Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [183]
“Shh, Luciente!” Morningstar rebuked her. “We’re listening.”
“I blather.” Luciente drew Connie away. “Such hardness in your mind tonight makes me babble more than usual. I fear for you.”
“But it was you, your people, who taught me I’m fighting a war.”
“Then fight well, Connie!” They walked out into the cold clean brisk air. Luciente paused to grab a jacket and drape it over Connie’s shoulders. Big disks of snow came tilting and turning down where already several inches lay thick, rounding all corners and softening straight lines, an expanse of white across the square marked only by the tracks of children playing.
Luciente touched her shoulder. “You want to ask if I still mourn … .”
“I wouldn’t ask!”
“I know. But you want to feel how I am. Yes, I mourn. But I work too. It hurts, but I can’t let the pain bind me … . Diana has helped. Otter has helped. Bee has carried me! … I want no new lover and I dread spring … . But look!” Luciente waved her hand at a snowball battle swirling around the statue of a funny bird dancing on one foot and a barricade of benches. Briefly Dawn ran through a pool of light, whooping and waving.
Lazy flakes drifted onto the arm of the borrowed jacket. “Luciente, do you think it’s always wrong to kill?”
“We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice.” Luciente caught flakes on her outstretched palm.
“I mean to kill a person.”
“How can I face something so abstract?”
“To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in.”
“Power is violence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we’re back to the wall—or to tear down a wall. You know we kill people who choose twice to hurt others. We don’t think it’s right to kill them. Only convenient. Nobody wants to stand guard over another.”
“In my time people are willing to stand guard. It’s a living. I guess maybe it’s power, too.”
“You brood on killing someone, my friend?”
She nodded, disentangling herself from Luciente to clutch her hands together before her breasts. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world. Luciente was speaking, but under the rush of her blood, the words mumbled like stones in the bed of a river. Slowly people drifted from the meetinghouse and began taking shovels, brooms from sheds along the square and the paths. The shovels clanged against the stone, the wood scraped. The night began to fill with laughter and the sounds of shoveling. The children stopped their fight and began to clear the snow. In red pants and a dark blue parka, Dawn was wielding a broom, coming along behind Otter, whose broad single braid bounced rhythmically on her back. Bee was clearing snow from the path toward the fooder, as Hawk came running and sliding to work beside him. Her breath came out in white plumes as she talked and talked full speed to him.
She could hear Luciente speaking but she could no longer distinguish the words in the roar of her blood. Only dimly she could hear the scrape of metal on stone. Lips moved as if people were singing. Dawn looked over her padded shoulder at them. Dawn smiled and waved and began to sweep very hard with the broom, showing off, casting up a fine white dust. Flakes rested lightly on her black dome of hair, the hood of the parka cast back. One flake sat for a moment on the end of her delicate, sensuously curved nose, snow on her beautiful Mayan nose where Connie imagined that she pressed a quick kiss.
She lay flat on her bed, out of breath as if she had been dropped from a height.
“What is it?” Tina sat up, awake. “You okay?”
“Yes …”
“You cried out. What happened—you have a bad dream?”
“A good