Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Bad memories can stand out like formidable enemies. In adversity of this sort you see everything clearly. It is unsettling. You remember tiny details around you, like the cold, gray sky dotted with swirling snowflakes. Your eyes seem to remember and you conjure the colors, like the pale edges of frozen mud along the rivers edge, the tan barkless tree covered with frost, and the indented burrowings of insects.

  We were on our fifth year of independence, fending for ourselves without Father. This wasn’t too long after the winter in which Mother set out in the blizzard to search for stranded livestock.

  You remember that story, don’t you?

  How we left because of Ma tti qwe ta tti ta, the One Most Afraid, and Father’s obsession with her? The One Most Afraid was the younger sister that Dorothy Black Heron never knew.

  Don’t you remember how we almost starved until the blizzard came as a blessing?

  The silhouette I saw of Mother?

  There she was in a woolen shawl raising a giant meat cleaver with both arms, hacking away at the half-frozen pigs who were piled along the fence line in the tall snowdrifts. Had it not been for the pigs who huddled and climbed atop one another for protection from the historic snowstorm, we would have either frozen or starved. The boars and sows ended up crushing each other senseless.

  Toward spring thaw, numerous bodies of frozen animals and birds covered the forest and prairie floor. The hollow-eyed, sparsely fleshed pig skulls proved the most disturbing.

  I recall thinking: This could have been us.

  As we approached these areas of devastation where the deer, fox, and rabbits last congregated before dying, the scavengers ran or flew away in a flurry as if they had just committed an atrocious crime. It wasn’t their fault; they were only being what they were.

  For months afterward I had nightmares about mice and crows expertly scraping their way into our rigid bodies. Tunnels of our once-life melting. Of course, I now know these dreams were premonitions, the volatile beginnings of a family tragedy. I sometimes feel death has overpaid me.

  For the first time since we had made a reluctant return to the central encampment of relatives in Tama County, I was feeling good. In spite of the flood of the Iowa River, we had survived four harsh seasons, and we were on the verge of knowing better how to take care of ourselves. But I never anticipated being enveloped by my sisters private secret. And I never expected to be troubled by a beloved person’s twisted direction. The direction Mother took.

  How I wish I could go backward! There are many things I would have changed. . . .

  Before the flood we were doing perfectly that fifth year at the Amana Colonies: We traded corn and beans we grew in the summer for sausage and ham in the fall. The red-cheeked European farmers were eager to obtain our crops. They were astonished at how much longer our garden varieties lasted and how well they tasted. To hasten the trade, we learned German words like “ke to ben, potato” or “schwi ben, onion.”

  But all that came to an abrupt standstill when the torrential rains started, rains that caused uncontrolled emotion to inundate the heart of a woman with malice for her beloved daughter. Mother and Bent Tree, they were entangled in the leftover webbing of love medicine spells that took our father. Unexpected visits and written notes from the One Most Afraid proved the most potent. An alluring young girl and a family of suspected sorcerers who desired their daughter and niece have a bountiful life, free from want.

  John Two Red Foot, our father, was thus seen as an ample provider; an ideal mate. What cost was it to his wife and family but humiliation? they must have said as the first mirror shots were sent from the woods into the door of his lodge. Directing the sunlight to the area where he kept his bed they must have spoken into the mirror in a breath of “persuasion” plants.

  Throughout our existence, there are bound to be periods when tragic situations spring up from the calm. If these tragedies are missing, the elders used to say, a person will be overwhelmed with melancholy when it strikes that “lives can be taken.” And it is strange. A family that cares for each other can also die from loneliness for each other.

  Back then, of course, we were more susceptible to diseases. Many varieties, as many as our garden held. The loss of a single youth or parent could cause the loss of other family members. Even if disease didn’t inhabit all our defenseless bodies, the deaths of people close to us had similar devastating capabilities.

  The “shadows,” or ghostly presence, of deceased loved ones would return in dreams and guide us by hand and familiar voice to where they resided—the Afterlife. Even when we had abided by the rules of not naming their names in daily conversation, their faces and bodies came to us as if they had never left for the West, never died.

  Had I known the course of upcoming events then, I would have confronted Mother. But I sought to remove myself from Bent Tree, my sister, as she whispered those awful descriptions. It was an intimate subject best understood by women. Their anatomical physicality, the differences. Traditionally, even as siblings, we the boys were separated from the girls, and fathers were not allowed to change or bathe their own daughters. That’s just the way things were. I didn’t know Mother’s anger and suspicions would become evil.

  Just as there are bound to be moments of personal disaster, there will also be moments of helplessness. This is how I reacted that day by the river: I was rendered speechless, and I prayed it would go away. It didn’t. It was like waking up to find a smoky-shaped trespasser, a night-enemy, beside the bed, inhaling at will your breath, causing paralysis. I was unable to move or say anything.

  Of course, I knew instantly what Mother was doing was wrong, but I didn’t know how to resolve it. I had no words to give to my sister or mother; I felt bad, for they should have been given in either consolation or complaint. I was aware Bent Tree had reached womanhood, which often made it necessary for her to sleep, eat, and hide in a mi ya no te wi ka ni, menstruation lodge; I just never expected to know beyond the obvious what young girls must endure to become women. I ni ye to ki-ke te na e tti ke ki? ne te tti te. Is this the way it really is? I thought to myself.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Bent Tree said in a quavery voice. “And I am bothered every day by her suspicions. She tells this to the women who visit. They probably go home and tell everyone of my supposed wrongdoings. With who? I don’t even know any men other than you two, my brothers! She checks me physically for signs of sexual activity!”

  Even though I found her secret unbelievable I began to realize that strange events had indeed transpired between Mother and Bent Tree. For no apparent reason we were sometimes told to do chores. Of course, we obeyed, thinking there was a good reason why they had to be alone. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound pleasant from a distance. When we got our work done, we went on long meditative walks. Maybe we didn’t want to hear their words. By evening the long quiet spells before falling asleep somehow became increasingly bothersome. It went beyond being respectful for the occasion of family sleep. There was trouble.

  In the shade of the cottonwoods that lined the four riverbanks I began to shiver. With two rivers, there was twice the wind, twice the cold. Presumably, twice the fish. Consumed by thoughts of confusion, I lost all interest in spearfishing; I didn’t want to look for the watery shapes of dark catfish lumbering and hiding beneath the unwanted fish. The half-submerged spear began collecting layers of ice. I soon began to fear that my eyes would freeze as well, for I had begun to weep. Unknowingly. In a fleeting thought I knew then our lives would somehow go awry. It was as if an entire railroad bridge had lifted upright, levitated, and settled itself slowly on one sharp corner over my boney chest. The weight of the bridge, ko ka i ka ni, was more than the frail rib cage could tolerate. It splintered and sliced into an already saddened heart. I could either thrash about or lie still like a speared fish. In either case there was sure death.

  As the clouds and the sun began creating varying levels of intermittent daylight, I couldn’t think of anything appropriate
to say. Over the crusty ice, shadows made from our combined breath raced in the cold wind, circling my other sister and two younger brothers. The rectangular opening over the frozen river where we had seen fish in multitudes became a portal to a dark, dark earth. Death reached out its long fingers and prepared to trip Bent Tree. She would fall and never see anything again.

  With exposed fingers I leaned forward slightly against the spear and listened to the barbed tines grind and sink into the sandy riverbottom. We had been taught that frank discussions about our bodies was taboo. More so between a brother and his sister. It was inappropriate. Mother had taught us that. As we matured we were forbidden to do many things together; the point being, the less we interacted, the less the possibility of incest. Because of the difficulties we faced as a fatherless family, working together and being close was virtually impossible. Yet there was never any intent on either side of exploring each other, not even out of curiosity. We cared for each other too much.

  “Mother thinks I am seeing a man,” confessed Bent Tree. “She also thinks an admirer is stalking me and I am encouraging him by allowing him to touch my private parts. You are probably too shocked or so full of evil that you can’t tell the truth,’ she accuses me.”

  As she started to tell me when and how long ago Mother began inspecting her for alleged sexual misconduct, I purposely drowned her out with my own thoughts, remembering: I caught them once, surprised them by returning too early. I had dismissed the event as being normal. Things only women and women-to-be knew about. Something beyond the realm of a young man’s life. Something not easily understood, like childbirth or “being outside” monthly in the personal lodge.

  Finally, as my eyes began to get clearer on that long-ago wintry day, large catfish shapes began to emerge from under the hundreds of suspended fish. I hovered the spear close over the sandy, stone-lit bottom and waited for the largest. Like a clear blue sky that has a uniqueness of its own, I remember everything from that day when Bent Tree divulged her ugly secret on the confluence of the Iowa and Swanroot Rivers. The white rocks we had thrown to the riverbottom to serve as a light background shimmered before they darkened with finned and barbed silhouettes. Lqoking up I saw the fish-drivers, my siblings, lifting the wooden posts and pounding them to the ice, driving the packed fish out from the deep greenish waters. There were vibrations on the soles of my worn-out boots. Bent Tree, looking distraught, kneeled down, scooping away the icy slush from the rectangular opening with a perforated tin dipper. When she stood back up, she vowed Mother would never touch her again. High above the willow saplings the double echo of wooden posts slamming against the exposed branches of huge submerged trees resonated between the two rivers.

  It was hard to dismiss the picture she had drawn in my mind of a hideous belt made of male genitals, the one Mother accused Bent Tree of wearing as proof of her sexual conquests. It wasn’t true, but Mother had convinced herself the old story about an unfaithful woman was happening to Bent Tree.

  Shortly after our return to Tama County, Mothers condition worsened. She did what she could to fight the doldrums, though. She began talking to Bent Tree more. She was still deeply embittered about being abandoned by our father, John Two Red Foot. Bent Tree, as it turned out, took the brunt of this pent-up anger. Mother eventually became suspicious of everything she did, questioning her movements around the house—and the Settlement. Whatever semblance of mental clarity Mother had fought so hard to regain at our Amana Colonies camp crumbled when the torrential rains began, ruining our home and the gardens we had subsisted on.

  During one endless week of pounding rain in the month of July, Be na wi ki tti swa, anyone who lived anywhere within a mile or two of the Iowa River—for one hundred miles in either direction—was forced to high ground for a three-week period. The flood was unlike any experienced in history.

  Near Gerslossen, where we lived, a family of farmers died when the man refused to leave his cherished home to the rising debris-filled waters. They were all found weeks later with bullet holes in their decomposed skulls. Mass suicide was preferred over drowning.

  Forty miles upriver, on tribal lowlands, news came to us that strong young men had been sent into the muddy brown waters to retrieve sacred mattings from the earthlodges. In the rush for high-ground safety, the mats were inadvertently forgotten. There was panic, for if the mats were drenched in the slightest, new thunderstorms would materialize. Another calamity.

  All along the circumference of the flood the religious but fearful elders paced. It was rumored that the sale of a sacred mat to a Belgium museum by a man named Francis Marie led to the angry retribution of the Thunderstorm Gods. When they spoke, lightning bolts shot forth from their mouths and set fire to tall cottonwoods. Under the branches was where sorcerers took shelter and congregated. There were many.

  Standing behind the elders were the young swimmers’ parents. Everyone peered in a worrisome manner toward the swollen lowlands. Above the river valleys were long streams of smoke, marking places where cottonwoods fell. Dozens upon dozens. The sun couldn’t be seen due to the smoke-darkened sky.

  As the swimmers came to view and emerged, everyone was told what happened. After being confronted by large snapping turtles who blocked the smoke portals of the longhouses, the swimmers were able to dive and open the submerged doorways of the earthlodges. They then broke through the roofs, kept the mats dry by tying them to staffs, holding them above water, and taking turns.

  This was the closest the Well-Known Twin Brother had brought us to earth’s untimely demise. The unrelenting torrential rains brought defiant turtles who saw a chance to revert to the monsters they originally were in the First Earth. They were still upset by the Well-Known Twin Brother posing as a woman momentarily to steal back his sacred mat. (Maybe this was the very mat that Francis Marie sold, speculated the people.)

  The flood hung on, and all that remained of our home and the three gardens in Gerslossen was shiny black mud and bare trees. Everywhere was the putrid odor of rotting fish and livestock. Mud-covered shapes of pregnant horses, some with their insides ripped apart, glistened ominously under the blue sky.

  The scene reminded us of another season. If it wasn’t a blanket of head-high snowdrifts, then it was a vast sludge-ridden grave. Surviving scavengers with wings and paws deflated the gaseous carrion systematically with their beaks and sharp teeth before the feast.

  After Mother saw our lodge poles under a valley of oily mud, including the surrounding countryside, she abandoned any thought of staying. All the clothes, dishes, kettles, and traps we had accumulated in trade and purchase were swept away. We waded knee-deep and found nothing salvageable. We consoled one another and said we were fortunate to have gotten out with clothes and dry food satchels. Had it not been for the sound of sizzling embers in the cooking fire being engulfed by the initial floodwaters, we would not have awoken.

  If given the chance again, Mother would have preferred drowning rather than going back. We remained in the hills over our valley for as long as the supplies lasted. At the central encampment we were looked upon with intrigue, like people who had ventured far away, failed in their exile, and then straggled back. We must have been a spectacle: shameless adolescents in ragged clothes and moccasins indistinguishable from soil. The children we once played with had all grown. They were told to keep away but couldn’t.

  After we were taken in by relatives who were both worried about our health and embarrassed by our appearance, it was nice, catching up on news. Listening to dreamlike voices other than our own was the best part of our reunion.

  Through the generosity of Mother’s cousins we were allowed to stay in a house with a smooth wooden floor, glass windows, and one creaky door. The only trouble was, Mother would by habit stay in the house all day and never come out until well after sunset, e ki tti-ni ki tti-ki tte swa. Mother didn’t want to meet up with our father, no se na na, John Two Red Foot. There was a good chance he was somewhere in the community, traveling by buggy and
horse with his seventeen-year-old wife and two infants, our half siblings, without a hint of disgrace. On occasion, he would attempt to converse with us but it came out awkward and insincere. He tried and we denied.

  If we happened to be within hearing distance with Mother, he would mimic banter and carry on like a zestful but pathetic man. With me alone, however, he reacted differently: He would stare, nod faintly, and smile without wanting or meaning to. It was the way adult men exhibited resentment. This was the way it was then, i ni tta-e tti ke ki-i yo i ni na i.

  There was excitement amid the despair. One day we were tricked into going to Weeping Willow Elementary. We felt like the early runaways on their way to the infamous “barns.” Once the school officials understood we were “irreversibly illiterate,” we were led back to the wagon and given a quick but polite good-bye. Personally, I was relieved, but the others were somewhat dejected; they wanted to display their speaking skills in German.

  As young people are apt to socialize within our own age group, we would frequently leave Mother alone at home. This didn’t seem harmful then, but our absence was probably hard on her. And for Bent Tree, my sister.

  “I find the daylight annoying here,” Mother would say to us every time day’s end arrived. “It is an unusual red and yellow glare.” She would therefore wait for sunset. Only then with the curtains fully opened did the warm, stale air rush out. “There! You see what I mean,” she would assert. “The sun is still that reddish tinge.”

  In spite of her peculiarities, the evenings at the Black Eagle Child Settlement were beautiful as we all sat in the small room of the crude government-built house. Mother would sew and bead in the shadows. On weekends we were sent to Why Cheer, o te we na ki, to set up a roadside crafts display. She could still support us with her diligent work. But something lingered and it festered in her thoughts.