Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  She’s Indian, Greggy said.

  What’s that got to do with anything? I asked.

  I sometimes drink coffee with Greggy at the truck stop in Lone Tree. He’ll talk of easy wrongs and quick solutions: crossing double yellows, running stop signs, ninety-in-a-sixty-five, all balanced out with fines and time.

  Indian, Catholic, sinner? he said. All about the same. You two know any difference?

  He looked at the patrolmen. The older one grinned, his teeth sparking in the roving lights, bright as cheap jewels plastered to his face.

  Be damned if I do, he said. Now you mention it. Someone was in a lot of hurt down there. I turned to go back to my pickup.

  Don’t you guys get wet, I said.

  A stone skittered from my boot, bounced against the asphalt, through the slick glaze of puddles there, then shushed into the grass on the opposite side of the road. Water sprayed from my boot tips in an arc, like thrown claws caught in the lights. My boot heels made the only sound against the rain.

  Then Greggy’s voice came, explaining to the patrolmen: He used to be a priest.

  The words reached out from the ditch and stopped me in my tracks just a few feet from my pickup. Just words, and I should have been able to walk away from them, out of their range and back to the present, but I stood eavesdropping on the rumors of my own past as if they might reveal some secret about me I didn’t know.

  He give it up years ago, Greggy went on. Me, I didn’t know you could do that. Went back to ranching, which he grew up doing. Out toward Lone Tree. So now he’s just a rancher.

  Was it he wanted to ranch or didn’t want to preach?

  He don’t talk about it.

  A priest. Huh. Never woulda figured.

  A priest?

  It was a new voice, wavering, drawing out the word, reedy through the rain. It froze me, like a voice in the night coming out of someone else’s dream. It was a woman’s voice with something deeper in it than a woman’s voice, a huffing, like a blacksmith’s bellows being used to make a grass blade sing. I had my hand on the door of the pickup. I shivered again and bumped against the mirror.

  I need a priest, the voice said. Those drawn-out e’s rising at the end.

  Silence then, except for the rain. Then Greggy’s voice, low to the patrolmen: He left yet?

  Then, shouted: Caleb? You still here?

  Then, muttered: Well, I’ll be damned. Call me a prophet.

  They hunched themselves over, and I squatted down. She lay on her back, her hair streaked black and grayish white. Rain had blown against one side of her face and smoothed it, but the other side was wrinkled, the skin parched. She wore a dirty white coat with fur trim, way too big for her—looked to be drowning in it. Dark brown eyes, large for her face, gazing widely at me.

  A priest? she asked. Her voice was a whisper but with that huffing resonance I’d heard across the highway, as if her breathing were too big for her chest. Maybe the accident had hurt her lungs. Our touching shoulders held her voice within a circle, magnifying it even more.

  I shook my head. No priest, I said. An ambulance will be here soon.

  She held her fists on her stomach. She curled one of her wrists and bent her elbow the way a pregnant cow lifts her back foot from the earth, careful and slow. She did the same thing with her other arm. I thought she was drifting off. Then her eyes suddenly blazed so hot and immediate I jerked, my foot slipped on the grass, and I had to grab Greggy’s shoulder.

  I heard! she hissed.

  I gained my balance.

  You did, I said. Just, they were wrong. Greggy—you have to keep those lights going?

  Rules.

  They’re driving me nuts. How bad’s she hurt?

  Not sure. Got thrown from the car. Make my job a lot more pleasant if people’d just put their damn seat belts on. Hasn’t moved her legs.

  I took off my hat and stared at a blond hair, stuck there, glinting blue and red. When I lifted my face to replace the hat, my eyes went to the knoll. For a brief moment the lights seemed to open a door in space, and a white animal was standing there, patient in the rain. A Charolais heifer, maybe. I didn’t see it long enough, and when the lights swung back it was gone.

  I turned to the woman. The afterimage of whatever animal it had been hovered between us. I could hardly tell which one I was seeing and which my eyes created. Then she emerged from the afterimage. Her nostrils flared.

  Why are you here? she demanded.

  For someone hurt she was pretty pushy.

  Just happened by, I said. That’s all. I best be going.

  I stood. Rain smacked against the tarp and shattered. The lights swung over us, fierce in their coming, lazy in their leaving. The knoll appeared and went away. Then that damn Greggy.

  He ain’t a priest, really, spite a what I said. He used to be. But not anymore, see?

  Her hand shot out and attached itself to my pants cuff, so tight it looked hard and solid as a hoof. I stood looking down at it, the rain coming in under my tipped-up hat brim and running down my neck. Then I squatted back down on my heels. Greggy seemed mighty interested in the furred fringe of the woman’s coat. The wet side of her face had gone smooth as something molded, shining, her eyes darkly radiant.

  Then you are, she said.

  Used to be. Like Greggy said.

  Yeah. Like I said.

  But nothing changed in her face, and I knew what she was thinking. She let go my pants cuff and shook her head slowly, as if it were way more massive than it was and her neck barely had strength to move it. She reached up and put her hand on mine, resting on my knee. Hers seemed hard as rock, but then warmed and softened.

  Once a priest, she said, always a priest.

  Greggy coughed, then stood and went through the rain up the road ditch. The two patrolmen looked at the woman, then me. The younger one said, Gotta stretch my legs, and the older one agreed, and they drifted off.

  I was just driving by, I said, more to myself than her.

  You stopped.

  Anyone’d stop.

  You are a priest. Nothing changes that.

  I shook my head, but I knew what was coming next.

  You have to hear my confession.

  I slid my hand out from under hers and smelled tobacco on it, and something else, soil and mold, as if her hands were soaked with the smell of grass and ground. I looked up at the knoll. The white animal was suddenly there again, barely visible, shaped by the lights, seeming out of space. I shut my eyes so tightly my eyeballs hurt. When I opened them it was gone.

  I can’t, I said. I’m sorry.

  You must.

  It sounded like a tired argument—an am-not/are-too argument she would stubbornly chant against me until the rain ended and the world dried up. But I had only to resist until the ambulance came, and it was arriving already, somewhere. I felt sorry for her, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing I had to do, nothing I was meant to do. I was supposed to be on an empty road.

  But then she said: Your belief doesn’t matter here. Mine does.

  I thought at first it was the kind of arrogant, militant religious stuff that lets suicide bombers and murderers feel holy. But she said it and went still, and her meaning sank into me. It wasn’t arrogance. It was humility, or something like—an admission of helplessness, or emptiness, or need. And because of it, her belief had precedence: if she believed I was a priest, then, for the sake of her urgency, I was.

  The lights circled and the rain dripped off the edges of the tarp and rolled down the grass blades to the ground. She pulled her arms into her chest and wrapped the ragged coat tight. She withdrew into it. She closed her eyes. Under the coat her thin body heaved. I thought to call Greggy, not sure she was all right. But the lights mesmerized me, and I just squatted on my heels and watched them illuminate her face and color the gray-white coat. After a while she quit struggling and went completely still. Her movements had been frail and small, but now, as if stillness had mass, she seemed to fill the coat. I
thought she’d gone to sleep and that, after all, the issues that confronted me would be lifted into dream, and I would wait a few moments and rise, relieved, and walk through the rain and nod to Greggy and climb into my pickup.

  But when I shifted, readying to go, her hand unfolded on her stomach, and her fingers lifted and moved back and forth in a slow rhythm, like grass moving in a quiet wind. It held me.

  You can’t just walk away from yourself, she whispered.

  I thought I knew what she meant and opened my mouth to reply, but before I could she continued: Who was she?

  It was as if the grass asked the question, the wet grass and wet land and invisible herds of animals on invisible hills rising and falling into distances all around us. I absorbed the question as if it were soaking into me with the rain, inarticulate and meaningful as water filling pores in rock, creating reservoirs. I didn’t even wonder how she knew to ask—as if the entrancement of the lights and the rain drumming against the world had merged all memory, mine with hers, and I wasn’t answering her but, unsurprised, was answering myself.

  Her name? I asked.

  She nodded.

  Angela. A parishioner. Married.

  She nodded again, as if merely confirming what she knew.

  It shouldn’t have happened, I said.

  But it did.

  No. That’s too easy. Not just happened. I wanted it.

  And she?

  I think so. Yes.

  Was it sudden?

  It was sudden when it was sudden, I said.

  We were talking so quietly under the rain that I wondered how we heard each other. Greggy and the two patrolmen stood near their cars like sentinels, the night just cold enough that their combined breathing formed a little cloud above their heads that the lights cutting through filled with changing color.

  What happened then? she asked.

  They had a child. That ended it. But it had to end anyway. Somehow.

  You couldn’t go back to what you were?

  It wasn’t there to go back to.

  Brock and I are pregnant, she had said. He’s always wanted children. He deserves them. This has to end.

  This was on the phone. The words had the chiseled, precise sound of words memorized. I felt as if she were cutting ropes and I was falling and she was watching me.

  What am I supposed to do? I’d asked her. She’d had no answer. And neither did the church and all my learning. I couldn’t understand her sudden hardness, her ability to extricate herself, to lift herself up wholly and away and speak to me as if she were on some ledge beyond my reach. Yet I was the one who should have been telling her to do what she was doing. When I hung up the phone I had no world.

  It was there.

  She was speaking again, this woman with grass reeds in her voice.

  It’s always there, she said. You just couldn’t find it anymore.

  I saw no use in arguing. All right, I said. I couldn’t.

  So we’re here.

  We’re here.

  I believed she meant the impasse between us. But she was silent, and as I watched her I wondered if she meant something else, some resonance in the world, as if what I’d done twenty years ago had sent a wave through time that nudged her off the road so I could come and kneel now wetly by her side.

  It is indelible, she said.

  I assumed I knew what she meant: how the soul is marked by sacraments, and nothing can erase the mark, no omission or commission, no thought or word or deed, and the power I’d been given remained, regardless of belief.

  Greggy and the patrolmen murmured. I felt how wet I was. My hand on my knee seemed apart from me, veins gleaming in the blue light snapping by. She lifted her own hand and slowly reached inside the fringe of her coat, struggling as if its weight alone resisted her attenuated strength. When her hand came out, her palm was down.

  When we ask a holy man for a ceremony, she said, we give tobacco.

  A spasm passed across her face. A strand of white hair blew across her eyes and tangled, and something wild came into her pupils. Then it passed, and she turned her hand over and revealed a leather pouch decorated with glass beads. I recognized the diamond pattern in red and yellow and blue and green: triangles reflected, tepees standing by still water.

  She raised the pouch to me, but I couldn’t do what she wanted. It would be an empty act. I hadn’t felt holy for over twenty years, and I knew too well the old lessons of sacred objects that required, for their touching, consecrated hands. So I only looked at what she held.

  She shook her ponderous head.

  What do I have to do to get you to take a gift? she asked.

  It occurred to me to say: Make me worthy of it. But it sounded like self-pity or false humility. Before I could think of a way to phrase it, she said: I saw my grandmother tonight. She died years ago. I’ve seen her before, alongside the road. But tonight she wasn’t on the shoulder. She was right in front of the car.

  The rain had thinned, I didn’t know when, to barely more than the smell of itself.

  That’s never happened before, she said. I reached for the rosary on my mirror. And this.

  She moved the pouch. The beads caught light.

  Her lips twitched in the briefest smile.

  Of course, she said, that took both hands.

  She rolled her head away from me and looked into the night. Then she turned back and pressed the pouch against the back of my hand, the spent blood of my veins under the skin.

  This was hers, she said. It goes back to before Wounded Knee.

  I felt the leather against my hands, this old, old thing touching me, having been touched by others, caressed and used, and having come from an animal that, if one believes it, offered its life to align itself with purposes greater than existence and was transformed by prayer and ritual, and then handed down through feuding generations to this moment of our meeting. It was too deep, too old. I turned my hand palm upward.

  Memory overwhelmed me. I thought again of Hayley Jo Zimmerman: her baptism the last sacrament I’d ever performed. Even as I’d poured the water and pressed the Sign of the Cross into her forehead, I’d already betrayed my vows and allowed a married woman to betray hers. But I’d told myself—I had to—that grace cannot be weakened by anything a human being does or disbelieves. It runs on, a pure thing, in spite of, as well as because of, us. And if grace exists at all, what I’d told myself was true.

  I looked at the tobacco pouch. Its earthy smell rose through the damp air. Maybe merely accepting it made me worthy of it. Hayley Jo Zimmerman had carried my baptism into her death. How small human acts—a few words and signs—and how little we know of their consequences. The next baptism in that church was Laura Morrison’s. I couldn’t have stood before Angela and heard her say what name she gave her child. Those two girls had run together, their heels in my headlights elliptical and wonderful, so familiar and so alien. Daughters and friends. Someone else’s. I’d drive on by and resist the urge to look back into their faces.

  And now this stranger and this object in my hand: I bowed my head. We began the old, familiar words, and she told me the things she felt she had to tell, to the God she believed worked through me. I let myself be the ears of her belief, and if I lied in so being, I lied myself into a kind of truth. When she was done I assigned a penance. She was in pain enough already—but suffering has got to be given order. Otherwise it’s just chance, just randomness and happening. So I gave her a penance, and she accepted it. Then I forgave and blessed her.

  Pilamaya, she said when I finished.

  I knew to reply, Ohan.

  I opened the tobacco pouch and took a pinch. I held it to the compass points, then the sky, the earth, then the seventh direction, inward between us. I didn’t know if there were proper words. I said what seemed appropriate, then took a pinch and with my thumb and forefinger broke it in half and held it out to her. She raised her hand. I placed a pinch between her thumb and first two fingers, then placed what remained between my li
ps and gum. She did the same. We shared the taste of tobacco, its holy rush in our blood. There should be smoke, or there should be bread, to drift away or to be swallowed. We did what circumstance allowed.

  In the distance a scatter of erratic lights appeared through the nearer, stronger ones.

  The ambulance, I said.

  She nodded, slow as a great, standing animal dozing. Behind us now the lights of the ambulance increased the chaos with their steady order, and a door opened and shut, and then another. She raised her hand toward me. The furred cuff of the coat didn’t slide down her wrist. Her hand was closed, her fingers pressed into her palm so tightly they seemed to be growing into it. She made a little circle with that closed hand.

  Bless you, she said.

  I rose, hearing the steps of the EMTs in the ditch behind me. She shut her eyes and began a chant that seemed to roll out of the land around us in a language I didn’t understand. It seemed all huffs and grunts and multitude. Then the EMTs appeared around me, moving with great precision and grace, communicating in gestures and throaty murmurs, seeming everywhere at once. I walked up the ditch slope and stood on the road with Greggy and the patrolmen while the EMTs, faceless, their heads enlarged by rain hoods, their shoulders humped, strapped her onto the backboard, grunting with effort, and carried her up the road ditch, their heads turned earthward. I tried to catch a glimpse of her face as they put her through the door, but all I could see was the coat, the shaggy trim moved by wind, looking empty.

  Well, I said, watching the wet road between our boots deepen with light. I better get back.

  I looked up. The ambulance was gone. I hadn’t heard the door shut or the tires hiss as it pulled away. I thought I might see the reflection of its lights in the low clouds, but time had passed without my knowing, and the only light I saw was a bluish star on the horizon, underneath the leaving rain.

  Yeah, Greggy said. We’ll get a wrecker out here, then tack that fence back up.

  She told me she crashed because her grandmother was standing in the middle of the road.