The Purification Ceremony

by Mark Sullivan

  He says, "You look so beautiful in your nightgown, I didn't want to change you."

  And because she can still remember that she loves my father, Katherine smiles and enters the water with him. He watches as she draws the tippet and the leader and the first few feet of green floating line through the ferules. The line lies on the water.

  Now her wrist and shoulder act on muscle memory. The line loops gracefully in the warm May air. She spots the kiss of a trout on the water, false-casts once, twice, three times before laying the dry fly perfectly on the spot. For a moment all is still—the trout, the fly, the water, my mother, my father—and then the trout darts and the fly disappears and Katherine raises her arms to set the hook just as my father slips in behind her.

  The water below them ripples with his movement, warping the reflection so her face becomes his and, in my mind, his became the homicidal countenance of Ryan peering at me across the clearing that morning.

  Out on the frozen lake the storm howled, a blizzard, a whiteout around me. It clawed at my skin and beat at my eyes until I feared I would go blind. It came from beneath me then, from deep under the snow-covered ice. It wrapped itself around me, crushing my stomach and ribcage until I choked for air. I heard the wind's tone turn to tortured moans.

  I doubled over, knowing that the god-awful noise came not from the north, but from me. I collapsed under the blizzard's assault, holding tight to my stomach, wanting more than anything to give myself over to the storm's Power, to lie there until the snow shaped-changed me forever. No pain. No suffering. No haunting dreams of years gone by. And when the spring came, I would shape-change again and join James Metcalfe at the depths of the lake.

  I took off my coat and laid it on the ice. I forced myself not to hold my arms tight to me. The cold would work better if I exposed myself wholly to it. I lay down and turned my face into the drifting snow, and within moments I felt the first sense that my body was retreating, shutting down blood flow to my arms and legs. My hands and feet numbed. I felt drowsy, the first signs of hypothermia. I will become sleepier, I told myself, and then there will be nothing but the blackness of the river in my hallucinations in the cave.

  It came for me, slinking along the ice, an oily thing, the presence of which I felt, not saw; and I was preparing myself to greet it when, from far away, I heard the sounds of children laughing and giggling. A pleasant thing to imagine when you are about to die, I thought. But the laughter came again, more insistent, and now I recognized the laughs as those of my own children. I lifted my head from the snow. I saw them before me in the swirling white: they were at the dinner table, much younger than they actually were, Patrick maybe five and Emily two. She was sitting in her booster chair, eating and painting herself in spaghetti. Patrick was making faces at her and she was laughing, the noodles and tomato sauce spraying from her mouth, so abandoned in her glee that it went straight to my heart and warmed me, made me want desperately to live. If I died, I could not teach them how to survive in a world of shifting, vicious Powers—some physical, some emotional. My death here would be a curse they might spend a lifetime trying to hide from or trying to explain to themselves.

  I stood up shakily and faced the blizzard. I ignored the burning cold and turned into the face of it and vowed, "I will not doom them to that.”

  I got my coat back on and crawled through the white on white for almost an hour until I found a tree and then another, and the trees gave me a frame of reference from which I could navigate. I found my cabin at last and went into it, dazed and nearly numb.

  I looked around the room, at the furniture, at the walls, at the gas lamps, at the oil painting and finally at the buck. Hatred welled inside me at all that the deer seemed to embody and I tore it from the wall and raised it over my head by its antlers. I gazed up at the buck, wanting to remember its shape before I dashed it against the wall. In its glass eyes I saw myself looking back.

  I stared through the deer and into myself for a very long time. I lowered the buck finally, frightened at and yet resigned to my sudden understanding that stopping Ryan would demand that I follow one of Mitchell's and my father's tenants of hunting—to hunt the deer well, you must become the deer.

  To hunt Ryan, I would have to be willing to enter a world where nothing was as it seemed, where turbulent Powers ghosted through animal and rock and sky. I would have to give myself completely to the forest of the mind and risk madness.

  As a girl, I had listened to Mitchell recite the legends of our people, how the Puoin prepared for their rituals and their travels within the six worlds by erecting a pole or a tree branch outside their lodges. These they hung with gifts. It was the visible manifestation of the tree that connected the world we see, touch, taste, smell and hear with those ephemeral realms below, above and beyond. Warming myself before the stove in my cabin, I admitted that I did not comprehend an eighth of all I needed to know to perform this ceremony, but I did not have a choice. I would remember as best I could the shadows of my early life.

  I opened the door and let the blizzard inhale me again. I fought my way to one of the trees and broke off a big limb. I brought it into the cabin room and propped it up between two chairs. On it I hung the deer-skin robes I had worn the night I escaped from the wolves. On the skins I hung the picture of Emily and Patrick and beside it the picture of Lizzy Ryan. Around both photographs I draped the bloodied bandage I'd taken from my forearm. Above that I placed a small mirror from my cosmetic compact. Below, I affixed the raven's feather I'd taken from Grover's mouth and a lock of hair cut from my bangs.

  When I was satisfied I went into the bathroom, stripped and showered. I came out and rubbed myself with crushed, fragrant needles from the crown of the tree limb that had become the centerpiece in the altar of my shrine.

  I turned down the gaslights then, wrapped myself in one of the deer robes and sat cross-legged facing the shrine, warmed by the fire behind me. I forced myself to recall every detail of the last hunting lesson my father had begun to teach me before he had announced his decision to let Katherine kill herself.

  I was sixteen and a half that fall, a veteran hunter who had tracked and taken seven big whitetails. It was nine o'clock one early November morning. Overnight the first three-inch storm had swept over Katahdin. We had crisscrossed the forest since dawn, but found no tracks.

  "The first storm makes the deer nervous, unwilling to move and show us where they've been," my father said.

  "So we go home, wait until afternoon?"

  "No," he said, smiling. "You are going to learn to track them with your heart."

  I frowned.

  He said, "There are energies in the forest that, with concentration, you have already learned to sense. Energies that give evidence of an animal's passing. This is just a new way to sense that energy."

  "I don't understand."

  "Think of how I taught you to look at which way a fern had been twisted to tell a buck's travel direction."

  I nodded. "Yes."

  "Now, remember how I trained you to open your ears to all sound and how you have learned that the volume of small animal chatter changes with the approach of a big animal."

  I nodded again.

  "All these exercises were just getting you ready to let your heart be a sense," he went on. "It's only with your heart that you can feel Power, invisible but real and living around us in the trees and the cliffs and the rivers and the sky and the wind."

  The "heart hunt," as my father described it, involved abandoning control of your heart until it adopted the rhythms of the energies that pulsed around it. He claimed it was at once a way of truly joining spirits with the deer during the hunt as well as a cloudy window that allowed a first glimpse into the world of Power.

  I had not been very successful in my lessons that fall. Twice I had achieved a fluttering in my heart in anticipation of a buck's appearance in the woods, but I had never been able to wipe away the frost that clouded my vision and look into the other world my father claimed he
could see.

  Now, sitting before my shrine, my life seemed to depend on it. I tried to slow my breathing as he had taught me and after a while I got my respiration to even out until I could feel my heart beating. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get my heart to feel anything but my own sorrow.

  "I can't do this!" I screamed at the deer head on the wall. "I'm not strong enough. Maybe I should just die."

  The deer stared back at me. So I tried again. I calmed myself and focused, soon feeling my heart once more driving the rush and flow of blood at my temples.

  I closed my eyes to the deer and imagined myself the way my father and Mitchell had described the oldest of the old ones in our legends: a woman draped in leaves and moss, living in a hole beneath a tree where the dead are buried. In my mind it became the deepest, stillest part of the night and I dwelled on every breath, easing the pace down, expanding the volume and length of each inhalation and exhalation until my brain glowed and then sparked with an oxygen-fired sensitivity, until, at last, I felt the troubled rhythms of my heart steady and become gentle probing waves that left me, bounced off the ceilings and walls and returned so that even with my eyes closed I could see.

  It was late when I knocked at the front door to the lodge.

  :'Who's there?" Phil asked.

  "Little Crow."

  I must have been a sight, for when the door opened, Phil looked away, embarrassed the way I used to be encountering the addled street people who lived around Copley Square. I had taken soot from the woodstove and smeared black ribbons on my skin to break up my profile. I was dressed in Griff’s white camouflage outfit. On the wool shirt I wore underneath, I had pinned a piece of deer skin and my children's photograph over my left breast, and over my right I had affixed the picture of Lizzy Ryan. In my hair I wore the raven's feather.

  "Woman, where the hell do you think you're going, looking like that?" he demanded.

  "Hunting," I said, pushing by him. The lights in the great room had been dimmed. The fire in the hearth had gone to coals. Theresa slept on one of the couches under a red and- black wool blanket. A shotgun lay on the floor beside her. Lenore was curled up in a chair across from her. Nelson paced on the landing before the shattered stained-glass window, a rifle held at port arms.

  Kurant sat one floor below, studying through the window the broad oval of light that banished the darkness of the lodge yard. Arnie was tending to Earl, who seemed to have taken a turn for the worse in the hours since I'd left the lodge; the tycoon was shifting and groaning on the bed in the corner. Griff was nowhere to be seen.

  "What d'you mean, hunting?" Phil snapped. "We all took a vote. None of us are leaving this room until the plane comes. Round-the-clock watches. We all make it or none of us do."

  "I don't know if the plane is coming any time soon," I said. "The ice is too thick and broken up around the dock. They're going to have to wait until a smooth section freezes, or they're going to have to come in after us by land, which could take days. So you die your way, Phil. I'll die mine."

  I kept moving as I talked, padding by Theresa and Lenore into the dining room, where I pulled up a chair and was standing on it when Griff came out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. He saw Phil first and then me and then Metcalf’s bow and the quiver of cedar arrows which I now had in my hands.

  "Diana, I hope you're not thinking of—"

  But I was already down off the chair, moving toward the door to the great room. "The only chance to stop him is to go after him alone," I said.

  Griff put the coffee and sandwiches on the table and ran after me. He caught me as I was about to go out the front door.

  "You can't do this," he said.

  "I have to do this," I said sadly.

  "Give me one good reason."

  I thought for a moment about telling him everything, then decided he couldn't possibly understand all of it, so I gave him the piece of it he could grasp: "I was taught as a child never to leave a wounded animal in the woods.

  THANKSGIVING DAY

  IN THE LEGENDS I remember from childhood, the shaman encounters Power after becoming lost deep in the forest. One story in particular accompanied me as I walked east toward the dawn. It was the tale of a young boy who wanted to run away from his cruel older brother. He loses himself to his former life by shooting his arrow into the woods and running as fast as he can to catch it before it falls to the ground. His mind is on each flight of the arrow, not the familiar world of home and parents. Soon he finds himself in alien terrain, disoriented, relying on his senses to survive.

  I walked far out along the logging roads toward that eastern quadrant of the estate where Ryan seemed most comfortable. I drew one of the six cedar arrows from the quiver on my back, spun myself in circles, then loosed the arrow into the stillest, darkest moments of the night. As soon as I let the arrow go, I ran after it.

  The snow under the new snow, the snow that had been wet yesterday, had frozen to create a firm, even floor beneath my feet. I ran without fear of being tripped by an unseen log or stump or rock; they had been buried, changed by the Power of the storm.

  The blizzard weakened and finally stopped. And the clouds broke overhead and the darkness around me gave

  way to the light of the waning moon.

  I told myself as I ran after my arrow that Ryan had embraced the chaos of the forest of the mind. To kill him, I would have to do the same. Ryan believed he was a Mara'akame. To survive the final clash certain to come, I, despite all my education and training in the visible world, would have to become a Puoin, the last of a line of Micmac shamans that stretched back through my father to my greatuncle and his mother beyond to the old ones who once had lived in the forests of Nova Scotia.

  I ran until I felt the first pangs of uncertainty and fear that well up in the understanding that you are lost.

  I slowed, sweating, letting my eyes roam in the forest heart, casting back and forth through the dimness to catalog the weird relief of gray-and-black gnarled shapes against the snowpack. My mind played games with me.

  The black triangle off to my right, probably a chunk of unexposed rock, became the face of the alpha-bitch wolf, intent on revenging her lost eye. A mosaic of thin dark lines—a branch? Two saplings intertwined?—became Ryan's arms supporting bow and arrow.

  The evidence was mounting; I could not trust anything I could sense here in the ordinary meaning of the word. So I closed my eyes and repeated the sequence of memory and rhythmic breathing I had followed the evening before. Soon I could feel my heart beating outward, striking objects and reflecting back to me the energies within the predawn.

  I opened my eyes and crept through the gloom, all the while continuing to probe the mutating shapes around me with my heart. A deer browsed into the wind on the bench above me. Two more steps and she caught my scent, snorted and bounded away. At dawn I sensed a ponderous force buried under the snow in a thicket of pine and knew a bear slept there. A half mile more and the sun cleared the ridges on the other side of the Dream, sending brilliant shafts of light and Power through the woods.

  Above me and to my left, hidden in the boughs of a majestic ponderosa, I felt a small, troubled being that had the peculiar ability to look at the world both as vast landscapes and as specific blades of grass. The young crow cawed loudly as it left the tree. And, for a moment, I closed my eyes and left with it, soaring on an updraft until I looked down upon the forest as I had eight days ago in the floatplane.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was frightened to see that even though the sun still shone magnificent and bright, what appeared to be a fine crystalline snow filled the air. I raised my face to the crackling blue-and-white mist, expecting brief cold stings. Instead, my cheeks, nose, mouth and eyelashes were caressed as if by warm feathers. There was a grain in the pattern of this precipitation; it seemed to run, then break around and over invisible objects, and then retract almost the way a waxing tide will inhale and exhale boulders on the seashore. A
nd yet I could still see clearly through the feather snow to the sunlit trees and the drifts over boulders and the crow that had circled back into the glen, heading for its rookery. The crow flapped and glided in on the current of the feather snow as a kayaker would. I realized in awe that I was seeing as the crow saw, that for the first time in the nightmare, I had an ally.

  When the warm crystals passed by my body, they blew outward and swirled. Standing still, I created an eddy in the current of the feather snow. I took a step. The swirl expanded, a minor wave in front of me. Ahead some hundred yards, there appeared the suggestion of a swell in the pattern of the snowfall. There was no wind, and I watched the swell grow before a doe and a fawn stepped out.

  This is what it's like to lose your mind.

  For much of the morning I crept through the forest, the bow in my left hand, an arrow in my right, teaching myself to interpret the billows and wafts that appeared in the grain of the snowfall much the way I had learned to track deer so many years before. An animal's passage would be preceded by a bulge in the pattern. If the animal stood still, the ripples were smaller. Birds in flight caused the ripples to curve.

  Near midday I believed I was beginning to understand the limits and permutations of my madness, that I could navigate in this world and, when my task was finished, leave it behind. We cling to such fallacies in times of crisis out of ignorance. And yet it is only during times of crisis, under increasing levels of stress, that we strip away the veils that separate us from deeper levels of existence, selfknowledge and pain.

  My wanderings had taken me along a shelf above one of the small clear-cuts that dotted this part of the estate. Suddenly, I was confused to notice, at the far left of my peripheral vision, the feather snow not bulging, but being sucked away suddenly as if by a tremendous vacuum. I turned and stared at the phenomenon, at the way the snow now spun inward and retreated like a whirlpool.