Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  “What the hell do you punks want?” demanded Pat angrily. He slammed the car door hard, rocking the entire frame.

  “We want to tell you guys something,” said one of them, as he slid down hurriedly over the rough bark. In a dark T-shirt, ragged blue jeans, and tennis shoes, with long, scraggly hair tied into a ponytail, the short boy with a jutting jaw stepped forward. “My name is Little Big Man,” he said.

  “I’m a big man, period,” answered Pat, “and what are you going to do about that?”

  The boy trotted to the incline and pointed down toward the front of Weeping Willow Elementary. “Down there—”

  “This better be good, you little green pea shitball!”

  “Hey, cool it . . . okay? We saw some guys lip-locking.”

  “With some girls?”

  “Not even, Steven,” said Little Big Man. “They’re weirdos.”

  “Ah, c’mon!” shouted Pat.

  Little Big Man followed us to the car and persisted until he convinced us to have a look-see. We crouched low within the tree shadows, skirting the center-stage action. From behind a row of bushes that lined the front of the school we spied on two unidentified males engaged in a rigorous clasp of arms and legs, with a third male standing close by, panting.

  “Dragonflies,” whispered Pat, “mating with their mouths.”

  “You guys want a disgusting picture of this?” asked Little Big Man in an imperious tone.

  “Sure, why not?” answered Pat, nudging us.

  “That’ll cost you money, mister!”

  “How much?”

  “A twelve-pack of Leinenkugel’s long necks and a pack of cigs.”

  “The cigs okay; the booze is gone.”

  With that, Little Big Man, who named himself after a novel excerpt in Playboy magazine, dashed swiftly across the driveway of Weeping Willow. Next, he got on his stomach and crawled across the lawn. We waited and watched. The photograph was timed perfectly. In the camera’s skyrocket flash, the mascara outlines of three heterosexual fireflies—Horatio, “Grubby,” and “Kensey”— were immortalized.

  The First Dimension of Skunk

  It is the middle of October

  and frosted leaves

  continue to introduce

  their descent as season

  and self-commentary.

  On the ground yellow-jacket

  hees burrow themselves

  into the windfall apples.

  On the house the empty body shells

  of locusts begin to rattle with

  the plastic window covering

  torn loose the night previous

  in the first sudden gusts of wind.

  South of the highway bridge

  two extinct otters are seen

  by Selene’s father while

  setting traps.

  “Mates swimming;

  streamlined and playing

  games along the Iowa River.”

  In the midst of change

  all it takes is one anachronism,

  one otter whistle.

  For us, it began with the healthy-

  looking salamander who stopped our car.

  So last night we stood in the cold

  moonlight waiting for the black

  coyote. No animal darted

  from tree to tree, encircling us.

  There was a time in an orange grove

  next to the San Gabriel Mountains when

  I was surrounded by nervous

  coyotes who were aware

  of the differences

  between thunder

  and an earth tremor.

  Selene motioned for me to stand

  still, and the moonlit foothills

  of Claremont disappeared.

  An owl began to laugh.

  I remained quiet and obliged

  her gesture not to mimic its laugh,

  for fear we might accidently trigger

  the supernatural deity it possesses

  to break this barrier—

  and once again find ourselves

  observing a ball of fire

  rise from an abandoned garden

  which separates into four fireflies

  who appear like four distant jets

  coming into formation

  momentarily

  before changing into one intense

  strobe light,

  pulsating inside an apple tree,

  impervious to hollow-point bullets,

  admissions of poverty and car lights.

  We stood without response

  and other disconnected thoughts came.

  From the overwhelming sound

  of vehicles and farm machinery,

  together with the putrid odor

  of a beef slaughterhouse,

  such anticipation

  seemed inappropriate.

  Whoever constructed

  the two railroad tracks

  and highways through Indian land

  must have planned and known

  that we would be reminded daily

  of what is certainty.

  In my dream the metal

  bridge plays an essential part

  and subsequent end of what

  was intended to occur.

  I would speak to the heavy

  glass jar, telling it

  the paper bullet

  was useless underwater.

  Three days ago, in the teeth

  of Curly and Girl, a skunk

  was held firmly and shook until lifeless.

  The first evening

  we hear its final death call.

  At the same hour the second night

  we hear it again. The third night-

  sound is more brave and deliberate;

  it waits to blend with the horn

  of an oncoming Northwestern train,

  forcing us to step backward,

  taking random shots at objects

  crashing through the brush.

  We have a theory that Destiny

  was intercepted, that the Executioner

  ran elsewhere for appeasement.

  We also think the skunk’s

  companion returned on these nights

  to mourn a loved one,

  but all had to he deleted,

  leaving us more confused.

  Yesterday, we examined the dead

  skunk and were surprised to find it

  three times less the size I first

  saw it with Mr. D.

  My parents offered an explanation.

  “A parrot or a pelican on their

  migratory route.”

  With our surroundings

  at someone else’s disposal,

  all we have are the embers

  and sparks from our woodstove

  and chimney: the fragrance

  to thwart the supernatural.

  From The Invisible Musician by Ray A. Young Bear, Holy Cow! Press.

  The Incorporeal Hand

  The loss of William Listener in 1980 wasn’t fully felt until the Red Swan successors took over as the main communicators in the first spring following his untimely passing. Among the leaders was my father, Tony Bearchild. Their overreliance on William endangered ceremonial-related memory, faith, and tenacity. Those hypothetical situations William once offered in his sermons about our fate as an Earthlodge clan were now real.

  In the smoky din of the earthlodge, he would bemoan how we had fallen short of spiritual obligation by not abiding by the Well-Known Twin Brother’s teachings. As with everything, there was blame to be placed. Himself excluded.

  “They cannot even converge as a group; they have lost everything to time and disregard. Now, is that what we want? Our personal downfall will result through our own ignorance and the reckless actions of thoughtless others if we permit it.”

  The next day my father, Tony, would pick up the topic. “The responsibilities are incredibly difficult. Sometimes it is a challenge to do as he has done. H
e certainly instructs us well, utilizing a vast array of approaches, but one regrets not recording on audiotape the many songs and prayers he knows, songs that have been with us since the Beginning. . . .”

  * * *

  The Red Swan songs that once flowed out of William’s exceptional repertoire like a clear, fast-running creek were no more, “a living songbook” closed. What my father and the other successors were able to remember was quickly transferred by pen to paper. Unfortunately, the tribal notation of music was insufficient; yet much of what couldn’t be conveyed thus—the pauses in voice, rattle, and drum— was documented through singing rehearsals.

  Although William was convinced during his later years of the advantages of an audiotape recording machine, especially with hard-to-learn-and-memorize songs, no one had the courage to propose a recording session. For the longest time he hadn’t permitted it. Asking a spiritual leader to relinquish in one sitting the elaborate sacredness of a series of god-given songs acquired and amassed since childhood from his father and grandfather was contrary to the precept of “learning through diligent attendance.” The presence of God that was sought and achieved within the smoky earthlodge Could not be present in a Sony or Panasonic tape recorder. It was a contradiction to communicate the greatest message onto a thin strip of plastic. It wasn’t a last resort. He felt the religious continuity he had vigorously espoused was far from being lost.

  It was my father, though, whb brought up on occasion the ignorance that was imbibed through modernity itself. Hence, disenchantment with tribal ceremonies and ways. Knowledgeable in another people’s language, William was no doubt receptive to social change, but he was also of the opinion that indulging in the Outside World’s offerings, be they education, alcoholism, drugs, or whatever, offered only short-lived pleasure. Once the infatuation ceased, we would understand that the only way to prepare for the Black Eagle Child Afterlife was through the Principal Religion.

  It was during the final year of my “infatuation” with academia that Selene Buffalo Husband and I came home one November day and learned that William had become comatose after a long bout with a cancerous illness.

  We accompanied my parents and Grandmother when they went to his bedside at the Heijen Medical Center in Sherifftown. By the deep, peaceful expression on William’s face, I felt he would never wake from his rest. The years since our trip to Canada had taken their toll. With one arm amputated and a hip bone “in degeneration,” he had been confined to a wheelchair.

  Grandmother, unafraid, walked up to William and brushed away the white tufts of hair from his forehead and spoke to him as if he were awake.

  “A kwi ma ke ko no tta wi ya ni-to ki wa ni-ki sko. Nothing will happen to you when you wake, Ki sko.”

  She spoke softly to William as if she were his mother; she also addressed him with the name given to all Black Eagle Child firstborns, ki sko. Listening to Grandmother s pleas for William to awaken, I felt the welling of sadness inside me. In a tribal society that was historically burdened with obstacles, suppression of emotion became an art form. To cry over the departed was to inflict misery upon their “shadows.” In death there was a deep-rooted fear that personal grief could bridge the world of the real and the nonreal. Whatever our affliction—physical pain, bereavement, sheer loneliness, or embarrassment—being ostentatious was not part of our demeanor.

  The more Grandmother assured William with touches and words, the more I wished and prayed for his recovery. Yet there was an underlying feeling that he would not be bothered anymore by our ignorance and ineptness. Us mortals. He had done all that was humanly possible to instill in us the means to emulate his accomplishments as a carrier of the Red Swan Society.

  On the evening of Thanksgiving in 1979, a week after our hospital bedside visit with William Listener, Selene and I were preparing to eat the day s bountiful leftovers in my parent’s kitchen when something mysterious inside a large, grease-spotted grocery bag began to shake by itself.

  We froze and looked at the bag that sat in the middle of the cluttered table. From inside the bag we had taken almost the last of the frybread, leaving a flattened piece or two. We knew there was nothing in there that could make it shake that much. Mice, three or four of them, were a possibility. Or birds. When the bag started up again, it began to inflate and deflate itself as if it were breathing and then worked itself into a frenzy until the palpable shape of something took over.

  And then just as abruptly as it began, there was quiet. We sat still and were gradually overtaken with a nightmarish terror that we were about to experience a paranormal occurrence. The bag shaking was only the establishment of a presence. The chatter of the television and the conversation between family members in the living room began fading away, and the kitchen table along with the floor beneath brought a bloating effect, an intumescence of concrete substance.

  Next to the bowl of red Jell-0 and marshmallows, the fire-singed squirrel legs and flour dumplings looked trite and cold as the presence displayed its power again. The grease-spotted grocery bag shook once more. This time we could see the shape of a fist, striking out from within. Open-mouthed, we were stunned by the furious motions it made. Regardless of how hard the phantom fist hit the paper bag, it couldn’t break through. The sound—like empty popcorn bags being blown up, sealed, and exploded under the foot—was hard on our ears.

  Years before, in a university housing complex, we had heard and seen plastic trash bags topple over by themselves and then inflate and deflate. The noise made by these visitations stuck with us for days. When these events escalated to all-out animation, we were baffled. We later figured out that our ghostly kindred were probably annoyed by how much food we were throwing away, and were reminding us they needed to be fed also. In Black Eagle Child tradition, a dish should not be left with its contents uneaten or unfinished; everything given or taken should be eaten. Food is treated with respect and not as an object at one’s disposal. When we started setting aside portions of our meals, offering sacred tobacco, alcohol, a lit cigarette, and a short prayer that included the enunciation of their names—at least those we could remember on either side of the family—the trash bags stopped breathing.

  Selene and I ascertained that aside from our being punished for disposing of edible food, our infrequent participation in religious gatherings attracted the wandering spirits of our departed relatives. To show us their displeasure in our lifestyle and forgetfulness, trash bags were crushed. Actually, it was my choice—not Selene’s—to cover every square inch of my small-framed body with parchment, glued, resembling Robert De Niro in the movie Brazil as he attracts masses of swirling paper trash off the street until he is suffocated. Selene, in her trust and faith, hung me like a piñata from the ceiling and prodded me with a stick to spin and dry, communicating with me through a copper umbilical tube. Hoping to show humility, I became literally what Ted Facepaint used to call my “paper wall from clan responsibility.”

  We were already familiar with animate trash bags. This manifestation of the incorporeal hand in the grocery bag shouldn’t have surprised us; yet we were on the verge of emotional devastation.

  The hand, we felt, wanted terribly to get out or tell us something that was pressing. To be trapped in a bag that once held the fried delicacy of bread must have been agony for some lonesome spirit. But I later thought: What if the hand was sending a signal of distress, a warning? What if Thanksgiving was only a rude irony”? It was clear that the trapped hand didn’t arrive as an idle knocking on the door or the slight lingering odor of flowers beside the bed in the early hours before sunrise. It had chosen instead to single us out in the house of my parents at the peaceful close of a holiday. It had done so by scaring us senseless.

  After the fourth manifestation, and when the struggling and the hitting ceased, I slowly rose from my chair and reached over to open the grocery bag. Except for a few flattened pieces of frybread there was nothing inside. Empty.

  In a state of numbness we walked to the living roo
m and informed my mother and father what had happened. They were bewildered. My mother believed us right away, but the skeptical nature of my father kept him indifferent. The fact it took place in his kitchen was hard to take. It was only when Clotelde said that it could be my father’s comatose brother’s spirit did he think something could be wrong.

  He went out to the cookshack and brought back the ashes in a cast-iron skillet—the same one used to make the frybread. The kitchen was then purified with the smoke of the cedar bough.

  Maybe that was the last time William Listener was with Selene and myself. Maybe that was his way of letting us know he was fighting what ailed him. But he died several months later without ever waking up from the coma. . . .

  Part Three

  The Perils of Being a Black Hummingbird

  Rose Grassleggings was the only woman ever chosen from the tribe to stand with the men who sang the Black Hummingbird Society warrior songs. Her vocal accompaniment was a trademark of sorts, something people would recall for years and years. Her presence imbued the songs with a wailing female emanation. What was discerned in her incredible voice, it was said, was the encumbrance of being a woman. She could sound like a bereaved mother weeping unrestrained in the hills after sundown, or she could sound like a grandmother who was singing for all the present and forthcoming Black Eagle Child generations. . . .

  During the summer in which the Black Hummingbirds were taking their vows of subservience, the initiates came to her porch, leaving four red stones on a freshly woven reed mat. Aged and shiny in a patina made by centuries of ceremonial upkeep—which “overnight” non-Indian tribal art scholars will pay thousands of dollars for, knowing they can quadruple their return upon selling them—the invitation stones resembled Easter eggs made of catlinite or pipestone. Upon them were epigraphs written in French and Black Eagle Child. Parallel to the stones themselves was an antique French rapier with a beaded scabbard that was decorated with the spotted heads and tail feathers of two small indistinguishable birds of prey.