Songs of the Dead Page 23

  I remember one of the first times I met him he told a long, elaborate story about a premonition of death he’d had when he was a teenager, and how a dog and a cat had saved his life. I’d been utterly fascinated and unable to understand why everyone else fled as soon as he began: Allison to clear the table, May to wash dishes, and Allison’s sister Vi to feed the cats. Eleven or twelve retellings later I understood, and began helping May to dry dishes and put them away.

  Tonight he tells a story I’ve never heard. May helps. It’s from Allison’s childhood.

  “We always encouraged Allison and Vi to take as much freedom as they could handle,” George says, then turns to May. “Do you remember the time Allison decided to sleep in a cardboard box in the basement?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “You got her a box from the appliance store and I made up a little bed for her, and she took her stuffed animals.”

  George continues, “She slept down there for probably two months, then one day she said she wanted to come home.”

  “How old was she?” I ask.

  “Twenty-three,” says Vi.

  “Oh, she was not,” responds May. “I think she was six or seven. She said she wanted to go on a trip, and every day she would tell us where she and her box had gone the night before.”

  “And then do you remember,” George says, pointing his fork at no one, “the time we gave all her toys to the McNallys?

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Oh,” May says softly, “the McNallys were so very poor. The father used to be a roofer. He was working at some business and fell through the roof, landed flat on his back. He fractured his skull, broke his back, and then got a terrible attorney who talked him into settling for about $5000. This was a long time ago, but that was still not nearly enough for them to live on.”

  “And then do you know what the attorney did?” George asks. “He got a job with the insurance company about three weeks later.”

  May continues, “So George used to go down to the grocery store—this was before they were all big and automated—and he sometimes told the owners to just charge us the next time the McNallys came in.”

  “So Allison donated her toys? How nice!” I say.

  “So Allison donated her toys? How nice!”

  Everyone laughs. Allison rolls her eyes.

  George says, “Not hardly. We took them from her.”

  “Why?”

  “She was a messy child,” says May.

  George says, “You should have seen her room. Games and books and clothes all over the floor.”

  “That was normally okay,” May adds. “We usually just closed the door.”

  “But it got to be too much,” George continues. “We couldn’t even get the door shut. And she started leaving her stuff everywhere. In the living room, the kitchen, our room, Vi’s room, grandma’s room—this was before she died, obviously. So we told her to clean up her mess.”

  “What did she do?”

  May answers, “She ignored us.”

  “How old was she?” I ask.

  Predictably, Vi answers, “Twenty-three.”

  “Oh,” May responds just as comfortably, “she was not. I think she was nine.”

  “I think she was ten,” George says.

  “No, it was the summer Vi got chicken pox, so she must have been. . . .”

  Silence.

  I say, “What happened?”

  “Oh, Vi was really sick. I remember giving her oatmeal baths to help her feel better.”

  Allison sighs, then says, “I think he means with the toys.”

  George says, “We gave them away. We kept saying, ‘You need to clean up your mess,’ and she kept ignoring us. Finally we said, ‘If you don’t clean it up we will. And everything we have to clean up you’re going to lose. You’ll never see any of it again.’ She didn’t believe we would do it.”

  “We realized,” May says, thoughtfully, “that it was time to teach her about consequences, and about responsibility.”

  George again: “So we cleaned it all up, and everything on the floor we gave to the McNallys.”

  May adds, “Oh, how Allison cried. She cried for a couple of days, and afterwards pouted until she realized that wasn’t doing any good. The toys were gone and she wasn’t getting them back. At that point she got on with her life.”

  The next day I tell George about the demons. He already knows about me falling through time, but we haven’t yet told him why we left Spokane. I’ll leave that to Allison, if she so chooses: they’re her parents.

  George listens carefully, then says, “Let’s go outside.”

  We do. It’s a sunny day, hot for the cool coast of far Northern California, maybe seventy degrees. George and May moved here five years ago when he retired. Vi moved to live near them. George and May live in a meadow on about forty acres of second growth redwoods which they bought to keep them from being cut. The land has become something of a sanctuary for wild plants and animals increasingly surrounded by lawns—which are nothing more than heavily poisoned clearcuts—and houses. They routinely see bears, foxes, and other wild creatures who have been pushed out of their homes.

  He takes me to a huge brier at one edge of the meadow, says, “You know what these are.”

  I nod. “Himalayan blackberries.”

  “Invasives,” he says. “They take over everything, and if you try to cut them out the thorns get into your hands. And have you ever stepped on a blackberry with bare feet?”

  I acknowledge I have not.

  “You don’t want to do that. I know someone who got infected that way and the red lines started moving up his leg. He had to go the hospital and have surgery.”

  Even without the infection I can’t see wanting to step on a blackberry thorn. They’re huge.

  He says, “Living on the East Side”—that’s what a lot of people on the coast call the areas east of the Cascades or Siskiyous—“you probably haven’t encountered these plants very much, but they’re everywhere out here, and they crowd out a lot of native species. It’s a big problem. And even if you do pull them they just come right back. The roots are very persistent.”

  I’m wondering what this has to do with demons killing people.

  He asks, “How healthy do these plants seem to you?”

  I look more closely. “They look terrible.” I’ve seen enough blackberries to know that normally the leaves are deep green, solid, vigorous. These are limp, fading, growing transparent, with holes and red and black splotches.

  He turns over a leaf. The underside is covered with yellow and black pustules. He says, “Himalayan blackberry rust. It’s a very targeted disease, only affects this species. It arrived a few months ago, and you can see it’s already killing the plants.”

  I don’t say anything. I still don’t see the connection.

  He makes it for me. “This is what happens to noxious invasives. They take over for a while, but at some point the land finds a way to get back in balance. When you overrun an area, eventually some disease kicks in, brings you down. That’s just the way life is. And we’re not exempt, no matter how much we like to pretend.”

  I understand.

  He continues, “What you say doesn’t surprise me at all. And in some ways it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about real physical demons sucking out people’s insides or whether these demons are symbolic representations of what some disease is going to do to us. Either way it’s going to happen.”

  I nod.

  “The big surprise to me,” he says, looking at the wilted blackberries, “is that it hasn’t happened already.”

  Allison is so very much her father’s daughter.

  Allison and I drive north of town. We park at a trailhead. She walks to a beach to sit and read. I walk parallel to the ocean, always a half-mile or so from the shore. I can hear the waves, and when the dunes turn to sandy forest I can hear the slight breeze in the trees. It’s hot. I walk. The path climbs, then levels off. Below me to my right, on the inl
and side, I see some large ponds. I sit. I look at the water. I feel as though I’m going to fall through time, but I don’t. Still, I feel something I can’t quite identify. I walk back to the trailhead, then down to the ocean. I see Allison sitting. She doesn’t see me. I look at her for a few moments, enjoy her profile, the texture and color of her hair blowing in the wind coming off the ocean. I walk up to join her.

  The next few nights the place makes itself the setting for my dreams. In one, I’m running along the trails by the ponds. In another, I’m beneath a pond’s surface, using a reed to breathe. In yet another, I’m in the middle of a great ocean, and the land there rises to make an outcrop, an island, a continent. Grasses, then trees, grow in the soil. Birds fly in to land on the branches.

  I don’t know why I’m having these dreams. I don’t know what they mean.

  Still more dreams. I see great auks. I see Carolina parakeets. I see passenger pigeons. I see Eskimo curlews. I see Quagga. I see Steller’s sea cows. I see silver trout. I see Ridley’s staghorn ferns. I see marbled toadlets. I see Rodrigues little owls. I see Sampson’s pearly mussels. I see Crimson Indian paintbrushes. They have all gone away, because they don’t like how they are being treated. They’ve gone to the other side, to the other sides, to where the muse lives, where the dreamgiver lives.

  They are waiting, waiting until it is safe to come back to this side. Sometimes one or two come to check whether things are better here, but then they go back and let the others know that things are not better, that things are worse, and worse.

  This is what I dream after I walk at that place.

  I wake up. It’s dark. Allison is next to me. I say, very softly, “Are you asleep?”

  Her voice, clear, “No.”

  “I know why the demons haven’t come.”

  Silence.

  “They’re waiting to see if humans are redeemable. . . .”

  More silence.

  “. . . or if we’ve all either been killed or lost to the wétiko sickness.”

  Still more silence.

  “We’re being given one last chance to clean up the mess humans have made. If we don’t clean it up, the demons will. And if they do, they won’t discriminate. They’ll kill as many of us as necessary, and if that isn’t enough, they’ll come back and kill more, and they’ll keep coming back to kill us until the wétikos are gone.”

  I hear her take a deep breath, then, “What does that mean?”

  “It means we have to stop the wétikos. It means we have a lot of work to do.”

  Another deep breath, before I hear her say, “You’re right. We do.”

  The day is gray and windy, and cold enough for us to wear jackets. We drive back to that trailhead, and this time walk together toward the ponds. I feel the same things I did before, but still I do not fall through time. We turn east, drop down, walk a maze of paths. The day is still windy, still cold. We walk, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes not.

  It’s been a while since we’ve made love. Her parents’ home has an open design, and privacy has been at a premium. We’ve snuck into the forest a couple of times, but our daily average is plummeting. My prostate is by now much better, and I’m fortunately no longer bound by Dr. Lu’s prescription. Not that it’s mattered the last few days.

  We both notice something as we walk. Have you ever been to a place where the land demanded you make love? Even if Allison and I had already made love several times today, even if we were both sexually exhausted, we both would have been compelled—compelled is not too strong a word—to intertwine our naked bodies. We would have been compelled not solely by our selves, not solely by our respective muses, but by the land.

  We don’t talk about it. We don’t have to. The only thing Allison says to initiate is, “How about there?”

  We walk to the spot, a bed of moss and tall grass at the edge of some trees. We face each other, hold both our hands. We kiss, and my hands slip out of hers, reach behind to pull her close. After an embrace we step apart, remove our jackets, our clothes. I start to lay down my coat for us to lie on but she says she wants to feel the moss on her back.

  “That’s cold,” I say.

  “I don’t care,” she says. She sits, shivers, lies back, says, “Will you cover me, please?”

  I do. She wraps around me and I fold into her. We stay like that, not moving. I close my eyes, feel her, then open them to see she’s looking over my shoulder. “What do you see?”

  “The sky,” she says. “The trees. They’re all so beautiful.”

  I move slightly, keep staring at her eyes. I say, “You have the face of an angel.”

  She smiles. “Would you like to see god?”

  “I already do.”

  “I want you to see the sky, the trees. Like this. Together.”

  We roll over, still on the bed of moss. I look at the sky, the trees, a distant hawk. She’s right. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. She moves her hips, rises up then down, softly, slowly. I look at her face. Her eyes are closed, her expression soft, her lips slightly parted. My eyes move down, to her neck, shoulders, breasts, ribs, belly. I see goosebumps. Further down I see where we come together, see her moving slowly, softly, up, then down, up, then down.

  Her pace quickens. So does mine. She opens her eyes, looks straight ahead at the trees, the tall grasses. She says, “Oh.”

  Faster, and faster. I look at the sky, the trees. I close my eyes and still I see them, still I see her, still I see us.

  The trees close in, the grasses join us, the mosses, too, and the soil beneath them, all of them join as we move together, slow, then fast, then slow, then fast.

  “Oh,” she whispers. “Oh.”

  And I hear the trees whisper in return, and the grasses. “Yes,” they respond. “Yes.”

  Afterwards we don’t spend much time basking together. It’s too damn chilly. We whip on our clothes and continue walking the path.

  It heads sharply uphill. At the top we see a small fence surrounding a forty-by-forty-foot area.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say.

  She says, “You were right.”

  “What?”

  “It was me.”

  “What was you?”

  “At the cemetery. Making love. We just hadn’t been here yet.”

  I look inside the fence. There are small markers. “You’re right.”

  She says, “I’m sorry I got upset.”

  “That’s okay. I probably would have done the same.”

  She stops, then says, “But in your dream we lay atop the coats.”

  I think, say, “Yes.”

  “What do you think that difference means?”

  We stand silent a moment, then she says, “You said Oh too. For the same reason?”

  “No. I said it because I’ve read about this place. It’s called Yontocket. For the Tolowa people, this is the center of the universe, where land first came up from the water.”

  “Your dream a few days ago.”

  “Yes. And each year they’d have their world renewal cere- monies here. They’d dance and sing and perform rituals to help the world renew itself. But one year the whites. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I need to sit. It’s happening.”

  She helps me sit on the short grass.

  It begins. I see people dancing, and I see a fire. The fire is alive, and it is speaking, to the Tolowa, to itself, to the wood it consumes, to the land. It is speaking in the language of fires, a language I do not understand. But it is speaking. The Indians are dancing.

  And then they aren’t. They are screaming. They are falling. They are dying. They are running. I see men—white men—shooting them, stabbing them, throwing Tolowa regalia into the fire, throwing Tolowa infants into the fire. I hear the same laughter I heard in Spokane at the murder of the horses. And I hear the voice of the fire, different now, saying something different, something I still don’t understand.

  I see the whites bashing ou
t the brains of the old, young. I see them holding children by their feet and swinging them against trees. I see them chasing adults who run down paths toward the ponds, and I know the Indians will dive in, hide, breathe through reeds.

  And now I see Allison, wearing her jacket the color of camel skin, and I see the pale gray sky, and I see the short grass, and I tell Allison what I saw.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  Suddenly again I don’t see her, and instead I see Indians dancing. I see fires. I see days and nights and years of celebrations and mournings. I see people making love. I see the same for all kinds of animals, all kinds of plants. I see them living, dying, loving, hating. I see generation after generation of human, generation after generation of cedar, generation after generation of porcupine, generation after generation of ant, generation after generation of grasses, mosses, generation after generation of fire.

  And suddenly I see even more. I see generation after generation of muse, dreamgiver, demon, walking back and forth between worlds. I see geese and martens and wrentits moving between worlds. I see fires moving between worlds. I see humans moving between worlds. I see the living and the dead.

  I see all these worlds being renewed by this intercourse, this movement across borders porous and impenetrable and permeable and impermeable and breathing and alive as skin. I see these worlds winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers they are, and I see moments in time, too, winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers that they are, too. These worlds, these moments, they are not one, they are not two. They are lovers, like any others.

  I see Allison. “Hold me,” I say.

  She does.

  I say, “There was a horrible massacre here. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But this land is not the site of a massacre.”

  She holds her breath.

  “That was one night among thousands and tens of thousands of years of nights. Yes, it was horrible. Yes, the massacres of the wild continue everywhere. But that’s not how the land identifies. That’s not who the land is. . . .”

  “No more than Dr. Kline raping me is who I am.”

  “Yes. There are thousands of years of humans making love here. Hundreds of thousands of years of nonhumans making love here. Fires making love. Everything.”