The Removed(58)

She held the rocks out in her hand, ignoring me. “They’re jewels,” she said. “Look at them, they’re all around us. Do you see how pretty they are?”

“Pretty,” I said, glancing at them. “But are you with your mother or dad?”

“I’m here to see my sister who died on the Trail.”

“Your sister on the Trail?” I said. “Do you mean your ancestor?”

“No, it’s my sister. My name’s Clara.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“She’s over there,” she said, pointing, but when I turned I couldn’t see anyone.

“Look at these,” she said, holding out the rocks again. She ran a finger over them in her palm. They were sparkling in the sunset. I knelt down to get a better look, but she turned and ran away from me. I considered following her, but then I noticed a woman at the end of the road. She was an older woman, wearing a red coat.

“Is she with you?” I called out. “I was worried she was alone.”

“Thank you,” the woman called back.

Clara ran to her, grasped her by the hand, and the two walked away together.

I walked on to Ray-Ray’s grave, and on the path I saw a man up ahead wearing a wolf mask with feather trimmings. Beside him was a woman and child. “We finished the Snake-Mask Dance,” the man called out to me. His wife and daughter were waving. The little girl pointed to the sky and shouted at me to look up. Papa had told me the tale about the seven dancing boys who turned into stars, and when I looked up to the graying sky, I saw them dancing, even in the daylight.

“The seven dancing boys,” I called out, but when I looked back at the people, they were gone. I continued walking down the path, looking around. They had disappeared so quickly. I remembered Papa once saying all cemeteries are connected, and a wave of sadness passed through me as I thought about how many bodies were underground. Death was all around me.

Mosquitoes and insects buzzed in the air, which was humid and warm. The cemetery was colorless and grim, as all cemeteries felt, with the smell of rotting wood and damp grass. When I reached Ray-Ray’s grave, I saw his name engraved on the gray stone. The stone still looked new, after all these years. The engraving was so prominent. I reached down and touched it, ran my fingers over the letters of his name.

As I looked down, underneath the earth I saw him, my brother Ray-Ray, lying on his back. I saw his mangled body, his corpse. His face was disfigured, unrecognizable and without eyes. I was stricken by the horror of the image, my dead brother looking so different. It filled me with anguish, seeing such an unhinged and cryptic apparition. But how different, too, I must’ve appeared to him—or had he watched me grow? Had he in fact been watching all along, with our ancestors, disguised as an animal or bird?

Only then did I begin to see his beauty blossoming. Death opened like a cave into his body, a passage to somewhere; and I entered it, collapsing into him, entering my little brother, and the two of us watched a bird circle in a cloudless pale-blue sky.





Tsala


Resurrection

BELOVED: REGARDING MY DEATH, I do not understand the reason why I awoke when I did. The soldier had taken my life and your life from us, from our family. We were no longer of this world.

I saw only dark red, the color of blood. In death, as we slept beneath the earth with the worms and the cold mud and rocks, hearing the soulful howl of the coyotes and the drumming of our people, as we slept beneath the feet of those who stomped the ground and shook the heavens, I felt your mother’s aching.

I felt her suffering as if it were my own, a suffering so great I felt my spirit move restlessly in an unfathomable darkness. How long was I dead? Surely not long!

I crawled out of the earth like a beast in the night, with necklaces made of bear claws and gold, with wet mud and worms matted to my hair, which hung to my chest. I crawled out of the grave and felt as strong and mighty as a horse, even though I knew I had died. I remembered the story of the tribe of root eaters and acorn eaters whose wives were buried in the same grave as their husbands, and I feared I would look down into the grave and see my wife. In the old story of the root and acorn eaters, a lighted pine knot was placed in a wife’s hand, a rope was tied around her body with a bundle of pine knots, and she was lowered into her husband’s grave, where she would die after the last pine knot was burned. I feared I would find my wife’s body in the grave, burned and dead, and the fear consumed me like a great fire.

When I looked down, I was happy to see that the grave was empty.

And here I stood, not of flesh but of spirit, not of bone or skin as I had known. In this world around me I saw a great fire, right there in the same world where I had lived. A great fire spreading across the sky, heavy in flames, flashing and blinding, and I saw animals running to the trees and birds flying in the sky. Soon the birds changed into children and then disappeared into the flames. I saw columns of smoke leading to the heavens. I saw snakes with their heads chopped off; their mouths were still biting. Their bodies slithered into the ground and turned into dust. The dust rose into more columns of smoke. I saw figures in that dust, figures whose faces I did not recognize but whose bodies were strong, who rose up and drifted away as dust. They rose up and drifted as dust, falling into the great fire, and this sight was beyond anything I had ever dreamed. I saw the winged bodies of others forced into a vortex of wind and smoke, disappearing into the great fire. Yet I was not afraid.