Jumping (19 page)

“Do you like yourselves around it? And each other?” They look at me, bemused.

“Let me show you what I mean. How many of you have visited the Grand Canyon?” Two people raise their hands—Kevin and Carrie Jean.

“How did you feel about it?” I ask.

“I was blown away,” Kevin says. “I've never forgotten it. We spent the night at the bottom, and the stars were so close, they felt inhabited. I've never seen them that way again.”

“I was awe-struck, too,” Carrie Jean says. “And so was my brother. We felt big and small, and we wanted to live there forever. I think I was eight.” She laughs. “But it reminded me of home. Even though the government claims the land, the Native Americans there look after the Canyon. It's their sacred place, like the Void is for the Tribe.”

“Now, how many of you have been to Plymouth Rock?” I ask, knowing the answer. It's in every family's photo album around here.

All hands go up, and they all laugh. Despite its historic significance, the rock is small and nondescript. You'd miss it if you weren't looking for it. It tends to underwhelm its many visitors. The park it's in, Pilgrim Memorial State Park, is just off a busy highway in Plymouth, and the rock star's home up the way often receives more attention. But still, it commemorates something, which is why they go.

They hardly think of the rock as a monument anymore, and don't go any more unless they have to. Now they have a counterpoint to write from or at least think from, if they didn't already. They're re-anchored in themselves, their own experience. They're almost ready to write.

They're quiet for a few minutes.

“What makes a place sacred?” Kevin asks out of the quiet.

Nathan, who seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, says, “Maybe just what we were talking about. You'd let your kids play here. You could sleep here. You come here for private moments—for the peace it provides for thinking about the things important to you. You're more yourself here, your best self, than maybe anywhere else. You feel accepted. It's like a good friend.” He pauses a moment, looking toward the Void. I'm impressed by where his thoughts have taken him.

“Whatever might have happened here, in the past, the Void didn't do it. Maybe it witnessed it. But it didn't do it,” he finishes, a little defiantly. I wonder what Nathan knows about what might have happened in the past. No one else says anything for a moment. Then Carrie Jean speaks.

“We've all heard stories about Tribe people jumping, but no one is sure what did or didn't happen here. And of course the Void didn't do anything. It's a sacred place.” She looks troubled. “These stories are old. We may never know the truth.”

They've all brought their journals, which are a part of the requirements for the class—another twenty percent of their grade. These journals are writers' journals, not just any old
dear diary
, I've told them. They are a place to capture the workings of their imaginations.

This is why I agreed to come here with them—as a writer's exercise. By being this close and being able to actually look into the Void, they can imagine jumping if they want, or just note their feelings in being so close, what it evokes for them. I've told them I believe that this place has the power to set their imaginations free. And coming here to the Void with the intent to write legitimized their trip, sort of. At least it made my original discomfort manageable. I still don't know what my department would say about it, but I haven't told anyone there, or anywhere, either. No one except Babe knows.

I turn the timer on for twenty minutes, its familiar ticking their signal to begin. They write steadily.

For those moments that they write, I allow myself to feel good—about being here, about doing this. I see the stars twinkling beyond the group's soft lantern light, I feel the night wind move across my face. I feel the peace and renewal of being outside at night, with the night's small sounds and smells released with the day's heat. I find I'm grateful to be here and don't want to be anywhere else at this moment. I have to smile because that's how I usually feel around the Void. So I smile at the Void. I'm thinking of Babe's earlier comment, about knowing she's ready to jump, and I know I feel the same way. I'm at home with the idea, even looking forward to it.

The timer goes off, startling me and them. They've been absorbed in their writing. One by one, they read their stories aloud in the light of the lanterns and flashlights. There is silence between each story, until someone fills it with more reading. I don't choose who's next. They choose themselves, as usual. They've moved closer together, so they can hear each other better. Some wrap the extra blankets around themselves, feeling the chill of the late October night and maybe an internal chill from the stories. They are quieter than usual, without any side conversations, checking of phones, or the general restlessness I'm used to on their weekday night class after most of them have had a long day at work. They don't look at each other, either, staring ahead of them or glancing toward the Void.

Carrie Jean, surprisingly, goes first, something she's never done. The low light shadows the angles of her face and puts gleams in her long dark hair. She looks fiercely Tribal.

“I wrote about my twin brother, Jimmy Lynn, who jumped to his death from a twelve-story building two years ago, after he moved to the city alone to find work. I must have been looking for him here.

“We were both tall, like our mother. Made for horses, our Granny said. She kept our hair like she had our mother's, according to tradition, long and never cut. I was always caught between our tradition and your world. Your world has ‘way fewer rules! But I'm not the right color for your world, and I don't carry your culture in my blood. I think my brother felt the same way. Whose rules do we follow?

“We are Tribe people first, me and my brother, raised in the Tribal community. Does that make us Native American? I don't know. It's hard to know our culture nowadays, there's been so much intermarriage. So many comings and goings. Usually, I think of myself as a part-time Indian, like Sherman Alexie says. Do you know him? He's an Indian poet and filmmaker, and he's really funny. He comforts me. I don't know our heritage for sure. I think we're Algonquin and Sioux and Navajo, but I think there's some African slave and French Canadian in there, too, and maybe even some Irish. You tell me what to make of it,” she says, looking up at us. “Maybe it's no different for you.”

“We were raised by our Grandmother Noreha, our mother's mother, because our parents have been gone a long time. The story is that our mother killed herself, jumping to her death, some say into the Void, but our Granny has never said a word about it, and we never really wanted to ask. It was enough to know our mother was gone, that we didn't have her. People say our father fled right after that, never to be heard from again.

“I never knew either of them,” she says, “but that doesn't mean you can't miss them.

“My family was my brother and my grandmother. My brother killed himself. Now it's my grandmother.” There are tears on her cheeks.

“I'll tell one story about him, so you can see what he struggled with before he died.” She looks towards the Void as she talks, the light breeze moving through her hair.

“One morning, when we were thirteen, we were standing out on the road, waiting for the school bus. It's the same school bus you probably rode, but it picked us up first, so it was always really early, before the sun came up. We were half awake, never feeling we were even on our way to starting our day until we were on the bus, moving. Suddenly Jimmy Lynn points. I thought he'd seen a quail or wild turkey, so I casually look. What I saw was smoke coming out of the house across the road from the bus stop. Not a lot of smoke, but as the top edge of the sun cleared the horizon, we could suddenly see the little house was filled with smoke. That's all you could see at the windows, just thick white smoke.

“The bus pulled up right then—we hadn't even heard it come around the bend. Jimmy Lynn yelled to the bus driver to call the fire in, to the volunteer fire department. The driver, Meg Shirley, had a radio phone, and she was a volunteer fire fighter herself, so she knew what to do. Before Meg could stop him, Jimmy Lynn ran across the road and up onto the porch of the house.

“We knew who lived there—it was Henry Chepi and his wife Anna. They were at least in their eighties and pretty frail. I knew he was going to try to get them out. Meg yelled for him to get away from there and something about back draft. I ran over to stop him, while Meg did her best to keep the rest of the kids on the bus as she radioed the call.

“I heard the fire siren go off on top of the tiny general store at the cross roads a half mile back up the road, and I knew help would be here quick. Practically every adult is a volunteer, and no one ignores the siren. It might be their time of need someday, so they know to be available for everyone else's fire. Jimmy Lynn had his jacket off when I got up the porch and he was winding it around his hands. He said the front door was locked and too hot to touch. He was going to try to break a window.

“'They're in there!'” he said fiercely to me. I took my jacket off, too, scared but knowing we had to. We pounded on the windows, but they just wouldn't break. I've never seen anything like it. We know how easy old windows are to break.

“Firefighters started to arrive, pulling on fire jackets as they ran, grabbing the hose off the truck, running to connect it to the lone fire hydrant at the side of the road. Don Bannerly, the chief volunteer, yelled at us to get off the porch.

“His brother Sam came over, while pulling on his heavy gloves and fire coat, and said, ‘Give it up now. We'll take care of it. This is a fire that's been burning for a long time, Jimmy Lynn, prob'ly all night. The inside of that house is like an oven. You open that door and a whole lot of heat will come out of there, and it will be ignited into fire by the outside air. If you were standing in its path, you'd be one crispy critter right quick.’

“Jimmy Lynn looks up at him, and Sam says, ‘Those people are long gone. They've prob'ly been turned to ash by now. That's what happens with such intense heat for so long. But, Jimmy Lynn, they would prob'ly have been asleep while the fire did its slow burn. The smoke would have got them while they slept. Most likely they never would have noticed a thing.’”

“Jimmy Lynn and I moved back off the porch, out of their way, holding onto each other, which we hadn't done in a long time. Something was on his face that I couldn't read. The firemen took their axes to the door handle and then jumped back. The door exploded open, and heat and fire blew out of it, then subsided. Smoke kept billowing out, but the firemen went inside with hose and axes and shovels, testing the floor as they went. They broke out some of the windows, and more smoke came out. After a little while they came out and stood around in the yard talking. They were waiting for the ambulance. It would take what was left of the Chepis to the hospital, where the coroner was waiting.

“We could hear that they had found the couple not too far inside the front door, side by side on the floor. One of the men had touched one of the bodies lightly on the shoulder as it lay on the floor, and the whole body crumpled in on itself. They were just ashes to ashes now.

“We didn't get on the school bus that day. We went back to our Granny's house. At least I did. Jimmy Lynn took off for the woods and stayed out there until dark. When he came in, he didn't talk, and he stayed that way for a few days, not going to school, hiding in the woods. I left him alone, knowing from experience that was all you could do. Towards the end of the week, when I was in the little general store up the road, picking up some flour for my Granny's flat bread, Sam was in there. He saw me and came over and pulled me aside.

‘I tried to talk to your Granny,’ he said, ‘but she didn't get it. The old people always have their own version of things. So, I'll try tellin’ you, and maybe you can help your brother. I hear how he's hanging out in the woods all day, not going to school. I think he's suffering from what we call survivor's guilt. He wonders why those nice old people died, and he's still alive. He wonders why he couldn't save them, and if a better boy would have found a way. He's prob'ly thinking the same thing about his parents. They'd be here now, if it wasn't for him.'

“That stops me in my tracks. I look at Sam, not knowing how he knows, not knowing how to say thanks for giving me the key to my brother, for helping me understand myself. He just chucks my chin and says, ‘That's okay, Carrie Jean. I been there, too. Just go talk to him.’”

“So I got two things that day that my brother didn't get: a good man who's a role model and an understanding of what is and isn't our fault, couldn't be our fault. I got most of that in one look.

“I did talk to Jimmy Lynn, and I do think he understood about the survivor's guilt and got some comfort there. He started going back to school, but I always saw some kind of permanent lostness hanging over him that I couldn't chase away. It was with him the day he left to go to the city, six years later. He carried too many of his parents' choices and actions with him. I don't know why. Maybe it was that lack of a good male role model. I have Granny, who I still think is the strongest female role model you'll ever find. But whatever he had or didn't have, I loved him. You can see how the loss of Jimmy Lynn was a hard loss for me. Maybe I should have expected to find him again, here, tonight, at this place of jumping. I thank you.”

She stops and closes her journal, looking up at me. I give her a nod, and she nods back. She's already grateful to the Void, I think, whether she knows it or not. And this, I know for sure, is what the Void does. It produces your own truth for you, no matter how well you've hidden it.

I look to see who's next.

Kevin, the reader who quotes Dante's
Inferno
, is next. He smooths his short blonde hair with the hand that holds his journal and uses the other hand to tuck his neat black t-shirt into his creased jeans. His timing is perfect, and he instinctively moves us away from Carrie Jean's deeply personal and heartbreaking piece to something more universal. Kevin writes of the Void as though it contains nine rings of hell captured in the Earth. It's a story straight out of the
Inferno
, but he describes the rings in his own way, with rings for having no friends, the wrong clothes, or not fitting in. He tells about those who've jumped into the rings, like Dante's fortune tellers, out of a desire to belong. They end up having their heads on backwards because, by jumping, they've forfeited the right to have a future, so they can't look forward to anything. It's an ambitious story and I commend him for attempting it.