Celia's Song

by Lee Maracle

  “I love you, Auntie,” Jacob says, the way men say it when they have a feeling that their woman is standing on the edge of something dangerous they don’t understand and they want them to walk away from it. It was a “don’t jump” kind of “I love you.”

  Sometimes to really know something you have to dive deep.

  This time Celia hears my whisper. Celia needs to know something. This is an old edge. She has been do-si-do-ing back and forth before it for a long time. She breathes slow and deep, puffs up her lungs, pumps her blood, shores up her muscles and kicks up her agility. She understands Jacob’s “I love you,” but she means to leap anyway.

  The weight leaves. All that remains is a faint feeling of trepi dation. Celia knows this trepidation and doesn’t really mind it. It is the sort of fear she felt the first time she was asked to prepare someone’s feast food. She wondered, “Do I know these plump berries well enough to turn them to feast soup? Am I familiar enough with salmon to urge him to rise to the feast house all still and dead like that? Do I really remember how to dig the roots, season everything with the sort of medicine that will open the throats of every human and inspire them to dig inside their spirit for words, for song, for the sacred?” It is not unlike the hesitation she felt the first time her body responded to a lover’s looks, the skin, the touch; she had no words with which to speak to herself about it. She just wanted to be next to that skin, that body.

  The trepidation anchors itself to the kind of confidence she has acquired from knowing she’s crossed this bridge before. She is up to the journey, up to the flight, up to the silk-soft landing, up to the unfamiliar, because she has mastered the unknown before. Her people swallowed the serpent generations ago — one head was courage, the other fear. They had found a way to anchor the fear to courage; the courage underpinned and softened fear. Fear helps her to look twice before leaping, to exercise caution. Fear does not stand alone inside her body, so it can never consume her.

  “Let me pop by Alice’s place,” she says to Jacob. “She was something else at Nora’s funeral.”

  “It’s late, Auntie.”

  “Alice writes poetry. She doesn’t sleep on nights like this.”

  The word “poetry” scrapes its way down Jacob’s throat, sharp and full of the ridiculous smells of musty odour and sterile-coloured classrooms. The sound of boys and girls mimicking rhymed couplets carefully memorized for no reason at all returns to him. Why anyone in this village would drag that old dead cat home and participate in its foolishness is beyond him, but he swings alongside his aunt into his cousin’s drive. Her living room light shouts out a welcome to visitors.

  “Ha-ay,” Alice sings out. “I was just heating up some water for tea. Come on in.”

  While the ginseng steeps, the women cluck on about the storm, the dark, the gathering at Momma’s house. Momma’s stunning fine rage, the way she shut everyone but Madeline up. Neither woman mentions that Madeline is part of their healing circle because Jacob is there, but it clearly cheers the women the way they are cheered when female blackberry vines droop low with the weight of children and the male vines are stiff, jutting out straight and strong, disconnected from the females, making the picking so easy. Alice pours the tea.

  “Read me some of them words, Alice. The kind that make a body feel big and strong.” Celia nestles into a chair, half-leaning forward. Jacob looks for something to distract his mind. There are photos on the wall: photos of Alice, of her small children by themselves, and some of her with her children. He focuses on Alice’s son, Mike. In this photo he is hardly older than Jacob is now. There he is with a pair of toddlers and a woman Jacob does not really know. He thinks this must be Mike’s wife.

  “I swear, Celia, with this one I must be losing my mind. I have no idea what got into me, but here it is …”

  Jacob barely hears over his musing about Mike marrying and having children so young. He couldn’t have been but eighteen …

  “I want to walk along with eyes/Wide open and see the world.”

  Alice’s voice grabs Jacob. It is lyrical and soft, with that slight accent and wee rasp that Salish men find sexy in their women. Alice is his cousin, so he tries not to think about that. But it is the words; the words hold him. Me too, me too runs through his mind. The poem settles into the room. Jacob imagines it breathing life into the candle that burns in the centre of the table. It creeps under his skin and smokes its way to his bones, his flesh, his mind, and opens doors to sky, to being, to home and sound. He follows Alice’s words as they play about the room. The words land easily on the flickering candle-tip, jump onto his skin and somersault their way through his chest, filling his lungs with purposeful breath. Alice’s words engage his thighs and set his feet to tapping the rhythm of the song which hums beneath their meaning.

  “I want to see,” Celia moans at the end of Alice’s recitation. She swallows the last bit of her tea, and bids Alice goodbye. Jacob cannot be so casual about what he has just heard. He rises in stunned silence. He wants to say something, to engage Celia in some kind of discourse. Celia has been as familiar as an old shoe and now she is as a stranger. He nearly trips going out the door, stubbing his sock feet on the carpet where his shoes lie waiting for him.

  Outside the clouds have disappeared and the moon brightens Celia and Jacob’s path. It sprinkles bits of light among the trees lining the road and makes it easy for them to find their way. The stars wink an old hello and Jacob slips his arm in Celia’s, more to anchor himself than to help her find her way.

  “That’s poetry?” he says with some surprise.

  “That’s what she calls it. To me, those words are personal power songs. Jewels. Carved word-paintings and woven rugs all rolled into one.”

  “She do that often?”

  “No. No woman gets to do anything fun very often. Not here, anyway. No. Sometimes I go there and she has a new one. Most times I just get her to read some of my favourite old ones.”

  “She has more?”

  “Oh yeah, Alice has been writing poetries since she first learned to read. You know, to read in a serious way.”

  Jacob restrains his desire to correct his aunt’s reference to “poetries,” and instead asks, “Anyone else know she does this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t talk to anyone about it. I don’t know if she ever does. I just remember her sitting there, candle burning, light on late one night. I was turning in and asked her what she was doing so late with a single small lamp going and a candle on the table burning when she clearly had electricity. She offered me tea. Told me that the candle lit a fire inside and the words came from that fire. ‘What words?’ I asked. ‘Poetry,’ she said. ‘Read some,’ I said, and she did.”

  A stone from the gravel road jumps into Celia’s shoe. She wiggles her foot, sends it off to one side, leans over, removes it, and carries on without stopping.

  Don’t throw that stone away. I am tripping along in the bush next to the road, following Celia home. Truth be known, going to Alice’s to hear poetry is my favourite part of being a witness. Then Celia picks up the stone and stuffs it in her pocket. We are getting along now. I have to stop myself from laughing.

  “Do you visit her much?”

  Celia doesn’t want to talk just yet. She wants Alice’s words to roll around in her mind for a while. Talking stops this from happening.

  “Jacob, you quit skirting and jumping around like a square dance team and get to your real point or I will get over the feeling Alice just filled me with.”

  “I just want to hear more.”

  “Next time I go, I will swing by and get you.”

  “You could phone ahead.”

  “No,” she says. “Feels better if I don’t touch anything electrical before I go.”

  XI

  SALMON DON’T DANCE ON their way upstream. Their dancing is done in their ocean playground with its infinite breast of
salt water, coloured green, slate grey, silver, white, and blue, depending on the mood of the sun. Sometimes the ocean’s water is warm, sometimes it is chilly, but the fish play, discover, dance, and flirt their way to strength, to knowing, to preparing for the journey upstream. In this place of dance and play their language is born. This language has reference posts that head them up the right stream to the river the fish-women know well. The men dance themselves to a mating pair and learn the language of these women who are the only ones who know where the spawning grounds are. The dance and the play get them ready for their silent war with the current. This swim will carry them to death whether or not they experience the ecstasy of procreation.

  It was winter. After the blankets. After smallpox tore through the village. After the forest had been set ablaze. After the vicious hunger that followed the fires. After the foreigners settled on the lands that grew their precious camas. After the sod had been rolled over and the original food had been buried deep under the soil.

  It was before cars, before radio, before gramophones, before television, before English swallowed their tongue. It was just before the songs and dances of the village became lawless things.

  The first Alice lined up with the children of her family and stood ready to enter the smokehouse. They were going to come out with their own song, the one that would be their personal road to power. Alice’s gramma was dead, but her mother had done her best in the language to prepare her for this moment. Alice sensed her mother’s wavering commitment to this ceremony; it was in the hesitation she heard in her voice and the nervous movement of her body. This wavering pushed itself onto the words her mother spoke and it wrapped a thin wire of fear around Alice. Alice quietly prayed that her song would melt this wire of fear.

  Language needs a post, like dogs need stumps to piss on, or wolves need to turn around and look at the tracks they have made. It needs a reference marker to remind, to tell the rememberer they are hooked to some moment, some familiar place where bearings can be found. The rememberer need only clear the underbrush with old familiar tools and locate the starting point. All people have to do is identify who is the one that can remember. Alice stood in her kitchen musing over these her last words as her spirit left. She tried hard to say them to someone as she slid down the wall of her kitchen, but there was no one there. She died but she could not really leave. She floated about the space between the stars and earth, hoping to find someone to say it to.

  No one hears, but Jacob feels something. This is a different kind of see. I smile; he will get it eventually. I set to witnessing again.

  JACOB FEELS AS IF he does not have reference posts to understand Rena, Momma, Stacey, or any of the women. He doesn’t know there is any other life but the one that they live; he sometimes thinks they are mean. He imagines them throwing dirt on his tracks, stopping him from pissing and marking his own territory. Celia eases the scrape somewhat, but even the cloth of her voice seems to dampen his sense of belonging. At times it stops him from being part of her. He needs to know he is part of something. It rankles. It rankles the way blackberry vines can rankle a run down the hill along the edge of a forest, a forest so young it makes you want to run, seduces you into it, and then sends up these vines to shred your skin and betray your very desire.

  Rena shreds Jacob. He is convinced that she sets out to shred him. After Rena starts in on him, each woman by turns shreds his perception. They shred his linguistic markers, rendering useless as slugs the words he so carefully learned at school at their behest. These women, who paid such close attention to the marks the instructors handed out to him at the end of each term, speak in a language that contravenes everything those marks stood for. Damn, he thinks. Damn. And he vows he will never again ask why his cousin killed himself. The trouble with ending the question is that Jacob stops looking for answers. He closes his own door to wondering, but he has no way of knowing this. He decides he wants to hear more of the “poetries” his aunt loves. He laughs secretly at his aunt Celia, who behaves as though she can make this language behave, moving subjects into objects, making them plural by adding an s to them.

  “Plump berries sometimes fall where the ground has not been stirred by light-stepping feet; these babies then wither and die before they sink root. Sometimes children hear them weeping, fighting to be born, to be fed, to be. Pick the berries; they like it.” The first Alice says this to him, but Jacob doesn’t hear her. Jacob doesn’t wander through the bush much anymore. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t wonder about why he doesn’t like the bush. He just knows he doesn’t like it.

  THERE IS AN OLD shack in the common, down past the end of the village. Folks tell the boys some old snake used to live there, but no one can remember his name. It isn’t that they’ve forgotten. The “can” in this case is about permission: no one is allowed to think of the dead man’s name. He is what the old folks called “forever dead” — meaning dead to memory, dead to speakers, dead to storytellers, and dead to mythmakers. The boys who used to hang about with him and might have talked about him have never said a word about him. Most of them left and drifted their way to death in broken-down hotel rooms, or drowned in their own vomit in some place called “Blood Alley” in Vancouver. Rumour has it one of them was crushed in a dumpster. It doesn’t matter; the mythmakers have had a fine time drumming out tales about the three young men who used to hang at the snake’s because they were not dead and they were fascinating in the terrible cruelty they had inherited from the one who was dead.

  THIS MORNING GRINDS OUT sunshine in fits and starts, clouds jerk back and forth across the sun. Jacob finds it annoying. In the west the mountains and the ocean’s gentle wind-warmed water don’t spark much more heat than a sweet taste of sun on the skin, quickly followed by a breeze to cool it. Summer days like this make Jacob’s body restless. He is still a teenager; the natural restlessness of adolescence on days like this turn his youthful restlessness into a cat’s claw of anxiety.

  The ball tournament has been neither exciting nor emotionally satisfying. He is antsy all day. After leaving Celia at her door, he takes to wandering around his village.

  Don’t go there, I warned, but I was too late.

  Jacob is on his way to the old snake’s cabin.

  My timing does not matter. Jacob cannot communicate with animals; he cannot hear me.

  Jacob has always been curious about the old snake’s cabin. Momma and Stacey warned him against going there in case he swallowed whatever poison the snake ate to make him so evil. Jacob does not believe this, and it perplexes him that Stacey does because as a teacher she ought to know better. None of the teachers at his school believe a person can swallow what has poisoned someone else’s mind. They refer to the beliefs of the old people in this village as superstitions or old wives’ tales. Until his cousin killed himself it hadn’t crossed his mind to go down to the old snake’s, but now the desire to peel back on the taboo is burning him up. His foot taps senselessly and the tapping unnerves Stacey who tells him to get on outside and do something besides wear a hole in the floor and tear at her mind. It is just the kind of scolding he needs to abrogate the caution not to go to the old snake’s cabin.

  The road ends before the patch of dirt in front of the old snake’s cabin that once served as a yard. The villagers had built the road to bypass the snake’s place. The patch between the road and the cabin is overgrown with dense brush and small trees. It is creepy, this thick little stretch to the snake’s. The brush scrapes at Jacob’s arms; Jacob whacks himself, thinking he is being bitten by some bug. It is cold inside the brush; there shouldn’t be any bugs out. Still, he feels like he is being bitten steadily. He is beginning to feel like turning back when he hears voices. The sound of a little girl whimpering and begging nips at Jacob’s ear and freezes his feet. A man’s voice punctuates the pauses between her whimpers and the pleading phrases.

  “No. Please. No.”

  The interplay of snarling an
d wicked laughter behind the pleas and whimpers weakens Jacob’s legs. He stops, steps, stops, then steps again; each time he stops he listens to make sure the man hasn’t heard him. Before taking another step Jacob hesitates for a second, and then carries on. It can’t be the old snake. Who then? Who would dare to live here in this place of the forever dead? Jacob listens as the sun sets.

  How can Jacob listen to this and not curse? And then my very soul grows terrified. Jacob should be a lot more offended than he is. I roll from side to side, praying this boy will be horrified by what he is witnessing.

  The moon comes out and the clouds drift away. The stars paint the sky cold cobalt blue, but their light does not make it through the brush. He barely sees who’s there, but he figures it must be the old snake. But how can it be? He’s banned. Who is it then? Even in this barely lit underbrush, Jacob makes out the body of a man and a child, but it is too dark to identify them. It must be the old snake; who else could it be? Jacob decides it is him. No one knows the old snake is back now except him. He shudders to think he is the only one who knows the snake is here, up to his old tricks again. The child looks like she is tied up. He thinks he can see the man poking her with something.

  The shack is a shambles. The yard is worse. On the right side of the house a hide is stretched out, covered with maggots. At first the hide doesn’t interest Jacob; but, as he watches the man torment the girl, he is drawn to it again and again. He decides to have a closer look. He inches his way forward. Then he sees it.

  He vomits.

  This relieves me; whatever he swallowed is up and out.

  His belly heaves. He looks up between heaves to make sure the snake hasn’t seen him. No one in the house seems to hear his heaving guts. The hide was a dog. He knows it. He has no idea how he knows it. He has never seen a skinned animal, but he is as sure of it as if he had seen hundreds of skinned animals of all shapes and sizes. This was a dog. He can’t get the image of the dog out of his mind, even as he hears the whimpers from the little girl, and wonders what the man tormenting her is doing. Then he sees clearly what the old snake is doing to the child and he gets sick all over again.