Fuller - Quiet Until the Thaw
Here you can read online Fuller - Quiet Until the Thaw full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (S.D.);South Dakota;Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, year: 2017, publisher: Penguin Publishing Group;Penguin Press, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
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Leaving Before the Rains Come
Fallings
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
Scribbling the Cat
Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright 2017 by Alexandra Fuller
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Quiet Until the Thaw from The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians, gathered and translated by Howard A. Norman (Stonehill Publishing, 1976).
Reprinted by permission of Howard A. Norman.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Fuller, Alexandra, 1969 author.
Title: Quiet until the thaw : a novel / Alexandra Fuller.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056759 (print) | LCCN 2017001457 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223349 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735225145 (international edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Lakota IndiansSocial life and customsFiction. | Indians of North AmericaFiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical.
Classification: LCC PS3606.U49 Q54 2017 (print) | LCC PS3606.U49 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056759
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
T.D.F.
19402015
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace
Life is a circle and we as common people are created to stand within it and not on it. I am not just of the past but I am the past. I am here. I am now and I will be for tomorrow.
Oglala Lakota maxim
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather, O Pioneers
Quiet Until the Thaw
Her name tells of how
it was with her.
The truth is, she did not speak
in winter.
Everybody learned not to
ask her questions in winter,
once this was known about her.
The first winter this happened
we looked in her mouth to see
if something was frozen. Her tongue
maybe, or something else in there.
But after the thaw she spoke again
and told us it was fine for her that way.
So each spring we
looked forward to that.
Swampy Cree narrative naming poem
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
T hey say Rick Overlooking Horse didnt talk much.
Actually, it was a little more than that. From the start, even for an Indian, his silence was bordering on worrying. For example, in his fourth spring, when You Choose Watson shot him in the leg with an arrow, he didnt go wailing to his grandmother like any normal kid. He turned his back on his Rez cousins mocking laughter and limped away with the arrow still in his leg, down the hill toward the third in a row of tar-paper lean-tos on what is now Second Street in Manderson village. Then he stood in the kitchen, silent as ever, staring at his Closest Immediate Relation.
Mina Overlooking Horse, accustomed to her grandsons silence, took a long time to look up from the backseat of the 1935 Ford coupe that had served as her sofa since it had been torn from its crumpled mother chassis in a ditch outside Chadron, Nebraska. Then she noticed the dark, viscous pool spreading on the earth floor beneath Rick Overlooking Horses feet, and the arrow juddering from his leg. Ayeee! Youre making a mess of everything! she said.
But Rick Overlooking Horse just blinked and stared at the dirt on which he was standing. Maybe he was wondering why You Choose had just shot him in the leg with an arrow. Or maybe he was wondering how he could mess everything up any worse than it already was. But no one would ever know what he was thinking about this, or much of anything else, because the child wouldnt talk.
It was like that Swampy Cree Indian poem, Quiet Until the Thaw, as if his tongue must be frozen. Eventually, his grandmother and some of his More Concerned Immediate Relations thought to look in his mouth to make sure. But nope, everything was all defrosted and accounted for. Rick Overlooking Horse was simply a child, and then a man, of shockingly few words.
B y the time Rick Overlooking Horse was fixing to enter his second decade, he had uttered, all told, about enough words to fill a pamphlet from the Rezurrection Ministry outfit based out of Dallas, Texas. And those pamphlets were exceedingly short, designed as they were by little ladies with big hair for heathen Indians who had been out in the sun too long, so to speak.
Although to be fair, the little ladies were just doing their Christian bit. And to be accurate, some of them were very far from what you might describe as little. Plus, this was back in the early 1950s, which was a confusing time for a lot of people, particularly for people who counted on time being linear, one thing following another, one foot in front of the other, one breath after the other, from cradle to grave, accounting for all the time between birth and death, but accounting for none of the time between death and birth.
Mina made an attempt to get that confusion squared away early and often. They say youve been here from the very start, and youll be here to the very end, she told Rick Overlooking Horse when he was just nine years old. Every last drop of you and everything around you. Nothing has ever been taken away. Nothing will ever be added. Then she sighed as if the very idea exhausted and perhaps saddened her. Ayeee, they say thats true for you, its true for You Choose, and its true for me. Yep, its true for the whole steaming, rotten lot of us. Mina let this sink in for a moment. Like that breath you just took. In the beginning, a dinosaur breathed that breath. Then a tree. Then an ant. Then you, now me. And maybe itll be You Choose next. Or maybe that breath will sink to the bottom of the ocean for one of those blind, ugly fish. Or maybe it will be someones dying breath. You see? They say you just borrowed that breath. It wasnt yours to begin with and it wont be yours to end with.
N ine-year-old Rick Overlooking Horse gave this a lot of thought, and his mind did what all minds have done since time immemorial while dealing with such a boundless, mysterious, obdurate idea. It blew up. Quite literally, it stopped working the way most peoples minds work and it started off on its own kick. And that made Rick Overlooking Horse sleepless and also exalted. It was like angels should have been hovering in the clouds above his head, singing a chorus of sweet surrender. It was like his mind should have been able to trip heavenward on shafts of sunlight. It was like
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