. And keep giving life.
This is the edge, the slip. They are, like us, unfinished. People do not
possess such places but are possessed by them. I felt it when I was there.
I imagine the Aleut people have been feeling it for thousands of years.
And I believe some of them still remember the power that lurks in this
land. When I first heard their story, I felt as if the wind were lifting a
veil, revealing something I already knew. And some part of my brain
stepped back from the edge of extinction and smiled. Their story takes a
shape our instincts recognize. The whisper under a shout. And in my mind,
I’m standing again on a cliff overlooking that siren ocean, feeling the
wind press into my lungs. And I, too, remember.
It blows over the beach below on this sunny, cold afternoon long ago and
into the face of Tekuxia as she stands among the rocks and sand. She and
thirty others from her village have gathered here at Tumgax’s request.
Another vision has come to him.
“Something is coming,” Tumgax says, leaning forward to peer into each
person’s eyes. “The wind will bring newcomers from beyond the sea, and
everything will change.”
Tekuxia shudders when the shaman tells of these visions. Her children
whimper with nightmares after such talk. But she listens well.
And she believes.
“Last night I journeyed again to where the spirits talk.” Tumgax turns his
face to search past the breakers, past the towering rocks guarding the
village cove, toward the open ocean. “These newcomers will bring new ways.
The People will take up their ideas, their clothing, their lives. Until no
one remembers who we were.”
Tekuxia shivers under the cold sun. The villagers know there exist people
much different from themselves. Twice in her thirty-seven years, parts of
a whale-size boat have come to rest on the beach. The bits of iron,
holding water-soaked wood together, were quickly stripped and hammered
into knives and awls, their blades wearing much better than stone. And she
has heard the tales of a people to the west, beyond the last island. But
these tales have grown so old that they now sound like myths serving only
to warn the young men not to venture too far from home.
“When they come,” Tumgax continues, “we will welcome them. We will embrace
their God and their toion and everything will change.”
As the gathering breaks, Tekuxia scoops up her little girl and holds her
close, feeling the dark shiny hair under her cheek. Tekuxia does not fear
for herself; she feels certain her generation will pass before the change.
But Aya. Aya will see it all. She sets the girl down and kneels in front
of her.
“Aya, you must remember what I am going to tell you. Say you will.”
The girl looks up, surprised by her mother’s urgent tone.
“Yes, Mama.”
“These hands,” Tekuxia says, turning the sand-caked palms upward in her
own, “in them you hold your fate, and in no one’s hands but your own does
your future rest. Do you understand?”
Aya understands only the strange desperation in her mother’s voice, only
the first notions of fear. But she nods.
“Yes, Mama.”
In the years to come, Aya will listen to her mother repeat this strange
ceremony, the turning up of her palms and the heavy words. But she will
not come to understand them until her mother is long gone and the change
has blown down upon her like a williwaw.
Hurl yourself forward 220 years and fly inland to another girl learning at
her mother’s side. My mother’s legacy of wisdom was no less insistent, no
less burdened by a maternal instinct to warn her daughter of what she
fears.
“Brandy,” she says, buttoning up her blouse, but not too far, as I gaze
into the depths of her cleavage, “you always want to take up the hem some
on a store-bought dress. At least two inches. Got that?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Two inches. Two inches.
The water bed sloshes with the rhythm as I repeat the words in a whisper,
scared to forget anything even then.
“And,” my mother says, bending forward at the waist to invert her blond
curls and burden them with spray, “this Aqua Net is the best shit on the
market.”
Aqua Net. Aqua Net.
She takes my face between her two hands as she passes by me for the door.
“Such a pretty girl,” she says, and I squint to see past the barriers of
black-clumped lashes. I squint to see into the wreck of my mother’s eyes.
She throws her customary parting over her shoulder as she leaves. “Be bad
enough so they call you good.” The smell of perfume and hair spray and a
protean dampness lingers in the room.
(Continues…)
William Morrow
ISBN: 0-06-059770-4
Excerpted from And She Was
by Cindy Dyson Excerpted by permission.
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