Remnants of the First Earth
Page 29
is considered the Black Eagle Child Hereafter.
Could I be seeing too much? Past the west
and into the Grandfather World? Twice
I’ve caught myself asking:
Was Ted’s pose portentous? When I look
closely at the background of the Indian Dam
below-the horizontal line of water that runs
through the trees and behind Ted-I also know
that Liquid Lake with its boxcar-hopping
lights is nearby.
For Ted and his Well-Off Man Church,
the comets landed on the crescent-shaped
beach and lined themselves up for a ritualistic
presentation. For Jane Ribbon, a mute healer,
a seal haunted this area. But further upriver
is where the ancient deer hunter was offered
immortality by three goddesses. While
the latter story of our geographic genesis
is fragmented, obscuring and revealing
itself as a verisimilitude, it is important.
Ted and I often debated what we would
have done had we been whisked through
a mystical doonvay to a subterranean enclave.
Ted, unlike the ancient hunter who turned
down paradise, would have accepted-’
and the tribe never would have flexed
its newborn spotted wings. In the hunter’s
denial we were thus assigned as Keepers
of Importance. But the question being asked
today is, Have we kept anything?
Our history, like the earth with its
abundant medicines, Grandmother used
to say, is infused with ethereality. Yet in
the same breath she’d openly exclaim
that with modernity comes a cultural toll.
In me, in Ted, and everyone.
Stories then, like people, are subject to change.
More so under adverse conditions. They
are also indicators of our faithfulness. Since
the goddesses’ doorway was sealed shut by
our own transgressions,
Grandmother espoused that. unbounded
youth would render tribal language
and religion inept, that each’ lavish
novelty brought into our homes would
make us weaker until there was nothing.
No lexicon. No tenets.
Zero divine intervention. Sh$ was also
attuned to the fact that for generations
our grandparents had wept unexpectedly
for those of us caught in the blinding
stars of the future.
Mythology, in any tribal-oriented society,
is a crucial element. Without it, all else
is jeopardized with becoming untrue. While
the acreages beneath Ted’s feet and mine
offered relative comfort back then,
we are probably more accountable now
to ourselves-and others.
Prophecy decrees it. Most fabled among
the warnings is the one thatJorecasts
the advent of our land-keeping failures.
Many felt this began last summer when
a whirlwind abruptly ended a tribal
celebration. From the north in the shape
of an angry seagull it swept up dust,
corn leaves, and assorted debris,
as it headed toward the audacious
"income-generating architecture,"
the gambling hall. At the last second
the whirlwind changed dire,ction, going
toward the tribal recreation complex.
Imperiled, the people within the circus tentlike
structure could only watch as the panels
flapped crazily. A week later, my father said
the destruction was attributable to the gambling
hall, which was the actual point of weakness
of the tribe itself.
Which is to say the hill where a bronze-eyed
Ted once stood is under threat of impermanence.
By allowing people who were not created
by the Holy Grandfather to lead us we may
cease to own what Ted saw on that long-ago day.
From Rolling Head Valley to Runner’s Bluff
and over the two rivers
our hold is gradually being unfastened by
false leaders. They have forgotten that their
own grandparents arrived here under a Sacred
Chieftain. This geography is theirs nonetheless,
and it shall be as long as the first gifts given
are intact. In spite of everything that we are
not, this crown of hills resembles lone islands
amid an ocean of corn, soybean fields,
and low-lying fog. Invisibly clustered on
the Black Eagle Child Settlement’s slopes
are the remaining Earthlodge clans.
The western edge of this
woodland terrain overlooks the southern
lowlands of the Iowa and Swanroot Rivers,
while the eastern edge splits Widely into several
valleys, where the Settlement’s main road winds
through. It is on this road where Ted and I walked.
It is on this road where Ted met a pack
of predators.
Along the color slide’s paper edge the year
1961 is imprinted. Ted and I were fourth
graders at Weeping Willow Elementary.
Nine years later, in 1970, a passenger train
took us to Southern California for college.
It proved to be a lonely place where winter
appeared, high atop
the San Gabriel Mountains on clear days.
Spanish-influenced building styles, upper-middleclass
proclivities, and the arid climate had a subtle
asphyxiating effect. Instead ,of chopping firewood
for father’s nonexistent blizzard,
I began my evenings in Frary Dining Hall
where Orozco’s giant mural’ with erased privates
called Prometheus loomed ’above. My supper
would consist of tamales and cold shrimp salad
instead of boiled squirrel with flour dumplings.
Through mountain forest fires the Santa Ana
winds showered the campus with sparks and ashes.
In a wide valley where a smoke- and smog-darkened
night came early, the family album possessed its
own shimmery light. Pages ,were turned. A visual
record of family and childhood friends. Time.
Ted and I transforming,
separating. During the first Christmas break
in which we headed back to the Black Eagle
Child Settlement, Ted froze me in celluloid:
against a backdrop of snow-laden pine trees
a former self wears a windswept topcoat,
Levi bell-bottoms, cowboy boots, and tinted
glasses. Ted and I, like statues, are held
captive in photographic moments.
As the earth spins, however,
the concrete mold disintegrates,
exposing the vulnerable wire
foundation of who we are not.
The Night of Jim
Right up to 1982, fourteen years ago, like a couple of wide-eyed, captive elementary school students, Ted Facepaint and I would wait for the reverberations of Doors music to enshroud us in nostalgia, along with selections of Creedence Clearwater, Carole King, Chicago, John Mayall, Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, and Santana. We saluted Jim Morrison, legendary singer, composer, and poet, with Miller s High Life beer and a joint of righteous homegrown on occasion. While many from my fortyish age set can relate to the music-— though not so much the character—of the noted American rock-and-roll band c
alled the Doors, there are few in Iowa who can actually recall spending an evening before an earthquake with its lead singer, the “Lizard King” icon of the flower child era.
As far-fetched as it may seem, with the exception of the characters involved, the following story actually happened:
When Ted Facepaint and I were college students we found ourselves partying with Jim Morrison—or at least someone who resembled him—in a doorless mountainside cabin that was situated right over the San Andreas Fault. Facepaint often reflected that “this must have been at the pinnacle of Jim’s illustrious but tragic career.” Ever since the tombstone door was closed in Paris over the musician, a rare and unexpected visit from Ted Facepaint couldn’t pass without playing the audiocassette tape of The Doors Collected Hits.
Selene Buffalo Husband, my wife, who was grateful that I had a visitor at all, forced herself to sit with the Settlement’s oldest hippies before excusing herself to go after her sister, the “Woman from Hengelo,” down the road. It worked. Both of them would slap us back to Paula Abdul and Michael Bolton reality. To understand the enormity of the contribution to the history of American rock and roll we thought we made, and to not be credited, gnawed away at our rural complacency.,
In our get-togethers we’d describe the San Andreas Fault as nature’s version of the famous sidewalk vent that blew Marilyn Monroe’s skirt upward. The main difference was, the earth-breaking crevice couldn’t delight us with a view of the breathtaking anatomy of a sexually charged female. When the layers of rock beneath the mountains could not stand the subtle shifts of the Pacific Ocean, the energy released had no alternative but to become an unknowing accomplice in the taking of human life.
And we were there, doped-up silly and unable to distinguish night from day in an abandoned mountainside cabin on stilts.
Shooting forth from Grandmother Earth that morning were unseen bullets, awesome aftershocks that caused the untimely collapse of a freeway on a carload of commuters on their way to Los Angeles. Other bullets unleashed violent rock slides on school playgrounds. In one episode a slide raked an unsuspecting mother and her eight-month-old child into the froth-filled ocean.
For weeks afterward, whenever we heard of “the famous one” that rocked the Richter scale, Marilyn Monroe ceased being the source of male adoration. The subterranean shifting of the West Coast made us realize how insignificant we were in the greater scheme of things.
Back then there was rarely, if ever, any occasion to weigh seriously the ramifications of one’s own life-related decisions. But being on a mountainside at the wrong bone-jarring time crystalized for us the perception that we as humanity were indeed infantile. Being reminded of our powerless ways was, in an odd way, beneficial. Earth gave, earth took.
For me it went a little bit further than that: I got myself into those predicaments due to my own dangerous immaturity. In short,I should n’t have been partying with some hooligans in an unfamiliar area. Clotelde, my mother, had specifically warned me through letters. Sometimes, in the acting out of denial, it seems as if I were absorbed in a Star-Medicine-induced dream. Academia was there but in the flutter of an eyelid I was miles high in a fluid noncommittal state of consciousness.
That’s how much being far away affected me.
On that particular Southern California mountainside, loneliness took a tangible form: With my eyes still closed I woke up to the familiar but atrocious sound of buzzing flies, o tte wa ki. They reminded me instantly of summer mornings past when the oily colored flies congregated on the screen door of my grandmother’s small yellow house, the one that had been converted from a chicken coop for three hundred dollars.
The flies would gather in blotches every day in the cool of the morning before the scorching sun came over the wooded hill. The brilliant unrelenting rays would make conditions miserably hot and sweaty. The flies made things worse, of course.
Drifting in and out of REM, I thought I was actually home for a few seconds. There was the faint humming of insects that seemed to echo from within the cornfield, and from the treetops came the cacophony of a skin-burning song. The drone entered my ears and it rung like a telephone wire that had been grazed by a sling-propelled rock. I listened and visualized. Four horizontal gray lines slit and divided the woodlands. As the pieces peeled away and wrapped themselves around me I became aware of where I was, the sound I heard.
That was the very humming that originated from Grandmother Earth and her inhabitants. Grasshoppers flitted into the flower-scented breeze, crisscrossing the lawn and garden. The bees followed whatever moved and the house wasps hung upside down. Above, crows and vultures, along with an occasional red-tailed hawk, went their ways in search of food. By midday, ants, spiders, and box elder bugs warmed themselves on the yellow-aged knots of sunlit lumber. By sundown the pensive crickets were ready to join the locusts and tree frogs with their hypnotic shrilling.
Here, I recalled what Grandmother said about the oily colored flies amassed on the screen door. All it would take would be one plump fly on the nose of Ma kwi ne tti, Bear Paw, to make him a keen-nosed hunter. It would be unsightly, squishing one on his snout to ensure exceptional hunting services. The honor that came with a belt full of dangling squirrels was hard to resist, however. A minimum of three squirrels had to be shot for a meal on the table. Their ages were important with regard to meat texture. If they weren’t up in their years, it was certainly wo’rth the firemaking. Once they were properly singed, they were degutted, cut into quarter pieces, and then rinsed, along with the squirrel’s head. Several hours in a boiling pot of water, lid partially closed, made the charred pieces of sinewy meat tender. Then the final ingredient of cornmeal was added.
As I sailed over the plains of half dream, half sleep, President John F. Kennedy unexpectedly came to mind. . . . On the day he was assassinated in Dallas, my uncle Winston Principal Bear and his sidekick, Dwayne Afraid, emerged from the forest of orange leaves with ten squirrels apiece. The small game was slated to make the main dishes for a family-sized ghost— remembering people no longer here— feast. But no one would have the luxury of eating boiled squirrel brains, a Black Eagle Child delicacy. Not with perfect head shots. This skillful practice, Winston taught, eliminated the chance of a wounded squirrel returning home high atop the inaccessible cottonwood trees and dying inside a hollow tree next to his mate. I dreamt that the president of the United: States was one of the unfortunate fox squirrels back then. On that day in Texas, I asked myself, were his last meditations centered on home, family, or politics? Or were his thoughts totally absent at that precise second?
In a twisted tangent, did it fucking matter?
In jerky, squirrellike gestures] the president leapt forward from the cab of the limousine, and the excess skin on his autumn-fattened sides expanded into a parachute, guiding him upward instead and away from the range of the Carcano rifle. From a nearby thorn tree a single insect stole sound away from the lesser insects in the humid summer air. Attired in a grooved black shell, the large Lee Harvey Oswald insect hoarded the precious wind, grass, bird, animal, children, and cloud music. It hunched protectively over the Carcano. When the presidential motorcade appeared, the insect opened its white-tipped transparent wings as a prelude to the deafening raspy cry that a more intense sun ray, a darkening skin agent, was about to be thrown out. This was the insect’s assignment, to burn skin. E te si ke a was its name. And somewhere within was the fingertip-sized piece of obsidian, zipping along in accordance to the calculated trajectory path. Standing next to the projected point of impact were the green cornstalks that would soon be saturated with the bloody aftermath.
I remembered watching the grainy black-and-white television footage of the slain president’s horse-drawn casket clacking down the street. Standing in attention next to the widow-immaculate Jacqueline was the well-dressed child who saluted his father.
People for one reason or another always leave each other behind, Grandmother taught. Recklessly they entrust to others the care
of all humankind. Recklessly. As her grandson of twelve years I questioned if we could manage world affairs without the Squirrel King named John.
As I reviewed the solemn procession again, an inscrutable question sprung out of the mishmash: Did Jacqueline, the first lady, wear perfume that day? What kind? By custom, I thought, Black Eagle Child women left themselves free of beautifying ointments until the mourning period is over. Was the perfume on her delicate wrist bone releasing its wondrous beguiling scent amid the calamity?
Another question, circling back to home, formulated: What did Grandmother cook this morning? Having no desire to see what I suspected might be there instead, I dream-tricked myself into a home-style entrée of sticky rice and beef, golden brown frybread, maple syrup, and cool, green tea. For now it was pleasant, this nostalgic stimulation of the senses. I could put up with flies for one academics-free day, away from the valley where classes on philosophy and American literature awaited.
Growing more convinced I was on a familiar threshold, I permitted the daylight to crack the shells of my eyes open on the rusty rim of an iron skillet. Drained of spirit, hungover, and paranoid, I found myself in an old, abandoned cabin that was perched on stilts overlooking a mountainside in Southern California. The prospect of Grandmothers cool green tea dissipated in the yellowish haze of the smog that hung below the midfliorning sun, and the only thing that mattered was my endangered life.
As I stood up on nimble legs, the cabin seemed to respond by swaying. Something creaked from beneath and I held still, waiting to see if it was an aftershock—or just me. Structurally, the cabin wasn’t safe. Even a minor cramp of my left buttock could trigger a hazardous quiver. With legs and arms extended, I stood still. Looking down, I saw where the cabin had been ripped in half and thrown back together; the splintered edges of the wooden frames overlapped, pinning some sleeping bags and blankets. I pictured Jane Ribbons facial deformity, what the Creator had done, ripping it up on purpose and piecing it back together with rope; I pictured Rose Grassleggings riding the waves on a black whiskered seal surfboard over the Iowa River. Stretching my arms farther out for equilibrium, I pictured Mr. Mateechna, the school janitor, bowing to a blank wall of the Well-Off Man Church as he felt the first mind-altering effects of the Star-Medicine mushroom as “a horrendous cramp of the buttock.” In this panorama of recollection, lo and behold, my left buttock began twitching!