Ch. 2: The Leaving

The forest received Salali as a stream receives rain, without judgment, without question. She moved through the darkness gathering between the trees, her moccasins finding deer paths she knew from childhood wanderings, from gathering expeditions with her grandmother, from the first shy walks she and Tsula had taken when their union was new and every glance felt like a gift. Ferns, cool and damp with evening, brushed against her deerskin dress, leaving silver traces of dew that clung to the pale hide like tears she had not yet shed. She pushed past them without feeling, past the young hickories and the ancient oaks whose bark was ridged like the faces of grandmothers, past thickets of mountain laurel where the last pale blooms hung withered and brown.

She did not know where she walked. This was not the careful, purposeful movement of gathering, not the alert passage of hunting. She walked as the wounded walk, without destination, only away, only into the sheltering dark where the trees grew close enough to muffle thought, to hold the pieces of a breaking heart from scattering entirely.

Behind her, distant now, she heard Tsula call her name once, twice. The sound reached her attenuated, strained through grief and anger, and she pressed her lips together and walked faster. The path narrowed, climbing slightly toward the ridge where she and her young cousins had once played at being spirits, where the moss grew thick as a mattress and the blueberries made stains on fingers and mouths. She did not go that way. She turned downstream, toward the water she could hear now, the river that ran clear and cold from the high mountains, that carried the memory of snow and stone down to the valleys where the Aniyvwiya planted their fields.

“Salali!”

Closer this time, or perhaps only more desperate. She recognized the timbre of his voice, the particular resonance that had once made her own name sound like a prayer in his mouth. Now it struck her like a hand at her back, urging her forward, deeper into the forest's embrace. She broke into something between a walk and a run, careless of branches that snagged at her hair, of exposed roots that threatened her moccasins. The beads at her collar caught on a low-hanging limb, and she heard several scatter into the leaf-fall, tiny sounds of loss she would not stop to mourn.

The river grew louder, not the rush of rapids but the steady murmur of water moving over stone, patient and eternal. She followed it, letting the sound fill her ears until she could no longer hear Tsula‘s calls, until the only voice was the water’s ancient whisper telling stories of mountains she had never seen, of journeys to seas beyond imagining.

At the edge of the trees, the forest opened without warning onto a small clearing where the river had cut a shelf of flat rock, smooth as pottery from centuries of passage. Here the water moved more slowly, pooling in depressions before continuing its downward way, and willows leaned over from both banks, their trailing branches forming a curtain of green that filtered the last light into something soft and green-gold, something that belonged to neither day nor night.

Salali stopped at the water‘s edge, her chest heaving, her hair loosed entirely now and falling around her shoulders in the wild disarray she would never have permitted in the village. She looked down at her reflection, broken and reformed by the water’s small movements, and for a moment she did not recognize herself—the face drawn and pale, the eyes too large, too bright with the tears she had held since the doorway of their home.

“Who are you?” she whispered to the water, and the water gave no answer, only carried her words away, small and meaningless against its endless journey.

She lowered herself to the rock, finding the place where generations of women had sat to wash, to rest, to weep. The stone held the warmth of the day like a memory, and she pressed her palms flat against it, grounding herself in something solid while the rest of her seemed to spin loose, unmoored from everything she had believed certain.

The tears came then, not the hot, angry tears of the doorway but something deeper, older, rising from a well she had not known she contained. They fell silently at first, then with small sounds that escaped her control, small animal sounds of grief that she would have been ashamed of in daylight, in company. Here, with only the willows and the water for witness, she let them come. Each tear struck the river's surface with the faintest disturbance, each one carried away, dissolved into something larger than her own sorrow.

She thought of her mother, dead before her memory could hold her, of the grandmother who had raised her in a home where voices were never raised, where disagreements were smoothed like clay between patient hands. She thought of the day Tsula had come to ask for her, standing so straight in her grandmother's doorway, his dark eyes earnest, his hands trembling slightly where they held the offering of venison and dried corn. She had loved him before she knew the word for it, loved the way he listened when she spoke of herbs and their properties, the way he noticed small things—a new bead on her moccasin, the particular song of a hermit thrush at dawn.

And she thought of his mother, the woman whose shadow had fallen between them like a third presence in their marriage. A-nu-tsa, gentle and skilled, who had welcomed Salali into their home with genuine warmth, who had taught her to plant corn in hills of fish and ash, who had died in the coughing sickness that took so many that terrible winter. Salali had mourned her properly, had cut her hair and fasted, had helped prepare the body for its journey to the spirit world. She had not known she would spend the years after competing with a ghost, would hear her name spoken always with the unspoken comparison, would feel her own young hands found wanting against the memory of older, more practiced ones.

“Did you love me?” she asked the water, not certain anymore which she addressed—Tsula or his mother, the living or the dead, the man who had chosen her or the one who still seemed to search for what he had lost. “Did you ever see me?”

The river answered only with its ceaseless murmur, carrying her tears toward some distant union with larger waters, with the sea that was itself a kind of forgetting.

Tsula stood at the forest's edge, his dark eyes straining against the darkness that had thickened while he hesitated, while he stood in the doorway hoping she would return, hoping the night air would cool her anger and bring her back to him. The trees rose before him like a wall, and he heard sounds within that might have been her passage, might have been deer moving to water, might have been nothing but the small lives of the forest going about their business while human grief raged temporary and passing among them.

“Salali,” he called, and his voice broke across the name, rough with the regret that had filled him the moment she turned away, that had grown with every heartbeat since. “Salali, please. I was wrong. I am sorry.”

The forest swallowed his words. No answer came, no rustle of recognition, no breaking of branches to signal her return. He stepped into the trees, his hunter's eyes adjusting slowly to the diminished light, his feet finding paths he knew from years of passage. He moved quietly, the way he moved when tracking deer, but this was different, this silence not the alert stillness of predator but the hollow quiet of a man seeking what he had carelessly broken.

He found the place where her beads had scattered, three small disks of white shell lying pale against the dark leaf-fall. He gathered them without stopping, closing them in his fist as if they could somehow lead him to her, as if the small objects that had rested against her skin might carry some residue of her presence, some direction his own senses could not find.

“Salali!”

He called louder now, the hunter's caution abandoned. Let the deer startle, let the night creatures know his passage. Let her hear him, wherever she had gone, let her know that he followed, that he would not let the night close between them without at least this effort, this proof that he was not the man his words had made him seem.

The path forked, and he hesitated. Upward toward the ridge, where they had lain together on moss thick as a sleeping mat, where she had once shown him the first gentians of summer, their blue so deep it seemed to hold the sky's own color? Or downward, toward the river, where she went sometimes to bathe in the cool of evening, where the water ran clear over stone and the willows made a private world?

He chose the ridge, his heart choosing memory over likelihood, the path of hope over the path of wisdom. He climbed through darkness that grew absolute beneath the dense canopy, his hands finding holds on bark and stone, his moccasins slipping on damp humus. Twice he stopped, certain he heard her ahead, only to find empty stillness when he reached the place, only to recognize the sounds as his own breathing, his own blood's desperate pulse.

At the ridge top, the trees grew thinner, and he could see stars through gaps in the canopy, the same stars that wheeled over Kituwah, over the home that suddenly seemed impossibly distant, impossibly empty. He turned slowly, searching the darkness below for any movement, any sign. Nothing. The forest held its secrets, and Salali among them, hidden more effectively than any deer had ever been from his seeking.

He descended more quickly than he had climbed, careless of noise now, of the branches that whipped back against his face, the exposed roots that threatened his balance. At the fork, he paused again, listening to the river‘s distant voice, and something in its steady murmur called to him, some recognition deeper than thought. But when he reached the water’s edge, he went upstream, drawn by some false instinct, some misreading of the signs, and the willow-hidden shelf where Salali wept lay downstream, around the bend where the river turned to avoid a granite outcropping, invisible and unreachable.

He walked until the moon rose, silver and remote, casting shadows that confused more than they revealed. He walked until his moccasins were soaked through from missteps into the water's edge, until his voice grew hoarse with calling, until the hope that had driven him from the doorway flickered and died like a pine knot consumed to ash.

At last he turned back, the hunter acknowledging a failed pursuit, the husband admitting a loss he did not know how to measure. The path to Kituwah seemed longer in return, each step carrying him away from her rather than toward, each familiar landmark a reproach, a reminder of walks they had taken together, of futures now uncertain.

The village slept as he passed through, the central fire banked to embers that glowed like a dying heart. He reached their home and stood in the doorway, looking at the mess of their interrupted meal, the overturned bowl, the food grown cold and unappetizing in the hours of his absence. He righted the bowl with mechanical care, gathered the scattered spoons, moved through the small rituals of order as if they could somehow restore what order could not touch.

He sat on his eating mat, then lay back against the wall, his long legs stretched before him, his eyes open to the darkness. The house held her presence in a thousand small details—the herbs hanging to dry in the corner, their scent of sage and sweetgrass; the deerskin she had been tanning, stretched on its frame; the pattern of beads she had arranged on a mat, a design not yet begun. Each one struck him like a small wound, each one spoke of the life they had built, the harmony they had achieved, the duyuktv he had shattered with words that cost him nothing to speak and everything to recall.

“Come back,” he whispered to the darkness, to the empty space where she should have been. “Please, come back. I will spend my life learning to see you, only come back.”

But the darkness held its silence, and somewhere in the forest, beyond his seeking, Salali sat by the river and wept, and the water carried her tears away, and the night wore on toward morning without answer, without promise, without any sweetness to ease the bitterness of words that could not be unsaid.

The moon had passed its height when Salali's tears finally slowed, when the well within her seemed, if not emptied, at least drawn down to a level she could contain. She sat quietly now, her fingers trailing in the water, feeling the cold current move against her skin, carrying away the heat of her grief. The willows whispered around her, and somewhere upstream, a nightjar began its mechanical call, repetitive and strangely comforting in its predictability.

She looked at the stars reflected in the water‘s stiller pools, fragmented and reformed by the smallest movements, and she thought of Tsula’s eyes, the way they had looked when he finally found her face, when the horror of his own words broke through the exhaustion that had made him cruel. She had seen something there, beneath the regret, beneath the fear—something that might have been love, or might only have been the memory of love, the habit of affection that dies slower than affection itself.

“Does he love me?” she asked the river, and this time the question was genuine, not rhetorical, not despairing. “Or does he love only what I remind him of, what I fail to be?”

The river answered with its eternal murmur, and in its voice she heard, or imagined she heard, something of the patience of water, the way it shapes stone not through force but through persistence, through the long willingness to remain, to continue, to wear away what seems unyielding. She thought of her grandmother's hands, shaped by decades of such persistence, of her voice when she spoke of marriage—not the romance of young love but the deeper truth of two people choosing each other again each morning, through difficulty, through disappointment, through the ordinary wearing-away of illusion.

Salali knew, sitting in the darkness with her fingers in the cold water, that she would return. Not tonight, not with the wound so fresh, the words still echoing. But eventually, because she had chosen him, because he had chosen her, because the life they had built was more than one night of careless cruelty, more than the ghost of a mother who could not release her hold even from the spirit world. She would return, and they would speak, and perhaps they would find a way through to something harder-won than their first easy affection, something more durable for having been tested.

But tonight, she sat by the river and let the water carry her tears, and she waited for morning, and she did not know that above her, beyond the willow curtain, Unelanuhi observed her sorrow with ancient compassion, and planned a gift of sweetness still unknown, a trail of red hope leading back from darkness to the light of reconciliation.