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.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I hope you have enjoyed The Purification Ceremony.
If you feel so inclined, please return to my webpage at Smashwords.com, and make a donation to the book. Half will be given to programs that support reading and writing.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
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