Sewing on the Edge of Time
I admit that I doubted her idea at first, as I have doubted all her ideas. And I don’t understand her process or her materials, and now this electric motor itself. I grow impatient watching my daughter’s painstaking, endless work. I don’t understand, but she does, and so I watch the glimmer of what will be, as bright as the primitive fire: the precious stones, the metals of constantan, iron, chromel and copper, all reflecting the light, steady throughout time, in her eyes.
That has always been the case, that I don’t understand what she’s doing as she does it, working with tools that she invents or finds or is given, and then when she’s done, traveling on.
I saw her once, a long time ago, as she sat in some cave, choking by a smoky fire, pressing her needle made of bone, some incipient idea warming her face more than the embers in that dim oppressive place. She didn’t tell anyone what she set out to do fashioning something peculiar and new from scraps and pieces of animal hide.
I watched her crouch amid the heavy, tanned skins purloined for her experiment off the very backs of her people, and other scavenged pieces she lay on the packed earth floor to sew together. She took no time from her chores and responsibilities but waited till she should be sleeping to do this work. With her bone shard needle laced with small lengths of dried and twisted sinew, with her calloused fingers, with some indecipherable idea and her growing will, she made one piece large enough to form a tent over their heads. Then they could travel, could put up stakes, drape the patchwork over top, pull it down, fasten it to the ground, and make a home. It was modest and small but it was theirs and portable to anywhere they could trek and gave them a modicum of freedom. After that they could venture more than half a day’s distance from the cave and escape the communal, crowded base, delving into the wider, dangerous unknown further away.
Yes, I admit that I, too, doubted her idea at first, as I have doubted all her ideas. It made sense in retrospect, what seemed at the time such a pointless effort, ridiculed of course, and misunderstood. No wonder she hid it from them in the beginning: the elders, the warriors, the other women, all those who were content to scramble for a small place in the long and twisting caves, shallow or deep, still not affording enough space and privacy and no mobility at all. My daughter will never be content with that.
She sewed the shelter, learning as she went, making something to hold the heat, keep out the wind and the rain. She used a tiny bone with a sharpened edge to pierce and then another to thread the sinew through holes in the hide already beaten, stretched, treated, and dried. She sat in the daylight, sat by the fire, her roughened fingertips, cramped with effort and weary with fatigue, always working. She ignored the glaring and nattering naysayers. She worked till she couldn’t see, holding the heavy material in her small hands, boring the holes, pressing the sinew through and pulling it taut, making the seam to hold against the storm, the simmering dark and against some other nameless threat only she could see.
Looking back now, I realize it was worth the pain of trial and error, rejection and disbelief, even if it didn’t last long past the freedom she bought with her bone shard needle that she packed up in a roll of soft macerated leather, her most precious possessions carried on her person with her wherever she went in time or place ever afterward. They mocked her and laughed at her until they finally saw what she made, the outlandish portable shelter, giving them more than they knew until much later. And she was gone.
* * *
I saw her just before she took that first leap, looking back at the dome of the shelter, lit by fire, warmed by human breath harbored within while she watched from a distance, preparing to go further yet.
It wasn’t the same roll of leather and wrapped tools I saw with her later in some other place or time. I don’t remember where or when except in stone surroundings once again, and this time fashioned by men into turrets and walls and rooms: cold, narrow stairways and barricades, slits to send rocks and arrows through, parapets from which to fight.
My daughter no longer sat on the ground but perched on a knurled wooden chair, marks of the hewers ridged and pressing into her flesh. She sat, legs spread to accommodate the massive yardage of fabric, feet planted and back braced against the tedious hours of work. I saw her extract from her pouch a single needle, made of metal now, amid others she had gathered, hidden, stolen perhaps, protected and hoarded, kept with her always, a small fabric bundle, a needle and now a thimble.
She showed me the value of a thimble as she sat with bent back and cramped neck over the mass of fabric, rushing to finish the strange garment for the tiny wan princess given to an unruly king as security and bond, given in pledge of peace at last, the document of trust written on the heavy garment she wore.
My daughter sewed the train of the gown for that momentous day. Later it hung upon the stone balustrade over the great hall. It rested there for many years, the symbol and the testament all in one until first it drooped with neglect, then sagged and rotted away with time and the damp. Only shreds of it survived for archaeologists and historians to study, marveling at her fine stitches, the meanings conveyed with them and the wealth that lay embedded on the fabric even then. History might have mocked her at the time but still rested on her needle, her needlework, her sentient fingers, sewing the precious thread in a pattern like words on a document not read (for who then could read?) but discerned and revered nonetheless by the rough and restless mobs. They stopped in their discontent and ready violence at the procession through their untamed countryside and their fetid city. Their seething masses surged to the newly wrought alliance, met and joined and in the end acquiesced to the tenuous peace that somehow lasted.
This too only made sense as I looked back on it: all her tedious work underestimated at the time, those tiny, rare gems, that golden line of intricate design, all to create the pledge, the vision afterward displayed to help join two struggling tribes. The dress was the foundation, its yards of fabric encrusted with the wealth of an heir-less society given in security to its neighbor, held up in the light, the stones, the metallic threads, the wealth a sign of faith and trust on the flesh and blood and bone, the trembling frame of that small girl who became a queen. The dress, heavy and uncomfortable, was worn only once and kept like a document to record forever the diplomacy, then left to molder and fade while the union itself lasted much longer.
It didn’t make sense to me, all those hours of my daughter’s own blood flowing in pinpricks among the jewels, the reddest ruby, and the thread that cut her fingertips. But it doesn’t seem to matter what my daughter works upon. It might as well be the embroidery on such a wedding dress. She worked on it, beading the expensive satin, bleeding her fingertips raw with the needles they used in those days, bending her sore neck in the dim light over her work even as tears broke and ran down her face. Must my daughter always be so patient? Through time must she always persist?
* * *
I caught one more glimpse of her in that time and place, backing away into the shadows, a nobody watching from the crowd to catch a flash of the new queen encased in her gown, the alliance secure, the crowd giving its loud illiterate assent. Who knew that those intricate stitches, the pattern of a political deal written in fabric, could mean so much? Did it give my daughter’s raw and throbbing fingertips some relief? The thin needle, wrapped and secured, was tucked away on her person, no use for it there any longer. She gathered her own unadorned skirts tightly to her, and as the crowds celebrated around her she closed her eyes and prepared to take the leap.
However much they needed her, they still discounted her, and so she left once more. There was yet another time for she who saw and sewed the long line together with every stitch she took, interweaving the hides she’d scrounged, the fabrics rich and important, the metals in the already beautiful coiled strands. Connecting, always connecting something, the long line of humans before her, the long time to come after her. She worked alone by firelight. She worked alone under burning rushes or in some factory under coal oil light, or now, as I see her now, under brilliant LEDs in a new workshop, but just the same today as in the oldest times, always patient and plying whatever her tool may be, stitch upon stitch, stitch upon stitch of whatever material she had to hand this time. No wimple, no gown this time; she now sits in her shiny overalls under the brilliant light.
So I watch her again, her head bent over some new task, an enigma to me with tools I don’t understand even though she’s explained it to me many times. “It’s the thermocouples for the stator, mother.”
* * *
She sits now with others, the electro-magnetic component of the motor team, I am told. The stator looks like an “O” with grooves inside where she coils one strand of wire over and around and over again. The cylinder is about the size of her arm. Teeth protrude into the center from one side to the other, and she winds tooth to tooth in the same precise pattern. She says it’s for a three-poll motor, A, B, C, firing different cylinders. I don’t know what that means, but she does.
I watch her strip the insulation, take the two very fine gauge wires, as fine as the metallic thread in the new queen’s gown, into her long slender fingertips and twist them together as tightly as she can into a helix of wound copper and some silver metal, very, very fine — the gauge of a needle. She routes them through one end of the donut shape, the ends sticking out with their long metal arms, looking like an ancient jellyfish extruding its arms lit by a cold primeval moon.
The scene before me seems barbaric and she party to an ancient rite of the needlewomen, only this time she isn’t making a garment or adornment, but a part for a motor. “The stator is stationary, mother; the rotor rotates to generate the current that makes it move.”
I don’t know what these words mean, except that she has given them to me like some incantation for the future. I watch the tool in her familiar hands, this time a blunt over-sized needle like an upholstery needle, inserting something made of metal through the tightly wound wires as if she were a medieval seamstress embroidering with patience and dedication, as if it were work that would save civilization. And perhaps yet it might, this strange new device.
Over and over again, she inserts wire from a big spool and slowly she unwinds and then winds precisely onto the stator. No one better than she with such meticulous control of her strong fingers that have sewn by fire light, by rushes soaked in oil, by candle or by lantern, by coal oil factory light. Her flesh is pale against the wire, which shines and glows. That wire can hold the heat and the charge, conduct it when needed, convey it like flashing thoughts in the nerves of a brain to power intent, to move and carry forward.
When the woven stator is done, it’s heavy, heavy and solid, its variegated metallic glow restive in the light at the center of the shop like the chamber of the ancient stone tower or further back in the silent cave. It’s all the same to my daughter. She shrugs away the rigid posture of her shoulders and back, flexes a cramp from her hand. Intricate human-made lights gleam on the metal a thousand times more potent than the full moon glimmering in the tower on the needle of the woman working there.
She has light; she always finds the light and the tools. And now no bucolic hum surrounds her but the electronic buzz of the test laboratory. Could she almost recall another age? No, she holds herself back from that, from daydreaming. There is no drop of blood falling from her rent fingertips onto the needlework of another time.
I will see her later, standing back and away from the light, away from the others, ready to take the plunge through time to the next edges that need to be sewn together. She watches them all from the darkening lab, admiring and testing the finished stator with its sheen of coated metal fit into place, given the spark so the lights come on and the motor sings to life with the quiet, understated electric whir. Her face lights with one brief flash of something I’ve seen before and then she retreats into the shadows as the others gather around the mechanism, barely containing its unearthly potential.
She stands once more as she did before, retreating into the shadows away from the settlement, not so far that the wild animals would sense her, but far enough to glimpse the faint light from within the shelter she’d made. A stream of smoke trickled out above and she knew it was cozy within. The babies slept, the chill held off, kept at bay by her tight stitches. I could almost feel her grip the shard of bone safe within its pouch. She didn’t know if it would make the leap with her that first time but had to try. There would be new tools where she was going, for all tools were as inevitable as they were precious, and she’d held this one, used it and done as much as she could with it. She clasped the pouch to her chest, closed her eyes, and prepared to make the plunge.
Now she holds the odd-looking needle, her calloused fingers wrapped around it. I see her slip it into a pocket of her coveralls, close her eyes, and prepare to take the leap once again.
I don’t understand what a stator does, and I am sure it will be even harder to understand the next thing the next time. I don’t really care as long as I can see my daughter, her hair pulled back from her face so it won’t fall on her work, and her strong fingers holding the tool, one time a needle, this time something else, and next time I can’t even imagine what it will be. Once it was the sinew and hide she sewed with a sliver of bone torn from an animal used in every part, meat and bone and blood, brain and sinew. I see her plying her skill as she has and does and will, making shelter, making devices, making diplomacy, making yet another future with her clever, nimble fingers.
She’s had countless tools through the endless times and places where she sat and worked at her unexplainable work, sewing this time ahead to the future, always sitting there just beyond my reach, for I am past, and she is reaching with her strong fingers, her divining mind, her will and her patience, into the future.
At least I can still see my daughter, and it doesn’t matter what her work is as long as the light reflects on her face showing no trace of time or defeat.
* * *
I will watch her pack up her tools over again and travel to the next time. For now, there she sits amid materials I can only describe but not name. I watch her through time and wonder where it will end for her, if it will ever end for her.
We have not yet been to the immense dark that lurked above the shelter of hides she once made, the darkness marked by pinpoint, distant stars. I know there are a few who are beckoned, those who look up and already measure, assess, conceive and plan. Their fingers itch and yearn with desire. Then in their workshops, towers, or caves, they work against the shadows and the fear of the naysayers. And they sew.
My daughter keeps her tools to hand, stowed and ready for use on the next leg of her journey and prepares to take the leap.
Keltie Zubko is a Western Canadian writer who has an extensive background writing about freedom of speech legal cases, but now prefers to explore our relationships with each other and with technology in her short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in literary publications in Canada, the U.S. and internationally.