Jumping (32 page)

I'm dumbfounded into silence once again. Leonid says, “As Norwenna said, this is what a string of lives looks like in our cohort. It's a lot to try to heal from, a lot of people to be healed. That's why we did what we did today. And what you did today has reversed that string of lives for us. I wish you could understand the significance of that.” He gives my shoulder a little shake, smiling at me again.

Norwenna squeezes my hand. “I needed it, Miles. You know that. Thanks for helping provide it.”

“Where's Ethelred?” I ask, suddenly remembering this was Ethelred's battle, too.

“He'll meet us back at the castle. He lost sons in this battle, you know, so he always gets a little melancholy. He had to do his own healing around that. He knew this was yours to do, or not. He didn't want to influence it one way or the other. Your choice, always.”

Norwenna says, “You know, this battle was in a particular time, a time before rules of warfare emerged. Rules came with Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, later. This battle reminded me how important the rules are. They provided the first formal recognition of the difference between soldiers and civilians—women and children and older persons—helping to ensure terrible killings like we saw today couldn't happen again. They provided a space for justice and fairness within the bloodshed.” She pauses to look at me. “And I fought them! I didn't want any reason not to kill.”

We look at each other, holding each other's hands, forgiving each other.

Leonid nods his head towards the castle, and we get up from our spot under the tree. I dust off the seat of my pants, feeling stiff and bone weary. The light has almost faded from the sky, and I see our rising has startled a large flock of ravens into rising up from the field in front of us, where the battle was. The ravens head into the woods, and I remember that ravens were regular battle field scavengers, to the degree that myths grew up around their being the bringers of death, not just the scavengers of it. I shake my head at that, thinking about how often we've shifted blame to animals and other aspects of nature for anything bad that happens, rather than see ourselves as the cause.

As we walk, I can see by the soft glow over the far hill to the east that a moon will be rising soon. “Isn't this where we were just a short while ago,” I think, “walking with Ethelred across this field in the moonlight?”

Leonid, who has heard my thought, says, “And it's still beautiful, isn't it? The field.”

“Yes, it is,” I agree, “but I wouldn't want to return to those woods.”

“Neither would I,” Leonid says. “And now you don't ever have to. None of us do. Thank you.”

“Stop it, now, or you'll make me cry again,” I say wearily. “Thank you.”

“We've helped a lot of people today,” Leonid says, thoughtfully.

We walk back across the field, through the knee-high grass, back to the castle, and I think of this thing between us, this thing that is “a bond stronger than life.” I sigh. I had had no idea.

Ethelred is waiting for us at the castle, at the small outside door that we exited by, just the other side of the animal pens. He gives me the same kind of bear hug he greeted the others with, and I have the breath crushed out of me while I feel my feet leave the ground. It's not altogether unpleasant. We go back up the winding stairs and into Ethelred's large room, where Keilor is sitting by the fire and a feast waits by candlelight. There's a tart red wine, good bread, plain roasted meat with a few roasted vegetables. We fall to it, surprising ourselves with our hunger.

The food tastes wonderful. Rosemary and fennel and onion flavor the meat and vegetables. I still get pleasure from sitting in a castle, at night, with a king, savoring a meal.

At the end of the meal, we talk about my return to my life. The rest of them are going back to their between-lives pursuits. They tell me I will fall asleep here and awaken back at the edge of the Void, in my world. I wonder about my life back there and how it will change because of what I know now.

“It will come to you. You will know what to do,” Leonid says. “You have your place back there, your work, your life. You did not come to the Void searching for those things. You came to deepen your own understanding through the lifting of the negativity that has haunted you.” He smiles at me. “You would never have been a war protester without these wars to protest. You now have a real compassion you didn't have. Your heart is different now.”

The Void was calling to me for a long time, and I resisted. I see why.

Leonid just smiles at that. “You are a story teller and a keeper of stories. You've always kept the stories that do the most healing. Keep teaching, Miles. Keep speaking out. And keep your students reading their stories out loud! No matter how much they object!” Leonid laughs.

“You've done a good job. Now you can relax a little. Deep down, you can believe you are a good man, worthy of anything. Or anyone.” He smiles mischievously at this. I blush, thinking of Babe, despite trying to hide it from Leonid, who knows all.

As I prepare to sleep on the low straw berth up against the wall, near the fire, Ethelred, Leonid, Norwenna, and Keilor come to say good bye. I get another bear hug from Ethelred—a long one. When Ethelred puts me back down on the ground, I can see the gleam of tears in his eyes.

“You helped my sons today, you know,” he says. “They've gone Home, to be with their mother.” He looks at me.

He brings tears to my eyes.

“We released all today that was holding us back from wholeness of spirit—guilt, shame, regret. We let down our borders and defenses and made ourselves vulnerable to the scene from our heart's perspective. We won't kill in these ways again.” He, a king, stands and moves into a deep bow to me. Before I can stand, he has moved back into the shadow. “Until next time!” he says as he goes.

Leonid steps out of the shadows. I stand, and as we hug, I realize Leonid is no longer a mutant. He is no longer deformed. He's almost eye-to-eye with me now. His body is straight and strong, his teeth are restored, he shines with good health and well-being. I have to laugh.

“You're yourself again, you handsome devil!”

We both laugh and hug again. Leonid says, “You'll never know all the ways you've helped. We never do.”

“Does it always take such an ordeal to heal?” I'm thinking of the dark, dark space I went after the battle.

“No. It's only the resistance to look at it that makes it hard.”

“I feel scoured clean by it.” I take his hands in mine. “Thank you for guiding it.” We hug one last time. As he walks away, I declare, “And you are a handsome devil!”

He laughs as he moves back into the shadows.

Norwenna steps forward and takes my hands. I grip her hands and smile at her.

“We were in lots of fighting lives together,” she says, “laying waste to everything around us, known for it, even proud of it.” She pauses, looking at me. “I found it harder to leave than you did. I didn't have that storytelling thing that you do.” She smiles. “Even back then, you used to be the one who wove the battle stories together at night, around the fire. I look back on the singing and dancing and storytelling around the fire and wonder if that was us at our best.” She looks back at me. “Even then, you had more than just fighting energy.

“I never felt I had any other skill. For the longest time, war was all I knew to do, so I kept going back to it, thinking I could heal it from within. But I hadn't built the resources to do that. I see that now. I can see that being a woman for a few lives builds a wealth of resources.”

She smiles sadly at me. “A woman wouldn't do what we did on that battlefield. And she'd know why, because she knows what she values.” She pauses to stare into my eyes.

“I just think I need to consider the woman's perspective for a while.” She laughs.

She stands and we hug. As she walks away, she turns to blow me a kiss with both hands, a very womanly thing to do. “You're getting better at the woman stuff!” I call after her. She laughs and waves over her shoulder and moves off into the shadows.

I'm too keyed up to sleep, so I'm glad to see Keilor come and sit on the edge of the berth with me. I want to hear what the day was like for him.

“Tell me what you did today,” I say. “I didn't see you, but I felt you around.”

“Yes, that would be right,” he says, “because I wasn't there to be seen.” He smiles at me. “I dissipated my physical form into pure energy. I did this to provide protection, direction, and guidance to all of us who were there trying to heal that battlefield. As energy, I could see where I was needed the most.

“You remember my energy holds steady and constant. It does not waver. When I bring my energy into a space, like this battlefield, it can re-align all the positive energy that's there. It will then follow the highest intent present. And we had of course set the intent to heal. The energy of the trees, the rocks, the water, the wind, the animals, can all be called on, as well as the other natural forces, the ancestors, galactic forces, light beings, and so forth. All the forces indigenous peoples have always called on.” He smiles.

I stand to hug him, but he stands and takes my hands in both of his instead. Then he drops to one knee and places his forehead on our joined hands. After a moment, he looks up and smiles. “This is how we do it where I'm from.”

I laugh, charmed and moved by his gesture. Then I drop to one knee, too, and he laughs. We look at each other and then touch foreheads. I know I will never forget this moment. “Neither will I,” he says. We rise together, and he turns to walk into the shadows, looking back once, raising his hand. I raise mine, and he's gone.

I sit and remember all the horrors we saw this day. How often during the day I believed “I can't,” or “It's more than I can bear,” or “I don't want to do this!” How I was weakened by horror and shame and self-loathing. I was never sure I wanted to, or could, go on. Through it all, Keilor's energy remained constant.

As I lay down to sleep, covering myself with a rough blanket, I watch the coals of the fire glow. I feel a greater peace than I've known before, because I know now who is in the world with me, working for the good. I think of home and Babe and fall sound asleep.

T
HE MORNING OF
M
ILES
and Babe's jump, I sit at the Void, in the grass, thinking about what I just witnessed.

Why am I around so much jumping? Duncan Robert. Babe and Miles. Our mom, they say. And my brother, even if he didn't jump into the Void. I can't help but feel destiny pushing me.

I look at the waving grass, the wind bending it to the Void. Tribal lore tells of the people the Void has caught over the years. There weren't that many—a young man who felt called to jump as part of his vision quest, another young man who was said to have jumped from a broken heart, a woman who dreamed it first, and a few others. Who knows how many, or even if any of the stories are true? After all it's all oral history, as they say. Still, the stories of those individual jumps have created a master story to describe the purpose and meaning of the Void, if I could just put it together. Then maybe I could understand it.

All those jumpers made it a place of jumping. But it was there before them. It had its own story to start with. What was it? I know all of this jumping has triggered my own buried stories, and I'm uneasy with it.

Am I a jumper, too? I have to laugh. I don't even know if I'm an Indian! I've hardly thought of myself that way, except for my connection to Granny. Is blood the only determiner, or are we Indian because we live with one, or because we participate in some Indian practices, like eating frybread or going to pow-wows? Would we be Indian if we didn't do those things? Does it matter how a person feels about it? Could we opt out of it? Or maybe we are all part-time Indians, like Sherman Alexie says. We have the blood, whether or not we have much else.

Another Indian, John Trudell, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, is one of my heroes, too. He said he felt as if he had been knocked unconscious when he was born and has been trying to gain consciousness ever since. That's exactly how I feel. I study our history, but it doesn't give me answers.

Wounded Knee, John Trudell, Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement, these are the stories I collect, to see if I can build an understanding of myself out of them.

We're a seriously oppressed people, generally dirt poor, with high rates of alcoholism and suicide. No one expects much of us, and generally, we live up to that. Add to that my own family stories—not knowing my parents, losing my brother, rumors of my mother's jump—and where does that leave me? Nowhere to go but the Void? How do I build my own story?

I think about Granny. She's the only person I know who built her own story. You never can forget Granny is Navajo because she still dresses in the traditional Navaho way—long gathered skirt, stopping just past the tops of her knee-high moccasins, blue work shirt loose over her skirt, buttoned up all the way and cinched with a sash at her waist, purple shawl. Silver jewelry, when she dresses up. Long gray hair in the trademark Navajo double bun, every day of her life, since she reached puberty.

She's unlike anyone else I know. She's got that fierce, frowning hawk visage and is all business. She acts on and speaks her truth when she has a mind to, to anyone, anywhere, any time. She's fearless, which makes her seem powerful and dangerous. She was always larger than life to me and Jimmy Lynn. There is no doubt that she's an Indian.

I look up, gauging the sun's progress and stand up stiffly, realizing the sun is now much lower in the sky. I laugh at what being near the Void always does to time, brushing off my jeans and walking home through the field between Granny's bungalow and the Void.

At home, I watch Granny now, as she moves in the kitchen, wondering what she knows of all that's happened at the Void. I'm starving and I'm home in time for dinner, not saying anything about what I've seen. We eat bowls of green chili stew from the big pot at the back of the woodburning stove, with her home-made tortillas, grilled right on top of the stove. As usual, we don't talk, but it's a companionable silence.