The Taming Power of Love

July 26, 2010

I am happy to announce that my new novel, The Taming Power of Love, is now available.  In this story I follow two young Lakota boys who lead the way to a total revolution of the heart.  This book has been a labor of love and committment for me as a writer–ten years in the making and my favorite story.  You can now order it at Amazon.com I am posting the first two chapters here tonight.

Chapter 1

February 27, 2003

Cuny Table, a tabletop mesa in the heart of Lakota country, is an unlikely place for a restaurant. The mesa itself is a survivor, having held its ground as thirty-five million years of wind and rain eroded the land into what is now the Badlands of South Dakota. On its high top are a few scat­tered ranches, fields of winter wheat, and a view so wide it feels like the floor of heaven. Sketched along the skyline to the west are the Black Hills; and on the northeastern edge surrounded by a few rough buildings is the Cuny Café.

Agnes Stands Alone, the owner of the café, has been there as long as anybody can remember. She is an old, square-bodied woman with short, coarse hair and eyes like dark marbles that seem to see straight through you. The regulars call her Unci, or Grandmother in Lakota. Most of them wander in not so much for the food (although the food is good) but for her company and the unusual tea she brews from plants gathered down in the Cheyenne River breaks. The old ones, especially, find Agnes’s tea eases their aching bones and makes the blood flow more easily to the toes. Oh, she makes no claims about her tea, but everybody who walks in gets a steaming cup slapped down before them with a brisk command to, “Drink up.”

The café, an old thirty-foot trailer, has been gutted, in­sulated, and made into one open space except for a back bedroom which nobody but Agnes has ever been in. The front has a single booth, two tables, and a plywood counter top covered with blue-flowered contact paper. Some strangers think the poor old trailer looks like a dislocated train car hooked to nothing, going nowhere.

Agnes never hesitates to give advice—or a solid scolding—when needed. But, more than the tea or Indian tacos or advice or whatever is on the menu that day (everybody eats the same daily special), the locals go to the café for Agnes’s stories. She knows all of the old Lakota stories. She knows the creation stories, the stories of Iktomi the trickster and the Seven Sisters who can still be seen winking down from the sky on a clear night. Her favorite is the story of the Second Cleansing when Unci Makah grew tired of the antics of her human children and tossed all but a few off her powerful body. According to the story, those She sheltered later emerged from Wind Cave as The Lakota People.

Agnes, however, doesn’t just tell old stories. Sometimes she tailor-makes the story especially for the person hearing it. For instance, once J.J. Runs At Night had a new colt so sick it couldn’t stand. Agnes told him a story about how a grove of young willows withstood the mightiest of storms by forcing their roots further into Unci Makah, Grandmother Earth. “Such smart, young trees,” she said, “to know just what to do.” By the time J.J. got home, the colt was running across the corral on four sturdy legs.

Another time, June Player’s daughter tried to die by cutting her wrists with the top of a tuna can. The poor girl nearly bled out before they found her. For this dangerous moment, Agnes told June about a small ant who had lost his place in line—until the wind blew a single grain of sand across his path, forcing him to turn another way. The next day, June’s daughter woke up from her deep, uneasy sleep talking about needing to find her place—before it was too late.

A while later, the girl began writing poetry and gave Agnes this poem written in a smooth, pretty hand:

In the greater scheme of things

Only she who sings,

And learns to play the wind,

Will ever grow wings.

Now I play the wind.

Agnes took a pineapple-shaped magnet, stuck the poem to her fridge and said, “Good.” After that the young girl began hanging around the café helping Agnes peel potatoes and wipe off countertops.

Of the nearly forty thousand residents of The Pine Ridge Reservation, at least half of them have been in the Cuny Café at one time or another, not to mention visitors from Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and many other places. Agnes keeps a guest book and feeds them all tea and stories.

On slow days, Agnes sits in an old rocking chair on the rough-lumber porch that the regulars had built for her five years earlier and lights her pipe. When it’s not in use, she keeps the pipe in a small, beaded bag hanging on a nail beside the screen door like a good luck charm. The bowl is carved red pipestone from a quarry in southern Minnesota. This particular stone, Agnes says, was once part of the Black Hills until it broke away and floated off during some ancient upheaval.

Agnes fills the pipe with a dried version of her tea, and while she smokes, she prays. Sometimes the praying takes her far off to what she simply calls “the other place.” The first time she visited this other place she had been only seventeen and drunk. Her uncle, a medicine man, had found her puking her guts out beneath an old cottonwood tree and taken her home and made her pray for three days straight without food or water. That ornery old man—he’d cut straight through her young spirit to the old woman already living there, and Agnes had never again been able to return to her ordinary young life.

Now, when the locals drive up Cuny Table to grab a bite to eat and find her sitting so still with the pipe in her lap and the spirit absent from her eyes, they know not to disturb her and simply tromp up the steps to help themselves in her kitchen. Occasionally, the praying is so complete, so per-vasive, that they find it impossible to cross her threshold and simply get back into their trucks and leave.

Agnes sees many things in the smoke curling up from her pipe; she sees the land, she sees distant places, she sees the beating hearts of the people, the breaking hearts of the people, the loving hearts of the people; and, sometimes, in the hazy curl she sees the old ones who once walked the earth but now watch from other realms. The old ones have stories of their own to tell, but Agnes never tells these stories to anybody except Bill Elk Boy.

It was one of these days, on the edge of winter, when Agnes cast her inner eye outward toward the weathered lands north of Cuny Table and saw the change coming. There, on a single square foot of dry, deserted earth in the Badlands, a thin line of dust rose up from a single needle-mark in the sand. Agnes watched the whorl of dust curl upward like the smoke of her pipe. It had no discernible color unless she used the very edges of her peripheral vision—and then she saw the palest of pink light rising from a dark horizon. As she watched, the pale moving spiral seemed to take shape, as if Creator was conjuring something from nothing, dancing dust into form.

When the dust settled, she saw the form of a woman   asleep in the sand and Agnes knew she had returned at last, the little one . . . the lost one. Two young boys were walking toward the sleeping woman.

When the glaze cleared from her eyes and she again entered this ordinary realm, Bill Elk Boy was beside her. He took the pipe, the bowl now cold to the touch, tapped it clean on the edge of his chair, slipped it back into the beaded bag, and said, “It begins, Agnes. Today it begins.”

Chapter 2

The two boys approached cautiously. From a distance Jed Forrest thought it must be a dead deer or that someone had dumped a pile of clothing out here in the middle of nowhere. He got closer, and his heart started thumping hard when he saw it was a person laying there on the ground—a lady. He and his little brother, Pete, had seen a lot of strange things out here in the Badlands—but they’d never found a body before.

Pete hurried ahead and was on the ground reaching out to touch the lady. Jed caught up to him and whispered, “Don’t touch her,”

“Why not?” Pete asked.

“Because she might be dead, murdered maybe, and we’d mess up the crime scene.”

“Oh,” said Pete. “But, Jed, what if she’s just sick and needs a doctor? We got to do something.”

“I know that. Let me think a minute.”

Jed didn’t know what to think or do. The lady was curled into herself as if she was cold. She wore nothing but a light jacket, jeans, boots, and no cap. He resisted the urge to touch her even though he’d told Pete not to. His dad was maybe fifteen minutes away—too far to hear them if they yelled—but Pete was right; they needed to do something. He reached for her wrist to see if he could feel a pulse. Her skin was warm and relief washed through him—she was alive. He pressed his fingers into her wrist and felt the thump, thump of her heartbeat. “She’s not dead, Pete.”

“Look, Jed. She’s waking up. Maybe you brought her back to life.”

“Shut up, Pete.” Jed dropped her wrist just as the lady blinked her eyes once, twice and then looked up at him. It was strange, the way her eyes wandered, looked up and down, and then finally focused on him. She shook her head and rubbed her face. Jed said, “Are you okay?”

“What?” she said quietly, still blinking and rubbing her eyes.

Pete squatted down and said, almost yelling it out. “She’s alive.”

“Hush, Pete. You’ll scare her. ” Jed stood up and looked down at the woman. “Are you hurt?”

She moved slowly feeling her arms and shoulders and then pushed herself up into a sitting position. “I don’t think so. No, I’m fine. Everything seems to be working.”

Jed looked around for something to explain her being asleep in such a strange place “What the heck are you doing here?”

“I . . . I don’t know. Where is here?” she asked.

“Sheesh—you don’t even know where you are? This is the Badlands. We thought you were dead.” Jed couldn’t believe it.

She smiled. “Well, I don’t appear to be dead since I’m sitting up. Who are you guys?”

“I’m Jed. This is my little brother, Pete. But who the heck are you?” Cripes, he thought, she looks like she just woke up from a little nap in her own bed.

“Give me a minute here, boys. I need to get my bearings. It’s been a very long night, maybe the longest night ever.” She planted her palms on the earth and dug them into the sand, as if the sand was going to tell her something she didn’t know. Jed waited.

The lady finally dusted off her fingers and said, “To tell you the truth, I don’t know who I am.”

Pete sat down beside her and crossed his legs. “She’s got nesia, Jed. You know, like when you can’t remember things.”

Jed said, “The word is amnesia, Pete.”

Pete nodded, focusing all his attention on the lady. “Or maybe you got picked up by aliens, and they dropped you here from their spaceship.”

“Aliens? Come on, Pete.” Jed poked him with his toe.

“Well, I saw a show once and there were these creatures from another planet and . . . .”

“Not now, Pete.” Jed tried to explain it to the strange lady, “My brother is—”

“Sweet. Your brother is sweet,” she said. “No, Pete. I don’t think it was aliens who left me here.”

“What’s your name?” Pete asked.

She rubbed her face and then scanned the earth around her. “Terra. My name is Terra.”

Jed wondered if she was playing some sort of strange game with them “If you can’t remember who you are, then how do you know your name is Terra? What are you doing here? And how did you get here?”

“So many questions for one so young,” she shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know how I know, and I don’t know what I am doing here. Waiting for you guys, I guess,” she said. She looked around again and seemed to really see where they were for the first time. “This place takes my breath away. It’s so beautiful.” She gave her fingers a wiggle and then looked down at them as if surprised to find them working. “This is amazing, incredible really.”

“What? What’s incredible?” Jed tugged at his long, dark hair—hair he had not cut since his mom died.

The lady watched him, seeming to notice him for the first time. She looked from him to Pete and said, “Are you guys Indians?”

Jed nodded, “Lakota.” He was beginning to not like this game or this lady or the way Pete was staring up at her as if she were the moon and sun combined. “Pete—quit staring at her.”

“She’s pretty, Jed.”

“Oh cripes.” He resisted the urge to kick sand at his stupid little brother.

“Pete. Jed.” Terra said quietly, as if the names were sacred sounds. “It’s okay, Jed. Everything is okay, don’t you know?”

“What? What don’t I know?” He was beginning to dislike this word game. The lady reached out as if to touch him but he pulled back.

“How old are you, Jed?”

“Twelve.”

“Ah, such a good age.” She turned to Pete. “And how old are you?”

Pete grinned. “Seven. Almost. Next month.”

She nodded and said, “Perfect. Now, quit worrying, Jed. Never mind that I can’t answer your questions yet. I’m just so happy to meet the two of you. Really I am.” She stood up, pausing a minute as if to make sure her legs were working, and then she said simply, “Come on. Let’s go.”

“But . . . but where are you going?” Jed asked.

“With you and Petey, of course, since I don’t know where I am and it wouldn’t make sense to just stay here all alone.” She took Pete’s hand and then started off down the draw in the same direction from which they had just come.

Jed shook his head as he watched the strange lady and his little brother walk off like who-do-you-know. His head felt funny, tight and full, and he couldn’t figure out what was going on. There was no car or truck, no motorcycle or campsite, nothing to explain what she was doing passed out under an embankment, no clue of who she was or what the heck she was doing sleeping in the Badlands.

Jed didn’t like strangers, and he most certainly didn’t like strangers who called his little brother “Petey.” He let Terra and Pete get ahead of him. He was thinking about how, when they’d first found her, he’d thought she was dead, lying there not moving, like something tossed away. He’d felt for a pulse and just when he’d been about to run for his dad, she’d opened her eyes and blinked up at them. Cripes, that had given him a scare—like a movie—the dead one getting up again and again.

Except they didn’t all get up.

His mom hadn’t gotten up again. Sometimes they were just plain dead. He felt the familiar plunk in his belly that always came when he thought of his mom. “Dang,” he muttered aloud.

Now the lady and Pete were walking ahead of him like old buddies, and he had to hurry to catch up. He closed the distance between them. When he caught up, Terra put her hand out; and without thinking he took hold of it like it was a stick and he was drowning in a creek. The lady just smiled at him and suddenly his cheeks felt hot.

Something crazy is going on here, he thought, now totally conscious of her hand in his. In an eye blink, everything had changed. He looked at her, but she was staring forward, marching along like a soldier. When they topped the rise, he tugged his hand from hers and said, “My dad is this way.” He pointed off in the direction of the truck and they walked soundlessly down the dusty wash and up over the bluff.

She looked at him and said with a wink, “Lead the way, my man. Wither thou goest, there go I.”

“What did you say?”

“Relax, Jed. I’m only having some fun with you. Are you always so serious?”

“I am not so serious.” The lady stared at him like she could see right through him, and that made him mad. He turned and walked off.

Staying ahead of them, Jed led the way over the bluff and back down into another wash, following the tracks that he and Pete had made just a little while ago when the world still seemed together and they were just going off to collect sticks or cans. He could see their tracks pressed into the sand like fossils—yet it didn’t seem like the same path they had come down. Suddenly nothing seemed familiar. He looked around and it seemed like a movie with the volume turned up, like there was more of everything: more color in the sky, more softness to the sand, more insects buzzing in his ears, more yellow in the morning sun . . . more, more, more. It made him dizzy.

He headed toward his dad’s truck shaking his head, fighting a sudden weird urge to laugh and wondering what his dad would say about her.

Let him figure it out, Jed thought. Let him just go figure.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Book Excerpts, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Muse in Black

April 14, 2009

A Tidbit from a few years back.  Never could make the Lit Mags.  Sour grapes–or more?
The Muse in Black

In Milwaukee I find the mother lode of literary magazines and park my ass on the dull carpet and scan the titles, plucking first one and then another off the shelf to read beginning with ‘A’ for Antioch and moving to ‘Z’ for Zoetrope.  Most of them I’ve never seen despite all dire warnings of read the markets before you submit.  I can’t help it.  I write and write with little care of who will take the offering. 

But here, now, I intend to find out where I belong.

I read the Braille of my culture in the clip, clip, clip of the new writer, leaf tip curling from early frost, fruitless buds, hearts frozen, all memory of blooming gone, cut short, can’t.  The style is an email style; short, staccato, cut it until it bleeds truth, bony finger language, incomplete sentences.  Stop.  Staccato, wings clipped, flight impossible in the mutation of language, in the marriage of current culture and language, in the deep abandonment of soul. 

There is no generous, voluptuous language swinging its hips, stretching a finger across space to touch a blemished face, across time to spy on a mother’s first moments with her newborn, no loose limbed walk across an open field filled with the scent of soil, sage, and sex sticking to your jeans. 

More like jab, poke, flip. 

I think back to my radio days when the NPR style suggested we edit the breath itself for efficient sound bite, sound chunk, bits and bites and no chewing, no time for digestion or digression or exposure.  I think back to my German teacher who says all neurosis rests in a failure to complete the reaching out movement.  Infant to mother, soul to life, the complete outward stretch. 

I test it out and think Colorado peach.  I want, I desire, I long for, I reach and reach and stretch and elongate, in elegant braids of desire and need, in a moment, one moment more, the breath caught in my thought, salivating, the zen movement, satori movement of breathing through the obstacle until yes, feel it, smell it, touch it, bite it, suck it, juice dripping, wet, water, life flowing, yes, yes, mine. 

Tension releases.  I eat the peach. 

Life is wet.  Oh well.  I slip the magazines back on the shelf-and buy nothing. 

 And then I drive again through Wisconsin gold and red, autumn in the leafy world, along the river, through the farmlands of Minnesota, back across the long, dry prairie, counting cows and counting minutes until I can get back to my page of blank white paper and play and dance and sing the muse out of hiding and demand she disrobe before the grand council and do a river dance until her toes bleed and her heart sings once again for the sheer love of it, the sheer love of life, the sheer love of language. 

She sheds her widow’s weeds and joins me in the dance.

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

On Becoming a Woman . . .

March 22, 2009

The semester is blazing away-my last semester at Oglala Lakota College-such a mixture of sadness and the scent of freedom.  Since we are making plans to return to our Homestead MN project-building a bit of straw bale summer home, planting a garden, simplifying our lives-I decided to return to a batch of stories that I wrote from a collection called “Leaving Lake Country”.  I pretend that it is fiction, but it is pretty close to the bone–all about coming of age in the north woods.  This piece is one of the early ones.  I grew up in Northern Minnesota on the Iron Range.  When I was a young teen we returned to my parents’ home town in Cass Lake, Minnesota.  It was not an easy time for me.  Not many would recognize the shy girl in me today, but she is still with me.

Happy Spring!

Jamie

 

On Becoming a Woman . . .

 

It is policy for swimming.  That’s all.  Jackie and the other sixth grade girls enter the locker room and are issued up one red cotton-knit swimsuit (one size fits all) and a limp white towel.  They change near their lockers in quick hurried movements shoving clothes, shoes, and socks into cold, unfeeling metal lockers.  They line up by the pool door.  Their legs look white and skinny and the required bathing caps suck up all stray hairs and individual personality traits and make them all bald and desolate.

The red suits hang soggy and long in the crotch and tiny nipples poke and pucker beneath  unlined and unforgiving fabric that displays the exact size and shape of each sixth grade set of breasts.  Miss Hammer, the gym teacher, is in charge of the pool and gym areas.  She is a lean, mannish woman with short hair and sharp eyes.  She wears white shorts, white socks, white shoes, and a white jersey sweat jacket every day from fall to spring.  A silver whistle dangles between her breasts.  “You girls have got to work harder!” she yells each day, emphasizing the word girls in a way that makes it sound like boys teasing one another on the playground. “What are you-a girl?” 

Jackie has a particular fondness for water and swims the ten laps required warm-up by Miss Hammer.  And sometimes, she feels as if she should have been a fish, maybe a dolphin, skimming and slipping through the water for a lifetime or two-and then maybe, just maybe it would be alright.  But it is the legs and what is between the legs and no fins that make it all very difficult to deal with, and she is certain that dolphins didn’t have to worry about blushing with shame and fear and exposure every time they go into the water.  Of course, none of this ever enters her mind consciously. 

Not consciously.  Rather it twists around her thoughts and through her middle in tight little knots like cramps and has been doing so ever since her mother carried home that frightful thing, that white strapped cupped thing, and told her to put it on because she was becoming a woman now.  Breasts.  And bleeding. 

Or maybe it all came from earlier who-knows-what times when Jackie worried nighttime thoughts about Catholic Gods and pink pajama bottoms and sin-or when the boys in fifth grade starting teasing her and snapping her bra straps.    

And the way the health teacher shuffled the boys into one room to show them a movie and the girls into another room to show them the same movie like it was something they should all be ashamed of.  The girls got happy little books called, “On Becoming a Woman” and the boys got nothing but the giggles.  The book said it was some kind of celebration, but it Jackie didn’t feel like celebrating.

But it is getting out of the pool that is hard. 

After class the girls shiver and cover themselves and line up waiting for Miss Hammer’s whistle to give them permission to head for the warm showers.

Jackie stays in the shower under the warm stream as long as possible until she is all alone and the giggling girls can be heard from the locker area dressing and combing their hair.  The hair dryers are running.  She hates the wire baskets beside the shower opening where they are required by Miss Hammer to drop suit and towel and run naked to the locker areas.  And the way Miss Hammer stands there like a man watching er and fingering her whistle and smiling that makes the short distance over cold, slippery tile floors nearly impossible for her to cross.  The locker area might as well be a glacier with her nude and freezing to death and unable to make it across to the fire and warmth of her clothes.  Miss Hammer screams at her, “Get a move on it!” and Jackie chants to herself, “hammerhead, hammerhead, hammerhead shark.”  She hates the bulges on her chest.

When her period begins she is spared the naked spectacle but is then forced to declare her development in other, more painful ways by staying fully clothed and sitting on the hard tile benches beside the pool with a bulky, chunky, cotton thing between her legs, a foreign and hated intrusion. 

Later, in seventh grade, Miss Hammer makes the girls who are having periods go to a study hall on a special pass.  It isn’t a choice.  After the first time Jackie faces that room full of snickering boys who know exactly what is happening between her legs, she devises elaborate illness and ways to avoid that study hall.  She even takes one of her sister’s tampons and stands with one foot up on the toilet seat poking and prodding but never can get the thing tamped in.

On becoming a woman. 

Hadn’t she tried to bypass the whole works by pretending to be one of the boys in the neighborhood-by running, jumping, climbing, and skating faster than any of them?  Well, hadn’t she?   

But none of this goes through her mind in any orderly fashion because her brain is too full of how to get to the lockers without being seen, how to buy a Kotex pad for a nickel in the bathroom without being seen, how to get out of God’s line of vision without being seen, how to get past Miss Hammer’s eyes without being seen, because that is what it boiled down to-not being seen.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays, Short Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Girl on the Northern Range

May 29, 2008

A guilt piece–I haven’t written in here for too many days.  I’ve ordered my blueberry plants and Saturday we leave for northern Minnesota to check out our land.  Here is a very autobiographical piece about growing up on the iron range of Minnesota.  This became a long series of “stories” that later I realized were very close to the bone for me.   Call it fiction.

Here it is.

Jamie

 Girl On the Northern Range

 

In the middle of the town square sat a chunk of taconite as tall as a tree.  It stood like a forward guard before the tiny string of shops that formed the main street and the downtown of Babbitt, Minnesota.  There was a Laundromat, cafe, grocery store, drug store, and post office-all in a single long building set off the main street.  The small mining community, folded deep in forest country just minutes from Canada, twisted out and around the jutting rock. 

  The chunk of rock had stood, silent gray sentry, since the early fifties when the humble potato field was laid flat and barren by cheerful yellow bulldozers.  Contractors opened veins in the earth and dropped in sewer systems and water lines, and concrete trucks with swirling bellies rumbled and growled, spitting out sidewalks and driveways.  Houses sprouted rapidly in small semicircles around larger semicircles until, from the air, the humble potato field looked like the patterned swirls of a fancy ceiling.  An elementary school was built, and a single strip of shops that housed a grocery store, a drug store, and one café. 

Young couples, blinking and shading their eyes, came to inspect the empty houses that stood waiting while realtors, working for the company, waved icons of security before the hopeful young men and women.  No crime, they said.  Superior schools, they said.  Job security, a place to raise a family, a chance at a new life, they said.  Papers were signed and keys distributed. 

The houses filled quickly with watery-eyed young women stroking swollen bellies.  The husbands became company men and carried their lunch in black tin boxes.  They stood on assigned corners at 6:30 a.m. or 3:30 p.m. and were swallowed alive by buses, digested daily by the taconite mine tucked up behind a hillside.

Taconite, a rough ore mined for the iron.  Tons and tons of earth gouged from the gentle, aching hillsides were dumped into an ear-shattering crusher (one of the largest in the world), as the iron ore, red as blood, was extracted from the earth.  The useless tailings left behind in lifeless gray-red mounds looked like fresh graves along the northern range.

Babbitt, cut and sewn from a single hastily-woven piece of fabric, was a postcard town plopped down in a hollow at the end of the civilized world.  It was cut off, isolated, as sterile as dental instruments lined up on a gliding tray.  There were no theaters, no bars, no shopping malls or traffic-and no tourists or travelers, and no strangers.  Those headed for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area never reached Babbit, but turned north two miles before on the highway to Ely.  In its raw, red-faced infancy there were also no old people, no teenagers, no divorces, no rich and no poor.  And there were no Black people and no Indians.  With ancestors from Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all inhabitants were as fair-faced as the blanket of winter snow.

It was to this bewildered wilderness that the children first opened their eyes. 

Sissy lived in a pale green house at 48 Garden Circle.  Her father built a stone step with black wrought-iron railings that made their house stand apart from the others so carefully placed along the semi-circle.  Sissy was a middle child, in the middle of the wilderness.  It was in this place that she first attempted to find her own outline, like a single tree against the sky, but when she looked about she could not see the tree for the forest was everywhere.  A strange wonder and a bewilderment set in. 

Although, at age seven or eight, there was no reason to believe herself different, still, something in Sissy felt foreign and apart.  Alone.  It came to her at odd moments, unexpected, like a secret, like when she would tumble onto her back in the dry, crisping grasses of autumn edging the forest and the full wide blue of the sky would instantly steal away her age.  It spoke to her in the tongues and mantras of ancient prophets and seers.  “Look here”, it would chant, “I am your looking glass.  As big as I am . . . so are you.” 

A holiness and a wonder would fill her tiny spirit and lift her into a blue baptism of ecstasy and sky and then, when she could stand it no longer, she would roll over onto her belly and be equally awed by the sandy scent of the earth as it withdrew from summer.  Finally, her senses drunk and reeling with autumn gods come alive, Sissy would race down the ditch toward home, stop, and approach the house cautiously.  So carefully would she fold the blue-sky spirit, like a tablecloth, and tuck it away, and only then enter the house. 

The house was noisy.  And stale.  It smelled of furniture polish and diaper pails.  Little boys squalled needfully and older sisters whined and fussed at each other and at nothing.  The television squawked and clamored in a broken language, certainly not the language of wind in the trees and skies that speak.  She felt like autumn itself, pulling in all of its life-giving forces, tucking its roots, curling its leaves.

Sissy did her chores without words.  She tended to little boy runny noses, socks stuffed into corners, and white metal kitchen cabinets smeared grimy with finger prints.  Every moment was a forever, a waiting she could scarcely endure, but did.  Out of doors, they played on without her, the trees and skies and songs on the wind, and it was not easy, this waiting.

There were so many things that Sissy did not understand.  She did not understand about hard wooden school desks and sitting still.  Or about gray buses that shoveled up fathers on street corners every morning and afternoon.  And she didn’t understand uninspired women with swollen bellies wandering from one kitchen table to another in houses so all-the-same that you never need ask where’s the bathroom, or where’s the light switch?  And she really didn’t understand Sunday mornings and chapel caps and genuflecting and black robes and strange melodic masses that didn’t sound at all like the sky, but were called God.  It was these things she didn’t understand that made her feel alien and foreign somehow.  These things were not like the things that she did understand; the things that happened out there, on the edge of the world.

She understood the woods.  She understood that if she ran a certain way through the underbrush, with a certain understanding, she could run real fast and never be switched with a branch or tumbled by a root or jutting log.  But she had to run a certain way, like all of her parts were loosely assembled and separate from one another, and yet together.  When she ran like that, she ran like a deer runs or like a wolf runs.  She also understood that she must stay in the little woods because she was little.  The big woods went on to forever once you crossed the skinny stream, skinny as an old brown pencil, connecting two muddy ponds.  The big woods were for bears and big things.  The big woods would swallow a little girl like her, and this she understood and respected.

And the icy spring-fed Birch Lake in summer-that she understood, respected and loved.  Those iron-rich brown waters would envelope her heated skin with a shock and a jolt like memories leaping from nowhere.  Sissy loved to swim way out and lay on her back-unresisting, sinking, until inches of water lay over her like translucent, textured glass.  In this place, with the bright skies blurred yellow and blue, and all sounds muted and drowned, then she would feel in her right place. 

Always she sought a better match mate than the even rows of houses lined up like teeth on gums in obsessive half-circles.  Inside her was a great, stretching hungry mouth that wanted to bite down hard on something.  Anything.  So when her mother gathered her brood and walked down past the chunk of taconite to the town library it was like that mouth had found, at last, its desired food.  Books; forests on shelves, introductions to other places, far away places, and people, like her, people not content with four walls and sameness and steady, expected trails going nowhere.  But the feast of books, rather than filling her, fed only her appetite and made the mouth inside link up to a great empty belly, ravenous and greedy, and aching.   

To satisfy the hungry thing, she went more and more often to the great stands of pine, birch, and maple to listen.  She found dry, rocky places filled with scraggly raspberry bushes and tasted the tiny red jewels, or sat in the sodden lower areas and looked, eye-to-eye at blueberry bushes, their berries glowing like deep blue pearls. 

She was a quiet child, well mannered, and shy, and did as she was told.  She sprinkled the laundry with a pop bottle corked by a metal cap full of tiny holes.  Carefully, she sprinkled, rolling each piece and tucking it into a plastic bag with the other damp-smelling shirts and sheets and dish towels.  She did not ask why or verbalize these foreign things, these rough pine-bark, high-sky things to anyone.  She didn’t know the words to speak.  She didn’t know the words. 

Then, slowly, there opened a great space between the things she understood and the things she did not understand and she stood puzzled, chewing a single fingernail, between a grand stand of forest and a pale green house on Garden Circle and, try as she might, Sissy could not reconcile one with the other.  Confusion descended like a veil or thin membrane that made all things difficult to see and understand.  A ragged whispering began in her head and continued from day into night and night into day and it spoke to her of the world.  She listened, a barren dry kind of listening, not understanding, or not wanting to understand.  The skies grew silent.  The trees stood tight together and seemed to exclude her.  She turned away.   

The chasm widened and the spell of blue-pearl berries, big woods and tall golden grasses became like bright, wild eyes that, giving a final look, blinked heavy-lidded, closed, and drew a blanket around her youth.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Our Straw Bale Project, Short Fiction | Tagged , , | Comment (1)

My Aunt Carol

May 7, 2008

It has been awhile since I posted any fiction.   I clicked through files and found this story.  It has never been published but it did find an interesting home.  In the nineties when Milt and I were producing radio documentaries, we decided to do a documentary on the human heart-is it just a biological pump . . . or something more?  While deciding the approach, we thought it would be fun to weave ordinary documentary material with fiction, and I chose this story to use as a backdrop for the documentary called “You Got to Have Heart”.  It is still probably one of my favorites of all the documentaries we produced during that time.  We had some fun with composed music, poetry, fiction plus real interviews with heart transplant patients, the doc who first performed a heart transplant using a machine instead of a real heart.  The show aired nationally on PRI on Valentine’s Day.  You can still get it on a CD or (soon) as a download.  Go to www.oyate.com and visit the store to find it. 

 Be sure to leave a comment or sign up to get this blog.  It keeps me writing to know people are actually reading it.  JL

 My Aunt Carol

 ”Oh, you know how your Aunt Carol is . . . ”

I was twelve the first time my mother said that to me, like I really did know. Or like I possessed a wisdom beyond my years or something.  I did not know how my Aunt Carol was.  Not then anyway.

Aunt Carol lived in Santa Fe in one of those old adobe houses just a few blocks from the main plaza.  Mom was worried about her poor sister in Santa Fe, so we went to visit her, just mom and me.  It was my first trip out of South Dakota so I was pretty excited. Anything past Newcastle, Wyoming was “the big world.”  You see, at twelve, I had this lump in my middle; I mean, it wasn’t a real lump, not like a hunchback’s lump or anything, but it was a thing buried down there somewhere and I could feel it.  It made me hungry all the time for wanting to know about stuff.  So when my mom said “You know how you’re Aunt Carol is.” I checked the lump to see did I know?  What did I know?  What should I know?  I really wanted to know.

Aunt Carol was selling her furniture and most of her belongings.  Mom’s cousin called in early May from Los Alamos-that’s where they made the Bomb, you know.  Anyway, the cousin visited Auntie, learned about the selling of the furniture and the belongings, and called my Mom IMMEDIATELY because she thought my Mom should know what Carol was up to NOW.

On the trip to Santa Fe, Denver was my favorite.  It showed up all smeary and gray with cars and city scattered everywhere like a lost monopoly game.  The whole world was so buried in clouds that I couldn’t even see the Rocky Mountains until Denver was already behind us.  Then, all of a sudden, we flopped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS.  I almost cried, the lump hurt so hard.  But I didn’t want Mom to think I was like her sister or something so I pretended I wasn’t even very impressed when we just dropped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS. 

I tried to get it out of my Mom.  “What’s wrong with selling your furniture?”  Mom had that pinched, whitish look when I asked that, her eyes squinting and red lipstick bunching together making her lips look as thin as fingernail cuttings.

“Your Aunt is very peculiar, dear, a dreamer . . . ” and then her sentence just dropped like dust onto the dashboard.

Oh sure, well that explains everything, I thought.  I’m not usually sarcastic but her answer made me crazy.  I didn’t know much about my Aunt.  I knew she had done a lot of neat things like gone to college, traveled through Europe, got married, got divorced.  “What does Aunt Carol do for a living?” I asked Mom.  The question sounded absurd to me.  We were south of Colorado Springs now.  The thing that seemed absurd was the way adults say “for a living” and here I was, twelve years old, and saying it myself like it was a sacred mantra or like it meant something to me.  Do for a living.  It sounded sort of once removed from life, like when somebody says “her cousin, by marriage” as a way of letting you know they are not REALLY related.  That was how “for a living” sounded to me and yet here I was asking my Mom what Aunt Carol did “for a living”.

Mom wasn’t much for talking right then.  She just sort of stared and drov and drove and stared.  I felt like we had separate rooms and she had her door closed, so I read a book, felt for the lump, and wondered exactly HOW peculiar Aunt Carol was going to be.  I secretly hoped she would be VERY peculiar so I could be like Mom and say how very peculiar my Aunt Carol is.  That would be something.  I have a peculiar Aunt who lives in Santa Fe without any furniture. 

Maybe I needed something out of the ordinary or maybe it was the lump in my middle that made me feel so peculiar.

Soon we mounted Raton Pass like it was a pony and tumbled down toward Santa Fe.

Santa Fe was something; all the streets named “Calle” instead of regular street names like Oak or Maple.  And no sharp corners on the buildings, just round adobe edges like castles in beach sand.  Even the shabby tumbling adobes looked like they belonged there, not like you should toss a little gasoline on them and remove them like the wobbly wood houses in my hometown.  Mom surprised herself by finding Aunt Carol’s place without getting horribly lost. 

Mom and Aunt Carol hugged and laughed and cried and spun little circles on the stoop of Carol’s adobe.  I was surprised.  I really expected my Mom would be much more reserved around such a peculiar person, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all.

Aunt Carol didn’t know about the cousin informant or that my Mom already knew about the missing furniture.  Evidently, Aunt Carol had taken up collecting pretty old furniture and antiques years earlier and had quite a collection before she decided to sell it all.  But I had been instructed to not SAY A WORD about the furniture.  (Mom’s can be so peculiar sometimes, weaving a lie just so.)  Anyway, I was naturally dying for them to stop hugging and crying and get on with it.  Finally we got our bags from the trunk and went into Carol’s house.

My mother seized the moment.  “Carol.  My God.  What has happened to all your beautiful furniture???”  I grinned.  I couldn’t help myself-the lump was giggling.  (I was beginning to think of it as a friendly sort of tumor.) As for myself, I was disappointed.  I’m not sure what I expected but it wasn’t this.  There was, well, no furniture, not that her living room was empty.  Not at all.  There just wasn’t anything regular like you expect to see when you go into an ordinary old living room.

 Carol grinned at me (why did she grin at me?) and winked.  I felt like I had snuck in and sold her furniture myself.  Aunt Carol looked at my mom and said, “I sold it, Beth.”

That was all she said.

“But why?  Why would you sell all those lovely old pieces?”

I finally really looked around.  I didn’t know what she sold but  I thought what was left looked better than most anything I’d ever seen.  The floors were wood, shiny as marbles, with thick, velvety rugs everywhere that had flowers and fancy designs dancing around their borders.  Giant colorful pillows were stacked in one corner around a low table with a glass top (the ONLY piece of furniture in the room).  Above us, a cloth fan-folded screen drifted down from the ceiling and almost hugged the low table.  There were no lamps except for ghostly white paper globes, three of them, each a different size.  I say ghostly not because they were white paper but because they were so light they looked like chubby angels flying above us, still swaying from when we came in the door. 

That was about it.  A few pictures on the walls and, oh yeah, two other things.  One was a painted wooden carousel horse that, had I been six and not twelve, I would have already been on its back riding like the wind.  The other thing was a large painter’s easel that held a huge canvas filled with flowers. 

It stopped me.  That painting.  I could almost smell those flowers and it made the lump ache awful to look at them.  I wanted to pluck a flower from that beautiful, ironed-flat garden, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.  Carol, my most peculiar Aunt, was looking my way out of the corner of her eye, smiling while she talked patiently to my Mom.  I got the feeling that she saw the lump and maybe wanted to paint it or something. 

I didn’t know my peculiar Aunt was a painter.  I was a painter.  Or at least I secretly dreamed about being one.  I could remember my first box of crayons like it was yesterday, each waxy stick glowing hot like colored candles.  My Aunt Carol watched me, still smiling, and then she turned back to my Mom. “Oh, Sis, that old furniture didn’t mean anything to me anymore.  That’s all.  And I needed the space to do my painting.  This isn’t a very large house, you see, and all those heavy dark things were so . . .  so heavy I couldn’t breathe.”

“But, Carol, what did you DO with it all?”

“I sold some.  Gave some away.  You know.”

Now my Aunt was saying, “You know” to my mother as if she did know.  She didn’t know.  I could tell by the way her face moved against itself like a lake in a storm.   She definitely did not know!  But what I didn’t know was why Mom looked so pinched and why Aunt Carol looked all lit up like there was a candle behind each eye.  Shining.  That was what I wanted to find out about my Aunt Carol.  Mom couldn’t get her mind off what was missing long enough to notice what was there.  When Carol and my Mom went into the kitchen to drink tea and “get to the bottom of this,” Carol took her garden painting off the easel, handed me her pallet and brush, placed a small stretched white, whiter than snow canvas on the easel, winked again, and said, “Here baby, have some fun.” 

         *              *               *

 I’ve been looking for My Aunt Carol all my life but, instead of an easel with a glorious flower garden splattered and taking root on a canvas, I have a neat, tight-assed little computer, a Papermate pen, and reams of paper painted in ink and pink and purple and blue and black and every bit as beautiful as my Aunt Carol’s canvas. 

It’s the Gypsy in me.  I must have been a Gypsy in a past life because, sometimes, I forget that I’m not in this lifetime.  When she visits me, I’m older than time, younger than a minute.  If not constantly vigilant, I could mistake my Suburu wagon for a Gypsy caravan and find myself loading it with a few pots and pans, a set of tarot cards, writing a bad check, and off I go. 

The first time the Gypsy came I was in college killing myself to make enough money to deserve to be there. Unfortunately, I discovered that Highway Two runs not only through Bemidji, Minnesota but keeps on going all the way to the west coast until it reaches the Puget Sound.  This was a perilous discovery. 

How about it?  Pretend I don’t know I am a student, tuition paid by pushing drinks in a supper club filled with people floating around the bar like amoebas in a primordial sea that smelled strangely of Miller Beer?  Simply forget?  Become a Gypsy in a greenish-blue Buick speeding toward the Puget Sound?  Couldn’t get lost if I tried?  The map promised that-an invitation out of lake country.  The Gypsy read my palm and promised me a long loose life if I followed that single line west-all the way west. 

Of course, I never did.  I never followed Highway Two all the way to the Puget Sound.  I was a responsible student, after all, sitting in intro to education classes with puffed up professors declaring that I would soon hold the youth of America in my hands, the power to mold the young minds of the future.  Ha!  What Gypsy, running west with bangle earrings and inner voices could lure me from such a noble path?  I ignored her and she slept like Van Winkle for a hundred years.

A second Gypsy invitation came years later in Colorado, while stuck on a prairie with car trouble, three kids, and a husband who thought my name was “Whythehelldidn’tyou?”  When we finally made it off the stark yellow prairie to a hotel room, the television lulled the stretched-tight rubber band family back into shape.

I went for a walk down a concrete sidewalk thinking about whether to step on the cracks or not, and whether it would do any good or not.  Now that I was a mother, I considered these things more carefully.  I thought I wanted only a cup of coffee, a short respite from the kids, but somewhere along that sidewalk she jumped out of the covered caravan of my mind and joined my walk. 

“We could walk across Colorado” she said. “To the mountains.  To the sea. 

“You mean not go back to that hotel room.  Not go back to him?” I queried. 

“Yeah, I mean not go back.” 

I was shocked, naturally.  My heart began beating rapidly, and I shivered.  She went for me then. 

“You know all those people who just disappear?  They aren’t lost.  They know where they are.  You would know where you were, too.  Maybe for the first time ever, you would know.  Even if nobody else did!”

I got hot.  And then I got cold.  Would he report me as a missing person?  Would he even notice me missing?  True, it was a miserable life I was leading.  Who could blame me? But would they spend forever wondering was I alive, dead, disappeared?

That time it was short, chubby little arms that reached out a great distance to pull my ears and grab my hair.  He was only two, my son.  Somehow that two seemed more powerful than a Highway named Two.  I never thought of fate as having little fat pudgy hands and fingers that, had I left, would have clutched at me until forever was over.  So there you are.  No Gypsy–and no Aunt Carol. 

Although later I did unload most of the furniture, and him, (my husband, not my son) and invited the Gypsy to bring her computer and tambourine and come live with us.  She hangs out in the kitchen before a bright white stretch of countertop like a short road, and dreams about the sea while watching the apple tree bud, bloom, bear, drop, and rot, only to start all over again.  She never lets me forget that she is near. 

 

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Short Fiction | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Finishing One Drum

April 20, 2008

I haven’t been posting much lately because I am hard at work doing final edits on my novel, ONE DRUM.  Just for fun, I’ll paste the first couple of pages in here.   I am excited because a long winter of revision is over and I finally have an agent to take it to the marketplace.  I love this book and have been behind it for too many years. 

 

ONE DRUM
Chapter I

 February 27, 2003

 Cuny Table, a tabletop mesa in the heart of Lakota country, is an unlikely place for a restaurant. The mesa itself is a survivor, having held its ground as thirty-five million years of wind and rain eroded the land into what is now the Badlands of South Dakota. On its high top are a few scattered ranches, fields of winter wheat, and a view so wide it feels like the floor of heaven. Sketched along the skyline to the west are the Black Hills; and, on the northeastern edge surrounded by a few rough buildings, is the Cuny Café.

Agnes Stands Alone, the owner of the café, has been there as long as anybody can remember. She is an old, square-bodied woman with short, coarse hair and eyes like dark marbles that seem to see straight through you. The regulars call her Unci, or Grandmother in Lakota.  Most of them wander in not so much for the food (although the food is good) but for her company and the unusual tea she brews from plants gathered down in the Cheyenne River breaks. The old ones, especially, find Agnes’s tea eases their aching bones and makes the blood flow more easily to the toes. Oh, she makes no claims about her tea, but everybody who walks in gets a steaming cup slapped down before them with a brisk command to, “Drink up.”

The café, an old thirty-foot trailer, has been gutted, insulated, and made into one open space except for a back bedroom which nobody but Agnes has ever been in. The front has a single booth, two tables, and a plywood counter top covered with blue-flowered contact paper. Some strangers think the poor old trailer looks like a dislocated train car hooked to nothing, going nowhere.

Agnes never hesitates to give advice-or a solid scolding-when needed.  But, more than the tea or Indian tacos or advice or whatever is on the menu that day (everybody eats the same daily special), the locals go to the café for Agnes’s stories. She knows all of the old Lakota stories.  She knows the creation stories, the stories of Iktomi the trickster and the Seven Sisters who can still be seen winking down from the sky on a clear night.  Her favorite is the story of the Second Cleansing when Unci Makah grew tired of the antics of her human children and tossed all but a few off her powerful body.  According to the story, those She sheltered later emerged from Wind Cave as The Lakota People.

Agnes, however, doesn’t just tell old stories.  Sometimes she tailor-makes the story especially for the person hearing it. For instance, once J.J. Runs At Night had a new colt so sick it couldn’t stand.  Agnes told him a story about how a grove of young willows withstood the mightiest of storms by forcing their roots further into Unci Makah, Grandmother Earth. “Such smart, young trees,” she said, “to know just what to do.” By the time J.J. got home, the colt was running across the corral on four sturdy legs.

Another time, June Player’s daughter tried to die by cutting her wrists with the top of a tuna can. The poor girl nearly bled out before they found her.  For this dangerous moment, Agnes told June about a small ant who had lost his place in line-until the wind blew a single grain of sand across his path, forcing him to turn another way. The next day, June’s daughter woke up from her deep, uneasy sleep talking about needing to find her place-before it was too late.

A while later, the girl began writing poetry and gave Agnes this poem written in a smooth, pretty hand:

In the greater scheme of things

Only she who sings,

And learns to play the wind,

Will ever grow wings.

Now I play the wind.

Agnes took a pineapple-shaped magnet, stuck the poem to her fridge and said, “Good.” After that the young girl began hanging around the café helping Agnes peel potatoes and wipe off countertops.

Of the nearly forty thousand residents of The Pine Ridge Reservation, at least half of them have been in the Cuny Café at one time or another, not to mention visitors from Japan, Switzerland, Germany and many other places. Agnes keeps a guest book and feeds them all tea and stories.

On slow days, Agnes sits in an old rocking chair on the rough-lumber porch the regulars had built for her five years earlier and lights her pipe. When it’s not in use, she keeps the pipe in a small, beaded bag hanging on a nail beside the screen door like a good luck charm. The bowl is carved red pipestone from a quarry in southern Minnesota.  This particular stone, Agnes says, was once part of the Black Hills until it broke away and floated off during some ancient upheaval.

Agnes fills the pipe with a dried version of her tea; and while she smokes, she prays. Sometimes the praying takes her far off to what she simply calls “the other place.” The first time she visited this other place she had been only seventeen and drunk. Her uncle, a medicine man, had found her puking her guts out beneath an old cottonwood tree and taken her home and made her pray for three days straight without food or water. That ornery old man-he’d cut straight through her young spirit to the old woman already living there, and Agnes had never again been able to return to her ordinary life.

Now, when the locals drive up Cuny Table to grab a bite to eat and find her sitting so still with the pipe in her lap and the spirit absent from her eyes, they know not to disturb her and simply tromp up the steps to help themselves in her kitchen. Occasionally, the praying is so complete, so pervasive, that they find it impossible to cross her threshold and simply get back into their trucks and leave.

Agnes sees many things in the smoke curling up from her pipe; she sees the land, she sees distant places, she sees the beating hearts of the people, the breaking hearts of the people, the loving hearts of the people; and, sometimes, in the hazy curl she sees the old ones who once walked the earth but now watch from other realms. The old ones have stories of their own to tell; but Agnes never tells these stories to anybody except Bill Elk Boy.

 

It was one of these days, on the edge of winter, when Agnes cast her inner eye outward toward the weathered lands north of Cuny Table and saw the change coming. There, on a single square foot of dry, deserted earth in the Badlands north and west of Wounded Knee Village, a thin line of dust rose up from a single needle-mark in the sand. Agnes watched the whorl of dust curl upward like the smoke of her pipe.  It had no discernible color unless she used the very edges of her peripheral vision and then she saw the palest of pink light rising from a dark horizon. As she watched, the pale, moving spiral seemed to take shape, as if Creator was conjuring something from nothing, dancing dust into form. When the dust settled, she saw the form of a woman asleep in the sand and Agnes knew she had returned at last, the little one . . . the lost one.

Two young boys were walking toward the sleeping woman.

When the glaze cleared from her eyes and she again entered this ordinary realm, Bill Elk Boy was beside her. He took the pipe, the bowl now cold to the touch, tapped it clean on the edge of his chair, slipped it back into the beaded bag, and said, “It begins, Agnes. Today it begins.”

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be | Tagged , , , , | Comment (1)

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 7

March 20, 2008

Day Four

Morning Recording Session

“Already this becomes a pattern, Jilly, with you sitting there, and me sipping coffee. Is your talking machine on?”

“On and recording, Grandfather.

“Good, this is good. We are almost there. Let me see, where did I leave off yesterday?”

In all the time I had spent with my father, we had been in the beautiful emerald valley, the sun bright and yellow above us. Now, as Father finished his instructions to me, his form again shifted to the smaller, sinewy form of First Man as we neared the top of the hill. The gray walls I’d first encountered with my Grandfather rose suddenly around us once again. They were the color of slate and threw light back at me. I put my hand flat on its surface and it felt as solid.

First Man smiled. “Don’t worry. It is solid, just not as solid as we once believed.”

I entered through the same arched doorway into the wide hall but, when I turned to speak to First Man, he was gone. He had not followed me in. Fear clutched my middle for an instant but the feeling was quickly removed by that warm presence behind me that father had told me to sink into my belly. Evidently, I had done it right.

I wandered an open, empty space that looked like a large, enclosed courtyard. Uncertain about what to do next, I waited, but not for long.

I felt her presence before she entered. There was a change in the air, a softening of the energy.  It’s hard to describe, but when I turned to see where the change was coming from, I saw First Woman enter from an opening to my right. I think I had expected a female twin to the sinewy First Man but, instead, before me stood the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. She was so beautiful that I felt suddenly oafish, lumpy and adolescent in her presence.

Her features were fine and smooth.  Long hair flowed to her waist and seemed to take the qualities of this place into itself because the color shifted with each step she took. It was dark as the night sky one moment, and a pale red sunrise the next, and then yellow as sunlight a second later. Finally, all color left until her hair looked like a moonbeam.    I must have looked ridiculous, like a boy meeting a movie star. She laughed and I heard bells, crystal bells, tinkling in her laughter. 

“Oh Albert.” She laughed again. “You look dumbstruck.” She ran a hand over her hair as if telling it to settle down, and it muted all color back to deep night.

You would think such a woman would wear flowing white robes but she wore only an ordinary tan cotton shift. No adornment, no rings, no beads, no strands of shell, or headgear or feathers. In truth, she needed nothing added.   I think I was just a little in love-maybe a lot.  Forever after I would seek her in all the women I saw, and would eventually marry the one who had her qualities. I shook myself and blushed. “Sorry. You are First Woman and I am a rude boy. I expected you to be old.”

“I am. I am very, very old.” She grinned. “Come, we have much to talk about and very little time.”

First Woman turned and quickly walked out the way she had entered. I followed. We passed the gray walls and were suddenly standing on the shore of a beautiful turquoise lake surrounded by red canyon walls. Across the lake, twin waterfalls flowed over high ledges and landed in limestone-crusted plates of stone that looked placed by the hand of god. A fine misty spray reached my face from where we stood.

First Woman said, “Pretty, isn’t it? It is my favorite place in all of the realms. Water helps me think.” She walked down the path a hundred yards and sat down on a wide slab of polished wood cut from a giant cottonwood tree. I took a place beside her.

“You are having quite the adventure, Albert.”

“Yes.”

“I am to instruct you about the Weavers, the children who are arriving. Many are already here, actually.”

I had nearly forgotten the words First Man had said, so filled with my father was I still. “Yes, First Man told me.”

The bright look on her face faded as though a cloud had passed overhead. I glanced upward but the sky was a sheet of blue.

“You must listen carefully, Albert. Much de-pends upon these children finding their place in this time. For a thousand years the wind has tumbled the people of earth into one another until they no longer remember where they belong, who they are, or what they have come to do. The longing, the seeking, the deep sense of aloneness and isolation will, for a time yet, cloud all connection with the higher realms, even with the earthly realm. It is a blindness of the soul-you know of what I speak.”

“Yes, I think I do.” I thought again of blind Albert unconscious beneath a grove of cotton-woods.

“It comes rapidly now, this time of change. Soon you must go back but my instructions are very specific and won’t take long, so I want to tell you one small story from my own storyline.” First Woman smiled and the shadow lifted.

Her smile warmed me to the core of my being. I really was in love. She could have talked for one hundred years and I would not have wiggled, so enamored of her was I. Her words were like warm water.

“Before the Wind began, actually it was already blowing, we just didn’t know it, but all the people had a deep belonging with the natural world. We spoke the language and heard the language of earth, stone, animals, dreams, and the soft whispers from the spirit realm. We spoke the language and we listened. It was a natural, graceful way of being. In truth, we couldn’t have survived this cycle without the help of the plants and animals. When the Wind began, it stirred the natural rhythms and disturbed them. It brought with it the beginning energy of separating and, with that, an awareness of what is mine-and what is yours.” First Woman stopped and gazed into my face. “Do you understand?”

I said I wasn’t sure.

“The deep harmonies were disturbed, Albert. Now, instead of living in belonging with all things, we drifted from true belonging into ownership. This belongs to me. That belongs to you. That doesn’t belong. You see?  The energy of belonging shifted.”

I nodded, now understanding her meaning.

“It is impossible to describe how this shift interrupted the natural rhythms, but you can see the result in your world. Now the people of earth fight to have, and not to be. From this place I am now, this high vista, I see the many cycles which form the spiral of which First Man spoke; the energies of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone. Now a new twist of the spiral opens. It will carry human-kind into the next, and even deeper, com-munication between the realms, but it has been very painful, this ending of one cycle and the opening of the new.”

As First Woman spoke, I felt the pain of which she spoke like a knife-point at my throat. I said nothing, just nodded again like a puppet.

“When I was a young girl I, like you, was taken to the this realm, and made a Watcher. It is very difficult to be a Watcher, Albert. You live in one world while simultaneously seeing another. It is confusing, and sometimes very painful. Always you ask why others cannot see what you see. You feel very alone. You see-but are seldom seen by others. Being instructed, as you have been during your time here, helped me, but still I had to live in a world that was rapidly changing.”

She took my hand in hers and continued. “In my village, a neighbor to First Man’s village, I was a maiden of the Sun. I took the Sun as my master. Another man, a priest in my village, fell into the Wind and took darkness into his soul. I tell you this not as an indulgence, but to let you know that in that time, the seed of this time was also planted. I fled my village with another Watcher from the south. I had twin babies in my womb. The evil priest believed himself to be the father of those babes, a boy and a girl but, in truth, they were special children formed from the mating of the Sun and the Moon.”

First Woman gave another tinkling laugh. “Never mind about the logistics of that mating. It simply was. There were others born to the Watchers at that same time around the world, and it is these special children who have seeded the human race with what is needed as the new spiral begins. The descendents of all of those children are like a silver net holding the potential for this new time, when the Wind is ending. I’ll try to explain in more modern terms. The energy of sun and moon combined in these children and created a new chamber in the brain.” First Woman tapped her forehead between her brows. “Here. This chamber is not unlike its predecessor, it is the place of connection, of gathering, but in these descendents of sun and moon, it carries an even greater potential, a preparation for the new spiral of gathering and belonging. A wider reach, so to speak.”

First Woman was excited about this mysterious chamber of which she spoke. Her eyes were wide and shining. I could not take the time to think through all she said because I simply needed to record her words in my mind so I wouldn’t forget.

“Oh, Albert. The potential is so great, so far- reaching and full of promise, and yet so fragile at the same time, but it is container only.  It is like having a miraculous machine, but it must first be turned on. If properly turned on, the human race will flourish once again and surpass its former state of being. The sense of belonging will reach far, far beyond the skin of a single person. Do you understand?”

“I think so.” In truth, I didn’t understand yet, but her excitement was so contagious that I was caught it its glow.

“The Wind of a Thousand Years will not have been in vain for it will herald in such a time of peace, of connection, of light. I want that for the next generation, and all the generations to follow.”

Her eyes misted over and pale particles of light and energy rose up from her shining hair again and formed a halo around her head. I was reminded of the sweet images of the Virgin Mary that I had so loved as a child. In fact, this woman was not unlike my image of that other woman. Such a vision she held for the human race and, with her help, I saw the promise of it too. Her vision of humanity bloomed in my own mind, although it was not the world I currently knew.

She watched my face, her gaze tender and sweet. “You see it?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then my story has carried what it needed to carry to you.” She leaned over and kissed my brow in the same place she had tapped her own brow. “Now sink it, Albert. Sink that vision into your middle.”

She sounded like my father and I laughed. With that most tender of kisses, First Woman became all business again. She ran quickly through my instructions on what she called ‘Care of the container for Weavers.’ She began by reminding me that we cannot know which children are descendents of the sun and moon energies and so therefore, the instructions apply to all children. “As it should be,” she said. She did say that we will in some ways be able to recognize the Weavers because they will enter the world greedy, restless for knowledge, impatient to learn-and intolerant when that learning is denied or constrained.

First Woman then spent a long time talking to me about how, in this new time, we must be mindful of the larger container of earth, that the Weavers must have pure water, pure air, the food supply restored and cared for, and that the ability of these children to weave will depend upon their own brain’s ability to weave its fine connections. “Caring for the weaving child requires a larger spiral of care,” she said, “Which includes care of the mother, care for the family, and care of the earth.”

Remember that the man receiving these rapid instructions was a crazy, young man who had not even considered fatherhood as an option yet. I think that First Woman must have poured the information like liquid into my own container.    I took it in whole, in one long, thirsty drink and have never forgotten the simple instructions she gave.   

However, in the world that unfolded as I grew and aged, following her instructions was another matter entirely. From what I could see, in the final decades of apathy and despair left in the wake of the mighty Wind, our institutions and culture did exactly the opposite of what she instructed. It was remarkable.

But I also saw that these children with the golden chambers, the special containers, would not be denied the learning or the care required.

“A break, Jilly? I begin to stray from my story.”

 ”Yes, Grandfather.”

Albert’s Notes

Jilly looked reluctant to push the stop button on her recorder, but smiled and clicked it off. Oh, I knew she was one of them, one of the Weavers. I haven’t yet said a word about the others, the ones not descended from this ancient line, born of sun and moon, the ones whose containers, for whatever reason, were not filled with this potential.

First Woman called them ‘The Weepers’. Sadly, those who could not pass through the final days of the Wind, she said, would cry all their lives for what they could not have, be, or do. They would die having never thrown off the gray net of despair. I will make no further mention of this hereafter. You will know them when you meet them, the Weepers. They cry and they cry. First Woman also told me to remember that eventually all will cross the stream again and be descendents of sun and moon.

For many years I wondered about this use of words beginning with a ‘W’ in this language of the other realms, and the new spiral. The only thing I saw is that it is the only letter in the English alphabet whose two thin arms reach for heaven, for the higher realms, while its bottom is firmly planted on the earth. ‘W’.  Firmly seated-but reaching.

The telling of this story, so long held, is both energizing and making me weary to the bone. I’m embarrassed to say I sent Jilly off to do useless errands so I could be alone in my home for a moment.

The meeting with First Woman shaped the rest of my life. I became an artist so I could capture her in oil or watercolor. I took up photography to chase her shadow on film. I wrote to feel her hand cover mine over the pen. I married my wife because she reminded me of First Woman. She was a good wife to me, too, and soon, I will find her again.

I think it is time for a rest.

I am an old man. After the last session I crabbed back into my room and stretched out on the bed for nearly an hour until Jilly returned and came back to see that I was all right. I didn’t tell her that it is only there, in my dreams, that I see First Woman. She is always there, whenever I seek her guidance. Refreshed from my nap, I told Jilly that we would do one more session after lunch. It is time to finish this story now.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Indian Country, Short Fiction, The Education Crises, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 6

March 19, 2008

To read the first five chapters of this short novel scroll down until you find Part 1.

 

Day Three

Afternoon recording session

“The coffee is good this afternoon, Jilly.”

“Thanks Grandpa. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Stop me, Takoja, if what I say is not clear. I want to get this next part down in a good way. Are we on?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The era of despair.

First Man said the end of each major cycle overlaps with the opening of the next. One is closing, another opening, but not like doors, not so clearly defined. He explained that during this long transition there will appear to be very different types of humans on earth. The time of transition will be blurred, and there will be difficult struggles as the long dark winter is ending and a new spring beginning.

First Man said several things would influence this time, whether we survive as a race, or simply blink out of all time. Most importantly, he said, we must take our gathering and belonging only from our ancestral line, and from the parents. The parents are like the spillway of a great reservoir high in the mountains. Like water spilling over a damn, the flow of life must enter us through the gateways of our parents and it is from there we take our truest belonging. We may choose to gather with others and belong, but all belonging is only fleeting and temporary except for the ancestral line. There we belong forever.  And we must return to tribes and clans and follow the line of memory and learning through these pathways.

If we do this, if we create strong families, from these sturdy cradles will spring the new child. First Man was very particular about this. This child, rooted firmly in the family, will remember to remember. This child will see both forward and backward. He called these children “The Weavers.” This child, he said, would be able to see back before the time of the Wind and remember to whom he truly belongs. Because they are firmly rooted in the family, like the Aspen, they will be strong and have long lives.

I asked First Man why he named them so. He said they would be born with the potential to weave one realm with another-very important. With proper care, they would remember the spirit realm from which they came. The Weavers would have access to the higher realms and would, therefore, have special abilities to hear, to feel, to see beyond the physical body and into the spirit body, wherever it roams.

First Man told me we must take great care in the raising of the weaving child and that I would receive further instructions on that later.  He said it is enough to know that in this new opening of the spiral-of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone-the gathering or bonding would be with the higher realms. The Weavers toss the net that makes this possible, the weaving of heaven and earth together into one continuous fabric.

I was entranced with that image, of small children weaving threads that tie this earthly life to the higher realms. He said the Watchers of my age become the Weavers in this new age.

When he had finished his long talk about the Weavers, I asked First Man the question that had been sitting on my breast ever since I came here to this place, or even longer perhaps, since I first came from the spirit realm as a newborn into my troubled family. He’d told me earlier that I chose it, it did not choose me, but I needed to ask again, “Why me, First Man?”

He looked at me for a long moment and then smiled. “Ah, that ancient question. Where would humankind be without that question?”

First Man began to turn away, but I was not to be put off. “I need to know. Why have you brought me here? Why have you told me about the spiral of life?”

“You forget so quickly, Albert. We did not bring you here. You came because of your question-and to find your father.”

“But I haven’t found my father.”

Then, in the odd manner of this realm, the moving points of light and energy rearranged themselves within the bird-like body of First Man. His flesh filled, his skeletal frame shifted before my eyes and, in a moment, First Man was my father.  He said nothing. Just stood before me with the steely strength I remembered so well.

“Father.”

“My son.”

I was stunned to be looking into the eyes of my father. Around me, points of light flickered with remembered images-father putting me on a pony, father teaching me to hunt, father cornering mother to steal a kiss, father wiping morning milk from my sister’s mouth. The poisonous pain and grief that had so filled me to the brim two years earlier when he died rushed to my head. I nearly passed out.  Deep within my belly the grief rolled up my body like thunder and, suddenly, an astounding sound issued from my mouth that was both human and animal, both call and cry. I couldn’t stop it. It was as if the wailing became like great birds that clutched my pain in their sharp talons, and then flew out of my body.

Father took me in his arms and held me. I couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say. He cradled my speechless body until the wailing ceased and only a breathless gasping issued from my mouth.

I grew calm again, resting deeply in his care. A bright, new sun rose in my body as I realized first, that he had not ever been gone from me, not where it counts, and second, that my strength was in my ancestral roots. Just as First Man had said, my true belonging was to my father and mother’s lines and in order to be strong in the world, I needed to remember that.  

Finally, my grief-to my great relief-was exhausted.  I pulled away from him and smiled at this man who had given me life from the seed of his body. “I found you.”

Father shook his head. “I was not lost. You were. What you found was yourself, Son. Come. Let’s sit.”

We chose a large boulder and sat in the sun. I wanted to know the connection between the man   I knew as my father, and First Man, who had showed me the story of The Wind of a Thousand Years.

“There is no need to tell you all of my stories, Son. The many times my spirit has traveled from this realm to the others is like a man crossing a streambed-first on one bank, then into the water, then up onto the far bank. You also have been in and out like a frog in a pond.” He laughed and the sound warmed my soul. “We all have. Most of us are blessed with not having to remember. We are all traveling the same spiral.” He stopped a moment and cocked his head as if listening, or testing the wind. “We must finish this talk soon. You cannot leave your physical body for so long that it is damaged or dies.”

At first I laughed. I’d grown so accustomed to this place, I’d nearly forgotten the young, drunk Albert beneath another grove of trees. But then the laughter died and a flood of shame brought the gray net hovering over my head. “I haven’t been a very good son, Father.”

“I know, Albert.”

“I am ashamed.”

“It will be better now, my boy. Not easy, but better. There is much that needs to be done, and you mustn’t replace pain and anger with guilt. Guilt is a useless thing unless we learn.”

“But what am I to do? What is the meaning of all of this?”

Father said, “The lessons have been clear. You will understand more and more as you age. One day, when the time is right, you are to give these lessons away. You are in your own small cycle, Son. You are gathering. You will go home and carry these things for many, many years, and then you will set them apart from you, give them away to others, and you will be alone once again.”

“How will I know when the time is right?”

“I can’t tell you that. You will know. All I can say is that one day when you are old and nearly ready to come back to this realm, a young woman will come to you. You will give her this story. Write down all you remember from your time here, and all you learn from it as you move through life. Keep it for her.”

“Who is she?”

“She is First Man’s wife. I call her First Woman. She is part of my story. You see Son, we are all part of long story lines. Occasionally, we remember them. Most of the time, we don’t. First Woman’s story also begins with the coming of the Wind. It is nearly time for you to meet her.”

Above my head the sky grew dense and gray. This clouded world was becoming familiar to me, caught by the net of my own fear and doubt. “Father, what if I fail? What if I don’t do this in a good way, whatever purpose I am to fill? How will I know?”

“You will know, Albert. We always know when the path is right. But then we must choose that path. There are other Watchers, many of them now around the world, who have been given a similar task. Your part is not so great. In fact, it is quite, quite small actually.”

Father must have seen the balloon of my pride deflate a little and he chuckled. “A holy man you’re not. Never take this gift in a prideful way. It is the only sure way to fail. Do you understand? You will be silent except with a few guides you will meet along the way, until it is time to complete this moment.”

“Yes Father, I understand.”

“Also understand, I will not be so far away.”

“Thank you, Father.” And then I thought of the little desk in the grove and laughed. “Why the school desk?”

Father laughed with me, and then slapped my shoulder. “If you would have gone and looked, you would have seen your initials carved into the corner. Come, now you will go to First Woman and get her teachings and then it will be time to return.”

There was so much I wanted to ask him, especially about the gunshot, the blood, the death, my mother and sisters, how I would explain to them-but all the questions fled my mind like nervous sparrows as soon as they landed. It was clearly not the time to ask these questions, and I thought about what he’d said about always knowing the right path.  I did, however, keep my eye on my father’s back as we walked, fearful that he would vanish in a swirl of moving points of energy. Grief began to rest on my shoulders like a shawl cut from the blanket of gray. Must I lose him a second time, I wondered. Why?

Before we’d walked a quarter mile, Father stopped walking and turned back to me, as if he’d sensed the direction of my thoughts. He put his hand on my shoulder and turned my body away from his. “Look again, Albert, out into the great valley to the grove of trees.”

I raised my eyes and stared out across the vast lands, my father at my back, his hand resting on my shoulder. Over my head he said, “This is my place always. You cannot lose me, just as my father holds his place forever at my back, and his behind him. You must plant this feeling, this energy, deeply into your body and then fear will no longer rule your life.”

I stood a long time and did as he told me. I took the radiant heat of his presence behind me and sunk it deep into my belly. As I did this, the fear, the grief, the grayness left once again.

“Good,” he said.

I turned, knowing this would be my final full look at the form of my father. “I love you, Father. I hadn’t told you that, not for a long time. That was the hardest thing. I never told you.”

Father smiled. “You didn’t have to.”

Albert’s Notes

Poor Jilly. This was proving to be an emotional task for her, acting as my secretary. Her cheeks were wet with tears yet again. She too had lost her father at a young age. “Come my takoja, let me show you.” Takoja means grandchild in Lakota. It was what my own grandfather called me when I was a boy in need of comfort.

I took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She had done all of the recording sessions sitting on my floor at my feet. Jilly swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. It made her look six and not twenty-three. We are always a child to our parent or grandparent. I turned her body so she could look out across my golden prairie, and then I stood behind her just as my father had done, my hands resting very lightly on her shoulders, to add presence and not burden. “Close your eyes,” I told her. “Now, let yourself feel your father behind you, and his father behind him here.” I pressed my fingertips against her right shoulder. “And on the other side, the line of your mother, stretching so far back you see only the haze of time.” I pressed my fingertips into her left shoulder. “Your strength comes in here, from behind you, from the strong men and women of your line. It comes to give you courage.”

Jilly nodded.

“You feel it?” I asked her.

She nodded again. I felt the subtle shifting of energy, the realignment of her body beneath my palms. I grinned and whispered in her ear. “Now sink it deep.” I waited a moment. “Good. Now open your eyes and look out there at our beautiful world. If you look very carefully, you will see the play, the points of light moving, always moving.”

When Jilly turned around to face me, she wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me. “Thank you, Grandpa. I got it. I sunk it deep.”

“Wonderful. Maybe we need a short walk. Let’s go see if the air out there is made of sugar this morning.”

We had a lovely walk and returned to my humble dwelling much refreshed. Jilly cut up some more chicken breasts for our supper and we ate it with one of those dull salads people are so wild about these days. Then I retired to my room to watch the darkness come and the pale light of the moon rise over the earth.  

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Indian Country, Short Fiction, The Education Crises | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter 5

March 18, 2008

Day Three

Morning Recording Session

 ”Are you ready then, Jilly?”

“Yes, Grandpa, but can I tell you something first?”

“Of course, as long as it doesn’t lead us astray from my story.”

“No, it won’t. It is, well, I keep thinking about what you said about remembering to forget and all that. It is the weirdest thing. I’ve been transcribing your tapes at night but when I listen to the tape, I find I have forgotten all you said. Isn’t that strange? Why can’t I remember? I heard it only a couple of hours before.”

“You must think you are getting as old as your grandfather. No, Jilly. It isn’t so strange. This story, as I have told you, is not mine but comes from the other realm. Because we are here, in these all too human bodies, the knowledge from the other realms is a shifting, changing thing easily caught in the web of forgetting. Not to worry, pretty girl. Not to worry. The right parts of the story will come to you at the right time. You will see.”

“All right, Grandfather. I trust you’re right.

“It is what I hope for, Jilly, that in telling this story, the words will be like rain and tears-pure enough to wash the thin veil of gray from our eyes so we can see, and remember. Now, to the task at hand, is your little machine ready to remember?”

“Yes, it is more reliable than I am. Go.”

I was still staring into the valley of trees when First Man walked up behind me. He put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “Do you see the power of alone?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is not a lonely thing, not if we release the fear.” I was strangely comforted by his hand at my shoulder, his presence behind me, and recognized that the new cycle begins with the gathering of strength and energy.

“Yes, if we release the fear, and listen for the deeper rhythm of things. Come with me now. You are ready for the next lesson.”

I followed First Man as he walked a path down the mountain and into the valley that held the standing grove of trees. My ears still heard the deep thump, thump that had restored my sanity. Beneath my feet, the soil was damp and I smiled. My tears.

First Man was silent as we walked. My sense of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling were vibrating within this vivid world. I didn’t want words-only this wide-awake thing flashing around me. When we had walked for perhaps an hour, we came to a grove of Aspen trees lacing their thin stumps and branches through the other, sturdier pine and oak. We came to a small clearing and First Man stopped. “Your classroom,” he said, grinning.

I laughed aloud, for sitting in the center of the clearing was a small, wooden desk very much like the kind we had had in the mission school. It sat ridiculously alone and out of place in the peaceful, leafy grove. I fully expected a black-garbed nun or priest to step out from behind a tree.

“You like it?” First Man grinned at me.

“Funny, First Man. I think I will call you Funny Man.”

“I like it too.” He waved a hand and the hard, wooden desk disappeared in a flash of dissolving points of light. “Do you know, Albert, that an Aspen grove is one of the largest and oldest living organisms on earth?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, beneath the earth their roots are common roots. This whole grove of Aspen trees is one family. It can travel when it runs low of food and water. Do you know why it is so long-lived?”

“No.” I felt as though I should have taken a seat in the little wooden desk.

First Man walked over to one of the trees and spanned its trunk with his ten fingers as if it were the waist of a pretty girl.  ”This tree knows to whom it belongs. It never forgets. All the trees stand alone, are separate, and yet they hold their belonging deep within their roots. This pretty Aspen will never wonder if it should be a Pine, or a Maple.  It is an Aspen.”

“What are you saying, First Man?” It seemed obvious to me, but I knew he wanted me to see       a deeper meaning in his words.

“Let’s sit. I want to tell you about the four ages of humankind.”

I sat, as instructed, and First Man talked and talked for many hours again. I cannot recount all his words but will retell the lesson as I understand it.

He said the cycle of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone is both a very small cycle and part of a larger spiral. Just as day passes into night, and summer passes into winter, and life passes into death, each cycle is both separate from, and a part of, the larger spiral of life. We are all subject to the same natural law.

The human race, First Man explained, has been in one singular sweep of this spiral for thousands of years, since the first Walkers walked out across the earth and left the First Family. While continuing in their small ways to form tribes and clans, and dissolve tribes and clans in order to form other camps of belonging, they have also been engaged in the first single spiraling loop of consciousness.

First Man said a thousand years ago the gathering, or bonding and belonging parts of       the first large loop was completed.  That is when The Wind of a Thousand Years began blowing the people of earth into one another. It is the time of separating, First Man told me, a painful but necessary time, a time of letting go of old identifi-cation and attachment, a rite of passage for the species as a whole. A necessary madness, he said. And now, in this time, we have entered the time of standing alone.

Remember my gray cocoon? First Man says all the human race is now blanketed in this gray. In this time, and perhaps over another decade at least, the sense of despair, grief, isolation and loneliness will reach its zenith. During this time there will continue to be great suffering and bloodshed.

As I listened to his voice, I thought of the wars even now burning across the earth. This making of war, First Man said, is a desperate attempt to find our footing by creating a mythical belonging, a false belonging. It is the noisy claim of one group over another, but it is a belonging no longer based in root and seed but in ideology, theology, of the mind only and not the body. It is the belonging that comes with forgetting.

I didn’t like his words. I didn’t like the truth of his words, and considered the way I had fought for my own small place in the world.  His words left me dead and cold in the center of my belly. I felt my old anger rising like a serpent inside, of Indian and white, of rich and poor, the unfairness of it all. I wanted there to be no truth in what he said. First Man saw my anger and waited.

“You see,” he said, “How quickly we jump to take back our smallest identity.”

“But you said it yourself. This Aspen is an Aspen-not a Pine or Maple or Elm.”

“Stop, Albert. Remember the standing grove? And remember also that the Aspen is the oldest living organism, and the wisest. It never cuts its own roots.  It belongs first to its own family, and then to the other families.”

I did remember, but struggled to understand as if it were a difficult math problem.

First Man smiled. “You are young, Albert. You will not get this all in grade school. Time. There is time.” With that he turned and began following the path down which we had first entered the grove. When he began the upward climb, however, he took a path toward the east, as best as I could tell. The land was still beautiful, but I noticed it had lost its sweet sugar smell.

“My energy leaves me again, Jilly, and I need a break.”

“Yes, Grandfather. I’ll make us some lunch.”

“Thank you, dear, and don’t despair.  The best is yet to come.”

Albert’s Notes

I smile a bit at myself. Don’t despair, I tell Jilly. But we are in the era of despair. I may as well tell the sun not to shine or the moon not to bother rising. I don’t think Jilly got my little joke. I didn’t either, not for several decades after my meeting with First Man. I wanted to prove him wrong but, in the end, his truth remained. 

But now I begin to see a resolution.

While Jilly makes us a nice lunch of tuna fish, I wander back to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. I stare out across this sun-drenched land. It is a relief to finally be finishing what was begun so long ago. I no longer fear death. It holds little interest except as it opens that next spiral of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone. Jilly calls me to lunch.  I take a long sip of the coffee she brings me. It is warm and creamy, a little sweetened.

She leaves me to enjoy my coffee and review my notes for this afternoon’s session.  I thought a long time about what First Man said about the aspen and how they never cut their roots.  That is why they are so long lived.

 I understood the need for common roots, or at least I thought I did. But I was unable to reconcile the earlier images of many leaves blowing around the world, all different colors, and all different races.

At first I thought the white-barked Aspen must mean First Man was talking about white people, and that we must all maintain our racial identity if we were to survive as a race. The Pine must be a Pine, the Aspen an Aspen. Finally, many decades later, First Man’s words began to make sense.

The whole human race is like the Aspen, linked at the root, traveling over the world, always related, always connected. The trees, the wolves, bears, birds-all kinds of creatures-are living side by side in the standing grove.   Connected, yet separate.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Indian Country, Short Fiction, The Education Crises | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Albert’s Manuscript–Chapter Three

March 16, 2008

If you are visiting my blog for the first time, you will see that I am entering a short novella called Albert’s Manuscript.  Just back up to see parts 1 and 2.   

 Day Two

Morning Recording Session

Albert’s Notes

I slept last night without a wiggle. I thought the telling of my vision would bring the dreaming back, but it hasn’t, not yet. After my two-day journey, I gave up the booze, but I like my morning coffee to kick a little.   Jilly knows that and comes in, hot mugs in hand, looking like the morning star.

“What are you writing, Grandfather,” she asks?

“None of your business,” I tell her.

She laughs, and her laughter clears the morning air of night. She sips her coffee and waits for me to finish writing whatever it is that is none of her business. Jilly knows I bark, but I don’t bite-like Hound Dog. Before I speak, I want to remind my granddaughter and others that these are not my words. I am not wise, despite my great age, and I certainly wasn’t wise enough at age twenty to make up First Man’s story. I tell it as it was told to me. I have learned that when there is true wisdom in the world, it always comes from the other realms-and not from the minds of men or women. They have only heard it.

“Are we turned on, Jilly?”

“Yes, Grandfather. We’re turned on.”

“Good.  I will now tell First Man’s story as he told it to me.”

First Man’s Story

My name is First Man of the Wind of a Thousand Years. I am from the realm of the ancestors. There are other worlds, other realms, and I don’t speak for them except to say that the Wind originated there. We, like those still in the land of the living, are subject to the power of this great wind.

I was a boy, living in what you know as the southwest, when first I felt the Wind. I lived a simple life with my parents, and my people. We existed much as we had lived from the first memories that came down to us from our ancestors in the stories that we kept. Evening was my favorite time of day, the time of hearing my parents and grandparents tell the stories of my people, stories of spiders weaving, and of my people climbing up through the realms to emerge on earth as First People. I listened carefully, as I was instructed to do, so that one day the stories could be passed down in a good way to my children and grandchildren. It was inconceivable that anything would happen to change that long, slow, unfolding history.

Until the Wind came.

With the first kiss of this mighty Wind came the drought. In just a few years, our lands were sucked dry of all moisture and food was scarce. Our people were suffering, and they began to break into small groups and travel out from our main village. The wind continued to blow until the hot sun baked the earth into crust. The people began to protect food instead of share it. The fear came first and then the anger.  People began to build weapons with which to defend themselves.  At last, the peaceful way we had lived for thousands of years was shattered. 

One day another tribe came from the south and attacked my family’s village. Their storm was violent and quick and, when the dust settled, my small body lay on the ground, broken, bloodied, sandwiched between the dead bodies of my parents and surrounded by my dead village. Death was all around. This event so shocked my young spirit that it left my body and fled to the high rock pinnacles surrounding the dead village and perched there, staring down at the horrible sight below. I sat, still and unmoving, watching as the carrion birds and the wild dogs below cleaned the bones of my relatives.

For decades the sun rose and fell, and rose and fell, until it had bleached the bones white.  Still, I sat. I didn’t know enough to travel alone to the ancestors, and none came to claim me. It was not known to me until much later that this long period of stillness, perched and waiting, was my initiation into becoming a Watcher. I also didn’t know that in other parts of the world similar terrible events were unfolding and being witnessed by other Watchers across the earth.

The Wind of a Thousand Years had begun.

Eventually, the rock on which I perched began to grow. It rose so high above the earth that soon   I could see other nations of people living on other lands. I could see far south into wet jungle lands and torrid areas. I could see north to frozen, icy lands where bands of people in small clusters were moving across snow and ice in their fight to survive the harsh land. I could see east and west across great bodies of water to other lands and everywhere I cast my eyes, the people were moving; walking, walking out across the land. As my perch grew higher yet, my eyes could no longer see the bare bones of my parents but only the travelers which  I later came to know as The Walkers.

I no longer shivered, no longer curled into my spirit body but looked out upon the world.  As I looked out, I grew curious about the massive, moving bodies of people. I wanted to understand what was happening. My questions grew-just as yours have, Albert.

Finally, I stood high up on my rocky perch, raised my arms up to the heavens, and prayed. It was the first time in all the years of watching I had prayed to the ancestors to show me what was happening.

And then, a miracle.

They came for me. The ancestors came and took me home, much the same as they came to get you, Albert, and for a similar reason-to teach me how to see. And how to interpret what I had seen so that one day, a thousand years later, I could tell you this story. 

So, Jilly, that is First Man’s story.  He was a tiny, sinewy little man. It was easy for me to picture the boy’s spirit perched like a bird on a rock watching the land below while his spirit aged. Waiting. Watching. The story of his family evoked images in me of my own family, of my own people scattered across the frozen land at Wounded Knee, of my father’s body dead of a gunshot.  I did not think I was going to like First Man’s story. And I don’t, even to this day, although I understand its meaning.

Oh Jilly, the question I asked First Man then still embarrasses me and I hate to have you record it, but don’t shut the machine off. Not yet. I must say it.

I asked First Man, “Why me? Why have I been chosen to hear your story?”

His answer was simple. He said, “So that you, too, will become a Watcher. One day, you will also tell others what you have seen and heard. This story and your own.”

I was sharply aware that I did not want to be a messenger, a Watcher as First Man called it. There was no desire in me to translate unknown things. I was a young man-no, a boy. I wanted no such responsibility.  Look at how I had treated mother, how I had failed at being the man she needed me to be. Look at how I had failed my sisters, my father, my people by being drunk and angry. No, I was not a reliable messenger.

First Man seemed to read my mind. “You have chosen it, Albert. It has not chosen you.”

When he said those words, I remembered. In quick, flickering scenes, I saw that I had crossed many times already between the spirit and the earthly realms-in my dreams and thoughts, in my childhood fancies of flying and traveling, in my questioning and in my running away. And certainly, death was not unfamiliar to me. The death of my father, which I had felt so keenly, like a knife in my belly, was just one of many, many deaths that had pushed my spirit up on to the high peaks to watch, and wait, just as First Man had watched, and waited. I had, in my spirit, already been a Walker-in training to be a Watcher.

It was my father’s death that had pushed me into this realm even while my broken body remained in the other world.  At least I hoped that was so-that my body beneath the grove of trees was still waiting for my return. First Man said I had chosen it.

I said nothing, just nodded to First Man to let him know I understood and he should continue his story. When I gave him that nod, another layer of understanding filled my mind. I understood that First Man, too, had chosen this. He too had jumped in and out of many lives, many bodies, even while a part of his spirit remained high on a perch above earth.

And suddenly, I knew that my spirit, too, must be perched on a high point and had been watching the progress of the world. This, probably, was the first real lesson I got during the twenty hours of speaking, and the next twenty hours of listening.

I must speak this clearly. I had believed, if I thought of it at all as a twenty-year-old, that one body contains one spirit, rather like a body is given one portion of arms, another portion of eyes and ears. Never had I understood that spirit was a fluid thing, like this world I now visited, that spirit could be simultaneously in the body, and perched high above the earth, or perhaps even living other lives in other lands.

I am not sure if First Man taught me this, or if I just finally understood it. Our way of communi-cating had gone beyond words, rather like ink in water, one blending into the other. It seemed pointless to wonder what came from his story and what simply bloomed in my mind. I said to him, “So, you were taken to this realm in a similar way?”

First Man smiled at the way I tried to tie his story down like a pony to a stake.  He said, “Yes, I was taken into the council of Elders. They told me about the cycle of learning, that each of us must complete this cycle, but that mankind as a whole must also complete the cycle. And that is why the Winds have come. The Wind of a Thousand Years has come to scatter the many tribes of people into one another so humankind can complete one cycle and begin another.  You see, when each cycle ends, a new one begins. Over thousands of years it forms a spiral-not a circle.”

First Man was speaking slowly and watching me. He explained that the spiral of life always contains four movements, and these four movements coincide with the natural forces of heaven and earth. There are four directions, four seasons, four parts of each day, and always the closing of one cycle opens another. He brushed a place in the dirt,  took a stick and drew a circle but, just as he was about to close the circle, he skipped past the connecting point and began a spiral. “You see?” he asked.  

I nodded and said, “Yes, I see.”

“Good. Each movement has its own energy,      a force contained within it that drives the spiraling outward. The four energies are gathering, be-longing, separating, and standing alone.”

Whatever I expected in this great teaching, it was not the simple words that First Man spoke. I must have looked like the wind blew me over because he laughed so hard he rolled onto the ground holding his sides. That was the only time    I wondered if a great hoax was being played on a poor drunk kid who couldn’t stay atop his horse. I couldn’t possibly have gone through all this, yanked into the spirit world to be given such a school boy lesson? Gathering, belonging, separating and alone?

Finally, First Man quit laughing and came back to our small circle of firelight. “Sorry,” said First Man. “The look on your face, it reminded me of my own reaction when I got the same lesson. But trust me, those four movements within the spiral contain the natural world-and the wider realms as well. Pick up that stone, Albert.”

I looked around and saw no stone. Then I looked again and we were in a circle of small, smooth stones as white as snow.  I was getting used to the fluid ways of this reality. I picked up one of the stones and held it. It felt good, as though it belonged there in my hand.

“Now, let it go again,” First Man said.

Oddly, I was reluctant to let it go, but did as      I was told. My hand was empty once again.

“You see?” said First Man. “You take it up, hold it but a moment, let it go again, and your palm is empty once more.”

He must have seen my confusion again. “Don’t make it a difficult lesson, Albert. It is simple. We gather, hold a moment, let go, and are alone again. You came from the spirit world, you gathered or were bonded into a family, you stayed awhile, then you move away to find your aloneness once again. The cycle is endless. Everything we take, everything we bind ourselves to, we must eventually release and stand alone again.”

“I don’t understand, First Man. What does this have to do with the Wind, or with life?”

“It has everything to do with the Wind, and with life. Do you remember why you came here?”

“To find my father.”

“Yes, because you could not separate, could not bear to be alone. This is the breath of life, coming in, staying a moment, releasing, and then going out again to regather.”

A deep silence settled around us. The thrum-ming of the drum stopped, the animals ceased their chattering, and the very air around me seemed to stall. I thought hard about First Man’s words. In the edge of my vision, a gray pall began to descend. “But to be alone, First Man, it is unbearable.”

“Yes, it is. And to be permanently bound, held to one place or person, it too is unbearable.”

I was silent, staring into the flames and, in the moving light of the flame, I saw scenes unfold-of an infant letting go of the womb in his slide into life, the child letting go of its mothers hand, a boy letting go of his father’s bleeding body. Gathering, belonging, separating, and alone.

First Man nodded. “All are necessary in the wider movement of life. All are equally powerful forces. And what is true for the single soul is true for the greater soul. Your ancestors said it well. As above, so below. A cycle closes on earth now, Albert, and it is necessary that the human race sees this cycle, and accepts it now if they are to survive as a species.”

“Jilly?  Are you okay?”

“I am.  But what did he mean, Grandfather? If we are to survive as a species?”

“It will become clear, my dear girl. But first, a break.”

 

Albert’s Notes

I saw the shiver enter Jilly’s body from First Man’s words. When I looked up from my many scraps of paper, her eyes were wide, dark disks in her face. Oh, how I longed to wrap these old arms around her, but that is not what I had been instructed to do. These intense moments, of awakening-from dream, from sleep, from illusion-are exactly what we need now. We need to feel the truth of First Man’s words and cannot freeze the cycle without freezing life itself. I told Jilly there is no need to fear our aloneness because it contains the greatest of all gifts. It is in alone that we enter the next cycle, the gathering.

She was not listening to me. Her soul had retreated to its own tall peak to scan the landscape below. My Jilly knew about alone. Both of her parents had died of alcoholism before she was ten. She had lived with me for a decade, and with an auntie since. When she was born I had a vision of Jilly, and knew her aloneness would make her a Watcher, and that one day she would lead others to the high places of earth where they could see clearly. I trusted that vision. “Go. Take a break, Jilly. I need to gather my thoughts,” I told her. I must have sounded a bit abrupt. Her feelings played across her face like winter skies. How difficult not to soothe, not to say more to ease her pain. She went quietly off and wandered out into the sunshine. I smiled again to myself. She knows from which direction her strength comes.

For years after my journey I forgot this part of First Man’s story. Then one day I witnessed a tornado.  It hovered a moment, placing its pointed toe on the earth, and then flew off again to the north. It had looked like a great being, and then I remembered the spiral-that gathering at the base, that wide, whirling, opening at the top, and all things moving up the spiral. I think First Man must have sent that tornado to remind me.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Indian Country, Short Fiction, The Education Crises | Tagged , , | Comments (0)