The Purification Ceremony (33 page)

    She had dwindled to an echo of herself by the spring of my senior year in high school. Her mind had stiffened under the relentless assault of the disease to the point where she rarely spoke with ease; her thoughts were like a jigsaw puzzle tipped off a card table.

    The last time I saw her alive it was early morning, the time of the hatch, and she was sitting in a wicker chair by the window in her bedroom, gazing out toward the gazebo and her casting pond. The dew on the grass glittered under the rising warm sun. My father had already been in to see her. Her hair had been brushed and her makeup applied with care. She hummed an old song and her fingers busied themselves worrying at the hem of her white cotton nightgown.

    “It’s a morning to remember, isn’t it, Little Crow?” she asked when I came in to bring her breakfast.

    I smiled. When she called me Little Crow, it usually meant her mind would be flexible for much of the day.

    “The brookies are rising to meet it in the pond,” I said.

    “I’ve been watching the ripples,” she agreed dreamily.

    “That old fat one that lies near the spring, he rolled over and slapped a couple of minutes ago.”

    “When was the last time you caught him?” I asked. Talking about fishing usually kept her on track.

    She shrugged and smiled and drew her fingers through the air in a lazy arc. “Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter?” “No, I guess not.”

    Katherine stopped talking and drank the orange juice I’d given her and absently bit at the rye toast with the honey she adored.

    I watched her eat in silence, wondering for at least the thousandth time that spring how it was that she could remain so ethereally beautiful outside despite the ravages within.

    “I’ve got to go to school now, Mom.” I said to her at last.

    “Chemistry final this morning. Last one before graduation.”

    She did not reply. She was watching a great blue heron that had landed in the shallows on the far side of her pond. I took the tray from her lap and made to leave. I was at the door when she called to me. “Little Crow?”

    I turned and Katherine held her hand out to me. I put the tray down and went to her. She gathered me in her arms and brought my face into the crook of her neck and I smelled wild hyacinth and I could have been six again, it made me feel so warm and secure. She kissed me on my forehead when I pulled away.

    “I’ll see you this afternoon,” I said and I went out without looking back. My thoughts were of the test to come.

    I imagined then that my father had been waiting for just such a day, when the red-winged blackbirds called from the willows, when the bullfrogs roared in the reeds, when the heady spice of the viburnum gave way to the delicate scents of the lilac. It was a fitting setting in which to carry out his deed. It cohered with his vision of the world, a world imbued with invisible, mysterious Power, where nature ruled and to live in union with it was the blessed way.

    I could see him, intoxicated with the certainty that this was how nature would have wanted it. Nature culled the weak. Its power was indiscriminate, arbitrary and ruthless, yet beautiful. My mother should die in beauty before she became a shell, a mockery of nature.

    Now he leads her down the hill, telling himself that this is the right thing to do. She has forgotten everything, he tells himself. She should have her last clear moment in the waters before her mind turns permanently black.

    Katherine has long forgotten her decision to die with dignity. She believes only that he is taking her to the pond to practice her cast. Halfway down the lawn, she looks down at herself and asks him, bewildered, why she is outside in her nightgown.

    My father is not thinking of her now. He is not thinking of the oath he took as a doctor. He is thinking only of Mitchell and the rituals and legends he has used to define a lifetime. He is taking the ceremonies far beyond what his uncle taught him; he is taking them to their extreme, making the ultimate devotion.

    He says, “You look so beautiful in your nightgown, I didn’t want to change you.”

    And because she can still remember that she loves my father, Katherine smiles and enters the water with him. He watches as she draws the tippet and the leader and the first few feet of green floating line through the ferules. The line lies on the water.

    Now her wrist and shoulder act on muscle memory. The line loops gracefully in the warm May air. She spots the kiss of a trout on the water, false-casts once, twice, three times before laying the dry fly perfectly on the spot. For a moment all is still — the trout, the fly, the water, my mother, my father — and then the trout darts and the fly disappears and Katherine raises her arms to set the hook just as my father slips in behind her.

    The water below them ripples with his movement, warping the reflection so her face becomes his and, in my mind, his became the homicidal countenance of Ryan peering at me across the clearing that morning.

    Out on the frozen lake the storm howled, a blizzard, a whiteout around me. It clawed at my skin and beat at my eyes until I feared I would go blind. It came from beneath me then, from deep under the snow-covered ice. It wrapped itself around me, crushing my stomach and ribcage until I choked for air. I heard the wind’s tone turn to tortured moans.

    I doubled over, knowing that the god-awful noise came not from the north, but from me. I collapsed under the blizzard’s assault, holding tight to my stomach, wanting more than anything to give myself over to the storm’s Power, to lie there until the snow shaped-changed me forever. No pain. No suffering. No haunting dreams of years gone by. And when the spring came, I would shape-change again and join James Metcalfe at the depths of the lake.

    I took off my coat and laid it on the ice. I forced myself not to hold my arms tight to me. The cold would work better if I exposed myself wholly to it. I lay down and turned my face into the drifting snow, and within moments I felt the first sense that my body was retreating, shutting down blood flow to my arms and legs. My hands and feet numbed. I felt drowsy, the first signs of hypothermia. I will become sleepier, I told myself, and then there will be nothing but the blackness of the river in my hallucinations in the cave.

    It came for me, slinking along the ice, an oily thing, the presence of which I felt, not saw; and I was preparing myself to greet it when, from far away, I heard the sounds of children laughing and giggling. A pleasant thing to imagine when you are about to die, I thought. But the laughter came again, more insistent, and now I recognized the laughs as those of my own children. I lifted my head from the snow. I saw them before me in the swirling white: they were at the dinner table, much younger than they actually were, Patrick maybe five and Emily two. She was sitting in her booster chair, eating and painting herself in spaghetti. Patrick was making faces at her and she was laughing, the noodles and tomato sauce spraying from her mouth, so abandoned in her glee that it went straight to my heart and warmed me, made me want desperately to live. If I died, I could not teach them how to survive in a world of shifting, vicious Powers — some physical, some emotional. My death here would be a curse they might spend a lifetime trying to hide from or trying to explain to themselves.

    I stood up shakily and faced the blizzard. I ignored the burning cold and turned into the face of it and vowed, “I will not doom them to that.”

    I got my coat back on and crawled through the white on white for almost an hour until I found a tree and then another, and the trees gave me a frame of reference from which I could navigate. I found my cabin at last and went into it, dazed and nearly numb.

    I looked around the room, at the furniture, at the walls, at the gas lamps, at the oil painting and finally at the buck. Hatred welled inside me at all that the deer seemed to embody and I tore it from the wall and raised it over my head by its antlers. I gazed up at the buck, wanting to remember its shape before I dashed it against the wall. In its glass eyes I saw myself looking back.

    I stared through the deer and into myself for a very long time. I lowered the buck finally, frightened at and yet resigned to my sudden understanding that stopping Ryan would demand that I follow one of Mitchell’s and my father’s tenants of hunting — to hunt the deer well, you must become the deer.

    To hunt Ryan, I would have to be willing to enter a world where nothing was as it seemed, where turbulent Powers ghosted through animal and rock and sky. I would have to give myself completely to the forest of the mind and risk madness.

    As a girl, I had listened to Mitchell recite the legends of our people, how the Puoin prepared for their rituals and their travels within the six worlds by erecting a pole or a tree branch outside their lodges. These they hung with gifts. It was the visible manifestation of the tree that connected the world we see, touch, taste, smell and hear with those ephemeral realms below, above and beyond. Warming myself before the stove in my cabin, I admitted that I did not comprehend an eighth of all I needed to know to perform this ceremony, but I did not have a choice. I would remember as best I could the shadows of my early life.

    I opened the door and let the blizzard inhale me again. I fought my way to one of the trees and broke off a big limb. I brought it into the cabin room and propped it up between two chairs. On it I hung the deer-skin robes I had worn the night I escaped from the wolves. On the skins I hung the picture of Emily and Patrick and beside it the picture of Lizzy Ryan. Around both photographs I draped the bloodied bandage I’d taken from my forearm. Above that I placed a small mirror from my cosmetic compact. Below, I affixed the raven’s feather I’d taken from Grover’s mouth and a lock of hair cut from my bangs.

    When I was satisfied I went into the bathroom, stripped and showered. I came out and rubbed myself with crushed, fragrant needles from the crown of the tree limb that had become the centerpiece in the altar of my shrine.

    I turned down the gaslights then, wrapped myself in one of the deer robes and sat cross-legged facing the shrine, warmed by the fire behind me. I forced myself to recall every detail of the last hunting lesson my father had begun to teach me before he had announced his decision to let Katherine kill herself.

    I was sixteen and a half that fall, a veteran hunter who had tracked and taken seven big whitetails. It was nine o’clock one early November morning. Overnight the first three-inch storm had swept over Katahdin. We had crisscrossed the forest since dawn, but found no tracks.

    “The first storm makes the deer nervous, unwilling to move and show us where they’ve been,” my father said.

    “So we go home, wait until afternoon?”

    “No,” he said, smiling. “You are going to learn to track them with your heart.”

    I frowned.

    He said, “There are energies in the forest that, with concentration, you have already learned to sense. Energies that give evidence of an animal’s passing. This is just a new way to sense that energy.”

    “I don’t understand.”

    “Think of how I taught you to look at which way a fern had been twisted to tell a buck’s travel direction.”

    I nodded. “Yes.”

    “Now, remember how I trained you to open your ears to all sound and how you have learned that the volume of small animal chatter changes with the approach of a big animal.”

    I nodded again.

    “All these exercises were just getting you ready to let your heart be a sense,” he went on. “It’s only with your heart that you can feel Power, invisible but real and living around us in the trees and the cliffs and the rivers and the sky and the wind.”

    The “heart hunt,” as my father described it, involved abandoning control of your heart until it adopted the rhythms of the energies that pulsed around it. He claimed it was at once a way of truly joining spirits with the deer during the hunt as well as a cloudy window that allowed a first glimpse into the world of Power.

    I had not been very successful in my lessons that fall. Twice I had achieved a fluttering in my heart in anticipation of a buck’s appearance in the woods, but I had never been able to wipe away the frost that clouded my vision and look into the other world my father claimed he could see.

    Now, sitting before my shrine, my life seemed to depend on it. I tried to slow my breathing as he had taught me and after a while I got my respiration to even out until I could feel my heart beating. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get my heart to feel anything but my own sorrow.

    “I can’t do this!” I screamed at the deer head on the wall. “I’m not strong enough. Maybe I should just die.”

    The deer stared back at me. So I tried again. I calmed myself and focused, soon feeling my heart once more driving the rush and flow of blood at my temples.

    I closed my eyes to the deer and imagined myself the way my father and Mitchell had described the oldest of the old ones in our legends: a woman draped in leaves and moss, living in a hole beneath a tree where the dead are buried. In my mind it became the deepest, stillest part of the night and I dwelled on every breath, easing the pace down, expanding the volume and length of each inhalation and exhalation until my brain glowed and then sparked with an oxygen-fired sensitivity, until, at last, I felt the troubled rhythms of my heart steady and become gentle probing waves that left me, bounced off the ceilings and walls and returned so that even with my eyes closed I could see.

    It was late when I knocked at the front door to the lodge.

    :’Who’s there?” Phil asked.

    “Little Crow.”

    I must have been a sight, for when the door opened, Phil looked away, embarrassed the way I used to be encountering the addled street people who lived around Copley Square. I had taken soot from the woodstove and smeared black ribbons on my skin to break up my profile. I was dressed in Griff’s white camouflage outfit. On the wool shirt I wore underneath, I had pinned a piece of deer skin and my children’s photograph over my left breast, and over my right I had affixed the picture of Lizzy Ryan. In my hair I wore the raven’s feather.