A Wolf by the Ears by Wayne Karlin

Author:Wayne Karlin [Karlin, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC014000 Fiction / Historical, FIC049040 Fiction / African American / Historical
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

TEN

JOSEPH

THE MOON COMES INTO US

We light no fire. On this night there is no heat and no smoke and we stare up at the smoke hole in the roof as the moon slowly fills it, at first merely the edge of a silver coin, cutting the blackness, pushing away the darkness, its milky light flowing into and illuminating all the corners and crannies of the lodge. The shadows from the lodge posts and framing poles elongate and crawl along the packed dirt floor, shifting the shapes of objects and transforming them, as if their true orenda, their inner spirit, has been released to our vision, its purpose so luminous with clarity it makes my eyes ache. The moon enters us as it enters the lodge. Enters me. Enters us. We each feel it differently. On this night, I feel it in the stirred heaviness of my sex but not only there. A tumescence of the whole body. Flesh and spirit are one.

Pain. The pain of birth, if that act were felt by the child as well as the mother. Multiplied in his flesh. As if the conception and the tumble into flesh all happened at once. But this pain is fleeting, gone almost immediately from memory, as the child must forget his rending passage into the world once he emerges from his mother’s body.

Now I feel unutterable delight as I open to the world, my skin bristling, each follicle an appendage touching the world, as if the air itself has become part of my skin and I can feel all the quickening of lives moving in it. It is not distracting, this expansion of myself. No more than the rhythm of my breathing or the involuntary beating of my heart. A deer, a mile away inside the swamp, thrums softly on the edge of my perception as it chews tender stalks of marsh grass; I feel its breath, its heartbeat; the smell of its warm musk tendrils into my nostrils. I look at my companions and feel how they share the sensation. Holding the plants, remembering now when they were first put into my hands. No, not remembering. The ancestors are here. In the smoke. From the smoke. They are as I dreamed they would be. Heads shaven except for warriors’ locks on one side, faces painted half-black, with ochre lines and circles on their chests and legs. They tower over me. They look at me with scorn.

I feel unutterable grief. At the loss that will come. It is always there, a pulling weight on the heart, the knowledge that what I have become is finite. As finite as the movement of the moon across the sky to die at the door to morning.

The grief that the man remains.

The moon comes into us. If you could see it enter, I imagine it would look like a flow of phosphorescence in the blood, the way those streaks of luminescent silver we see in the black water of the river thread and pulse, as if the reflection of the full moon is diffusing into the water.

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