by Laura Resau
The song faded and his body fell limp against the wall. His journey had begun. Now his soul was traveling through the night, to the stream, to the girl’s spirit. We watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall.
“Is he all right?” the woman asked me.
I nodded. “Soon he’ll be back,” I assured her.
But Ta’nu wasn’t back soon. Time passed. Much more time than it had ever taken him before. The girl’s parents barely moved. Their eyes flickered back and forth between their daughter and Ta’nu. Back and forth, back and forth. Watching and waiting. Once in a while they looked at me with faces full of questions. But what could I tell them? I kept watching Ta’nu’s body closely, making sure his chest rose and fell. Something wasn’t right. This was taking too long.
He’d always told me never to touch him, never to wake him during a soul travel. It was too dangerous, he’d said. A touch could break the thread from his body to his soul. But he’d never told me what to do if he didn’t come back.
Time passed. A dog barked in the distance. Silence again. Then another sound. A wilder sound pierced the night. The cry of a jaguar.
Soon the roosters would crow. Loud noises like a rooster’s crow could also break the string. Ta’nu had to come back soon. Why was he taking so long?
His chest stopped moving. He lay still, perfectly still.
The woman turned to me. Her mouth hung open in alarm.
I closed my eyes. I willed Ta’nu to take another breath. Breathe…breathe…breathe… On a tiny current of air I entered his lungs. I entered his lungs and urged them to rise.
My eyes opened and his chest rose. He was breathing again. Breathing, but faintly. Very faintly.
“Wait here,” I told the girl’s parents.
I ran to the kitchen. Some tea remained at the bottom of the pot, a half cup’s worth. That should be enough for me. I was half the size of Ta’nu. I ran back to the hut. My feet slapped the mud. I kept one hand over the cup to keep it from splashing. Back in the hut, I sat down, took a deep breath, and drank the cold tea. Oh, it was bitter. So bitter, I almost spit it right out.
I sang, the same way Ta’nu did. I asked the spirits and saints and God for help. The rhythm carried me, the rhythm of my voice. A voice that spiraled upward with the copal smoke. My tongue and lips felt numb, yet I heard words coming out of my mouth. Words that I couldn’t feel myself forming. Behind my eyelids I saw swirls of light. Pulsing whirlwinds I saw. Whirlwinds pulsing with cricket sounds, with my heartbeat, with the light drumming of rain.
Then I was outside, in the night. But I felt no earth under my feet. I hovered above, at the treetops. Everything glowed. Only a crescent of moon showed that night, but the leaves and branches glimmered, silver. And everything pulsed with life. The trees whispered to me, the corn murmured. Even the stones were breathing. Over the treetops I moved. Below, I saw threads, like spiders’ webs, connecting everything.
Walking, it would have taken hours to reach the girl’s village, but my flight lasted only minutes. Soon I reached the shiny curving stream that marked the outskirts of the village. I floated above the woods at the water’s edge, then made my way downstream. There they were, Ta’nu and the girl! On top of a cluster of stones in the middle of the river. Two wispy figures, glowing faintly. So faintly I’d almost missed them. Their soul strings seemed to be knotted together and pinned down with rocks.
But just behind them was something else. Oh, it was something so cold! Something that chilled my bones. Something that made me want to fly home as fast as I could. The spirit of the stream. He hadn’t seen me yet, but I saw his eyes. Eyes that formed dark whirlpools, sucking me in, threatening to drown me.
I hovered, hidden in the leaves, helpless. If I tried to untangle their strings, the spirit of the stream might capture me, too. I looked around for a sign of Ta’nu’s spirit animal, a deer with eight white spots. No deer to be seen. Perhaps the spirit of the stream had pulled the deer under its frothing waves. Ta’nu and his deer spirit had been rescuing souls all their lives. So what could I, a little girl, do?
There I lingered, at the edge of the woods, hoping the spirit of the stream wouldn’t notice me. Then, below me, a noise. A rustle in the underbrush.
It was the shiny form of a jaguar! His spots shimmered like tiny moons, and he stood so close underneath me I could nearly touch his powerful shoulders. He looked up. Moonlight glinted in his eyes. Then, in one swift motion, he loped over to the stream and lapped at it with his tongue.
The stream spirit froze. The black pools of his eyes filled with fear. He backed away, downstream.
I watched the jaguar. Water dripped from his jaws. He looked straight at the stream spirit, opened his mouth, and let out a cry. A cry that ripped through the night like lightning.
In a flash, the spirit of the stream disappeared underwater.
Now was my chance. I descended from the leaves. Little by little I moved toward Ta’nu. His eyes held terror. Terror was something I’d never seen there before.
I looked at the girl. Her spirit body was thin and trembling. First I loosened the knots at Ta’nu’s wrists. All the time I felt the eyes of the jaguar behind me. And I realized something. I realized he was not stalking me. No, he was guarding me, protecting me.
Untangling took a long time. Imagine the worst tangle you’ve ever gotten in your hair, how much patience you need to smooth it out. Then, after the soul strings were untangled, it took all my strength to heave aside the rocks. One big push on the last rock, and there, Ta’nu was free. He kissed my forehead, then helped me let the girl loose. How fast he was! His fingers were well practiced—quick and nimble like a weaver’s. Soon enough, the girl was free too. She shook out her arms, and a trace of a smile came to her face.
I looked back at the jaguar. Still, he was watching me. His gaze was steady and tender, as a mother looks at her baby. How can a jaguar have tenderness, you wonder. A creature that weighs more than a man, that kills its prey with a single bite through the skull. A creature that dwells in secret places, where people never see. But I tell you, this jaguar looked at me with a fierce tenderness. I had no fear.
The jaguar took a last lap at the stream, then, with a flick of his long tail, turned and sauntered off into the forest. Into the thick foliage he went, where sunlight doesn’t pass, where even moonlight doesn’t pass.
Ta’nu and I held tightly to the girl’s hands. Together we flew back over the trees, across the hills, into the yellow glow of the hut.
The next morning, the girl and her parents left for their village. They gave us a sack of pitayas—cactus fruit—as payment. Outside in the morning sunshine, Ta’nu and I ate them together. We leaned against a tree, worn out as old sandals, tired from the long night. Tired but content, eating the sweet fruit. One after another we ate the pitayas, our fingers sticky with red juice.
“Ita, little one,” Ta’nu said. “You saved us last night. Thank you.”
His words made me flush with pride.
But then he sighed. “Who knows how the stream spirit caught me? He sucked my deer spirit underwater and carried her downstream so she could not help me. Even so, I shouldn’t have been caught. Oh, perhaps I am too old…perhaps it is nearly time….” His voice dwindled. “Still, Ita, you have much to learn before your next soul flight.”
“Why, Ta’nu?” I wanted to fly again, soon.
“Soul flights are dangerous, very dangerous, my child.”
“When can I go again?” I pressed.
“You know your spirit animal now. You must thank him. That way he will always protect you.”
Ta’nu sliced open another pitaya and handed it to me. The red seemed redder than ever. The shiny seeds blacker than ever. My life up to then had been like a forest reflected in water, I thought. A flat forest. Now I was beginning to understand the deep places, the high places, the hidden places. The caves and mountains and tree hollows. Oh, part of me was flying as I sat under the tree.
“I won’t have
to wait long, will I?”
“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “I’ve suspected that you would be a healer, Ita. As your father was. But the life of a healer is difficult. More so for a woman. I feel sad for you, little one.” Again, he paused. “Yet I feel happy for you too.”
“Why?” I asked, confused.
“Sad for the suffering you will endure. But happy because you will help others live.” He took a bite of pitaya and chewed thoughtfully. “Through that, Ita, you will know what it means to be alive. Truly alive.”
My cousin’s shrill voice broke our peace. “Helena! Come help us make tortillas! Hurry! Before my father wakes up!”
It wasn’t fair! Ta’nu always rested after staying up all night on a soul journey. I wanted to curl up under the tree too. Curl up and sleep, right next to him. Happy and full of red pitayas.
He looked at me with tenderness and brushed the hair out of my face. “I wish you could rest here too, Ita. But for women, life is work.”
“Helena!” Aunt Teresa appeared outside the kitchen door. “The tortillas!”
I sighed and took a last bite of pitaya. Slowly, I chewed it. So slowly, keeping it in my mouth as long as I could. I rolled the seeds around on my tongue while I dragged myself into the kitchen. My tongue rolled the shiny black seeds as I patted out the corn dough, trying to remember the deep places and the high places. Trying to hold on to that flying feeling.
Clara
After Abuelita’s story, I couldn’t stop thinking about souls. Was my soul what made me different from the plastic doll? My soul, my inside self. When I was younger, my outside self matched my inside self, like a shoe fitting perfectly over a foot. But the shoes I’d been trying on for the past year just didn’t fit right. They were too loose or too tight in places. Too stiff or too flat. All year in eighth grade I tried to get into things that Samantha and our other friends were doing. We went to the mall and walked back and forth past the plastic trees and the fountain with the fake waterfall. But it didn’t feel right.
For a while I’d wondered if I needed to know more about my Mexican roots. One day, my social studies teacher asked me to describe how Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead. I said I didn’t know. Then red-haired, blue-eyed Hannah O’Neil raised her hand and talked about sugar skulls and altars for dead relatives. I sank down in my seat, feeling stupid.
As far as I knew, there weren’t any other kids with a Mexican parent in my school. Some of them had Spanish last names but didn’t speak any Spanish. Some of them had a parent from another Latin American country, like Venezuela or Argentina. Once, a girl in my math class with an Argentinian father invited me to her house. Maybe everything will fit together there, I thought. But they spoke Spanish with strange sounds in a strange rhythm. And when her father, a surgeon, asked how my own father ended up here, I turned red and said I didn’t know. I left her house with a heavy feeling in my stomach.
Really, I didn’t even know what my inside self was anymore. It seemed all jumbled up, like puzzle pieces that got dropped and somehow didn’t fit back together.
I thought of the little girl’s spirit that Abuelita rescued. I hoped my spirit was still all in one piece inside me, not trapped by an evil spirit in a rack of jeans at a department store.
All this was going through my head as I walked along the edge of the cornfield, toward the mountains that towered over Yucuyoo. My belly felt full from a late breakfast of beans and tortillas and lemongrass tea. Abuelita had said they grew almost all their food themselves. She’d shown me the bean vines, the tall clumps of grass that smelled, strangely enough, like yellow Life Savers, the dried corn still on the cobs that she stripped and boiled and ground to make tortillas. After the meal, I’d stayed alert for signs of Montezuma’s revenge, but so far so good. Of course, the outhouse had been gross, and I had to sit over the wooden hole a full ten minutes before I was relaxed enough to go, but everything came out normal. Mom would have been happy that Abuelita boiled the drinking water in a giant pot over the fire to kill all the germs.
When the neat rows of corn ended, the land grew rocky. A steep dirt path led up through grasses and wildflowers. Hummingbirds and butterflies wove in and out of my path.
Abuelita’s sandals felt solid under my feet. I’d told her this morning she could have her shoes back. I said I could wear my gypsy shoes with two pairs of socks so that I wouldn’t get blisters. “No, mi amor,” she said. “Wear my sandals. My feet prefer touching the earth as they walk.”
Sometimes when you wear another person’s clothes, part of that person rubs off on you. Maybe it was Abuelita’s sandals that made me start thinking about hidden things. I pictured my life as a big forest. Up until a couple of days ago, I’d only lived in one little clump of trees. I’d thought that was all there was. But Abuelita had pulled me into another clump—another world. And here I was.
Now the path grew shady, with trees and moss-covered boulders along the way. I breathed in the smell of wet earth. This place reminded me of my nights in the woods at the edge of Walnut Hill, when I had the feeling that every cell of my body was tingling, ready for something big to happen.
The trail ended at a small stream, about knee-deep, maybe ten feet across. Water bugs ran across the surface and tiny fish flashed underneath.
I stopped and sat on a rock to map out the route so far. See, anytime I go somewhere new I make a map and think about the place from all perspectives. I imagine I’m a bird, looking down at the scene from above. I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page. With my pencil, I began tracing the path along the cornfield to the stream.
That was when I noticed the sound.
At first I thought it was the wind…but there was no wind. The leaves hung still. Maybe there was a highway nearby—it could be the rush of trucks. But no, that couldn’t be it—we’d traveled hours on one-lane dirt roads to get here. And the stream was too small to make more noise than a soft gurgling. What it really sounded like was a waterfall—a muffled waterfall. If that was it, it had to be farther upstream. I slammed my sketchbook shut, stuck it in my backpack, and started jogging along the stream.
A little while later, I paused to catch my breath. I shrugged off my backpack and leaned against a rock face. It felt cool on my back. The rock outcropping towered above me. Vines draped over the rock’s surface like a curtain of ropy hair. I had the urge to move back the vines, the way Mom always tried to push the bangs out of my face. The rushing sounded louder now, like a tub faucet turned on full force behind a bathroom door. But I didn’t see a waterfall anywhere.
The sun was high in the sky, already past the middle of its arc, now dropping toward the mountains. My grandparents ate lunch in the late afternoon, and I’d told them I’d eat with them. I took one last look around and then jogged back downhill. My legs kept going faster and faster, until the rest of me was just trying to keep up with them.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and soon, dark clouds blew in. The wind picked up, whipping branches this way and that. Green shadows flew past me. I leaped over fallen logs and ducked under low tree limbs. And you know the strange thing? All this wildness didn’t scare me. It felt good. It felt right. What was outside me matched what was inside. I could feel my heart racing—boom-BOOM, boom-BOOM— and my blood pulsing under my skin—shh-shhh, shh-shhh— and my breath moving in and out like wind through a tunnel—oo-hoo, oo-hoo. They were the sounds of the waterfall, the sounds of a seashell pressed to your ear. Rushing blood mixed with pounding rain until the two things became one and the same.
Rain drummed on the kitchen roof. Over lunch, Abuelita had told me that in the rainy season buckets of rain fell every afternoon. I sat by the kitchen fire in jeans and my fuzzy green sweater with holes in it. I liked the holes. They were souvenirs from a hike Dad and I took through a thorny field in Maryland early last fall when the sky was unbelievably blue. No wonder Dad was so crazy about nature, after growing up in a place like this, tucked into mountains and forests.
That hike thr
ough thorns in the fall was the last hike Dad and I took together. When I’d told Samantha about the hike at school on Monday, she said, “Clara, you are, like, the most wholesome girl in our entire school.” After that, whenever Dad asked me, I made up some excuse about homework or hanging out with friends. He would look down at the ground and say softly, “Okay, then. I’ll go alone. Yo solo y mi alma.” Just me and my soul.
Once Samantha hinted that my dad was stuck with his landscaping job because he hadn’t gone to college like her father. It felt like a kick in the stomach. I didn’t know what to say. Mom always bragged that Dad came over as a penniless fruit picker and was smart enough to work his way up to owning a business. Of course, I didn’t tell Samantha that. I didn’t want anyone to know that my dad was ever an illegal fruit picker. But if Samantha were here now I’d tell her that maybe he just wanted to be outside, around plants, because that was how he grew up.
I wondered what Dad and Mom and Hector were doing now. Dad, especially. I wondered if he was thinking about me, thinking about his parents, about Yucuyoo. I had a flash of inspiration and decided to fill my sketchbook with drawings for him. On the first page was the little pink house with shutters and flowers in the windows. I labeled that What I Imagined. On the second page was a picture of the shacks and outhouse and wild gardens nestled in a valley that I’d drawn my first evening here. What Is Real. I looked at the two pictures side by side. If you wanted something familiar and predictable to hang over your sofa, you’d pick the first picture. But if you wanted a picture that held surprises and secrets, a scene to look at closely and explore, you would pick the second.
I flipped to the page with the map I’d drawn of the path up the mountain. Path to a Waterfall? I wrote as the caption. I still didn’t know where to put the waterfall, but I felt sure it existed.