I will arrange him his favorite dinner with a nectar that will turn him back into a child himself. A brew of my own recipe which fulfills the word of the custom, so that I might have made a child, and he might achieve a time before his sorrows, find his expectations for himself, and we could stay together always.
He agrees.
Everyone has what he wants. I am forty-one years old and keep the orchard grounds full-time. I live in the two room cabin by the edge of the pears. My specialty is fermentation. Dah lives with me, but we keep a certain privacy from one another, and it feels the most like trust that we’ve ever had. Dah is the Arbor’s favorite acolyte, a dutiful scholar of the seed and the stone. He’s small and agile now, too, so I send him up Pah’s towering plum tree to pluck the fruit from the very top and down into our baskets. This year we have such an abundance that I can imagine an infinite yield in an eternal harvest. Each ripe little orb looks like a sunset hurling down to the ground, a tiny mystical vision I can hold in my palm.
WE DID NOT KNOW WE WERE GIANTS
I saw the god of storms on the midsummer at the summit of my childhood. In bright, blessed solitude, high atop our mountain, I scoured for ground cherries along the ledge of an unshaded cliff. They grew within a crinkled husk, and when they ripened, the husks parted like eyelids and the sun-yellow fruit peered out like the jaundiced doubt of the elders. I plucked the delicate fruit out from the granite in fistfuls.
The rock crackled with current. I tasted the charge upon my lips and tongue, and beneath my arms, and along the sweat of my spine. The downy wisps of hair on my body stiffened sharp as thorns. The ground cherries glowed, and the pine needles sparked, and their roots surged and hummed. From my vantage, I turned and saw him as he strode the bouldered slopes between the trees. And from the brightness of him, from his presence, the storm came.
He was a great stag, so pale as the fog that white clouds gathered like a holy veil over the mountain. His hooves rolled heavy with thunder that boomed and crashed like an avalanche, thunder that coiled in the stomach before it echoed in the ears. Wheels of wind and quenches of rain poured along his path.
Behold, behold! It seemed all that I could say to witness him. His crown of antlers were blue-white and luminous bolts of lightning, and each sway of his head commanded a brilliant strike of that power, and he commanded that it upon the cliffside where there it struck through me and into the parched land. I cried out, and it was all that I could do to make that place sacred.
Does your country have such gods as these? Tell me, stranger, do you see them? Do they come to your land steady, or fickle? Do they bless you with bounty and miracles? Or do they scorch your prairies with their gales and fire, or churn your waters with their rapids and their undertow?
What, stranger, do you forfeit to endure them? Each midwinter beneath the hunger moon, my lanspeople sacrificed what little we had left to the gods that roamed our timbered mountains. They are mountains that rise from course and endless flats of pine barren. They are barrens that flow with tick-ridden and swamp-bottom sands.
We relished glimpses of our god-beasts and were grateful. The god of night emerged at dusk, a cautious black rabbit. At dawn, she dashed and hid from the god of day, that ferocious golden weasel in constant hunt of her. Do you see the flash of dark fur at the corners of the sunrise? We asked each other in greeting. We gestured with a pinch over our hearts, released over our shoulders. Did you catch the glorious sight of a shining tooth? We set aside a bit of our hunts and forages, a bit of our pride and sentiment, with the turn of each new day and each new year.
Our mountain concedes survival only to the hearty, to life that is willing and able to yield to her in return.
I returned from the cliffside unharmed by his lightning. I returned to our lodge purified by the splendor of it. We filled our barrels with his rains and rejoiced.
That year, the roots and leaves and fruits and seeds were great and many. The deer grew fat and careless. At frost, we stalked them by endurance and cut their exhausted throats. The shining quartz of our blades ran red as we sawed their flesh. We roasted it plain over fire, dried it spiced over smoke, pressed it with birch bark and buried it to ferment. Though no matter how easy or plentiful the game surrendered, no matter how we seasoned or prepared their carcasses, the meat of our mountain always tasted as bitter as the resin of the pines.
At midwinter, we brewed teas of mountainsweet and carried steaming mugs of it in our fur-wrapped hands. We made our procession through the forest, singing. All the land slept but the evergreens, our eternal giants, the steady fingers of the mountain herself. So as we kept wake and watch alongside them through the longest night, our song rose to meet the snowfall, and our voices rang across the frozen ground.
The hunger moon rose and we each proclaimed what precious thing or attachment we renounced in the name of the coming year, in the name of survival. The cold pine wind stung our nostrils and nipped the wet of our eyes. At my turn, with a piety as clean as frost, I sacrificed everything that I still possessed.
First I gave up my pinewood baubles, and the elders called me faithful. My toys had splintered and scuffed my small hands, but I took comfort in their companionship.
Second I offered up my long-grown hair, and the elders called me passionate. My hair was as thin as the air and course as the brush, but I took pride in its plenty.
Last I renounced my given name, and the elders called me foolish. They called me knot-hearted. They said I would not attract special concern or praise through grand gestures. They warned me of youthful fits and folly, of making an indulgence out of denial, of narrowing the purpose of my life like the dark mouth of a cave.
The given name shimmered in my mind. I took pleasure in the sound of it when spoken. I cannot tell it to you, though it is no secret, and I have no more use for such luxury as secrets. After their warnings, I ceded it still.
I told the elders how the name kept me frivolous and vain, how being at all distinguished from others, distinguished from dirt, enabled intimacies and stoked desires, when I had been struck through with his lightning directly, when truly I had been called to serve, to give.
So I became nameless and was hollow, for the privilege of that lacking, for the emptiness of me. I prayed for my lanspeople, and for the thaw, and for the forest, and for the rains from the fog-white god of storms.
Most of all I prayed for him. For was he not the greatest light in the woods, in the world? The weasel’s sun and the rabbit’s moon surpassed the reach of our mountain, but his lightning relinquished jagged shards of the greedy sky to the humble ground. In what other being was such power tangible, terrestrialized?
The next year followed, and the red hawk delivered the first warm breath of thaw. Then the green beetle turned and resurrected the mulch. Streams of snowmelt gushed, but the rain did not come, and the streams soon trickled to creaks of dust, pebble, and filth. That year, the god of storms did not come at all.
The bottoms of our barrels cracked, their gaping mouths craned toward a cloudless sky. By midsummer, the leaves and flowers shriveled, and their roots burned, and what few cones dropped from the pines opened seedless. The deer did not calf, or give milk, and they collapsed in pestiliance instead of hunt. We found only putrid carcasses, overtaken with slow and delirious flies, pulling weak chews from brittle bones.