The Crying Heart Tattoo by David Lozell Martin

Author:David Lozell Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

GRAVĒDA

The part Felicity told me when I was twenty-four and home to be married.

22. Now Gravēda is out of Eller’s well-lighted cave and is climbing the path to the top of the cliff. Evaporating cavesweat makes her shiver and shake, but the storm is easing and the rain at last has become regular rain, just drops of water falling through the air. She sees sunlight in the seams between clouds.

Gravēda thinks about what happened in Eller’s cave but is unable to make any sense of it. She wonders if Eller really is writing her story and, if he is, can he possibly know everything that’s happened to her. Does he know, could she even make him understand, how she felt that day she was picking berries on a hillside and heard Momma scream and Poppa yell? Could Eller describe what Gravēda saw when she got to where Poppa lay dead, Momma lay bleeding, and the bear went lumbering casually away as if unimpressed with what it had done?

Gravēda thinks about all this until she reaches the top of the cliff and begins to walk along its edge. Then her stride lengthens and walking replaces thinking, because walking is better than thinking. When you’re walking, you can look in the distance and see a hill and say, That’s where I’m heading today. And when you get there, you can turn around and see the place you camped the night before and you can say, That’s where I’ve been.

Not so with thinking; it leads you in circles so that after hours of thinking you either are lost or end up right back where you started. And all you have to show for thinking is head pains.

It was walking—not thinking—that carried Gravēda ten years alone on the trail, and it’s walking that brings her to the caves where the old travelers live.

She looks down at the cliff’s rock face, which slants into the ocean in four terraced steps. The terraces are pathways that run in front of large holes, the entrances to the travelers’ caves.

Gravēda is about to climb down to the first pathway when the setting sun flashes through a rip in the clouds to color her, and the slanting rock below her, in bright yellow light.

The sudden sun draws out the travelers. Four of them step tenderly from caves to pathways, moving like cripples. They wave their skinny arms and slowly lift and lower their feet. These pathetic dances are accompanied by little halfhearted chants, moans and groans and the creaking of stiff old bones.

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