Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Jean nodded slowly, then abruptly stood up. “No, I don’t, not really. It was—I don’t know what it was like. As if I knew and didn’t know. I was there, but I wasn’t looking. I can’t explain it. I know he came and found me, but not as if it’s something that happened to me really. I’m sorry. I can’t explain it.”

  Serena simply nodded. “I know. What is the word that means not in yourself? Beside yourself?”

  “Projection? Astral projection?” Jean took her seat again. Serena was shaking her head. “Ecstasy?”

  “That’s the word I need. Ecstasy. You were in that state. Sometime that afternoon you left yourself, turned away, and that let you walk without hurting on the rocks and fire glass. That let you heal your feet so fast. . . .”

  “I didn’t do it, you did. Just as you heal everyone who asks for you.”

  “You can’t heal someone else. No one can. That night I told you to heal yourself and you refused at first, so I waited until you were beside yourself again and then told that other self it had to make your feet well, and it did so.”

  “I don’t remember,” Jean said helplessly. “I wish I could, but I don’t.”

  Serena poured more tea for them both. The only light in the room was from a candle sputtering on the table behind the women. Now and again the screaming wind forced an entry between the door and walls, or through small openings around the windows. The tiny blasts were too frail to endure inside as wind, but they stirred the air and flickered the light and distorted the shadows before they died. Now and then the house cracked or groaned in protest when the wind became particularly violent and hurled sand or uptorn brush against it. Few of the houses had ever been painted; paint would have been a gesture of utter futility under this onslaught. Serena’s voice was low, sometimes hesitant, as she searched for the right words and combinations, sometimes racing fluently with her thoughts, sometimes merging with the wind noises until Jean could hardly tell where one stopped and the other began. The scene became dreamlike, surreal, with the shifting shadows and the two voices merging, separating, joining again.

  “It’s hard to explain because your language is so hard,” Serena said sometime during that long night. “Your words mean such tight things, only this and no more, and there are matters that can’t be described with such hard outlines. Look backwards at yourself, where you’re standing on the edge of the cliff; it’s still there, something is there. It will always be there. You’re connected to it, and if you deny it, you’re denying a part of yourself. If you deny too many parts of your own past, deny yourself too many times, you become no more than a shadow moving through what is now.”

  “I can’t,” Jean said. “I try to remember, but it’s too faint, too hazy.”

  “That’s because you’re in the wrong place when you turn to look. You have to step aside and then you can see. . . .”

  “My father once told me about a place, he said it was a thinking place. Is that what you mean?”

  Serena muttered several words to herself in Wasco, then looked at Jean and shrugged. “It’s as near as I can say in your language, but that isn’t really right. You can think there, but you can not-think too and just see. You can go to it without awareness and without memory of it afterward. Or you can go there because you will it and then remember everything.”

  For a long time neither woman said anything. Jean found herself studying Serena’s broad face. How old was she? Fifty? Forty? Sixty? It was impossible to say. She was a heavy woman, not very tall, with dense, large bones, and the short-legged look so many Indian women had. Jean had thought her quite homely in the beginning, and now she realized she was thinking how calm and even beautiful her eyes seemed, and the expression on her face. Not a physical attractiveness, she thought, not to her anyway, because her entire cultural heritage said this was not the combination that made for an attractive woman, but her culture now seemed far removed, and the reality was that she did find Serena attractive, even beautiful in a way she could not define.

  Serena put her cup down on a table by her side, began to loosen the ties of her moccasins. She did not look at Jean, but said to her, “Sometimes when you’re sleeping you cry out. Would you like for me to come and take your hand, walk with you into the past to find what troubles your dreams?”

  “No!” Jean stood up, shivering. How cold the house was! The devil wind was getting in after all, chilling the air, defeating the fire that was dying down.

  “Yes,” Serena said softly. “You’ve left such a large part of yourself in the past, you’re like a shadow here. Even Mary wants to touch you sometimes to see if you are solid.”

  Jean heard amusement in Serena’s voice and stared at her stonily, trying to still the shaking of her hands by clenching the blanket tighter about her. “That’s silly.”

  “I agree. Many things are silly if you have to say them in such tight little hard words. Go to sleep now, little Olahuene. You have become a daughter to me, and I am a good mother who sees that her children have enough food, enough sleep, enough love.”

  Jean bowed her head, unwilling to return the love, unable to respond to it, and walked blindly back to her own room.

  She dreamed that she was a statue, frozen in place forever, and people she could not see were hacking away at her with sharp knives, chipping with stones, hitting her with flails. She felt a terrible fear that turned to terror, then pain, and finally humiliation and shame. Semen, spittle, urine, blood. Blood, spittle, urine, semen. She felt her own body as slimy, loathsome, degraded beyond redemption, fouled beyond cleansing. Fists of hatred, words of hatred, bodies, cocks, mouths, so much hatred it eclipsed her pain, and she suddenly felt a shift and became one with them and their terrible hate. She could not speak, but she could hear her own awful scream: “Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!”

  She woke up shaking. Get out of bed, she thought. Walk, move, do something before the dream comes back. Only then did she realize her shade had been raised; brilliant moonlight shone on Serena, who was standing at the window.

  “Help me,” Jean whispered. “Please help me.”

  Serena cupped her hands and let them fill with moonlight and brought it to Jean and bathed her with the cool fiery light. “Your spirit is shaped by your heart and your deeds, my daughter, by what you do, not what is done to you,” she said softly. “It’s your spirit that the Great Spirit sees. . . .”

  Jean heard her voice, and saw her use the moonbeams, and could not tell if she dreamed or was awake. Later, knowing it was a dream, almost knowing it was a dream, she thought clearly, she could see her own spirit shining, washed clean by moonbeams, and she slept deeply again.

  The harsh winter stripped the land of everything movable—topsoil, leaves, insecurely anchored shrubs and sagebrush. Every day Jean held class in the agency building, where more and more of the tribe now joined the children. One day Doris showed up, said simply that she could help, and after that they became partners and friends. Doris suggested they should recruit others and one by one began to bring them in. The program took on the characteristics of a crash program; there was a great urgency, even desperation, to learn. At the tribal meetings there was much discussion of the merits of going to the Seattle Newtown in a large group. Many of them had decided to go, Jean knew, as she watched adults struggling with the language they had hated. They had forgotten much of it and had difficulty with the government forms they tried to fill out as practice. They were afraid of being classified as illiterate, afraid of being cheated out of the reservation land if they signed papers they could only poorly understand. She now had half a dozen aides to help her teach, but they all turned to her frequently for guidance, and invariably when the more educated ones came for help, it was the system they were planning to enter, not the language, that baffled them.

  One afternoon in early March she took her class of younger children away from Tenino flats for their lesson, across the highway, out of hearing range of gunshots that echoed on the reservation lands. They were slaughtering t
he extra horses, to dry the meat, to rid the land of the unnecessary burden of providing forage for animals no one would want now. Only a week before, nearly half the tribe had left for Seattle.

  The children had found a flat spot where they could sit in a circle around her and talk about the sky, about the earth, the air, each other. Many of the adults had gone to the Columbia to fish, and in another week many more would travel out to the upland prairies to find camas roots. Soon, Jean thought, she would have to make a decision also, and she was not yet prepared to make any decisions at all.

  The children had found juniper berries and were gorging on them. Mary returned to Jean’s side and opened her hand, full of the bitter blue berries that had been frozen all winter, and were slightly fermented now. Jean ate several, then shook her head.

  “Look at your belly,” she said, patting Mary’s round stomach. “Soon the hawk will notice you and start thinking about dinner.”

  “Come on, redtail!” Mary shouted to the sky, thrusting her stomach out even more. “We’ll have roast hawk!”

  The other children had come back and were ready to resume the lesson. “The sun is very bright,” Jean said.

  “The sun is very bright,” they said in chorus. There were fourteen of them, all under ten.

  “What else is bright?” Jean asked, of no one in particular.

  “Knife blade is bright,” Jimmie said.

  “Yes. The knife blade is bright.”

  Jimmie repeated it, adding the article this time. Jean waited.

  “Is stone bright?” Miriam asked hesitantly.

  “The stone is bright,” Jean said, picking up a piece of gleaming jasper with a streak of white agate in it.

  It went on for the next half hour and then Jean started to read to them. She was halfway through the Tolkien trilogy, which they loved. Abruptly Mike, one of the older boys, stood up, sniffing the air. He said something in Wasco, although no one was supposed to use the native language during the English lessons.

  Jean asked him to say it in English, since she had not caught it the first time. He shook his head helplessly and repeated it, more slowly.

  “You said the desert is coming?”

  Again he shook his head. Now the other children were rising, dusting sand from their clothes. “We go back,” Mike said decisively.

  “Go on,” Jean said. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  They hesitated momentarily, then turned and began to hurry toward the village.

  Jean looked out over the desert slowly: mesas and buttes here, and deep chasms, tumbled land, broken rocks, stark black basalt rimrock, and a scattering of junipers that were low and grotesquely distorted. There was sagebrush, randomly spaced in clumps, then solitary plants low against the ground. There were stands of gray rabbitgrass; sometimes it hummed or whistled in the wind and sounded almost as if a person were coming, breaking the silence before him, but now it was quiet; there was not enough wind to move it. Farther, the ragged skyline, level enough in places to suggest lake beds, then sharply broken where the land had risen, or fallen. Farther still, the land and sky merged, became one in a blur. The sky was cloudless, the sun warm. She sniffed and smelled nothing that had not been there before: the pungent juniper berries had left a fragrance where a few had been crushed; the sagebrush had its own sharp aroma, almost astringent; the smell of stone and bare dirt. She shook her head.

  For almost a year she had been studying their language, had learned it better than most students ever learned a foreign language. She could translate anything they said into English, but even knowing what the individual words meant, she had no inkling of what Mike had meant by saying the desert was coming.

  “Jean! Is anything wrong?”

  She spotted Robert on a bluff overlooking the flat place where the lesson had been held. She shook her head, shouted, “No.” He started down toward her.

  “What are you doing? I saw the children without you; I wondered.”

  “I’m looking for the desert,” she said grimly.

  He was close enough now to talk normally, although he was still higher than she. Now he looked eastward and sniffed, as Mike had done. “What do you mean?”

  “Mike said the desert is coming and they scooted back to the village. Why? What did it mean?”

  Robert made a snorting sound. Laughing at her, she suspected, and turned her back on him. He drew nearer. “You can’t feel the change in the air?”

  She shook her head. “There is such a slight wind that I don’t think anyone would really feel it.”

  “Mike did.” He was teasing her now. He squatted at her side and looked toward the northeast. “Let yourself feel the wind on your cheek. How does it feel?”

  “Warm. The sun’s very warm today. I’m probably getting a burn.”

  “Pay no attention to the sun. Just the wind. When you came out, it was from the south, and now it’s from the northeast. The wind has shifted; it’s caught between the warmth of the south and the cold of the north. It dances on your face if you let it.”

  “It hasn’t changed,” she said flatly. “Don’t go mystic on me. Just tell me what Mike meant.”

  “He meant that the wind is shifting now, that it’s coming from the northeast and it will bring frost and it will blow very hard in the next half hour. He smelled the Wallowa pine scent, where before there were alkali smells. He meant that redtail up there is following the frost wind because he knows many small animals will be caught outside their burrows when the shift is complete, and then redtail will feast. He meant that it’s a mile back to the warm stoves and hot food, and that half an hour ago the walk back would have been comfortable, but that for every minute you delayed, the chances increased that your bones would rattle with cold before you got home.”

  Jean glanced at Robert now. He was smiling gently at her. “You make a word carry a lot of baggage,” she said tartly. His smile broadened. “You resent that you can’t see through Mike’s eyes, feel through his senses, think with his brain. You resent that he sees a reality you don’t see, and that for him, and for you, his reality is the one that decides who lives and who dies, and what happens in between. You’d try on his reality for a time if you could. And it can’t happen like that, little Olahuene. You can’t dive into another reality as if it were a swimming pool that can be sampled and left again. You can’t live with one foot in your own reality and the other in this one. To enter our reality you have to die first, your world has to collapse, crumble, dissolve. You can bring nothing with you.” He stood up again.

  “But I did die,” she said. She had gone through all the stages—the anger, the fear, acceptance, agonies—until she had stepped beyond them all into an eagerness to be finished with it, a sublime anticipation of the next and final step, ecstasy. “You brought me back after the hard part was over; the rest would have been so easy, so painless; release was so close. I’m dead to my world. I can’t go back to it. I have nothing in it any more. I can’t enter yours. I’m like a spirit stuck between two worlds, unable to enter either one, and I don’t know what to do, where to go.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me what I should do.”

  “No. The wind’s going to start now. Let’s go back.” He looked down on her somberly. “Your anthropologists say we’re all mystics, our children are born mystics. Maybe they’re right. We have a belief that if you’re withdrawn from death’s clasp as easily as you were, it’s because you have a great task waiting for you. I didn’t just find you that day. I was guided to you as surely as the salmon is guided across the sea to the one river’ that will permit him to fulfill his destiny. You had to experience the touch of death before I reached you.”

  From deep within her Jean felt a chill; it grew and spread until it filled her. She would cause the weather to change, she thought; it would start with her, like a stone dropped into a lake, sending ripples on quiet waters, touching every part before they were done; this icy cold would send waves of
hoarfrost and rime. . . .

  “Don’t be afraid,” Robert said gently. “At this point you should be laughing at me for keeping such a hard core of superstition in spite of the efforts of your civilized schools.” How easily they laughed at her. The chill was gone, replaced by a flush of annoyance. “It isn’t fair,” she said. “I try to understand and you mock me for it.”

  Robert laughed heartily and held out his hand, took hers and pulled her to her feet. “Today I’ll tell you what to do. Come home now. But one day you’ll tell me what to do and that day you’ll understand.”

  She scowled at him and they started the walk back to the village. Now she could feel the difference in the wind; it was frigid and biting suddenly. But she hadn’t been able to see it happening; she had reacted to it after it became overt, incontrovertible. She had not been able to perceive it happening. You could see reality only from within; that was what Robert meant. And she was still apart from his reality, would always be apart from it.

  The wind stung now, and they hurried back to the reservation. Later that day Jean told Serena about a dream she had had the night before. “It isn’t enough to understand dreams,” she said aggrievedly. “They can still be frightening.”

  “Maybe you don’t really understand it,” Serena said.

  “I understand it thoroughly, and I’m afraid of it anyway. I am walking and I know something is behind me, keeping up with me. I run, but I can’t lose it. I know it’s still there no matter what I do. I’m in a panic now, and finally I know I have to turn, and I see that it’s only my shadow. I should laugh, but instead I wake up, terrified, unable to move. That’s one of the dreams that keep me up at night. And it’s just silly.”

  Serena nodded, continued shredding horse meat. “When the Great Spirit was giving attributes to the creatures He had created, He gave the redtail wings, and redtail flew into the sky satisfied. He gave the hare speed, and the hare raced off. He gave the elk mighty legs and the elk climbed the mountaintop. He gave man speech, and man went away talking. Then he gave coyote cunning, but coyote didn’t leave. The Great Spirit said, ‘What more do you want?’ and coyote answered, ‘Only to see inside your basket of magic.’ The Great Spirit let coyote look inside the basket and to learn what he could from what he saw, and then coyote went away satisfied.”