In Her Best Days Seyavi Was Most Like Deborah, Deep Bosomed,
Broad In The Hips, Quick In Counsel, Slow Of Speech, Esteemed Of
Her People.
This was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand,
her own wit, and none other.
When the townspeople began to take
note of her--and it was some years after the war before there began
to be any towns--she was then in the quick maturity of primitive
women; but when I knew her she seemed already old. Indian women do
not often live to great age, though they look incredibly steeped in
years. They have the wit to win sustenance from the raw material
of life without intervention, but they have not the sleek look of
the women whom the social organization conspires to nourish.
Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual
ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers along after the
accustomed time, but that also failed. By all counts she would
have been about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit in the
dust on the sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength left
for anything but looking. And in time she paid the toll of the
smoky huts and became blind. This is a thing so long expected by
the Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither bitter nor
sweet, but tolerable because common. There were three other blind
women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had
memory and speech.
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