Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Ordinarily, invitations were extended to men, preferably those with combat, hunting, or singing|and songmaking experience. Because of Rose’s extraordinary healing skills, the Black Hummingbirds made an exception. They knew she would honor them by returning these sacred materials, her gesture of acceptance. The community was dependent on her invaluable services. In addition to her traditional doctoring, she had the burden of performing the “shadow-releasing” ceremony for most deceased tribal members. She cleared the way and opened doors to the Hereafter.

  Long ago, under the tutelage of a prominent medicine woman named Jane Ribbon, Rose Grassleggings accepted the awesome responsibility of healing. It didn’t happen right away, though. But it should have because Jane was a close relative. For Rose, adulthood wasn’t as easy as childhood. Romping along the shores of the two rivers with her renowned pearl-diving Many Nickel sisters was far from the debilitating existence she had had as a woman.

  Were it not for her association with Jane Ribbon, Rose could not have gotten through a succession of failed marriages, children with different fathers, and epispdic bouts with alcoholism, obesity, and abuse. Jane was the one person to whom Rose crawled in misery. Oftentimes she woke up on her porch. From Jane she learned how to heal herself with medicinal plants; from her mother’s aunt Sophie she learned words spoken to the dearly departed, words that strengthened one’s own existence.

  For the Black Eagle Childs, time was an adversary. In the past and up through the present it sandblasted the stone pictograph of our bird aegis to an unidentifiable object, leaving a remnant that only the blessed, like Rose, could read and understand. As the elders passed away, one by one, including Jane Ribbon, those people who had last been close to the elders were seen differently. Rose eventually attained status as a keeper of importance. In spite of her original credibility problems, tribal members realized she had acquired vast healing and “shadow-releasing” knowledge. Even if it was on a piecemeal basis. The elders rationalized that Rose’s instability personified the very plight of the keepers themselves, that unstable roads were an intrinsic part of living.

  For years these healing and “shadow-releasing” practices remained within the Ribbon family, but when the remaining Many Nickel sisters careened off the spiritual road, Rose Grassleggings was stuck with an enormous obligation. Fearing that she would ultimately fail her mentors Jane and Sophia Ribbon, Rose made a number of wrong choices. It wasn’t until the birth of her hermaphrodite daughter named Brook that Rose’s association with Jane deepened. The Holy Grandfather had asked her to heal people and send them on through to the doors of the Afterlife, but He had also asked her to suffer, to experience unimaginable torment.

  “Long ago we either lost or mishandled the gift of healing,” said the Black Hummingbirds delegation after they knocked on her door. Their combined, syncopated voices came through the door, and the brass hinges squeaked along and vibrated. In the air was the fragrant aroma of the autumn leaves of walnut and red oak trees.

  “With fewer and fewer Earthlodge clan worshippers, we are making rules that are less strict,” they said in a short spiel.

  That was the main pitch. They were inviting her to become a member of the elite and much-feared Black Hummingbirds.

  “Ka tti-ni ni we na-tte we ske? Why, is that all there is?” she asked, wondering whether she should turn on the porch lights.

  “E a i, yes!” they said.

  “A kwi-ma ma ha tti-ni na wa tti-na ha mo we kwi ni? Will you not sing first?” “A kwi, no!”

  And that was it. She heard a clatter of footsteps, the shutting of metal doors, and the 4 × 4 truck engines rumbling to life, along with several motorcycles.

  It didn’t take much deliberation. She sent word by messenger that she had accepted their invitation.

  The next day a person arrived to advise and instruct her on what to expect.

  “There are eight persons in all who stand up throughout the elaborate day-long ritual,” she was told. “The clans themselves sit outside of the earthlodge ten to jfifteen feet away and quietly observe, careful not to disturb or interact with the worshippers.”

  The four wall panels, the corners, of the elongated octagon-shaped structure were removed for people to see what was happening inside.

  She was already aware of these factors.

  At the juncture where the day was divided into four parts—predawn, morning, noon, and sundown—the Black Hummingbirds took turns singing the songs in groups of two, two singers per wall panel opening, while the other six prayed or partook of the boiled goose meat sprinkled with the sacred black-feathered hummingbird’s heart.

  “You don’t seem to see anyone,” said Rose in a low voice to Ted Facepaint in the corridor of the IBlack Eagle Child Recreational Center. “The songs blur everything out. Focus is accorded to the music, the drumbeats and where they are placed, the speed and tempo. And the eating is essential, too. Not only are you the cook, singer, and partaker of the sacred concoction, you are also the dancer. As for the observers on the outside, you know they are there. For the purpose itself, though, they don’t really matter.”

  Ted didn’t know how to take being asked to participate as a last-minute replacement. It was sheer coincidence that the eighth person was part of a Iowa National Guard contingent sent to the Persian Gulf.

  “But what if I forget the songs?” Ted asked. “There might be too many. To boot, I’ve never done anything outside the Well-Off Man Church.”

  Rose shifted her poundage inside her large Hawaiian print smock and smiled. “Ted, we know this. Which means we can help you, carry you. The observers won’t even see, hear, or know. It will all come together smoothly.”

  Her detailed explanation of the ceremony sounded academic— point by point, step A to step C.

  Ted shook his head in apprehension and spoke.

  “Even with your help, Rose, there would be nervousness. Errors. I’d screw it up and make a fool of myself in front of everyone.”

  That’s about how the soft but poignant conversation went. I caught only part of it as I walked up to them. The rest was masked by the echoing shouts and screams coming from the gymnasium where local Girl Scouts played volleyball.

  My eavesdropping wasn’t intentional that winter 1989 night.

  Since it was rare even to see Ted, much less to talk to him, I sometimes think that maybe I didn’t really want to hear what Rose said to him. Strange, that’s how I first hooked up with Ted: not wanting to hear what was said to him. During our first years at Weeping Willow I rescued him. Encircled by an onslaught of older, strong-armed students who were making fun of his speech impediment, Ted cowered and trembled. Feeling sorry for him I struggled past the crowd, shouting as my grandmother would have, “Leave him alone! He isn’t doing anything to you!” My brashness didn’t work; I was blindsided with a straight palm to the temple and shoved toward him.

  “Can you understand him?” the angry crowd asked, as I sought to regain my balance with small outstretched arms and twisted legs. “He can’t even talk right!” someone shouted in my ear before being pushed. “Now get in there and protect him! Speak for the wordless snake!”

  With sparks revolving within my sight, I screamed, “Leave me alone, he is saying to you! I haven’t done anything!” Someone backed off and” the rest followed. The crowd then converged on someone else down the sidewalk.

  Ted Facepaint looked at me through his messed-up hair and tried to express his gratitude. What he missed saying, I made up in my head. From then on, throughout Weeping Willow Elementary, we were virtually inseparable. My reasons for befriending him were fundamental. Hardly anyone liked him or spoke to him. Ted was a loner, a contrarian—like myself.

  After that schoolground incident, Ted became a regular visitor to our home. Alan found his speech problems amusing. He even named him “Three-Speed” after a fancy English bicycle. Grandmother said she already knew him from cooking for his family’s doings on weekends through the Well-Off Man Church. Which al
so happened to be the unusual oblong-shaped house where Ted lived with his aunt, Louise Stabs Back, in an area known as Whiskey Corners Road.

  From about ten feet away, out of courtesy, I announced myself. Startled, Rose backed away fast and nudged Ted on his left shoulder with her huge, puffy hand. In remembering, I didn’t like how the fingers and palm were evenly spread over the physical mass of who was and still is my closest friend. Sorcerers or would-be spellcasters employed this conspicuous maneuver: walking up from behind people and greeting them by touch. It was so obvious and outwardly evil to me, for rarely did we as a tribe or family resort to physical groping.

  But weakened by modernity, we were vulnerable. Entrapment was easy. A touch was a touch. Few of us knew this wasn’t the case.

  In infancy I was told of an elderly visitor, a neighbor, who in essence raked my newborn skin with her long, crooked fingernails. It had actually been a gentle stroke of the knuckles, but my face broke out in a rash the next day, and while the applied medicines cured it, some pockmarks remain near the jawline. This was part of the reason why Grandmother gave me the stone-knife necklace, pointing outward, repelling spells. In my first few days of life I was already a target in the supernatural shooting gallery.

  Wearing the shroud of the stone-knife, this is what the sorcerer sees of me: Painted over the top half of my face is the color of yellow. These words are then spoken to the disguise-wearing visitor: “Whoever you are, whatever your purpose, you will stop this travesty. Go hack and tell the one who sent you your medicine has failed to get hold of us. You will also tell that person how the shot was reversed and how the projectile embedded itself in your heart and that you decomposed willingly at earth’s first light.”

  Ted stood in a half-slouching pose. Within the chaotic din of the girl’s volleyball game—Rolling Head Valley versus Stone House Bullheads—he had been listening very carefully to Rose.

  If I had only intervened earlier, risking perhaps my own life or those of my immediate family, he might still be alive. I’m not saying Rose Grassleggings is responsible or anything, you see. I just think Ted was a target all along. And the shooters were many. From different directions for different purposes. At any time, anywhere, akin to Dorothy Black Heron and her lovely sister, the One Most Afraid, we are all susceptible.

  Disguised as a circus, the supernatural shooting gallery would attract our earthly shadows to a festive gathering of ordinary humans and nonordinary beings. Lulled by the showlike atmosphere, we would be caught off guard. Like Ted Facepaint, we would knowingly allow death in the form of a fat Hyena to circle the booth where we sit, listening to the one-piece country and western band called Mike & Mike in the Dutch descendant village of Hellendoorn. We would watch the Unworthy Hyena of Nothing, with its lower jaw hanging heavy by a mouth darkened and stuffed with cheap chewing tobacco, attempt to speak in the yellow foreign air.

  The biggest difference between us, as it has always been since that late evening in 1970 at the Marion, Iowa, train depot, would be the stone knife that Grandmother gave me, the one I wore inside the locket necklace before my travel westward.

  Since then, aside from navigating Selene Buffalo Husband and myself over the Black Eagle Child Ocean, deflecting adversity, the stone knife has on occasion sparked before us like flint and iron. By doing this, it reminds us of its omnipresence.

  On the Night of the Hyenai, however, during Ted Facepaints last visit, the sparks reversed themselves: they came out from his sad eyes in spiraling miniature bullets of light. Halfway across the room they faded. After he presented us with a six-pack of Michelob beer, we never saw Ted alive again. That next morning, wondering what the spiraling eye lights meant, I opened the locket and discovered the stone knife had split itself four ways. At the same moment that I separated a single piece for Ted, my brother Alan drove up the driveway in his Dodge truck, bringing the tragic news. “Something s wrong with Three-Speed.” That’s when I decided to wrap the stone remnant in leather and take it to the funeral home. When we changed Ted into his traditional regalia, I affixed the small bundle with a safety pin under the lapel of his ceremonial shirt; I placed it as close as I could to his gentle sleeping heart.

  The Deformed Pearl Diver

  There were thin, white strips of clouds that held motionless against the blue summer sky. High atop a cottonwood tree, three insects buzzed noisily together in their rendition of a sun-burning-skin song. Through the high grass and shrubs somewhere along the edge of the Iowa River, there rose the mirthful sounds of human conversation and laughter. These were the oblivious targets, walking humans. The insects sang, accompanying each other; one would start, the lead, and sing the loudest and longest skin-burning song; and the other two, at separate points, would join in, staying a pitch softer than the lead and stopping just before the end.

  Upon hearing this, the blue-and-white-colored kingfisher rattled the humid air with its own dissonant cry, warning any of its kind nearby. Everyone present froze and waited. In an attempt to listen, the kingfisher leaned forward with tail feathers high and peered into the bend. The insects stopped their music, too. But there was only calmness. And the only movement detected was among the few butterflies crossing the open stretch into the dense woodlands on black-and-yellow fluttering wings.

  As the human voices came up through the trees, the insect’s skin-burning songs picked up again. The sun’s rays were being directed downward to the skin of the unsuspecting humans.

  “Darken them, darken them, for heing so hold as to walk in the sun’s fiery light,” sang the insects.

  The kingfishers eyes followed the music and cried its warning for the last time. Nearby, a heron leapt clumsily into flight from a weeping willow tree and flew south along the winding path of the river. Below, the heron could see the flickering shadows of the many footprints made on the glaring bone white beach of sand.

  Through the thick forests of the Black Eagle Child Settlement, the ever-present sun reflected and broke into a thousand shimmering pieces as a group of giggling children and their guide waded into the dark green water with bare feet. They stood still for a moment and listened. Among the children themselves arms were pointed, heads nodded, and questions quietly asked. Including an adult female, there were three girls and two boys. The boys, about seven and nine years old, furtively looked up and down the length of the large crescent-shaped beach before whisking their clothes off. The girls, as they had been taught, chose to keep their dresses on. Yet, as the woman took her bag to the bushes to change, the girls secretly took turns stealing looks at the skinny buttocks and penises of their brother and cousin. It wasn’t so much the idea of viewing a male private part as it was a chance to see each other make a “broken face, ha na tti na ko si wa” expression while looking at something they weren’t supposed to.

  The woman observed them gawking as she was changing into a fancy and modern bathing suit. Flailing her arms and grunting, she scolded them for being capricious and informed them of the kingfisher who sat on a tan branch of a half-submerged tree in the hazy distance.

  “Ki a tti me ko wa-ke i na-wi ske no. That bird will tell on you.”

  The young people and the kingfisher watched each other as the woman walked out from the willow saplings, wearing a black bathing suit that had a small fancy skirt trimmed with yellow lace. From her bag she pulled a large oval mirror and looked at her spurious self while the children went to their designated spots in the river. This was the only place where the woman felt secure. There was privacy. From her share of the pearl-hunting proceeds she ordered modern clothes from a catalog. The earrings glittered as the “Deformed Pearl Diver” positioned herself over the deepest but most lucrative pool.

  In the cloud-streaked clouds above, the black-and-yellow-winged butterflies hovered in place over Half Moon Beach. With their sparkling wings they danced hypnotically to the skin-burning insects’ litany. Suddenly, as the woman waded into the pool, she stopped. There, with the cool river water rippling against her knees, she
removed her sunglasses, shielded her eyes from the glaring sun, and peered into the dense, serene surroundings. Sensing an instantaneous change would occur, she walked back out onto the hot sand and placed a large veil hat on her head.

  From a faraway Cottonwood perch the heron brushed branches and leaves aside to observe. Like a World War I Sopwith Camel biplane the kingfisher buzzed the beach twice and strafed the area on its return run with a blaring staccato shrill. From the air traffic observatory post the skin-burning insects, e te si ke a ki, confirmed a manifestation was imminent, and their music was amplified by conches that were inadvertently abandoned by migrating pelicans. The spiral-shaped seashells wedged in old, hollow trees resonated like the sound of the trumpets once employed by Triton, the inferior sea god, half-man, half-fish; and the music’s intonation changed from a message of direction to that of paranormal warning.

  Not knowing what else to do, one of the girls who was waist-deep in the river froze when she found herself standing atop a sleek creature. Each movement made urged the submerged creature to inch forward. She took off the shoulder bag of clams, tossed them to the closest diver, and waved to the shore, until the woman in the bathing suit inquired what was the matter. Through sign language the girl calmly asked if human-sized fish existed. The woman signaled back: Mi ya na me kwa-ye to ki. Me ke ki ne ta ye to ki? It must be catfish. A large one maybe? The girl’s fearful situation persisted. Her companion divers, including the heron and the kingfisher, watched helplessly as the girl drifted downriver. She instinctively stretched out her arms, attaining balance before being flung into the air. In an instant a black-whiskered seal exploded to the surface of the quiet, green river, barking in vigorous protest as it flash-swam through the exposed roots of the massive maple trees.

  Knowing seals were considered bad luck, the pearl-diving expedition participants jumped out of the waters running. In a close pack, like ancient clan runners, they ran back through thick forest. The sound of their bare feet slapping against the dried mud of the winding riverside paths made ground-level roosting birds screech and flutter.