Kurant’s story also revealed that the fourth scalp in the cave belonged to J. Wright Dillon, the hunter who had shot Izzy. His body was never found, but the DNA match with the flesh in logging camp four was identical.
When I attempted once again to get joint custody of Patrick and Emily, Kevin’s attorney tried to use the events at Metcalfe against me, asking the judge in family court to stick by Kevin’s earlier request that I be psychologically evaluated. After all, how could the courts allow two young children to be left with a woman capable of coldly hunting and killing someone?
My attorney had argued that it showed I was capable of protecting the children, that the experience had only made me a better mother. Kevin whispered something to his attorney and it dawned on me this wasn’t about the legal process, this was personal. It had to be worked out personally.
Before the judge ruled, I asked him if I might have some time with Kevin alone, no attorneys. Kevin’s lawyer objected, but Kevin looked at me and I mouthed the word “please.” He hesitated, then nodded. The judge said it was almost lunchtime and we could use a conference room until court reconvened in two hours. I was as nervous as I’d been hunting Ryan when I followed my husband into the book-lined office.
Kevin stood awkwardly in the corner, fiddling with his starched cuff.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Been better,” he said. “I don’t like courtrooms.”
“I don’t either,” I said. I played with the front page of the Globe lying on the table. “Believe it or not, I missed you.”
“Uh-huh.” He wouldn’t look at me. I waited until he did.
“I guess you didn’t think about me at all. Even after all that happened in Canada.
Kevin seemed startled by that remark. “No, of course I thought about you. I was… worried. How are you?”
I hesitated. “Better. Better than I’ve been in a long time.”
He hesitated. “I wish I could believe it.”
“I know,” I said. “And I know that it’s going to take a long time before you believe it, too. I told you once if you loved me you wouldn’t ask me about my life before we met. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”
“Diana, I still think — ”
“Hear me out,” I pleaded, and I told him I’d been unfair to him since the day we’d met, that I’d hidden a huge chunk of my life from him and that was not the sort of foundation on which to build a relationship. Then I told him the high points of it; how I’d been raised, how my mother had died, how I’d run from her death and my father for years, a stranger to myself and, in more ways that I cared to admit, to him.
“The world changes shape and we change shape as we grow older,” I said, “but from the time we are born to the time we die, we search for things that are true and constant to cling to. I clung to you for years because you loved me… almost without question. And you have to believe me when I say that no matter what I may have hidden from you or done to you, I loved you. And part of me still does.
“But the past came for me, Kevin, and I’ve had to admit who I am and what I am. I know it doesn’t make much sense right now. But I’ll do my best to explain all the details if you give me half a chance.”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know if knowing the real you will help, Diana. I’m afraid I’m always going to look at you and see this person who lived a secret life. This didn’t happen to someone in a newspaper story. It happened to me! I don’t know if that can ever be repaired.”
I fought the tears to no avail. They streamed out and I sobbed, “I know. I’ve hurt you and I’m so very sorry. I know that you don’t think we can ever save this marriage, and maybe we can’t. But I’m asking that you think about the happy times we did share. I’m asking you for peace and to share our children. For their sake as well as mine. I need them, Kevin. I need them to be whole again.”
He didn’t say anything for the longest time. The tears kept coming and I hung my head, sure that he would continue to fight me and that Emily and Patrick might never be part of me. Then I felt his finger brush away the tears on my cheek. “That’s how Yastrzemski used to swipe balls off the Green Monster,” he said.
I could not stop crying.
We talked for another half hour. In the end, I agreed to a psychological evaluation. Kevin agreed to a more lenient custody agreement. I have them two weekends a month and every other Monday night. It is a start.
The bow of our canoe ran up on gravel washed down by the spring rains. Patrick jumped out and pulled the canoe onto shore. The burial island is about a half mile long and a third of a mile wide. As a child, I enjoyed coming here because the girth of the island is grassy and peppered with hundreds of paper birches. I led my children south along the deer trails that crisscrossed the meadow grass, still stiff from the dew that had frozen overnight and now shimmered in the morning sun. Emily found a bird’s nest in the budded low branches of a birch and cradled the treasure in her arms.
She and Patrick ran ahead toward the southernmost point on the island where the graves are. I felt strangely cleansed in a way I hadn’t in a long time, even though I continue to have flashbacks about the death of Ryan and what I did after I killed him.
I lay on the bank of the Dream for a long time after I’d hit him with the log, feeling Ryan’s presence beside me, feeling the river trying to tug him toward the other shore. When at last my strength returned, I got up and fashioned a bandage around my wound. Then I pulled him free of the water and stared at the peace in his face. How could a good person like this have gone so far into the night?
I had to know. I put my lips to his and inhaled all that was Ryan in the breath that remained. I closed my eyes and let his head fall into my lap, hearing in my mind the fleeting musical sounds of a woman’s voice. I felt her warmth around me, cradling me until there was part of me in her.
I caught flashes of their memory, and just before I sensed the dark part of his world coming into me, I sensed something else, an energy I had not thought to examine closely before, and its dominant presence in Ryan shocked me. I blew out the breath, shaking.
I dragged his body up onto the bank, covered it with snow and marked the spot with his bow so the Mounties could come to claim it if the wolves didn’t first. When I was done, I was sweaty and my shoulder ached and I was seized by the need to wash.
I built a fire near his body, then stripped and went to the Dream. The ice water on my skin made me cry out, but I forced myself down into it, feeling it numb me, make me aware, reconciled and yet dead to who I was before I’d struck Ryan down. Back at the fire, sitting there, I felt my reawakening skin sting and itch. That feeling has not gone away. And probably never will.
I did not talk about what happened after Ryan’s death with the psychologist. Nor did I give more than passing reference to Power or the Micmac legends. She was a toothin woman in her thirties, given to fashionable clothes, and drove a convertible sports car. What could I have said under the circumstances? That I have come to believe through the horrible events at Metcalfe that there actually are invisible worlds constantly clashing in the air around us? That I have embraced a vision of this life forged centuries ago by primitives living in the Northern Forests? She’d have recommended I be kept from my children and undergo years of therapy.
So I said nothing about the feather snow or the flashes of electric light that passed into me when I killed Ryan. Nor did I tell her that I took Ryan’s breath and that he now lives in me. Instead, I just go about my life as best I can, trying to rebuild it as best I can.
The canoe trip yesterday was an important step toward the goal. Mitchell is buried on the point where the Penobscot rejoins itself. Katherine and my father are behind him, a little bit higher on the gradual slope.
“Did you miss your mommy and daddy?” Emily asked when at last we stood before the stones that marked the spots. The warm south wind picked up and blew my hair into my eyes.
“Mommy?”
“Yes,” I said. “Eve
ry day now.”
They asked what my parents and Mitchell were like and I told them some of the stories that always come to my mind when I think of them. I told them how my mother embodied all the colors of the trout, and how on days like today my father sang songs to the spring, and how my greatuncle believed that even the smallest blade of grass and the tiniest pebble were alive.
They looked at me, confused, as they should have been. I laughed and tousled their hair and told them that it would take me a long time to tell them all the stories, and then maybe, just maybe, they’d begin to understand.
We stood there in silence for a long time after that; then Patrick and Emily wandered down by the riverbank to explore. I sat cross-legged among the graves and watched as a kingfisher launched from the top of a hemlock on the eastern shore. The bird bore down quickly on the shallows, angled its wings, then splashed into the water, surfacing almost immediately with a wriggling fish in its beak.
Patrick yelled, “Mommy!” and held up a smooth white rock he’d discovered. Emily still cradled the nest in one hand while stirring the water with a stick. I asked myself whether that rock or the nest or the stick would enter their dreams, form a place in their minds as it would have in the children of my ancestors ten or twenty generations ago. There was no answer to that and I knew it. I could only hope they would find some place in their hearts for such things.
As for me, the deer no longer runs in my dreams. Instead, my trips into the forest of my subconscious are marked by the expression on my father’s face that day when I rushed home to find Katherine dead on the bank of her casting pond.
For so many years I had believed his expression was one of satisfaction, that he had taken his vision of the world to its logical conclusion and that he rejoiced in the strength of his faith. But leaving Ryan’s body to wander back through the twilight toward the lodge, I had had a different vision of the events leading up to Katherine’s death, and it is that vision that revisits me almost every night.
I dream now that my parents were waiting for just such a day, a glorious day of renewal, for my mother to die. It cohered with an ancient understanding of the universe, a universe imbued with invisible, mysterious Power, where nature ruled and to live in union with it was the blessed way.
I dream that my father waited until long after I had left for school to come for my mother. He led Katherine down the lawn, hearing and smelling and seeing everything around him in a heightened, precise manner — the redwinged blackbirds calling in the willows, the bullfrogs roaring in the reeds, the scent of the lilacs’ last blush, the breeze across the pond water. All the crazed bustle of spring.
Only there was no religious frenzy flowing through my father as I once believed. There was only the sense that he was terribly apart from all that surrounded him, aware and yet not aware, his focus Katherine and only Katherine. For she had been his Power, the beating heart through which he made sense of the world.
I dream of them sitting in the white glider in the gazebo, watching the water play with the light and the mayflies dance. They hug each other for the longest time, believing they are doing the right thing, that they are following the precepts of their religion, that they are living and dying in accord with nature. And then I hear my father’s deep, gravelly voice singing not the birth song of spring, but the leaving song, the song of autumn.
And when he finishes, he cannot go on. It is Katherine who has the resolve to stand and walk to the water’s edge and beckon him. She wades into the pond smiling, her bare feet pressing down into the inch of soft muck that winter and two months of spring have laid over the sand. Her nightgown lifts and floats about her knees.
My father feels sick as he gets to his feet and follows her. He is in agony as he kisses her one last time before she sets herself back into the water, pressing his hands into her chest. He takes over now, because it is what she wants. He holds her below the surface during her brief struggle, watching not the final bubbles of air leave her lungs, but the last of the morning’s mayflies flutter and die on the mirror of water above her.
In my dreams the water ripples and I see someone I don’t recognize at first. The dawning of awareness comes slowly. It is my father, a much younger version of him. And then the water ripples again and it is me. And out of that comes grief and the racking cries that always awaken me, the cries that signal my understanding that almost fifteen years before my father committed suicide in the woods below Mt. Katahdin, he’d killed himself drowning my mother, just as I have killed myself by killing Ryan.
“Mommy!” Emily cried, shaking me from my thoughts.
“Come look.”
I went down by the river then and found them crouched around a patch of frozen mud thawing in the strengthening sun. In the mud there was a single, clear track of a big deer probably trapped on the island during the sudden thaw, waiting for the river’s fury to subside before it could swim to land.
I squatted next to Emily and Patrick and showed them how to run their fingers along the wall of the track and into its depths to determine the deer’s weight, his direction of travel and the time that had passed since he’d been here. They got down on their knees and studied the track, absorbed with what I was telling them.
“Let’s follow the tracks,” Emily said.
“Let’s do that,” I replied.
And I took their hands and led them back toward the birches, where I would teach them to hunt as I was taught.
I felt once again that energy within Ryan that had so disturbed me. That energy and the words of my father’s suicide note echoed and mixed within me as we walked.
And for the first time, I understood that the same thing that had motivated Ryan was what my father was trying to describe in his suicide note. And it was the same thing that fortified and nearly consumed me during the ten days at Metcalfe. All of nature’s creatures are murderers. We must murder to live. It’s the law of the forest. But unlike the animals, we who are human are aware of this and must suffer each death as a small death within ourselves.
We who are human carry the dead within ourselves. As such, we have been imbued with the highest and most complex manifestation of that thing my ancestors called Power. It drives us. It haunts us. It can become twisted and destructive. But it can also heal. It can give us rebirth at ever}’ death. It can offer faith, forgiveness and sanity where there seems hope of none. Some of us will spend a lifetime hunting for it.
Emily tugged at my sleeve. “What are you thinking about, Mommy?”
I paused and looked over my shoulder at the graves of my parents and my great-uncle and then back to my children. “Love.” Then I took my children into the forest.
Here dies my story. Here lives my story again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I hope you have enjoyed The Purification Ceremony.
If you feel so inclined, please return to my webpage at Smashwords.com, and make a donation to the book. Half will be given to programs that support reading and writing.
And please return to www.marktsullivan.com and download more free novels.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the writing of The Purification Ceremony, I am in great debt to ethnologist Ruth Holmes Whitehead, author of the remarkable work Stones from the Six Worlds. Ms. Whitehead’s insight into Power and the mind of the Micmac was a constant source of inspiration.
I am similarly indebted to anthropologist Barbara G. Myerhoff, for her haunting study, Peyote Hunt, the Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians. Her descriptions of the rites of the Mara’akame fired my imagination.
Thanks also to white-tailed deer hunting experts Sean Lawlor, David Lawlor, Nick Micalizzi and Gordon Whittington for their advice. I am grateful to Joanna Pulcini and Damian Slattery for their patient reading and rereading of the various drafts, as well as to Ann McKay Thoroman, my editor, for prodding the work to its final shape. All errors, however, are my own.
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