Rejected Luna, Stolen Mark

Two Knots

Hessa had been carrying everything on the right for four days, and I had been letting her, because that is what two people do when they have agreed not to ask each other anything.

She took the baskets on the right arm and reached over the top of things instead of across. Twice I watched her set a cup down with the left hand and pick it back up with the right, which is a thing a body does when its own hand has surprised it.

On the fourth morning I put my own hand flat on the table, which is what we do in that house when one of us means it.

"Let me see it."

"No."

"You have been rubbing it since the yard."

"I have been rubbing it since before your mother was a girl, and it is the weather." She said the word weather the way another woman would say a swear word. "Eat your bread."

I ate the bread. Then I put the hand back on the table.

She looked at it a while.

"If you make a face about it I will put you back in that bed," she said, and rolled the sleeve up past the elbow.

I have read a hundred marks. On the dead and on the living, on a man with his leg open in front of me and on a boy with a splinter, on a wrist in a long room with six women laughing behind my shoulder. In nine years of sleeping four feet from that woman I had never once read the one on her arm.

It was high on the inside of the forearm, white and old and closed, the size of a thumbnail.

It had a seam.

Both ends. Two turns and a pull, top and bottom, the knot I had found at both ends of my own, the one my mother tied on a dead man's chest when I was five, because she was teaching me and dead men do not complain.

I put my finger on the upper knot and did not press.

A mark that grew where it sits is warm under the finger. It has no temperature of its own to speak of, and the skin around it does the work of being alive, and you can feel that. A mark that was moved is different. It sits in the skin like a coin in a pocket, and the skin goes on being skin all around it, and the shape in the middle is neither warm nor cold, because it is not really there. It is being held.

That is the thing I had never had words for until that morning. Every mark I had ever read that came off somebody else was being held by something, and the something was always a knot, and the knot was always the same knot.

"Whose is it."

"Nobody's."

"That is not how marks work."

"It is how this one works." She took the arm back and pulled the sleeve down, and she did not do it quickly, which was worse than if she had. "It has been on me twenty-six years and it has never once pulled. It is a dead man's half and there is nothing on this earth for it to close on, and I have been glad of it every day."

Twenty-six years. The bad winter.

"Ewan," she said. "Ewan of the north ridge. He went under a wagon in the second week of it and I sat with him for two days and he did not know me at the end."

I did not say anything.

"Your mother took it off him the night he died." She was looking at the window and not at me. "I asked her to. I was thirty-one years old and I had no mark and no house and no man, and a woman with no mark in this valley gets given to whoever will take her. He was going in the ground by morning. I asked her to put him on me instead." She reached for the cup and took it with the right hand. "She did it in the shop with the door barred and she would not take money, and she told me it would hold because she had made it, and it has held."

Nine years I had eaten at that table.

"You knew what she was," I said.

"I knew what she did for me. That is not the same as knowing what she did to you."

The fire moved. Somewhere out in the lane a cart went past, and the wheel made the noise that wheel makes at the rut by the forge.

I have gone back over that morning more than any other morning of that winter, and what I keep coming back to is how ordinary it was. Bread on the table. The black jar open. Her sleeve rolled up past the elbow on an arm she had been hiding for a week, and the mark on it, and under the mark a name that was not hers.

I sat there and did the arithmetic, because that is what I do with a thing I cannot hold, and it came out in two directions at once and I did not want either of them.

The first was that a woman had asked my mother for something once, and my mother had done it, and had not taken money for it, and it had held for twenty-six years like she said it would. That was a thing my mother did. That was in her hands.

The second was the same hands, in the same shop, with the same needle, laying a dead woman on a live girl who was asleep, and that girl had been me.

One hand. Two nights. Nine years apart. There is no way to hold both of those at once and have it come out to a person you can be angry at, and I tried, and I could not.

"Nine years," I said. "You have been waiting nine years for me to ask you something."

She did not deny it.

"Ask it, then."

So I asked it.

Hessa got up and went to the door and put the bar across it, which she had not done in daylight in nine years.