Celia's Song

by Lee Maracle

  “You must really like smoking,” he teases.

  She takes a drag from his smoke. “Before ceremony there was madness. It isn’t new, this business of killing children. There was a war. Blood was let. Humans love ritual. They cannot escape from it. They need it just like they need air. Love is a ritual. Hate too. We are busy loving or killing depending on the direction we choose to move in. Life is an experience, but our movement through it is a ritual.” She crushes out the last of her smoke and walks straight off the edge of the mountain. The image of her fades through an opening in the clouds.

  Is that what had happened? The snake had gone to war. He had killed. The ritual of killing, day after day and year after year, became his life’s direction. He could not stop killing, destroying his family, raping his own mind and sharing that with his daughters and Madeline. The ritual of inflicting pain, watching men squirm under the bullets he was raining down on them, never went away. The snake killed men for six years, men he did not know, men who were also killing other men, the killing was sanctioned and revered by everyone. It became normal. Jacob searches for the words that these men must have used to justify the ritual killing. Maybe murder was just a direction that men sometimes travelled toward, as old Alice said. Once you start you can’t stop, unless somebody turns you around. At some point in all that killing, life itself becomes worthless in the mind of the killer. The devaluing of all those lives gave the snake permission. Maybe choosing that direction is the permission we give or do not give ourselves to value life. No one had known how to turn the snake back in his original direction.

  Ceremony must be a conscious use of our natural need for ritual. “Thou shalt not kill,” the Christians say, but the pope himself had blessed that war and the blessing of murder was the ceremony that altered the snake’s direction. Too bad they had not given him some ceremony to restore him.

  Jacob beds down and animals come, surround his sleeping body, whisper, “You have a ceremony to restore your path,” then are gone. Jacob in his sleep is aware that he is dreaming and determines not to remember his dream when he awakes.

  BY THE TIME STACEY comes home, Jacob has already left and the dark is folding over the house, sweet and comfortable. She does not expect him to be home; since becoming a teenager he has roamed freely from her house to his grandpa’s or his cousins, but usually he leaves a note or calls. This time there is no indication of where he is. Still, she is relieved. Guilt twinges her as she wonders when his absence had become a relief. She had loved fussing over him, when he was a small child, playing with him, comforting him; every part of him seemed so enjoyable. Then, as his body stretched, his face changed, and his bones arranged themselves into the shape of the affair with a man she had never meant to keep, she distanced herself from Jacob. During his grade school days she felt crowded by him; he reminded her that she couldn’t dress up on Friday and walk into some dimly lit, crowded bar and pick out a little comfort for the weekend. It had nothing to do with her looking old or acquiring morals; it had more to do with her feeling that motherhood felt too dignified to just squander her body on one night stands. Jacob was about twelve when she bumped into Steve in the mall. She told him to call her, he did, and, on a weekend when Jacob was with his grandpa, Steve had come over. The affair seemed easy, but now she realized it had all sorts of constraints. Jacob should never be an inconvenience. Her freedom was up, left somewhere in the run of diapers and dishes.

  She finds herself a candle, lights it, and sits down. In the fire of the candle an old memory burns. She was thirty-five. The tables were full of people. Her attention was drawn to a handsome-looking woman of about fifty. The woman sat with a group of men who all looked like they wanted to be the one who got lucky. She smoked a cigarette, sitting wide open and laughing hard at something one of them had said. There was a hint of crying in the way she laughed. Her movements were subtle and jerky. Some smell of fear pervaded her perfume. She was a little too made-up, a little too dressed-up, a little too everything. Stacey turned around and walked out. She wanted more than another romp. She wanted some piece of that mountain in her life.

  When she got home, she turned on all the lights in her house. Then she remembered Steve. He had made a point of telling her he was single again. He kidded her about it being her fault. They both had laughed, but he had had that you-look-yummy-enough-toeat kind of look. She had asked him if he’d like to visit sometime. “I make a nice cup of coffee and a passable piece of fry bread,” she’d said. “You call me when you want to make more than one piece,” he’d answered, “and I’ll bring the coffee.” He’d given her his number. After seeing that woman in the bar, she dialled Steve.

  Jacob was thirteen. Steve understood her rule and never violated it. She figured she was safe to invite him over and her son would not be the wiser. She told Steve that she needed him to be discreet. He understood. At first she only rang him when things got trying or something confounded her; but, as Jacob wandered off more frequently, she found herself dialling Steve for no reason at all.

  She doesn’t, even now, believe she loves him; it’s more that she finds him comfortable. She has an easygoing romance with Steve, so comfortable she doesn’t feel she can possibly end it. She has never gotten up the passion to get angry and argue and test the relationship; she figures it will never get any better. It will always be comfortable; she isn’t sure she can be satisfied with that. And then her phone rings.

  “Hello.” It’s Steve.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she says.

  “I was just sniffing around for a nice piece of bannock and a good cup of coffee,” he says. She hears something different in his voice, like the sound is being scraped as it runs by his vocal cords.

  “Are you all right, Steve?”

  There’s a pause. “No. I’d really rather talk about it in person.”

  She wants to tell him about the child, about the fight for her life, about the chance they are all taking, but she doesn’t think he would understand. Nervousness sets in. This might be the end of her and Steve and, although she isn’t sure she loves him, she’s beginning to suspect this is only because she doesn’t dare let herself. Loving him brings expectations, and expectations require common ground; she has no common rock for both of them to stand on. He would never understand this family. “Love is not enough,” she whispers to herself. It takes a lot of elbow grease to accept someone else’s way of being.

  “I would really rather talk about it in person.” She recognizes the intent behind these words. Five years is about to be flushed down the toilet by an ultimatum from him; she has no way to brace herself. Although she has not dared to love him, she has not ever wanted to let him go. She wonders if she could. For some reason this wondering brings her back to her nephew.

  She looks up at her kitchen wall where the photographs of family smile down at her. A black and white of two boys, Jacob and Jimmy, blowing bubbles from those little stems with a round hoop at the end. There is a wire fence behind them. She loves that picture of her nephews; there was such beauty in them, confidence and innocence. After the funeral, Jacob went to remove the picture and she had panicked. “No … please … no.” She couldn’t let Jimmy go; he was tied so tight to her memories of Jacob that she couldn’t separate them. Taking down the picture would somehow have removed Jacob too, but she hadn’t said that to him. They had gone through the rest of the day without talking. Now, she looks up at the wall again and thinks she catches a glimmer of sadness peering through Jimmy’s smile. She cringes. Why had she not seen it before?

  The knock comes too soon. She opens the door. Her voice softens, and she is humbled by the picture of his frame, backlit by a full moon. Damn if it doesn’t loosen the tide of tears lurking behind her eyes. Steve holds Stacey. Her sobs are so deep, so long, and so hard they worry him. He wants to ask what’s bothering her, but he knows better. Stacey’s great aunt Ella had told him that Salish women believe the less
a man knows the better.

  He waltzes her through the door when he hears the sobs calm into ordinary weeping, and sits her down on her couch. He isn’t sure what he can do for her when the sobs end, but Stacey reaches for a cigarette and solves this for him. After a pull on it, and a few chuckles about how old that need to cry had been, Stacey recovers and relieves him of having to do anything.

  “I think you came here to hurt me, Steve. You better do it and go on home.”

  “Actually, I think I came here to get hurt. But you’re right, I ought to do it and go on home. I want more, Stacey. Don’t interrupt.” He puts his hand up to warn her not to respond before she starts. Most white men in their fifties don’t have much hair, but Steve still has a full head and the yellow light works magic on the blond. She wants to touch his hair, to pull him down next to her, to ask him to love her just one more time before he hurts her.

  “Stacey. I got married and it didn’t last. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and I think my wife had some kind of sixth sense because when she asked for a divorce she mentioned you. Not in any kind of a nice way. She was right. I saw you in the mall that day and it all came back just like I was still standing on the bridge watching fish swim upstream all over again. In the mall, you asked for my number. I never said anything about the kind of relationship you wanted because my daughter was young and I hadn’t finished paying for the house. It’s been ten years, ten years of making double house payments and socking away money for my daughter’s education. My ex-wife phoned me yesterday and said she just made the last mortgage payment. I’m free. Suzy has a job. She starts college in the fall. Today I took her to the bank and gave her what I had. I don’t have much saved up for my retirement, but I still have my medical practice. I have no debts and no obligations besides my daughter’s future wedding — if she has one.”

  The candle flickers. Stacey remembers their last day on the bridge. She feels the same hurt she had felt in her room that night after she left him there. The dark had settled in and the pain had scraped away at her. She remembers that she knew the decision she had made was the right one. He was so young and so white and she knew he would insist she move to white town, where she would get lost. She would be swallowed by her own lostness, become unrecognizable to him, and then he would divorce her. She was not like his ex-wife. She could not take him to court, insist on child support and that she keep his house and child and make a new life for herself. She would have withered away.

  “It’s been five years of waiting for you to call, Stacey. I want … I want to see you every day, bent over the stove frying bread and fixing coffee. I want to see you troop off to Momma’s and come back all tight and strained and tired looking. I want to hold you until it all melts away. I believe you want that too.”

  The chair gives in to her body and his voice settles some unasked question deep inside. She does want it. She wants to see the back side of him retreat into the early morning light and head for some place in white town, and to have him return to this side of the bridge, day after day. She wants to hold him when his shoulders get rounded from whatever weighs on him. She wants to get excited about some small dumb thing and jump up and down telling him about it. She just isn’t sure if he wants to be here with her. She never wanted to live on the other side of that river — where no one gives a shit about her, Stella, or that child — and he would not risk his career over some relative of hers he hardly knows. At least not willingly.

  In the silence of her absence, if she didn’t tell him where she was going and what she was doing, he would grow weary or suspicious and leave her; she would be left here in this house, feeling lonelier than she feels right now. She would never again have this easygoing kind of love from him. He had never said anything about wanting more of her before and she had not thought about where their secret affair was going before now. Now it is out there, playing with her skin, dancing in her belly, teasing her in that deep down forever kind of way that wakes up hope, pulls up promise — the promise of them sitting on a rocking chair sharing one last breath, one last handclasp, one last look before their eyes close forever.

  “Why did you have to go and do that?” The tears roll out as she laughs, her voice so gentle. He smiles at her. “Look at me.”

  “I am. I like what I see.” And he winks, takes both her hands in his and finishes what he started. “This is a promissory ring. You get to keep it no matter what you answer. It means that I promise to get you an engagement ring and then I will marry you. If you can see your way to saying yes then I will get you the biggest gawdamned engagement ring white town has to offer.”

  “You people get to take everything so lightly.”

  “Don’t call me ‘you people,’ Stacey. You know I don’t like it.” His voice tightens as his body stiffens.

  “You know what I’m talking about, Steve.” He does not. He cannot. He sighs.

  “I just don’t want to be called ‘you people.’ The name is Steve.” His earnestness makes her laugh.

  “Okay, Steve,” she says, mimicking his tones.

  “Okay you won’t call me ‘you people,’ or okay you’ll put this ring on your finger?” He means to push the envelope right here and right now. The memories that had no pressure attached to them slip away. He is telling her he’s always loved her and had married someone else because she’d turned him down. He’s set his daughter and wife up with a house and investments. He’s coming to her penniless, but still productive. She plays cynically with his words; she doubts he would set her up as neatly and cleanly if she was the one he was divorcing. He does not wish to be called “you people,” but she doubts that he treasures her in the same way he did his ex-wife. On the one hand, she doubts they could go forward as a married couple, but she also knows they cannot go back to that easygoing, come-on-in-stranger, long-time-no-see, take-yourshoes-off-and-stay-a-while arrangement after he’s asked her to keep him. She feels an all-or-nothing tone in his voice.

  Living with him would require extra care; he’s white, different. She has no way to frame that difference without offending him and jeopardizing the future of the relationship. The situation would require carefully measured words. She would have to let him know where she was going and figure out how to get what she needs without saying too much. She would have to figure out what he needs and give it to him and still maintain her private world of family. There would have to be a separate world and a together world, which means life with him would be complicated. He has no idea that it would be this complicated, and she is not sure she can deal with it.

  “Steve, you have no idea what you’re asking of me.”

  “Sure I do. I know you don’t want to live on my side of town. I’m prepared to live here.”

  “How mighty white of you,” she wants to say, but restrains herself. So arrogant, as though being prepared to live here were so decent and big of him. At best it is shallow and simple. She wants to scream at him and at the same time she wants to sink into some momentary sweetness of slow-burning desire.

  “I guess that sounds arrogant. I am prepared to live here, since living there presents a whole different set of problems for you,” he catches himself.

  He caught himself; maybe this isn’t going to be as difficult as she imagines. She feels herself relenting, succumbing, and loving him for catching himself.

  Another voice nags: No more. Jump right in here under my covers. Let’s just roll around for a while. I’ll make you breakfast before you go. No more watching his back receding into the day knowing she didn’t give him much. No more waking up and deciding to head over to Madeline’s and camp out with her and her quiet girls for a day or two without saying a word to anyone. No more heading to the bank on Friday with Alice’s gal and buying all kinds of makeup neither of them needs, then coming home and playing with it all night long. No more you’re-welcome-to-visit-anytime with each of you knowing that to visit someone you have to leave. She hadn’
t had to think about him at all over these past five years. He’s offering her a ring that brings with it a terrible tension; she feels too stuck to respond.

  She needs to talk to Momma about all this, but she will have to wait until the crisis is over. She doesn’t think Steve will wait out a crisis she does not wish to explain. He wouldn’t understand and, like Judy, he would insist they call the police. Tears come; they slide over her cheeks and fall to her hands in her lap. Out of the blue, she laughs; she hasn’t given one thought to how or what she would do without him. She laughs, because she knows she wants to keep this man without all hell breaking loose and only Momma can help her with that.

  “Are you still an Owenite?” she asks.

  “I am Steve, the man who loves you and makes his living as a doctor.”

  Stacey’s light goes on.

  “Doctors have ethics, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, but what’s that got to do with us?”

  “Could you ever see your way to breaking your rules for us, for this sorry-ass village?”

  He stops breathing to clear his throat. He wants to ask what regulation he would be expected to break, but thinks better of it. First of all, she would not think it mattered; secondly, she would not likely tell him. He figures she wants to know what he would risk for her and he remembers the epidemic. His father would not risk his medical practice for a bunch of scraggly assed Indians. He tells himself that things are different now, but would he gamble his practice for people that remain a mystery to him?

  “If you insisted.”