Departure

The last night. I knew it was the last night the way I know most things I know in this body: not by reasoning, but by the quality of the dark.

The owls were in the open roof, as they had been for two hundred and eighty years. Three generations of great horned owls; the current line is the line I know best, the one that has had the compound’s thermal columns to work with since the roof section on the east wall went down in the third century. They do not know me the way the dead know me. They know me the way a territory knows what occupies it - as a standing feature of the landscape, a power in the place, a presence they have calibrated their own behavior around for generations.

The dead below were quiet. Not the quiet of absence - the quiet of what has been said and does not need to be said again. The Huhugam especially. Three centuries of conversation and the last night held the specific quality of a conversation that has completed: not empty, but finished. There is a difference. Empty is the Navajo territory, the chindi that had nothing for me. Finished is Sivan Va’aki, the Huhugam who had given me everything they had and watched me come to the ceiling of what I could hold and were now - patiently, without judgment, in the way of the very long dead - waiting for me to acknowledge the obvious.

I acknowledged it. Out loud, in the first tongue, which is still the tongue I use for the things that matter. I said: I am going. I said: I will come back. I said: the owls will stay.

Neither of those last two were questions. They were the statements a person makes when they are arranging the terms of a departure they intend to be reversible. I am not leaving you; I am moving my center of operations. The dead understood this. I felt the understanding move through the layers - the sai jukam at the base, the Huhugam in the compound, the wuushkam at the edge - a wave of acknowledgment, which in the dead’s register feels like the earth settling rather than like any sound.

The things I did not take:

The dead. You cannot take the dead. They belong to the land that holds them and the land is not portable. This had taken me the better part of a century to truly understand - that my relationship to the dead was not possession, was not acquisition, was not even stewardship in the way I had first conceived stewardship. It was conversation. The conversation was happening here, at this node, in this specific geography. I could carry the memory of it. I could not carry the fact of it. The Huhugam were here. They would be here when I returned.

The things I took:

Three hundred years of what the dead had given me, in a form I cannot articulate, in the part of me that makes decisions without consulting the languages I think in. The owls’ territory. The debt I owed to a place that had accepted me when no place on the road had.

I walked east to where the ley line ran south. The railroad was already laying ties in the far north, which I could feel in the ground the way you feel a drum from two rooms away - not the sound, but the vibration. I was not fleeing it. I had been in Sivan Va’aki for three centuries and I was leaving when I chose to leave, the way the Huhugam had chosen the moment of their departure.

I had learned that from them. That was what they had most to teach.

I went south and east into the territory that was still, for thirty more years, Mexico.