The Purification Ceremony

by Mark T Sullivan

  Arnie had hold of the safety strap above Sheila’s waist. Griff waited below with his arms raised. Phil severed the line at the tree trunk and she settled into Griff’s arms and then into the snow. Cantrell went to her, took off his glove and brushed the slush from her cheeks. Whatever was left of him vanished in that simple gesture.

  It took us almost three hours to get Sheila’s body back to the lodge. I wish I could tell you what went through my mind during all that time, but I can’t recall any of it, only that we all seemed to be pushing on through an infinite darkness because there was nothing else we could do. We tried to put Sheila in the icehouse with the others, but Cantrell had pushed us aside and lifted her and taken her to their bed in his cabin. He put her under the blankets and sat by her side holding her hand, his head bowed. Arnie slipped the pistol from Cantrell’s holster without the outfitter noticing and we left him alone with her.

  Theresa had managed the hike back in a stoic silence. But when we were at last in the great room of the lodge and had brought Earl and Lenore down and told them all that had happened, she broke down. “So now we wait to die, eh? All of us? We’ve tried everything and he just keeps coming. That’s what’s going to happen. He’s just going to keep coming.”

  “Theresa,” Nelson said, walking toward her. “Enough.” She swung her beefy arm at him and caught him square on the jaw. “It’s not enough. Not for him! He can come in here and kill Butch and we all shoot at him and no one hits him. We can lay traps for him and he knows what we’re doing before we do. He’s inside us. Inside me with that Indian voodoo. I feel it!”

  She pointed at me. “You know it’s true. You said he can do things you don’t understand.”

  I nodded, that sleepy, heavy sensation hovering around me again. “It’s true.”

  “Then we’re gonna die, all of us, before the plane comes back.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. The last shred of certainty I’d clung to had evaporated with Sheila’s death. I no longer saw the world in the same way and I was groping desperately for purchase.

  “Three days,” Lenore said hopefully. “We can make it.”

  “Can we?” Theresa asked. “Can we really?” She sank into the sofa and sobbed.

  I stood and walked by the hollow men that had once been Griff and Kurant. “I’m going to my cabin.”

  Outside, the bellies of the clouds roiled in shades of blue and steel gray, spitting out half-dollar-sized flakes as the wind shifted to the north again and the temperature fell. The ice at the lakeshore had buckled and heaved in the past two days, only to refreeze into threatening pale blocks like tombstones. I climbed out onto the frozen cemetery, moving toward the black line where open water still defied winter’s advance. I stopped five yards from the ebony mirror and looked into it, seeing the driving snow reflected on the surface, now mutating into relentless memories: Ryan blowing the Datura smoke into my lungs, Cantrell imploding at the touch of his dead wife’s skin, my own fingers touching my mother’s chill, damp cheeks.

  I balked at that image, an image I’d buried deeper than any other. But it would not stay buried. There was no escape from it now. In the end, what other choice did I have than to face who I’d been? In the end, what was there to follow but the fleeting mental images of me, of my children, of my husband, of Mitchell, of my father, of Katherine? I have come to believe, like my Micmac and Penobscot ancestors, that we live more than the sum of the present moments in this visible world; we exist within layers of reincarnated, reinvented memories that shape-change and prod us across invisible boundaries into the many worlds of the mind. Until we gather unto us the Power to navigate there with confidence, we are lost and alone, savages in a dark forest.

  As it was with Pawlett, I cannot tell you exactly how my mother died. My father told the police that he had been working in his office in the basement that morning, going over a billing problem with his surgical practice; that he had left Katherine sleeping in her bedroom; that when he had gone to check in on her, he had found her gone. He had flown through the house calling for her. It wasn’t until he noticed that the case to her favorite bamboo fly rod lay open and empty on the kitchen table that he had checked the pond.

  I was taking a chemistry final. And by the time the principal had found me and driven me home, Katherine’s body was almost dry. My father had tried to get between me and her. I looked into his eyes and saw a window into a world that frightened me to my core. He was a stranger. I pushed him aside and went to the bank of the pond and knelt next to her. Her color had faded; the rose-and-speckled hue of the rainbow trout had gone to plastic. I touched her cheeks, stunned to find her so cold and damp. I held her and cried until my father came and tried to pull me away. I stood and whispered in as vicious a tone as I could manage, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t ever touch me again, you sick, fanatical bastard.”

  I knew what he had done and I hated him for it with every ounce of my being.

  When they had taken her body away at last, I sat in the glider in the gazebo and watched the surface of the pond mirror the lime, immature leaves of the birch trees blooming. A detective from the sheriffs department, a pudgy man with an unruly mustache and garlic breath, came over and asked me if it made sense. Would my mother have gone to her pond in her nightgown to fly-fish? Would she have fallen and drowned as my father had theorized?

  I glanced back at my father, who was standing on the hill talking to another detective. I despised the very sight of him.

  But for reasons I still do not fully fathom, I simply nodded and said, “My mother had been terribly sick for years, Detective. I don’t think she even knew where she was the last six or seven months. The only thing she seemed to remember at all was fly-fishing.”

  I kept appearances up, played the dutiful daughter during the wake and the funeral, but I rebuffed my father’s efforts to get me to talk. When it was done and she was buried, I told him that I’d be leaving for Boston. I would not attend my graduation ceremonies. He tried to contact me several times, but I never responded. I buried my past behind me, never allowing myself to speculate what might have happened that morning. Katherine was dead, and that part of my life was dead, too.

  But now, shivering in the storm by the shore of Metcalfe’s lake, I could not stop myself from gathering the shards of that awful day and, together with the suspect clay of my imagination, reassembling them into an explainable vessel of meaning.

  The final days of May are a glorious time in Maine. The lilacs and crab apples have bloomed, ripened and begun to fall in the southern breezes, tinting the air with the sweet perfume of promise. The rivers have settled after the engorgement of winter’s runoff and the nymphs have begun to hatch; the world above the water flutters with the gossamer wings of mayflies in their mating dances, diving and spiraling before sacrificing themselves on the river’s surface to sate the trout’s hunger. These days were Katherine’s favorites.

  She had dwindled to an echo of herself by the spring of my senior year in high school. Her mind had stiffened under the relentless assault of the disease to the point where she rarely spoke with ease; her thoughts were like a jigsaw puzzle tipped off a card table.

  The last time I saw her alive it was early morning, the time of the hatch, and she was sitting in a wicker chair by the window in her bedroom, gazing out toward the gazebo and her casting pond. The dew on the grass glittered under the rising warm sun. My father had already been in to see her. Her hair had been brushed and her makeup applied with care. She hummed an old song and her fingers busied themselves worrying at the hem of her white cotton nightgown.

  “It’s a morning to remember, isn’t it, Little Crow?” she asked when I came in to bring her breakfast.

  I smiled. When she called me Little Crow, it usually meant her mind would be flexible for much of the day.

  “The brookies are rising to meet it in the pond,” I said.

  “I’ve been watching the ripples,” she agreed dreamily.

  “Th
at old fat one that lies near the spring, he rolled over and slapped a couple of minutes ago.”

  “When was the last time you caught him?” I asked. Talking about fishing usually kept her on track.

  She shrugged and smiled and drew her fingers through the air in a lazy arc. “Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter?” “No, I guess not.”

  Katherine stopped talking and drank the orange juice I’d given her and absently bit at the rye toast with the honey she adored.

  I watched her eat in silence, wondering for at least the thousandth time that spring how it was that she could remain so ethereally beautiful outside despite the ravages within.

  “I’ve got to go to school now, Mom.” I said to her at last.

  “Chemistry final this morning. Last one before graduation.”

  She did not reply. She was watching a great blue heron that had landed in the shallows on the far side of her pond. I took the tray from her lap and made to leave. I was at the door when she called to me. “Little Crow?”

  I turned and Katherine held her hand out to me. I put the tray down and went to her. She gathered me in her arms and brought my face into the crook of her neck and I smelled wild hyacinth and I could have been six again, it made me feel so warm and secure. She kissed me on my forehead when I pulled away.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” I said and I went out without looking back. My thoughts were of the test to come.

  I imagined then that my father had been waiting for just such a day, when the red-winged blackbirds called from the willows, when the bullfrogs roared in the reeds, when the heady spice of the viburnum gave way to the delicate scents of the lilac. It was a fitting setting in which to carry out his deed. It cohered with his vision of the world, a world imbued with invisible, mysterious Power, where nature ruled and to live in union with it was the blessed way.

  I could see him, intoxicated with the certainty that this was how nature would have wanted it. Nature culled the weak. Its power was indiscriminate, arbitrary and ruthless, yet beautiful. My mother should die in beauty before she became a shell, a mockery of nature.

  Now he leads her down the hill, telling himself that this is the right thing to do. She has forgotten everything, he tells himself. She should have her last clear moment in the waters before her mind turns permanently black.

  Katherine has long forgotten her decision to die with dignity. She believes only that he is taking her to the pond to practice her cast. Halfway down the lawn, she looks down at herself and asks him, bewildered, why she is outside in her nightgown.

  My father is not thinking of her now. He is not thinking of the oath he took as a doctor. He is thinking only of Mitchell and the rituals and legends he has used to define a lifetime. He is taking the ceremonies far beyond what his uncle taught him; he is taking them to their extreme, making the ultimate devotion.

  He says, “You look so beautiful in your nightgown, I didn’t want to change you.”

  And because she can still remember that she loves my father, Katherine smiles and enters the water with him. He watches as she draws the tippet and the leader and the first few feet of green floating line through the ferules. The line lies on the water.

  Now her wrist and shoulder act on muscle memory. The line loops gracefully in the warm May air. She spots the kiss of a trout on the water, false-casts once, twice, three times before laying the dry fly perfectly on the spot. For a moment all is still — the trout, the fly, the water, my mother, my father — and then the trout darts and the fly disappears and Katherine raises her arms to set the hook just as my father slips in behind her.

  The water below them ripples with his movement, warping the reflection so her face becomes his and, in my mind, his became the homicidal countenance of Ryan peering at me across the clearing that morning.

  Out on the frozen lake the storm howled, a blizzard, a whiteout around me. It clawed at my skin and beat at my eyes until I feared I would go blind. It came from beneath me then, from deep under the snow-covered ice. It wrapped itself around me, crushing my stomach and ribcage until I choked for air. I heard the wind’s tone turn to tortured moans.

  I doubled over, knowing that the god-awful noise came not from the north, but from me. I collapsed under the blizzard’s assault, holding tight to my stomach, wanting more than anything to give myself over to the storm’s Power, to lie there until the snow shaped-changed me forever. No pain. No suffering. No haunting dreams of years gone by. And when the spring came, I would shape-change again and join James Metcalfe at the depths of the lake.

  I took off my coat and laid it on the ice. I forced myself not to hold my arms tight to me. The cold would work better if I exposed myself wholly to it. I lay down and turned my face into the drifting snow, and within moments I felt the first sense that my body was retreating, shutting down blood flow to my arms and legs. My hands and feet numbed. I felt drowsy, the first signs of hypothermia. I will become sleepier, I told myself, and then there will be nothing but the blackness of the river in my hallucinations in the cave.

  It came for me, slinking along the ice, an oily thing, the presence of which I felt, not saw; and I was preparing myself to greet it when, from far away, I heard the sounds of children laughing and giggling. A pleasant thing to imagine when you are about to die, I thought. But the laughter came again, more insistent, and now I recognized the laughs as those of my own children. I lifted my head from the snow. I saw them before me in the swirling white: they were at the dinner table, much younger than they actually were, Patrick maybe five and Emily two. She was sitting in her booster chair, eating and painting herself in spaghetti. Patrick was making faces at her and she was laughing, the noodles and tomato sauce spraying from her mouth, so abandoned in her glee that it went straight to my heart and warmed me, made me want desperately to live. If I died, I could not teach them how to survive in a world of shifting, vicious Powers — some physical, some emotional. My death here would be a curse they might spend a lifetime trying to hide from or trying to explain to themselves.

  I stood up shakily and faced the blizzard. I ignored the burning cold and turned into the face of it and vowed, “I will not doom them to that.”

  I got my coat back on and crawled through the white on white for almost an hour until I found a tree and then another, and the trees gave me a frame of reference from which I could navigate. I found my cabin at last and went into it, dazed and nearly numb.

  I looked around the room, at the furniture, at the walls, at the gas lamps, at the oil painting and finally at the buck. Hatred welled inside me at all that the deer seemed to embody and I tore it from the wall and raised it over my head by its antlers. I gazed up at the buck, wanting to remember its shape before I dashed it against the wall. In its glass eyes I saw myself looking back.

  I stared through the deer and into myself for a very long time. I lowered the buck finally, frightened at and yet resigned to my sudden understanding that stopping Ryan would demand that I follow one of Mitchell’s and my father’s tenants of hunting — to hunt the deer well, you must become the deer.

  To hunt Ryan, I would have to be willing to enter a world where nothing was as it seemed, where turbulent Powers ghosted through animal and rock and sky. I would have to give myself completely to the forest of the mind and risk madness.

  As a girl, I had listened to Mitchell recite the legends of our people, how the Puoin prepared for their rituals and their travels within the six worlds by erecting a pole or a tree branch outside their lodges. These they hung with gifts. It was the visible manifestation of the tree that connected the world we see, touch, taste, smell and hear with those ephemeral realms below, above and beyond. Warming myself before the stove in my cabin, I admitted that I did not comprehend an eighth of all I needed to know to perform this ceremony, but I did not have a choice. I would remember as best I could the shadows of my early life.

  I opened the door and let the blizzard inhale me again. I fought my way to one of the trees and broke off a big
limb. I brought it into the cabin room and propped it up between two chairs. On it I hung the deer-skin robes I had worn the night I escaped from the wolves. On the skins I hung the picture of Emily and Patrick and beside it the picture of Lizzy Ryan. Around both photographs I draped the bloodied bandage I’d taken from my forearm. Above that I placed a small mirror from my cosmetic compact. Below, I affixed the raven’s feather I’d taken from Grover’s mouth and a lock of hair cut from my bangs.

  When I was satisfied I went into the bathroom, stripped and showered. I came out and rubbed myself with crushed, fragrant needles from the crown of the tree limb that had become the centerpiece in the altar of my shrine.

  I turned down the gaslights then, wrapped myself in one of the deer robes and sat cross-legged facing the shrine, warmed by the fire behind me. I forced myself to recall every detail of the last hunting lesson my father had begun to teach me before he had announced his decision to let Katherine kill herself.

  I was sixteen and a half that fall, a veteran hunter who had tracked and taken seven big whitetails. It was nine o’clock one early November morning. Overnight the first three-inch storm had swept over Katahdin. We had crisscrossed the forest since dawn, but found no tracks.

  “The first storm makes the deer nervous, unwilling to move and show us where they’ve been,” my father said.

  “So we go home, wait until afternoon?”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “You are going to learn to track them with your heart.”

  I frowned.

  He said, “There are energies in the forest that, with concentration, you have already learned to sense. Energies that give evidence of an animal’s passing. This is just a new way to sense that energy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Think of how I taught you to look at which way a fern had been twisted to tell a buck’s travel direction.”