"Emily Gaskin - The Green Corn Dance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskin Emily)

The Green Corn Dance
By Emily Gaskin

26 February 2001


I remember Big Cypress, its sun setting in purple and green amongst the willows
and palmettos. The rustle of netting, scratchy like mosquito wings. The small
gasp of roasted oranges between my tongue and the roof of my mouth.
Grandmother spreading her rainbow skirts over the grasses to tell us the tales of
the Panther, the Turtle, and the Warrior Twins.


It's a place that I long for, remember, taste, and go back to so many times
these days, though I know I can never walk again there in life -- I, the wife of a
white man who walks with ghosts.


"Can't you do something for him?"


Steve's mother, Gloria. No hello, how is the weather, how are you feeling. Only
this. Her phone calls have come to mark the hour of the day by the increasing
degree of her frustration. Now her voice rings like metal in sunlight through the
long-distance static.


"I thought your people had ways of treating this kind of thing."


I do not feel my courage, or my anger, rising up to meet her. Instead, I say, "I
will make him tea to soothe him. If he wants to talk, he'll talk."


"I honestly don't know why I bother, Betty. The father of your unborn child. If he
were one of your kind, you would help him."


If he were one of my kind, he would not be having haunted dreams.


Steve tells me about them, after we have both been sleeping. I see it as he talks
in that low drawl of his. The room black as a gator's mouth, the moon filling up
the window. The grey man comes and stands by his bed. He comes and does
not move. He does not move, but he watches.


Steve says that I do not wake for this. I sleep and do not help him. He tries to
talk, but no words come out. The grey man steals him from the bed, and he is
so afraid.