PalmCaster

A long time ago, before our mothers, before our mothers' mothers, before any roof in this town stood, a man came down to the salt and sat. He did not know how to stand. He did not know how to eat. He had been sent to watch a door in a house we do not know, and he had seen something he was not meant to see, and after he had seen it the door had let him through, the way doors sometimes do when a watcher will not stop watching. A woman was walking the salt that morning. Her name was SHEN, as the country was SHEN — her mother had given her the country's name because her mother had wanted her daughter to belong to something. She saw a man on the salt who did not look like the men of the town. She did not ask him what he was. She gave him bread. This is the first thing you are to remember: she gave him bread. Everything afterward came because a woman gave a man bread on a salt flat at low tide, and he ate it. He stayed. He learned to walk. He learned to sleep. He learned to gather salt, badly. After seven years, a child was born to them. The child did not cry. The child opened his palm before he opened his eyes. The man left when the child was small. He walked back to the salt to ask if he could go home, and home would not have him. What became of him is told three ways. We will tell you all three when you are older. The child stayed. His mother did not give him a name. She was afraid to. He named himself. He said it the way a child says a first word, with the deliberate clarity of a thing already known. He said: OBOBO. He was three when he placed his hand on a hen that would not lay, and asked it a question. He was three when the town began to bring him broken things. A pot. A child with a cough. A goat. A husband who would not speak. A piece of rope that could not be untied. He did not ask, of any of these, who owned them. He asked them what had been taken from them that belonged to their being. A pot had lost its wholeness. A child had lost breath. A goat had lost the giving relation with the woman who carried it. A husband had lost one sentence he owed. A rope had lost release. When the thing still held the answer, it answered, and what had been taken was given back. When the thing no longer held the answer, it did not, and he did not press. This is what the salt remembers. The rest is in the other accounts. The other accounts disagree.