Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Ted responded in a laughing tone.

  “Well, there really isn’t any reason to think about it,” I returned, a bit startled. On the occasions when I was exposed to the morose topic through my grandmother’s acquaintances, I didn’t like it. On top of that, I was vaguely aware I had accompanied her on visits that may have been death watches. Grandmother had been summoned to administer traditional medicines and to soothe the frail minds of terminally ill people.

  Chances were, Mother was out with my father then. Absent. Hence, the reason Grandmother and I were doctoring late at night and well into daybreak. They were probably cruising the farm roads somewhere. The color photographs I once saw of Mother in a yellow bathing suit on the shore of Liquid Lake may correspond with this particular time period. Like the funerals back then, her four to five poses left me feeling indifferent.

  After feeling a couple of shakes, Ted reeled in his line to check on the hook. There wasn’t anything there except for the split shot and sinker.

  “It’s gotta be northern pike,’ I said excitedly.

  “Does your family ever discuss death?” Ted asked while motioning for a chub fish. I stuck my hand into the bait bucket and brought out a feisty one, which was then hooked through the tail and tossed gingerly back out into the river’s current.

  “No, hardly,” I said, and then made a correction. “Well, maybe Grandmother. But not a lot. Why?”

  Before answering, Ted drew more line out, adding slack, until the hooked chub dropped into a whirlpool and settled. “I’m just wondering,” he said, while bracing the pole against a Y-shaped stick that was impaled on the muddy bank. “You know, I just wonder. I mean what kind of funeral will I have? A traditional one or a pan-Indian type? The Well-Off Man Church doesn’t believe in shadows of the departed. Speaking to them special words and stuff.”

  Ted’s line picked up, slowly drifted with the current, and then stopped. “Somebody’s there again,” he said in an extrasoft voice that was punctuated with two short inhales. “That’s where the game fish will most likely be, waiting at the base of the drop-off points to feed.”

  “Wouldn’t you want someone to release your shadow?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but if my parents—should I die before them, I mean— decide against it, I’d have little choice. Right?”

  “Yeah, but what if you told them your preferences now. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”;

  “Your hypothetical demise, ke bi ti plugged rear.”

  “Hey, isn’t that what Selene Lovely Buffalo called you? Wait. Think someone’s pulling.” Ted gently tugged the line, bouncing the bait and sinker off the bottom and back into the current. “Well, that’s been bugging me,” he continued. “If I bought the Maggie tomorrow, let’s say, my parents wouldn’t permit anyone like Rose Grassleggings to come close to my body. Shadow-eaters they call them. So it’s really not up—”

  In midsentence Ted whipped up the thick fishing pole from the wooden brace and set the hook. The pole bent forward in his arms and a run ensued. Ted followed the caught fish along the shallow banks, releasing some line for slack.

  “I gotta let him swim to the middle!” he said loudly.

  “What’s ‘this gotta’ business?” I asked sarcastically as I walked behind the action. “You got no choice.”

  Before the fish went north toward the dam, it swam up to the top of the rapids and made a jolting turn. There was a large boil of water after the huge tail of the northern pike flashed. Ted and I couldn’t believe the enormity of the fish we had long stalked. For over ten years we had had the distinction of hooking it five times and being provided with ten to twelve minutes of heart-pounding exhilaration. He ran parallel with it past the sandbar and up to the dirt cliffs that encircled the dam itself. From the falls the fine watery mist floated toward us, coating our sweaty skin with the enveloping smell of fish and moss. Ted shielded his eyes from the glaring reflection of the sun in the water. He began yelling again, reporting. “Shit, he’s too fucking big! Ah, man, he’s diving to the deep part! Toward the wire snags underneath!”

  “Start bringing that line back!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

  The thick fiberglass fishing pole that was rigged with twenty-pound test line and wire leader was on the edge of splitting. That’s all Ted needed, a fiberglass explosion in his face.

  It had been five months since our infamous return from college in Southern California. Ted hitchhiked and got into some adventuresome trouble, while I got lucky and wrangled a jet ride home through a poetry reading in Minnesota. There were differences, you could say, in how we each got home to the Black Eagle Child Settlement. I flew and Ted . . . Well, long story. The major point was, no one paid me to commit a crime along the way. Whereas Ted financed his trip through a purposely botched murder in Wyndam, Utah. Things would have been cool but he was later trounced by a couple of roadside hippie thugs. That’s the way we tumbled out of academic orbit. Permanently. We were content knowing we had each given it a try—and failed. We stayed apart for the summer, trying to figure out the next move in our dysfunctional post-teenage college dropout years. By then I was a student at the University of Iowa, studying my favorite subjects, poetry writing and art. Ted was still partying excessively.

  It was hard being a college student and going home on weekends. Vice versa for Ted not possessing “a goal.” Mine wasn’t firm but it occupied my interests. All week I attended mass lectures on Postimpressionism and snuck into art classrooms to create my own etchings; I hated the still-life assignments. In terms of poetry, college was a downer. I quit one class where the distinguished prof was flicking his cigarette ashes over the sample manuscripts. Believe it or not, that’s how it was determined who would go and stay—whose samples had the most burn-throughs. Fortunately, I bypassed that procedure by telling the workshop prof that my work had been published in the Seneca Review, next to his, the year before. After a night of barhopping, I questioned if anyone had the background knowledge of my tribe to see that mythical complexities superseded line structure and rhythm. The next day I ascended the marble steps and opted for a general creative writing class. On Fridays leaving campus had a pattern: I’d stop off at the Airliner Tavern for a bottle of Heineken. On the minijukebox—the kind mounted on the wall of the booth—I’d select Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” Next, I’d walk to the Greyhound Bus Depot across the street and buy the $4.10 ticket for the ride home with Sylvia Plath’s unread book tucked under my arm. At Why Cheer I’d stop off at Bender’s and call Joe Gadger’s Taxi. Anyway, Ted would be there among the hard-core winos. If he didn’t blank out, this is where we made plans to go fishing at the Indian Dam. ...

  In small, mincing steps, Ted traced the river’s earthen edge with his tennis-shoed feet and reeled in the taut line with quick, circular motions. The legendary northern pike was at least three feet long, looking like a torpedo. Its sleek body shot toward the Indian Dam’s deepest channel, going past the submerged baling-wire entanglement.

  “Just doing something like this,” said Ted, pointing to the sunbaked edge, “could kill me.” The roots on the high riverbank were exposed and the swirling current constantly claimed small and large chunks of dirt, weakening the edge to a dangerous point. Suddenly, the thick fiberglass pole and the attached line began to strum to the movements of the strong fish.

  “Hi-e! quit rambling,” I implored. “Catch the goddamn thing!”

  “I can’t. Something’s not right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  All the while the fishing line began to stretch and tighten.

  “Those dreams that I’m having, of leaving for no place specific, to never come back, bother me.”

  “We all have them,” I said, “and this isn’t the time to talk about them.”

  On the other side of the river a crowd of white curious fishermen began to collect, chatting and keeping parallel with us as we walked upriver. From deep inside the forest o
f brightly colored fall leaves, a thousand blackbirds began to exit, darkening the popular area.

  “Bo-shit, man!” protested Ted. “Those kinda dreams ain’t normal. I keep having them like . . . like as many birds there are here.” He pointed upward to the treetop branches that were flickering with blackbird shadows and then to the ground where they seemed to emerge like wasps. Their nonstop chirping din even drowned out the sound of the waterfalls cascading over the Indian Dam.

  “No, that’s the truth,” I returned. “Look, figure it out. Your dreams are far-fetched to begin with and—-”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t call getting dressed for directionless travel farfetched.”

  He was right, and the blackbirds knew this. On a bullshit spiel I posited that dreams had multimeanings. “That’s where interpreters come in as people who can single out factors that are most prevalent,” I said.

  “That’s where I come from, Ed. You nitwit.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, remembering what the Facepaint family’s role was in the early tribal encampment days. They painted dreams for people. His dreams and my travels came from a common inter-dimensional plain.

  It occurred to me right then and there that we admittedly were not as perceptive as our forebears, but there was room in the realm of possibility for the argument that our talents were inherent. The rest depended on commitment, which neither of us had much of. As for Ted adopting the stance he was credible as an alcoholic interpreter, it was ludicrous.

  Death talk on the banks of the Indian Dam made me think of Luciano Bearchild, who had similar dreams. Shortly after his disappearance, I came to view journeys, trips, or vacations as rehearsals for one’s actual demise. What possible justification could there be in leaving home? Luciano often questioned. The more journeys I took, the more I increased the likelihood of never returning. In other words, being in school out in California was equivalent to near death. Ted’s wine-induced recurring dreams were probably no different. I neglected to interject subtly that heavy boozing, along with a lack of sleep and food, was not good.

  Before we ever got to discussing his overall condition, he’d bring up the California “blast.” To regale as he did was infectious. The flip side was, our partying led to academic indolence. Ted didn’t think of it that way. “Be glad it happened,” he’d opine before immersing himself in wild tales. Among the mapy things that happened, Ted was bemused by the Jim Morrison encounter. “Meeting him must have been a malfunction in the Creator’s plans,” I’d say, to which he agreed. Few on the Settlement could accuse the Doors of plagiarism. Upon our return from the West Coast, though, it got us into an unlikeable situation. When the word-stealing event circulated, Ted and I were interrogated on a roadside by the Well-Off Man Church elders. We emphatically denied being responsible. This was the first time I realized that Grandmother’s warnings about the inherent power of word was true. Through the car window the elders recounted verbatim the story they’d heard, beginning with how we had waited for the rainstorm to come over the San Gabriel Mountains before we pounded the octagon-shaped hand drum. This is what you were said to have said, we were told. The connection was indisputable. Indeed, the first verse of the Star-Medicine song did begin with the simulated sounds of falling rain and the crack of lightning, exactly the way it was done in the prelude to the Doors song “Riders on the Storm,” with the words set to the same music but in a slightly upbeat pace:

  Ke me tto e me na na-e se mi e na kwa-bye to se wa-mi ye ki

  Our Grandfather who helps us walks toward us on the road

  Ma ni tta-e tti te e ji: ni ta na bwi a wa ki-ma ma ke a ki-ni wa

  kwa wa ji

  His thoughts are: I will await these toads to leave, go away

  Therefore you will let your children pray

  Ki wi to ka wa ba tta-ke ta be no e ma wa ki-ni ma ma to mo wa

  tti

  If you let the savior arrive

  wi to ka ye kwi-ni bya tti

  the total number of your family he will help

  e ta tti ye kwi-ki a se mi e ko wa

  Grandfather Savior . . . on the road

  The truth of the whole affair was, in our collective altered states the cardinal tenet escaped. We were unable to refrain from providing detailed words of Black Eagle Child Star-Medicine songs to the wa he ski na me ska tti ki, white-complexioned people. Instead of being backed up by the Angels of Circumspection, we had treated our uninvited but esteemed guest to translated insights, which he then scribbled into a notebook. Next, undoubtedly, we imagined, came the studio recording sessions where the Red-Hatted Grandfather was portrayed as an evil impersonator.

  That same year, through the Doors, the sacred song was released as “Riders on the Storm” on radios across America, Europe, and the entire universe. . . .

  As Ted looked out over the Indian Dam, he held the bent fishing pole against the blackbird-decorated panorama of water, land, and sky. The tempestuous fish beneath shook and twitched its head, causing the monofilament line to vibrate. It was a sign that it was settling down to the riverbottom and holding still.

  From Jim Morrison to Luciano Bearchild the train of thought switched: Long before Luciano’s alleged abduction by UFOs at Liquid Lake, he sat and lectured heartily in his dingy log cabin on dream symbolism. “Edgar, to travel is to have your earthly departure simulated,” he imparted, “the summoning of thee by the Holy Grandfather of AH to act out the grand finale.” Luciano communicated that Carson Two Red Foot defined it best when he compared death to “the return of all memory.” But Luciano, much like Ted Facepaint, despised the repetitive dreams he was having, those that had him taking great measures to go somewhere, though he didn’t really know where. After devoting himself to religion, making preparations to join all those people who had come before him in the Grandfather World, he found his mission elusive. With head slightly angled to the slabwood floor that was sprinkled with cigarette tobacco, Luciano’s discourse on the positive and negative of dreams was informative. “A small distraught child’s late afternoon dream can be a funnel,” he’d say, “through which the ill-minded spirits travel and become troublesome.” Mindful parents or caretakers, like mine, forbade children to sleep during this period. Those Who didn’t, according to Luciano’s teachings, unknowingly invited a mass gathering of noisy blackbirds. They clogged the trees with their presence, weighing them down like wet snow from a chaotic, sight-impairing blizzard. It was believed the restless conscience-ridden shadows of suicide victims sat on their shiny wings, as well as the shadows of those who were not properly sent on to the Grandfather World by their negligent relatives. The blackbirds in swarms would encircle the house where the disturbed child slept. Deprived of care and mistreated as a tiny, fragile human being, the child, with undiscernirig eyes, would find the blackbirds appealing.

  In my own grandfather’s passing, Grandmother used to recall the blackbird swarms my loneliness summoned. They darkened the small wooded valley where we resided. In thinking of these symbols I wondered what our specific life purposes were. Through my poems and the travels that resulted therein, was I on a metaphorical quest for my grandfather? Had I been rehearsing my own departure through the transport of writing all along? There was no greater being than what flowed from the tips of my fingers. My worship was for the writing instrument—the pencil, pen, and keyboard—and not what the fragile all-pervasive shadow needed.

  “In the end,” Luciano used to observe, “the only one that matters is the all-inclusive you, dying alone.” He inculcated the idea that being away from home, whether in reality or dream, was similar to death. My writings thus evolved into Luciano-based themes of leaving, returning, and forgetfulness. In an era when tribal literature was fashionable I went around—in my so-called death rehearsals—saying there was no such thing as American Indian literature, that the only thing vaguely resembling tribal literature was religious and therefore inaccessible. What does that leave you? “Assimilates,” as Pat Red Hat used to say. Victims of linguistic atrophy
expressing themselves in a language not theirs.

  As the large northern pike fish whipped its tail fin toward the depths of the Indian Dam, Ted’s fiberglass pole gave in and cracked. A kingfisher who had previously strafed a lingering flock of blackbirds with its staccato cry swerved from the gunshotlike sound. Everyone winced at the near catch and watched as the busted line flew back to the rod tip, growing limp. On the other side of the river, the white fishermen clenched their fists and threw them down in disappointment, cussing. Exasperated, Ted and I sighed our profanities. Above us, near the Sand Hill lookout point, the red and yellow leaves that were caught in a breeze became indistinguishable from the swirling butterflies.

  To See as Far as the Grandfather World

  The photograph. On this particular March day

  in 1961, Theodore Facepaint, who was nine

  years old, agreed to do a parody. With hand

  balanced on hip and the left leg slightly

  in front of the right, my newly found friend

  positioned himself on Sand Hill before turning

  to face the hazy afternoon sun. This was a pose

  we had become familiar with:

  the caricature

  of a proud American Indian, looking out

  toward the vast prairie expanse, with one hand

  shielding the bronze eyes. When I projected

  the image of the color 35 mm slide onto

  the wall last week I remembered the sense

  of mirth in which it was taken. Yet somewhere

  slightly north of where we were clowning around,

  Grandmother was uprooting medicinal roots

  from the sandy soil

  and placing them inside her flower-patterned

  apron pockets to thaw out.

  Twenty-nine years later, if I look long enough,

  existential symbols are almost detectable.

  The direction of the fiery sun in descent, for example,