The Purification Ceremony

by Mark Sullivan

  I must have dozed, because when I opened my eyes again, he was sitting cross-legged on one of the deer skins •about six feet away, studying me. There were two yellow arrows before him in a cross formation and beside them a gourd of water and beside it the wolf skin that had been removed from his head to reveal a thick shock of steel-gray hair. He must have been remarkably handsome once, but that seemed to have been drained from him, leaving a gaunt, bony face above the beard line and thin, almost blue lips. I could see his eyes clearly now—the irises were a willow green, the pupils hugely dilated and black, the whites filmy and bloodshot. The most tortured eyes I've ever seen.

  He reached out and untied the gag, then sat back.

  We held each other's gazes for several minutes. My heart caught again. It was as if he actually had the ability to reach inside and read me. I turned away, sickened by the sensation, but it did not cease.

  Finally I blurted, "Are you Ronny Metcalfe?"

  He said nothing.

  "If you won't tell me who you are, at least tell me why you're doing this sick thing."

  His body squeezed up tight, hinting at something unfathomable simmering below his tranquil outward surface. For a second I feared it would boil over and I would be swept away. Instead, his eyes became glassier, heavier, and he said thickly, "I've seen the pouch around your neck. You have Indian blood in you, don't you?"

  "Micmac and Penobscot," I replied.

  "Northern Woodland, Algonquin." He nodded. "What is your name?"

  "Diana," I answered. "Diana Jackman.':

  No, your Indian name."

  I hesitated. "Little Crow."

  That seemed to satisfy him. "Little Crow, I watched you in the woods. You are a fine hunter. You come to it with reverence. Very rare. And yet trailing behind you, like a shadow, is a sadness, a confusion that you are unwilling to face."

  I started at that. "I . . . I'm just here to hunt."

  He laughed, but there was no feeling in it. "I see things others do not. We are kindred spirits, I think."

  In spite of myself, I snapped, "We have nothing in common. I don't kill people for sport."

  "Sport!" he roared. "This is no sport! I'm here to cleanse the filth that has defiled the hunt, to purge the evil liquid that now festers within the great ceremony, to render balance where there is none!"

  He was on his feet now, raving, kicking over pots and pans. He held a wicked-looking knife with a black stone blade and a deer-antler handle. I scooched back against the wall, cowering from his rage.

  "Kauyumari and Tatewari have commanded me to come here," he fumed. "Here there is no sacrifice and thanksgiving for brother deer. There is just the pursuit of trophies and all of it . . . all of it orchestrated by him, the one who corrupted the sanctity of the hunt to begin with. Him! Sanctioned in his evil deeds by the laws of civilized man, making his money from it!"

  He yanked at his hair, then coiled himself down to pluck the two yellow arrows from the floor of the cave. He held one in each hand and closed his eyes halfway and began to shuffle, almost a dance really, in slow, purposeful circles around the firs. As he moved, I could sense the frenzy draining from him.

  Tears streamed down my face. I could not help it. Finally he stopped before me. "Can you understand?" he asked softly.

  I shook my head, snuffling.

  He knelt in front of me. "I've scared you, haven't I? I'm so sorry. Do you know you remind me of someone I loved?" And he reached out to stroke my face.

  I jerked away from his touch, but he smiled. "You think I'm a barbarian, but I'm not. I am an educated man. I did my doctoral thesis on the Huichol peoples of the Sierra Madre. Do you know the Huichol? I've been living among them again since the abomination."

  "I've never heard of them," I said, trying to keep him talking about something that seemed to soothe him.

  "We worship the deer," he announced. "Deer is Kauyumari, the messenger between man and God, whom we call Tatewari. Deer also brings Peyote to earth. Peyote is as sacred to the Huichol as the deer. Peyote and other plants in the desert bring visions of Tatewari to the taker."

  If he caught my befuddlement, he did not show it. Instead, he looked out into a distant place and spoke tenderly. "Once, a long, long time ago, the Huichol lived in Wikuta, the hallowed high desert.

  We were a hunting society and the deer was our brother. Even now, when a Huichol hunts a deer, he does not try to chase it as you or I might do here. Instead, we look for a deer that will stand and face us and not run. Then we set snares where he lives and catch him so that we might talk to the deer as our brother, to tell him why he must die so we may live. It is difficult because before he dies, the deer talks to us with his eyes and breaks our hearts.

  "When a Huichol kills the deer in the sacred way, he finishes by offering prayers to Tatewari and to Maxa Kwaxi, elder brother deer," he continued. "When all is consumed, the bones are buried in the forest so that deer may regrow from his bones."

  He laughed. His face radiated with animation. He touched the side of his nose. "We hunt Peyote the same way in the same place, the Wikuta, the sacred desert. Kauyumari is there, too. We believe, in fact, that deer comes from the sky and where he lands, Peyote is found. Therefore Peyote must be tracked and shot with an arrow like deer."

  He fell silent and sighed at the memory. I was trying desperately to understand him, to figure out what the murders had to do with it all. "Do you see yourself as a Huichol?"

  He laughed, this time a real laugh. "I am more than a Huichol," he said. "I have trained these past few years to become a Mara'akame, what you might call a shaman. I lead the hunts for deer and for Peyote and Kieli, which also brings great visions. In my visions I am one of the wolf people who came before all of us. Wolf is my animal ally. He has led me here to purify that which has been desecrated."

  "Why us?" I demanded. "We've done nothing illegal, nothing to hurt you."

  He ignored me. He stood suddenly and ran back into the alcove, returning immediately with a small drum, the deer horns, the third yellow arrow and a buckskin pouch about eight inches long. He sat across from me a third time. He reached into the pouch and brought out what appeared to be a short length of animal intestine filled with blood.

  "This is deer's spirit," he informed me, unwrapping a piece of sinew he'd used to tie the intestine shut. He smeared some of the blood on his fingers and then, before I could react, smeared the blood on my face in long streaks.

  "Don't. Please," I begged, recoiling from the moisture on my skin.

  "I can tell that in your way you worship the deer, too. Little Crow," he went on. "But you have unfinished business with deer. Because I have respect for you, I will help you complete your business before I have to go."

  "No," I said. "Please, I don't want to—"

  "In some ways, you know," he interjected, "the Huichol are children. They hunt only Peyote and deer and Keili and raise corn and believe these are the ways to know God.

  "But I have learned that there are other paths into the spirit world. There are some Mara'akame among the Huichol who disapprove of the men I have sought out in the far reaches of the Sierra, the men who have taught me other ways to talk with Tatewari."

  His face screwed up and he hissed through his teeth,

  "They cursed me for following these men and learning these paths. They said ingestion of the Datura plant would lead to madness. But I wanted answers Peyote would not give me. Datura has given me the wolf as an ally, has given me the vision."

  He cocked his head. "Do you think I was wrong?"

  He said this last with such intensity that even though I had no idea what he was talking about, I shook my head.

  "No," I said. "I believe knowledge is a good thing."

  He nodded, but said nothing more. He arranged the arrows in a splayed pattern around the drum, tips pointed outward like the points on a compass. He dripped blood on the yellow arrows, smeared blood on his own cheeks and started to chant, low at first, then gradually increasing
the volume until the sound echoed off the roof of the cavern. Despite a hoarse, hollow voice, the singing was beautiful, and though I knew not the language, I understood he was talking to his Tatewari, the God of the Sierra Madre.

  Now his every action turned gesture, precise, ritualistic, layered with meaning I felt but did not comprehend. He reached into the buckskin pouch again and removed a stout wooden pipe with a short stem and then another, smaller pouch. He unwrapped the pouch, still singing, and a stench, acrid and fungal, filled the space between us. He plucked a wad of a dark, stringy mixture from the pouch and thumbed it into the bowl of the pipe, then set the pipe on the drum.

  He stood and placed the wolf's cape back over his head, then bowed in four directions before padding once more clockwise around the fire ring, all the while singing in that hoarse, hollow voice.

  After completing the circle three times, he knelt, got stick matches from the pouch, lit one and held the flame to the bowl. The sick-sweet smoke I'd smelled in the alcove belched forth from the pipe. He sucked on it and held his breath before releasing a cloud of gray. His eyes fluttered and threatened to close, but he shook this off.

  "An old wise man of the Sierra taught me the mixture," he said, holding the pipe stem toward me. "Datura, Keili— the tree of the wind—Peyote, cannabis and the mushroom. He called it the path to past visions. I call it memory smoke. Memory is how I see Tatewari's purpose for me. What is God's purpose for you, Little Crow?"

  He gestured for me to take the pipe in my mouth. I shook my head violently and gritted my teeth. "No, I don't want any."

  He reached around the back of my head and took hold of my hair. I struggled, but he held me in a vicious grip, wrapped his lips around the pipe bowl and blew smoke back out the stem into my face. I held my breath as long as I could; then he took his other hand and pinched my nose shut and he shook my head as if he were disciplining a dog. I screamed and gulped air and the smoke that now surrounded us like fog.

  He retreated after seeing that I had made several great inhalations of the smoke. He returned to his singing, which now seemed to hang around me like a warm blanket. I delighted in his voice. I focused on him and on the plumed arrows he waved about him as if he were sweeping the air. The plumes left contrails of glittering red and yellow floating in the space between us.

  The cave wall beyond him sparkled and pulsated, and my ears rang and I felt a heaviness at the base of my skull that quickly spread down my spine and up over the top of my head, pooling like a hot, comforting liquid behind my eyes. My head seemed to separate from my body and expand and become its own distinct being, capable of hearing and touching and seeing everything. The pattern of the green lichen on the walls of the cave came alive, swelled and ebbed with each of my breaths, mutating into a thousand distinct designs.

  I stared at the wall for what seemed an eternity; and then I was aware of him again. His eyes were closed, he rocked back and forth and he was still singing, but it was different from what I had heard before. His voice, passionate and longing, bounced off the cavern walls and came deep inside me and mixed with the drugs to stir brilliant, hallucinatory colors in my mind. My eyelids grew heavy and I shut them, to find myself swimming in rivers of ruby and pearl and emerald.

  All went to blackness suddenly and I was very afraid. Then, as if in a night sky, a first star appeared from behind windblown clouds. The star shimmered and turned red and grew. I went into the star, blinded by a crimson light that settled into a woodland landscape at dawn. I was in snow, snow that drifted in a stiff wind. And there I saw myself impaled upside down on the branches of a massive pine tree, its roots descending far below the snow and the earth, its limbs rising impossibly high into the sky. I stared at myself, unbelieving. My lips moved, but I heard no words.

  There was the night and the clouds again and another star, which darted about the sky and became a bird of a thousand colors. The bird hovered in the night sky and sang a lullaby.

  The bird arched high into the blackness, exploded and became a huge circular painting composed of many colored yarns and bird feathers. Women with electric azure hair gave birth in the painting. Men fished with boys on an emerald stream. Dogs howled at the moon. At the center of the painting a crow held a mirrorlike orb in its beak, and for a split second the faces of my children appeared in the orb, calling to me. I wanted desperately to hold the orb, to talk with them, when in the upper right-hand corner a deer with flaming fur took a step. I tried to stay focused on the orb and Emily and Patrick and the crow, but the deer compelled me to follow and I did, surprised that the deer was a fawn going to the emerald stream to drink. I entered the stream alongside the fawn. The river was not water, but many iridescent streams of odors I'd long forgotten— the wet leaves that used to blow up alongside my mother's gazebo in October, my father's bay-leaf aftershave, Mitchell's Pall Malls, the oven in our kitchen, the hospital smell that seemed to linger in the air near Katherine in her last years.

  That last scent was like a powerful current that bore unceasingly at my legs until they gave way and I slipped under the surface of the river of odors into a blackness. I turned and swirled in the blackness until a silver bubble came at me.

  I grasped the bubble and looked into it, shocked to see the front hall of our home outside Bangor and a muchyounger version of myself walking in wool socks on the wood floors, feeling the uneven surface through the bottoms of my feet, seeing the photographs of us all on the wall. Mitchell hoeing the garden. Katherine and me on a fishing trip to Labrador. My father with one of his biggest deer. Wedding pictures. Baby photos. A family. A lifetime.

  I watched myself turn into my father's office and Katherine was sitting there on his lap in her flannel nightgown, and my father asked me to shut the door. It was February inside the bubble, my senior year in high school. I knew what my father was about to say even before he said it, and I didn't want to hear those words repeated. I had never wanted to hear those words. But the things occurring within the bubble were my past, beyond my control.

  Now Katherine was looking away from me into the distance.

  And my father was saying, "Your mother doesn't want to go blank. She doesn't want to fade to a nothingness that haunts us. She knows that if she lived long ago, the forest would treat her as it would any enfeebled animal and end her life long before her mind turned completely dark. She wants us to be the forest for her, Diana. She wants us to help her die while she can still remember us."

  I watched my younger self watch Katherine, unbelieving. After she'd resigned from her Senate seat, I had prepared myself for everything—for the loss of her mind, for her slow, lingering descent—but not this.

  "I won't let you!" I cried. "I don't care what Mitchell or what the old ones might say; you can't do this." "It's what she wants," my father replied.

  "How do you know what she wants?" I screamed. "She can't tell you where the mailbox is half the time."

  Katherine reached for me and said, "I want this, Little Crow."

  But I pulled away, sobbing, "No, you don't. He's filled your head and my head with all this stuff about nature and his ancestors and how no one sees the world whole anymore except us. You don't understand what he wants to do."

  "Yes, I do," she said.

  But I wouldn't listen to her. I turned on my father.

  "Daddy, I know you think of yourself as a modern Puoin or something. But put Mitchell aside for one second. You're

  a medical doctor. You took an oath. You can't kill her or help her kill herself. They'll take your practice away. It will be the end of you."

  My father's face clouded and now he was yelling at me. "I took a far more important oath to her when I married her. Little Crow, you've got to understand . . ."

  "No, I don't! And I'm not your Little Crow anymore. I'm Diana Jackman. And she's my mother. And if you do this I'll tell the police. I'll have you thrown in jail for murder!"

  I was crying now in the dark river of the hallucination and my hands were crushing the bubbl
e, which developed a waist like an hourglass. I was inside the bottom bubble suddenly, squished inside and frightened. I beat against the sides, but no one heard me. Then a face appeared outside, Mitchell's face.

  He talked to me about the forest and the shape-changers and the need to cloak myself in Power lest I be harmed. His voice faded and I became aware that the bottom of the bubble was pressing me upward through the neck toward the upper bubble and I screamed, feeling the pressure, not in my head, but in my chest, around my heart. The pressure became excruciating, much, much worse than the racking hour and twenty minutes I had spent in transition during Patrick's birth. My ribs were on the verge of cracking when I burst into the top bubble, which exploded and left me floating again in the darkness of the river.

  I was no longer feeling myself as I floated. That is to say, I was still myself, but someone else, too. A second heart beat within me, a second set of lungs took breaths, and I saw visions of things I knew were memory, but not from my experience.

  I saw a small house filled with primitive Mexican art: sculptures of men holding bows and huge yarn paintings like the one I had already seen and entered in my hallucination.

  I was looking for someone, walking fast through a bedroom with white furniture and then a sewing room and then a room with a great many deer heads on the wall. The rooms were all empty. And then I heard noises outside at the rear of the house.

  I walked through a kitchen and opened the door to see a policeman leading two men away from me toward a cruiser. Another policeman approached with this look on his face that told me I was about to be cast to the winds.

  My entire body went vacant. I followed the officer toward two ambulance men working with their backs to me. I passed them and focused on the face of the woman in the killer's photograph. She was lying on her back in curled brown leaves. Tiny bubbles of blood shone at her lips. Her eyes swept lazily from the men working over her to the sky and then to me.