Poems by Erin Jamieson

Autumn

by Erin Jamieson

From Canary Fall 2018

Erin lives near the Little Miami National Scenic River.

I yank the lead harder, and the camel turns to spit at me.

“Bolioch! Stop!” I order.

The ground is adorned with the decomposing corpses of fallen leaves and the tree branches are bare, hauntingly human as they sway. There is not a patch of vegetation as far as the eye can see. The camel seems to sense this: he stops every few feet, turning his head towards me. His mouth hangs open in thirst, revealing crooked, yellowed teeth.

But this time, I cannot get him to budge. I see why: a young man, some twenty years my junior, is in front of us, also leading a camel. He wears no hat, and his face is raw and red, and I know it will blister from the cold. What man is foolish enough to wander in the thick of November without a hat?

“You’re practically dragging your camel. You’ll never get anywhere that way. Here, let me show you.” Before I can protest, he snatches the lead from my hands.

I am pleased when my camel refuses to move.

“He listens to me,” I say, taking the lead back from him. An hour ago, I would have given next to anything to see another human. Now the insult stings me.

The young man shakes his head, reaching for the flask he carries and taking a gulp of what I presume is airag—it can only be airag, for the putrid scent of fermented milk reaches me.

“Just trying to help,” he grunts. “Didn’t mean anything by it. Live around here?”

I stifle a laugh. “No one can live here.”

He settles on a lone tree stump, his camel obediently standing beside him. “Third time this year I’m moving,” he says. “Gets exhausting.”

I nod, but his words do not touch me. Everyone moves in the Gobi; home is where there is fertile ground, where there is life. I stare up at the sky, as it slowly fades into afternoon. It is periwinkle blue, cloudless and vast. It is true what they say of the Mongolian skyline: here, it goes forever. It is as close to eternity as a man can glimpse while he is alive.

“I have to move on,” the man says, and then I realize that he has been talking, and I have not heard a word he’s uttered.

“Where are you headed?” I ask, repeating the very question I did not answer.

“South. I have some cousins who’ve agreed to share land.” He sighs. “I don’t fancy the idea, truth be told, but I don’t have a choice. I have little to my own name.”

“And you’ve lived alone up until now?” I wonder.

He shrugs. “With my father. He passed away a year, maybe two years ago now. I lose track of time.”

Passed, like the clouds pass over the sun, like a camel passes over a patch of land. As easily as that.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Bayartai,” he replies. He mounts his camel with the grace of an acrobat . He is young and dexterous now; it will be years, I think, before he tires, as I have, as my father and grandfather did.

I stare at the leaves beneath my feet, and when I glance back up, the young man is nowhere to be seen.

He has vanished into the vast wasteland, nothing more than a speck of dust.

My grandfather fell ill the winter I turned ten. My mother laid him down in a cot and nursed him day and night. In exchange for the stew we fed him, he’d feed us tales of his boyhood, how he used to be ‘the greatest hunter for miles.’ We’d laugh as he told stories so outrageous you’d be hard pressed to believe them.

But as the fever grew, he began to forget us. He called us wind, shadows. He asked why there was no sun; could someone please get the sun back? Only after several times that he spilled food over the front of his sheets did we realize he had also gone blind.

On the eighth day of his illness, I sat beside him all day. I did not feed the animals. I did not fish. I did not help launder clothes. I sat and held my grandfather’s hand, thin as paper and leathery from working in the sun his long life. I stared into his eyes. They had no life in them.

My mother let me stay by his side; it is not the Mongolian way to abandon family, even at the very end. But on the twelfth day after I had been crying endlessly and refused food for two days, she told me to leave.

I couldn’t.

It is noon when I see them.

I hope to pass among their camp silently, but the camel betrays me: long overburdened and as desperate for a drink as I, he rears his head and snorts. It is a soft sound, a sigh, but one of the men working on the edge of the camp turns his reddened face to mine.

“Taniig hen gedeg wei?  What’s your name?” he asks.

“None of your business,” I answer. I can feel the camel stiffen beside me. “I’m just passing through.”

The man is heavily mustached and stocky, his skin leathery from the constant gaze of the unforgiving sun. “It is my business, seeing as you’re trespassing.”

“I wasn’t aware you owned the land.”

The man’s jaw visibly tightens, and he sets aside his shovel. A few of the other miners turn their heads in our direction.

“We’re digging for copper,” he says.

“You’re too late,” I say, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “Mining camps have already been here.”

“Must have been quite some time ago.”

“A month, two months,” I say carelessly. “Once it’s harvested, it’s harvested.”

“You think there’s nothing here?”

I shrug. “That is your business, and not mine. Let me and my camel pass.”

He laughs. “Humor me.”

I sigh. “If there was copper to be found, it already has been. The reason this land is uninhabitable is exactly this. Mining camps are set up casually, for greedy hands who understand nothing about the actual land.”

He gazes at my frazzled camel and back to me. “You’re a nomad, I take it?”

“I am when I need to be.”

“Well, I’m a miner when I need to be.”

“No, you’re a bloody fool. Now let me pass,” I repeat.

“Good luck finding grazing land. There’s another camp set up a few miles down from here.”

I do not doubt it, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him discourage me. I start to walk around the ditch he is situated in, when he stops me again.

“You can’t go that way. We’re digging there.”

I laugh humorously. “You dig everywhere.”

He raises his hands in exasperation. They are stained inky black. “I do what I have to, to make a living.”

“You see this?” He brings a lump of earth to my face, and my camel rears forward hopefully, then retreats, seeing there is nothing to eat.

“It’s dirt.”

“Wrong. It’s more than that. It’s capital.” He throws it down. “Know what I think?”

I don’t really care what he thinks, but I entertain him.

“I think you’re lying,” he continues. “I think you know there’s molybdenum here. And I think you don’t have an ass’s right to judge how we use the land. Your camel eats away at it, doesn’t it? You use the resources, just in a different way.”

“Maybe,” I allow. “But I don’t bloody my hands doing it.”

He starts to dig again. “Have no idea what you mean.”

My camel has lost his patience and lets out an exasperated sigh. I can feel him tugging at the lead, urging me to leave. But I can’t.

“Yes, you do. Every year men like you take away our grazing lands. Our animals sicken and die. There is nowhere for us to live. You could set the camps up systematically, but what do you care? You scatter them around like ashes, and the whole land bleeds under your shovel, all so you can have some damned fancy radio or a cell phone or a new television set.”

“You don’t know anything,” he repeats, but his eyes flicker, and I know I’ve touched a sore spot.

The camel lets out another sigh. I ignore him. “You’re telling me that this – “ I wave at the camp, “ – is necessary? “

“You don’t own this land, fool.”

“No more than you do.”

“Let me work.”

“Work,” I murmur. I start to leave.

“You can’t fight it,” he calls to my retreating back. “Someday you’ll learn that you have to leave the past behind.”

“Don’t tell me,” I say, gritting my teeth, “how to live my life.”

“So what the hell is your solution?”

I throw the first punch. I am not a violent man. But when I bear down on him, I am punching his jaw until I hear it crunch and do not stop, even when a blow sets my nose gushing. We are fighting in the dirt and the blood until three other men pull us away from each other. He will have a scar where I threw the first punch, I can see that now. I am breathing heavily, feeling dizzy from what I have just done.

I don’t need to be asked to leave. I mount my camel, the miner’s protests vibrating in my ears.

“Be yadarch bain. I’m tired,” I say, and even though the camel does not respond in words, he tilts his head at me and releases a shudder.

“It won’t be long,” I murmur. But I don’t know that. It takes nearly an hour before we reach a small tributary. Even from a distance, I can smell rot. Lenok and graylings lie on the edge of the water, their yellow eyes wide and vacant, their silver skin peeling from their bones like the skin of an orange. Their mouths are open, revealing teeth that are grimy and saturated with the murky brown of the runoff that has leaked into the water.

When my camel tries to drink from it, I shake my head. “We need to keep moving.”

I am not quick enough. The camel’s lips are stained with the runoff, with the stench of dead fish, after he takes a quick drink.

And then I notice a flutter of motion near my foot. It is a fish, perhaps the sole survivor, half on land, gasping, flailing. It’s attempting to inch back into the lurid water, but I can’t stand to watch. I spear its chest, and with a few writhing motions, it dies.

“Leave it alone,” I tell the camel as he starts to sniff it. “He’s already dead.”

He’s already dead. He’s already gone.

“He’s already dead, Chulun. He is of no use to us, or anyone.” My mother told me as I bent over my grandfather’s weathered body.

He was still breathing. He was still my grandfather. He was the man who’d taught me that land was more than land. He’d shown me how to find the constellations of stars in the endless night sky. He’d taken me fishing and hunting. He’d saved his earnings for nearly a year to buy me a radio from the heart of Ulaanbaatar.

He is of no use, my mother repeated.

It was also my grandfather who’d taught me how to let go. He’d shown me how it was more merciful to shoot a wounded animal than to let it bleed out. He’d held my hand as we lowered my father—his own son—into the ground.

Had I known that in an hour he would wake and call out my name, I would not have left. Had I known, I would not have left.

But I did, and, sixty years later, the guilt is etched in the marrow of my bones.

I am not sure what compels me to pick it up.

The fish is slick even under my glove. I can feel where its vertebrae have shattered, and I wonder how long it lay gasping for air before I killed it. I am glad when the blood stains my glove, as if it is proof I have done the right thing.

I bury it under a pile of fallen leaves, knowing its body will decay with theirs. I know, too, that winter will be hard this year, and when the ground freezes, the fish will be forgotten. And maybe, in spring, there will be new fish.

A long, slow roll of thunder. Showers come without warning and so they fall now, heavy thick sheets of rain, striking my cheek like a slap. This rain is heaven sent, after miles without water, after polluted tributaries. With shaking hands, I reach for my empty flask, trying to catch the rain, which will have to sustain us until we find water somewhere else.

I can only hope this rain continues, that I will be able to fill my flask again. That we will make it. That is what fills me, as I struggle to catch the sweet cold rain: hope.

Hoping we will find somewhere to graze soon.

Hoping.

© Erin Jamieson