Chapter 9: The Long Water's Question

The river asked him the question on an afternoon when the air had gone so still and low that the surface of the water, for half a mile in each direction, did not know it was moving.

Jim had climbed down the brush-blurred notch below the compound's high shoulder and picked his way to the water's edge alone, in the hour when the day's labor had slackened and the compound had turned back to its cooking-fires and its skins and its long, easy gossip. He came down not looking for anything. He had half a day in his hands and a restlessness in his ribs that the compound's walls had begun to chafe, and the water called him the way large water always called him — the way it had called him across half the saved and studied maps of a life he had left on the other side of a century.

He sat on a drowned log at the mudline, out of the way of the glare, and let the Long Water have a long, unasked look at him.

It was enormous in a way the valley's small creeks had never been enormous. A body of moving water wider than any field the compound had ever planted, running deep and brown and patient past the can-brake and the drowned trees, carrying on its broad back whole islands of debris and the silt of a country he would never see, and it did not hurry. It had the particular large generosity of a great thing that had been going somewhere for longer than there had been a word for the direction and had stopped asking itself why a long time ago.

He got up off the log and walked a stretch of the bank, not hunting anything but reading the way he had once read a landscape for a living. He read the scar of the water in the lay of the land — the line of old flood-wrack strung in the cottonwoods where the Long Water had come up and gone down, the terrace steps cut into the bluffs by ten thousand years of the river picking at its own edges, the soft fresh banks where the current ate and the tall old timber where it had given the ground back. It was a country that kept its whole history written sideways in mud and wood and could not hold a secret if you knew how to read the slant of a root. He read it now, and he saw what none of the compound's day-to-day looked for: that this was not a wild, blind water but a great, ordered, working road, cut and recut by its own long habit, carrying the whole valley's spare water on its way to some far accounting it had never once been late to.

Jim watched it, and in the watching the question surfaced the way a drowned branch surfaces unbidden and refuses to sink again, and he let it have its head because there was nobody there to package it into usefulness: where does all this go? Not where the water went in the roundabout, practiced answer the compound gave when a child asked — it goes away to keep the world wet, the way grandmothers say a thing to a child who cannot yet carry the weight of the real one. He meant the real one. The Long Water gathered every creek and every ditch for a hundred miles of this valley, took them up like a man gathering a hundred household debts, and carried them all in one open, unhurried current to a place he had a name for on a map in his own long-ago study and no name for at all in the mouths of the people here.

South.

He looked south, down the length of the quiet brown current, and the asking of the question opened a door in him he had been careful to keep shut since the altar.

He knew, the way a man knows the shape of the ground he has stood on all his life even when he is standing on a different one, what this water became when it stopped being this water. He had lectured on it. He had walked its lower reaches in his own century with a canteen and a field notebook and a careful grant budget. South, past a thousand bends he could not see, past the last bluff and the first flat grey gulf of marsh and the wide land where the river finally gave itself up and the water turned salt and the sky got heavy and told you there was an ocean past it — a sea. Warm water. A curved coast. And past that, on the far shore of a water he could put an ocean's name to, the loud, frantic, crowded other who had made him and could not have imagined him here.

He knew, too, the name that would one day be set to this current, and he did not speak it even in his own head often, because to name it was to reach across a future he would never live into and call it into the room with him by a sound that belonged to a world not yet born. Old maps. A great muddy river that would come to run like a nation's spine, with a fledgling country of its own failed dreams dug into one of its banks. He had spent his working life among the ruins and the charts of that river, telling students that this water had carried a continent's story long before it ever carried a steamboat, and now he sat on a log above it with the story still running underneath him, unreadable by everyone he would ever be able to tell it to. There was a particular loneliness in knowing a thing so completely that no one around you could ever come to know it with you.

That was the door. He had not opened it since the eclipse, because to open it was to feel the whole hundred-year weight of everything he had lost, and a man who walks into an iron-age village carrying a hundred years of loss on his shoulders does not survive the first winter's kindness. He had let the compound teach him wood and water and fire and the plain, immediate grammar of staying alive, and it had kept him whole, and it had cost him the asking.

Now, in the still afternoon, on the drowned log above his own enormous unanswered river, the asking came back and would not be bargained with.

If I followed it, the thought ran, the way it must have run in a hundred tired prisoners and a thousand hopeful exiles before him, how far would it take me? Past the marsh. Past the sea. To a shore he could not reach in the body and did not have to reach in the mind, because the mind had its own long water, and it ran to the only home the world had ever named for him. The blue glass of a car window. The pale authority of a lecture hall. A cup of coffee at a temperature he had argued about with the department's best mind and lost, just to have something to lose.

He closed his eyes and made himself look instead at what was in front of him.

The river was not his own. It belonged to the people who had fed its banks for their whole remembered time, who did not know and did not need to know where it went because it had always gone there and it had always come back in the rain. To them the Long Water was not a long road to anywhere; it was a long thing that was there, faithful and enormous, the way the sky was there. And Jim understood, with a slow, unsteady pity for himself that he was mostly able to keep out of his own voice, that the thing he carried that none of them carried was the question itself — the wanting to know where the water went, and the thin, exacting, unquenchable belief that knowing it mattered to a man's life.

He asked it of Graybeard, careful, when he got back to the compound, as a question about the land and not about himself.

"Where does the Long Water go?"

The scarred hunting chief, sitting by the evening fire with a knife and a length of horn he was never idle over, did not look up. "Away," he said, the way a man says a thing that has been said to him a thousand times and is not going to be worn out by being true. "Down. To the place the water wants to be. It has gone there since before the first fire, and it will go there after the last one, and it does not need us to keep track of the road."

"I know," Jim said, patient. "But the road itself. Have you walked any of it? The way it turns, the land it runs through before it stops being itself?"

Graybeard looked up then, and there was something moving behind the flat old eyes that was not suspicion and was not comfort. "No one in this valley has walked it," he said. "They walked it north once, long ago, in my grandfathers' time, and what came back was a handful of dead men and a story about a country built of mud and stone where chiefs sit on the backs of other men and the corn is counted like a debt. South," and he turned the horn in his hands, watching it catch the firelight, "south is water and more water, and the people who go that way do not come back, because past the last bluff the river stops asking anyone's permission and there is nothing to stand on but the water's own wide mood." He worked his tooth a moment. "That is the whole of the road, sun-friend. North is bad ground and proud chiefs. South is water that swallows. And here is the only flat place a man can put his feet down and call them his own."

Jim sat with that through the evening, and he did not argue with it. Graybeard had told him the map the valley lived inside of — a small, guarded, hard-won flatness tucked between a greedy north and a swallowing south, with the Long Water running past it like a huge dark question none of them had ever been reckless enough to take personally. It was a map that had served a people well enough to keep them alive through the worst winters they could name, and a man did not stand in the middle of a people's hard-won map and tell them the geography they had trusted all their lives was only half the story. Not if he wanted to be useful there.

But he carried the question back out to the high shoulder above the compound in the last of the light, and he stood there alone in the way he had begun to learn to be alone in a valley of many people, and he looked south along the Long Water until the dark took the bend of it, and he let himself, in the privacy of his own held breath, want.

A boy climbed up to join him — Oheo, with the straight bow Jim had made him, quiet across his back, the way a man carries a thing he is careful not to be seen carrying. He stood a long while in the falling light, and then he said, low, without turning, "My grandmother says a people must learn what the water does before they learn to ask what it is for."

Jim looked at him. "Does your grandmother say that every day?"

"She says a thing is true if it has pointed the same way all her life." And before Jim could answer, the boy was down the slope and gone, leaving the question exactly where it had been and the asking of it, somehow, no longer his alone.

It was not a plan. It was not a departure. It was a seed, and he recognized the feel of a seed planted because he had planted them all his life in other soils. The want was small and specific and entirely unreasonable: to stand one time, at the far end of the water he was looking at, in the wide country his own far-off people would one day call by a name he already knew, and to know that he had crossed the whole of it on his own two feet and had not needed the loud, crowded other to show him how.

He caught the thought and weighed it, the way he had learned to weigh every dangerous want, and set it carefully aside — not denied, not fed. The valley needed its water kept and its bow strung and its children fed, and a man who spent a hundred years' loss looking down a second river while the first river's people stood behind him would betray the only good work left to him.

Still. The question was not a map. It could sit in him.

And somewhere down the darkening Long Water, past the shrouds of the buffalo-trees and the last flat-grey bend that caught the last of the light, it seemed to Jim that his own enormous, patient, unhurried river turned, or breathed, or answered the only way a great water ever answers a man who has asked it where it goes:

Keep me, and I will show you.

He stood a long time on the shoulder, looking south, until the star that the compound's sky-keepers called the Gatherer came up low and clear above the water's turning, and then he went down to the fire and the valley and the plain, faithful, immediate work of the day he was actually living, carrying the question hidden where it could not yet hurt anything that mattered.