Two Roads

by Joseph Bruchac

  “Does this sit well with you, Mr. Blackbird?” Morrell asked.

  As if I had any choice in the matter?

  So I did the only thing I could do. I nodded.

  That was three weeks ago. Since then I’ve been settling into my new role as a full-time farmhand. In addition to such things as grass cutting and whitewashing walls, I’ve been spending time in the stables. Mr. Adams has been teaching me how to work with the big Percheron horses. He also has detailed me to be the one most responsible for the feeding and currying of those retired cavalry mounts. I am clearly their favorite. Dakota, in particular. The big horse starts whinnying whenever I am within half a mile of the stables.

  I have also been allotted a plot of my own to farm. Whatever I grow there can be sold with funds from the sale going into my account. There are no academic classes, but I have been able to study on my own using books borrowed from the library. A big box of novels and textbooks discarded from a high school in Oklahoma City was donated in June to our so-called library, housed in that small room in the academic building.

  I was the first to get my hands on them. We do not have a proper librarian, but Mrs. Tygue suggested to the superintendent that I should be the one to go through the books and see they got shelved right.

  My favorites among them are no less than ten novels by Sir Walter Scott and four by Robert Louis Stevenson. Possum, on my recommendation, is now working his way through Kidnapped.

  The one I’m reading right now, before sleeping, is Treasure Island. I read it two years ago. But it has even more meaning for me now. I guess what I like best about it is that while I’m reading it, I am not here at Challagi. I’m off on that wild quest with Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. For a time, deep in those pages, I’m not even worrying about Pop or missing him. For a time there’s nothing but pirates and buried treasure on my mind. I close my eyes and drift off into a dream where Jim—who looks a lot like Possum—and I are walking along an ocean beach.

  “NOO! LOOK OUT! NOOOO!”

  That shouting, near-hysterical voice was so loud that it woke me up.

  I look around. I’m in my bed in the half-empty dorm room. The still-open copy of Stevenson’s adventure tale is clutched in my right hand. Jim Hawkins isn’t there, but I’m not alone.

  Possum and Little Coon are both staring down at me with worried faces. That tells me the one shouting was none other than yours truly. It pulled them out of their cots to the side of their crazy friend.

  “Jay Bird,” Possum says, “it was only a dream.”

  I shake my head, half to try to come fully awake and half to deny what my friend just said. I close the book, swing my feet out of bed. I rub my eyes, which are wet with tears.

  “No,” I say. “More than that.”

  I look at my two friends. The full moon shining in through the window casts enough light for me to see the worried looks on their faces. And despite what Possum just said, he knows that a dream can be a lot more than a dream. He’s the one whose aunt had medicine dreams that were just as precognitive as the visions of Cassandra in the Iliad.

  I know if I tell them what I just saw in my dream that they’ll take it serious. I know, partially from what I’ve learned about being Creek and partially because a part of me has always known, that my dreams are connecting me to other people. People who’ve passed on—like Miz Euler’s husband who got gassed in France—and people still living. My dreams are of things that happened, even before I was alive on this earth.

  This dream was about the living. It wasn’t just about something that was going to happen. It was more than that. It was about Pop, and in that vision I sort of was Pop, seeing through his eyes. It was night and there was noise and confusion all around me and the other men who were marching forward. There were lights, bright spotlights being beamed on us. We were on a bridge, facing armed men. We were not armed ourselves, but we were not going to let them get past us. We kept marching toward them.

  “GET BACK! STOP OR WE WILL FIRE.” That was what the man on the bullhorn was saying.

  They won’t shoot us, the man next to me shouted. They won’t never shoot us vets.

  And that was when the soldiers started firing. I felt the bullets entering my chest and I was falling, dying. . . .

  And woke up shouting NOOOO!

  Possum and Little Coon are still by my cot, looking at me. I’m amazed it’s only them. I was hollering as loud as a bluetick hound on the trail of a raccoon. But as I raise my head and look around the room all I can see in the cots that hold other students here for the summer are sleeping bodies.

  Possum smiles. “Yep, Jay Bird, they are all still ree-cum-bunt,” using the word I taught him yesterday out of my Webster’s. “That yell of yours was meant just for us, I suppose. Nobody else was supposed to hear it. So they didn’t.”

  If he had said that two months ago I would have thought he was nuts. But not now. I just nod my head.

  Then I realize someone is missing. Why isn’t Deacon, whose bed is just past Little Coon’s, also here by my cot?

  I stand up and peer in that direction. It looks as if there’s a body in Deacon’s bed. But, then again, it looks as if the cots of my two other friends are also not empty. I walk over to Deacon’s bed, pull back the covers. He’s not in it. What it holds is a bedroll like the ones in Little Coon’s and Possum’s cots. Like the one they are fixing in mine.

  “Put on your sneakers, Jay Bird,” Little Coon says. “Deacon woke up a good two hours before you started yelling.”

  “Yep.” Possum nods. “Seems he had one of them pree-mo-ni-shuns, too.”

  Little Coon nods. “Said the time had come for us to do something you needed done. Told us to wait till you woke up and then take you to our camp. That’s where he is. Getting things ready.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TIME TO GO

  Even though the moon is bright, I see the light of the fire burning next to the creek long before we reach the clearing where our gang’s cabin is located. It’s a much bigger fire than usual, far larger than to cook anything and certainly not needed for warmth on a balmy summer night such as this.

  But the fire is not the only thing out of the ordinary. Right close to the creek, not far from the fire, is a flat shelf where the bank juts into the stream. It’s a week since I’ve been here, but someone else in our gang clearly has been here to construct what’s been built on that shelf. At first I took it for a big mound of brush, but as we come closer I can see it is way different from that. It’s a rounded hut, sort of like a giant mushroom.

  “Nice, innit,” Little Coon says. “Three of us spent the last four days a-makin’ it.”

  It’s all covered up with blankets—blankets that I recognize from the stable.

  “Horse blankets?”

  “Yup,” Possum says. “Long as we bring ’em back all clean and folded, Mr. Adams don’t mind our borrowing them. Not that he gave us out-and-out permission, but he turned a blind eye, knowing how we’d be using them. Covering for the lodge.”

  The blankets are folded back on the fire side of what Possum just called a lodge. I peer inside and see that the structure the blankets were laid over is made of peeled poles lashed together with stringy roots and brown twine. It’s not big enough to be a hut for living in. A single deer antler, looking like a hand with curled fingers, rests just inside. There’s a hole in the ground about the size and depth of a good-sized cooking pot right in the center of the lodge.

  “That’s for the stones,” Little Coon says, seeing where I’m looking. He gently grasps my shoulder. “Don’t go inside yet.”

  I look at him in confusion. Then at Possum. A third figure stands up from the other side of the fire. Deacon. He was sitting so motionless that I hadn’t seen him.

  “Never seen a lodge before?” Deacon asks, his voice soft.

  I shake my
head.

  “Sit down here.”

  I sit down close enough to the fire to feel its heat washing over me. It’s a good feeling, peaceful. The fire smells different from any fire I’ve smelled before. I look closer at it and see that there are objects glowing red in the heart of the flames. It takes me a moment to recognize what they are. Stones. Each of them more or less round and half the size of a man’s head. They’re so hot that they seem to be throbbing—like hearts starting to beat.

  “Stones are alive,” Deacon says. “Fire just wakes them up more.”

  Little Coon and Possum sit down next to me. They’ve stripped off their shirts and sneakers. I do the same, feel the heat caressing my chest and my feet.

  “Deacon was given this—taught to do it—by his granddad,” Possum says. “So, because he is carrying it, he can do this. Make a lodge, run a sweat.”

  What is a sweat? I wonder. But I do not have to ask. Deacon begins to answer me before I’ve even finished that thought.

  “Grandad Harjo,” Deacon says. “He told it to me this way. There was a holy person a long time ago. Way before white men came. He showed himself to a boy who needed help. He taught him this way to cleanse his words, cleanse his body. Then that boy went on to help others in the same way. Now, Jay Bird, this lodge is here to help you.”

  Deacon keeps talking, his words punctuated by the snapping and crackling of the fire and the sound of hissing and cracking from the stones. Grandfathers, Deacon calls them. What he explains to me seems to be coming as much from those stones and that fire as from his voice.

  I nod my head now and again as he talks.

  Then he looks up at me.

  “Are you ready?” he finally says.

  “Yes.”

  He and I take off all our clothes and crawl into that lodge one after the other. I sit at the very back, facing the door that opens, I was told, toward the east. It’s the direction of the dawn, the new day, the beginning of life. Possum, who is the fire keeper, moves burning pieces of wood aside with the pitchfork. He levers out a glowing stone, then carefully scoops it up. He reaches it into the lodge where Deacon uses that deer antler I saw earlier to guide that rock, pulsing with heat, off the pitchfork’s tongs and into the hole in the center.

  One stone, two stones, another and another. Even with the door open to the night air I feel the heat building inside the lodge. Eventually the hole is filled and Deacon holds up a hand to signal enough.

  Little Coon, who’s the door keeper, passes a bucket of water in to Deacon. Then Little Coon pulls the blankets down to close the door. Deacon and I are alone with the stones, their glow like that of miniature suns.

  I can’t say how long we’re inside the lodge. It’s as if time doesn’t exist. Deacon prays and sings and I do my best to sing along with him. The heat is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, especially whenever he splashes water on the stones and steam rises to wrap itself around our bodies. Every inch of my skin feels as if it’s on fire, yet it also feels cleansed at the same time.

  Finally, after one more song—the fourth one, I think—Deacon lets out a long cry. It’s just like that of a wild turkey, but so loud it almost shatters my eardrums.

  Immediately the blankets are thrown up and aside as Little Coon opens the door.

  “Go on out,” Deacon says. “Don’t dry yourself off. Go right into the stream and let its waters wash you clean.”

  Dripping with perspiration, I do as he says. I wade in up to my waist, then sit down so that my head is underwater. When I stand up again, the air feels cool on my body and all of my senses seem more alive than I can ever remember them feeling.

  There’s a huge splash next to me as Deacon jumps into the water himself. Then he pops up, sudden as a diving duck coming back to the surface. His upper body seems painted silver by the bright light of the full moon streaming down on us.

  Little Coon and Possum are reaching their hands down to help pull us up onto the bank. As they do so, Deacon looks over at me and I see a glint of mischief in his eye. He makes a little sign. I nod.

  “Now!” he says as he grabs Little Coon’s hand and yanks him into the creek at the exact moment as I do the same with Possum.

  As the four of us sit by the fire after the sweat, I know they are all feeling what I’m feeling. We’re truly brothers. Whatever happens from here on in we’ll always be as close as kin.

  Deacon looks over at me.

  “Tell us about it,” he says.

  I don’t have to ask him what he means. I’ve never told anyone about my visions before. But being in the presence of friends who understand, who don’t think such things are crazy, who even have names for the kind of seeing I’ve been experiencing makes all the difference. I look over at Possum and Little Coon.

  They both nod. Go ahead.

  So I tell what I saw, speaking more and longer than I ever have before. All three of them listen intently, not interrupting.

  When I’m done I actually feel a little better, as if some of the weight’s been lifted. But it’s also made that vision stronger. And it’s raised even the question in my mind that I have to ask.

  “Does my seeing that mean it’s going to happen?” I ask Deacon.

  He stays silent for a good long time, gathering his words.

  “My grandad,” he finally replies, “told me that seeing that way can be more of a warning than a prophecy. Letting you know what might happen, not what has to happen.”

  Not what has to happen. Those words make hope start to flutter in my chest like a bird. It means what I saw might be changed. Pop could be saved. But there’s only one person who can do that.

  The summer days here are long, so it’s after ten the next night when Possum and I climb down the vine. I have my pack with me. It holds the few things for my journey. It being summer I’ve only shoved in a light blanket and a change of socks and underwear. Money from my school account is in my right sneaker. My French Victory Medal, which Possum and I got out of his hidey-hole last night on our way back from the sweat, is in my left pocket, my jackknife in my right.

  The near-full moon is almost as bright tonight as it was last night. That is both good and bad. Good because we will not need any other light to find our way. Bad because we might be more easily seen. So we keep to the shadows, avoiding the open pathways, staying close to the edges of buildings, moving as quiet as ghosts.

  “Okay?” Possum whispers, hefting the pick as I hold the shovel like a rifle at parade rest. “You sure now?”

  “Never surer,” I whisper back to him.

  “Me, too,” someone whispers from behind me.

  I would have jumped out of my skin if I hadn’t recognized that voice as Little Coon’s. I turn my head to look at him, the moonlight glittering off his teeth from a grin near as wide as Possum’s.

  “You need a lookout,” he says, his voice low and soft.

  I nod. What else can I do? Even though I wanted to avoid getting more of my friends in Dutch, he’s right.

  I’m sure about what I have to do, but there’s still a knot the size of a boulder in my stomach as I lead the way to the stables.

  “I’ll set up here,” Little Coon says when it comes in view, a dark shadow set back from any other building. Possum and I keep going, even though it seems as if I am walking through heavy mud the closer we get to the deserted guardhouse where unruly students used to be locked up. We stop, pause a while in the shadow of a big sycamore. My heart is pounding so hard in my chest that I’m afraid it might be heard like a drumbeat.

  Possum plucks my shirtsleeve. “Let’s go,” he says.

  We continue on, silent as shadows, until we reach the stable. Possum puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Here you are,” he says in a soft voice.

  I want to say something, thank him for being such a true friend—my first real friend. But there’s a
lump in my throat the size of a rock.

  Possum chuckles. “Ain’t no word in Creek for good-bye,” he says. “Uncle Big Rabbit told me that’s cuz we are always going to be meeting up again one way or another down the road.” He gives my shoulder a gentle push. “Now go, Jay. You got yourself another road to travel for a while.”

  As I enter the building a soft whicker from the far stall greets me. Dakota has caught my scent. He nods his head up and down as I approach him

  “Good boy,” I say, opening the stall door. I pat his neck and he nuzzles his head against my chest so hard it almost knocks me down. “Ready to run?”

  I don’t put a saddle on him. That would take too long. But I’ve always been comfortable bareback on a horse. The bridle is all I need. I lift it off the hook, slip it into his mouth, walk him out of his stall, step up on the railing, and slide onto him. I adjust my pack over my back. Everything I need is in there. It’s taken me no more than a minute to do all this. But there’s no time to spare.

  “Giddyup,” I say, shaking the reins.

  Dakota doesn’t rear up, kicking his front hooves like the horses do in the cowboy movies. He was a cavalry mount, trained to charge into battle—not waste time with fancy moves. Instead, he bolts forward. We burst out through the open barn door onto the farm road. I’m gripping tight with my knees, one hand holding the reins and the other grasping his mane.

  “GO!” I shout, kicking my heels into his sides.

  As we pound along, we’re not headed toward the main entrance of the school. We’re angling across the northern field, a wide expanse of prairie ahead of us. But that’s all right. During the months I’ve been here I’ve gotten to know the lay of the land. The direction we’re heading is the way I want to go, and a shorter way by at least a mile. The moonlight shining on the field, the scent of the prairie grasses being kicked up by Dakota’s hooves, the warm night wind in my face, and the feel of the horse’s strong, muscular body beneath me is almost like a dream.