File Note 156: Duane Linklater with Ethel (Trapper) Linklater, Tobias Linklater and Grey Plumes

‘Remember’, my grandmother told me, taking a few steps and gesturing with her fingers, ‘it goes like this’, but when I returned to the village this time, as a baby girl, I had forgotten. My aunt taught me pottery and singing, though the songs she knew were garbled and fragmentary, and when I was old enough she showed me the pot beneath the cookfire where the patterns were kept. It was a misty day, and without opening the pot she took me outside and pointed to a droplet of water on the end of a pine needle. ‘Notice’, she said, ‘that everything is reflected. The sky is contained in this droplet of water, the forest, the country, the oceans and all their fish, the invaders and you and I, and our tent, as well as the pot beneath the cookfire and everything in it.’ The pot beneath the cookfire, she explained, was only a pot. But it, too, was a droplet of water. ‘If I made another pot in the same shape’, I asked, ‘would that pot, too, be a droplet of water?’ ‘Everything is a droplet of water’, said my aunt. ‘What you mean to say is, “Would I have eyes to see it?”’ One morning, a party of invaders came over the ridge. I only had time to grab a single pot, so I put in it what I could. Necklaces, needles, snow glasses, red ochre, a handful of beads. I wrapped my sister’s last words around my husband’s braid. Traveling west I was married again. Because my husband and sons had kidnaped me, I came to feel confused about the meaning of love. Every day while drawing water I considered jumping in the well, but I was afraid. One morning, I smashed the pot and scattered its contents. But I let my daughter know where I had buried the shards, and after my husband got drunk and murdered us both I came back as a man. I knocked over the cross they had placed on my grave and for this and other reasons they hanged me. It happened before I could take a breath; when I screamed, it was as an infant again. When I came of age and wanted to marry again I showed the girl I loved my spear, my cross and an iron knife. One night, much later, she unwrapped a red cloth and showed me her handful of pottery shards. It was misty in the cabin with the shutters open, and the shards glittered in the firelight. Strange patterns reflected from their shiny reddish glaze and moved across the ceiling beams. ‘Notice’, she said, ‘that everything is forgotten. This clay was dug beside a river that has emptied itself into the ocean a thousand times. It was shaped by hands that grew old and were buried and grew up again as corn and squash and potatoes and beans, to be eaten and shat and eaten again, to be turned to flesh that would die again, and it was fired in a fire that left no traces.’ She picked up the smallest shard. ‘But the form reverberates.’ She traced her finger along the glaze. ‘However small you break it’, she said, ‘the shard retains a curve. The curve implies a shape, the shape implies a posture for the person that made it, the posture implies an attitude, and an attitude implies a culture. A culture needs a people, and the meaning of a people is to live.’ I lay awake that night while my wife was asleep and tried to follow the ripples of her thought. The Earth revolves in space, space extends forever, and the infinite stars are fixed. If I crushed the shard into powder and mixed it into my garden, would my squash and okra grow any different? The question wasn’t whether the whole is contained in its parts, but whether any one part can ever see it. A teardrop caught in my eyelashes, and through it the smoky room seemed to fracture and glitter like a jewel. In the morning a party of invaders came over the ridge.

We combined our stores and wrapped them up again, and when the camp moved we carried them with us. I suckled six babies and buried three. I had fifteen grandchildren and fifty great-grandchildren, and they had hundreds more. One of my beads is at the bottom of the ocean and another reached the islands on the other side. Don’t ask me what I kept or lost. Some of my children had their lips sewn shut and some were taken away. Some of my sons were killed in battle and some were beaten and lashed and some were enslaved and some were victorious and many of my daughters were raped. Some of my grandchildren choose to remember and some choose to forget, but also no one has a choice about anything. Some of my grandchildren murdered their cousins and asked for my forgiveness. I told them I forgave them, but I knew it was a lie. I don’t know if that was right. Some of what they said was new and some of it was old. Some of what they remember is true and some of it false. If you obey the commandments and keep them, we are told, we will be given health and prosperity, but then we’re all cut down just the same.’ She pulled aside her shirt, and one wrinkled breast, and with her fingertip traced the line of her sternum. ‘But notice’, she told me, ‘that life has a curve. A curve implies a shape, and a shape must have a limit, as I said. But a limit implies a choice, and a choice carries meaning, which carries intention. And intention, you must remember, comes from faith, which is limitless.’