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But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from? Well, I dont know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. Its the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I dont know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos. It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers. The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth and the seed of the skyAwonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase. Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his twelfth birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before lying on the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old. The binding had been eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled. He picked it up, looked at the title-page: the book was called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Linda was lying on the bed, sipping that horrible stinking mescal out of a cup. Popé brought it, she said. Her voice was thick and hoarse like somebody elses voice. It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope Kiva. Its supposed to have been there for hundreds of years. I expect its true, because I looked at it, and it seemed to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized. Still, itll be good enough for you to practise your reading on. She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside the bed, turned over on her side, hiccoughed once or twice and went to sleep. He opened the book at random.
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stonekiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithlbut better than Mitsimas magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him; talked wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda; about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor beside the bed; about Linda and Popé, Linda and Popé. He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldnt make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real. One day, when he came in from playing, the door of the inner room was open, and he saw them lying together on the bed, asleepwhite Linda and Popé almost black beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other dark hand on her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her throat, like a black snake trying to strangle her. Popés gourd and a cup were standing on the floor near the bed. Linda was snoring. His heart seemed to have disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty, and cold, and rather sick, and giddy. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous Like drums, like the men singing for the corn, like magic, the words repeated and repeated themselves in his head. From being cold he was suddenly hot. His cheeks burnt with the rush of blood, the room swam |
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