by Faith Hunter
Aggie glanced at me, and seemed to catch my discomfort. Her mouth twisted in thought and she slowed, taking a particularly deep bump that cracked my head against the car roof. While I held on and rubbed my head, she and Lisi chatted in Cherokee for a while; then Aggie said to me, “Going to water is not a hard and firm ritual. It isn’t about calling on a specific god or a specific spirit. It is a way of recognizing our roots, our heritage, and calling on the past to lead and direct us into the future. It is as individual as the way you pray, as the god or spirits you believe in. You may adjust it according to your need, and as your god directs.”
She braked, turned off the car, and got out, helping her mother out as well, white shell dust and road dust billowing past. The two women moved into the trees, leaving me sitting there, alone, the engine pinging. We were in a small clearing about half the size of my kitchen, surrounded by thin rails of young pine trees growing so close together they would keep out most wildlife.
Wordless, I opened my door, brushing it against the scrub to the side and closing it only with difficulty. I followed the women, my flip-flops spanking the earth, along a flat trail that snaked through the trees, to the edge of a bayou where the ground became so muddy my thin shoes sucked and pulled against my toes with each step. The water in the bayou channel was brown and muddy from the recent storm, running high, overlapping its banks into the trees. It was very different from the clear streams of the Appalachians, and a sudden gust of homesickness swirled through me like a dust devil.
Chatting to her mother, Aggie hung her black cloth bag from the stub of a broken tree limb and unscrewed the lid on her Thermos. She poured the liquid inside into the plastic cup top; it was hot and black, and it smelled like boiled tree limbs and lichen and pinesap. I wrinkled my nose. Aggie gave the cup to her mother, who guzzled it down and said something that sounded unkind before moving into the trees. “Mother doesn’t like purging like the men have to do. She likes the women’s ritual better, but it must be done.”
From the woods I heard retching and my gorge rose in sympathy. I clasped my arms around my waist. I so did not want to do this.
Aggie poured a second cup and swallowed it in a single gulp before pouring another for me. “There are good reasons why we go to water,” she said, her tone gentle but not soothing me. “When we face war or trouble, or some great decision must be reached, we must be clean inside and out in order for the gods, or God, to talk to us. Drink. Then go into the woods and do what you must.” And this time it was a command. Aggie handed me a small baggie and tapped it. “Native tobacco. Use it like I told you. It’s hard to come by these days. Don’t waste it.” She hurried into the trees, leaving me alone.
. . . War or trouble, or some great decision. Yeah, that kinda spelled out my life right now. I looked at the liquid, black in the darkness.
Beast huffed deep inside. Jane needs this. Beast that is I/ we needs this.
Which is why I don’t want to do it, I thought back. My mental tone sounded stubborn. Whiny. Sorta the way my housemates sounded when I was a teenager and my housemother wanted us all to clean the bathrooms or do laundry. I sighed. That was why I was feeling so antsy. It had been a long time since I had to do something against my will because it was good for me.
I sniffed again and grimaced at the earthy stench of the herbal mixture before tossing it back. I gagged getting it down. The elixir from hell didn’t taste any better than it smelled and it wanted to come up faster than it went down. I held it in and ran deeper into the woods. Gorge rising with about-to-die nausea, I fell against a tree. I hated throwing up. It was a crazy way to start something that was supposed to be spiritual. In the children’s home the only rituals had been daily Bible study, a required theology course during my high school years, the Lord’s Supper on Sunday, and being baptized, which I’d done in a river. Oddly, that had been at dawn too.
Suddenly the emetic hit and I bent over, my empty stomach cramping. I lost liquid. I lost stomach acid. I lost bile so bitter it made my teeth hurt. It felt as if I lost everything I had eaten for the last month until I was retching only air. I was cleaned out down to my toes.
Empty, I spat, getting rid of the last of my stomach contents. This was just gross.
Hunger from the shift was riding me hard and my stomach twisted into a single vicious spasm. As quickly as it began, the spasm and nausea stopped. I stumbled to a clean spot a few feet away and held on to a thin rail of a tree until I could remember to breathe and was able to stand on my own. It had been a whole lot easier just getting baptized.
Beast rolled beneath my skin, sick and angry. Jane let human shaman give . . . She stopped, no words in her Beast vocabulary. Jane ate bad meat. Kit mistake. Foolish. Sick.
Poison. Beast was talking about poison. My skinwalker metabolism began to react again, and my body rejected the potion, this time from the other end of my digestive tract. It took forever. It was awful.
I hung against a tree, pine bark sharp and sorta crinkly under my palms, and breathed as if I had run a long race. I felt hollow and tingly, drained and bare, like an empty room, sound ringing off the barren walls of my soul. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling.
Somewhere in the last minutes, Beast had disappeared, leaving my mind vacant and lucid. I rocked, my back against the thin tree. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ankles and along my arms. I held out a hand in the dim light, my skin looking tight and drawn, desiccated. I’m going to water. My housemother at the children’s home would throw a hissy fit if she knew.
I bounced the tobacco baggie in my palm as if measuring it. This wasn’t a worship service. It was meant to be a physical and psychological cleansing. If I did it at a therapist’s office or as part of a high colonic, I wouldn’t think twice.
I opened the plastic baggie and sniffed the tobacco inside, the scent unlike most tobacco I’d smelled, being richer, more raw. It was an earthy dark brown, the leaves curled and moist, perhaps a tablespoon altogether. I was supposed to salute the four directions with it.
I faced east, the sky a pale gray there, against the cerulean backdrop of the night. The air was calm and expectant, the quiet marred only by the purl of water nearby. The quiet pressed against me, steady, almost solid.
Taking a pinch of the tobacco in my right fingers, I thought about what Aggie had said. This was supposed to be a ritual to prepare me to fight, a ritual of my own making, not hers. So maybe I could use my own words but Aggie’s grasp of the stories and the olden times.
I held the tobacco high, as if greeting the sun, and paused, thinking. I drew on some old Bible studies into the ancient Hebrew names of God. “I call on the Almighty, the Elohim, who are eternal.” I let the bit of tobacco fall and a cool chill brushed across me, like an unseen breeze. But nothing moved, the trees around me motionless.
I turned to my right, facing south. “I call upon my ancestors, my skinwalker grandmother, and my father. Hear me.” I dropped a bit of the tobacco. A sudden morning wind skirled through, taking the leaves away before they hit the ground, and died as fast as it rose. Cold prickles lifted across my flesh. I resisted the urge to look behind me. But I knew that I wasn’t alone. Not anymore.
I turned west, holding up a pinch of tobacco. Aggie had used the name Unelenehi, whom she referred to as the Great One. “I call upon the Great One, god who creates.” Again the breeze blew through, harder, stronger, smelling of wet and mold and the soil of the earth, and the tobacco was whipped from my fingers before I could drop it. My breath went hot and noisy in my throat, like a bellows wet with steam.
I turned right again, now facing north, pinching the tobacco in my fingers, my heart rate too fast, thumping erratically. “I call upon the trinity, the sacred number of three.” The skin on the back of my neck crawled as I spoke the words, and I hunched my shoulders as the wind swirled past. Beast growled low in my mind, the sound far away; the place where she usually hunched was vacant.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to complete the circle and didn’t
remember the instruction from Aggie, but it felt right, so I pivoted back to the east. I gathered up the last bit of tobacco and closed my eyes, my fingertips tingling and cold. I let it fall. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.” In the distance an owl called, loud and long, the hooting echoing. Nearby another answered, three plaintive notes. Terror like spider legs crawled down my spine, yet there was no reason for fear.
I opened my eyes and looked up into the pine tree tops for the owls. If they were there, they were hidden by the gray light. The spider legs crawled faster and I shivered. I really didn’t like not seeing the owls. Not at all. I closed the baggie and dusted my hands.
My stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. The tingly feeling still coursed through me, slightly breathless, but exhilarated now, with something expectant, almost like joy. I wondered for an instant what herbs had been in the herbal emetic, and if they did anything other than empty my stomach.
I snaked through the trees upstream in the general direction Aggie had taken, the earth sucking at my flip-flops as if it wanted to pull me within. The world smelled fresh and new, the clean tang of fresh fish, duck and goose and hawk, the distant reek of skunk; even the mold smelled good if that was possible.
Just as the trees opened out at a sharp curve of the bayou, I caught a whiff of burning pine. In the center of a tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting on flat stones, naked except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes were folded neatly beside them. U ni lisi, grandmother of many children, tended a tiny, smokeless fire.
I turned my gaze away, wondering why so many of the Cherokee rituals seemed to involve getting naked. Knowing I was supposed to follow suit, I stripped to the skin and folded my clothes on the far side of the fire beside a third stone that I assumed was mine.
Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs in a pile to the side. Right. I was supposed to pick them up and scatter them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Trying to bend so I didn’t expose my backside to the two women, I picked up the sap-rich branches, the bark scratching my unprotected skin, and walked clockwise around the fire, dropping a thick layer of the branches in a circle. The sap made my hands sticky but the act of bending and lifting settled my mind. Any lingering self-consciousness was gone by the time I closed the pine bough circle. The faint morning breeze died again and the air went still, heavy with possibility. Waiting.
At a gesture from Aggie, I placed the last of the green boughs on the fire. The scent of pine smoke billowed up; Aggie had said no evil could cross the circle or enter the fragrant smoke; it acted as a ward against malevolent spirits. Finished, I sat, the stone cool beneath me. The old woman stood and faced east. Her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a half-empty balloon, her breasts heavy and pendulous. But there was strength in her limbs and something quietly powerful about her form as she raised her hands to the rim of sun. As they lifted, yellow light pushed through the tree trunks and touched her face. Warming her. Pine smoke rose and swelled, curling around her, gray in the dawn.
I shivered in the morning light as she began chanting. The language was Cherokee, some of which I remembered, the version older than what Aggie and she spoke, the cadence formal, whispered as much as spoken. I placed my palms flat on the ground for balance as her words brushed over me with the smoke, rising and falling. Rising and falling. The world seemed to undulate beneath my hands like the tides of the ocean, though I knew it didn’t move.
The chill pulled my skin so tight that it ached all over as if I’d jumped into an icy creek. Smoke batted at me, swirling, filling the protective circle. Tears gathered fast in my eyes to fall across my cheeks and splash on my chest. The smoke, I told myself, just the smoke. But the deeps of my mind knew it was something else, something more, and so did my Beast, who hunched deep inside, far back in my consciousness, head on paws, killing teeth hidden.
U ni lisi’s words had a rhythm and life of their own, ancient and powerful and full of the memories of the past. When the chant ended, she dropped her arms. Nothing but the soft susurration of bayou could be heard. The skin of my face was tight with drying salt; fresh tears ran through it, burning.
She opened the beaded bag hanging around her neck. From it, she pulled a tablespoon of the native tobacco and held it in her left hand. With her right, she added other herbs, Aggie calling out their names in English for me. “Sage for cleansing. Sweetgrass for life and joy.”
Aggie’s mother added a final herb, and Aggie didn’t speak its name. Perhaps it didn’t have an English equivalent. Or perhaps it was part of the mysteries of going to water, and no one knew but her. The old woman rolled the herbs all together into a fat cigarlike cylinder and tied it with what looked like hemp string, creating a smudge stick. She held a burning twig from the fire to the smudge stick until the herb tube was lit and smoking. She dropped the twig back to the fire and stood. She handed the smudge stick to Aggie, who took it kneeling, almost as if making obeisance.
With unhurried, circular motions, she smudged the air around her mother. The old woman was silent, her eyes almost closed, her face serene. Slowly she turned, lifting each foot and placing it just so, like a dance or the measured and balletic martial art form of Tai Chi. Her mother held out her own braids and the smoke curled around them like a living snake, touching and spiraling up. It coiled around her legs and back and belly, up over her face, more gentle than a lover’s hand. As the smoke wreathed her, the wrinkles on her face softened; a small half smile touched her lips and she sighed as if some ever-present pain was temporarily gone. When she was satisfied, Lisi sat, eyes closed, seeming to barely breathe.
Aggie held out the stick to me and turned her back. Feeling clumsy, I took the smudge stick and came to my knees, concentrating on the smoke rising on the still air, brushing up her body like the finger of God. She lifted her hair and I held the stick so the smoke passed through it. I turned and she turned, lifting a leg so the smoke could touch the back of her thigh and curl over her buttocks. When every part of her had been blessed by the smudging smoke, she opened her eyes and smiled, though her gaze seemed far away.
With a slow gesture, Aggie indicated her mother, and I gave the old woman the smudge stick. I turned to the side as each of them had and closed my eyes. The smoke was warm, curling up from my ankles, fragrant and rich, and I breathed it in. And turned a half step, then another. Lifting my arms. Moving into the dance of the smoke.
“Hold out your hair, Dalonige i Digadoli.” My whole body shuddered with the words, with hearing them spoken properly, in the whispered syllables of the language of the People, the Cherokee. “Hold out your hair.”
I sobbed once, hard. Tears pouring down my face, I lifted my hair. Aggie’s mother walked slowly around me, the smudge stick rising and falling, the aromatic smoke touching my skin, wisping through my hair, which fell through my fingers in a long veil, over and over again. The smoke curled up my legs, across my stomach. It brushed my back, touching, so delicately, my face, as if tasting my tears. I breathed in the scented smoke, drawing it deep. My lungs trembled. The world spun and steadied. My heart tripped and slowed, finding a rhythm older than human memory. I closed my eyes and breathed. Just breathed. As the water flowed in the bayou nearby, singing a nearly silent, ancient song.
“We sa,” a soft voice whispered. “Time to go, we sa.” Cat. Bobcat. One of my beasts. I heard my name spoken by my father, his voice echoing in my memory, as it had so long ago. I opened my eyes and saw the protective circle was open, and U ni lisi was stepping into the bayou water, Aggie behind her. I followed them to the water’s edge, across a dark, slick, claylike bank, and into the bayou, thick muck pulling at my ankles. The water was clearer here, not as muddy with hurricane runoff, and I could see my feet pressing into the black mire.
I remembered that I was supposed to pray, but the words and ritual prayers Aggie had i
nstructed me were gone from my mind. Unbidden, other words came to my lips. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.” With the words, I bent my knees and sank beneath the water. It closed over me, dark, moving sluggishly on my skin, cool and wet, the womb of the world.
Seven times I rose and sank into the bayou, each time asking my prayer. When I came up the last time, Aggie and Lisi were on the bank, dressing. The sun had risen. And I was empty and light and so . . . free.
I walked through the deep mud, out of the water, and up the muddy, black clay bank. I shook both feet. Looking down, I was amazed that I didn’t seem to have any mud on me. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Quickly I dressed. Still silent, we put out the fire with bayou water, stirring the coals until it was cold. Together, in a short line of three, we walked back to the car and drove away.
CHAPTER 12
Would Little Evan go crunch?
I called a part-time cabdriver I used, catching Rinaldo just before he hit the sack after his third shift at a local plant. He showed up pretty quickly; I was only a mile or so from Aggie’s street, trudging along in my flip-flops, hands in the pockets of the loose pants, and already sweating in the day’s heat. He pulled his bright yellow Bluebird Cab over and hung halfway out the window. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
I was pretty sure the line didn’t deserve the amount of laughter it got as I climbed into the front seat, but Rinaldo thought I was a party girl, always needing a ride home after a wild night out, so he probably assumed I was on a giggly high. I slammed the door and buckled in as he tire-crunched through a three-point turn and eased his way toward a paved street in the distance. With a sly grin, he slanted a look at me. “Hungry?”