The Purification Ceremony (32 page)

    Cantrell squinted in thought, followed immediately by a look of pure exultation. “Then he’s gonna go north toward the next finger! At Griff and then Nelson!”

    Cantrell took off again, quickly finding the deep trough of a path we’d all tramped down from Kurant’s stand to Griff’s earlier that morning. I tried my best to stay with him as he poured downhill toward the swale that separated the two razor-backed ridges, but Cantrell was mad with adrenaline, sure that he was a step ahead of Ryan. By the time we reached the bottom, he was more than a hundred yards ahead of me, a ghost of a figure in the sleet and the wet snow falling. And then gone.

    The pain in my hand and forearm had gotten worse. I suppose I had not physically or mentally recovered yet from my ordeals in the cave and with the wolf pack. I stopped, doubled over, trying to catch my breath.

    I reached for the radio to warn Griff of what was coming and then cursed; the radio was back there in the snow below Kurant’s stand. Cantrell’s carefully thought out funnel hunt was dissolving into exactly the chaotic scene he’d hoped to avoid.

    I had taken only two steps down the trail Cantrell had followed when a blip of information registered in my peripheral vision. The faint shadow of a track heading not northwest toward Griff, but true north. Toward Sheila.

    “Cantrell!” I screamed. “Cantrell!”

    But the wind had picked up, and with it the suffocating din of pelting snow and sleet. He would not have heard me at eighty yards, much less the two or three hundred that now separated us.

    I turned, a growing knot pressing in my stomach. We’d mistaken Ryan’s ultimate goal. He didn’t want Cantrell to die more than the rest of us. He wanted the outfitter to feel the same absolute sucking vacuum of emotion he’d endured witnessing Lizzy’s last breath. He didn’t just want Cantrell to die. He wanted Cantrell to suffer before he died.

    And then I was running again, true north, my stride matching the long, loping, purposeful gait echoed in the snow before me. For an instant I saw myself racing down the front lawn of my parents’ home toward the gazebo and the prone figure of my mother.

    Tears flowed down my cheeks and the knot moved from my stomach to my throat as I babbled, “Don’t do it, Ryan. She’s innocent. Please don’t do it!”

    By the time I made it around the tip of the third finger, I was grasping at hope, telling myself that somehow Sheila would see Ryan first, that any moment now gunfire would break the evil spell that embraced these woods. I broke away from Ryan’s track halfway across the brief dip between the third and fourth fingers and cut diagonally at Sheila’s stand. If he held to the manner of approach he’d used with Theresa and Kurant, Ryan would circle Sheila and come at her from the north.

    I might have time.

    The snow on the south face of Sheila’s razor-back was deep and dense with moisture. I flailed my way up the slope, frantically scanning between the trees for the open hardwood glen in which we’d placed her stand before dawn.

    I couldn’t find it. I was on top now, but still surrounded by thick softwoods. And then it dawned on me: I’d misjudged my position by a good twenty degrees; I was west of Sheila by at least two hundred yards. I held the stock of the Whelan before me like a battering ram and snapped dead branches and snow-laden limbs out of my way in a pell-mell rush east.

    Ryan must have heard me coming. For as I broke from the fir trees his legs and arms were already spinning in space, gyrating to keep his body vertical as he dropped the twenty feet from the metal pegs we’d screwed into Sheila’s tree. Her body swung a few feet below the base of the portable tree stand, supported and bowed by the nylonwebbing safety strap Cantrell had insisted she lash around her waist. A cedar arrow jutted from her rib cage.

    I slid to one knee as Ryan landed, casting the Whelan to my shoulder, trying to find his chest in the peep sight as he struggled for footing. He had the bow in one hand and a knife in the other. He’d been trying to cut her down when I appeared.

    Ryan’s head came up then and he looked right at me, comprehension followed by disbelief, followed in turn by a screwing of his gaze into a penetrating concentration. And in that instant, that instant when I should have squeezed the trigger, I felt my heart seize and I was back in the cave with him, overwhelmed by sorrow and the primitive chants and the hallucinogenic smoke. I saw Lizzy Ryan die. I saw my mother worry the hem of her nightgown on the last morning of her life.

    Both images melted into a shifting kaleidoscope of refracting and reflecting images: my mother dead on the grass near the gazebo, Lizzy plucking wet clothes from a wicker basket.

    “No!” I shouted, understanding suddenly that he’d used his power over me to cause the moment of hesitation. But that was all he needed. Ryan dove sideways and rolled toward the bank even as I swung with him shotgun-style, fired, pumped the action and fired again.

    “I missed him,” I said numbly. “I had a clear sight picture, Griff, and I missed him… twice.”

    Griff had his arms around me. Cantrell knelt below the snow-coated body of his wife, which swung in the gusty wind like a weather vane. He had not uttered a sound since his arrival in the clearing. He had gone vacant, dropped to his knees and stared up at Sheila with the resigned look of the doomed.

    Phil was climbing up the pegs to get her down. Arnie was helping. Kurant was off at the edge of the clearing. After he’d vomited, he’d gotten out his camera and was taking photos.

    Theresa would come no closer than the edge of the clearing. As if drawing near would make her susceptible to Sheila’s fate. She kept her back turned to us, holding tight to Nelson.

    “You said she was dead when you got here,” Griff soothed. “There was nothing you could do.”

    I pushed back out of his grasp, seeing not Griff through my tears but a blurred, white-haired man. “I’m always late, aren’t I? Aren’t I?”

    “I don’t know, Little Crow,” Griff said, confused. “Are you?”

    “You know I am!” I cried. He reached for me, but I swung my arms violently as if to strike him and Sheila and everything churning in my mind. My shoulders became heavy and I wanted more than anything to lie down in the snow and sleep forever. But overriding it all was the desperate need to explain to Cantrell why I’d been unable to save his wife.

    I knelt next to the outfitter. Phil had swung her body around the side of the tree. Arnie was reaching for her. Cantrell still stared upward, unseeing.

    “Mike, I… I tried to get to her, but I got lost.”

    He gave no indication he’d heard me and I said it again.

    He turned his head and looked through me. He spoke in a flat, terrible voice. “I been losing myself since the day I helped murder Lizzy Ryan. Only thing that kept me from disappearing from this world was Sheila. Lost? It’s all lost now. All lost.”

    Arnie had hold of the safety strap above Sheila’s waist. Griff waited below with his arms raised. Phil severed the line at the tree trunk and she settled into Griff’s arms and then into the snow. Cantrell went to her, took off his glove and brushed the slush from her cheeks. Whatever was left of him vanished in that simple gesture.

    It took us almost three hours to get Sheila’s body back to the lodge. I wish I could tell you what went through my mind during all that time, but I can’t recall any of it, only that we all seemed to be pushing on through an infinite darkness because there was nothing else we could do. We tried to put Sheila in the icehouse with the others, but Cantrell had pushed us aside and lifted her and taken her to their bed in his cabin. He put her under the blankets and sat by her side holding her hand, his head bowed. Arnie slipped the pistol from Cantrell’s holster without the outfitter noticing and we left him alone with her.

    Theresa had managed the hike back in a stoic silence. But when we were at last in the great room of the lodge and had brought Earl and Lenore down and told them all that had happened, she broke down. “So now we wait to die, eh? All of us? We’ve tried everything and he just keeps coming. That’s what’s going to happen. He’s just going to keep coming.”

    “Theresa,” Nelson said, walking toward her. “Enough.” She swung her beefy arm at him and caught him square on the jaw. “It’s not enough. Not for him! He can come in here and kill Butch and we all shoot at him and no one hits him. We can lay traps for him and he knows what we’re doing before we do. He’s inside us. Inside me with that Indian voodoo. I feel it!”

    She pointed at me. “You know it’s true. You said he can do things you don’t understand.”

    I nodded, that sleepy, heavy sensation hovering around me again. “It’s true.”

    “Then we’re gonna die, all of us, before the plane comes back.”

    “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. The last shred of certainty I’d clung to had evaporated with Sheila’s death. I no longer saw the world in the same way and I was groping desperately for purchase.

    “Three days,” Lenore said hopefully. “We can make it.”

    “Can we?” Theresa asked. “Can we really?” She sank into the sofa and sobbed.

    I stood and walked by the hollow men that had once been Griff and Kurant. “I’m going to my cabin.”

    Outside, the bellies of the clouds roiled in shades of blue and steel gray, spitting out half-dollar-sized flakes as the wind shifted to the north again and the temperature fell. The ice at the lakeshore had buckled and heaved in the past two days, only to refreeze into threatening pale blocks like tombstones. I climbed out onto the frozen cemetery, moving toward the black line where open water still defied winter’s advance. I stopped five yards from the ebony mirror and looked into it, seeing the driving snow reflected on the surface, now mutating into relentless memories: Ryan blowing the Datura smoke into my lungs, Cantrell imploding at the touch of his dead wife’s skin, my own fingers touching my mother’s chill, damp cheeks.

    I balked at that image, an image I’d buried deeper than any other. But it would not stay buried. There was no escape from it now. In the end, what other choice did I have than to face who I’d been? In the end, what was there to follow but the fleeting mental images of me, of my children, of my husband, of Mitchell, of my father, of Katherine? I have come to believe, like my Micmac and Penobscot ancestors, that we live more than the sum of the present moments in this visible world; we exist within layers of reincarnated, reinvented memories that shape-change and prod us across invisible boundaries into the many worlds of the mind. Until we gather unto us the Power to navigate there with confidence, we are lost and alone, savages in a dark forest.

    As it was with Pawlett, I cannot tell you exactly how my mother died. My father told the police that he had been working in his office in the basement that morning, going over a billing problem with his surgical practice; that he had left Katherine sleeping in her bedroom; that when he had gone to check in on her, he had found her gone. He had flown through the house calling for her. It wasn’t until he noticed that the case to her favorite bamboo fly rod lay open and empty on the kitchen table that he had checked the pond.

    I was taking a chemistry final. And by the time the principal had found me and driven me home, Katherine’s body was almost dry. My father had tried to get between me and her. I looked into his eyes and saw a window into a world that frightened me to my core. He was a stranger. I pushed him aside and went to the bank of the pond and knelt next to her. Her color had faded; the rose-and-speckled hue of the rainbow trout had gone to plastic. I touched her cheeks, stunned to find her so cold and damp. I held her and cried until my father came and tried to pull me away. I stood and whispered in as vicious a tone as I could manage, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t ever touch me again, you sick, fanatical bastard.”

    I knew what he had done and I hated him for it with every ounce of my being.

    When they had taken her body away at last, I sat in the glider in the gazebo and watched the surface of the pond mirror the lime, immature leaves of the birch trees blooming. A detective from the sheriffs department, a pudgy man with an unruly mustache and garlic breath, came over and asked me if it made sense. Would my mother have gone to her pond in her nightgown to fly-fish? Would she have fallen and drowned as my father had theorized?

    I glanced back at my father, who was standing on the hill talking to another detective. I despised the very sight of him.

    But for reasons I still do not fully fathom, I simply nodded and said, “My mother had been terribly sick for years, Detective. I don’t think she even knew where she was the last six or seven months. The only thing she seemed to remember at all was fly-fishing.”

    I kept appearances up, played the dutiful daughter during the wake and the funeral, but I rebuffed my father’s efforts to get me to talk. When it was done and she was buried, I told him that I’d be leaving for Boston. I would not attend my graduation ceremonies. He tried to contact me several times, but I never responded. I buried my past behind me, never allowing myself to speculate what might have happened that morning. Katherine was dead, and that part of my life was dead, too.

    But now, shivering in the storm by the shore of Metcalfe’s lake, I could not stop myself from gathering the shards of that awful day and, together with the suspect clay of my imagination, reassembling them into an explainable vessel of meaning.

    The final days of May are a glorious time in Maine. The lilacs and crab apples have bloomed, ripened and begun to fall in the southern breezes, tinting the air with the sweet perfume of promise. The rivers have settled after the engorgement of winter’s runoff and the nymphs have begun to hatch; the world above the water flutters with the gossamer wings of mayflies in their mating dances, diving and spiraling before sacrificing themselves on the river’s surface to sate the trout’s hunger. These days were Katherine’s favorites.