Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Across the river, Bruiser and Hundo—a husky and a young pit bull—ran beside the frost-covered forest with craned necks and pointed ears, trotting and sometimes breaking into a prance. Their black paws broke through the coarse snow, reminding me of show horses with stiffened manes. When a fox squirrel broke from a tree, a chase ensued over the railroad tracks. In a frozen submissive state I couldn’t stop the squirrel-chasing.

  Slightly bent over, I stood and balanced myself as the polar landscape reverberated. There were barks followed by echoes, and then there was only the northern wind. Bruiser and Hundo could have been taken in sacrifice to the North to plead my case. They were fine, majestic animals—one like a silent wolf and the other a two-headed beast—with clouds of their frenetic breathing punctuating their small-game hunt.

  Didn’t ancient Egyptians entomb pets of the deceased? To honorably serve as protectors of their masters even in death? Yes? Well, with some tribes it’s the same—to a certain extent. But not as lavish as, let’s say, an Asian warlord who is buried with a regiment of statue warriors and their weaponry. With so little to be thankful for in my childhood, I don’t know how I would have said it to my grandfather: What if bad luck strikes and I die? Would Bruiser and Hundo be entombed with me?

  “Do you think plastic flowers over graves mean anything?” Grandfather might have snapped. “They’re attractive reminders, but dead people can’t eat synthetic petals and stems.” The joke referred to whites divorcing themselves from their kindred ghosts, not feeding them specially cooked food. Their favorite sweets, meats, drink, and tobacco. Remiss mortuary customs and such. There was retribution of sorts. Manifestations of the anger of the dead and forgotten souls merged into tornadoes, destroying their farms and cities. Elsewhere the ground shook and split open, avalanches slid down mountainsides, and thundershowers bombarded a rain-soaked valley until a river of mud swallowed people and made them part of the landscape’s horizon.

  In the skylit haze of a December Iowa morning, I mentally recited a song that had been taught to me by Joseph All Stars, my half-blind grandfather. It was a Song of Necessity to beseech spiritual aid during my chest-high wade across the open part of the river. Over the summer the family dove for clams here. In a different season, with floating, massive slabs of ice, the shallow stretch of river was imposing. Each chunk of ice represented obstacles—natural and unnatural adversities—I would later meet.

  As strong gusts of wind drove flecks of biting snow into my exposed skin, I almost shouted out the first crucial verses of the song. But I shout-withheld and cringed in remembrance of how glasslike shavings from sawed clamshells felt when they became lodged in the sweaty pores. I looked to the gray North where work was being done on a Supernatural Clamshell and wondered: If fine grains of snow carl sting this much, what will become of me helplessly wedged between jagged, protruding pieces of ice? Razors were lightly tapped over the tender limbs of girls in first menses, but this was crazy. Later, half-dollar-sized shells, the ones I helped sand to shape, would be placed over my wounds and blessed as future ornamentation.

  The stinging snow continued to layer until I pictured the snow-flakes changing into knives, inverted icicles, impaling themselves to my torso in barbed increments.

  (Actually, I didn’t know which was less threatening: a crystal porcupine rolling away like a tumbleweed before splintering beyond recognition or a block of ice containing a missing half-Indian boy in off-white underwear. To imagine what could have happened ... that’s just dandy! The local press would have salivated while developing the negative, getting aroused by the pungent smell of hypo and other things.)

  The maple tree saplings along the sandy beach of the Cedar River clattered, as did the clenched jaws with my small teeth in between. Under my breath, the words formulated in anticipation of the half-submerged icy walk:

  A ke tti ki wa ni-e ne bwa ka wa ni-we tti na na na to na ni:

  W to ka wi ka ba-ni ba ma te se wa ni? Ta ka mi a tto ke wa ni?

  For the reason you are old and wise is the reason I ask:

  Would you permit life for me? If I wade across?

  The year was i960. My grandfather, Joseph All Stars, wearing his best old German Amana wool blanket, moccasins with mink fur lining, buckskin leather legging, a fire engine red breechcloth, and an otter-hide turban, sat in relative comfort and warmth near an uprooted cottonwood tree that had been set ablaze. As the fire crackled and hissed, he pointed to my bare feet with an antique medieval French sword. In a stuttering melodic tune he reminded me of the second verse.

  Sing the first four verses

  when your feet are

  underwater.

  Shortly after touch the water.

  With the blade pointed next to my hands, he chanted further in a soft fractured tone:

  Sing the next set when

  the river comes up to your elhows.

  But when the river is up to

  your neck—

  this is extremely important now—

  change the words.

  Slightly.

  Everything depends on how

  you do this.

  Keep your thoughts clear

  of disturbances. Let the dogs hunt;

  they are helping you

  by not distracting you, feeling sorry

  for you.

  They know you

  have to sing in this fashion,

  grandson:

  “For the reason they are old and wise is the reason I ask them: Will you permit life? If I come across?”

  I remembered the third and fourth verses—changing the “they” to “we” and “them” to “you”—had to be sung during the actual crossing and midpoint in the river itself. To intone these word-songs, he emphatically urged, would push back the icy river from the physically compressed heart.

  The medieval French sword was chimed against the rock-strewn sand.

  Do you understand

  everything that you are supposed

  to do?

  The songs’ sequences?

  It is imperative that

  you do.

  During the whole Passage of Necessity I wasn’t permitted to communicate verbally; one had to reserve strength for the ultimate plea, Grandfather All Stars had reminded, that of life itself.

  To indicate I clearly understood, I waved my arm twice between his limited field of vision and the shiny surface of a sword blade, named “side one” in jest. The sword’s mirrorlike sheen was the only light source capable of penetrating his marble blue diseased eyes. The opposite, “side two,” was left unpolished and used in extreme sunlit conditions only.

  Momentarily blocking the sword’s blade light, sending a quick shadow onto my grandfather’s weathered face, let him know you were about. He preferred that type of greeting as opposed to voices or intrusive touches to the wrist. For people who rarely touched one another except in marriage and child-rearing, touching was not customary, necessary, or welcome. Caring in essence was not the sum of hands or arms wrapped around a relative, or wet lips upon lips. Affection had to do simply with being there as part of a family.

  My presence was known by two quick hand waves near the shiny blade middle. Custom dictated he instruct in a singing voice, a skill that took a lifetime to acquire and perfect; Grandfather All Stars was characteristically reserved and didn’t expend energy by inquiring in song who was signaling. He could talk normally, though, and he could hear fine. Especially by nightfall, once the sword’s hilt clicked against the engraved scabbard.

  * * *

  In a brief spell of awareness as an infant, I heard my strange cousin, Denton, refer to Grandfather as a “meter of spiritual devotion.” I memorized the English words for some reason and didn’t know what they meant until my grandmother noted the glass-covered device affixed to the side of our house that measured electrical usage. Under Grandfather s scrutiny our piety was constantly being judged through our physical emanations. Considering the irreverence exhibited by Denton, I wasn’
t surprised by his comment. For Denton there was nothing to measure.

  Whenever the yellow utilities truck from Rural Power Cooperative drove up the farm driveway thereafter, I associated its company logos—a cartoon of a smiling lightbulb-headed man with a lightning-bolt body—with faith, and mused how a displaced Canadian Indian family in the wretched hinterlands of the American Midwest lost it all. . . .

  As my thin, fragile body began marking the Cedar River’s depth— first the feet and then my hands, elbows, and neck—I sang the appropriate verses in the midst of indescribable cold, and the soles of my feet felt like they were being scorched by the hot coals of an underwater fire. Eventually forced to start swimming by deep, unexpected drop-offs, I gasped and lunged forward, somehow maneuvering myself between giant wedges of ice. The flames of the icy fire rose in conspiracy and slashed prescient pictures on my arms, legs, hips, and rib cage. With punctured skin and coagulated blood, my bare chest became an instant perforated shirt.

  (During this agony I envisioned Grandmother sitting calmly on the bed with her daughter Emma, tapping the straight razor like a telegraph key over her bare back. It was a bloodletting code known only to the Supernatural Clam, that of the Shining Red Shell Woman.)

  Once, when a pack of ice got in my way, I lunged on top, hopped to numb feet, and ran the length, diving headfirst without caution. As I surfaced, even with Grandfather’s encouraging shouts behind me, I became disoriented and couldn’t breathe properly; I began emitting heaving sounds like a child does when a cry can’t be stopped.

  When the final set of verses came up, I took several inhales of air mixed with slush and called for help (dialing frantically, no doubt, for Aphrodite, born from sea foam, protector of seafarers: 1-800-GOD-DESS). I wept and swam forward like that mythical frog deity—the Invisible Musician, the frog from those old stories who skimmed over the summer swamp grass in its flight from the green, French-speaking eagle—until my legs felt something solid, holding me up, something that felt like a carved slab of stone. . . .

  In 1920, as a young night-enemy disciple—an endeavor he attributed to naïveté—Grandfather All Stars climbed onto the roof of a bark-covered longhouse one evening to observe and spy on an adversary. He explained that in thinking the sorceress was crippled, he believed he could make a lot of commotion. She probably won’t bother to inspect the noise, he had foolishly assured himself. Under this assumption he shimmied over to the smoke portal and looked down into the interior illuminated by the open cooking fire. Silhouetted against the red-hot wood ashes was a stone knife. He said there was a flicker, a movement: a hand had tossed a lethal combination of antiwitchcraft medicines over the stone knife. He knew exactly what he had come up against. Green birch leaves that had a dusty coating, fine twig roots of the female and male clusterberry, along with pieces of woolen lint— a reinforcing agent—shot up as smoke and singed his inquiring eyes. In recounting this story he would grab his eyes and lean over in pain.

  “The last thing I saw was the lame sorceress’s weapon silhouetted over the iron grill, the intense fire being fanned by a crow’s wing. Before I had a chance to jump free, the antiwitchcraft smoke blew out from the longhouse and cauterized the delicate tissue of my eyes. The sorceress laughed like an insane owl as I slid off and plummeted to the ground. Sadly, there was no antidote.”

  It was a strange turn of events: The same knife-shaped stone that deprived him of sight made a French medieval sword surface one day from between two intertwined box elder trees as he was led by rope by his niece to the river to wash clothes. Its silver glint pierced his morose, embittered mind. In descriptive, haunting sentences he told how the trees subtly ground into one another, making human-sounding whispers, “Eh-e-e-s-s-s-h-h-e-e-ehl A yo he i, ne si me! Ayo! Over here, my little brother! Here!”

  “Ha-i! We ko ne tta-ne ta we ne ta me kwi. Ha-i! What is it that you want?” Grandfather All Stars cried out, jerking back the rope and nearly dislocating several bones from his niece’s delicate shoulders.

  The box elder trees creaked in the wind and spoke again.

  “Ke ke te ma ke ne me ko ki-tti na we ne ma tti ki-ki tti me ha te si tti ki. Your (deceased) relatives feel sorry toward you. Ne ta no ka ne ko he na-ni hwe to na ki-ma ni-ke tti-ma te si. They asked that we bring you this long knife. A se ni-ma te si-ke ne tti wa na ji e kwi-tte na-ma ni-hi ya he ko wi ki-a kwi. The stone knife destroyed you but this metal one will not.”

  And like muscles under stress that help ease a thorn from its wound, the sword emerged at the precise moment he determined his suicide was preferable to hand-scrubbing unseen clothes. Helplessness of self and dependence on others gone. It was amid this sublime contemplation that a silver light pulsated and the tree deities spoke. There was sincerity in their words, Grandfather would pontificate, and the flowing Cedar River sounds nearby corroborated that the sword was a god-given implement. He dropped the laundry sack, asked his niece for food and supplies, and spent the next few days carving out the antique sword from the milky red twisting lines of the box elder grains.

  As I reminisce about that particular wintry day, I am convinced the knife-shaped stone that stole Grandfather All Stars’s eyesight arose from its watery grave and floated directly below my dog-paddling feet until I made contact and stood up, balancing like an ancient Hawaiian on a sacred slab of stone, a surfstone. In the singular block of daylight that came through the static clouds—a synthesis of science and destiny—I was propelled past the reef-crashing waves. Within that particular beam of daylight the dust particles of our lives collected into a definable, corporeal shape. There were pale seabirds who flew just above the watery explosion, following the contour of the tropical landscape sculpted by the bird deity eons ago. Nearby, sleek black fish were navigating toward the islands, zigzagging through the rocky narrows.

  It happened like that. The river surfing business. My journey began with small, colorful dreams that foretold. They didn’t mean much initially, but when I started telling my parents and relatives what I thought would happen, predicting events became easy. A radiance would envelop my face when “the knowing of exactly what will happen” unfolded. It was a talent that I fought against, however. In the end my resistance was useless. Suffering was a prevalent factor in anything, like the river-surfing incident. Fording a river of ice was a minuscule achievement, however, compared to dreaming: the dream of the white and yellow convertible that rounded a Claer street sideways on two wheels and the one about the soldier who threatened to injure himself under the Cedar River bridge invaded my senses. They clubbed me senseless in adolescent sleep. Two passengers, except the driver, died in the convertible and the lonesome soldier died under a bridge in Germany.

  “Indians and alcohol in unfamiliar places, if this were a mathematical equation, equals incongruity,” Denton, my strange cousin, used to say. “Like catfish bloated with dead shad in the springtime, it was fuckin’ bound to happen. Piss on the naysayers if they don’t believe you, Junior!”

  Edgar Bearchild used to preface and summarize stories by saying: “Ma ni tta-i ni-e na ska ki-a ji mo ni. In this direction does the story fall.” Bearchild used this phrase to an obsessive degree for everything. I later realized this statement freed the narrator from any information presented. In this direction being the disclaimer for words spoken in perhaps an unfavorable context, does the story fall being inevitability. History, or rather centuries of political subjugation, made Bearchild and the rest a careful lot. Black Eagle Child Indians were hard to befriend; yet they were honest and forthright. . . . Now where am I going with this? Was Bearchild’s quote applicable here?

  In this direction does the story fall:

  The angry wind of December blew down upon the ice-crackling river, causing the water to churn and boil until the frothy waves be came larger and larger, crashing resoundingly into the shallow shoreline. The maple saplings clattered against each other and bewildered crows crashed into the treetops in their flight from a wind of fear. Clouds of breath expelled
changed into crystal tumbleweeds that rolled away, only to shatter over the beach in pieces. Decorated in bleeding clamshells and covered with layers of glazed ice, I rolled after the crystal tumbleweeds in a semiconscious state. (I was, you could say, mummified. Cryogenics.)

  At the precise moment that the squirrel-chasing dogs howled, the stone surfboard whisked me away from the dangerous breakers. Guided by the faint, flashing light from Grandfather’s sword the surfboard skipped across the treacherous river while melting sheets of ice slid off my arms and legs. The white sun that came through the gray overcast clouds bounced off “side one” of the French medieval sword and marked a singular hot spot on the opposite side of the river where I was catapulted.

  The Meaning behind Hawaiian Punch

  Considering Ted Facepaint had stopped visiting my family altogether, he was still a good friend. Nonetheless I avoided mourning Facepaint’s loss. There was simply too much to do in terms of establishing a credible and unbiased investigation. Ted’s family were binge-drinking like they had never done. None of them, especially his aunt and uncle, Louise Stabs Back and Clayton Carlson Facepaint, were fit to contradict the findings of the special coroner, the county attorney, and “Barney Fife,” the county sheriff.

  This is where I voluntarily stepped in as the unofficial Facepaint family counsel. That much at least I owed Ted. Whatever action I could muster would come frorri my mediocre notoriety as a writer. He had encouraged me often enough to use my writing abilities for just causes, criticizing me when he thought I was using my writing “as a paper wall from clan responsibility.” Now that my occupation was working on his behalf, it Seemed awkward, requesting Ted’s guidance.

  But it happened.

  It began the day after the wake, shortly before the funeral, while I stood spellbound in front of the bathroom mirror. “Ted, my friend,” I whispered solemnly into the steamed reflection in the oval mirror. “Do you want me to get involved in the investigation of your murder?” At that precise moment, Selene, my wife, was on the telephone with her younger sister, Evelyn, who was seeking advice from their brother, Octavius Buffalo Husband, who was in the living room portion of their mobile home. In a voice that sounded remarkably similar to Ted’s, Octavius said, “Yes, but this has to be done right away.” I was stunned, hearing a response to my rhetorical question from the unknown beyond. When I reached out to clear an opening on the steamed mirror with my nervous hand, I heard him again. It was as if he were standing within me, looking at me woefully from behind my own eyes. His voice picked up and then fell back to its real owner. “They’ve gone this far. Things ain’t gonna change because there’s a new school.” That incisive comment by Octavius jolted me back to reality.