the way to rainy mountain(3)

In the weeks after the attacks, for example, the Justice Department arrested scores of young Arab and Muslim men and held them without charges, in undisclosed locations. Their names were no released, nor were they permitted to send word to their families. They simply vanished. Georgetown University law professor David Cole calls this “the practice of disappearance”, and it is something we associate with repressive regimes, not with participatory democracies. Not only do such activities compromise the nation’s integrity at home but they are sure to undermine American credibility a abroad. If we cannot adhere to our own ideals and values, to the standards we’ve called on other nations to adhere to in the past, then we call into question some of our fundamental assumptions about who we are.

Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of weather watch.

The windowpanes are black and opaque; you imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many ghosts, bones given up to the land.

They belong in the distance; it is their domain.

The summers there were full of excitement and reunion. The Kowas are summer people; they abide the cold and deep to themselves; but when the season turns and land becomes warm and vital, they cannot hold still; and old love of going returns upon them. The aged visitors thos came to my grandmother’s house when I was a child were made of lean and leather, and they bore themselves upright.

They rubbed fat upon their hair and wound their braids with strips of colored cloth. Some of them painted their faces and carried the scars of old and cherished enmities. They were an old

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council of warlords, come to remind and be reminded of who they were. The women might indulge themselves; gossip was at once the mark and compensation of their servitude. They made loud and elaborate talk among themselves, full of jest and gesture, fright and false alarm. They went abroad in fringed and flowered shawls, \bright beadwork and German silver. They were at home in the kitchen, and they prepared meals that were banquets.

There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts.

Now there is a funeral silence in the rooms, the endless wake of some final word.

I could see the long row of trees by the creek, and low light upon the rolling plains, and stars of the Big Dipper.

A cricket had perched upon the handrail, only a few inches away from me. \My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil.

for there of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me.

The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on dirt road to Rainy Mountain. It was already hot, and the grasshoppers began to fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning , and birds sang out of shadows. The long yellow grass on the mountain shone in the bright light, and scissortail hied above the land. There, where it ought be, at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother’s grave. Here and there on the dark stones were ancestral names. Looking back once, I saw the mountain and came away.