The Purification Ceremony (26 page)

    He retreated after seeing that I had made several great inhalations of the smoke. He returned to his singing, which now seemed to hang around me like a warm blanket. I delighted in his voice. I focused on him and on the plumed arrows he waved about him as if he were sweeping the air. The plumes left contrails of glittering red and yellow floating in the space between us.

    The cave wall beyond him sparkled and pulsated, and my ears rang and I felt a heaviness at the base of my skull that quickly spread down my spine and up over the top of my head, pooling like a hot, comforting liquid behind my eyes. My head seemed to separate from my body and expand and become its own distinct being, capable of hearing and touching and seeing everything. The pattern of the green lichen on the walls of the cave came alive, swelled and ebbed with each of my breaths, mutating into a thousand distinct designs.

    I stared at the wall for what seemed an eternity; and then I was aware of him again. His eyes were closed, he rocked back and forth and he was still singing, but it was different from what I had heard before. His voice, passionate and longing, bounced off the cavern walls and came deep inside me and mixed with the drugs to stir brilliant, hallucinatory colors in my mind. My eyelids grew heavy and I shut them, to find myself swimming in rivers of ruby and pearl and emerald.

    All went to blackness suddenly and I was very afraid. Then, as if in a night sky, a first star appeared from behind windblown clouds. The star shimmered and turned red and grew. I went into the star, blinded by a crimson light that settled into a woodland landscape at dawn. I was in snow, snow that drifted in a stiff wind. And there I saw myself impaled upside down on the branches of a massive pine tree, its roots descending far below the snow and the earth, its limbs rising impossibly high into the sky. I stared at myself, unbelieving. My lips moved, but I heard no words.

    There was the night and the clouds again and another star, which darted about the sky and became a bird of a thousand colors. The bird hovered in the night sky and sang a lullaby.

    The bird arched high into the blackness, exploded and became a huge circular painting composed of many colored yarns and bird feathers. Women with electric azure hair gave birth in the painting. Men fished with boys on an emerald stream. Dogs howled at the moon. At the center of the painting a crow held a mirrorlike orb in its beak, and for a split second the faces of my children appeared in the orb, calling to me. I wanted desperately to hold the orb, to talk with them, when in the upper right-hand corner a deer with flaming fur took a step. I tried to stay focused on the orb and Emily and Patrick and the crow, but the deer compelled me to follow and I did, surprised that the deer was a fawn going to the emerald stream to drink. I entered the stream alongside the fawn. The river was not water, but many iridescent streams of odors I’d long forgotten — the wet leaves that used to blow up alongside my mother’s gazebo in October, my father’s bay-leaf aftershave, Mitchell’s Pall Malls, the oven in our kitchen, the hospital smell that seemed to linger in the air near Katherine in her last years.

    That last scent was like a powerful current that bore unceasingly at my legs until they gave way and I slipped under the surface of the river of odors into a blackness. I turned and swirled in the blackness until a silver bubble came at me.

    I grasped the bubble and looked into it, shocked to see the front hall of our home outside Bangor and a muchyounger version of myself walking in wool socks on the wood floors, feeling the uneven surface through the bottoms of my feet, seeing the photographs of us all on the wall. Mitchell hoeing the garden. Katherine and me on a fishing trip to Labrador. My father with one of his biggest deer. Wedding pictures. Baby photos. A family. A lifetime.

    I watched myself turn into my father’s office and Katherine was sitting there on his lap in her flannel nightgown, and my father asked me to shut the door. It was February inside the bubble, my senior year in high school. I knew what my father was about to say even before he said it, and I didn’t want to hear those words repeated. I had never wanted to hear those words. But the things occurring within the bubble were my past, beyond my control.

    Now Katherine was looking away from me into the distance.

    And my father was saying, “Your mother doesn’t want to go blank. She doesn’t want to fade to a nothingness that haunts us. She knows that if she lived long ago, the forest would treat her as it would any enfeebled animal and end her life long before her mind turned completely dark. She wants us to be the forest for her, Diana. She wants us to help her die while she can still remember us.”

    I watched my younger self watch Katherine, unbelieving. After she’d resigned from her Senate seat, I had prepared myself for everything — for the loss of her mind, for her slow, lingering descent — but not this.

    “I won’t let you!” I cried. “I don’t care what Mitchell or what the old ones might say; you can’t do this.” “It’s what she wants,” my father replied.

    “How do you know what she wants?” I screamed. “She can’t tell you where the mailbox is half the time.”

    Katherine reached for me and said, “I want this, Little Crow.”

    But I pulled away, sobbing, “No, you don’t. He’s filled your head and my head with all this stuff about nature and his ancestors and how no one sees the world whole anymore except us. You don’t understand what he wants to do.”

    “Yes, I do,” she said.

    But I wouldn’t listen to her. I turned on my father.

    “Daddy, I know you think of yourself as a modern Puoin or something. But put Mitchell aside for one second. You’re a medical doctor. You took an oath. You can’t kill her or help her kill herself. They’ll take your practice away. It will be the end of you.”

    My father’s face clouded and now he was yelling at me. “I took a far more important oath to her when I married her. Little Crow, you’ve got to understand…”

    “No, I don’t! And I’m not your Little Crow anymore. I’m Diana Jackman. And she’s my mother. And if you do this I’ll tell the police. I’ll have you thrown in jail for murder!”

    I was crying now in the dark river of the hallucination and my hands were crushing the bubble, which developed a waist like an hourglass. I was inside the bottom bubble suddenly, squished inside and frightened. I beat against the sides, but no one heard me. Then a face appeared outside, Mitchell’s face.

    He talked to me about the forest and the shape-changers and the need to cloak myself in Power lest I be harmed. His voice faded and I became aware that the bottom of the bubble was pressing me upward through the neck toward the upper bubble and I screamed, feeling the pressure, not in my head, but in my chest, around my heart. The pressure became excruciating, much, much worse than the racking hour and twenty minutes I had spent in transition during Patrick’s birth. My ribs were on the verge of cracking when I burst into the top bubble, which exploded and left me floating again in the darkness of the river.

    I was no longer feeling myself as I floated. That is to say, I was still myself, but someone else, too. A second heart beat within me, a second set of lungs took breaths, and I saw visions of things I knew were memory, but not from my experience.

    I saw a small house filled with primitive Mexican art: sculptures of men holding bows and huge yarn paintings like the one I had already seen and entered in my hallucination.

    I was looking for someone, walking fast through a bedroom with white furniture and then a sewing room and then a room with a great many deer heads on the wall. The rooms were all empty. And then I heard noises outside at the rear of the house.

    I walked through a kitchen and opened the door to see a policeman leading two men away from me toward a cruiser. Another policeman approached with this look on his face that told me I was about to be cast to the winds.

    My entire body went vacant. I followed the officer toward two ambulance men working with their backs to me. I passed them and focused on the face of the woman in the killer’s photograph. She was lying on her back in curled brown leaves. Tiny bubbles of blood shone at her lips. Her eyes swept lazily from the men working over her to the sky and then to me.

    Suddenly I was in the darkness again and nearly bent in two, tearing at my scalp to ward off the scorch of disbelief and abandonment and terror writhing within me. I seemed to be propelled forward through the darkness now. Only the darkness had become the first light of day over a vast desert plain that gave way to charcoal mountains. I touched down on the plain in a grove of purple-leafed plants and strange lime-green cacti, the arms of which looked like thorned antlers. One plant before me had no thorns and I sat on it, legs crossed, and I noticed I was naked, but had no definable features as man or woman. Just blank skin.

    The sun glowed over the mountain peaks, throwing shadows of the cacti across the desert landscape before me. A huge deer appeared in the sky and floated to earth, only to run zigzag through the cacti. Pale blue flowers bloomed in each of his tracks. And then I was holding the leaves of the plant on which I sat. I squeezed the leaves and they oozed black blood into my palms, through my fingers, gelling in the dust at my feet. In the distance a wolf came down out of the mountains.

    I raised the bloody leaves in the wolf’s direction, and an indescribable rage pouring from the black blood dripped onto my stomach and burned its way inward. It bore into my veins, hot, tearing at whatever was left of me, and I screamed and screamed a promise of vengeance.

    My eyes snapped open and I heard horrible, choking cries. The killer still sat before the drum, body convulsing, drenched in sweat, nostrils flared, his eyes half rolled up in his head. My last thought before I passed out was that I was his mirror image.

    I believe the entire hallucinatory experience, from the time he blew the smoke into my face to the time I awoke to find a fire burning in the ring, encompassed five hours.

    Oddly, I did not feel lethargic or weakened by the drugs, but my senses were dulled, as if the stimulus of the visionary world had dampened the effect of reality.

    He was piling his gear near the tunnel entrance.

    “I’m thirsty,” I croaked.

    Wordlessly he took up the gourd next to the fire ring and held it to my lips. He would not look me in the eye.

    When I’d finished, I asked, “You’re leaving now?”

    “The end is near,” he announced as he stood.

    “I must finish the ceremony before the blackness comes to take me as it did your mother.”

    I froze for an instant, understanding that somehow we’d passed inside each other in the bubble. We had shared shapes, and now he dimly knew the clouds on the night sky of my heart as I knew his.

    “Why here?” I demanded, knowing that if he meant to finish the ceremony, he meant to finish me, too. “You still haven’t told me why you had to do this here.”

    He took me in with a blank, unmoving stare. “In August, at the time when Tao Jreeku, Father Sun, was at his most powerful, a messenger came to me in a vision, a messenger with hair like fire. He said her killer was unrepentant for his transgressions. He said he had gone far north into the forests where no one knew of his evil deeds and was hunting again. I asked Tatewari and Kauyumari if what the messenger said was true, and they said it was and this was why the hunting everywhere was so poor. Wolf came to me later. Wolf told me I had to restore the balance, to avenge. I will kill the killer and all who follow him to purify the hunt.”

    “There’s no killer here,” I said. “No one except you.” He snorted. “You are blind. He’s been here a very long time. I have scented him since my first day in the forest. I have felt his terror grow as I have hunted his brothers. He knows I am coming to inflict on him what he inflicted on me.”

    “But why the rest of us?”

    “You are part of him and by being part of him, you further defile the hunt. I will sacrifice you all.”

    He said no more, just turned away.

    I called after him: “Who did this to you? Who’s the woman in the picture?!”

    “Silence!” he bellowed, spinning in his tracks to glare at me. “He will suffer! They all will suffer!”

    I drew back from the explosion. I dared not say another word for fear he would finally turn on me. He panted and coughed and tore at his hair again and then went through the circular dance that had soothed him earlier. When he was composed, he bundled up his gear inside several of the deer skins. He added wood to the fire, then laid strips of venison on metal skewers and thrust them into the flames. He fed them to me rolled in a tortilla he heated on a rock. He checked my restraints, got into a pair of chest waders, then disappeared out the tunnel into the night. Over the course of two hours he returned repeatedly to take away more bundles. Ice caked his beard. The skin on his face and hands turned scarlet from the cold, but he seemed not to notice.

    Each time he left, I tried to free myself from the lashes around my wrists. The knots never gave an inch and I fell into a deep despair, sure now that I would never hold Patrick or Emily again, that I would die at the hands of a madman. I felt the need to pray. I fumbled around in my head, wondering whom or what to pray to, and realized sadly that because Kevin and I had basically lived the agnostic life, I had only the spiritual teachings of my childhood to fall back on.

    I thought about the stories I’d heard Mitchell tell so many times, about men and women who camped on lakeshores deep in the forest and had encounters with Power. Nothing I could remember had prepared me for this. Those had just been stories. I was inside a story of Power now and had no guide to lead me.

    In desperation I grasped at one of the most cheerful memories I have: when I was seven, we all went on a picnic in early May to a beaver pond far out in the woods. Beaver ponds are strong places, Mitchell always said. He took water from the pond in a birch bark bowl and stared at the reflection. My mother held me in her arms, and she and my father sang a song to the world waking up from winter.