One
Time and the seasons had left the old woman’s face a ruin.
Much like my own. The man called Old White reached up, running the tip of his finger along the wrinkles that ate into his brown skin. He traced them where they deepened around his mouth, followed their patterns as they mimicked the uncounted ghosts of smiles and frowns long past. His forehead was a mass of ripples, his cheeks loose like flaps. A lifetime of blazing suns and scorching heat alternating with periods of frost-dimmed and aching cold had left its mark on his skin.
“What are you doing?” The old woman was watching him as he fingered his wattled chin. They sat in her thatch-roofed dwelling, high atop a long-abandoned earthen mound. Beyond the cane walls, he could hear the south wind in the trees as it blew up from the gulf. A fox squirrel chattered in one of the oaks.
He shot the old woman a sidelong glance. “Comparing my face to yours.”
“You always were a silly goose.” She sat across the fire from him, her bony butt on a tightly woven cattail mat. A worn fabric dress hung from her sunken shoulders. From a leather thong a pale shell gorget dangled below her withered neck. Long white hair was drawn into a bun behind her skull. Expressionless, she watched him with pensive eyes like polished pebbles; they seemed to read his souls. “There are no answers there, you know. A face is nothing more than a flawed mask. Ungovernable, it often hides what you wish given away, and betrays that which you most wish to conceal.”
“I was thinking of how beautiful you were the first time I ever saw you.” As clearly as if it were yesterday, he remembered the moment he’d laid eyes on her. She had been naked, bathing in a small pool in the creek that lay a short distance north of her house. He’d been fleeing down a forest trail, his pack on his back. At first glimpse of her, he had stopped in surprise, his form masked by a tangle of honeysuckle. He could still smell the flowers, hear the whizzing chirr of the insects, and sense the faint rustle of wind in the gum and hickory leaves.
She had looked up, meeting his stare. To his surprise there had been no fear, no startled widening of the eyes. Instead she’d raised an eyebrow, demanding, “Are you going to stand there and gape, or will you come down and scrub my back?”
Awkwardly he had stumbled down the leaf-matted slope, thick black soil clinging to his moccasins. Somehow he’d managed to help her bathe, wondering at the perfect form of her lithe body, painfully aware of the full swell of her pointed breasts and moonlike buttocks. It was later he’d finally remarked, “It was as if you knew I was coming.”
She’d narrowed her eyes, voice softening. “Oh, yes. I’d heard your souls whimpering from quite some distance.”
He had stayed, and she had partially healed him. Hand in hand they had explored the old earthworks, line after line of curving ridges. Forest had reclaimed what had once been a great city, but in the backdirt of squirrel caches, and in places where the leaf mat was disturbed, old cooking clays, bits of pottery, and chipped stone tools caught the light.
“What was this place?” he had asked in awe.
“The ghosts,” she said softly, “they tell me this place was called Sun Town. They say it was the center of the world. All manner of men and Spirits came here to marvel. That is, if you can believe the ghosts.”
“Can you?”
She had shrugged. “Even ghosts lie.”
He had studied the layout of the place, so different from that of the peoples he knew. He had sketched it out in the black loam, and thought it in the shape of a bird. It was while digging for greenbriar root that he noticed the little red jasper owl lying among the old cooking clays.
Her eyes had shone, pensive and intrigued when he’d given it to her.
“Masked Owl,” she’d told him. “He comes to my Dreams sometimes and tells me stories about the past. Tales of murder, intrigue, and poison.”
“Then your Dreams are as haunted as my own.” And he had looked sidelong at his heavy pack where it lay beside her door.
Several hands’ journey to the south, the Serpent Bird band of the Natchez had built a town around several temples atop tall mounds. Despite being so close, they shunned the quiet ruins of Sun Town, left it to the ghosts and the solitary woman who lived atop the tree-studded mound. But on occasion some individual, driven to desperation, would brave his or her fear and follow the trails north, seeking the Forest Witch for some cure or other.
That long-ago summer had been blissful for him. He’d been alone, with only her knowing eyes and her soft touch for company. She had heard his story, and salved his souls in the house she’d built atop the ancient tree-studded mound.