Buffalo Flats

by Martine Leavitt

LaRue put a comforting hand on Rebecca’s arm. “It is God’s will, Rebecca. He made us to have babies.” Rebecca covered her friend’s hand gently with her own. “We like to blame everything on him,”

They finished making supper. That was what they always did when there was nothing else to be done: cook. Against the storm, they would eat, and eat well, as if to celebrate the storm. This was what the hoarding had been

“Coby says guns are the product of a fallen world,” she said. “He says sometimes we’re cruel to Mother Nature.” She realized that at some point she had stopped speaking for Coby and was speaking for herself.

When you were young, she thought, you ran and played in a pack. One child was no different from another. You didn’t notice yourself. No one minded you for good or bad. And then, one day, you picked one out to be special, and maybe he picked you back, and suddenly you felt like you were you for the first time...

But though her people preached the gospel of love for one’s fellow man, and service to others, somehow, Rebecca noted, Father felt it a shame to accept help from one’s neighbor. Rebecca thought it a perplexing arithmetic problem: take the number of people who are supposed to serve one another, which was everyone, and subtract the number of people who will not be served if they can help it, and you have...

“Rebecca. Sometimes—sometimes a body must stand for something, and sometimes, when we do, we will offend.”

“Some people think I am an angel because I do not express contradictory opinions, and they think it is because I cannot. They think I am a shadow and that they can walk right through me. But they misunderstand angels, and they are going to bump into me now. They will see that I will not move to the right or the left, and they are going to have to trouble themselves to walk around me.”

Coby was tall, but it was the height of something inside him she was seeing now, the way he was taller than teasing, the way he never had to tell other people he had been right. She liked being the only one to know him that way. She liked knowing the forest had a diamond in it, and she liked knowing that the world had a Coby in it.

Every person was a surprise, she was learning. Every soul never had its copy. Each one a world to itself, a world of that soul’s making, and when that soul was gone, a whole world ended. It didn’t matter if they started out old or ugly or cranky; by the end of it they were sweet and soft beyond bearing. She held the dying, each one a world, and she loved the life of that solitary world, that single bit of holy flame that birthed itself back to God.

This land, it had to be negotiated with every day, as if it were a small god that wanted to be served, appeased, with no promise of rewarding the faithful. What had she been thinking, anyway? You couldn’t live on scenery. Father had been right about that. But then, she thought, she couldn’t live without it, either.

She had learned that no mortal soul could love the whole world at once; you could love only the person before you, and the next and the next, one at a time, man by woman by child, just the one before you and the world each soul carried with her. That was grace. That was commandment. That was the Point.