This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [125]
When you have suffered enough, that is all you need to say. Mercy.
On the way home from the bus, as I walked across the back field to the house, I could see Shiva still out in the orchard, his hair slung back from the sheen of his forehead, the glinting steel of a machete in his hands.
The next morning there was the bloody head of that old porcupine on a stake in front of the house, its rounded nose drying beneath the prunes of closed eyes. Shiva had chopped it off with his machete and carried it in bloody hands back to the house to show Mama, a cat bringing home his prize. He put it on the stake, he explained, as a warning for the other porcupines.
In the light of early mornings, it seemed I might see or hear the secret to it all. A map of meaning. As my eyes opened, the light from the windows made broken shapes on the yellowed pine walls around my bunk. Brightness and shadow danced in the space of those shapes from the movement of the trees near the house. My mind drifted and caught on the patterns as they vibrated and hummed. They brightened to fade the shadow and darkened to fade the light. I watched for answers. I knew this would last only a few minutes, but in that eternity my mind could wander within a truth not spoken in words, a connectedness to all things. Dead and alive did not exist. All was just a coming and a going. What remained was mercy. The broken shapes of light fitted together into one. At-one-ment. Atonement. My eyes were closed, but the light remained.
I can feel, as if it were my own, Heidi’s longing. Water, with its infinite permutations, called to her. The cushions of sphagnum moss welcomed her bare feet as she approached the edge of the pond with her little red boat, the dark water reaching higher than usual up the slippery banks from the rain. Did the boat drift beyond her reach? The water was a welcome cool on her skin at first, but her feet couldn’t find the ledge. Her hands reached out for the boat, fingers grasping, closing only on emptiness. Pale blue eyes slipped below the surface. She breathed the water in. The lack of oxygen, someone once told me, feels like falling asleep.
In the Narnia books, the lion Aslan said there was a law older than time: if a willing victim, a scapegoat, offers his life in a traitor’s place, the stone table will crack, and death itself will be denied. Heidi was our scapegoat, and with her death she was set free.
I opened my eyes in my bunk to the feeling of a hollow space in the quiet of the farmhouse, like the empty stomach under my belly button. Lump the shape of an egg in my throat. Chill of October morning in the air.
Earlier there’d been whispering. Clara crying. Footsteps across the wooden floor. My sleep self was waiting for Mama to say, “Wake up, Lissie, it’s time to go.” The words didn’t come. I should have called out, “Wait, wait for me,” but sleep held me under. The wooden door latch slid across the smooth spot, closing with a solid sound, then only the scuffling of mice in the insulation and flies bumping the windows.
My body seemed too heavy, muscles hardening as if made of clay. There was the sound of voices outside. “Mama?” My head hit the ceiling boards as I sat up and slid down the bunk ladder and out the screen door, slamming it behind. The garden spread from the house down to the well in a tired patchwork dissected by log-lined sawdust paths. A few beds had shriveled tomato vines and dried beanstalks in them, some covered in seaweed for winter, most ragged with witchgrass. I scanned for the familiar curve of Mama’s brown back bending over the earth in her bandanna-print halter top, braids hanging below the half-moon of her forehead. The soil was cool under my toes, making goose bumps scatter up my shins. I was a young animal not finding the shape of its mother in the wild.
The air filled with the shushing of feathers, a flock of geese heading south, wings beating