The song wrapped itself around Sedna’s soul and drew her closer to the kayak. She sailed with the stranger over the sea, away from her home and her father. For a while she was happy. The petrel made their home on a rocky cliff and caught fish for her daily, and Sedna was so enchanted with her husband that she never thought to truly look around her. But one day the petrel’s glasses slipped off his nose and Sedna looked into his eyes. She glanced away and saw a home built not of thick pelts but of rotting fish skins. She slept not on a bear skin but on the tough hide of a walrus. She felt the icy needles of the ocean spray and knew she had married a man who was not what she had thought he was. Sedna cried with grief, and although the petrel loved her, he could not stop her tears. A year passed, and Sedna’s father came to visit. When he reached the cliff where she lived, the petrel was out hunting for fish, and Sedna begged her father to take her back home. They ran back down to his kayak and set out into the sea. They had not been paddling long when the petrel came back to his nest. He shouted for Sedna, but his cry of pain was swallowed by the howl of wind and sea. Other petrels found him and told him where Sedna was. He spread his arms, his wingspan blotting out the sun, and flew toward the boat that held Sedna and her father. As he watched them paddle even more furiously, the petrel grew angry. He beat his wings into the wind, creating currents, forcing a surge of icy waves. A storm raged up at his cries, and the sea became so frenzied the boat rocked from side to side. Sedna’s father realized the bird was so powerful that even the ocean was furious at the loss of the petrel’s wife. He knew that to save himself, he had to sacrifice his daughter.
He threw Sedna into the frigid water. She sputtered and splashed, her skin blue with the cold. She managed to grab at the side of the boat tightly with her fingers, but her father, terrified by the thunderous beating of the petrel’s wings above his head, hit at her hands with the kayak paddle. Sedna’s fingertips broke off and fell into the sea, where they turned into whales and dove away. Resur- facing, Sedna caught hold of the gunwhale again, but her father struck out a second time. The middle digits of her fingers shattered like ice and fell into the water to become the seals. One more time she managed to reach the boat, but her father batted at her hands until the third joints broke off and became walruses, and Sedna sank heavy to the bottom of the sea. Sedna became a mighty spirit who controls the sea creatures that were born of her fingers. Sometimes she whips together storms and crashes kayaks against the rocks. Sometimes she causes famines by luring the seals away from the hunters. Never does she break the surface of the water, where she might again encounter the petrel.
—Eskimo Indian legend
CHAPTERTEN
I’Mgoing to tell you the truth.
But the story starts long before I’d ever met you, long before anyone had ever heard of Alex Rivers. It begins on the day that Connor Murtaugh moved into the house next door—the same day I went home to dinner and told my mother that when I grew up, I planned to be a boy.
I was five years old, a prim and proper little girl in training to be a southern lady. The fact that we lived in Maine hadn’t kept my mother from schooling me to become the finest Georgia peach. I could read a little, and out of necessity I could even cook simple things like soup and grilled cheese and, of course, strong black coffee. I had mastered the art of tossing my hair over my shoulder and lowering my lashes to get what I wanted. I smiled without showing my teeth. Most adults found me charming, but I had no friends my own age. Bringing them home to play was unthinkable, you see, which made most of the kids in school think I was strange or stuck-up. And then Connor’s family moved from an apartment across the lake to the house beside mine.
I spent that first day helping him carry boxes and lamps, answering his questions about my birth date, my most hated food, and where you could find fat worms for bait. He overwhelmed me, and for the first time I began to see there was more to living than keeping your knees pressed together when you sat on a chair, and brushing your hair one hundred strokes each night. So I traded my Mary Janes for an old pair of Connor’s sneakers that fit when I jammed rolled-up socks into the toes. I learned the fine arts of sprinkling salt on slugs to dry them out and skidding belly-first across mud puddles.
I credit Connor for many reasons in my decision to become an anthropologist, but especially because he was the first person to show me how wonderful the earth feels when you squeeze it through your fingers.
These days my hands are almost always dirty, and although Connor has been dead for seventeen years, he’s still on my mind.
I don’t believe in UFOs, or reincarnation, or ghosts, but I do believe in Connor. All I can say is that from time to time, I feel him. He shows up whenever things are going wrong. I think it is probably my fault that he never got to fly off to heaven, or wherever old souls go, since he spent his childhood taking care of me and apparently still feels compelled to do so.
So, you see, I was expecting him that hot Monday in August when I was pacing the halls of the anthropology department, waiting to hear about tenure. I had been an assistant professor atUCLAfor two years now, after having received my B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. there. I wanted tenure. People who had been there less time than I had made associate prof. I had finally threatened Archibald Custer, the head of the department, with a bald-faced lie about alternative options at an eastern college. I wasn’t really expecting to receive tenure, because at twenty-seven I was still younger than even the adjunct profs and the lecturers. But it wasn’t my fault it had taken them longer to get to the same place I was. I was proud of the fact that I had decided thirteen years earlier what I was going to do with my life, and then stuck fast to my original plan.
I was leaning against the water cooler that stood outside the departmental secretary’s office when I felt the light pressure on my spine that I knew meant Connor was watching. If he was here, I reasoned, the news couldn’t be good. “They’re going to pass me over,” I whispered.
There—I had said it, and as I admitted to my lack of success, the words fell to the floor in front of me, heavy and sluggish like failure always is.
“I hate being affiliated with a university,” I said quietly, running my hand down the wall.
It was not the truth. I hated the political bullshit, but I fully embraced the money and the grants. I loved the way the red tape magically disappeared when I tried to open an excavation in another country. And I knew that in a week I’d forgive Custer, and all the people who received promotions. I’d forgive the whole board that voted me down. This year, I’d have to figure out what it was that I was doing wrong, and work a little harder.
“You know what I wish,” I said, “I wish the good things in life weren’t all clustered together when you were little.”
They weren’t, for most people. When was the last time I’d walked across the campus barefoot? Or missed a class because I had overslept?
When was the last time I had gotten dead drunk or awakened in a stranger’s bed or come up short of cash at the supermarket?
Never. I didn’t let myself live on the edge, although I didn’t really think I was missing anything. Spontaneity made me uncomfortable.
My single-mindedness was what was going to get me a promotion.
Someday.
But I had this sense that if Connor could come back to life, he would be disgusted with me. He’d want me to do the things we used to talk about: live on Tahiti for a couple of months, take up bonsai or rock climbing.
I tried to push Connor out of my mind in preparation for my meeting with Archibald Custer. He was standing in the open doorway of his office, monolithic, as if he expected to conjure whomever he wanted to see by the sheer force of his position. He was argumentative, pigheaded, and sexist. I didn’t much like him, but I knew how to play by his rules.
“Ah, Miss Barrett,” he said. He spoke by holding a transmitter to a box built into his throat, his own vocal cords having been severed due to throat cancer a few years back. The undergraduates thought he was creepy, and I had to agree. Except for his height, he always reminded me a little of the sketches done ofHomo habilis, and I had to applaud him for choosing such a form-fitting profession.
He didn’t like me either, not only because I happened to be female and young, but also because I was a physical anthropologist. He was a cultural anthropologist—made his name by squatting right down with the Ya¸nomamo¨ years ago. There had always been a friendly rivalry between the two camps of anthropology, but I couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done after I’d defended my dissertation. I had written a piece about whether violence was innate or learned, an age-old debate between physical and cultural anthropologists. The popular belief tended toward a cultural approach, saying that although aggression was innate, planned aggression—such as war—was brought about by the pressure of living in societies, not by our evolutionary history. I argued back, saying that this might be true, but society itself wouldn’t have come about unless the territorial nature bred into our genes required man to make rules.
All in all, it was a decent rebuttal to the cultural anthropologists, and this had Custer fuming. My first year as a lecturer he’d assigned me to courses that all ranked under cultural anthropology, and when I complained and asked to go on a field site, he had simply raised his eyebrows and said he thought it might do me some good to become more well-rounded.
Now he waved me into his office and motioned me toward the chair that faced his tremendous desk. He was grinning, goddamn him, as he started to speak. “I’m sorry to tell you—”
I jumped up from the chair, unable to hear any more. “Then don’t tell me at all,” I said, smiling tightly. “I assume I’ve been passed over, thank you very much, and I’ll just save you the trouble.” I took a step toward the door.
“Miss Barrett.”
