Last Chants

by Lia Matera

  “We’ve come here to do the right thing.”

  “What right thing?”

  “Listen to Billy, and to the mountain. Find out what happened and what they want done about it.”

  That wouldn’t have been my first guess.

  I handed him a glass.

  He held it in one hand, the juice in the other. “We’ll take a walk this morning.” He gestured with the juice, spilling some. “I’ll introduce you to the Great Mother.”

  I smiled. Lawyers are rarely introduced to the Great Mother on a work-week Tuesday morning. Nor would most of them welcome it.

  I made Arthur temper his enthusiasm long enough to have breakfast. Even so, he talked more than he ate. Between sips of juice and distracted bites of sweet roll, he set out to tell me how he’d met Billy Seawuit.

  “Almost fifty years ago, I searched for insight in southern places; I’m not sure why. First I went to the Amazonian tribes, including the Juavaro. I spent the questing part of my youth south of the equator. And then I sacrificed my middle years to academia, endlessly recogitating things I’d already done and was finished with.” He stared thoughtfully into his juice. “What a sad waste of experience scholarship is. The most valuable part of any experience is seeing for yourself. Academics are too quick to accept hindsight analysis over the continuing nuances of observation.”

  “Not everyone has a chance to make those observations, Arthur. A lot of people are grateful to you for bringing them yours, even if they do lose something. I wouldn’t consider your teaching years a waste.”

  “A waste to me. I litanized my experiences to the point that I petrified them. I robbed them of the fluidity to carry me in new directions. But,” he shrugged, “that was my choice. Or rather, my bow to the conventional wisdom. Then I saw myself becoming a sort of parrot of my younger self. In the field, I’d touched something universal. My teaching had become a Cliff Notes version of it.”

  He slumped in his seat, bags bulging beneath his eyes. Last night had been hard on me, and I was half his age. Watching him in the harsh light of an uncurtained window, I was more concerned with his health than his philosophy.

  “Try a roll, Arthur.”

  After a placating nibble, he continued. “I’d already been south, and so I traveled north this time, into British Columbia and the Yukon. That’s where I met Billy.” His expression brightened. “By then, I’d concluded that vision questing had nothing to do with ayahuasca, nor yagé, nor Dr. Leary’s LSD. The true purpose of the drugs was to induce a state of terror and profundity. No matter what you can achieve by praying or meditating . . . ” He shrugged, roll poised halfway to his lips. “No one approaches meditation with knocking knees and fear in his heart. But you can’t take a drug without facing danger and the specter of the unknown. And that’s it, you see. You put yourself on the line. The shamans knew it with their ghastly rituals. They knew that the exotic and ancient places within us couldn’t be reached cheaply and comfortably; that you can’t unroll a little mat and safely mantra yourself there. But it’s not the drug itself that’s essential. It’s the stake. Do you see?”

  “I suppose.” I’d been too recently in jeopardy to find glamour in danger.

  “I had started out as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, studying the relationship of plants to culture. But I had turned my experiences into an easy sort of chapbook, describing the mythologies of others without conveying the fearsome passages, the tumult and exultation of survival inherent in them. In the process of relating myths, I’d lost touch with their very source.”

  “The individual putting herself on the line?”

  “What the individual finds when he’s willing to gamble everything to listen to and be led by the universe. It’s from that place that all mythologies unfold.”

  I liked to have a more detailed map, myself.

  He put his hand on mine. “Across the globe, our stories are parallel, you know. Our myths resemble one another. Because their source is common to us all. You don’t have to go out and buy Bulfinch’s Mythology, nor do you have to apprentice with a Juavaro storyteller. If you’re willing to surrender control over your very life—and thereby your intellect, your expectations, your limits—if you’re willing to take that journey to the source within yourself, the story is waiting there in richest detail. It comes from a vast elsewhere that we’ve lost the habit of accessing. We literally have to scare centuries of cobwebs out of our mystical machinery.”

  I supposed I couldn’t keep skepticism off my face.

  Arthur patted my hand. “Ah, all those years you spent among ideologues. I sound like them to you, don’t I? But I’m not asking you to accept my view—that’s why I stopped teaching. Science, religion, popular culture: they bludgeon us with a theory, a spin, a replacement for personal observation. Consensus trance, I believe they call it. And it becomes difficult to break free, to have one’s own experience of anything . . . absent a profound internal upheaval.”

  “I hope you’re not wishing that on me.”

  “I thrust it upon you yesterday morning, my dear.” He attacked the sweet roll as if noticing it for the first time. “How good of you to bring me this. Billy used to provide for me, you know. Make sure I had my keys, put meals in front of me when I’d forgotten to be hungry.” He looked surprised. “But that’s what I started out to tell you: how I met Billy.”

  “Enjoy your breakfast, Arthur. We have all day.”

  “No, no. We have to get to Bowl Rock.”

  “It’s not going anywhere,” I pointed out. I entertained an optimistic thought: “Do you think you’ll find something the police didn’t recognize or understand?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Botanicals? Traces of shamanic ritual?”

  “The experience of the place itself.”

  To me this seemed a sentence fragment. But he appeared to feel it was a complete answer.

  He stooped over his breakfast. “That’s what I learned when I went north. I learned that a place can be as revelatory as any drug. A place can tear you from the safe coffin of your assumptions as dramatically as any chemical. I learned that from Billy Seawuit.” He pushed aside what remained of the meal. “His magic will blow away everything you think you know about reality, Willa. I guarantee it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “The earth used to be covered by redwoods.” Arthur waved his arm at the dense growth around us. “Giants, three or four times larger than these young trees.” The “young” trees were as tall as three-story buildings. “Now they exist only in certain parts of the Pacific Northwest. That’s a very important and primal link for us. We’ve been educated to think of Africa and perhaps parts of ancient France as our cradles of civilization. But our link to the primeval goes back farther than that, to the first botanical habitats of the earth. That’s why redwood forests speak to us in a way savannas can’t.”

  I was aware of the smell of evergreens shading wet earth, the sting of cold mist on my cheeks. I felt an invigorating freedom, probably because I was truant. But if the redwoods were “speaking” to me, they were being far too subtle.

  “This particular area is a power spot. If you can survive your most basic emotions, you can feel its history. It was flung up out of the ocean in a vast upheaval hundreds of millennia ago—very recently, geologically speaking. In eroded areas, it’s common to find fossilized shells. It must have been quite a sight, an entire ecosystem of sea creatures and vegetation lying here for however long it took water bacteria to develop a land version. Imagine the ground slowly desalinating in the rain until it could sustain plant life, then giant sequoias moving across it like a green glacier, making shade for ancient horsetails and ferns.”

  “What killed the rest of the world’s redwoods?”

  “The Ice Age. They can survive anything now and again, but for frequent or persistent cold, you need hemlock, spruce, cedar. Ah, the ancient cedars of the Northwest . . . the fragrance! No smell satisfies like cold cedar forest. We’re all Kwakiutl
s at heart.”

  I had to smile. I wasn’t sure what I was at heart, but Kwakiutl wasn’t even on the list.

  “What’s that?” I spotted something with a bright pattern under a tangle of shrubs.

  Arthur stopped, walking closer. “A bedroll. You do see them up here. Perhaps the hard economic times . . . ”

  He walked abruptly on, as if embarrassed to find something so depressingly usual in his power spot. He took a left at the head of a trail barely wide enough for one. I hoped he knew his way around. I hoped we weren’t going to get lost in the woods. This environment might speak to my primeval soul, but my chilly body didn’t want to be lost in it.

  I knew we were getting close to Bowl Rock when I saw a snippet of yellow plastic police tape caught in a blackberry vine.

  Somehow that shiny yellow strip, not six inches long, brought it home to me. More than Arthur’s tears, more than this morning’s newspaper account, this accouterment of disaster stopped me in my tracks.

  I hadn’t known Billy Seawuit, thank God; I’d been spared the pain of surviving him. I didn’t want him becoming real to me now. I felt, as usual, that I had enough problems. But I’d never known the universe to agree.

  I picked up the strip of yellow tape and stuffed it into my pocket.

  I glanced at Arthur. His shoulders rounded, his steps slowed as he continued. I caught up quickly. It was too late to worry about sparing myself pain; and it seemed unworthy in the face of Arthur’s.

  A few more steps took us into a clearing shagged with shrubs and vines and redwood saplings. Where the clearing met deeper forest, a boulder, roughly egg-shaped and as tall as a person, nested in a rut of smaller rocks and mossy mud. Alone at the edge of the clearing, it almost appeared deposited by a giant hand. The seam of stones around it gave it the look of a jewel in a setting. Even its color, yellow-beige with subtle reddish patterns, made it look otherworldly.

  Arthur stared at it, then raised both hands as if saluting it or waving it back. He closed his eyes and stood motionless a moment.

  He started toward it, then stopped. He turned toward me. “They’ll have removed everything?”

  “The crime scene tape is down, so yes. They’ve removed everything they think relates to the . . . to it.” But they wouldn’t have washed away blood on the rock; they’d have photographed it and walked away. I wondered whether to say something.

  Arthur had crossed to the other side of the boulder. Within seconds, I could see no part of him. I knew the rock obscured him, but I felt a surge of panic, a frantic need to see he hadn’t been swallowed up.

  I was startled to hear Arthur’s voice raised in song. It wasn’t like anything I’d heard before, somewhere between a dirge and a chant. I couldn’t understand the lyrics. It might have been Native American, a repetition of syllables like wa and nee, deeply sad and resonant.

  I crossed to the other side of the rock, stopping in shock because Arthur wasn’t standing there. I was struck by an unreasonable fear that he’d sung himself into some other dimension.

  What he’d done was climb inside the boulder.

  I could see why it was called Bowl Rock. From this side, it had no top. It was like an egg lying on its side with half its top, this back half, sheered away. Inside, it was thick-walled but hollow, the opening just large enough for Arthur to lie semisupine as if in a bathtub.

  I looked in at him. The sun filtering through treetops bathed him in fluttering shadows. His eyes were closed tight and his body trembled, either because he “felt” Seawuit’s presence or because it was cold in there. Dark tracings of moss and lichen started beneath Arthur, disappearing where the hollow stone arched above him. I could see dried blood behind his head.

  I backed away, not wanting to interrupt his song. I waited at the fringe of the clearing for over an hour, until the cold and the eeriness of the ceaseless chanting overcame me. I decided to leave Arthur there. Whatever he was doing must be important to him, part of his grieving. No one would lie atop bloodstains singing himself hoarse if it weren’t.

  I walked back to the cabin, relieved when I could no longer hear the waa oo ah waa nee of Arthur’s grief.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I waited hours for Arthur to return. I considered going back after him, but I thought better of it. It would take more than half an afternoon to blunt his grief.

  Out here with no phone, no computer, not even a radio, my options were narrow: I could sit around or I could walk back into town. I decided against leaving Arthur a note. If by mischance it was found, it might incriminate us both. As I’d waited for him, he could wait for me. I wouldn’t be gone long; long enough to call Edward from a phone booth. Long enough to drop into the Cyberdelics office and strike up a conversation.

  The afternoon had grown warmer, buzzing insects catching shafts of light through trees. The trail smelled of warming pine needles. My feet, in leather flats, alternately kicked up dust and squelched through mud, depending on how shady the spot. The walk seemed longer this time. The novelty of not working—especially after five months of unemployment—was wearing off fast. On the other hand, I’d have to be much more bored before longing to write a brief.

  Again I walked through downtown Boulder Creek. It certainly lacked the urban trappings: no street people or street music, no fine suits or prissy accessories, no jockeying traffic or swearing pedestrians, no neon windows, no bas relief or flashy architecture, no Asians or blacks, no SE HABLA signs. It looked like what it probably was: a shady mountain village on a minor highway, a community where people knew one another and found few occasions to dress up.

  I stood before Cyberdelics’ sixties-poster window. This was the anomaly. Not many mountain villages could lay claim to two computer design firms, both famous enough for me to have heard of them.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped inside. A heated conversation ceased. Four startled faces turned toward me. A statuesque blonde whirled with the drama of a cyclone and rushed out a back exit. One of the remaining three, a gaunt dark-haired man, scowled, watching the door swing shut. The other two glanced at each other. I’d seen these three at the restaurant, and I’d seen one of them briefly at Curtis & Huston. I hoped their glance had nothing to do with me.

  No one spoke.

  I’d expected to enter some kind of foyer or reception area. I’d been prepared to ask to speak to someone. I hadn’t expected to walk into what was obviously a workroom, with computers scattered over several long tables, monitors and VCRs mounted on wall brackets, keyboards on people’s laps, candy wrappers and wire snippings strewn across the floor, soft drinks nestled between cable wires and silver envelopes of computer chips.

  I hoped they didn’t build machines for sale here. They might literally have bugs in them.

  “I’m sorry,” I faltered. “I thought this was a business office.”

  “Didn’t we all,” one of the seated two said dryly. He was forty-ish and paunchy, in jeans and a sweatshirt, his thinning hair caught in a ponytail. He stroked his graying mustache, regarding me with sharp blue eyes.

  “What can we do for you?” The gaunt dark-haired man—whom I’d seen at Curtis & Huston—stepped toward me, scowl still in place. He buffed his short beard with his knuckles.

  “I . . . I wondered if you needed any employees?” And here I’d told Arthur he didn’t need to worry, that I’d be able to get information out of these people.

  “No.” His tone invited me to leave.

  “Do, um, any of you know of a place for rent up here?”

  “No,” he repeated.

  The back door was kicked noisily open. The blonde reentered as forcefully as she’d gone. She stood for a moment, looking larger than life in her tank top and jeans, sweater tied around her waist. Then she strode across to the dark-haired man and smacked him. He reeled, falling against a table right beside me.

  “Jesus!” The paunchy man leaped to his feet. “Toni, what are you—”

  She lunged again, forcing him to quit talking and jump
between them.

  The fourth person sat passively, watching. He looked young, barely out of his teens, and none too bright despite the expensive computer clutter around him. He neither intervened nor showed surprise.

  The big blonde was screaming, “Don’t you lie to me, Galen. Don’t you ever lie to me again!”

  “Goddamn it,” the man in the middle insisted. “He’s not lying.”

  Galen didn’t seem to have anything to add.

  I was alarmed by the tangle of bodies leaning over the table just a few feet from me. The brawling blonde looked angry enough to strangle both men—and me for an encore. I tried to back away.

  A nearby chair tripped me up. I overcompensated to keep myself from falling, accidentally brushing the woman’s arm.

  Surprised by my touch, she struck out absently, swatting my face as if I were a bothersome mosquito. I felt a hot stab of pain in my nose. I blinked away tears, trying to stay upright.

  The group staggered left, bumping against me. I managed to keep my balance, making my way to the opposite side of the table.

  From here, I could see red streaks on the blonde’s arm. I stifled a scream, thinking one of the men had scratched her.

  But I quickly realized the blood was mine; it had gushed out of my nose. It was dripping onto the table. The woman had given me a nosebleed.

  When she noticed the mess on her arm, it momentarily derailed her fury. She rubbed it, smearing it onto her hand. The paunchy man pushed her away from Galen.

  Galen carped, “Get a grip, Toni!”

  “Look what she did.” The young man pointed at my nose.

  “I’m okay,” I assured them. Blood streamed down the hand I’d raised to my nose. “I used to get these as a teenager.” At every demonstration where my face contacted a police baton.

  “It’s not broken?” Galen’s tone told me I wouldn’t be very popular if it was.

  I felt the bridge. Damn, this had been a trying couple of days. “I think it’s okay.”

  The blonde’s voice was tremulous. “Look at this. Look at my arm.”