Solar Storms

  He touched my face and held me, then he said, in a very businesslike way, “Come with me. I have to find the barbershop.”

  “Barbershop? You always said they were a waste of money.”

  “I want the judge to listen to me. I’ll have to look like one of them.”

  But at the barber’s, as I sat and watched the feathers of black hair fall to the floor, I thought he looked ridiculous. He knew it, too, this man who had always been so proud of his appearance.

  Then, with his respectable hair, we went to a restaurant and had coffee and American pie, as Tulik called the apples baked in a skin.

  I asked, “How is Dora-Rouge?”

  “She’s fine. She sends you her love. And, oh, I have this for you.” He reached into his pocket and took out a container, the last one, of sleeping potion.

  Later that day at the courthouse, Tulik said, “I’ve been meditating. But I don’t have inner peace. I can’t find it again. I think it would be better to have never had it than to lose it this way.” He shook his head, sad. “But then why should the inside be different than the outside? This is what happens to humans when their land is destroyed. Don’t you think so, Maniki, that they lose their inside ways?”

  I brushed the black hair off his shoulders and straightened his collar and we entered the marble halls of justice.

  WHEN IT WAS EVENING, the day of court over, Tulik said he longed to take Aurora on his lap and rock her. We went to the kitchenette Chiquita, Wiley’s wife, and I had rented, and Tulik lifted Aurora and made her light up. “She’s so big!”

  “You still have the gift,” I said to him with pride in my voice. You’d never have thought she could remember him from so long ago, but she did. She had eyes only for Tulik. And she toddled toward him and called his name while I boiled water in a pan and stirred instant coffee into two cups.

  Tulik called the courthouse the House of Units, Measures, and Standards, because the questions asked there were how many, how much, how often. How many fish did you catch two years ago? How many did you catch last year? He knew well that the worth and weight of things was now asked in terms of numbers, dollars, grams. His testimony was always direct and honest. “Are there less than there were?” they’d ask, and he’d say, “I never counted, but it seems like there are. By at least half.”

  They asked Tulik and some of the other men about their traplines, the places where they’d found moose, how many they’d killed in a year, what their income was. Had they lived off the land?

  The sessions started daily at nine. There were few breaks in the testimony. I was overwhelmed with the exhaustion of sitting all day.

  “Please answer the question.” The voice was strong-sounding.

  “I’m trying to answer.”

  Aurora’s eyes followed it all. Inside, she seemed to be listening to the testimony. Outside, she looked at the large buildings with the sun on their windows.

  In the evenings, after his testimony, Tulik looked gray and tired. It wore on him, on all of them, to be treated with derision and ridicule. To others, we were such insignificant people. In their minds we were only a remnant of a past. They romanticized this past in fantasy, sometimes even wanted to bring it back for themselves, but they despised our real human presence. Their men, even their children, had entered forests, pretended to be us, imagined our lives, but now we were present, alive, a force to be reckoned with.

  Those with the money, the investments, the city power, had no understanding of the destruction their decisions and wants and desires brought to the world. If they’d known what their decisions meant to our people, and if they continued with this building in spite of that knowing, then they were evil. They were the cannibals who consumed human flesh, set fire to worlds the gods had loved and asked the humans to care for.

  There was little press coverage. But one day there was a small photo in the bottom corner of a page. It was a newspaper photo of Tulik and the other distinguished men and women, brilliant ones, standing on the front steps of the courthouse. The caption read, “On the Warpath Again.” I hid the paper from Tulik. I tried, as he had done with me earlier, to keep him from pain.

  I think of him now sitting there with all his beauty turned into some kind of homeliness contained in the cold halls of stone that came from the illegal quarries of our world. He sat quietly, and listened.

  IT TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR before the building of the dams ceased and Tulik did not live long enough to see us win. He would have liked that, even though so much change had already fallen on the land. It was too late for the Child River, for the caribou, the fish, even for our own children, but we had to believe, true or not, that our belated victory was the end of something. That one fracture was healed, one crack mended, one piece back in place. Yes, the pieces were infinite and worn as broken pots, and our human pain was deep, but we’d thrown an anchor into the future and followed the rope to the end of it, to where we would dream new dreams, new medicines, and one day, once again, remember the sacredness of every living thing.

  In all of this, something was stripped away from me. Like a snake I emerged, rubbing myself out of my old skin, my old eyes. I was fresh, I was seeing clearly.

  One day, in the city, I looked up. It was going to rain. I couldn’t see the stars, but I knew they were there.

  There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love.

  And sometimes I sit and think about those who took apart this land, our lives. When they pull back their covers in the morning, I wonder, do they rise from sleep with joy? For all this, is there happiness and peace? Are they singing as they sit beneath the light of a lamp, or loving each other? I might as well ask if infinity has bitten off the end of its circular flight.

  SO OFTEN I think of Hannah. She is always at the edge of my dreaming, at the periphery of wakefulness and sleep. Anything can bring her to mind—an icy wind on a hot day, a day with a bad feel to it, a newspaper account of an injured child.

  My mother walked out of the rifles of our killers. She was born of knives, the skinned-alive beaver and marten and the chewed-off legs of wolves. She hurt me because I was part of her and she hated herself. I think of her last name, Wing, as if she could fly, weightless as a bird catching a current of air. Or, like the wolverine on the rock paintings, perhaps her wings were invisible until they were wet, and then they opened, full and strong. I hoped she lived in a place where she could open those wings with a love she’d never known in her life.

  Tulik once said there are still those of us who can travel to the past and return with something of value, a knowing, a cure, or a song. I wanted to be one of those, to return from the far regions having retrieved a song, a sacred bundle, a box of herbs, anything I could take to the future. But I wasn’t. I had to leave the songs behind with their owners, leave the herbs beneath water, the bundles in their caves and trees alongside bear skulls that had been watching us from hidden places. For a time, I thought that all I’d found were sharp sticks with skins and rags over them. Something like the things Old Mother, the first woman, had used to create her children. Maybe I had not gone far enough, or maybe, as in the stories of the creation of first woman and first man, I only needed the right song to sing to the sticks so they would come alive, take shape, and begin to breathe and move. Lately I hear something like a voice inside my ear, whispering to me. “Get up,” the voice says in the morning. “Offer cornmeal to the morning people.” I do it. “Be slow,” it says. I do this, too.

  And I could tell about my own passing through doors not of this
world, how my soul travels at times to the middle of rivers where doctors named stone reside, how I search for the plants of my grandmothers. Since then I have stood in the way of fireballs, begging them to fill me. There are other mysteries, too, ones lost men and women cannot find because the ancestral markers are taken away. There is no map to show where to step, no guide to tell us how to see. But maybe, as Dora-Rouge once said, maps are only masks over the face of God and we are the lost ones; it is not that the ways are lost from us but that we are lost from them. But the ways are patient and await our return.

  I’ve shaped my own life, after all. Like a deer curled into grasses, or the place a moose slept.

  ONE DAY BUSH, Husk, and I received a note card from Dora-Rouge. It was an invitation to her death. I dreamed we should go, but Bush, as painful as this was for her, could not travel. She could leave neither the old people we now lived with, nor the plants she was propagating, so I went alone. This time I took the train, watching the land pass the coyotes. Standing between the cars of the noisy train, everything seemed fragile and temporary.

  When I arrived at what had been Two-Town, I was stunned. The tracks I traveled along now ended in water. There were submerged buildings, sediment rising up, dark and silty. I didn’t have to dive to see any of it. I knew the terrain by heart. Miles covered, pictographs, rivers drowned, even a dead moose floating. A fast river had become nothing but a pond, green with algae, stagnant, a desperate place except for the dragonflies above it. There were floating trees, pines, fish. The wood of old walls floated to the surface, fence posts, a piece of tree bark carved in the shape of a heart; maybe it carried the initials of Tony and Loretta.

  Walking from the train, I asked a man, “Where is Tulik’s house?” Even though Tulik was gone, he was remembered, and the man pointed me to a new, government-built house.

  When I knocked on the door, Miss Nett answered, her curved back forcing her to strain to look up at me. Filled with emotion, she hugged me, saying nothing, just holding me tight. Then, rosycheeked, she turned to Dora-Rouge, who was inside. “Ena. It’s Maniki!” she said.

  As I entered the room, Dora-Rouge said, “Oh, darling, I can barely see you.” I held her close. I could smell sickness on Dora-Rouge and she was bonier than before. “Nobody will come to my death,” she said.

  “I’m here,” I told her gently.

  “Yes, you are, Maniki, a true human being.”

  I went inside and sat down on a wooden chair beside her, remembering a story Tulik had once told me about the men, the human people, who wanted what all the other creatures had. They went to the large bird and said they wanted to fly. They were granted this wish. They went to the mole and said they wanted to tunnel, and this they were able to do. Last, they went to the water and said, We must have this unbound manner of living. The water said, You have asked for too much, and then all of it was taken away from them. With all of their wishes, they had forgotten to ask to become human beings.

  “I had such a rough night. I couldn’t sleep,” Dora-Rouge said. Her wild white hair and the dark circles under her eyes showed it. “Do you have any of that potion left? Did you find those plants?”

  “No,” I said. The truth was, I had not looked. I’d been so busy salvaging everything from the flooding and helping the people at Adam’s Rib, I’d forgotten all about the plants. But I vowed to myself that I would keep looking. I didn’t tell Dora-Rouge about the world she’d lived in for so long at Adam’s Rib, now flooded. Now there was no need for her to know, no reason to add weight to her grief.

  “I know it’s out there, that plant. I feel it.” She pointed toward the north.

  I hoped she was right.

  “Where’s Bush?”

  “They are so sorry.” Then I told her that we had moved to the Hundred-Year-Old Road and that the people needed Bush.

  Dora-Rouge was sorry to hear this, but still she was cheered by my presence.

  I decided to stay for a while with Dora-Rouge and Miss Nett. I thought I’d search out the plants. I sent word to Tommy that I would stay for a few weeks, and the two women settled me into a folding cot. I didn’t complain.

  One day I went out searching for the plants. I thought I might have a chance of finding them, if only Tulik were with me. I wished I had Ek’s book, too, with its maps to certain plants, but with the terrain so changed, the maps would have been of no use. Now the river below us was trying to learn its new home, its new journey. It wasn’t doing very well. Nor was the dry land that had been under water, now exposed to air, not yet with new grasses sprouting from it.

  Early one morning I dreamed that Dora-Rouge was alone in the woods. That morning, when I woke, I found her missing. “I don’t know where she went,” said Miss Nett. “How could she have gotten away?”

  I went to the place of my dream. It was near the place of the three-leafed plants Tulik had taken me to visit. On the pathway was her chair, a knot and tangle of wicker turned on its side, the name Mother Jordan still visible beneath the paint. It was strangelooking, overturned that way with the grasses beneath the webbing and weaving of it. But Dora-Rouge was not in sight.

  I found her on a bed of moss just off a path in the remaining forest. She was surrounded by ferns, mosses, and the deep green of spring. Although she was white-haired and withered, she was curled up like an infant waiting to be born.

  “Grandmother,” I said. “How did you get here?” I knelt and touched her shoulder.

  “I have my ways.”

  “All this way?”

  “This is where I want to die.” She was on her side, smiling up at me.

  “You came all this way without anyone seeing you?”

  “All this way.” She looked proud of her accomplishment, but she was weak.

  I sat beside her on the ground. She smiled into my eyes. “Look. The rain cloud. How beautiful.” She looked at the sky.

  I lay next to her on my back and looked up. There was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear blue day. When I looked back at her, she was gone, not in the hard way that I have seen in other deaths, no death rattle or struggle to breathe, no fighting. She died easily, soft as a leaf falling from a tree that knew new leaves, branches, and roots would unfold, a tree that had the power of its belief that spring would one day come.

  And though it was cloudless, it began to rain, a soft female rain. It fell over us. I sat with her body, rocking her in my lap. Above the cloudless rain was the sun, meteor showers, and cosmic dust. I was small, sitting there, rocking death. I sang an old song. It had been Dora-Rouge’s song. It was the animal-calling song. And while I sang, the animals came to where she lay. I didn’t see them with my eyes, but I knew they were there. Wolf, thin and old, stood back away from us in the trees. He kept his distance. Who could blame him? And there was Eagle with watchful eyes. The sound of a bear, snuffling, moving through the brush, and another shadow behind him. Wolverine, I thought, come to pay last respects.

  THE NORTH is not always cold and white. Some mornings it is warm and the wind stirs, a gentle hand touching the world and people. On these mornings, the shadows of leaves are beautiful on the ground. Light comes slow and languid, as if the sun is hesitant to rise above earth, as if earth has slowed in its spin to a lazy, gentle curve. And some nights when moonlight casts a spell, it is clear enough to see the shape of Fish in the sky. Next to it are Wolf, Badger, and Wolverine. Though I have never seen that constellation, I know it is there. Sometimes the aurora borealis moves across night, strands of light that remind me of a spider’s web or a fishnet cast out across the starry skies to pull life in toward it. At other times it reminds me of the lines across a pregnant woman’s belly. It leaves me thinking that maybe our earth, our sky, will give birth to something, perhaps there’s still another day of creation, and the earth is only a little boat with men and women, slugs and manta rays, all floating in a shell across the dark blue face of a god.

  ONE NIGHT, at his home, I asked LaRue, “Say, whatever happened on that river whe
n you escaped?”

  “You think I did that on purpose?” I could see he was reverting to his old self. “I was scared shitless. I thought, This is it. You saw that river. It was wild.” But just then LaRue looked at the window, “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s a wolverine.” He jumped up, half-screaming, grabbed his gun, and went to the door.

  “Don’t shoot it,” I yelled after him but already I started to laugh. When he came back in, I held my belly and said, “It was you.” I could hardly talk for laughing. “Your reflection.”

  He looked beaten in some way, but he said, “I thought it was too ugly for a wolverine.”

  When I told Bush, she laughed and softened even more. I told her he had holes in his socks and that I’d seen him cry.

  She said, “I’m starting to like that man.”

  LOVE OPENS its eyes that way. When I am with Tommy, I have no words, and together we are awake in a still-unnamed forest. One night, together, Tommy and I held Aurora up at the traditional dances, in our hands, raised her above Tommy’s head and showed her off to the people. Together we danced the dance where songs were dressed in sunlight, where they walked silver and thin out of sky, out of a distant past. There were songs that helped rain fall.

  We danced the dance of our own marriage, two become one. I was grateful for the love of Tommy. I believed Tommy and I were our ancestors reunited in their search for each other and we loved deeply, in the way they had loved. I thought how gods breathe on people and they come to life. Something had breathed on us.

  Or maybe it’s the way light comes from wood and becomes sun once again, passing through whispers of a hundred past years.

  EVEN NOW the voice of Agnes floats toward me. I hear her say, “Once the whole world was covered in water.” I hear her sing, stepping out of the fog the way she did that day when I first saw her. And sometimes Dora-Rouge touches me. It’s her, I know. I can tell by the bony finger, the familiar feel of her hand on my shoulder. At times she brushes back a strand of my hair like she had always done, in order to see my beautiful face. There are times I would think her hand was the wind, but in another brush of her hand, I hear her say that a human is alive water, that creation is not yet over.