The Cardiff Giant

by Lockridge, Larry

  One of these thrusts outward hit Thor and Esther, knocking them against Sheila and me, thudding us up against Tabby and Harris, whacking them against Bouche and Homero, who walloped many others in what became a choreography of dominoes. When I picked myself up, I beheld a panorama of fallen tango dancers, bewildered and prostrate before an orchestra that continued to bleat out its tribute to Evita Perón as if nothing had happened.

  — Chapter Ten —

  PLANT SPIRITS

  Sheila and I stared at Indian artifacts in the Fenimore House Museum.

  “Those are the moccasins I copied for Hazel Bouche,” she said. “Huron. My people.”

  I was doing all I could to win Sheila’s favor, and I took appreciative inventory of the black-dyed skin, moose hair, and embroidery.

  Our visit to the Thaw Collection of North American Indian Art was a warm-up for our excursion to Gilbert Lake, where Sheila was set on teaching me Plant Spirit Medicine.

  I took a chance and alluded to James Fenimore Cooper. “Why did Cooper make a Huron the villain in Last of the Mohicans?”

  “That’s easy. Cooper was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Magua is called a basilisk but he’s the real hero—he has all the fire and energy. Remember that scene where he fights Chingachgook hand to hand? Natty Bumppo can’t take aim because the two faces keep changing places. You can’t tell the villain from the hero.”

  “So Cooper sits on the sidelines like Bumppo, attracted to his bad Indian and not admitting it?”

  “Exactly.”

  As we viewed an embroidered Huron knife sheath, I tried to tilt this learned conversation toward romance. “Magua’s energy is erotic, don’t you think? He spends the whole novel pursuing and capturing Cora, the passionate mulatto. But Cooper bumps them off instead of letting them have their moment. Guess that would make the miscegenation worse, forcing a mulatto to be with an Indian.” Note my euphemism—be with.

  “No, that is their consummation,” she said spitefully. “Cooper saw that sex is death.”

  “Oh.”

  We left the Thaw Collection, went to the Cooper Room, and looked at a Thomas Cole painting based on Cooper’s novel. Cora kneels at the feet of the wise Delaware chief, Tamenund, begging for her and her sister’s freedom from Magua. Delaware Indians form a large circle around them on a circular plateau. Sublime mountains painted in deep autumnal tones encase the humans.

  “You see,” said Sheila, “this proves my point.”

  “How so? Why wouldn’t Cora take to Magua? He’s energy, she’s energy—more than her sister Alice, the good-good girl.”

  “Cora knows that sex is death—a dark energy that would kill her. She dies anyway, trapped by patriarchy.” Sheila grunted the last word.

  Before leaving the museum we paid our respects to the macabre exhibit of Browere’s life masks of great Americans—squat uncanny busts arranged in yet another oval and conversing grumpily. You have your Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams and Alexander Hamilton. You’ve got your James Monroe and James Madison and your Henry Clay—and one founding mother, Dolley Madison in her bonnet. Also John Adams, who looked unusually dyspeptic even for his ninety years. Jefferson had almost lost his ears when the plaster hardened too soon and the sculptor was obliged to hammer it off with a mallet. “I now bid adieu forever to busts,” he wrote Madison.

  “These life masks are nothing to the human-head effigies downstairs, the False Faces,” said Sheila, alluding to the spooky wooden masks used by Native American shamans in curing rituals. “Look at Jefferson—that’s miscegenation for you. Founding Father as big-time slave owner and rapist of a Black woman. White male American heroes are death dealers.”

  “But Jefferson was a gardener, always a young one, he claimed. Maybe he’d be an eager student of Plant Spirit Medicine.”

  “Too late for him, not for you, Jack.”

  Though still much attracted to Sheila—and how can I explain such a feeling?—I was finding her a little forbidding. You may have noticed she was really down on men.

  The next morning she picked me up in her Jeep Cherokee and we sped at full throttle to Gilbert Lake, a ten-thousand-year-old remnant of glacial melt and excuse enough for a state park. She explained that, like most state parks, you rarely ran into anybody on the trails. Locals either sat next to the small placid lake eating wieners or they holed up in their campers, drinking wine coolers, watching videos, and getting into fights, rarely lethal. It never occurred to anybody to take a hike. Beyond the unused paths and park perimeter were deep forests, as close to wilderness as one could find in the Catskill foothills.

  “You know your way around these hills, Sheila?”

  “I’ve been coming here for two years, in training as a Plant Spirit healer. I commune with the plants. Don’t laugh.”

  We parked off Cabin Colony Road and started hiking down Ice Pond Trail. I was wearing my signature Tilley hat. The Canadian company guaranteed it would bring me more adventures.

  “Why are you beating on that drum?” I asked.

  “Shamanic drumming. It alerts the plants that we’re coming as friends. And there’s another use—I’ll show you shortly. You need to learn patience.”

  A more immediate consequence of drumming was the scaring of birds and, I hoped, bears. Frankly, I approached this day with more trepidation than a walk in the park normally occasions. As Sheila had explained it, we were about to visit the underworld, the realm of the Plant Spirits. It was scary.

  “Why am I carrying this cornmeal?” I was lugging a ten-pound bag of the stuff, organic of course.

  “When we approach a plant, we bring an offering. Cornmeal is a favorite of many plants.”

  “And why the tobacco?”

  “Some plants like cornmeal, others prefer tobacco. Don’t worry, they’ll tell us which they want.”

  It seemed downright cannibalistic for plants to be eating plants, a scruple I kept to myself. Yes, I was trying to keep virtually everything to myself as I entered Sheila’s Plant Spirit Underworld.

  Walking past the Ice Pond and heading up a hill toward Spring Pond, beyond which lies the Lake of the Twin Fawns, she talked more about her Huron roots.

  “My people were matrilineal—the clan was determined by your mother. And the mothers decided who the clan chiefs would be. My mother was descended from the Turtle clan.”

  “Didn’t the Huron believe the world rests on the back of a giant turtle?”

  Her drumming sped up at the question. “Are you making fun of them? There’s a deep truth in that belief—deeper than what you’ve got in male astronomy.”

  “Male astronomy?”

  “Look at a telescope. What does it remind you of? Men extending their little penises to distant galaxies. Wishful thinking.”

  “Never thought of it that way. Well, Galileo did love his daughter.”

  I needed to watch my mouth. We were getting into delicate territory. Meanwhile, the trail to Spring Pond was becoming more arduous and I was panting under the weight of cornmeal and tobacco.

  She was silent for a time, frowning. “The Huron were exploited by the British, the French, the Jesuits, forced to kill beavers for the fur trade. Forced by white men into warfare with the Iroquois. The Beaver Wars and smallpox almost wiped them out.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Isn’t it odd that your mother would marry a furrier?”

  “Yes, she should have listened to the Great Spirit. She was sleeping with the enemy. I forgive her. She didn’t grasp the difference between our ancestors sacrificing animals out of necessity and white men killing them for profit. Our ancestors always asked the animals for forgiveness. The animals understood and were generous.”

  “Want to tell me more about your family tree?”

  “It’s been hard to trace but I know I’m the reincarnation of the eldest daughter of Orontony, the great Huron chieftain.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “The Plant Spirit of St. John’s wort told me in a
dream just last year. This explained everything about me, especially why I was drawn to Plant Spirit Medicine. That’s the Huron in me restoring balance and wholeness, trying to make me a whole Huron.”

  “Just as your half-sister is trying to become a whole Jew?”

  “Making fun of us, Jack? Don’t. Yes, Esther is seeking her roots too, but real roots aren’t Jewish, they’re Indian. We’re going into the underworld of the Plant Spirits—this means finding our real roots, or at least mine.”

  We drummed our way by Spring Pond and onto the far side of Lake of the Twin Fawns. As I looked for the fawns, we left the path and headed up into the forest, confronting white ash, black cherry, eastern hemlock, white pines, sugar maples, and at our feet, cinnamon ferns and poison ivy. Chickadees, woodpeckers, chipmunks, red squirrels, and whitetail deer scooted at the beat of our drum.

  We hiked a mile or so through bugs and nettles. I was getting nervous. “How do you know which way to go?”

  “I’ve been asking the trees—the maples. Maples are benevolent and wise. They show us the path when there is no path. They’re telling us there’s a sacred grove of oaks up ahead. That’s where we’ll speak to the Plant Spirits.”

  Sure enough, we came across some oaks. I wouldn’t have called them a grove, more like a row or scattering. But I kept this to myself, not wishing to prolong our shamanic journey. I was tired and hungry and maybe not so confident that maples have a good sense of direction.

  “Okay, Jack. You do the drumming now. We kneel in a prayerful position and get acquainted with these plants.” She pointed at a stand of unassuming flowering plants I couldn’t identify. “This is mugwort, known for correcting spleen-pancreas imbalance and cooling inflamed cervical vertebrae. Also too much metal in the system.” She slowly looked me up and down. “You have too much metal, Jack, and I’m sure you suffer from spleen-pancreas imbalance. How’s your back?”

  “Right now pretty sore from all the luggage.”

  “Pulse the drum softly three times a second. We introduce ourselves. Hello, O Spirit of Mugwort, I’m Sheila Orontony and this is Jack Thrasher. We come as friends . . . See whether they want cornmeal or tobacco.”

  I held out a handful of each.

  “Shut your eyes and feel which hand is being tugged.”

  “Hmmm, maybe the right, the cornmeal one.”

  “Good. Now sprinkle cornmeal all over these plants.”

  I did so but couldn’t see that they were receptive.

  “Keep beating. I’m going into a trance and will dream the dream of the Mugwort Plant Spirit. Come along with me.”

  Her eyes went to the back of her head and she began mumbling something. The Mugwort language, I surmised. Being a good sport, I threw my eyes to the back of my head and began mumbling, all the time pulsing the drum. With a bit of beginner’s luck, maybe I too would descend into the Plant Spirit Underworld, playing Paolo to Sheila’s Francesca.

  After some twenty minutes of this, I was working my way into a trance and seemed to be flying through shadowy air toward Sheila’s finely honed haunches, reaching with great erotic hunger when—splat!—a grackle let loose its cargo on my forehead. I collapsed backward, awakening Sheila from her trance. She spoke with warmth as I removed my Tilley and wiped off with an oak leaf.

  “Jack, the Mugwort Plant Spirit has received our gift and wishes to reciprocate by generous donation of its leaves and flowers.” She plucked many of these, asking for forgiveness, readily granted. “Now get the brandy.”

  Yes, I’d also been lugging a pint of organic brandy in a Mason jar. Into this, she crumbled the leaves and flowers. “This will yield the healing essence of the Mugwort Plant Spirit. It has all the power of acupuncture without the needles. While we wait for it to infuse, I’ll do more intake.”

  Over the past few days she’d asked questions about my medical and psychiatric history, getting into some personal areas such as how often I moved my bowels, how I felt at funerals, whether I would paint my kitchen yellow, what made me throw up, when I wore red pants, and where my sewer water went.

  “Now Jack, I’m going to measure your spleen-pancreas imbalance. Give me the incense.”

  This she lit by rubbing pieces of flint together. She instructed me to hold out my hands and monitored my pain threshold as she touched the burning tip slowly to each of my fingernails.

  “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

  “Yes, everything’s out of alignment, not just your spleen-pancreas. Your energy flow is blocked at all the meridians and you are suffering from fire imbalance. Mugwort is the remedy of choice. It’s ready now.”

  She poured some of the brackish liquid into wooden cups. It faintly resembled the sulfuric abomination Esther had inflicted on me, but I gulped it down. “Cheers!”

  I’ll omit the thanking ritual Sheila performed in the sacred grove. We lunched on tofu, bean sprouts, and organic apricots. It was time to head back. She looked at me with alarm.

  “Jack, you’re covered with hives!”

  “Sheila, you’re covered with hives! What’s going on?”

  Then the hiccups. No ordinary hiccups but huge diaphragmatic upheavals. Assume hives and hiccups through all of what followed.

  “The Mugwort Plant Spirit is bringing all our bad Karma to the surface. This is a purging of spirit as energy is transferred from our pancreas to our pineal gland.”

  I tried to take heart at this. At least hiccups were useful—they took the place of shamanic drumming in scaring off wildlife. We hiked through poison ivy, oak, and sumac—Sheila assuring me through hiccups that the Mugwort Plant Spirit was protecting us from all poisonous plants. Dusk was falling and it seemed to me that we should have come across the path by now. Sheila paused from time to time to ask directions from the maples. Maybe the hiccups made her questions hard for the maples to interpret, because she finally admitted, “We’re lost!”

  “I’ve got a cell phone. Let’s call for help.”

  “Cell phone? Not on your life. They cause cancer and they disrupt all the energy lines in our chi.”

  “Just this once?”

  “Absolutely not. Don’t even say cell phone. We’re going to make a lean-to and spend the night. This is fortunate, Jack. Don’t you see? The Mugwort Plant Spirit is inviting me to become more of a Huron. We’ll be doing nothing more than Indians did before the white man raped the land.”

  I thought worse things could happen than to bed down with this Huron, so I helped gather branches for our makeshift lean-to.

  According to recent surveys, three percent of Otsego County mosquitoes carried the West Nile virus. As we lay down on a poncho, their irritating buzz kept us awake. It would prove difficult to monitor bites because they were indistinguishable from hives.

  “More Plant Spirit brandy?”

  “Thanks,” I said, figuring that a few more hives and hiccups were a small price for getting high. Maybe she would prove seducible.

  “You and Homero certainly hit it off on the dance floor last week.”

  “Oh, Tony—yes, he’s been asking me out.” These words activated poles of jealousy and envy.

  “Oh, well, have you?”

  “None of your business, Jack. Do I ask you about Esther?”

  “No, but you could.”

  “Well, I’m not interested.”

  “But I am—interested in asking you.”

  Solely to avoid death by exposure, she agreed to huddle together in the spoon position on the soggy ground. I wondered if Homero had already felt the taut buttocks against his paunch. Despite the cold and fear of the dark, I felt the itch of arousal. Sheila either didn’t mind or didn’t notice as we hiccupped through the night.

  “I’ll say one thing for Homero,” I ventured. “He’s good at what he does.”

  “Very good!”

  I was left to ponder this. I felt jealousy, curiosity, and desire all compounded, but these gave way to alarm when a screech owl screeched. Then about five in
the morning I was spooked by the steady thud of approaching footsteps. “Sheila, do you hear that?” I whispered.

  The moon was up by now and we could make out dim forms of tree trunks and branches.

  “Must be a bear. One Huron clan was the Bear. It won’t harm us—or at least me. It’ll smell the Bear in me. We must greet it and ask forgiveness.”

  She began shamanic drumming while I looked around for a club. The footsteps got nearer—maybe one hundred feet away—when I made out the now familiar grinning visage of the Cardiff Giant! We screamed in unison. From the giant came that fiendish gravelly laugh. He turned and thudded away.

  One thing was achieved by this encounter: We were cured of our hiccups.

  With daybreak we investigated the footprints, easily size eighteen. We could see a trail of broken branches and trampled underbrush. This was evidence enough. I was now a convert to the Cardiff Giant and at least some dimension of the paranormal on this planet.

  The reporter in me wanted to follow the breakage and sneak up on the giant. But I hadn’t brought my video camera, and anyway, this might mean death. We went off in the direction of the sun, figuring that at least this must be east, wherever east might take us. When we came to a clearing, Sheila said she would gauge my imbalance again to see if the Mugwort Plant Spirit had reconfigured my meridians. She lit the incense.

  “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

  Unfortunately, the tenth “ouch” was accompanied by an involuntary jerk of my hand, which sent the incense up in the air. It landed amid tall grass and lit a fire.

  “Let’s take off our pants!” I cried. “Use them to put out the fire.” I’d learned this in Boy Scouts. We stripped to our undies and started swatting the fire. It quickly burned a circle of some fifty feet in diameter. Good, all those Plant Spirits are going up in smoke—a thought I kept to myself. We ran round the perimeter swatting like crazy.