Celia's Song

by Lee Maracle

  “Jacob is just like you. He used to tug at my skirt like that trying to make me finish a story.”

  “Don’t you change the subject, girl.”

  “Last night he said, ‘Miss Stacey, either you keep me or let me go.’”

  This stills their breath with wonderful anticipation. The light goes on in Celia’s mind and she prays Stacey told him to stay.

  “He left for work this morning. I took the money he gave me and bought me some new cloth, fixed me up some curtains, fixed him some head soup, and left him a note saying I would be late, eat the soup and hang the curtains.”

  “I hope you wrote please at the end of that,” Momma says. The women cheer and tease Stacey. Celia remains quiet.

  “Stacey has a man,” Rena says.

  “I heard she has a doctor.” Celia’s emphasis on “doctor” stops the women in their tracks.

  “Did you say you had a doctor?” Judy asks.

  “Yeah. I asked him if he would risk breaking his rules for me, for my sorry-ass village. He said only if I insisted. Do you want me to insist?” She turns to the child. “You want me to insist, baby?”

  STEVE LEANS AGAINST MOMMA’S porch railing, telling Stacey that she is going to make him crazy. He accuses her of manipulating him into agreeing to risk his career for her, all the time knowing what she was going to ask of him. It was manipulative. She gives him that. He paces back and forth. She stands still and watches him, then she turns to head back into the house. He follows. He wants her to promise never to manipulate him like this again. She stops in the hallway and reminds him that he had had his chance to name the conditions of the relationship. He had said there were none. He can’t go adding them now just because he doesn’t like what she’s done. Besides, she wouldn’t make those kinds of promises.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you aren’t one of us.” It comes out flat, sounding dangerously final.

  “Don’t bring up that ‘you’re a white man’ shit,” he hollers.

  She shoves him out the door and onto the porch.

  “First, that child does not need to hear a man bellowing. Second, my momma does not deserve to have you upset the spirit of her house. Last, I didn’t say you were a white man. I said you aren’t a Sto:lo.”

  “What the hell is the difference?”

  “If you were a Sto:lo I would just say ‘I have to go to Momma’s’ and you would answer ‘Okay’ and come with me. Breaking some white man’s rules would not ever be a question. Nor would it require a moment of consideration, because they aren’t our rules. But you are not Sto:lo, so you can’t be counted on to just come along.”

  “If I was a Sto:lo, I wouldn’t be a doctor.” He is sorry for saying it even as it comes out of his mouth.

  She slaps him.

  “How the hell did I get to be this white?”

  This makes her laugh. He does not get the joke. She confounds him.

  “I believe what you’re saying is that if I can’t be like you, I have to let you manipulate me for the rest of my days. I don’t know if I can do that.”

  She holds up her hand and repeats what she said: “You don’t get a second chance.” He sighs and says that he wasn’t thinking of that. It is going to drive him insane to do what she is asking, and he is afraid of what she might do if he fails.

  “Not a damn thing,” she answers. There is nothing to be done about it if he fails. She would try, he would try, but they would not always be successful and that is that.

  “Do you need a minute by yourself?” she asks.

  “No. I just want to know why you picked that cloth you picked for the curtains.”

  She smiles. “Because the sun picks up the pink through the cloth and spills onto all that blond in your hair. I like the strawberry hues it brings out.”

  “You are going to make me crazy, Miss Stacey.” He walks into the house to assess Shelley’s situation.

  WHAT’S THAT STACEY HAD asked her gramma one night as they trundled home in the dark? She had pointed at the skyline, which was jumping all over the edge of the earth with a pale blue light.

  “What’s wrong with the sky, Gramma?”

  “Nothing,” Gramma had answered.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Sometimes our northern relatives get tired of all that snow: shiny diamondback snow; slushy, wet, grey snow; blue-hued snow; icing sugar snow; big, white, flaked snow; house-making snow. They get so many kinds of snow. Even so, sometimes they get to wanting to look on some green; so they come down here and dance at the edge of our world.”

  Celia finishes repeating this memory to Stacey. “Do you remember telling me that?” she asks. Stacey does.

  “Well, it’s doing it again. The sky is doing it right now.”

  The women drop what they are doing; they leave Steve alone with Ned and go outside.

  Steve is shaking, he can’t get his hand to steady up.

  Ned notices. “Sometimes the weasel is the best teacher,” he says.

  Steve laughs. “Don’t you go trying my patience with an Ella riddle now, Ned. This story better be good and plain, because I am still as dumb as when I was young, except now I am older and slower.” He settles down to watch the girl. “She needs a lot of vitamin E. I’ll pick some up from the pharmacy. I can’t believe anyone could make it through all this, but it looks like she might. She should be dead. It’s more than the burns, Ned; she’s emaciated. Whoever did this was doing it for a long time. I’m surprised she lived long enough to give him the chance to do this much damage.”

  HE BARELY REMEMBERS WHAT he had been harping about when his aunt Ella told him that weasel story. He told her he had no sympathy for weasels. “You definitely don’t,” she had said and laughed one of those old people’s isn’t-that-the-damnedest-thing-you-ever-heardhe-doesn’t-like-weasels kind of laughs.

  “Do I look like a man whose woman has pulled the wool over on him?” Steve asks Ned.

  “You look like a man who’s mad his woman has pulled the wool over on him.”

  He isn’t surprised that it shows. He is easy to read; it’s one of the things Stacey says she likes about him. He laughs. He cannot remember finding himself funny before, and says so to Ned. Ned finds this funny. The two of them are laughing when the women return, talking about the lights in hushed tones. They tell Ned and Steve to go out and have a look.

  “I DIDN’T PARTICULARLY WANT any of my girls to bring a white man home, but if we have to have one you would be my first choice, Steve.”

  “Not much weasel in you, Ned.”

  “No. I’m kind of like you, Steve: a little on the dumb side, but I get around. This clutch of women is full of every possible medicine; if you know your light isn’t always shining, you just learn to move along with the rhythm they set in motion and wait for the story to unfold — or they will drive you to distraction. They’re always interesting, if they’re not always sweet.”

  “You know what’s scary, Ned? On the other side of that bridge, I am one of the smartest men I know.”

  Ned nods. What Ned thinks is even scarier is that they don’t think their own women are very smart on the other side of the bridge, and so they cannot imagine the women in this village being smart either.

  The lights dance. Ned imagines hearing the hum. Steve thinks he sees faint hints of blue and green in the columns that sway as though reaching for the top of the sky. The light bathes him in some kind of strange calm. He has never felt calm coming from outside of him and getting under his skin like this.

  “Is she worth it?” Ned asks.

  “Yeah,” Steve says without hesitation. This satisfies Ned. They continue watching the lights.

  “I have to go back to Stella’s,” Ned tells him as he butts out a cigarette. Steve helps him load up his truck with scrap lumber and tools, though he’s damned if he can figure out
why they want to help Stella at all — she belongs in jail.

  THE LIGHTS DANCE THEIR way around the belt of the night, glowing blue and green for a couple of hours. The women come out again when Shelley has gone to sleep. Awe silences them as the lights form human shapes. The lights reshape themselves: first into mountains of blue glacial light, then into humans again, ending as abstract shapes in motion.

  There doesn’t seem to be an adequate way to address the dead staring at you in their numbers. Silence is the only reaction they can call together and still maintain their awe. Each has stood calling out to the ancestors in a holy mass, eyes pointed skyward, bodies still, prayers completely silent. When the lights leave, their eyes turn to one another; this is their communion.

  Celia begins the circle by embracing her mother, before moving on to each woman, her mother following, until every woman’s heart beats with the other.

  Momma begins to sing. “They came to remove that awful tired you-know-the-one that slows the blood, thins the mind, and tortures the memory.” After Momma finishes that old sweet song, Celia slips her arm into her mother’s and asks if she knows many songs.

  “Now I do. I don’t know why, but seeing all those people swaying up there all sexy and dead woke up a song in me.”

  “You still have that drum?” Stella’s poppa asks.

  “Can you sing for a while?” Celia cuts him off. As Momma leaves the house with her drum, Steve falls in behind her, wiping up his hands.

  “I can do anything, child, anything at all.” Momma says something to Ned in the language and he fetches a bench from the woodshed and a couple sets of sticks, one for him and one for Steve. He sits on the bench, tells Steve to face him, and Momma picks up the drum. Momma sings. After the first round is finished, the others join in. Judy can’t get past her Prussian accent, and Steve can’t get past his lyric-less English, but it doesn’t matter. They sing until near sun-up, all except Celia. They sing until their voices crack.

  “AND THAT IS THE last song I know,” Momma says.

  “That’s all you know?” Steve asks, and they laugh. He takes Stacey’s hand. He knows he will sleep now. He will wake up. It will be a new day. He will be too sober and too serious for his own good. He will have grave doubts about what they are doing, but as long as they come together like this he will get through every completely insane and irrational demand Stacey makes of him.

  XIX

  GRAMMA ALICE SITS AT the end of Momma’s bed, saying, “Something has to die before something can be born.” Momma floats through her dreams, wondering who will die and what is going to be born. She sees Celia sitting at Alice’s house and knows they are up to something. Alice looks like she is reading from a slim sheet of paper. Celia is quiet. Why in the world would Alice still be reading to Celia? Surely Celia can read. What in the world is one grown woman doing reading to the other? What has that to do with Gramma Alice telling her that for something to be born something has to die?

  NED IS BACK. JIM is leaning against the same windowsill Ned left him leaning against; the place looks cleaner. Things are arranged in neat piles where Stella intends to put them when the cupboards are built. With clean clothes folded neatly, Ned feels a little safer and more comfortable. She has made a lot of decisions over the past three days. It surprises both men. She still seems strange, not quite all there, as if she is walking through a dream, but they have started to build whatever it is she asks them to. Ned brings a couple of windows with him, old but serviceable. He tells Jim to start putting up shelving while he installs the windows.

  The industry of building eases the tension within the men. Stella sings as she puts things away. There is a lot of garbage to be tossed. Ned hands her a pack of garbage bags and tells her to fill them up and load them onto the truck. No one lives close enough to mind the sound of sawing and hammering, so they carry on through the night trying to bring some sort of order to this place Stella calls home. Jimmy does his best to choose pieces of wood that are better on one side; he trims the edges so the shelving looks good.

  There is a bucket in the middle of the floor that Stella keeps avoiding. Jim finally asks the obvious: “Does the roof leak?”

  “Yes,” Stella answers, just as if he were asking “How are you?” and she were answering “Fine.” They will have to head up the hill for some cedar to make shingles; a couple of squares is all they’ll need. Jim half-smiles thinking about dodging a helicopter one more time.

  “Getting too old to dodge the man, Ned, you think?”

  “Never too old for a little adrenaline rush, lad. Never too old for that.” They kick around stories about the times they poached something that used to be theirs until the magic foot of the white man landed on it and it wasn’t theirs anymore.

  “I want a pair of white man’s boots before I die. I want to be able to step on something and make it mine,” Ned says to Jim.

  “Ain’t they some shit,” Stella says like a man, coming out for a smoke. They turn sharply and look at her.

  “Yeah. They’re some shit all right,” Jim says.

  Ned decides it’s time to talk. “What happened to that little girl of yours?”

  Stella looks around. “Where is she?” she asks.

  Ned closes his eyes and shakes his head. Jim thinks it’s too soon, but he answers her. Stella fights for some kind of grip on what has happened. She bounces words around, letting go bits and pieces of phrases that make no sense. She runs into the house, unable to handle the cacophony of sound that is going on in her mind and not quite coming out of her mouth. Jim and Ned finish their smokes. As he crushes out his cigarette Jim looks at Ned and says, “Too soon.” He gets up and goes into the house.

  The quiet emptiness is palpable. Jim feels it the moment he steps in the door. She’s not here. He looks around. The window in the sole bedroom is broken. There’s a pillow outside, on the ground. She broke it and bolted. Jim runs out of the room, nearly knocking Ned over. “She’s gone,” he tells him. They both head for the truck. They drive straight away from the house, down the main road. “Is anyone home at Martha’s?” Ned asks. Jim doesn’t answer, just turns the truck in the direction of Martha’s house.

  The seconds click by hard. They have to reach Martha’s house before Stella does something crazy. Crazy is getting to be so common. They pull up to the door and hear a scream. Jim kicks the door in and flips the switch. The gun in her hand, Stella lies in a pool of blood. They grab a blanket and staunch the bullet wound. Sam, Martha’s husband, stands by in his underwear, trying to figure out what the hell has just happened.

  “What the… What the … Stella …”

  “Can’t even do this right,” she says, and passes out.

  They haul her into the truck. Sam fetches his pants, he means to go with them. When he gets outside, they are gone. He heads for Momma’s house. He’s gonna give that girl a piece of his mind. Two of his children died in that damn epidemic in ’54. He lost another one to a drunken car accident. And now this, this suicide shit, threatened to take another. No more, he mutters, no more.

  Halfway to Momma’s, he turns back.

  STELLA DREAMS. SHE DREAMS of soft lace curtains, of white countertops, of pretty blankets, of dresses. She dreams of a softer life. She imagines that white women have everything she sees on the television. She pictures them in the malls, fingering everything like it belongs to them, all they have to do is decide what they want and poof there it is. Marry a white man and he will magically soften your life. All she had to do was find one that wanted to keep her.

  She offered herself up to one after the other. Which one of you wants to keep me? They took her all the way through high school, taking turns and discarding her. John came along, plain boring John, John who carried the promise of softness, John whose feet were magical. John merely had to step in any direction and he could get much of whatever he wanted. She would do anything for him. She did do anythi
ng for him. But the more she did the crazier he got. He wanted a woman, not a doormat. How could she have known that? She wanted softness, not John. How could he know that? They slid into one drunken crazy moment after another because Stella thought that was what John wanted and because he had no other idea how to deal with this woman. Two children surfaced and John changed. Everything became a war, the girls needed this, and why aren’t you doing that, the girls, the girls … and Stella began to hate those girls. They consumed her softness. They sucked up every penny she imagined should go toward easing the hardness of her life.

  There was no softness. She looked everywhere for it. It slipped through her fingers the moment she turned around. She gave up. She convinced herself she would have hardness then, raw hardness, brutal hardness, and she hunted it down. And she found it, around every corner she found it. Her hunt began as a means to forget John and the promise. It helped her to forget those little girls whose own softness made Stella insanely jealous. It became some ordinary demon she had to feed each day, an old mean dog sitting on her porch. She fed it.

  What happened? She went mad. “I went mad,” she tells herself. I deserve to die. I don’t deserve to live. I don’t deserve the hammering, the sawing, and the tending to my house. I don’t deserve this child, this life, this anything. She had bolted out of the house, headed down the road to her father’s house, found his gun, aimed it at her heart, and failed to kill herself. What’s that voice? What’s it saying? “Get some snarl, girl. You are going to survive. You are going to get through this and you are going to straighten up and live.” There is a threat in that voice. Poppa, is that you? “Yes it is. You aren’t doing this.” Poppa, where are you? “I’m right here, baby.” Poppa? Poppa, don’t hate me…

  She drifts off.

  STELLA HAS LOST A lot of blood. “She needs blood,” Steve tells them. “We have no way of giving it to her. She needs to go to the hospital.”

  Martha won’t let them take her. “If she is going to die, she will die right here. Maybe she ought to die,” she says. “Look at what she did.”