Dangerous People

1

Kesh towns were built on the pattern of the heyiya-if, two spiral curves with a common center or Hinge. The Four-House (sacred) arm consisted of the five heyimas or sacred meeting-places, the Five-House (secular) arm consisted of dwelling-houses, spaced out in a curve surrounding a common place or plaza.

There were so many houses in Telina that the secular arm had become three arms, outer, middle, and inner, each curving around its own plaza.

(Note that lower-case “house” means a dwelling-house; upper-case “House” refers to the Nine Houses into which the Kesh divided all being.)

2

The largest and most prosperous town of the central Valley, lying between the Old Straight Road and the River Na.

3

A pun both on the meaning of the phrase and on the author’s name, Arravna, River of Words.

4

A familiar literary evasion, understood to mean that though Hardcinder House is a real house, the characters are fictional and the story is a fiction (possibly with some historical or legendary basis).

5

Marai, household, means any number and any combination of blood kin and married-ins living in one house. The Kesh were matrilocal, and house ownership matrilineal, so a mother or grandmother was likely to be at least nominally the head of the family, responsible for the upkeep of the house and the behavior of family members.

6

Shamsha, the grandmother at the time of the story.

7

Water was piped into Kesh town-houses, which had interior flush toilets, sinks, and baths. Drinking water was kept cool in summer by various devices, often large earthenware storage jars that cooled by evaporation, fitted with a faucet.

8

Many wildflowers had symbolic meaning to the Kesh; chicory signified pregnancy. There are other significations. Hwette is in the morning of her life. The blue chicory flower will live only when growing untouched; if picked, it closes quickly and dies.

9

Sou = daughter, -bí attached to a word expresses affection.

10

Members of the Madrone Lodge undertook to keep records and archives and write chronicles and history either locally or for the Kesh people as a whole (in the latter case they worked at least part of the time in the Madrone Lodge Archives of Wakwaha). Because it dealt with the past, rather than with actuality, the Lodge was considered to belong to the Houses of Sky. Any person “living in the Sky Houses” was considered to be, to that extent, a “dangerous” person.

11

Shamsha is also a member of the Oak Society, in the Third House of Earth (Serpentine), made up of people interested in literature, written and oral. Closely connected to both Madrone Lodge and Oak Society was the Book Art, specifically concerned with the manufacture of paper, ink, paints, the tools of writing, printing, and visual art, and books of all kinds.

12

Concerning the Kesh attitude towards preservation of documents, etc., see “Pandora Converses with the Archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na,” pages 369–372.

13

One of the seven annual wakwa hedou, great dances, the Moon was a festival of ritual license, the most “dangerous” of all the great dances. It went on for ten nights beginning at the second full moon after the vernal equinox—mid-Spring. The references place the time of the story as late May or June.

14

The computer center at Wakwaha, installed and maintained by the super-terrestrial cybernetic/robotic network known to the Kesh as the City of Mind.

15

To do research on the computers.

16

In early or mid-August.

17

The noun or verb hinge, íya, is never used lightly; it always hints at further meaning or implication.

18

The town of Chúmo is in these hills.

19

Souv giyouda, daughter’s husband, so called having formally married Hwette at the Wedding ceremonies of the World Dance.

20

Han es im, the usual Kesh hello; amabí, dear grandmother.

21

The physical site of the spiritual center of one’s Earth House (maternal clan—in the case of Shamsha and her daughters the Obsidian). The five heyimas of the Five Houses were one arm of the double spiral formed by all Kesh towns; the other arm consisted of the dwelling houses.

22

The Obsidian House provided the ritual Clowns for several of the great dances. Fefinum and Hwette have joined the Blood Clown Society to learn and perform Clown roles in the women’s dances of the Blood Lodge.

23

The Kesh idea of property was complicated. Only sacred things were held entirely in common; only one’s own body was considered entirely one’s inalienable property. Everything else fell between those extremes. They used the possessive pronouns, but their meaning is often very shadowy, and is a kind of shorthand. Speaking carefully, one would not say “my family” “my house,” or “our trees,” but “the people I am related to,” “the house I am living in,” “the trees my family looks after.” The produce of farming and hunting was always shared to a degree determined by complicated traditions and rules. The farm holdings of a Kesh family were usually scattered here and there in a patchwork, cultivated partly by the individual owners and partly as a cooperative enterprise; work and produce were shared according to rule and custom. Shamsha’s family may have had various apricot trees in other orchards.

24

Hwette as a child was called Sehoy, Barnswallow; she renamed herself Hwette, scrub oak, when she was adolescent or grown.

25

Gift=badab, give=ambad; the two words in Kesh interplay and interlock to the extent that one implies the other; to have a gift is to give it, the gift is in the giving.

26

The Doctors Lodge was under the auspices of the Third House, the Serpentine, but people of other Houses could join it. Shamsha is thinking of Duhe as a member of her House, the House of the undomesticated plants such as wildflowers.

27

To the Kesh, a written text was “performed” by reading it aloud, or by hand-copying it, or printing it in letterpress.

28

Divorce was usually by agreement, but a wife could make a one-sided divorce public and final by putting her husband’s belongings in a pile on the balcony or outside the ground-level door and telling the other people of the household that he did not live there any more. A man refusing to accept such a divorce would face community disapproval and ostracism. Either party of a marriage could request and usually obtain divorce by putting the matter to arbitration by the Councils of his House.

1

The first chapter was told from the point of view of one person, Shamsha. So we are given what Shamsha perceived, felt, thought: the truth according to Shamsha.

This second chapter offers a great many truths, or untruths, as it “hinges” or turns continually from the point of view of one character to another; from Kamedan to Sahelm to Duhe to Sahelm. Then as the night comes on we no longer are inside anyone’s mind for long, if at all, and perceptions are obscure. In the scene between Kamedan and Duhe we know only what they say, not what they are thinking. When three-year-old Torip, Monkeyflower, wakes up in the morning we see the world as he sees it for a while. Then we move without identification from Kamedan to Duhe to Sahelm to Isitut to Modona to Shamsha’s household, until the chapter ends in the point of view of Monkeyflower and Moondog.

2

The formality of the phrase is rather unusual, and as it will soon be repeated, it may be drawing ironic attention to the fact that “correct” information is, at this point, unattainable.

3

With this sentence, the significance of the moon in Hwette’s story, or the identification of Hwette with the moon, is evident, though unexplained.

A full moon rises as the sun sets, and sets as it rises. At noon of the day of a full moon the sun is at zenith and the moon (as if on the other end of a rod) is at nadir, “under the world, in the dark.” Both the upward and the downward pull of the moon create the high and low tides of full moon. The Kesh, like most farming people, had many beliefs and theories about the effect of the moon’s phase and position on the growth of plants and the behavior of animals. The day and night of full moon is a particularly charged time.

It is at this moment of balance poised to change that Kamedan tells Sahelm, and the reader, that Hwette has been gone for five days, and that there are five different, plausible explanations of where she went.

4

The Kesh often called children ebbebí, kid, little goat.

5

Many old trees in the Valley had been given names.

6

This is a Kesh way of saying what we would say as “She was about forty and her ‘clan’ was the Serpentine.”

7

Membership in the Doctors Lodge involved years of training. At initiation new members gave themselves a Lodge name, not kept secret, but mostly used only by other Lodge members.

8

The Kesh way of saying what we would say as “She had a daughter, now thirteen.”

9

A couple famed in legend for their beauty.

10

The First House, Obsidian, is the house of the Moon. Duhe’s mention of “going to the moon” disturbs Sahelm because he believes the moon has something to do with Hwette’s disappearance and Hwette’s child’s illness.

11

We would say “the Doctors Lodge storehouse.” The Kesh language tends to avoid indicating permanent possession.

12

The Arts and Lodges, the societies that taught and practiced arts and crafts, taught songs and chants as an integral part of professional activity.

13

Sahelm is learning weaving, a craft taught by the Millers Art. Duhe is telling him that she thinks he has a gift for her craft, medicine.

14

This house stands rather isolated, being the last house of its “arm.” We know nothing about Kailikusha except that she had been married to Sahelm or living with him in her own household, evidently in Kastoha, from which he came to Telina to stay in his cousin’s house.

15

Sahelm is evidently entering trance. From here on, after moonrise, the narration loses some of its matter-of-factness and begins to become more elusive.

16

Strangers are by definition “dangerous people.”

17

“Five and five,” “four and four” are terms for familiar drum rhythms. The Continuing Tone is a single unceasing note serving as ground-bass, a feature of much Kesh music.

18

This character remains elusive; she is apparently one of the actors, named Isitut, but she is more than once mistaken for or identified as, or with, Hwette.

19

The child, like his mother, belongs to the First House or clan, the Obsidian, which is also the Moon’s House. Duhe is simply asking how old he is.

20

“A bringing-in” is the general term for a Kesh healing ceremony, of which there were many varieties, many connected with curative procedures for bodily ailments, some directed principally to psychic healing.

21

A chant, learned or improvised, using a single word as its text.

22

The Cloth Art, of which Kamedan is a member, was under the auspices of the Four Houses of the Sky. Its work is thereby defined as “dangerous”—morally or spiritually risky in one way or another (broadloom weaving because it involves the use of electricity and complex machinery). Marrying Hwette, Kamedan became part of a family whose work was under the auspices of the five Earth Houses, and so considered “safe.” He feels her household distrusts and even despises him.

23

Kamedan’s rambling speech expresses his anxiety that Hwette has gone up into the wilderness, the uncultivated hills above the Valley, “the hunting side.”

Townsfolk often had traditional claim to small sites in the nearby wilderness where they put up a shelter, a “summerhouse,” and camped in the hot weather.

Wilderness extended, however, for very large areas outside the knowledge even of the Kesh hunters, and the possibility of a child getting lost was a real peril.

24

The “hinge” (íya) is a central concept and metaphor in Kesh thought. Duhe and Kamedan are connected, through the child, in this moment, in some permanent way.

25

The ensuing dialogue is formalized; all the sentences are of four syllables. Such passages, called “Four-House speech,” are more characteristic of drama than fiction. They constitute a sudden, deliberate break from everyday speech. The line “Hwettez—Hwette?” is translatable only by paraphrase; literally it means “Hwette in the Four Houses or Hwette in the Five Houses?” Duhe is asking, “Did you see Hwette’s ghost or likeness, or in dream, or did you see her in the flesh?”