Bone Dance

by Martha Brooks

  “Peter, I didn’t buy you anything.”

  He pulled her against him. Kissed the top of her head. She wanted to tell him how she felt about him. How complicated that was. Maybe he knew already. His arms trembled.

  And then he whispered, “You’re a wonderful person, Alex. You know that, don’t you? You are a queen. A goddess.” He held her at arm’s length, grinning at her as if she were just too good to be true.

  Something caught her eye past his shoulder. She looked out to his car by the curb. The door was open. Some blond guy with bare arms sat, legs stretched out the passenger’s side, cigarette in his long fingers. He squinted at them through a trail of smoke, then smiled a beautiful smile. The evening was calm and humid. The cedars in the front yard were heavy with earthy perfume.

  She smiled brightly at Peter, didn’t know what to say or where to look. And then she did look at him, and he looked back, clear-eyed and solemn, waiting.

  Finally she told him, simply, “I hope you have a good time.”

  He walked away, stopped, turned around. He gave a slow smile and then, right in the middle of the sidewalk, did an ironic little dance all for her.

  Later, around one in the morning, still awake, in the dark, staring at the ceiling, she thought about the stunning truth of Peter’s life. And then her mother’s familiar soft rap came at the door.

  “I figured you’d still be up,” she said, coming into the room.

  Alex rolled over, struck a match, and lit the candle again. She patted the side of her bed for Mom to sit down. Her mother’s hair was pulled back with a brilliant yellow silk-wrapped elastic band. She sat down cross-legged on the bed. Her satiny knees poked out from under bold-striped cotton pajamas. She smelled faintly of L’Air du Temps perfume, which she put on every morning even if she only went across the hall to the little bedroom that Grandpa had transformed for her into an office space. Alex remembered his ten-year-old Chevy truck, full of lumber, parked under the cedar trees, the plate on the front that said I’m Spending My Kids’ Inheritance.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” said Mom.

  “Sure.” Alex’s heart rose high and achy in her throat.

  “I want to offer you my car for the week,” Mom began, “to go out to your father’s. To Earl’s.”

  “You’re offering me your car? For a whole week? Why?”

  “The weather is beautiful now, and there’s a lake where you could swim. I think it would be good for you. Put back some sparkle.” She ran a cool thumb just under Alex’s eye along the cheekbone. “If the cabin isn’t livable, well, then don’t stay. Or if you get there, and you can’t face being alone, then just come home.”

  Alex pulled at the loose threads on her sky blue quilt with the giant tree that always seemed to grow as you drew it up over you. She had always loved this amazing quilt. She loved to lie in the center of her bed, her hands reaching over the covers to stroke the gold-and-green branches. Christmas morning, when she was fourteen, and Mom’s eyes were so shiny with delight, and she knew the quilt had been much too expensive, she had said softly, “Cool,” and felt guilty, but it had been on her bed ever since.

  “Alex,” Mom said, “when I fell in love with your father, I never thought about how my life might turn out. I was nineteen years old. I was just a baby. How could I know anything? But I’ve been lucky in my life. And you’re lucky, too. Take your courage into your hands, and don’t turn away this gift.”

  After she left, Alex flicked out the candle. Outside her window, the city night hummed restlessly along. Here, in the darkness of her own room, with her eyes closed tight, her hands stroked the cool raised edges of cotton tree limbs.

  13

  She is running down the hill, through amber grasses, to the shores of the lake. “Wait for me!” she calls to them. “Look at me. I’m here. I’ve decided to come. Wait! Oh, please wait!”

  “Your granddaughter,” Old Raven Man says calmly, pulling a bone-handled jackknife from his pocket. One expert slash, and the fish is split up the middle.

  “Hello, Alexandra,” Grandpa says.

  “Hello, Grandpa. Oh, hello! Hello!” she cries joyfully.

  He’s hunkered down, whittling a point on a willow stick. She wants him to turn around.

  “Look at me, look at me!” she says, just the way she used to at the pool, where he’d sit in the bleachers, her extra towel, her gym bag, and a snack for her beside him.

  But he still won’t turn around. The jacket he always wore when he took her on camping trips hangs loosely around him. He’s as thin as he was when he died.

  “Would you like some fish?” Old Raven Man asks. He turns his eyes on her. She is struck by their beautiful light.

  “This is your dream,” he says, startling her. “You can call me whatever you want. I used to have a name. A long time ago when I was over there. I don’t miss it.”

  He adds wistfully, “I do miss honey. That was good. I remember what it tasted like. Would you like some fish?” he asks a second time.

  She should say yes to be polite. But she hates fish, and so she says no.

  “It’s a spirit fish. They taste like honey.” He smiles sweetly at her.

  “How are you, Alexandra?” Grandpa asks. He spears the fish with the willow branch and leans it, to cook, over a fire.

  She hesitates behind him. She hardly dares to ask, but she has to. “Are you really my grandfather?”

  “More or less,” he says, turning around. “But of course I’ve changed.”

  His eyes, like those of Old Raven Man, are clear and light filled. He is a beautiful spirit. She realizes, suddenly, that she didn’t have to worry about him. He’s finding his way.

  He takes her hand, squeezing it three times like he used to. It was their signal. It meant, I love you.

  “I miss you,” she says. “Why did you have to go away and leave me?” She starts to cry. Her tears feel real even though she knows that she is only dreaming.

  “Why,” asks Old Raven Man, “don’t you believe your dreams?”

  “Because they aren’t real,” she says, wishing they were, feeling her whole body shudder with tears.

  “There isn’t anything you can dream that isn’t real. Close your eyes,” he instructs kindly.

  “But I’m dreaming. You’re tricking me. This is just a dream. This is just a dream. This is just a dream.…”

  Grandpa wraps an arm around her. She smells the aftershave he always wore. “You have eyes to see the world with,” he explains, “and eyes to see your soul with.”

  “I’m afraid,” she says, “of… what I’ll find.”

  “You are afraid of being powerless,” says Old Raven Man. She hears him stir the fire. “That’s why we’re here. We’re here to give you power.”

  She doesn’t feel powerful at all. She feels weak and raw. As if she is being pushed to the edge of the world. But she does as she is told. She closes her inner eyes.

  “What do you see?” Grandpa asks.

  “Darkness,” she says, terror rising.

  “Let your mind wander. Just let it go.” Old Raven Man’s soft voice, like clicks of rain.

  And so she lets go. She falls. Spiraling down to the unknown. Even as she rushes away, the fishermen appear above her. And she sees, with relief, that she is connected to them by thin strong lines. She turns and tumbles to the edge of the sea of her being. And then she drops even farther. To the deepest place. To where it’s no longer dark. A light surrounds her. She is at the warmest, farthest, brightest place within herself.

  “A very big light,” she says from this deep place. “That’s what I see.”

  “Ah!” Old Raven Man utters a great echoing sigh. “She has found the Great Spirit.”

  She pulls up, with effort, from Divinity.

  Old Raven Man takes the fish from the fire. She can feel the drumming of his heart as he peels away the skin. He offers her a piece of the smoky flesh. She takes it from the rivers of lines on the palm of his hand. As he
promised, spirit fish tastes like honey.

  part two

  THE LEGACY

  1

  This small blue car pulled into the yard. Pop looked up from his coffee, like a man who had just heard thunder. Lonny stood, still holding his mug, his heart racing.

  The girl got out of the car. She was not at all what he expected. A big girl. Big boned, big breasted, loose limbed. Tall as him. With the blackest eyes the color of chokecherries, her fine dark red hair backlit by the morning sun. Amazing and prideful. Queen Bee, he thought, and then felt weak, like someone had just come up behind him and thwacked him hard at the backs of his knees. He tottered unsteadily toward her. “Alexandra?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, not smiling or flipping her hair or doing any of the cute things that girls he knew did when they flirted with him. “How did you know it was me?” She stared him down with her wild black eyes. She blasted through his veneer, through the walls that he’d so carefully built.

  The spirits rushed up from the mound. He could feel their old and powerful reel. They knew, like Pop, that she was coming.

  2

  The girl sat there, staring out at the LaFrenière homestead. He thought, She’s never going to get out of this truck. She had the same expression as her father’s the day he took over the land. But with her, it was different. She was a hell of a lot prettier than Earl McKay. Scarier, too.

  And this wasn’t the way he’d thought it would happen. He’d been prepared to hate her. He’d played over in his mind her moment of arrival, circling back to one image: Pop, once again, in weighted despair over the reminder, thrown back in his face, that his only living heir had rejected this land.

  But Pop looked at her, sitting between them, as if she were a delicate package that had just been hand delivered. He then opened his door. He swung his bearlike body down and stood in the tall grasses, eyes lowered, waiting with a kind of huge and noble grace.

  It’s one of those long hot evenings in August, and he and Mom are sitting on the steps in front of the house. He’s telling her that he’s had several dreams about bears. In one dream, he’s watching TV, eating popcorn, and a bear comes right through the window and curls up on the sofa beside him.

  I wasn’t even surprised about the bear, he tells her. In my dream it was normal. Well, she says, that bear is telling you something. Bear is a healer. It has powerful medicine. One time, she says, stroking his hair, I had this pain in my heart. It wouldn’t go away. Well, I dream that a bear comes and lies down beside me. He stretches his paw way across my chest. I can feel his fur brushing my skin. And he whispers to me. He tells me a love story. And two days later I see that ad your pop put in the paper. And two days after that, he’s standing in my doorway, looking like that bear in my dream, and right then and there, I fall in love with him. And the pain in my heart goes away.

  Lonny felt a burning pain rise up and lodge itself somewhere near his own heart. And the girl stirred beside him. She drew in a long gentle breath.

  Next thing, he was out of the truck. And Pop, furrowing his brow, sent out a silent signal that said: Help her down. But Lonny’s hand was already shooting out. She grabbed hold, soft skin, strong hand.

  He was still holding on as the spirit passed between them. A woman, he decided. Yes, bent over, weeping, clasping her arms in a keening motion around her own body. As clear as memory, she had passed right through their clasped hands.

  He quickly dropped the girl’s hand, before she could notice that his own hands had begun to tremble. They wouldn’t stop. He had to fold his arms and hide them under his armpits. Then he realized that she wasn’t seeing anything but the pale morning light, spreading itself like pure and god-given honey all over the land that was Earl’s legacy to her.

  3

  “You see now why we couldn’t let you drive your little car in here,” Mr. LaFrenière was saying. “You can just leave it parked up at our place. It’ll be fine there. Your dad never bothered to have a proper road put in. Didn’t own a vehicle himself. He’d just show up at our place if he needed a ride to town.”

  The cabin her father had built was set down in a grove of trees. It was a disappointment. Small, ordinary, undistinguished. The leaves all around sent up a chatter in the light wind. A sad-looking log structure sagged on its last legs to her far left.

  Mr. LaFrenière, standing beside the truck, said, “Didn’t hardly give you a chance to catch your breath, I guess,” and then added shyly, “Rushing you over here like this.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I was anxious to see the place.”

  Mom and Auntie Francine, out on the concrete driveway back home, poking their heads through the rolled-down windows, driving her crazy with questions and information: Have you checked the oil, the tires? Do you have your map? Don’t go down Highway 3. Take Highway I because it’s faster and more direct and there’s less chance of getting lost. Did you remember your sunglasses? Did you buy that sunscreen? You should take your jacket, the green one with the fleece lining. I don’t care if it is June. The nights around a lake can get cold. Now don’t you forget to phone us when you get there. Do you have Mr. LaFrenière’s address?

  Maybe I won’t stay, she thought. Maybe I’ll just take a look around, get back in their truck, go back to their place. I’ll tell them I’m not planning on staying. Just like that. It’ll be easy.

  “You like it then?” Mr. LaFrenière asked, anxious as a child.

  “Yes,” she said, pinned to the spot and humbled.

  He nodded his big head. Flicked at a couple of bright leaves that were stuck to the truck’s fender. “That body of water you see out there is called Fatback Lake. Your dad got to look at it mostly in winter. When I was a boy, I would skate there sometimes.”

  The lake, rolling away from the slight rise on which the cabin sat, was as familiar to her as her dreams. Cold prickles began to dance up her arms, along her neck, into her scalp. It was, in fact, the lake where she had dreamed about Grandpa and Old Raven Man fishing, where they had flipped a huge radiant creature from the deep dark waters. Where she had floated down and down through darkness into the light inside her soul. Where she had shared with them the honey-tasting flesh of the spirit fish.

  She swung around and looked at the hill behind her. A low buzz began to grow in her ears. She tasted the cold memory of snow on her tongue. Black wings flapped powerfully against her chest. And then, as the enchantment grew, a brilliant winter sky, a cabin with windows looking east to the lake, west to the hill.

  Without warning, her whole body reacted, became unbalanced. Dizzily she sank down, stretched her legs in front of her, hung her head, inhaled the green early-summer heat.

  “You just sit there for a while,” Mr. LaFrenière said kindly. “It will take some getting used to.”

  Think about something else. No, not the boy, standing there with his arms folded. His gorgeous black shiny hair. The smell of sage rising around him.

  Mr. LaFrenière went on, “This is undeveloped land that’s been in my family for a hundred years. When your dad bought it, he promised me that he wouldn’t change it except to build his cabin over there. He kept his promise.”

  She breathed deeply. “Mr. LaFrenière,” she said. “I’ve never even seen a photograph of my father. What did he look like?” And then she added, “When you knew him.”

  “He was a tall man. A little taller than you.” He took off his cap, running a massive hand like a bear paw through his hair, then offered, “And, I think, he was a tired man.”

  He was a tired man. A tired man.

  “How long are you staying?” the boy, Lonny, suddenly asked.

  “My mom lent me her car for the week,” she said, her guts churning. Please don’t let me throw up on this grass, right in front of him.

  “You won’t be using it much.” He scanned some faraway green place across the lake. His eyes were unreadable.

  She struggled back to her feet.

  They unloaded her things from the bac
k of the truck and set them on the wooden front steps of her father’s cabin: boxes of food supplies that her mother had carefully packed, two coolers, a big army kit bag, and three plastic bags full of every conceivable necessity— pillows, sheets, her cotton tree quilt, a first-aid kit, extra shoes, three thick wool sweaters, a flashlight, and so on.

  “If you need anything, there’s a phone,” said Mr. LaFrenière. “That dad of yours wasn’t altogether against modern equipment. I guess you knew that your mother called a couple of weeks back to say you’d be around sometime this summer.” He smiled and added, “So everything works. Everything’s in order. And by the way, the water’s okay, but it doesn’t taste so good. We haul our drinking water from town.” He looked at Lonny. “So we’ll leave now and let her get settled in. You can bring a jug of water down to her later. You’ll do that, won’t you, son.”

  It isn’t too late. Say something. They’re leaving. God, don’t leave me here.

  Lonny turned away. She watched him stride quickly over to the truck. Like he could hardly wait to get in and leave. He jumped inside and slammed the door shut and leaned against the steering wheel.

  Mr. LaFrenière pulled some keys out of his pocket. Two bright brass keys on a dull beaded brass chain. “He’s got something eating at him today,” he said apologetically. “These are the keys—one for the cabin, the other for the shed out back. And the power box is inside the kitchen. Main switch is right by the door. Just flip it on.” He paused, as if he was forgetting something, then said, “Would you like some help inside with your things?”

  He had warm brown eyes and a courtly manner. She half expected him to tip his cap.

  “I can manage,” she said.

  “Well, then, welcome to your little home, miss.”

  “Mr. LaFrenière?” she blurted out.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll be fine.”