The Purification Ceremony (20 page)

    “Who says so?” Earl interrupted. “I heard they never found the body.”

    My head began to thrum. And the semblance of control our decision to hunt had instilled in us now threatened to unravel.

    

    

    That thought almost destroyed our little community. If James Metcalfe was alive, why was he hunting us? Could his purpose be so twisted that he’d kill his beloved illegitimate son, Grover? And who was hunting with him? I jerked in and out of sleep under these burdens and the conflicting emotions Kurant had provoked in me.

    Cantrell had ordered us not to travel anywhere alone. At least one person in each group had to be armed. He gave guns to Sheila and Theresa, to Butch and to Kurant. The writer had blanched when accepting the .12-gauge shotgun.

    “Carrying this goes against everything I believe in,” he said as we trudged through the snow back toward our cabins. Griff had remained behind with Nelson to plot our tactics for the morning.

    “The gun’s just for self-defense,” I said. “Anyway, we’re trying to capture them.”

    “C’mon — it’s self-defense if we stay here in the compound. Otherwise it’s murder. And you know as well as I do that the way this is going, we’re not capturing anybody.”

    I said softly, “I can’t think like that.”

    “I’m paid to think like that.”

    “So you’re not going in the morning?”

    “I have to go,” Kurant said. “It’s my job. But I never saw it coming to this. I guess I have a vision of man as more sophisticated and civilized than the tribesman or…”

    “Or the hunter?”

    He stuck his chin out. “Yes.”

    “Well, what are you going to do out there tomorrow if you come face-to-face with Metcalfe or whoever it is? Say, ‘I think the human being is above this sort of thing, so don’t kill me’?”

    “Don’t patronize me.”

    “I wasn’t.”

    “You were,” he insisted.

    I took in his dim form in the darkness. I wanted things, for once, to be cut-and-dried. “I didn’t mean to be.”

    We reached my cabin. He stood on the porch while I got the door open and one of the lamps lit. I could tell he wanted to come in. Despite my exhaustion, I wanted him to come in. In the soft, flickering glow, he reminded me of Kevin, or at least what Kevin used to be. I was frightened of everything that had happened. And I needed to retreat into something that was familiar. I needed to hang onto a warm body in the night, to take hope. That’s what making love is, isn’t it — primal hope?

    Finally I said, “Come in.”

    “I’d like that,” he said.

    He took off his coat and hung it on a peg over the woodstove. He rested the shotgun in the corner. He took a seat in the chair underneath the buck. “You surprise me.”

    “Why?”

    “Because you’re a woman. And still you don’t reject all this.”

    “Reject what?”

    “This way of life. The killings just go hand in hand with it.”

    “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “this is the work of two people who are mentally ill.”

    “Is it? Or is it just the natural progression of the throwback, barbaric culture in which they were raised?”

    “Already developing the themes of your article, I see.”

    “I have to think ahead.”

    “So do I,” I said, cooling quickly to the idea of him spending the rest of the night in my cabin, then describing it in his chronicle of our nightmare. “I’m tired now. I think you’d better go.”

    “Something I said?”

    “Yes.”

    “Don’t hold it against me,” he said gently.

    I nodded. “Whatever. You’d better go.”

    I shut the door behind him and sighed. I might have found a few moments of physical refuge with him, but spiritually I was in this alone.

    I locked the door, then braced it with the chair. I turned down the lights and brought the loaded rifle into the bedroom and stood it against the wall where I could reach it.

    I got into bed and tried to sleep. I kept asking myself, was he right? Was my childhood a barbaric throwback? Was my soul damned by my supplications within a pagan religion?

    In fits and starts I drowsed into a troubled sleep. I cried in my dreams. Katherine appeared as she was when I was fifteen. She laid my head in her lap and stroked my hair. I understood that this was the day that I’d lost my first boyfriend, a soccer player named Stan with remarkable green eyes and powerful legs who’d also taken my virginity on a dusty bearskin rug at his father’s fishing cabin. In the addled reason of the hormonal teen, I was certain I’d been cheated out of my one chance at a soul mate. I snuffled a more base description of my convictions to Katherine, who, incredibly, responded with giggles.

    I’d stormed to my bedroom, not believing that she could be so callous.

    “Now calm down,” she soothed, coming after me. “I was laughing because I had the same breakdown after losing my first boyfriend. You’ll learn that life rarely hands out soul mates on the first go-round. For the most part, we get boys posing as wise men who appear to see the whole world, but who are really fumblers who can’t see past the ends of their penises.”

    She said this with such charity that I couldn’t help but laugh.

    She reached out to stroke my face. “The rough edge of each fumbler rubs you toward who you will be. When life thinks you’ve been disappointed enough, your soul mate will appear and you’ll know immediately.”

    “Did you know when you met Dad?’:

    “Even before I met him,” she replied. “I was running for a second term, giving a speech at a garden party thrown by one of my father’s cronies. Your father wandered among the delphiniums at the rear of the crowd. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. But it was the way that he stared off into space that got to me. For some reason it was important to me that he listen to what I had to say. I gave the speech directly to him, but he never looked at me. I went up to him later and asked him why he didn’t listen to my speech. He said he did. I said he didn’t, that he was looking off into the sky. He assured me he’d been watching hummingbirds feed in the tulip trees, but had used my voice as music to narrate their flight.”

    It was a story I’d heard countless times, but I asked as I had countless times: “You fell in love with him right then?”

    “Wouldn’t you?” She laughed as she always did.

    I stirred in my dreams and came awake for a moment. I grimaced at the knowledge that I might have spent years with a man who would never have thought to tell me my voice was the melodic counterpoint to nature’s drama. It was then that I realized that perhaps we are granted several kinds of soul mates in life; Katherine was the one I can point to with certainty.

    Which is what made the winter of my fifteenth year so difficult. It was swearing-in day at the statehouse in Augusta. My father and I always went to watch her take the oath. I loved seeing her on the floor of the Senate, among all those men, standing tall.

    Afterward she hosted a get-together in her office. Katherine got up on her desk. She talked about the legislation she hoped to push in the coming session.

    “Maine’s rivers, as much as her forests, are her spirit, she began. “For too long we have ignored the fact that the spirit is being slowly squeezed out of our waters by papermill chemicals and efforts to develop the banks of our wildest rivers.

    “The legislation we’ll push for will ensure that…” She stopped. A puzzled expression spread across her face. She looked around for my father, found him and smiled. “The legislation we’ll push for will ensure that Maine and Mainers will…”

    She tried a third time. And when that failed, she brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across her eye. “Excuse me, won’t you, everyone? I’m not feeling very well… the excitement… I’m fatigued.”

    Fatigued was a word one did not associate with my mother; she was one of those people who never needed more than four hours of sleep a night. My father eased his way through the crowd and helped her down. The two of us and her chief of staff got her into her office, where she could lie down on the couch. My father asked her questions, all of which she answered coherently. Fifteen minutes later she was back on her feet, ignoring my father’s orders that we go to the hospital for some tests, attending to the business of legislating. But in my eyes much had changed; until that day, I’d always regarded my mother as a still water incapable of being riffled by unseen currents.

    The second episode took place three months later. I came home from school on a Thursday afternoon. The legislature was on its Easter break. Katherine was at the flytying table my father had built for her for Christmas.

    “Hi,” I said.

    “Hi there,” she said, distracted. That same puzzled expression on her face. She held up the incomplete fly. “For the life of me, I can’t remember what hackle to use.”

    My mother had been tying the Catskill version of the Elk Hair Caddis for as long as I could remember. “You all right?” I asked.

    Katherine set the fly down on the table and stared through the magnifying glass at it. “I’ve been forgetting things,” she said simply. My mother was forty-seven. She was renowned for her ability to cite the details of a dozen pieces of pending legislation off the top of her head. She should not have been forgetting things.

    After several inconclusive tests in Bangor, we trooped south to Portland and finally to the Leahy Clinic in Boston. Three days later, they returned a verdict: Katherine exhibited all the signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. My mother was losing her mind on a daily basis.

    I came awake in the cabin at 4 A.M. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I remembered how stoically she’d taken the news. She’d even managed to make a joke about how the newspaper columnists could now rightly describe activity at the statehouse as “immemorable.” A month later, though, I found Katherine in her bedroom gazing at the rain-splattered window as if from a great distance.

    “What’s the matter?” I asked, choking at the sight.

    “Oh, nothing,” she replied. She bunched up the fabric of the bedspread with her fingers. “I was just thinking that I don’t want to forget you or your father or this world of ours, ever.”

    It was my turn to draw her into the crook of my neck.

    I got up from the bed in the cabin, lit the gas lamp and showered. Under the steaming water I wondered whether I was, in some way, the opposite of my mother. She feared that the drain of thoughts, memories and emotions would leave her a helpless fawn, lost in the forest.

    I feared that the overload of thoughts, memories and emotions would render me not ignorant, but frozen by the spotlight of greater awareness.

    An hour later, Nelson struck his spoon against his oatmeal bowl. “The storm, thank God, has let up somewhat,” he began. “We have to assume that whoever is out there will see that and come close to camp, hoping to catch us flat-footed like he did Phil.”

    Nelson wore a suit of brown-and-white camouflage and a green kerchief tied around his neck. He went on. “What I want to do is use a circle drive. We push him to the middle, squeezing closer and closer until we jump him.”

    “How big a circle?” Griff asked.

    “That’s the problem, eh? Mike says no matter what, we don’t travel solo. Everyone works in teams. Each team carries a two-way radio. We found six of them upstairs. They have about a three-mile limit, so we’ll stick to that range. If we don’t sight him or cut his track in the first drive, we’ll move and try again.”

    He brought us all to the map and pointed out the quadrant northeast of where Phil had been shot at and southwest of the skidder landing where I’d found Patterson.

    The plan was this: Phil and Arnie would leave directly from the lodge, work their way along the edge of the lake for a mile, then cut north. Earl and Lenore would be dropped off about a half mile directly north of the lodge: they’d work due east. Cantrell, Sheila and Butch would drop in off the old skidder road. Nelson and Theresa would move in from just west of the skidder landing. And Griff, Kurant and I would march south along the Dream for half a mile, then work west toward a huge beaver pond, which would be our rendezvous point.

    Fear is a smoldering fire in the quarter light of a rainy dawn. As we gathered our gear to head out into the predawn, its sick-sweet odor wafted around us.

    “How long will it take to reach the pond?” Earl asked dully. He was righting a big hangover.

    “Two and a half, maybe three hours,” Nelson said. “But take your time. And each team must call me on the radio every fifteen minutes. If you have a sighting or cut a track, call immediately, eh?”

    Laden with fourteen inches of new powder, the tag alders at the Dream’s bank were filigreed jewelry of silver and ivory photographed in black and white. Where the water was inky and swift, ice had not yet formed. But about the boulders, the fluid had crystallized and run out blue and translucent like a winter cloud trailing a front.

    As the snowcat carrying Nelson and Theresa chugged back to their set-in point, Griff walked off by himself. He stared at the river. Praying, probably. I had made my own acts of devotion before leaving the cabin.

    We’d come slow up the logging road. I sat in the front seat, my head out the window looking for sign. Aside from those of deer and moose, I’d seen no man tracks that would indicate that Metcalfe, or whoever it was hunting us, had entered this section. Part of me — the part that cherished the idea of surviving all this until I held Emily and Patrick again — was happy we’d seen nothing.

    Kurant put his hand on my arm. “I’m sorry I upset you last night. I felt there was something between us.”

    “I didn’t,” I said. “We’re just two people thrust into a barbaric situation. Those kinds of false feelings are bound to come up.”