Maybe I should wait to enact the Indian ritual until I go back to Vegas when the Colonel and I release his father’s ashes into the atmosphere but standing here in Barstow on the train tracks I have another idea about what to do with Lester’s medicine smoke.
Forest Lawn.
They close the gates at sunset so I drive as if on a vision quest, stopping only once, for gas, and hit the Glendale exit while the sun is still high enough to burnish this California town with bold strokes of gold.
No one stops me to check my I.D. at the gate, no one asks to look inside my car, the security for visiting the dead is non-existent and I encounter no other cars as I wind my way, slowly, up the carefully landscaped road to where I know he is, by memory, surrounded by Harold, Florence, Beth and Katherine under a stately Norfolk pine.
I take Lester’s packet and rummage for matches in the earth-quake kit I keep in my car, then I go to sit beside his grave to start this ritual.
Pine needles and other debris have gathered on the nameplate set into the earth, littering his name LOVING FATHER, and as I clean the litter with my hands I speak to him, You’re going to like the smell of this, old man, you’re going to be reminded of those places you lit out to.
They want to make a movie about you—set you out there on a horse against the wild. I bet you’d like to shoot it, wouldn’t you? All those beauty shots. And yet not once in your life did you ever photograph an Indian when he or she was laughing, eating, embracing, kissing—not once in your whole life did you ever photograph them all as if to say, This is who we were, and we were happy.
I peel back a bit of newspaper and take a few dry leaves and rub them in my hands, releasing the aroma of wet clay, baked earth, the green heart of fragrant growth buried in a desiccated stem.
I draw the sheet of newspaper from the bundle of bound leaves and then, around their stalks, I see the bracelet.
The shadow catcher.
“Oh, Lester,” I say out loud.
I slip it from the stalks and place it on the grave marker and light the leaves and blow on them until a fragile thread of smoke twists upward toward the tree above.
I watch the smoke braid and rise into the tree, a shadow branching growth, a ghost, and I think about the ways that lives can intertwine, the way one life touches on another, our lives and all the lives of others a long continuous thread—a train—of independent yet contiguous actions.
I slide my hand inside the bracelet.
If this were Hollywood there would be a whistle rising in the distance now, moving slowly toward me, the inimitable sound of train, a sound my nation makes, but instead there is the stubborn uninterrupted susurration of lives stirring from their shadows toward sustaining light.
And I feel safe.
notes on the images
DESCRIPTION
Edward S. Curtis, Piegan Encampment (NAI, Vol. VI). Library of Congress.
Edward S. Curtis, Sun Dance Encampment—Piegan (NAI, Vol. VI). Courtesy Northwestern University Library.
Edward S. Curtis, Navaho (NAI, Vol. I). Library of Congress.
Edward S. Curtis, Red Cloud—Oglala (NAI, Vol. III). Library of Congress.
Found photograph. Collection of Author.
ESC: R.I.P. Collection of the Author.
Reds. Collection of the Author.
Edward S. Curtis, Waiting in the Forest—Cheyenne (NAI, Vol. VI). Library of Congress.
Edward S. Curtis, Watching the Dancers (NAI, Vol. XII). Library of Congress.
Found photograph. Collection of the Author.
John Wiggins’s Civil War Discharge/recto. Collection of the Author.
John Wiggins & Mary Book. Collection of the Author.
Edward S. Curtis, Canon de Chelly—Navaho (NAI, Vol. I). Library of Congress.
Edward S. Curtis, Wishham Bride (NAI, Vol. VIII). Library of Congress.
Found photograph. Collection of the Author.
Edward S. Curtis, Canon de Chelly—Navaho (mirror image of the original, NAI, Vol. I). Library of Congress.
* * *
NAI: The North American Indian, published in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930.
acknowledgments
I am indebted to the novels of the late W.G. Sebald, whose interleafing of photographs with prose opened my eyes to the possibility of a new way of reading.
I thank the photographer Keith Carter and his light, Pat, for always wanting to know more about this lengthy work in progress.
To my sister, Johanne Wallace, more gratitude than can be spoken for the license to decorate our shared history.
I thank Denise Roy, Editor, for her grace and wit at all times.
I am grateful to these authors and these books for truth and inspiration:
Curtis, Edward S. The Portable Curtis: Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis. Edited by Barry Gifford. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976.
Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.
Gidley, Mick. Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated. Cambridge University Press, U.K., 1998.
Makepeace, Anne. Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2001.
Marias, Javier. Negra espalda del tiempo. Barcelona: Ediciones Alfaguara, 1998.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marianne Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Brussels, Rome, Paris, and London. She is the author of ten books of fiction, including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen—for which she was a National Book Award finalist in fiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She is Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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