LAST WEEK: Jim visits the town of Green. Gabriel begins to see more colors.
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Chapter 66
Jim
Greene — 1985
History Lies
Once inside the library, Jim scoots around the intricate carved wood pillars and heads straight to the card file. On a slip of white paper, small as the fortune inside a cookie, he scribbles down call numbers for books on native history. He wanders over to the shelves, but before he can select a book or even read the titles, a large volume topples, falling open at his feet. Jim kneels beside the book.
The pages turn, blown by an imperceptible wind. They crackle like fall leaves. The scent of campfires and moist earth rising from their leaves smells of life and decay, loss and memory.
“Like you, I used to think the Algonquians were a tribe, but Speakers of Algonquian languages stretched up the east coast of North America all the way to the Rocky Mountains,” Ryo whispers. He is glad to talk to someone who will listen. He knows that Jim, with his questing soul, cannot help but hear him, loud as an answer.
“The Lenni Lenape’s roots go so far back into the mists of time. There is no record of their arrival here. They crossed the Bering Strait when it was a bridge of ice and frost.” A page turns under the touch of an invisible hand.
“Their homeland included New Jersey, Delaware, parts of Pennsylvania, and New York State,” Jim reads. “But, by the mid-eighteenth century, they had been driven out. Displaced by Quakers and other religious minorities. Today, their descendants live on, continuing their traditions in Oklahoma and Ontario, Canada, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, although the Pennsylvania tribe is not officially recognized.” A shiver runs down Jim’s back.
“I think sometimes it’s better to read things in black and white,” Ryo says. “One is more apt to believe a book than a man. Funny if you think about it, as it’s men who write books. Still, I can see how it would be nice to have something besides the word of two ghosts to rely on.”
“Before the arrival of white man, the banks of the Lenapewihittuk, River of the Lenape, were dotted with Lenape villages,” Jim reads. “The English rechristened the river the Delaware in honor of Lord De La Warr, first governor of Virginia. Thus, the inhabitants along its shores have become known as the Delawares.”
“I love that use of passive tense,” Ryo says. “‘Have become known,’ like it’s an act of nature that renamed the people.”
“The Lenape were gentle people who lived in harmony with nature and each other. They were remarkably nonaggressive, not interested in territory or political influence. They believed that land was a gift to be shared.
“Lenape women were equals to their husbands. Their children were reared with love. Parents feared that unloved children would be taken by the Creator.”
I wish my dad had been a Lenape, Jim thinks.
“Don’t we all,” Ryo says. “Don’t we all.”
Words fade. Pictures flowed over the page like water. Jim sees a small village of half-domed, windowless huts. They are built on the bowed frames of saplings and fastened with rushes, strips of bark, and hide. Through holes in the roof, smoke curls lazily into the blue sky like ascending souls. Jim has never seen a sky so blue. He smells wood burning, hears leaves crunch beneath his feet. The deer skin door in one of the huts parts, and Amimi stands in the opening. On her shoulder is a crow.
Overhead, the sky turns an iridescent gray with feathered clouds of pigeons. Light bent by the beveled windows plays on the floor round his feet like the ghosts of children.
Chapter 67
Gabriel
San Francisco — 1985
Azure
Gabriel has made another delivery. Returning home, he falls into bed, falls into dreams as real as memory held between the padded paws of sleep.
Orchids sway against a blue sky. He has never seen blue before. The sky, the bay, have always been black and white, cross-hatched into waves, blotted into clouds. Now sky and bay are azure. It is overwhelming, breathtaking, so much color, so much variety.
Although he does not know it, Gabriel is seeing a solitary shade, a lone variety of tree, a garden of red flowers, an orchestra playing a single note. There is no harmony, but neither is there discord. However, slowly, softly, color by color, shade by shade, Gabriel’s vista is expanding. The world is in transition. With change and diversity come complications.
Chapter 68
Jim
Onteoras — 1985
Totems and Skinwalkers
Jim leaves the library. Outside, the day is fresh and green, but he is unaware. He climbs into the back of his old blue pick-up truck and sits there, dazed and motionless. Dust from the road blows across his windshield, exposing a line drawing of roses and silhouettes of flying birds.
Jim shakes his head, trying to wipe his mind clear of vision and memory, trying to forget an unseen voice and a vanished love. He turns on his rusty wipers, blurring the images, but not the recollection. He drives slowly homeward, parks his pick-up, and wanders to the barn. Half-finished coyotes, wingless crows, and legless wolves lie on the workbench right where Jim left them.
He stares unseeing at cobwebs hanging like moss from the rafters; occasionally they catch beams of light, turning them into bits of rainbows.
He can’t work that day. He’s trying to make sense of history, an almost impossible task. At night, Jim lies on the porch, watching the stars, listening to the crickets’ love song. He waits, not certain if he hopes or fears to hear Ryo’s voice, trying to figure out why visions disturb him more than ghostly voices.
If Ryo can still be heard, he thinks, even if only as a voice in the wind, then something, a soul perhaps, a consciousness, continues after death.
It is past midnight when he goes to bed. Immediately, he falls into darkness. The darkness converges, shaping into Amimi. Around her, wolves dance. She throws her head back and howls. Suddenly Jim is outside. Under the moon, bright and full, hungry shadows race, silent as wind. In the stillness, although she makes no sound, Jim hears Amimi’s voice.
“Trust your heart and not your eyes. You know that eyes deceive. You have sought visions to escape; now use visions to find wisdom. Do not trust appearances. Do not seek beauty and perfection. When making a blanket, a good weaver leaves a flaw in the weaving to let the soul out.
“Do not worry about the wolf in human clothing. I tell you, beware the human under wolf’s skin. All rough furs are not the same.
“Wolves are our brothers. They bring us warning in the night. They stalk the weak and ill. They hunt to survive. It is only men who hunt for sport, men who kill the strongest and the best, men who trade their soul for power.
“You read of werewolves; we tell of yenaldooshi, the skinwalkers. They made a deal with death; they feed on lies and deceit, creatures spawned from night terrors, traveling under different names, but wearing the same coat. They wander to all times and all places, searching for belief, hoping for faith, settling for fear.
“Lock eyes with a skinwalker and it will seep into your body. It can steal your soul and dissolve it like snow in summer. This is one of the reasons the wise will not look directly into someone’s eyes. Your people find this shifty and sly, thinking us guilty of evil thoughts.”
Amimi opens her hands and yellow powder cascades from her fingertips onto the smooth, gray gravel stones where Jim parks his pick-up. Wherever the powder falls, flowers sprout—yellow and purple crocus, scarlet paintbrush, delicate pale columbine, and three-petal trillium.
“Pollen, a blessing from Earth Mother to make the barren fruitful.”
“Jim,” calls a voice in the darkness. “Jim, I’m here. How I have missed you.”
Jim knows that voice. He starts running, tripping and stumbling over rough rocks in his path. Tears stream down his face like winter rain. They fall onto the dark earth, glistening briefly in the night. From each, a small, pure white lily blooms. No stamen fat with pollen rises from the lilies’ hearts, however: these flowers are barren as heartache, as sterile as lies.
In the night shadows of trees, shunning the moonlight, a man waits. It is Kristjan, taller than Jim remembers. He is nearly naked, covered only by a wolf skin. In the night, his eyes glow red. As Jim looks at him, unable to turn away, something dark slips beneath Jim’s fingernails, flowing like a shadow into his blood.
Kristjan reaches toward Jim with open arms. His hands are gloved with bone-white powder. Jim cannot move. He is paralyzed by the glowing eyes.
Suddenly the air becomes loud with flapping. The night turns black; the full moon is blotted out by dark wings, wings that have rainbows hidden inside each feather.
Kristjan leaps, twisting as he rises. In mid-air, his body lengthens and curves. His face elongates, coarse hair sprouts from his body. He stares at Jim, long wolf face hungry. His eyes are lifeless, no longer glowing in the blackness. He bounds toward the trees, leaving no imprint on the damp earth.
“Skinwalkers can read thoughts. Theirs is the power of death,” whispers Amimi’s voice inside his head.
“We sprinkle pollen, the yellow dust of life, as a blessing. But the strength of the skinwalker, the yenaldooshi, comes from the bodies of the dead, the powder of bone.
“I see endings and beginnings. I see heartache and sorrow.
“Look well where you are going. Expect the unexpected.
“If you do not travel with an open heart, you will not find your destination. It is not to be reached by road or trail.
“I see a river and a boatman. There, you will find peace.”
The birds fly overhead. The darkness passes. Moon and stars shine down like promises. Amimi is gone, scattered like pollen by wind.
Jim is alone. He shivers. He inhales, smelling only the fragrance of jasmine and the sap of pine. He walks slowly, head bent, toward his tiny house, dry needles and maple leaves crunching beneath his feet.
There, on the rocks, where Amimi’s crocus had lately blossomed, lie two coins, silver rimmed with gold. They shine like flat dew drops. Jim scoops them up. They fit into the heart of his palm, curiously warm, twins of the one that lies beside Jim’s heart.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK:
“Man kills the forests at his feet
The ice caps melt under his heat
Under his ever-cutting hand
Civilization turns to sand.
Making wastelands of the wild.
A sandbox for his only child.
Men talk money while we wait
Meekly to inherit fate.”
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.