Rose Grassleggings began having dreams that a shadow, or “soul,” was trapped between the two sets of sliding glass doors at the Heijen Medical Center in Sherifftown, Iowa. There were four large doors that opened and closed automatically at the presence of human beings who arrived and left like insects en masse. She understood the mechanics of a large hospital, conserving its air conditioning in summer and its heat in winter. The self-monitoring doors served their purpose well.
She also knew—through newspapers read, maybe—that they were gifts from two prominent Dutch families with a legacy in the gravel and truck radiator businesses. The doors were installed in posthumous honor of beloved relatives. Kinetic tombstones with names embedded in bronze plaques interacted with people twenty-four hours a day. Constructed from silver metal and large sheets of tinted glass, these doors had a simple function; through electrical vision they opened and closed for people.
While Rose Grassleggings saw them as architectural reminders of our short lives as human beings, our impermanence, the public saw them as a welcome convenience. Beyond that, no one thought about them much. Only two families—the benefactors themselves— knew about the philanthropy. No one read the bronze plaques; Sherifftown citizens didn’t care about that kind of “uppity” stuff. All they wanted the Dutch founders of the Heijen Medical Center— namely, Ans Visser and Fleming Joop—to do was open and close.
How would you thank them, anyway? Rose asked herself. Yellow and red tulips in wooden shoes? Dutch Friesland tobacco and Grolsch beer?
As the dreams progressed, Rose nearly became confused.
How could a shadow, or “soul,” get hopelessly stuck in the air space between the two sets of sliding glass doors?
Before long, and with the diligent help of neighbors, relatives, and prayers, she learned Ted Facepaint, a tribal member, had been pronounced dead between the two sets of glass doors of the hospital. Officially. Which was a violation of an old but stringent agreement between tribe and state: “It shall he understood by all residents of Tama County and other surrounding counties that no person other than a Black Eagle Child priest shall formally address and pronounce a fellow tribal member deceased.” It had always been taught that shortly after the moment of death, any word spoken to the deceased by anyone would liberate their shadows anywhere. Even between the doors at the Heijen Medical Center.
As the dreams began to unfold, like a puzzle, Rose saw herself in the glass-framed edifice: She stepped into the electric eye and opened the glass doors to commune with an invisible shadow. If everything went according to plan—this would be the first among her deeds—the ghost of a green pa|rrot would escort the shadow to celestial freedom. Literally.
Upon waking, Rose Grassleggings assessed that this task wasn’t monumental, and embarrassment to self was minimal. Ted Face-paint’s relatives would have to “go out on a hunting expedition” for an exotic bird. Its sacrifice would be next, causing a commotion. Eventually she would be manhandled by hospital security and taken into custody. The cost was small in return for a shadow’s eternal comfort. Wasn’t it? Rose asked herself. Who would enjoy being a tortured “soul,” reliving an unwanted body-leaving moment over and over, like a stuck record on an old Sears record player? And could denial of this death and others have wide-reaching universal complications?
“Why . . . yes, yes. Certainly,” she whispered as the dream demonstrated where to hold the exotic bird, how the leather hood was tightened around its feathered neck, and the words said to implore the shadow to watch for another “arrival.” The glass doors were also crucial, for contained therein was the voice of Dr. Plees, the special coroner of Tama County. She learned he happened to be leaving the hospital when Ted Facepaint was brought through the front entrance. When the paramedics told the special coroner the victim was Indian, a necro-crime was perpetrated. Dr. Plees, a former tribal doctor with a hidden agenda, hated himself for speaking the despicable Black Eagle Child language. But sometimes it came in handy, as it did in the case of Ted Facepaint. Rose knew for certain what happened. Dr. Plees bowed over the sheet-covered body, genuflected and made an upside-down cross sign, and said in a sarcastic tone: “I pronounce you dead to the world, Mr. . . . what’s a good Indian name?” Caught up in the strangeness, the paramedics had kept still until he answered himself. “I’m telling you now, A ni kwa-ne ni wa, Man Squirrel! Officially. Ka ta na na tti to ki ka ni! May you never wake again! Now let’s go inside and get the damn thing oyer with; I won’t have to do this tomorrow.” And he didn’t.
Everything the dreams explained thereafter was crucial. Observed from all angles—sometimes with a mirror or simply in reverse—the stories were ceremonies. Luckily, mystery-solving Sherlock Holmes that Rose was, the messages revealed themselves with the aid of pencil and paper. Hasty drawings were done on Safeway grocery bags. Arranged in chronologic order, the brown paper drawings were kept in her fully beaded purse. She pulled them out like playing cards and rehearsed exactly the way the Deformed Pearl Diver, Jane Ribbon, her mentor, had taught.
The reenactment of these dreams was important: The large green parrot, for instance, would be asphyxiated within the glass structure. It was also known that the “shadow-releasing” rite worked stronger with an audience. The latter, she methodically adduced, wouldn’t be difficult, for visitor traffic at Heijen Medical was constant. On the downside, being arrested for disorderly conduct and cruelty to exotic birds wasn’t good. Yet she was driven by a haunting feeling of despair that went beyond the norm. She wouldn’t mind sitting in a police squad car. Handcuffed. She could even tolerate hospital security imitating squawks the limp parrot made before it was thrown to them.
But that was only the beginning. For a moment, as the leather “suffocating” hood was unraveled from the parrot, the hospital security would shudder at the ghastly sight of a small human face before the compressed feathers ruffled back into shape. Half shadow, half bird. That’s what she was after.
In the guise of mockery the special coroner had knowingly liberated Ted Facepaint’s shadow by reciting the words—in Indian. In death, too, according to Black Eagle Child beliefs, there was a need for some guidance even if it didn’t lead to anything. In a dimension without a physical sense, akin to a quick, premature birth, Ted’s bereft shadow leapt out upon the instruction “not to wake,” only to find itself encased in glass and part of a kinetic memorial.
Long before Dr. Plees hated Indians, he studied their customs, language, and “heathenish practices” with avid interest. As an educated person he felt obligated to learn the inner workings of a Woodlands-based tribal society. More so with a lucrative health services contract at stake. Treating ailments of the Black Eagle Child Nation was secondary to the thrill of gaining insights into their ancient worldviews. Ideologically spawned by the greatest sin of Western civilization—that which seeks, connivingly befriends, steals, and then destroys—Dr. Plees made what he couldn’t possibly know through books his first priority. Another people’s intimate ways. Who could have foreseen the following upon his interfacing with the Black Eagle Child community?
• When the needle of the ethnologic compass levitated upward, shattering the glass face with such force that “fecal matter hit the propeller” (as whites by colloquial habit are wont to say), the cardinal points became clouded, and then he became disoriented.
• When the Tribal Council canceled his health services contract, with the state medical board’s blessing, the white communities of Why Cheer and Gladwood rallied behind him, urging him to burn “Indian books” and attend church.
• When the town s white businessmen called relatives from surrounding counties, sick people made thirty-mile round-trips—some driving themselves—to express disgust with his public firing and asked him to be their doctor.
• When his dejection allowed the seed of bigotry to be planted, there materialized a five-year membership to the exclusive Indian Acres Country Club and a second job, issuing certificates of death to the local populace.
Initially, the special coroner believed his position was created out of sympathy. Later, though, he learned the county’s Social Statistics Department had diverted federal funds intended for the tribe to local banks. As a result, a five-year backlog on Indian deaths and other program matters existed. However, it also made possible a new Chevy Blazer, complete with federal/state jurisdiction over the Black Eagle Child Settlement. The Blazer rolled over the thoroughfares of tribal land—anytime, anywhere—for the wrong reasons.
As a new member in a white anti-Indian community, Dr. Plees soon took special delight in learning that hefty interests helped sponsor the annual Twintowns rodeo and agricultural fair. Indian money was operating and public relations money for the Twintowns Chamber of Commerce. If federal agents ever planned an audit, he was told, “there was enough there” to cover anything—close to two million dollars. Twice a month the country club had live music, risqué men stuff, and free alcohol. Moreover, twice a month the wives held luncheons, flower-arranging sessions, and fashion shows—cospon-sored by the Why Cheer Preservation Club—with “real models” from Ames, Cedar Falls, and Winterset. Twice a year the members selected Why Cheer High School students—four males and two females, “preferably white and smart”—for college scholarships. Once a year the club’s exclusive Indian Acres Open drew golf amateurs from as far away as Dubuque and Council Bluffs to vie for the five three-thousand-dollar awards.
The Black Eagle Child Nation unknowingly paid all expenses, including tips for the caddies. But there was one thing the country club patrons couldn’t take away, and it bothered the hell out of them: “The Black Eagle Child Field Days and Chautauqua.” Every August for eight decades white visitors! crowded to watch the powwow, take part in pretty-baby and gardening contests and footraces, and enjoy parade music by the All-BEC Indian brass band. Its four-day success was measured by how many miles the automobiles were backed up on old Lincoln Highway 30.
The country club’s campaign to outdo this extravagant affair failed. Even with embezzled money! The rodeo and the hay-cutting exhibition with antique machinery attracted sparse audiences. This devastated the annual Pork Queens. They would bob their bonnets in sobbing spells inside the two or three registered floats of the rodeo parade.
But even in defeat theft continued.
Quick to capitalize on our celebration, the country club members took turns manning donation posts at the intersections of Highways 30 and 63. With aqua-colored buckets and gaudy cowboy outfits, they begged for pocket change. No one questioned if a charity organization called “Shetland Pony Rides for the Disadvantaged and Crippled Children of the Appalachian Mountains” really existed. After giving wrong directions to the Indian powwow, the rodeo clowns handed out suckers to visitors who willingly “gave” at the four-way stop signs.
A terrible lesson was learned: The fact that a new doctor took over a well-established clinic and its tribal health services contract didn’t necessarily mean all was well. Not even if he spoke Black Eagle Child fluently. Dr. Plees, the trustworthy doctor who had ministered to the tribe for years, began to crumble. Why? No one knew. Infidelity? A likelihood. Combat-associated flashbacks? Depending. Untimely incestuous urges? Who knows when and where medical incompetence begins and ends?
In any case, on the basis of growing complaints and charges, a tribal referendum vote fired Dr. Plees. The news media portrayed the dispute as “a simple misunderstanding.” In a show of support, a splinter group, the Indian War Veterns, held a chicken and boiled corn dinner dance for their honorary legionnaire, Dr. Plees. It was a flop, but a bevy of reporters took photographs: Here stood the honoree in a Northern Plains war bonnet, shaking hands with the Mad Soldier brothers—their real surname—inside the BEC American Legion Hall. That’s all the conservative Central Plains Register wanted. Sensationalism was SOP at the state’s biggest newspaper. An editorial even questioned if “outsiders” or “educated but radical-minded goons” were behind the mess. The press was, therefore, disappointed that there were no wild-eyed protestors brandishing placards with seething epithets.
In fact, it proved to be a downright boring dinner dance. None of the Settlement drum groups who otherwise sang “at the drop of a dime” showed up. The Rocky Raccoon Singers, a noted Black Eagle Child singer and his scuzzy backups, were nowhere to be seen. They could usually be hired for food and seventy-five dollars. Rocky Raccoon—his legal name, based on a Beatles tune—wasn’t all there, but his music was tolerable. If the tape recordings were slowed down, someone said, you could actually hear and understand his word-songs. The rest, sadly, vanished in his falsetto style of singing and horse neighs. No songs of honor were sung, the leg bells didn’t ring, and the emcee, “Mongol, the Texaco Man” (Rocky’s uncle), didn’t have to do his crocodile tears routine. Instead, the grandchildren of the veterans sat in their beaded and sequined regalias listening to the amplified music of Elvis Presley and small, annoying speeches.
To the doctor, these were “the heroic exception, the golden warriors” who saw the carnage of foreign battlefields and came home “with the American flag still in hand.” This statement drew the loudest commotion of the night, a smattering of mumbled affirmation from the Indian veterans. With cameras poised, the press could not discern who did the soft war whoop.
“The remainder, though, Dr. Plees,” inquired the newspaper reporters, “are they your enemies?”
“I don’t understand your question,” replied the doctor.
“It’s obvious the Indian War Veterans respect your impeccable combat record, but how do the rest of them feel, the Tribal Council and those who voted against you?”
“These are fine Indians. Generally. You fret none; I haven’t lost anything.
* * *
We were, however, accountable for the loss of his folksinging daughter s San Francisco Bay Area apartment. As he telescopically adjusted the crosshairs of his stethoscope on the frail walls of the Earthlodge clans, he orchestrated his necro-trickery. Devastating high-caliber control. The proverbial silver bullet tumbled in its illuminated trajectory path, splintering upon impact inside the bark and reed panels of traditional dwellings. Impalpable pieces of silver shrapnel swirled inside and clogged the mouths of priests in worship.
Since “shadow-releasing” priests, like Rose Grassleggings, were a pestilence, he entertained the fire and ambulance crews with parodies of their rituals. It was silly, but when news of his sacrilegious antics reached the Earthlodge clans, he was considered “the devil.” Which was odd because the concept of the Antichrist was not Indian. A belief in a dark, evil side was shared with Christianty, but we do not believe that evil is embodied in a single man. With Dr. Plees, an exception was made.
At crime scenes with Indian families present, the coroner, along with the police and paramedics, respectfully awaited the clan priests. If he was first on the scene and short on patience, however, he took the cherry-lit stage by blaspheming the most sacred of all tribal customs. The lifeless victims were shadow-released. Afterward, he whisked them to the clinic. There, it was rumored he crossed his scalpels before performing unauthorized autopsies on the “Bela Lugosis of the world.”
But what made him notorious were accounts that internal body parts were missing. Hollow bodies seen through telltale stitches. Whole stomachs mysteriously disappeared. Especially during the winter season. The coroner knew no clan priest would dare disturb what he had already violated. If Indian families cried foul play, he always disagreed and backed his protests up with information that only a forensic pathologist could provide. No one knew. Through shoddy examinations he summarily dismissed all suspicious wounds and doubts.
Black Eagle Childs, you see, respected—in a fearful way—their dearly departed. When their blood was spilled, for instance, a safe distance was maintained; it was thought that tangible evil used pools of blood as portals through which the legs of innocent passersby were tripped and grabbed.
* * *
Rose Grassleggings concluded emphatically that the coroner was the source of most apparitions. Her dreams said so. Each sequence would begin with a team of doctors standing around the cold, bruised body that she figured was Facepaint’s. She paid special attention to the minor details of the scenery. On occasion, the room wasn’t the same one she purified. There were subtle differences in color, smell, light, and dimension, and everywhere a wanton disregard for humanness resonated. English was spoken and biting comments were addressed to the deceased, who lay naked except for the white towel that covered the crotch area.
Ignoring their harsh conversation, she would sprinkle dry roots of the clusterberry followed by granulated cedar pines over hot embers. This she had already performed in real life. First woman-root and then man-root fell onto the hot toy shovel and crackled. Sparks darted and gathered to make a blue fire. Above the small, smoldering flame she used an eagle-wing fan, along with her hissing breath, to direct the smoke over the body, feet first. Purification for travel to the Hereafter. What she had failed to detect was the coroners vile presence: he stood in the haze of the emergency room, presiding. Several times she recalled telling this horrid little man that Facepaint’s face conveyed anger, not contentment brought by suicide nor the fear expressed from a fatal car accident.
She wondered why the coroner was there that day. Counting sick Indians? Had he dashed in and out of their rooms, reading charts? She thought it was part of the job requirement, unavoidable red tape. Indian families through outdated constitutional bylaws had to have a certificate of death before funeral funds were disbursed by the Tribal Council. There was absolutely no way around that obstacle. Before the inception of the tribal gambling enterprise, two thousand dollars “for grief” was a pretty heavy affair.
Rose Grassleggings and Dr. Plees had already met three times. She was there at the behest of mourning families. “Do they really care? Do they have the metabolism to mourn?” she overheard him say. “Or is it just the two grand?” She recalled it was necessary to ask for a moment of privacy. With the doctors gone, she took out the buffalo horn from under her sweaters and uncapped it. Inside, smoldering faintly, was the hot coal that lit the way for the wayward. She comically equated the coal with the Olympic flame from Greece, and it was known by that euphemism. Families relied upon her to say whether an autopsy was required or not.
On the occasions that she went against the coroner’s word, his hatred raged like an ocean of boiling lava. Vessels containing Indian shadows had little chance to set voyage. All for a mediocre nightclub-singing daughter in San Francisco; all for a thirty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year apartment on Fisherman’s Wharf once financed by the Black Eagle Child Nation.
In the stillness that followed her dreams, she was aware a lot had happened at the Heijen Medical Center. The kindred spirit of Ted Facepaint was unwilling to accept its sliding door destiny. For several months she would lie in bed, wondering why all the negative forces convened on the sharpened end of a screwdriver, the crude weapon used to riddle Facepaint’s upper torso with puncture wounds. During these quiet hours in which the refrigerator hummed and the gas heater turned itself on in response to the cold, she envisioned the patterns made by the puncture wounds. Even before Ted’s body had been washed by the Facepaint family, she could see pictures had been drawn.
Was this the artistry of Dr. Plees? An extra stab to the human canvas for morbidity? Was this the main reason why the precursory examination was deliberately botched?
Was it just coincidence that one picture resembled three owls in flight with fully extended wings while another—on the right arm— looked like the sacred, astronomical icon of the Well-Off Man Church, the Three-Stars-in-a-Row?
Obviously, sorcery came into play at some point, as did the bigotry of the law enforcement and judicial agencies of Tama County. It had been like this for ages. Among the white farmers and city folk there was a consensus that Black Eagle Child Indians “had no claim to being any kind of race.” Sometimes, especially through the art of human-on-human mutilation, it was hard not to agree.
But there were other factors to consider, like the assistant county attorney, Peter Beech, who boasted about “holding the federal crime laboratory boys by their blond fuzzy balls.” If there was indeed an Antichrist among the whites, “Peter Bitch,” as he was known by Indians, had to be the Antihuman. Attired in grungy blue jeans, smelly sneakers, and sky blue ties with pink curled-pigtail designs, he remained dog-loyal to his superiors and downplayed anything that had to do with their Indian neighbors. “Mighty friendly bunch they are and law-abi-i-i-ding,” he would chortle at the end of televised press conferences. “Reason why the feds stay out. No crime whatsoever!”
And so whenever an Indian-on-Indian crime occurred, there was unbridled glee within the Bohemian communities of Why Cheer and Gladwood. The town councils, along with their Protestant backbones, delighted in the exchange of blood and gore. Reporters with gruesome photographs that were still curled from drying met with the police and fire departments to share additional details that might have been overlooked by the camera. Like the vivid color of a tongue that had remained with the decapitated torso. Sometimes when their own townspeople took credit for “Duo-skin-cides” (double suicides of redskins), afternoon outings with hogshead cheese on rye bread, “Old Country” pastries, and iced Kool-Aid were made. With ladies from the Why Cheer Preservation Club decked out in old-fashioned parasols and men in suspenders and large straw hats, there was agreement how befitting it was for heathens to make the railroad tracks their pillow.
“Here! Here!” they were known to yell as they cautiously walked down the tracks balancing their picnic baskets. From the hazy hilltop of O’Ryan’s Cemetery, the Indian gravehole diggers said their hats and parasols looked like black crows, hopping angrily from carrion to carrion, as if there wasn’t enough “refreshments” to go around.
As the bluish gray moonlight came through the cracks of the curtains and onto her carpeted bedroom, Rose Grassleggings, Black Eagle Child’s premiere medicine woman, convinced herself winter was a lonely season to begin with. There was no denying that, not even for the few who saw what others couldn’t possibly see. She was no exception.
Encumbrance appeared. Regardless of the many people she healed to unparalleled physical renewal, she was constantly being ”tested in the most devious ways. These dreams, plus the one that lived with her as a nightmarish daughter, were two recurring examples.
The Journey of Encumbrance was explained to her this way by the “Deformed Pearl Diver”: “the Principal Father, for whatever reason, made a pact long ago with the Sinister Deity. It was a truce of sorts; a tenuous abatement in the war among supernatural deities. Already destroyed was the First Earth, and death became a permanent reality for one of his sons, the Lesser-Known Twin Brother. And so it came to be that just as there is kindness, there is outright evil. In a way, we are an ongoing test, for embodied within is all that is needed to properly look after ourselves. ...”
The gift of life had therefore been given, but during moments when we digressed to unnatural states, we had someone sinister to thank. More and more, the winter acted like a ghost train, picking up the shadows of relatives. How ironic, too, Rose Grassleggings thought, that the snow symbolized the Well-Known Twin Brother’s return to earth. This was one of the very first animistic concepts taught to tribal youth. In the form of snow He watched everyone, scrutinizing their conduct, and judging whether or not they were responsible.