Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  As for the women who incubated Horatio Plain Brown Bear’s history-altering seed, it was reported they had settled out of court. The payment? Diamond earrings from a Beverly Hills jewelry magnate who opened a shop at the tribal casino complex. Forever silenced, these women who so desperately wanted their children to be medically proven as Horatio’s and thus enrolled as Black Eagle Childs, receiving all the tribal benefits—an identity along with housing, health, education, and a casino per capita trust fund—disappointed everyone. Nine pairs of earrings worth thirty-five hundred dollars apiece were given to the Black Eagle Child and Why Cheer women, provided they drop their paternity suits. The tenth pair was given openly as a gift to the paramour brother-in-law, “Grubby.” These were eventually seen being worn by “Grubby’s” wife, Elvia, and her brother, the notorious “lollipopper of men and boys,” a perennial Weeping Willow school board member.

  It was depravity, a demented parallel universe, the kind that began an infamous Black Heron legacy.

  The power that came with the indiscriminate signing of gambling enterprises consumed everyone. At the highest point of corruption, tribal members fought among themselves when they couldn’t get access to the “cash cages” at the casino complex. Brandishing charms from a variety of hired guns, irreputable medicine men, those within arm’s reach of the money, hid small bundles of animal bones and other spell-producing agents that couldn’t be destroyed in the desktops of rivals or near surveillance cameras. If access was still denied, they’d scurry around with petitions about what the “other side” had done. It didn’t matter who was in charge, they were all part of the same kleptocracy. Nevertheless we’d sign the petitions hoping someone had the intellectual wherewithal to realign our destiny.

  We were wrong on all counts, however. There was never anything in our stories that told us to go that direction. By replacing the window of the Cosmic Earthlodge with aluminum paneling, we encouraged a sudden gust of wind to tear it apart, which made us cringe as the other elements gathered around us in force.

  My Summer of 2004

  Honorable Mention in Doetingham Junior High School’s O’Toole Creative Writing Award

  MAYA MAE BEARCHILD:

  Mud-scooping duck in the leftover pools of rain, what did you feel when the slimy water serpent wound its wet body around your chapped leg and webbed foot, refusing to be your meal? And what were your thoughts when the white-chested, red-tailed hawk swept by like a Chinese Mig jet taking in its afterburn your throat, your life, and the half-alive prey?

  Luciano Bearchild, I hear, was taken like that. Such was the story of the golden-bodied fish, exploring and living off “other tributaries” before the stars came after him. Encased in glass and stashed away in an antique trunk in the attic, we still have the fur military hat— the earmuffed one—Luciano cherished more than anything. Here’s proof of an extraterrestrial abduction! he probably wanted to yell, Frisbeeing the Red Star symbol hat over the metallic strobe-lit body of the UFO until the search party came up the sandy hill from Liquid Lake, telling each other upon its discovery, “Hey-y-y, this is the one he was rarely without.”

  What a grotesque scene the trio made: the hawk, the mud-scooping duck, and the serpent, all clasping one another in the defiant blue sky, all entrapped by differing instincts. Their silhouettes twisted high above in the hazy midday sun. The red-tailed hawk barely made it over the towering pine trees. I looked at the grass-covered slough as its water collected around my bare feet. In rapt attention I stood, taking notes. As the victims struggled the hawk lost control. They spiraled downward until someone froze, regaining flight equilibrium.

  Upside down crashed the Chinese Mig jet.

  Inside out was Luciano’s shadow, extracted by the silver spaceship, embedded in a sandy hill. A bloodless, clueless evanescence was instigated.

  The macabre scene of a redtail carrying a duck who itself is carrying and fighting with a snake over lunch rights reminded me of mobile sculptures I made at school. Especially when they hung still in the erratic autumn wind, suspended over the reed-edged pond, for the ten to twelve seconds I counted.

  A description of my next sculpture: Christmas tinsels spray-painted brownish yellow with lines of green; with the aid of an O’Connor model six-bladed fan the reeds will blow upward, fluttering vertically. Over the pond where no one swam or fished a giant circular sheet of Reynolds foil reson-undul-ates. Constructed from wire hangers, string, painted cardboard, rubber tubing, roadkill hawk feathers, and a duck call—all mechanized—“The Life Expectancy of a Duck and Not a Grebe,” rotates near the skylight ceiling of the Weeping Willow Educational Complex. Under Plexiglas the meaning: “The avant-garde kinetic sculpture with wings, metal serrated teeth, cables, and pulleys, all powered by a windmill, makes the gear-grinding music that is music to the inner fluffy ears of the three evil owls who bob their heads and necks in dance when death is imminent. I was thinking of the person my parents, Edgar and Selene Bearchild, sometimes talk about: Ted Facepaint. ‘He is the one that died so that you may be,’ I was told early on by my father, a troubled artist. ‘From the Grandfather World, far away from our day-to-day struggle on these minute islands of ourselves,’ my mother added, ‘Ted, with the aid of my grandmother and your mother’s mother and aunt, arranged it so that you may be here in their place.’”

  In any event, moving, descriptive sculptures—breezemakers— are my existential calling. She had known since fifth grade, they’ll say, when she tied slices of bread on tree branches on subzero windy days for hungry birds that there was nothing aesthetic about a violent wind sculpture. “Cinque” the revolutionary gray cat got very chubby that year from birds that were knocked unconscious.

  Which raises another question on aesthetic presentation: In what way could I depict the moment the snake and the duck shook simultaneously in an attempt to break free, causing the hawk’s talons to break and shimmy through their rigamarole of bones, innards, scales, and leathery skin, canceling out any hope of being released? Hopelessly locked, the tips of the talons acted like fine, curled needles that clamped shut, impaling both victims, who saw an upside-down earth view before Black Heron consciousness waned.

  What is the history, you query, of the Black Heron name?

  (You scribbled “How does it fit into the story?” on the first draft of 9/23/04. It is a stat that in our lifetimes one in three of us will meet a murderer. The mud-scooping duck, the serpent, and the hawk incorporate this “Black Heron” metaphor.)

  According to Black Eagle Child, my fathers book, it began in 1890 with Tama County’s cover-up of Dorothy Black Heron’s murder. My great-great-great-grandfather’s father went unpunished for the crime. Blackmailed by whites into signing a document that made him a federally recognized chieftain, my grandfather thrice over brought education into the tribe, including freedom for an ancestral criminal.

  Next came the One Most Afraid. In 1894 she was born to Albert and Clarice Black Heron four years after the loss of their first daughter, Dorothy Black Heron. Because of her spellbinding beauty, the One Most Afraid, at fourteen, stole John Two Red Foot, a good provider to five children, from Martha Two Red Foot. In 1908 John Two Red Foot chose the young enchantress over his family responsibilities as a father.

  (Per your request enclosed are the two stories of which I speak: “How We Delighted in Seeing the Fat” and “The Great Flood of the Iowa River” by Edgar Bearchild.)

  According to Carson Two Red Foot, the oldest of the five abandoned siblings, their mother, fearing humiliation, took them on a hinterland odyssey. (Carson, for your edification, was my grandmother Ada Principal Bear’s brother adopted by ceremony.)

  In 1911, however, after the unprecedented flood of the Iowa River, which swept away their wi ki ya bi, or lodge, near the Amana Colonies, they were forced to return to Black Eagle Child. Unfortunately, due to their mother s inscrutable suspicions, Bent Tree, Carson’s sister, committed suicide in 1913. Driven by new bouts of depression and guilt, their mother was fixate
d with the personage of the One Most Afraid.

  In 1915, in another place entirely, the Pipestar family, along with three others, arrived from Pinelodge Lake, Canada, and took up residence as communal farmers near the township of Claer, Iowa. Four decades and five years later, a ten-year-old boy called Junior rode across the icy Cedar River on a stone surfboard guided by the reflection of his grandfather’s French medieval sword.

  My great-grandmother, Ada Principal Bear, offers a related narrative about the Two Red Foot family. In 1919, she states that her husband, Jack Principal Bear as a young man, with the aid of a friend, captured a shawl-wearing sorceress on the first bridge, ko ka i ka ni, of the Settlement, holding her there until the morning light. Her identity unveiled, the well-respected woman physically deteriorated shortly thereafter.

  And so it came to be that in 1920, when Carson’s mother befriended the legless sorceress, a transaction was probably made for the One Most Afraid, herself a mother of two by then, to avenge Bent Tree’s suicide. Never having had a chance to know other men-friends, the One Most Afraid was set up by the sister of a young man she took a liking to.

  On a summer night, as she anxiously awaited her promising beau, three small floating lights nearby in the bushes shape-shifted. Three strangers thus approached from behind as she sat on a log and began clubbing her until she stopped moving at twenty-five years of age. Here, reminiscent of her older sister’s death, there were suspects, but the authorities did very little.

  My great-grandmother indicates that also in 1925 her family took the legless sorceress and her elderly companion into their home. Out of gratitude they eventually entrusted her with their powerful “seeing” medicines. The transference of these secrets caused anger. The closest relative of the feared duo by the name of Aunt Sophie, a “shadow-releaser” who had shunned them, promised retribution when she learned these “bone-affixed-to-limb-for-traveling” parfleches went to someone else.

  Used for wrongful purposes, the medicines could make one invisible or airborne, and allow one to see at night. Used in the right way by making the sick well, the medicines prolonged one’s existence, which was how they were used by my great-grandmother. Among them is the “stone knife,” the one I now wear inside a brass locket necklace.

  In the 1930s were born my grandparents, Clotelde and Tony Bearchild, who subsequently brought into this world an ochre, seal-eyed “word-collector” of Capulet and Montague descent by the name of Edgar Bearchild, upkeeper and maintainer of the Six Grandfathers’ Journals who went on to fall in love with my mother, Selene Buffalo Husband, in 1973, thereby giving birth to me—after three miscarriages—in 1991, two years after and replacing ceremonially the place once occupied by Ted Facepaint . . . Ada Principal Bear . . . Pat “Dirty” Red Hat . . . Luciano Bearchild . . . William Listener . . . and my lovely grandmother, Lillian Buffalo Husband, and her ever-present sister, Alice, going back further to my other grandparents and their own grandparents on either side, wa wi ta wi. Especially the Sacred Chieftains, O ki ma wa ki, and the Holy Grandfather who arranged their rightful return as decision-makers of the Black Eagle Child Nation, proving that my father was simply a pessimist all along.

  Verily, through the scattering of cigarette tobacco on the floor and through these ever-circling stories, I call upon all those before me, including Dorothy Black Heron and her younger sister, the One Most Afraid, to partake with me of this journey, reminding me every day how imperative it is to realign our destiny, to salvage these cherished but immutable islands of ourselves that tumble aimlessly among the blinding stars. . . .

  * It should be noted that Edgar’s story was changed for a creative writing class at Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa. It was first published in the Scarlett O’Hara, a college literary magazine, in 1962. Four years later, in 1966, upon the mysterious disappearance of a young prominent tribal member, an accomplished singer of religious songs, the piece was republished in the Black Eagle Child Quarterly.