Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Jake Sacred Hammer, a self-confessed Christian, scooped up ceremonial secrets freely with the spoons of our ancestors, feeding himself and his relatives. His expertise provided transportation between the white and red worlds. But when the “living archives” came to a standstill that day at O’Ryan’s Cemetery in the chilly November wind, there were feelings of ambivalence. A question was asked among the Black Eagle Childs: What would the greater powers do with him for selling all those secrets to the whites? Some elderly priests seized the opportunity to pronounce him guilty on behalf of the Holy Grandfather and sentenced him to an eternity of floating nothingness. Others, like, my uncle William, treated Jake’s shadow no differently. He had been asked—over the telephone—by Jake’s kin to address their father’s brother. “The Final Words to the Deceased before Their Journey West” were instructions, a verbal mapping, on how to get to the Black Eagle Child Afterlife. As if existence itself had been easy, there were yet more trials replete with questions of faithfulness and compassion for humanity and nature.

  It was during William’s eulogy that a long-legged, bald white reporter for the Why Cheer News-Herald began snapping photographs of Jake in ceremonial clothing and repose. Although many probably found the act objectionable, no one stepped forward, for this was a white-intermingling pattern Jake had already established. It seemed fitting.

  William, however, grew annoyed at the reporter in the green turtle-neck and safari-type jacket. Like a large buzzing fly homing in on the sweet cemetery fragrance, the reporter measured light, calculated distance, and adjusted the camera’s knobs and dials. In a flurry of motions the baldheaded fly prepared to take pictures. Suddenly, the wings slowed down and he quietly knelt beside Jake’s moccasined feet.

  At the most importune moments the large camera’s shutter clicked noisily.

  So you can have a restful journey ...

  Click! went the shutter. Buzz-z-z went the baldheaded fly.

  Your family seeks only the gopdfor you. . . .

  Click! The fly’s intrusive positioning began to grate William’s patience.

  Don’t think about returning if they accidentally say your clan name. ...

  Click! Click!

  You will never feel this way again; it will never be like this again. ...

  Click! Click! went the shutter. Buzz-z-z went the baldheaded fly.

  In retrospect I now theorize that the reporter was subconsciously reacting to the eloquence and rhythmic timing of the solemn but stirring words offered. As William’s frustration peaked, however, the pauses between the sentences became protracted, as did the camera shutter clicking. Composure regained, William switched into the English language. Where there had once been a serene message, a set of crucial instructions for the deceased, the situation now drastically changed.

  “Must there be a perpetual infringement of our lives? Can we not have the ultimate final moment of privacy?” he questioned, with his hand pointing furiously to the baldheaded fly.

  William continued angrily, and in the bitterly cold wind the numb ears of the white entourage tuned in. “For those of you non-Indians in attendance who are friends of the deceased and who do not understand our language, I have just delivered a prayer for our dearly departed. In accordance to our ways this is a time of bereavement and deep sorrow. ...”

  The reporter finally slowed down, froze in his prickly fly tracks, and listened with his bald head shining in the winter sun.

  “We are not here to judge what he may or may not have done. That aspect rests with the Almighty God. It irritates me more than you can possibly imagine to have a represenative of the news media taking pictures as if this were a Women’s Preservation Club picnic, a circus, or a small-town Republican caucus!”

  Inside I asked myself, Republican caucus?

  Suddenly aware he was the subject of these words, the reporter slowly lowered the Yashica camera, forwarded the film by habit, and stepped back from the coffin in an effort to hide in the crowd, but no one gave room.

  “This to me is the most flagrant form of disrespect! We do not take pictures of such in our society! If you are absolutely driven to take them, then please take them as we are breathing and conscious!”

  After these words, which were delivered without the slightest pause or slur, an attorney who represented the tribe in state and federal courts made his way to the circle of bereaved relatives and viciously yanked the camera from the reporters neck. He then proceeded to pop the film out, unrolling it carefully in the sunlight. As if it could be read only when placed before light, he held it from end to end vertically toward the sky like a sacred miniature scroll. The long-legged reporter stood there in utter dejection with bloodred ears, looking down at the exposed frames curling up over the cold, hard ground.

  I remember thinking as I saw this scene: “A small but symbolic victory over a newspaper that has been a disease upon our lives. One giant leap for Black Eagle Child kind.” The equation of an astronaut’s quote as he set his foot on the lunar landscape with the reprimand William had just delivered to the reporter was a caprice. Yet it seemed appropriate and righteous when the history of the American mass media’s treatment of the First People was considered.

  William stood with his oversized woolen shirt and gray khaki work pants. Sensing all was back to normal, he squinted his puffy eyes. His small-boned frame tottered slightly as he regained his footing over the casket. William resumed exactly where he had left off in the same low monotone of the instruction.

  No matter how strong the loneliness of your journey, make it easy for those who remain here. ...

  It was difficult to perceive him as a man of tribal letters, but he was a consummate orator. With his soaring height, like the eagle, he was the closest any human could ever get to the Well-Known Twin-Brother, the Creator.

  After the incident at O’Ryan’s Cemetery, I looked at William Listener differently. He represented a clan leader who was also self-educated. Of greater importance was the fact that he was bilingual. Aside from being on the Tribal Council and being a successful plumbing contractor, he was a drum-carrier for the Red Swan Society. The multitudes of prayers he knew and the songs he sang made young people like myself envious. Some even said he radiated when he sang.

  Of course, there were certain individuals who could never duplicate or equal his talents, especially those who judged him on the basis of his politics. They had nothing good to say. About anything! From the day I was told by my playmates—Ted, Pat, Horatio, and the Muscatines—that “his wallet was fattened with money from the sale of maps to the lightning-struck hillside,” I made it a point not to visit their houses no matter how lonely I got; I knew their parents would make me carry back petty messages. For reasons of comfort I avoided these people like the woods when night first begins. Maybe this was the phase when I distanced myself. Maybe it wasn’t far enough. On long walks during my adolescent growth I rehearsed arguments with myself—before facing my friends—that William was far removed from the offensive antics of Jake Sacred Hammer. What William did on the outside was irrelevant, I surmised. Knowledge was the real issue, knowledge needed by the next generation to facilitate their spiritual passage. This was the real priority, not rumors of financial improprieties committed while he was chairman of the Tribal Council. Abuse of social service funds wasn’t a heinous crime, after all, not when criminals lived undetected in our neighborhoods. It mattered little to me if he told those assisted with food and fuel oil by the state not to deal with the grocery store where his wife’s check bounced. There were murderers and rapists whose acts couldn’t be proven in a courtroom, but everyone knew they were guilty. The parents of these criminals were quick to provide alibis. They maintained their innocence, and they remained silent accomplices right up to the end. Their conspiracies were the fiercest kind imaginable, the kind that vanished forever: a stabbing, a shooting, a beating somewhere in the dark before dawn, where all the participants through their claims of innocence break apart and drift away in an o
blivion of eternal nothingness. . . .

  Yet, in spite of this lawless vortex, charges were made that William had misused food and fuel oil orders. The Why Cheer business people complained, as did tribal members. His vendetta unnecessarily involved the tribe, it was reported. There was also talk of carpenters and plumbers being paid in outright cash. News of his exploits came to the supper table in succession.

  Mostly, I came away not wishing to understand the function of a seven-man tribal government. It seemed a bad rendering of democracy, a mutation of a small-town Euro-American council system.

  And so we ate the boiled squirrel in corn meal and pondered.

  Would we ever be like William? Luciano Bearchild, my cousin— before he disappeared in 1966—used to ask when discussing our obligation-ridden futures. Despite having sung his way to prominence through the Earthlodge clans since childhood, Luciano was intimidated by William. Having no response to his own remarkable abilities, Luciano would tighten his necktie and shuffle across the concrete floor like James Brown. Regrettably, Luciano vanished near Liquid Lake, and no one since has known and worn hand-tailored suits, white silk scarves, Italian shoes, and perforated fingerless gloves.

  It seemed impossible in my twentieth winter to shuffle away. For the most part, I felt that in the split second the Bearchild family portrait was taken, I was already a blurred movement. You can’t make him out too clear hut that’s Edgar Bearchild, esteemed member of the SRS—the Society of Repressed Storytellers—or another reason why the elite literary world is very much like the Immigration and Naturalization Service a.k.a. “the good old boy network,” in departmental exclusion of un-Americans.

  In my total lifetime, if a miracle somehow changed my attitudes, I could be only one-sixteenth—maybe the part that belittled the white photographer—of whoever William Listener was.

  Since William was not an ordinary person, I am inclined to believe his detached hand—or a phantasm thereof—made overtures to communicate with Selene Buffalo Husband and myself in 1979. In actuality, William was lying comatose at the Heijen Medical Center in Sherifftown fifteen miles away.

  From this extraordinary event was born the story called “The Incorporeal Hand,” where the mystery guest signed itself in as “The Messenger of. . .”on the TV game show What’s My Line? Panelists Henry Morgan and Dorothy Killgallen, with oversized blindfolds, smirked as the excess lizard skin of their aristocratic throats rippled in the cold green light. ...

  The Stick-Shooting Escapade at Horned Serpent Lake

  Several years following Jake Sacred Hammer’s funeral and after much coaxing by my parents, I sat and sang with William Listener and the other prominent elders of the Red Swans. This secret society consisted solely of firstborns from the Tree-Raking or Claw-Marking Bear clans. My first real experience with the Red Swans came a decade previous when I accompanied my father, mother, grandmother, and William, the Grandfather of All Dream, to a major spiritual gathering in Canada.

  In the spring of 1961, almost one year from the time I accompanied Luciano Bearchild to Browning, Montana, for the North American Indian Days celebration, my brother Alan and I took a trip with my father, mother, grandmother, and William to a major spiritual gathering in Canada.

  Through the long travel by automobile that spring to Horned Serpent Lake, I got to know William, my half uncle. Sort of. Likewise for my father, Tony. William and my father had been invited by a religious group of Canadian Indians, the Ontarios. Through the “lost tribe” theory my father felt the pilgrimage would lead to an exchange and comparison of rituals.

  Even though great distances separated our homelands, our dialects were strikingly similar with this particular Northern tribe. Further, the secret societies of the tribes believed in the same mystical bird, whose transparent and outstretched wings covered the landscape with the color of an amber sunset.

  The two-day ride in a dark blue 1949 Mercury Club Coupe to Horned Serpent Lake would have been an incredible waste of a ten-year-old boys time were it not for the Red Swan stick-shooting ceremony. In the first fiery light of dawn, we watched the all-night dancers emerge from the longhouse, to later dance and then fall to the tall prairie grass in convulsions and paralysis after “being struck” by obsidian bullets that came from sticks.

  It was fascinating and scary at the same time. But before all that stuff happened, we got lost in the most isolated area of the lake, real Indian country. For miles there were no gas stations, nor were homes visible anywhere. Adding to the confusion were the roads. A single gravel road would split apart in three directions. With only a tattered handwritten map and a Mercury Coupe choking on mossy lake water, we were headed for disaster. Suddenly, at the last desperate moment when we were ready to turn around, the glass reflection of a rusted truck signaled us. Father and William then walked to the fence-enclosed pasture and siphoned the precious remaining fluid from the truck’s undamaged radiator. Grandmother used to say our lives were probably saved that day by kind spirits who were busy watching us from behind a steering wheel of ja ghost truck.

  We were welcomed to Canada by an old medicine man, ne a bi a, by the name of Jack Frost who offered us a supper of sweet potatoes, wild rice, biscuits, and warm tea before heading out to the longhouse. Before my father explained we had had radiator problems in addition to being lost, old man Frost began making witty analogies to his own internal ailments and the Mercury’s mechanical problems.

  “Maybe Mercury and me sick same time?” he half-chuckled in English.

  Touching and gently massaging the wool shirt over his chest, old man Frost saw himself as an overheated Mercury Coupe. I am sure I didn’t understand as much of the Ontario language as the adults, but I listened closely.

  He had awoken that morning with unusual chest pains. The dried blisters of his palms caught the shirt, making rasping noises before he inquired in a toothless wily smile: “When radiator get hot? Maybe same time I put medicine in tea?” Making motions as if he was turning the steering wheel of a car, he added, “Me. Car. The same.”

  He said our troubles must have gone away as soon as he drank the medicinal tea. “Same time you give coolant, right?”

  Through the laughter induced by the Mercury Coupe medicine man, we calmed down and the fatigue went away. That was the point. To humor us and throw us off track from his prescience. (But years later my father and William really didn’t know how long we had driven without coolant. Maybe most of the morning, as soon as we got off the main highway? they would question over the supper table. They conceded it had to have been a long while. Clotelde, my mother, with her daughters—my sisters Sherilyn and Toni—clinging to her skirt, had the question that made them ask no more: How did Jack Frost know what was wrong with the car? Grandmother later indicated there may have been a real connection, a godlike affinity, between the old man’s chest pains and the bothersome radiator.)

  By nightfall we were parked with several other cars beside a bark longhouse located in the grassy center of a large but narrow meadow. For all that was expected to take place, I was upset no one had bothered to clear the area of shrubbery and tall prairie grass. Back home, with whites for close neighbors and because of frequent trips into their community, we tended to our lawns with diligence. The tall grass swayed in the breeze and against the car. Before the car doors were opened, we were scolded. “If one sat down here in the grass, a driver would not see you and would run you over. Stay close, it’s dark.”

  Taking their hand drums from the trunk, William and my father strolled gingerly across the meadow and stepped inside the longhouse. Immediately after the blanket-door was sealed, the raspy-throated voice of old man Frost rose and then wavered slightly before creating a roller coaster-like effect with the convocation, the calling of the guardians of the doorways from the four cardinal points.

  There was a certain rhythm to his words; it was as if there were short, individual parts of music interspersed throughout the prayer. The drumming and the singing didn’t quit until the
next morning. The last thing I remember of the cool evening was the fiery orange thunderhead forming over a distant shore. I marveled at its electrical display. Bolts of lightning shot up to the sky and arced back down into the reddish, sunset-reflecting clouds.

  Before closing my weary eyes I wondered if the thunderheads were capable of injuring themselves. Among the deities I envisioned an immature deity, someone unlearned like myself, stealing into the nearby patch of dry brush with a box of wooden matches. “Johnny Angel” sets the hillside on fire, and the pot of water brought to extinguish the flames has a hole in it. Adults from the neighborhood fight the fire for hours. ...

  When the thunder’s rumbling could not be differentiated from the drumming or the wave swells crashing onto the rocky shore, my body muscles twitched. There was still a lingering taste of sweet potatoes and tea in my mouth. And the Mercury that had been the source of so much worry hissed to itself. Somewhere inside its gears I thought I heard the steady tapping of metal against metal, a mechanic among the little people.

  At daybreak, a gentle tapping on my shoulder woke me up. It was Grandmother whispering in excitement.

  “Ki sko, ki sko! Ba se kwi no! I ni ke-e ka ta wi-no we ka wa tti-na ka ni-te be ki-ni mi tti ki! Kis ko, Ids ko! Get up! It is almost time for the people who have danced all night to come out—in dance!”

  Looking out through the fogged-up window, I could see it was a dark, blustery morning with a drizzly mist in the cold wind. It looked like the dramatic end of an autumn day, the evening before the first snow flurries. Except for the occasional clattering of tree branches, the hypnotic singing that had lulled us to sleep had apparently stopped. I looked toward the longhouse and saw only spirals of blue smoke dissipating in the loud, rushing wind over the pine-encircled meadow. A cool and harsh season had been regenerated throughout the woodland expanse by this Red Swan gathering.