Chapter 2: Hale Ground

Elias Hale woke in the dark before day and lay still, looking up at the split in his own roof.

He had left it three days. It was no wider than a finger, with one thin gray line of sky in it, and he had meant to be up on the shingles the morning it opened, and had gone out to the far field instead.

Beside him his wife slept, deep and even, the way she had slept all night. He had not had three straight nights since the lights started.

They had come over the ridge a few days back and they had not stopped coming. Light going one way and then another, all hours of the dark, like men taking the ridge apart. Every time one of those streaks crossed the valley, Alder Creek hit the dirt. Elias had done it himself the first night, facedown in his own yard with his arms over his head, and half the village had been out doing the same.

He did not know what they wanted up there and there was no finding out. What he knew was what one of them could do to a valley on the way past. One blow of it, and there would not be a dog left alive in Alder Creek.

The woods were deep and the road was narrow. Nobody had ever come up from the crown to ask anything of this valley, and nobody in the valley had ever gone looking for the crown.

The Hales had worked this ground for two hundred years and more. His father was under it, and his grandfather, and every Hale back past the ones anybody could still name, up behind the lane where the family put its dead. A family goes into ground like that and does not come out of it. You could not move two hundred years and you could not move the graves, so he was where he was.

The boy was growing, and he ate like a man in the fields, and a morning down at the water was a morning he was out of the house. Elias turned over and lay with his eyes open until the window went from black to gray. Then he got up, and stood at the window a while, and put his hands behind his back, and went out. The yellow dog was asleep on the boards outside the door with its nose on its paws and did not lift its head.

Alder Creek was coming up out of the fog — a rooster, a dog answering a dog behind the houses, cook-smoke standing straight up. Elias went down the middle of the road at his own pace, and at his own gate he stopped and called back at the house.

“Duncan!”

The house rattled end to end. Something went over in it. The door banged open and the boy came out at a run and pulled up in front of him with his head tipped back.

“What are we doing today?”

He was half grown, with a sly look that sleep had not taken off him yet.

“Nothing today,” Elias said. “Take the basket and the long fork down to the Broadwater. Get your mother something fresh. She hasn’t been eating.”

“Yes,” the boy said. He said it twice and nodded hard with each one, and had the basket off its nail and the fork out of the corner before Elias had finished turning.

Elias laughed, twice, out loud, and went down the path toward the fields.

The Broadwater ran shallow and wide, mostly mudflat and reed, and at this hour there was nothing on it but two small rafts tied to the bank, rocking. The village kept geese and ducks out there by the hundred and never fed them. You turned them out in the morning and the river did the feeding, and at the end of the day somebody walked down to the bank and called, and the whole flock came home dragging its feet for a voice it knew.

Duncan was there before the birds were out. He rolled his pants up over his knees and his sleeves up over his elbows, knelt down in the mud at the edge of the flat, put his arms in to the wrist, and began feeling around.

For a while there was nothing but fog coming off the water in strips.

Then he saw green.

“Now that’s a fish,” he said.

He got both hands on it, held his breath, and went under. It turned once, hard, and then he had a hand under the gill and the weight of it coming, and he came up out of the water with it, laughing and blowing, and threw it in the basket.

Nothing that lived in the Broadwater got that big by being easy. This one had come down from somewhere up above, a wild thing, and Duncan had happened to be standing in its road, and he knew it.

He looked down at his own feet in the mud.

The bottom was smooth there. Smooth as a step in a doorway, worn round by everybody’s feet — a patch of it, out past where his knees had been — and under the mud, when the light moved, something threw up a thin shine of silver.

He looked at it. He stepped back and looked at it from a different angle. He had been in and out of this water his whole life and he did not know what he was looking at.

He took a breath, ready to go down, when somebody on the bank behind him called.

“Duncan!”

He had the basket behind him before his head finished turning — one hand on the rim, one arm hooked over the top of it — and he came around looking up the bank like a man caught at something, and what came up out of the reeds was a boy of twelve or so, thin, with mud to his knees.

Duncan let his breath out. “Eddie. Come to see to the ducks?”

The boy stood at the edge of the flat and looked at the basket, and Duncan brought it around where he could see into it.

“Out of the mud,” Duncan said. “Bare hands.”

Edwin leaned over the basket and laughed. “Now that’s a fish,” he said.

Edwin’s father had been in his bed for years, and his brother did not work that anybody had ever seen. Most weeks there was more supper at the Hale table than up at that house, and all of them knew it and none of them said it. Eddie was at the table or he was not, and either way there was enough. The two of them had grown up through the same door, and Duncan had never once made anything of it.

Edwin wanted to know how he had got it, so Duncan told him — both hands, no fork — and then told it again with more in it, because it was the biggest fish he had ever taken and he did not intend to waste the telling.

“All right, I’m going,” Edwin said after a while. He looked back up the bank. “I’ve got the ducks. If I come home two short, my brother will kill me.”

“Then go.”

“Okay.” And he went up through the reeds at a run.

Duncan was in the water before the reeds had stopped moving. He went down and up, down and up, walking his hands over the whole flat until his fingers were numb, and on the fourth or fifth time he came up with something in his fist.

He wiped his face with the heel of one hand and looked at it.

It was the size of his palm — a little round plate, gray-blue, set in a rim of something dark, iron or near enough. The face of it was broken. Seven pieces, eight, he could not get them counted, all of them sitting up against each other and holding on by the rim and nothing else. On the back was a mark. He turned it over twice in the light and could not make the mark into anything: it was not writing, it was not a bird, and it was not a hand.

He thought of his aunt’s mirror.

Most of the women in Alder Creek did their hair by still water. His aunt’s people had the biggest fields at the top of the valley, and his aunt had a mirror, a real one, and the week it came his mother had walked him over the hill to see it held up, and turned her own face in it, side to side, and both her ears had been in it at once. Water never did that.

This one was clouded. He breathed on it and rubbed it with his thumb and looked again, and there was nothing in it but weather, a gray wet blur with no picture in it at all.

He shook his head over it. Then he put it in the basket with the fish and went back to the fish.

Half a month in the water, and I had learned how to keep accounts.

Two weeks of it went like this: a meter of water, more or less, in every direction, the same stones under me, fish going through in ones and twos, and a crab that kept its hole in the bank and came out in the afternoons. Nothing I could put a hand to.

For two nights the moon came down and something in me rose up to meet it. On the third night it stopped rising. I worked at it another week and got nothing out of it — the same amount of me every night, no fuller than before.

And the one thing I could do with any of it was glow.

That morning I was lying there watching the big green fish that had been keeping to the same patch of stones beside me.

Then a hand came down and pinned it into the mud.

The bottom jumped. The hand took the fish under the gill and went up through the surface with it, and that was the end of the fish.

There was a voice up on the bank, and then no voice, and a stretch of that morning I could not account for. I had not finished with the first live person I had ever seen — the size of him, the sound of him, the plain fact of him — when the hand came back down and took hold of me.

He turned me over. He brought me up out of the water into the air and held me out where he could see me, and a face came down over me: young, wide, close enough that the edges of it went soft.

He said something. He said several things, one after another, quick, and he turned me in his fingers the whole time he did it. Then he flipped me over his wrist and dropped me into the basket, and I came to rest against the green fish, the two of us jammed in together at the bottom of it.

That was when I understood the thing that should have been plain from the first hour.

I could hear him. I could not understand one word.

It was a language, all of it, every sound of it, and not one of those sounds belonged to me. I had spent a life listening to people talk, and there was nothing in any of this I could get a grip on. It was like a radio going in the next apartment: clear, close, and not one word of it mine.

That was half of it. The other half came a moment later. If I ever found a way to talk, everything I had to say would come out in a language nobody here had ever heard, and it would be noise to whoever heard it.

So I stopped listening with what I had and reached instead. I pushed the thread out around me, slowly, an arm’s length at a time, and it came back to me with the stones, and the reeds, and the mud — and then with him.

The sense came back thin, and it came back close. It did not come from the bank or from the reeds or from anywhere past the small wet world I had. But it came. It put me behind his eyes, where his attention was. Which stone. Which fish. The want going out of him toward something under the bank — and then the fish was in his hand.

He talked while he fished. Every time a fish went into the basket he said something over it; every time he missed one he said something else, shorter. I listened for the sounds that came around again, and by the time the light was up over the far bank I had numbers three, four and five, and half a dozen names for fish.

He was a farm kid. I could not have told you how I knew — the hands, maybe, and the way he stood in that mud like it belonged to him.

A farm kid takes a thing like this home. He shows his mother. Then his father comes in, and whoever else is at the table when a wet boy comes through the door holding something up out of the water.

So: more hands, more voices, more rooms. I would listen, and I would learn the sounds the way I had learned three and four and five, one at a time, for as long as it took. I would stay quiet and stay small, the size of a palm and the color of the river stones, and keep drinking whatever moon I could get, and look for a way around whatever had walled me up on the third night. Day by day, until something moved. There was nothing else in me to work with.

Fish came into the basket. I gave each one its name back to him, on the inside, in his sounds, and got most of them right, and it pleased me more than it should have.

Then the basket went over and the light changed. He had stood up. He was lifting the handle, and the sky came down across the rim and the willows went sideways, and then I was on his back.

Water came out through the gaps in the willow with every step and ran down over me. The green fish slid up against my face and slid away again, up and away, with his walking. Through the rim I could see a strip of the bank going by, and mud, and a path, and then the path began to climb.