Rose Grassleggings was the only woman ever chosen from the tribe to stand with the men who sang the Black Hummingbird Society warrior songs. Her vocal accompaniment was a trademark of sorts, something people would recall for years and years. Her presence imbued the songs with a wailing female emanation. What was discerned in her incredible voice, it was said, was the encumbrance of being a woman. She could sound like a bereaved mother weeping unrestrained in the hills after sundown, or she could sound like a grandmother who was singing for all the present and forthcoming Black Eagle Child generations. . . .
During the summer in which the Black Hummingbirds were taking their vows of subservience, the initiates came to her porch, leaving four red stones on a freshly woven reed mat. Aged and shiny in a patina made by centuries of ceremonial upkeep—which “overnight” non-Indian tribal art scholars will pay thousands of dollars for, knowing they can quadruple their return upon selling them—the invitation stones resembled Easter eggs made of catlinite or pipestone. Upon them were epigraphs written in French and Black Eagle Child. Parallel to the stones themselves was an antique French rapier with a beaded scabbard that was decorated with the spotted heads and tail feathers of two small indistinguishable birds of prey.
Ordinarily, invitations were extended to men, preferably those with combat, hunting, or singing|and songmaking experience. Because of Rose’s extraordinary healing skills, the Black Hummingbirds made an exception. They knew she would honor them by returning these sacred materials, her gesture of acceptance. The community was dependent on her invaluable services. In addition to her traditional doctoring, she had the burden of performing the “shadow-releasing” ceremony for most deceased tribal members. She cleared the way and opened doors to the Hereafter.
Long ago, under the tutelage of a prominent medicine woman named Jane Ribbon, Rose Grassleggings accepted the awesome responsibility of healing. It didn’t happen right away, though. But it should have because Jane was a close relative. For Rose, adulthood wasn’t as easy as childhood. Romping along the shores of the two rivers with her renowned pearl-diving Many Nickel sisters was far from the debilitating existence she had had as a woman.
Were it not for her association with Jane Ribbon, Rose could not have gotten through a succession of failed marriages, children with different fathers, and epispdic bouts with alcoholism, obesity, and abuse. Jane was the one person to whom Rose crawled in misery. Oftentimes she woke up on her porch. From Jane she learned how to heal herself with medicinal plants; from her mother’s aunt Sophie she learned words spoken to the dearly departed, words that strengthened one’s own existence.
For the Black Eagle Childs, time was an adversary. In the past and up through the present it sandblasted the stone pictograph of our bird aegis to an unidentifiable object, leaving a remnant that only the blessed, like Rose, could read and understand. As the elders passed away, one by one, including Jane Ribbon, those people who had last been close to the elders were seen differently. Rose eventually attained status as a keeper of importance. In spite of her original credibility problems, tribal members realized she had acquired vast healing and “shadow-releasing” knowledge. Even if it was on a piecemeal basis. The elders rationalized that Rose’s instability personified the very plight of the keepers themselves, that unstable roads were an intrinsic part of living.
For years these healing and “shadow-releasing” practices remained within the Ribbon family, but when the remaining Many Nickel sisters careened off the spiritual road, Rose Grassleggings was stuck with an enormous obligation. Fearing that she would ultimately fail her mentors Jane and Sophia Ribbon, Rose made a number of wrong choices. It wasn’t until the birth of her hermaphrodite daughter named Brook that Rose’s association with Jane deepened. The Holy Grandfather had asked her to heal people and send them on through to the doors of the Afterlife, but He had also asked her to suffer, to experience unimaginable torment.
“Long ago we either lost or mishandled the gift of healing,” said the Black Hummingbirds delegation after they knocked on her door. Their combined, syncopated voices came through the door, and the brass hinges squeaked along and vibrated. In the air was the fragrant aroma of the autumn leaves of walnut and red oak trees.
“With fewer and fewer Earthlodge clan worshippers, we are making rules that are less strict,” they said in a short spiel.
That was the main pitch. They were inviting her to become a member of the elite and much-feared Black Hummingbirds.
“Ka tti-ni ni we na-tte we ske? Why, is that all there is?” she asked, wondering whether she should turn on the porch lights.
“E a i, yes!” they said.
“A kwi-ma ma ha tti-ni na wa tti-na ha mo we kwi ni? Will you not sing first?” “A kwi, no!”
And that was it. She heard a clatter of footsteps, the shutting of metal doors, and the 4 × 4 truck engines rumbling to life, along with several motorcycles.
It didn’t take much deliberation. She sent word by messenger that she had accepted their invitation.
The next day a person arrived to advise and instruct her on what to expect.
“There are eight persons in all who stand up throughout the elaborate day-long ritual,” she was told. “The clans themselves sit outside of the earthlodge ten to jfifteen feet away and quietly observe, careful not to disturb or interact with the worshippers.”
The four wall panels, the corners, of the elongated octagon-shaped structure were removed for people to see what was happening inside.
She was already aware of these factors.
At the juncture where the day was divided into four parts—predawn, morning, noon, and sundown—the Black Hummingbirds took turns singing the songs in groups of two, two singers per wall panel opening, while the other six prayed or partook of the boiled goose meat sprinkled with the sacred black-feathered hummingbird’s heart.
“You don’t seem to see anyone,” said Rose in a low voice to Ted Facepaint in the corridor of the IBlack Eagle Child Recreational Center. “The songs blur everything out. Focus is accorded to the music, the drumbeats and where they are placed, the speed and tempo. And the eating is essential, too. Not only are you the cook, singer, and partaker of the sacred concoction, you are also the dancer. As for the observers on the outside, you know they are there. For the purpose itself, though, they don’t really matter.”
Ted didn’t know how to take being asked to participate as a last-minute replacement. It was sheer coincidence that the eighth person was part of a Iowa National Guard contingent sent to the Persian Gulf.
“But what if I forget the songs?” Ted asked. “There might be too many. To boot, I’ve never done anything outside the Well-Off Man Church.”
Rose shifted her poundage inside her large Hawaiian print smock and smiled. “Ted, we know this. Which means we can help you, carry you. The observers won’t even see, hear, or know. It will all come together smoothly.”
Her detailed explanation of the ceremony sounded academic— point by point, step A to step C.
Ted shook his head in apprehension and spoke.
“Even with your help, Rose, there would be nervousness. Errors. I’d screw it up and make a fool of myself in front of everyone.”
That’s about how the soft but poignant conversation went. I caught only part of it as I walked up to them. The rest was masked by the echoing shouts and screams coming from the gymnasium where local Girl Scouts played volleyball.
My eavesdropping wasn’t intentional that winter 1989 night.
Since it was rare even to see Ted, much less to talk to him, I sometimes think that maybe I didn’t really want to hear what Rose said to him. Strange, that’s how I first hooked up with Ted: not wanting to hear what was said to him. During our first years at Weeping Willow I rescued him. Encircled by an onslaught of older, strong-armed students who were making fun of his speech impediment, Ted cowered and trembled. Feeling sorry for him I struggled past the crowd, shouting as my grandmother would have, “Leave him alone! He isn’t doing anything to you!” My brashness didn’t work; I was blindsided with a straight palm to the temple and shoved toward him.
“Can you understand him?” the angry crowd asked, as I sought to regain my balance with small outstretched arms and twisted legs. “He can’t even talk right!” someone shouted in my ear before being pushed. “Now get in there and protect him! Speak for the wordless snake!”
With sparks revolving within my sight, I screamed, “Leave me alone, he is saying to you! I haven’t done anything!” Someone backed off and” the rest followed. The crowd then converged on someone else down the sidewalk.
Ted Facepaint looked at me through his messed-up hair and tried to express his gratitude. What he missed saying, I made up in my head. From then on, throughout Weeping Willow Elementary, we were virtually inseparable. My reasons for befriending him were fundamental. Hardly anyone liked him or spoke to him. Ted was a loner, a contrarian—like myself.
After that schoolground incident, Ted became a regular visitor to our home. Alan found his speech problems amusing. He even named him “Three-Speed” after a fancy English bicycle. Grandmother said she already knew him from cooking for his family’s doings on weekends through the Well-Off Man Church. Which also happened to be the unusual oblong-shaped house where Ted lived with his aunt, Louise Stabs Back, in an area known as Whiskey Corners Road.
From about ten feet away, out of courtesy, I announced myself. Startled, Rose backed away fast and nudged Ted on his left shoulder with her huge, puffy hand. In remembering, I didn’t like how the fingers and palm were evenly spread over the physical mass of who was and still is my closest friend. Sorcerers or would-be spellcasters employed this conspicuous maneuver: walking up from behind people and greeting them by touch. It was so obvious and outwardly evil to me, for rarely did we as a tribe or family resort to physical groping.
But weakened by modernity, we were vulnerable. Entrapment was easy. A touch was a touch. Few of us knew this wasn’t the case.
In infancy I was told of an elderly visitor, a neighbor, who in essence raked my newborn skin with her long, crooked fingernails. It had actually been a gentle stroke of the knuckles, but my face broke out in a rash the next day, and while the applied medicines cured it, some pockmarks remain near the jawline. This was part of the reason why Grandmother gave me the stone-knife necklace, pointing outward, repelling spells. In my first few days of life I was already a target in the supernatural shooting gallery.
Wearing the shroud of the stone-knife, this is what the sorcerer sees of me: Painted over the top half of my face is the color of yellow. These words are then spoken to the disguise-wearing visitor: “Whoever you are, whatever your purpose, you will stop this travesty. Go hack and tell the one who sent you your medicine has failed to get hold of us. You will also tell that person how the shot was reversed and how the projectile embedded itself in your heart and that you decomposed willingly at earth’s first light.”
Ted stood in a half-slouching pose. Within the chaotic din of the girl’s volleyball game—Rolling Head Valley versus Stone House Bullheads—he had been listening very carefully to Rose.
If I had only intervened earlier, risking perhaps my own life or those of my immediate family, he might still be alive. I’m not saying Rose Grassleggings is responsible or anything, you see. I just think Ted was a target all along. And the shooters were many. From different directions for different purposes. At any time, anywhere, akin to Dorothy Black Heron and her lovely sister, the One Most Afraid, we are all susceptible.
Disguised as a circus, the supernatural shooting gallery would attract our earthly shadows to a festive gathering of ordinary humans and nonordinary beings. Lulled by the showlike atmosphere, we would be caught off guard. Like Ted Facepaint, we would knowingly allow death in the form of a fat Hyena to circle the booth where we sit, listening to the one-piece country and western band called Mike & Mike in the Dutch descendant village of Hellendoorn. We would watch the Unworthy Hyena of Nothing, with its lower jaw hanging heavy by a mouth darkened and stuffed with cheap chewing tobacco, attempt to speak in the yellow foreign air.
The biggest difference between us, as it has always been since that late evening in 1970 at the Marion, Iowa, train depot, would be the stone knife that Grandmother gave me, the one I wore inside the locket necklace before my travel westward.
Since then, aside from navigating Selene Buffalo Husband and myself over the Black Eagle Child Ocean, deflecting adversity, the stone knife has on occasion sparked before us like flint and iron. By doing this, it reminds us of its omnipresence.
On the Night of the Hyenai, however, during Ted Facepaints last visit, the sparks reversed themselves: they came out from his sad eyes in spiraling miniature bullets of light. Halfway across the room they faded. After he presented us with a six-pack of Michelob beer, we never saw Ted alive again. That next morning, wondering what the spiraling eye lights meant, I opened the locket and discovered the stone knife had split itself four ways. At the same moment that I separated a single piece for Ted, my brother Alan drove up the driveway in his Dodge truck, bringing the tragic news. “Something s wrong with Three-Speed.” That’s when I decided to wrap the stone remnant in leather and take it to the funeral home. When we changed Ted into his traditional regalia, I affixed the small bundle with a safety pin under the lapel of his ceremonial shirt; I placed it as close as I could to his gentle sleeping heart.