River Spirits
When animals were no longer people, I was walking with my young sons along the river of the sliding banks. Thick plugs of wild asparagus were pushing up through the earth, and in the darkness of the forest thousands of white flowers pricked our eyes like stars. My little one was kneeling in the mulch and pine brushes, pulling back the green vertebrae of a fern. Suddenly he
called out. I thought perhaps he’d found fox scat or a white spider until we crouched beside him and saw the Monongahela village.
Dwellings stretched the length of a finger, wattled walls and matted roofs. Hunters in buckskin huddled around a stone, and we could smell the gray thread of burning tobacco. A line of waterfowl was flying north over the village, not far from the orange cooking fire. Under the widest part of the fern, the older children and five women were hunkering or bent in the garden, laughing and weeding around the goosefoot, the green pumpkins, the bright sunflowers taller
than the old storytelling man drinking from a gourd.
“I am finished,” he said, “it is the end.”