Celia's Song

by Lee Maracle

  “There was this woman,” the old man says. “Two men were fighting over her.” He struggles a little with the English he is using to tell this story. “She kept telling them not to fight over her. It was up to her anyway which one she gave herself to. They carried on fighting. She went to the lake near where she lived. That time. Lake, humans, animals all spoke the same language. She told Lake how sad it made her feel to see these two boys fighting over her like that. Challenge them to a canoe race, Lake told her. She did. They did. Out in the middle of the lake they were. Lake swallowed them. ‘What did you do that for?’ she said. ‘Now they are both dead.’ Sometimes to move ahead, you have to go back to the beginning.” The old man laughs. Momma, Celia, and Jacob join him, but the others just smile and wonder what the story was about. “Sounds funnier in the language,” the old man says and laughs some more.

  XXII

  UNCLE JIM WAS RIGHT. Four days on that mountain make Jacob feel like he can do anything. This is what the old man’s story is about, he thinks. He swallows the tea Momma gives him. The old man is at his elbow, gently urging him outside. Ned and Jim fall in behind. He hears Celia asking young Alice to read a poem as the door closes behind him.

  I’m not sleeping, Momma

  And I can’t quite seem to die yet

  I float trapped between the endless pages

  Of confusion my death seems to represent.

  This floating is light

  And strangely slow.

  Clouds appear and disappear.

  The sun rises and sets, but I’m not dead yet.

  There is this wisp of thread

  Tying me to the world below,

  Each time I move in the direction of the other side

  The thread tenses and I return to the sky above your head.

  But my feet can never again touch the ground

  I can see you hanging on to the other end, Momma

  And I am asking you now to let me go.

  The thread in Celia’s hand feels sticky, spider-web sticky. She lets go, but it’s stuck. The spider weaves its sticky web with slow deliberation; she means to entrap the small world in the design of her murderous home.

  “I’m pregnant with your son’s child,” rings in her ear, over and over. Celia feels small. She had brought her son and his father together, thinking it would end her yearning. This was not what Jimmy wanted. He wanted to be let go. Now here he is, showing himself again in this woman. She had thought him too young to know who his father was when she refused to tell him, but he was never too young. Jimmy had beaten a retreat, exited, and freed himself of becoming a negligent father by hanging himself. Celia had held her son too close and too tight, strangling the life out of him. Momma is right. She is lonely. She had this child, hoping to close the door on her yearning for her momma. Alex had closed the door on his son, yearning for success. Her son had closed the door on his progeny, yearning for freedom from this terrible neglect. All this time she thought it was about Alex and how he had cast her adrift. The serpent was off the house front and each and every one of them had grabbed some terrible thread of bitterness from the restless head that stopped them from becoming who they needed to be. As long as each of them holds onto some bitter thread, they cannot really give life.

  Momma watches Celia for a while. She moves over to her, wraps her arms around her, and whispers, “You take your time, child. You take as long as you want.”

  Celia has to let her mother go. She can’t embrace her without letting that thread go, and yet she so needs her momma now. The thread of bitterness is in her hand, the young woman stands squarely in front of her, challenging and certain. Celia’s eyes drop to the woman’s belly. She opens her fist, holds up her arms. “Haitchka siem,” the song rolls out.

  “Jimmy. Say hello to the first Alice when you see her.” The thread breaks.

  JACOB MAKES HIS WAY to the front of the bar. He sits next to Amos who is already half lit up. The bartender asks him what his pleasure is. “Coffee. Yeah, give me a cup of that java.” Amos turns to face him; “Wuss,” he says. “Think so?” Jacob says and serves him up a winning smile. “Difference is, in a minute I can order a beer, drink it and leave, you can’t.” The smile makes Amos squirm. It makes him feel like Jacob sat next to him on purpose, that he wants something from him. He says as much. Jacob says he does want something. He wants to know why Amos keeps his hair long. Amos thinks this is an odd question and looks back at Jacob.

  “I know why I grow mine.” Jacob tells Amos the story of Cultus and asks Amos if he knows that story. He finishes his coffee and orders a beer. Amos does not feel like admitting he doesn’t know the story. Jacob pulls his own hair. “My hair is about truth, about beginning and about never ending. What’s yours about?”

  “If that’s the case, what are you doing in this bar?”

  “Talking to you, Amos. I came here to tell you I am going to the longhouse. We are building a longhouse. First one erected in decades. Your hair will get in, but the dance will likely kill you.” He points at the beer. Then he drains what is left of the beer he’d ordered.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Jacob gives him another smile, tosses change at the counter and swings off the barstool. He walks out the door, smiling back at Amos. It unnerves Amos, who drinks more than he intended, much more, so much that the bartender has to throw him out.

  ON HIS COT IN his rooming house, drunken pictures of other binges whirl. He leans over the side of his cot and vomits. Traces of his empty stomach lace the bed. Images of Jacob’s smile, the little girl’s whimpers, the crazy woman he beat half to death drive his sleep to distraction. He wakes up, cussing as he realizes he had slept in his vomit. He lies there, no sense in moving. He looks around. Besides this cot, there is nothing much in this room. He has an old shirt and a single pair of pants hanging over the back of the cot. Both reek from want of washing. No dresser, no sink, no stove, nothing to make this stinking place look like anything but what it is, a stinking hole.

  Amos looks up at the ceiling. Jacob’s face comes into view. He is telling that story about the lake that swallowed two men. “Lakes don’t talk, fool.” Amos says it out loud as if Jacob is standing in the room. He rolls over, to go back to sleep, and his face hits a streak of last night’s sickness. “Shit.” He wipes his cheek and gets off the bed. In the corner of the room is a rat. Well, that about sums it up. I’m sleeping in my own puke and my only company is a rat.

  Amos grabs his hair. It’s one massive rat’s nest. This makes him laugh. It makes some kind of crazy sense. He reaches into his torn pocket and pulls out the rest of his money — two twenties. He can’t remember the last time he had a good cup of coffee or decent company. They’ve all been rats of one stripe or another for years. Amos starts to realize how absurd this sounds. He’s fifty-nine and he’s been drunk and keeping company with filthy rats for years, decades.

  What did that sonofabitch want? He fingers his money and decides to hit the Sally Ann for some new threads and maybe get himself a coffee. He cusses Jacob out as he does so. How did that sonofabitch know his name?

  JACOB IS STANDING ACROSS the street from the rooming house. Amos can’t believe his eyes. Great, now I got the fuckin’ DTs. Jacob saunters over.

  “Say, Amos. What you up to?” Just like they were old friends.

  Amos fakes, “Not a lot, bro. Thought I would head to the Sally Ann for some new threads.”

  “I’m heading that way myself. Mind if I join you?”

  Amos isn’t sure if he minds. He hasn’t been asked that for a long time. He tries to think, but the only words that keep popping up are that Jacob could drink a beer or a coffee and he couldn’t. He thrusts his hands in his pockets to hide the shaking and decides to tell Jacob about the puke and the rat. It’s a story. Indians can’t seem to stop telling stories and they love hearing them. He puts it out there, like it�
�s a damned happy piece of shit, only Jacob doesn’t laugh.

  At the Sally Ann, Jacob turns and gives Amos that smile again. “You know, my old auntie Celia says black slacks and a white shirt are sexy. Must be because she’s nearly forty, huh?” Amos laughs. Jacob has him; it’s just a matter of time. He watches Amos stew over the price of every shirt and jean he fingers, finally settling on a couple of shirts and two pairs of jeans. It comes in under ten dollars.

  On the way out the door, Jacob says he’s heading back home. “Got things to do and people to see.”

  Amos is about to invite him for a drink, but doesn’t think he can handle another talking lake story, so he says, “Sure man. Later.”

  THERE IS A WOMAN in the bar. She looks like an old she-cat from any local rez; older maybe, but still looking good. She’s sitting at the bar alone. In front of her is a book; she’s scribbling on its blank pages. There’s a cup of steaming coffee in front of her. Amos decides to begin with coffee and end with beer and this woman.

  “Writing love letters?”

  “Poems.” Celia smiles. Amos thinks he recognizes the smile. Celia keeps him entertained all afternoon. She orders coffee and declines beer with “It’s too early.”

  “Yeah,” Amos agrees, stupidly, he thinks right after he’s said it. Now he feels like he has to stick with it. The bartender is surprised. Amos is a regular here, but he rarely drinks coffee. Matter of fact, the bartender has never seen him drink coffee. Man will just about do anything to get laid, he thinks, and keeps the coffee coming. About four o’clock, Celia swings off her stool and says she has to go.

  “You going to give me a phone number or something?” Amos asks. “Or you just going to eat and run?”

  “That would be ‘drink and run.’” She scribbles her number onto a page, tears it out of her book, and slides on out of the bar. Jacob is waiting for her. She smiles.

  “He’s ours.”

  The serpent is desperate. The air is cooling off. Fall is being pushed back by winter’s tide. The snake can’t slither so easily, but he is so hungry his eyes bulge. He must make one last foray out into the village to find something he can swallow, some piece of madness to satiate the cannibal spirit consuming him. His skin tightens. Each head threatens to eat the other, he is so hungry. All summer long he chased Jacob, but Jacob wouldn’t budge. That mountain is inside him. He is too big. On the bridge, just before white town, a boy stands. He holds a rope. At the other end is a cat, his tail tied to the rope. The boy hangs it over the bridge. The cat screams, and his squirming loosens his tail from his body. He falls to the stone below. The little boy opens his mouth to laugh. The snake enters and fills himself up. The snake returns to his pit. He can barely move. He hasn’t much time before the air will be too cold for him to move.

  The old bones have managed to sing the new ones into hopeful cooperation — the longhouse will see that they are buried properly in time. They begin to sing the old songs.

  XXIII

  THE OLD MAN HAD been here all summer and into late fall. He sat with these men, unloading the basket of knowledge he carried until he thought they were ready to build the longhouse. Jim and Jacob enter her first. Ned isn’t ready. The old man doesn’t think Ned will ever be ready. He doesn’t mind. Ned remembers what the old man said and he will stay long enough to remind them of his words after he is gone. The boys listen to Ned. The old man feels Ned’s inability to walk through the door of that house, and the melancholy coming over him, but he just can’t muster the sincerity of those boys.

  AMOS SAT WITH THE boys from late summer through the fall. The old man knew who he was. Jacob admitted it one day when the old man asked him. The old man was glad that Jacob told him the truth, the whole of it. When Jacob told him he meant to dance him — really dance him into his comeuppance, the old man shrugged. “It’s your house,” was all he said. “Does that one know?” And he nodded in Ned’s direction. “No, but my auntie and my gramma do.” He shrugged again. “It’s your house.”

  THE OLD MAN TELLS the story of the last war the humans in this area had engaged themselves in. “That’s when clubbing came into being,” he said softly. “They got so bloodthirsty, they had started to war on one another. Pitch woman gave that boy a club, that one who couldn’t kill. It was like the war drained all the blood lust out of that boy and he knew he had to end the war. The boy was so drained of any desire to kill that he could hardly get up the motivation to kill something to feed himself.”

  “Pretty bad, huh, Amos?”

  Amos agrees.

  The old man laughs. Amos has no idea what the old man is talking about; the old man knows this and finds it amusing.

  That night, Celia and Jacob decide to club Amos’s old friend — the other one.

  Jacob smiles at his aunt. “We got them both. We’re ready to dance.”

  ON HIS WAY TO the edge of the village, the old man signals Ned to join him. The other boys start to come. The old man shakes his head. At the ramparts to the bridge, the old man speaks: “Those fish are swimming upstream. Let’s watch them for a bit.” They are standing at the arc. The old man points to a dead fish on the bank, its mate atop the falls, waiting for him.

  “They all jump. Not everyone makes it, but all those guys jump. The dead one there, he inspires the others to try. They won’t necessarily make it either, and that woman there, she waits. Doesn’t matter how long to her, she waits, she won’t swallow anything else until he comes or she dies. It goes that way sometimes.”

  “I’m too old to leap.”

  “No,” the old man said. “You’re too old to make it, but you’re young enough to remember. You remember what I said for them boys. We’re both too old to do much besides remember, but it’s enough. It has to be.”

  When the doors to the smokehouse open, a scraggly group of villagers not related to any of the family walk through too. This surprises Ned. Momma looks prettier than she had ever looked and that worries Ned some. It means she is keeping a secret that pleases her. He doesn’t much care for the notion that she keeps secrets from him. Jimmy’s baby is due any moment now and Momma can hardly wait. Martha’s Stella has recovered. She lives at the old Snake’s end, but now no one would recognize the place. She had a fair hand at a hammer and saw and had fixed the place up pretty good with what she scavenged from the other broken down homes in the village. She is going to college now and her little girl is at school.

  Alex comes back to visit every now and then. He stands at his son’s gravesite longer than is comfortable. Celia is kind to him now, but she will never again call up that old feeling. Ned told Alex about the opening of the longhouse, so he is here too. Celia and Jacob spend a lot of time together, talking about this thing called culture. It brings Momma into their private world. Ned listens, but something makes him want to wait and see.

  Steve is excited. The last smokehouse had been burned in the twenties. He had listened to old Ella recount its story when he asked her how come they don’t just cross the bridge and join the world of the others. They were free to do so, he ended his question. “You are not free, you are not free to cross the bridge and come into my smokehouse, so you are not in a position to determine how free I am,” she had begun the story. She had ended it with, “You are never free if you have only one choice.” Steve feels the freedom this house represents to him. Stacey wasn’t sure about building a smokehouse, but she likes excitement coming from this man — it’s infectious.

  There are six men and two women about to be initiated into the house. The snake wakes up. He manages to slither to the outside of the house. Soon it will be too late. He slithers in different directions. His skin shed too soon. His eyes dried. His tongue is beginning to dry. He has to swallow Jacob or acquiesce to losing this battle before it’s too late and winter freezes his blood. He tried. He slithers through the middle of the village, cold stilling his back. He weaves his way through, hunting for somethi
ng.

  There is something on the bridge. That solitary boy is dangling another small cat. The serpent circles the boy. The boy feels him and panics. The boy starts to pull the screaming cat up. His mouth hangs open; the snake leaps inside, squirming as he does so. The boy feels it, and jerks the rope taut. The jerk cuts the cat loose of his tail with a terrifying shriek. The cat splatters over the stones below, its blood thin as the water that sends the cat cascading over the rocks. It pales from red to pink and finally runs clear just as it runs under the bridge and out of the boy’s sight.

  The boy leans back, into the echo of the serpent’s laugh as it goes off inside. He leans as far back as he dares over the rail. “More,” the snake hisses. “More.” The boy leans some more. The water pushes up on the cat’s squirming body. It is still alive. It shrieks as the water’s push ends its life. The boy leans one more time and falls over the side, crashing his head on the stone next to the cat. The serpent leaves the boy’s body at the same time that the cat breathes its last.

  In the meadow near the stone the restless head of the serpent smiles. There are plenty of victims where that one came from. He sleeps. Restless dreams he ate the sense of choice from everybody in the village. He dreams of snaking his way across thousands of miles of forest, field, and desert, swallowing this newly born joy before it grows too big for him to threaten. Gramma Alice watches him with a wicked grin. It won’t be long, she smiles; you’ll be back under the ground where you belong.

  She floats back to the feast hall. Momma is stirring fish-head soup. She mutters the whole time she cooks. Stacey thinks she is getting old, talking to herself like that, until she listens to what her mother is saying. The words make some kind of crazy sense. She wants to know what Momma is doing, and then she remembers: she’s talking to the food. Stacey’s language is rusty, but she joins her mother’s quiet muttering to each thing she cuts and cooks. Celia breaks into English, uttering whatever good thoughts and gratitude come to mind.