The Purification Ceremony (37 page)

    They looked at me, confused, as they should have been. I laughed and tousled their hair and told them that it would take me a long time to tell them all the stories, and then maybe, just maybe, they’d begin to understand.

    We stood there in silence for a long time after that; then Patrick and Emily wandered down by the riverbank to explore. I sat cross-legged among the graves and watched as a kingfisher launched from the top of a hemlock on the eastern shore. The bird bore down quickly on the shallows, angled its wings, then splashed into the water, surfacing almost immediately with a wriggling fish in its beak.

    Patrick yelled, “Mommy!” and held up a smooth white rock he’d discovered. Emily still cradled the nest in one hand while stirring the water with a stick. I asked myself whether that rock or the nest or the stick would enter their dreams, form a place in their minds as it would have in the children of my ancestors ten or twenty generations ago. There was no answer to that and I knew it. I could only hope they would find some place in their hearts for such things.

    As for me, the deer no longer runs in my dreams. Instead, my trips into the forest of my subconscious are marked by the expression on my father’s face that day when I rushed home to find Katherine dead on the bank of her casting pond.

    For so many years I had believed his expression was one of satisfaction, that he had taken his vision of the world to its logical conclusion and that he rejoiced in the strength of his faith. But leaving Ryan’s body to wander back through the twilight toward the lodge, I had had a different vision of the events leading up to Katherine’s death, and it is that vision that revisits me almost every night.

    I dream now that my parents were waiting for just such a day, a glorious day of renewal, for my mother to die. It cohered with an ancient understanding of the universe, a universe imbued with invisible, mysterious Power, where nature ruled and to live in union with it was the blessed way.

    I dream that my father waited until long after I had left for school to come for my mother. He led Katherine down the lawn, hearing and smelling and seeing everything around him in a heightened, precise manner — the redwinged blackbirds calling in the willows, the bullfrogs roaring in the reeds, the scent of the lilacs’ last blush, the breeze across the pond water. All the crazed bustle of spring.

    Only there was no religious frenzy flowing through my father as I once believed. There was only the sense that he was terribly apart from all that surrounded him, aware and yet not aware, his focus Katherine and only Katherine. For she had been his Power, the beating heart through which he made sense of the world.

    I dream of them sitting in the white glider in the gazebo, watching the water play with the light and the mayflies dance. They hug each other for the longest time, believing they are doing the right thing, that they are following the precepts of their religion, that they are living and dying in accord with nature. And then I hear my father’s deep, gravelly voice singing not the birth song of spring, but the leaving song, the song of autumn.

    And when he finishes, he cannot go on. It is Katherine who has the resolve to stand and walk to the water’s edge and beckon him. She wades into the pond smiling, her bare feet pressing down into the inch of soft muck that winter and two months of spring have laid over the sand. Her nightgown lifts and floats about her knees.

    My father feels sick as he gets to his feet and follows her. He is in agony as he kisses her one last time before she sets herself back into the water, pressing his hands into her chest. He takes over now, because it is what she wants. He holds her below the surface during her brief struggle, watching not the final bubbles of air leave her lungs, but the last of the morning’s mayflies flutter and die on the mirror of water above her.

    In my dreams the water ripples and I see someone I don’t recognize at first. The dawning of awareness comes slowly. It is my father, a much younger version of him. And then the water ripples again and it is me. And out of that comes grief and the racking cries that always awaken me, the cries that signal my understanding that almost fifteen years before my father committed suicide in the woods below Mt. Katahdin, he’d killed himself drowning my mother, just as I have killed myself by killing Ryan.

    “Mommy!” Emily cried, shaking me from my thoughts.

    “Come look.”

    I went down by the river then and found them crouched around a patch of frozen mud thawing in the strengthening sun. In the mud there was a single, clear track of a big deer probably trapped on the island during the sudden thaw, waiting for the river’s fury to subside before it could swim to land.

    I squatted next to Emily and Patrick and showed them how to run their fingers along the wall of the track and into its depths to determine the deer’s weight, his direction of travel and the time that had passed since he’d been here. They got down on their knees and studied the track, absorbed with what I was telling them.

    “Let’s follow the tracks,” Emily said.

    “Let’s do that,” I replied.

    And I took their hands and led them back toward the birches, where I would teach them to hunt as I was taught.

    I felt once again that energy within Ryan that had so disturbed me. That energy and the words of my father’s suicide note echoed and mixed within me as we walked.

    And for the first time, I understood that the same thing that had motivated Ryan was what my father was trying to describe in his suicide note. And it was the same thing that fortified and nearly consumed me during the ten days at Metcalfe. All of nature’s creatures are murderers. We must murder to live. It’s the law of the forest. But unlike the animals, we who are human are aware of this and must suffer each death as a small death within ourselves.

    We who are human carry the dead within ourselves. As such, we have been imbued with the highest and most complex manifestation of that thing my ancestors called Power. It drives us. It haunts us. It can become twisted and destructive. But it can also heal. It can give us rebirth at ever}’ death. It can offer faith, forgiveness and sanity where there seems hope of none. Some of us will spend a lifetime hunting for it.

    Emily tugged at my sleeve. “What are you thinking about, Mommy?”

    I paused and looked over my shoulder at the graves of my parents and my great-uncle and then back to my children. “Love.” Then I took my children into the forest.

    Here dies my story. Here lives my story again.

    

    

    I hope you have enjoyed The Purification Ceremony.

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    In the writing of The Purification Ceremony, I am in great debt to ethnologist Ruth Holmes Whitehead, author of the remarkable work Stones from the Six Worlds. Ms. Whitehead’s insight into Power and the mind of the Micmac was a constant source of inspiration.

    I am similarly indebted to anthropologist Barbara G. Myerhoff, for her haunting study, Peyote Hunt, the Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians. Her descriptions of the rites of the Mara’akame fired my imagination.

    Thanks also to white-tailed deer hunting experts Sean Lawlor, David Lawlor, Nick Micalizzi and Gordon Whittington for their advice. I am grateful to Joanna Pulcini and Damian Slattery for their patient reading and rereading of the various drafts, as well as to Ann McKay Thoroman, my editor, for prodding the work to its final shape. All errors, however, are my own.