Ama Gozen: The Graveyard (3)

By the middle of the morning the men had been up the ridge and come down again.

The fence was down along the whole of the hollow side, they said, and graves had been trodden. A stone set on one of the oldest of them had been kicked off and lay a long way down the slope, and the mound under it was torn. They stood in the yard and said it with their eyes on the mare, where she stood tied at the end of the stable, and the old women came out of the kitchen to look at her too. One of them turned and spat to the side, quietly, and went back in.

Tomoe's father listened to all of it. Then he walked down the length of the stable to where the mare stood, and the mare swung her head up and showed the whites of her eyes at him, and he stopped well short of her and looked a long time. Then he turned to Tomoe, standing beside the mare with dried mud cracking on her shins.

"You brought it down," he said. "Take it up again. Past the north pass, where the road goes over. Leave it there and come back without it."

 

---

 

The girl had said she would go at first light. At first light she was asleep against the wall with her mouth open and the bundle under both arms. The nun stepped over her feet and went out.

Gorō was at the woodpile. He looked at the doorway, and at the nun, and at the doorway again.

"East road's hot by midday," he said.

The nun took the second bucket off its peg and set it on the step by the door. Then she went down the path to the lake with the first.

When the girl came out, blinking, the sun was well up. She stood looking at the bucket. After a while she went back in for her sandals, put them on, and took it down the path.

The village children were already on the strand, the carp-catcher's boy among them, hauling a net up the sand. They stopped hauling when they saw who was coming down from the grave. The girl walked past them to the water as though they were posts, filled the bucket, and walked back. The carp-catcher's boy said something. She didn't turn her head.

The nun was waiting at the top of the path with her own bucket full. They carried them up together, the girl slopping a little at every step and saying nothing about it. At the water jar she set hers down and shook the ache out of her hands.

"Did her father beat her?" she said. "For the graveyard."

The nun poured her bucket into the jar.

"Not for the graveyard," she said.

 

          *

 

She took the mare up the north road before noon, alone.

They went at the mare's pace, which was slow. The leg had stiffened, and she favored it on the climb, stopping now and then with her head low until Tomoe said her name and she came on again. Below the pass, where the road crossed the stream, an old charcoal burner's hut stood back in a fold of the hill. It had stood empty since the burner moved his kilns lower down. From the road Tomoe could see the smoke of the new kilns rising out of the trees a long way below, thin and blue, going straight up in the still air.

She stood in the road a long time. The pass was a little farther on. She could see the place where the road went over.

She turned off it and led the mare up through the brush to the hut.

Half the roof was gone and one wall was stacked stone. She brought water from the stream in a cracked pot she found inside, and pulled grass along the bank until her hands were green and cut, and dragged deadfall across the doorway to close it. When she climbed over the deadfall to go, the mare came to it and stood with her chest against the branches, and watched her all the way down to the road.

It was dusk when she came into the yard. Her father was at the stable door, talking to one of the men about a horse that had split a hoof on the stones at the ford. He turned when she came in.

"Past the pass?"

"Past the pass," Tomoe said.

She said it looking at him. He held her eyes a moment, and nodded, and turned back to the man and the hoof.

At supper Komaō sat down beside her. He leaned across and plucked something from her sleeve, a stalk of grass with the seed head still on it.

"You've brought half the mountain home," he said. He put the stalk in his mouth and chewed it slowly, with his lip pulled back off his teeth like an old horse, until the small children shrieked and her father's eyes went down the room to him.

She went up to the hut the next day, and the day after, with water and grass and a fistful of barley each time from the stable bin. Ishimaru was always at the bin when she came, and always turned his back while she took it. The mare heard her on the road below and was at the deadfall when she reached it. The cut on her shoulder dried. On the second day she put weight on the leg.

On the third morning the charcoal burner came down to the house with his face black from the kilns. Something was in the old hut, he said. Something had been screaming up there in the night; he'd heard it from the lower kilns. He'd gone up at first light and it had kicked half the wall out. He didn't know what had set it off.

Her father listened to him. Then he took two men and a coil of rope and went up the north road. He didn't look at Tomoe as he passed her, and he didn't tell her to stay.

She went after them. A little way behind her, Kanehira came too.

The stone wall of the hut lay half across the brush. The mare was in the back corner of what was left, jammed against the timbers with her head high and the whites of her eyes showing all round. The cut on her leg had opened again, and there was fresh blood on the stones. When the first man stepped through the gap with the rope she went up at him, screaming, and struck, and he went backward onto the stones and lay there swearing with his arm across his face.

Her father stood in the gap and didn't move.

Tomoe went past him. She went in under his arm before he could close it, stopped in the middle of the floor, and let her breath out.

She let all of it go. Then the word, low.

The near ear came round. The mare's head came down. She stood in the corner with her sides heaving and her legs braced, and then, a little at a time, the bracing went out of her legs, and she lowered her nose to the stones and blew on them.

The man on the ground sat up, holding his arm. At the scrape of his heel on the stones the mare's head flew up again, and the whites of her eyes came back.

Tomoe didn't turn round. "Make them go out," she said.

Nobody moved. Then her father stepped back out of the gap, and the men went after him, the hurt one last, and the mare's head came slowly down.

When the wall fell, part of the roof had come down with it. A roof pole had come down across the corner with stones heaped on its far end, and the mare's bad foreleg was pinned under it. Tomoe took the stones off one at a time and set them down without a sound. Then she got her shoulder under the near end of the pole and pushed up with her legs. It was green wood and heavier than she was. It rose a hand's width and stuck. She held it there, shaking, her cheek against the bark.

The mare looked at the pole, and then at her. She drew the bad foreleg out from under it, very carefully, and lifted it over the wood, and the other after it, and stood beside Tomoe in the middle of the floor.

Tomoe let the pole down.

Her father was standing in the gap again. He had seen all of it. He looked at the mare a long time, and then at Tomoe, and it was the same look he had given the mare.

"Who took you up the ridge?" he said.

She opened her mouth.

"I did," Kanehira said.

He was standing in the gap in the wall behind their father. He didn't look at her. He was looking at their father, steadily, with his hands at his sides.

Her father turned to him. When he turned back to Tomoe, she could see him waiting for her to say something, and she closed her mouth.

"You lied to me," her father said to her. To Kanehira he said, "And you took a girl of ten into the ground of the dead at night." He stepped in and picked up the coil of rope where the man had dropped it and hung it over his shoulder. "You'll both kneel in the yard until I come for you."

He went down the hill with his men and said nothing about the mare at all.

 

          *

 

They knelt in the yard from dusk.

The ground was packed earth, swept, and it took the cold quickly once the sun was off it. The household went in around them. Doors slid shut. Somebody banked the kitchen fire, and the last of its smoke went up out of the roof into a clear sky full of stars.

Tomoe's knees ached, and then stopped telling her anything. Frost began to come up white at the edge of the yard, a little nearer every time she looked. Beside her Kanehira knelt with his back straight and his hands on his thighs. His breath went up in the starlight, and hers went up beside it.

Neither of them said anything.

Tomoe put her hand into the fold of her robe. The stone was still there. She had carried it against her skin since the ridge, and it was as warm now as she was.

She took it out and reached across in the dark and found Kanehira's hand where it lay on his thigh, and pressed the stone into his palm.

He closed his fingers on it.

 

~End~