by Muriel Gray
He leaned across the floor with his gap-fingered hand, grabbed the bark container of water and with a flick released an arc of water onto the rocks, reeling back as the wall of hissing steam hit him like a fist.
But it was in time. The spirit was still with him in the lodge.
Calvin waited for a few seconds until he could breathe in the new heat, then pushed himself fully up and slowly resumed his cross-legged position in front of the hot rocks.
He closed his eyes and spoke in a croak. “Thunder Spirit. I thank you for your presence. I am your unworthy servant and I offer this tobacco to you.”
He put the pipe to his soaking lips, blinking to see through the salty sweat and puffed four times, sending a prayer up with each cloud of smoke. The beating increased in frequency until it became one continuous, deep humming throb, then Calvin’s eyes rolled back in his head, his arms falling limply to his sides.
He was at one with the Thunder Spirit now.
Safe and secure, Calvin Bitterhand was wrapped in the awesome power that was generated from the very air itself, the pain of his body forgotten as he floated in the spirit’s caressing, encompassing crystal web. He would not be able to sustain this for long, and there was much to know, but, oh, the luxury of being without pain was so beautiful. If he could just sleep for a few moments in that soft place, surrounded as he was by the vibrations of sweet health and goodness, and the proximity of such irrepressible life force. But no. He jolted as his will reminded him of his mission, scolding his flesh with a spasm, and he returned his mind to the request he sought from this powerful spirit. It responded with a shiver. He could feel it was in readiness to answer him.
“Thunder Spirit. Is it the spirit I fear that I seek?”
The web that held him shifted, and he was rocked gently within it. “The same.”
His own voice answering, but the words were not his own. “And the keeper is the boy?”
“He is.”
“Will the keeper accept me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he does not accept that he is the keeper.”
“Then what is my part in this?”
“To tell the truth.”
“How, if he will not hear it?”
“You must tell it so he has no choice but to listen.”
The language Calvin spoke in his out-of-body state was an ancient tongue, the oldest form of Cree, and his questions sounded stiff to his own ears.
“Will the keeper succeed if he knows the truth?”
No answer. That sparkling crystal web was starting to tear, and he could feel gravity beginning to work on the body he had forgotten he owned.
“Will he succeed, Spirit?”
Nothing.
“Answer me, I beg you.”
Calvin was becoming aware of his physical presence again, and the ecstatic state of being free of his flesh was disappearing, like the tingling return of sensation to a numb limb. A rivulet of sweat ran down his nose as he struggled in a panic to liberate himself from his body again. But it was over. The pleasure of that ethereal state left him, and his whole being grieved for it. His eyes opened and Calvin knew the spirit was gone from the lodge.
He slumped forward, exhausted. His hair, stringy and soaked with sweat, hung down over his face and he sat bent and dejected.
The truth.
How could he make the boy know the truth, when Calvin Bitterhand was barely sure of it himself? So many truths. So many.
Eden had spoken of truth the night before he died. Before he was murdered. Did the old man know what was going to befall him? It didn’t take a shaman to know.
Anyone with eyes could have seen the drunken, insane fury with which Moses Hunting Wolf had looked at his father that night and seen that the devil was in him. He, Eden’s pupil and closest companion, should have known. Before he passed his mantle to Calvin, Eden had been a powerful and respected medicine man. And Calvin liked to cook for him.
It was one of the few times the two men were alone, and that was important to Calvin. It was during those times that Eden would tell him things, things that helped him understand why he’d chosen Calvin as his apprentice and not Moses. He struggled to piece it together from the old man’s memories, which became more disjointed and rambling as he got older.
“You don’t be picked, Calvin. You be born a shaman. I be born Walks Alone, and I don’t have no choice in it. Change my name don’t change nothin’ about what I got to do. A man can change his name all he likes. Changes nothin’.
“When that piece of shit comes back, and he gonna come back, believe me, everyone better know what’s in their heart, ‘cause he don’t be called the Trickster for nothin’.”
Calvin had pressed him often about what had happened back then but Eden would only nod and smoke and tell what he wanted to tell. The strangest thing was that Eden James Hunting Wolf still loved his son. He would say nothing judgmental about Moses, even when the women who cleaned, or the visitors who called, would tell him what new atrocities he’d performed on his family. That caused talk. Why didn’t the old man save his grandson? He knew what Sam was suffering at his son’s hands, and yet he sat in his chair and just looked on as the reports came back. He loved Moses and he loved Sam, but it was as though the events were out of his hands.
Calvin had been in Eden’s cabin the night Marlene lost her eye. Betty Sandtail had run over and told him, near-hysterical as she gasped out what happened, clutching and clawing at the folds of her cheap floral-print dress.
“People is cruel and dumb” was all Eden said. Nothing more.
Yes, Eden was a mystery. He told Calvin often and long about how he carried the honor and the weight of being the keeper, and how his father before them had saved them all, or they wouldn’t be there now, eating burgers and drinking cheap, watery beer. Calvin, as an apprentice to Eden, expected any day to be handed that keeper’s key and given his blessing. But he wasn’t. Calvin had pressed the old man gently on when Moses would be handed the knowledge and the responsibility, secretly hoping that it would prompt him into bestowing it upon him. But it never did.
“Moses don’t need it,” he said and changed the subject.
So that night, when Moses arrived, drunk and mean, Calvin had felt no duty to leave. He hated Moses Hunting Wolf, and he stuck around to make sure the bum didn’t end up dealing some nasty stuff up to his pappy. Eden could stop a man’s fist mid-air with just a look, but sometimes he seemed meek in the face of his sly and useless son.
The pan was on, sizzling with onions, when the screen door flew open to admit Moses. Calvin took the battered implement off the gas, and Eden just took another draw on his pipe, his backside squeaking in the plastic chair as he shifted his weight. Moses took a good look around.
“You thought about what I said?”
Moses squinted through his own smoke. Eden kept his pipe in his mouth and smiled, holding the wooden stem between his teeth.
“Don’t need to think. You ain’t the keeper, Moses.”
Moses’ eyes had flashed with malice and hurt, and he threw down his cigarette and stood. “You old fuck. You give me that fuckin’ thing an’ let me at its power. I’ll show you what a real man can do with it.”
“You ain’t gettin’ it, Moses. You go back home.”
Moses took three steps toward the old shaman and made two fists. As Calvin watched, Eden gently raised one gnarled finger to his son like he was a teacher making a point in a lesson. Moses stopped.
“I be dead before you ever get this off me. You know that.”
Moses seemed to be wrestling with an invisible force holding him back from the old man like a net. “And Sam? You’d give it to Sam?” He spat the name of his own son like he was cursing.
“Sam ain’t never asked.”
“But you’ll fuckin’ give it to him, won’t you?”
“Looks that way.”
Calvin had been amazed. Nothing had made him think that Sam was in line for
Eden’s bizarre inheritance. He’d stood silently, watching father and son stare each other down. Moses broke first, and turned away as he spoke. “You be such a dumb old fuck, havin’ medicine like that hangin’ around your scrawny neck and usin’ it for nothin’.”
“It ain’t such good medicine, Moses. I told you plenty times.”
“That’s what you say. You just keep it for yourself, but you don’t never use it.”
Eden’s face had changed then, growing darker than Calvin had ever seen it, his old eyes fixing his son but looking through him. “If you’d seen your grandpappy usin’ it you’d pray every day of your life like I do that you don’t ever be the one to use it. This don’t get you no beer, son. This take away your soul.”
Moses had just looked at him, then across at Calvin as if seeing him for the first time, then lurched unsteadily out the door and into the night.
This take away your soul, Eden had said softly to himself as the screen door banged, and Calvin had turned to the cooker to put the pan of onions back on the ring.
They had eaten then, and Eden had spoken for at least three hours. More than he had ever spoken at one time. He told Calvin about the days of being Walks Alone, and the railroad and the tunnel. He spoke warmly of the white man, the tall, thin minister his mother had honored with the renaming of her only son. And he had spoken of truth, and how truth was the food and drink of the spirits.
He’d leaned forward, one elegant old hand circling a red plastic picnic tumbler full of beer, and touched Calvin’s hand with his other.
“You know mortals always think there be lots of truths. Ain’t so, Calvin. The spirits know there be only one. Them that twists it and tricks you, they be mostly from beyond where we can get, and we got to keep away from ‘em. But they be part of the world, same as a tree or a moose is. Trickster just doin’ what he does. He couldn’t kill so much as a bug if it wasn’t that killin’ comes from the man. He just makes you reckon he could kill you soon as look at you, but he can’t. The killin’ comes from the man. And that’s the biggest part of the truth. That’s the part that kills the man too, if he don’t know that. You understand? Huh? You understand?”
This point had seemed to be important to Eden, who’d paused to make sure it had struck home, and although Calvin didn’t understand at all, he’d humored him and nodded. Eden seemed satisfied. He lifted the bit of burger he’d pushed aside on his plate and chewed at it. “He try to make you hate him, but you can’t do that. You do that and you die for sure. Just keep rememberin’ that he as old as the world and the world be the greatest creation the Great Spirit ever done.”
Calvin had squinted at Eden under the lamp, trying to make sense of what he meant. “You mean you love the Trickster, after what happened to your pappy?”
Eden chewed. “I just saying he be part of the same stuff that you and me made of. White men know him too. They just got a whole heap of different names. ‘Cept they don’t believe no more and that make them be weak as kittens.” His eyes lit up. “I ain’t goin’ to be the one to meet him again, Calvin.”
Calvin thought he recognized an old person’s tone in the statement, the forced cheerfulness about dying that they adopt to make relatives dismiss it as folly.
“You don’t know that, Eden. You got plenty years in you yet.”
Eden just looked at him. There was a pause. “Sam teachin’ good?”
Calvin had been relieved at the change of subject. When Eden fixed you with his gaze, it was as if he were reading your soul. “Sure. I don’t know that he be a shaman, but he be making a fine medicine man some day.”
It had been on his lips to add, “if Moses doesn’t kill him first,” but he knew he would get nowhere with Eden by attacking his family.
Eden looked like he could hear Calvin’s thoughts anyway. “Sam be fine. He be a shaman OK. You teach him everythin’ you know.”
Calvin had nodded, and they had drunk the rest of the beer in silence.
At half-past ten, Calvin gathered his stuff up and made ready to leave. He cleared the table, left the pan in the sink for the women and helped Eden back to his chair, where he would smoke for an hour more before going to bed.
As Eden sat down, his hand grabbed Calvin’s and he looked at him with such a kindly, loving expression it made him stop and stand before him in surprise.
“When we meet in the spirit world, Calvin, you be known as my son.”
Calvin had swallowed, moved by the first real display of affection Eden had ever declared. He could find nothing to say in response.
Eden smiled. “Don’t go wastin’ money on burgers tomorrow. I won’t need nothin’.”
Then he’d closed his eyes and lain back in that plastic chair, a sign that the evening was over.
It had been Rita Powderhand’s turn to clean next day, and she found the body on the floor by his chair, with its head split open like soft fruit.
No Kinchuinick called the RCMPs, but no one moved Eden either or touched anything in the house. It took only nine hours before the news reached someone off-reservation who fetched the police. And then the place had crawled with cops, asking questions and getting no answers from anyone. They couldn’t prove it was Moses, and Calvin knew they didn’t really care. Just an old Indian. Sure, they would have loved to have banged up some Kinchuinick for the murder, but it wasn’t like someone white had died. So after they’d taken Moses away to interrogate him and brought him back again, they mooched around the reservation for another six weeks before the visits started to tail off, and they went back to keeping white folk safe. The rumors were all that Moses had done it, and there was scared talk that Moses Hunting Wolf was now powerful with a bad medicine.
Only six months after the murder, Calvin saw Moses wearing the keeper’s key around his neck. He was in the bar of the Craigellachie Hotel that lunchtime, drinking miserably on his own when Moses and Buster Fishing Bear walked in like a pair of swells and ordered beers. Moses leaned on the Formica counter with both elbows and looked around like a predator while his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the shabby, sour room. It had taken him a minute or two to spot Calvin, who was sitting at a table by the iron pillar, but when he did he fixed him with those narrow, mean gashes of eyes and smiled. Moses said something to Buster, who laughed in a high-pitched giggle, then he grabbed his beer by the bottleneck and walked over to Calvin. Moses had seemed pretty sober when he’d pulled out the chair and sat down.
He slouched there for a moment, letting Calvin’s horrified eyes take in the sight of the ancient bone amulet sitting on his throat, then he took a swig of beer, wiped his mouth and laughed.
“Suits me, don’t it?”
Calvin had been speechless with hate, but his fingers had tightened around the neck of his own beer. Moses leaned forward slightly and tapped the amulet with a finger.
“You think I don’t know how to use this, huh? But you and Eden teach Sam good, and if I have to beat it out of your spineless little shit of a boyfriend, I gonna get to know the secret.” He laughed again. “How you be likin’ that, medicine man? Huh? How you be likin’ that?”
If Moses had not been sober, perhaps the bottle that Calvin swung at his face would have made contact with those high cheekbones, would have split open the flesh and made the blood spray. But Moses had been too fast. Calvin came to on the sidewalk outside the hotel, where the barman had thrown Moses and the remains of Moses’ handiwork, and lay there sobbing for at least half an hour until the barman came back out and moved him on with a kick.
Eden’s cabin lay empty for years, until someone burned it down, the women saying it was “noisy” with spirits that scared the children who played in the long grass inside the fence.
But Calvin was back there now in his mind, his sweat trying to sneak inside his eyelids, as he sat with them screwed tight thinking of everything Eden had said on the eve of his death.
He could not call the Thunder Spirit again. It had spoken and it would not speak again. He would have to call th
e Eagle Spirit and begin his transportation without the benefit of any further knowledge. Calvin gasped for air and bowed his head again. How could he continue? If he were to make any more errors, let just one more rogue spirit into the sweat lodge, he knew it would kill him. He began to chant and prayed silently that his impure thoughts of hatred and revenge be forgiven by the love of the Great Spirit.
Outside the tiny dome of canvas and wood, the snow started to fall again, and the aspens and birches and willows prepared themselves for their own battle, with the brilliant white weight that would threaten to snap their delicate limbs.
35
“Holly. Where’s Hawk?” Craig McGee wanted to talk to Daniel badly.
“Not in yet.”
“Did he call?”
“Nope.”
It was after two. Craig walked to Hawk’s desk and sat on the edge. There were three yellow Post-it stickers from Holly on Daniel’s phone: Dan. Phone Tess please. 9:05; Tess called again. Can you call her back? 11:30; Call your wife, asshole. She and Larry will be at Lizzy’s number after one, and she says put your answering machine on when you go out next time.
A small alarm went off in Craig. Tiny, but insistent. Hawk wasn’t here, and he didn’t seem to be at home either.
Unless he wasn’t answering the phone. Of course, the phones could be down with the storm and he might be snowed in. Unlikely. Hawk would get to work if you tied his ankles together and poured concrete in his boots. Snow wouldn’t stop him. Craig’s heart started to beat a little too fast.
Indian. He’s an Indian. Daniel Hawk is an Indian. Please, God, no. Craig reined in his dark thoughts.
“Lenny! Get a car up to Daniel Hawk’s place right now and get his ass in here. I need him.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“No free cars, sir. It’ll have to be highway patrol.”