The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “You’re awfully quiet, abuelita,” Bird said. He was sitting between Madrone and Holybear on the big couch, with Nita perched on the arm, and they all faced Maya, smiling. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that we are all descended from survivors here. Like Bermuda grass or the cockroach, we should be hard to stamp out.”

  “Not a very flattering comparison,” Nita complained. “Why not like mint, or blackberries, or even ivy? They also spread all over the place and are hard to kill.”

  “Tell us a story,” Bird said to Maya. “It’s your turn. Something instructive and inspirational.”

  “I’ve written my stories,” Maya said. “There they are in that pile of books on the table.”

  “Read us one, then,” Sage suggested, glancing up from the bright green-and-gold afghan she was crocheting.

  “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

  “No, but you can’t get off so easy,” Nita said. “Tell us a story!”

  “Tell us a story! Tell us a story!” they clamored.

  “Which of the dead should I tell about?”

  “To hell with the dead. Tell us about you. You’ll be dead all too soon, and then we’ll have to tell your story,” Bird said.

  Maya sighed, laying her knitting in her lap. “What I keep thinking about is the discussion we had with Lily.”

  “About how to resist the Stewards?” Madrone asked.

  “Sometimes it seems to me that I’ve been having the same arguments, over and over, for eighty years. Violence or nonviolence, how to struggle, where to draw the lines? Debate after debate, while all around us violence continued to rage unchecked. If I tell you a story tonight, it will be a war story.”

  “Go ahead,” Bird said quietly. “Maybe a war story is what we need to hear.”

  “The first war I remember was Vietnam.” Maya settled back in her chair, closing her eyes as if resting before a long climb. “We used to watch the evening news, Rio and I, on an old black-and-white TV. We were living in one big room, converted from an old garage, in Berkeley. He’d gone back to school, which I took as a personal betrayal. Nevertheless, I stuck with him.”

  “Why was it a betrayal?” Nita asked.

  Maya opened her eyes and looked at her. “Because when I first met him he’d seemed like someone from another star. Unbound by the mundane. An outlaw, a pirate, a savior in a black leather jacket with hair halfway down to his ass—which in those days marked a man as a radical. He’d seemed so free. We’d lived on air, traveling up and down the coast in his van, stoned out of our minds with rock music blaring out of the eight-track. We’d made love on the beach in a rainstorm with the waves breaking over our naked bodies. How could a man like that take midterms and worry about a grade point average?

  “Besides, my mother was constantly nagging me to go back to school. I couldn’t forgive him for doing what I was so strongly resisting.”

  “Why didn’t you want to go back to school?” Nita asked.

  “I’d dropped out and run away after Johanna and I got busted. Caught, that is, making love on the locker room floor of our high school gymnasium, after taking a little too much LSD. After that I couldn’t stand structures, hierarchies. They all seemed false to me, arenas where people preened and postured and attempted to impress themselves. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want a degree, I wanted an absolute: enlightenment by the great straight upward path, something real.” She sighed. “I thought I had it with Rio, but what I had was another form of fantasy. We weren’t living on air, we were living on the money he made selling dope. I had sand up my crotch from fucking on the beach, and he was proclaiming ‘free love’ and getting my best friend pregnant, although I didn’t find out about that until years later. Pregnant with your mother.” She nodded at Madrone. “So I suppose we should thank him.”

  “I’ll set a little more of that cream trifle on his altar,” Madrone said.

  “Actually, going back to school was one of the most sensible things he’d ever done. If he’d only stuck with it.” She picked up her knitting and stared at it. “But I was talking about the war. One of those news images is still seared into my brain: a woman on fire, burned with napalm, running and screaming and clutching her burning baby. She haunted me. Whenever I felt bad, when Rio and I were fighting or when I caught cold or wanted to crawl in bed with menstrual cramps, I’d think of her. How could I feel sorry for myself in the face of her suffering? And whenever I felt good, when the wisteria bloomed or sometimes in the middle of making love, I would think of her and feel ashamed. How could I dare be happy, when some other woman, just like me, was burning down to the bone?”

  She jabbed her needle into the yarn and swore softly as she dropped a stitch.

  “Go on, abuelita,” Bird said.

  “We tried everything we could think of to stop the war. Marching in demonstrations, blockading the draft board, badgering shoppers outside the supermarket. Nothing worked. The war went on and on. Rio’s brother was killed in it. That’s when he started drinking, coming home late and passing out on the couch, breaking up the furniture. He dropped out of school, but I was not happy about it. He’d begun to frighten me.”

  “But you stayed with him?” Sage said.

  “I continued to persuade myself that each binge would be his last. What can I say? I loved him, and I wasn’t clear on my alternatives. Anyway, the longer the war went on, the more frustrated we got. We went from singing ‘Ain’t Gonna Study War No More’ to shouting ‘Off the Pigs,’ from shouting to smashing windows and setting bonfires in the streets. Most people never went any further, but the atmosphere was changed. A few of us, like the group Rio and I joined, we started parading around the woods with guns and talking about bombs. It seemed justified. Compared to the violence being done in our name to the Vietnamese, compared to the violence of the police against us, what did it matter if a cop car got torched now and then or the Bank of America burned? BRING THE WAR HOME! That was our slogan.”

  “That’s understandable,” Bird said.

  “Perfectly,” Maya admitted. “Still, it was a failure of imagination. That’s what I regret—what we might have done if we hadn’t let our vision be constricted. And I knew it at the time, but I didn’t know how to talk about it. I knew it from one of the big riots in Berkeley; I don’t even remember exactly which issue it was now, Cambodia or People’s Park or whatever. But they’d brought in the National Guard, and there were troops up and down Telegraph Avenue, and barricades, and helicopters overhead. They’d set off tear gas, and the whole crowd was running and yelling in rage and panic. I’d lost Rio in the confusion. My eyes were burning and I was running with a cop behind me, when I heard this loud sharp sound. They were firing into the crowd. Just birdshot, but I had no way to know that then. I thought I was going to die.

  “Suddenly I got very calm. I didn’t want to run anymore, so I slowed down and the cop ran right by me and started chasing somebody else. If I was going to die, I wanted to do it with dignity, consciously, so I started walking very slowly up the street toward the shots. Everyone else was running away. Around me was all this motion and commotion, but I was a stillness at the center. I walked straight up to one of the Guardsmen who were firing at us and just looked at him, looked into his eyes. I wanted to see who it was that was going to kill me.

  “He was young, about my age. His eyes were brown, like mine, and I could see he was scared, like I was scared. We were just the same. All of a sudden I knew that, and he knew it too. I could see it in his face. His hands were shaking, and he lowered his rifle. I knew, then, what could really end the war.”

  She closed her eyes. For a moment, she felt Rio sitting beside her, his big hand on her shoulder.

  “I wish I had been able to tell you,” she said to Rio. “To cut through all the rhetoric we spouted and make you understand. But instead I just went along with you, until it got too weird and I had to leave. Do you forgive me?”

  “Madrina,” Madrone said so
ftly. “Speak to the living, not the dead. We’re here with you.”

  Maya opened her eyes, but they were gauzy, distant. She spoke softly, half entranced. “I ran away from Rio, to the mountains, where I stayed alone until autumn. It was a dry year; the snow was late in coming. Other backpackers left me food, and I learned to survive on very little. Every night I dreamed that Rio had somehow managed to find me, that he was lying next to me cradling my body in his arms. Every morning I woke alone. The rocks are very beautiful up there, a clean granite, gray-white with dark flecks and little sparkles of quartz. After I had been alone for a while, they began to speak to me. Everything came alive and had its own voice, and I could hear it. The Goddess claimed me, although I didn’t yet know any of her names. Without knowing the word for it, I became a Witch.”

  Her voice had sunk to a dreamy murmur, and they sat in silence for a moment, lulled by its spell.

  “What did Rio do when you left him?” Bird asked finally.

  Maya sat up. Her eyes snapped back into focus. “He threw himself into acts of political bravado. His group planted a bomb in the offices of a chemical factory, another at the local draft board. Their third action went wrong. The bomb went off too soon, before they could phone in a warning, and the night guard at the Federal Building died. She happened to be a woman, a black woman at that. Before I left, we’d moved into a flat in the City we shared with our friends. The police came after them, shot the place up, burned it down and our friends with it.”

  “How horrible,” Nita said.

  “Rio wasn’t in the flat. He was in his van, dead drunk. The police found him the next morning. They arrested him and took him off to prison, where he spent the next thirteen years.”

  Rio’s arm weighed on her shoulder; he was almost palpable. Well, it is Halloween, Maya thought.

  “That was the price he paid. I changed my name and ran away, to New York and then to Mexico. I didn’t see him again until late in the eighties, when everything had changed. Not least both of us. But that’s another story.”

  “And the moral?” Holybear asked.

  “The ends don’t justify the means,” Maya said. “That was what I learned from Vietnam, from the war and the protests against it. The means shape the ends. You become what you do.”

  “It’s almost midnight,” Sage said. “Shall we go upstairs?”

  They lit candles in the ritual room at the top of the house, cast a circle, invoked the Reaper and her counterpart, the Guide. Maya led them down the trance roads, to the shores of a dark ocean. A ship lay waiting to carry them away to the Island, the place in the spirit worlds where the dead and the unborn walked in the orchards of the Goddess beneath ever-fruiting trees.

  Maya was staring down into the center of a dark cauldron. Inside, spiral galaxies swirled in a dark night sky. The turning stars were the souls of the dead, of the unborn. They were all fates, all possibilities.

  One star flew toward her, growing huge and white hot until it burst and Johanna stood beside her.

  “She’s gonna go,” Johanna said. “The girl’s gonna go.”

  “Go where?” Maya asked.

  “To the Southlands. Where else?”

  “No.”

  “How can you say no? She’s needed there.”

  “No,” Maya said. “I can’t stand it. I’ve lost enough.”

  Johanna snorted. “It’s her road to walk. You can’t block it, and you can’t smooth it for her.”

  “I can complain, anyway,” Maya said.

  “You be good, girlfriend. You owe me one.”

  “Owe you one what?”

  “A favor.”

  “In return for what?”

  “All the many years I put up with you.”

  “You were lucky. What do you want?”

  “Let her go. Let go easy.”

  “You know I’ll do that, in the end.”

  “Do it in the beginning. She needs your help, not your fear.”

  Bird waited. He thought he was sitting on a log, under a flowering tree that was lit by a mother-of-pearl glow from within. He wondered who would come to him. His mother? His father or brother? Cleis, or Zorah, or Tom? Or himself, maybe, that Bird who skied and ran and whose supple fingers were the instrument of the great music. What would that Bird have to say to him now?

  In the stillness, an old man approached. It was Rio. He looked old but vigorous, his white hair shaggy and his beard full. But not like Santa Claus, Bird thought. There was nothing jolly about him.

  “What was it like for you, all those years in prison?” Bird asked.

  Rio seated himself on a mound and fixed his eyes on a high branch. “I was terribly lonely. Maya never wrote to me. My family disowned me. And I despised myself.”

  “Why?” Bird asked. “Because of the woman who died?”

  “Because I traced all my mistakes back to my own weakness. The drinking and the drugs were a part of it, but at the core was a kind of cowardice, a sliding away from pain. I had to face that in myself, and it was the worst time in my life. But I got lucky.”

  “How?”

  “I was in the punishment cell, one time. For a long time. Too long. All the windows were blocked and the door was solid steel. There was no light. Eventually I couldn’t bear it any longer. I wanted out so bad I was shaking, and there was no way out. In a little while, I thought, I’d begin to scream and never stop again.

  “I tried to calm myself by remembering things. Maya’s touch, and the wet smells of sex, but that was intolerable; it just made me ache and rage. Then I started to remember the wind on the coast and the fresh rain on my face and the clean, cold air roaring in over the ocean. I concentrated on it, that clean, clean wind, until I began to dream about it. When things are really bad, you know, you begin to think you could pledge your life to anything that touches you with kindness. There was one ray of sunlight that leaked through the window cover. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, that narrow beam of light, and I began to feel like I could talk to it, could ask it to speak for me to the wind and the rocks and ask them to forgive me. But then I realized that the sunlight and the wind and the rain and the rocks didn’t care what I’d done or left undone. It had nothing to do with them. The grace they offer can’t be earned or lost. It’s just their nature to cleanse and scour and heal.

  “I had always been afraid to face myself. Somehow the memory of the wind gave me courage. I felt stained and heavy, like tar that clings to your feet after a walk on a spoiled beach. But when I made up my mind to turn toward my own pain, everything changed. I found myself face to face with a beauty that offered itself in every dust mote dancing in a crack of light, in me no less. So I healed, slowly. There seemed to be a kind of compassion inherent in the very nature of things. I pledged myself to that. I swore my hands would never kill again.”

  Rio changed as he spoke, beginning to glow like the trees but with a golden light. I don’t shine like that, Bird thought; I’m still heavy, opaque with bitterness and hope.

  “When I was in their prison, all I thought about was getting out,” Bird said.

  “You were never really in despair. Maybe you never will be. You had nothing to reproach yourself with.”

  “But I did kill a man.”

  “When?”

  “In our action. One of the operators of the plant. A big, freckled, white-skinned guy. He came at me roaring and called me ‘nigger’ and—I don’t know, my hands just seemed to pull the trigger of the rifle I was holding. Then his eyes were staring out, surprised, glassy as marbles, and there was blood leaking out of his mouth.”

  Then his face turned into my father’s face, lying dead on the ground before me, Bird thought. But he didn’t admit that even to the dead.

  “How should I feel about that?” Bird asked.

  “I can’t tell you how to feel.”

  “But I don’t know. Was I right or wrong? Did I have the right to do it? What do I owe, now, to his ghost? Or to his unborn children? But if I hadn
’t shot him, he would have killed me. The plant might still be up and running, leaking its poisons. And how many would die then?”

  “Maybe we can’t answer these questions,” Rio said. “But here’s one for you. Would you kill again?”

  Bird sat very still for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Oh, maybe I would if there was no other choice, but I would rather try Lily’s way. Even if I’m not convinced it will work.”

  “There is always a choice,” Rio said. “Sometimes the choice is to die instead.”

  “It’s not death that scares me. It’s losing—losing this city, seeing it turn into what the Southlands have become. I’d happily die to prevent that, but I’d hate to die and have it happen anyway.”

  “But would you kill to prevent it?” Rio asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  Madrone was riding on a wave of undulating space, carrying her down and down. Then she was at the crossroads, the still point where all possibilities extended out like the spines of a sea urchin, herself in the hollow center. One road glowed like a path lined with luminarias at Yule. As she looked down that road she saw herself, walking south. It was a dry road; her mouth ached for water, and she couldn’t see the end of it, except that it seemed to lead on into her shapeless fears.

  She shook her head, trying to make the road fade, hoping some other path would open up. But it remained: shining, implacable.

  “I don’t want it,” Madrone protested, but without heart. She knew in the end she would not refuse. “Why me?”

  In the road was a snake, iridescent, pearly skinned, who fixed her with an eye in which light played among subtle colors.

  “Because of your gifts,” the snake said and rustled off, leaving her sitting on the Island of the Dead.

  Sandy came to her. He held out his hands. They were rough, with the dirt of the garden still in their pores. She remembered how he used to wash at the end of the day, and duck his head under the faucet to splash water on his face, and the tuneless songs he would hum. They had been the ordinary background noise of her life. She hadn’t realized then how the sounds contained the essence of her love for him.