Урсула Ле Гуин - Dangerous People

When Sehoy was grown and had given herself the name Hwette, her begetter laid claim to a superior understanding of her heart and mind, an intuitive link with her. He argued with her against her choice of a name; to call oneself Scrub Oak was self-denigrating, too humble, too scrubby, he said. She should call herself Isitut, Wild Iris: something delicate, beautiful, like herself. When Kamedan began to come to the house, courting Hwette, Geseta talked against him all the time. His jealousy and envy of the young man was so apparent that Shamsha felt a queasy pity for him. He insisted that he was thinking only of Hwette’s wellbeing. “Kamedan will destroy her,” he said.

“You should know,” Shamsha said.

“I do know. I know his type. He’ll love only one woman all his life. He’ll demand everything of her—that she be the world to him, and he the world to her. He’ll smother her with love, he’ll tie her down with giving. He’ll be jealous of anyone or anything that touches her, so he’ll keep touching her all over, all the time. She’s a wildflower, she can’t thrive indoors. She’s a hummingbird, like me—she needs to move, move. She’ll die if she can’t go from flower to flower. I used to resent your not letting me touch her, but I see now that you were right; you knew we had to keep hands off her. She’s very fragile. She can’t take pressures on her, claims on her. Her strength is in her freedom.”

Disgust with his assertion of complicity and distaste for his sentimentality did not quite keep Shamsha from agreeing with him; but she shrugged and said nothing. Hwette and Kamedan were going to marry. And in her beauty of sexual delight, fulfilled desire, pregnancy, motherhood, Hwette was radiant, like a hummingbird indeed, not for fragility but for intensity of life.

Yet that vitality flashed out less and less often. Scarcely at all for how long now, a year? or more? Kamedan was as all-loving of her as Geseta had foretold. He adored her and seemed to depend on her for his being. Neither Mehoia nor Geseta himself had ever drawn from Shamsha, drained her, demanded her as Kamedan did Hwette. It’s all very well for a lover to say he’d die without you, but unfair to make it your unremitting responsibility to keep him alive, Shamsha thought. Then she thought, What about Hwette’s own life?

The answer was a jolt, a blank. What was Hwette’s life?

To Fefinum just now she had said, “housework, garden work, bringing up her son and niece, working at the heyimas”—Well, wasn’t that a life, anybody’s life? The household, the heyimas; one’s family, other people; the obligations and responsibilities, the network of reciprocal and mutual work, observance, care, and celebration: what more was there?

A swallow in a net. Kamedan claiming her attention, desire, constant companionship; little Torip and Bolekash needing her attention, care, companionship, teaching; Fefinum demanding that she perfect herself spiritually to fulfil her sister’s ambition; and she, Shamsha, the mother, what did she ask of Hwette? To be good, not to bother, be competent, let me get on with my work, my head stuck into the empty spaces between written words all the time. She’s the hinge of the household, not I. It all depends on her being here, and she’s being pulled to pieces by us all pulling her different ways. She should leave. Take little Torip and go. Where? To her brother’s house in Kastoha, there wouldn’t be pressure on her there. Or up to Wakwaha, by herself, leave the child with us, go by herself, go alone, that’s what she should do. I’ll tell her that, Shamsha thought. First thing tomorrow.

THE DRY SEASON was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take the light away, mamou! Please, mamou, take away the light!” The child’s father went across the room on hands and knees and held him against his body, saying, “Mamou will be home soon, Torippi. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. Whe the day began, Torip was hot and weak and dull-witted.

Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that. Don’t fuss. My grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.

Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you’re here, Hunter.” Modona said, “So you’re here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife Hwette is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew they said Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking she’s hurt and not able to make her way back.”

The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who’d been in Ounmalin said they’d seen Hwette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”

“I don’t think they could be altogether correct,” [2] The formality of the phrase is rather unusual, and as it will soon be repeated, it may be drawing ironic attention to the fact that “correct” information is, at this point, unattainable. Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Hwette.”

The hunter said with a smile, “Are there women who look like Hwette?”

Kamedan was at a loss. He did not like Modona. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and the hunter went on his way, still grinning.

Torip lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha said it was a summer cold, there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. But in the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “Mamou, mamou! come here! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke up and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened a little and the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the worst of it, he’s over the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”