Excerpt from a book written by Glen Copper

Recap

            Scott and Willie are thirteen-year-old runaways who have been hiding out in a cabin in the Black River Forrest hidden between several rock pinnacles that belong to Scott’s great uncle. They have been waiting for him to show up there and while waiting discovered the skeletons of a long dead Native American and a cougar in a cave. They carefully collected their bones and solemnly interred them in graves on a ridge between the pinnacles. They have retained a flint knife and flute found with the skeletons.

            After months of waiting alone for his uncle, Willie, who is six months pregnant by her step-father suffers complications of the pregnancy and Scott borrows his uncles old car to take Willie to a hospital but they are lost in a blizzard and drive the car into a ravine. Nearly frozen to death they are discovered by Conrad, a Ho Chunk lad who brings them unconscious to a medicine woman to whom he is apprenticed and lives on a cave near their hide out.

Several days later

            The next morning Conrad woke Willie and me with another bowl of soup. They had returned from their collecting mission and Grandmother decided to just let us sleep through the night. She called on Conrad now to help her unfold a leather parcel on the sand floor near the entrance to the cave. It contained a tawny cottony mass the size of a football freckled with red and orange berries among a floss of thistle down.

            She looked at me and motioned with her head for me to come. I got up and crouched next to Conrad.

            “The bleeding inside, needs to be stopped,” Grandmother whispered, nodding toward Willie, “or it could …” she raised her hands as if to say, “You know the rest.” “The medicine we are looking for can stop the bleeding, but… ” She stopped and glanced at me, then at Conrad. “Younger eyes… we need your young eyes,” Grandmother said, pointing at Conrad and me. “Mother Mouse collects Shepherd’s purse, little seed pods for us. They are here in this fluff. They’re shaped like this.” She drew a heart-shape in the sand, “And they’re brown, the size of…” she took hold of my hand and held up my pinky finger, “half the size of this fingernail.” She indicated about a three-eighths inch length of my nail.

            “Inside are tiny orange seeds like grains of red sand. Some pods may have opened, so look for loose red sand grains too. Everything else we will sort later. These we need now. Come to me when you have sixteen red seeds.” She took from her pouch a folded piece of tin foil gum wrapper and unfolded it. “Put them in here,” she instructed, and handed it to Conrad.

            She then took a birch-bark torch and lit it from the fire, picked up her long otter-skin pouch, and walked toward the chamber where I had been sleeping. She did not need to duck-waddle to the cavern, just bending a little at the waist with the torch before her.

            “Did she take the shepherd’s purse with her?” Willie asked.

            “No,” Conrad explained. “That’s her medicine bag. Shepherd’s purse is the name of the plant that the little red seeds come from.”

            It didn’t take me long to find three heart-shaped pods. When I picked up the third one, its two halves came apart and spilled a dozen seeds onto the deerskin. The other two contained sixteen and twenty, which we collected and folded up in the tinfoil.

            “Here,” Conrad said, handing me the little package. “You take them to her and I’ll continue sorting through all this stuff.”

            “But… ,” I objected.

            “I know much of what the rest of this is; I have been learning, sorting since last spring. Besides… it’s YOU she wants to talk to… Alone. She told me.”

            I took the folded tinfoil packet and duck-walked back to the second chamber where I saw Grandmother slowly circumnavigating a stone pillar further back in the chamber than the light had extended before. She was chanting some barely audible words as she circled the column. There were four oil lamps placed equidistant around the column, and her circuit was inside the square defined by the lamps. She didn’t seem to notice my entrance to the chamber and I didn’t announce myself, but sat on a block of sandstone and watched. It reminded me of Father Mullen circling the sacristy as he prepared to say Mass. One dared not interrupt, even if you had finished your own Orationes Ante Missam. It was a prayer to prepare you for the solemnity of The Mass you were about to take part in. Most of us altar boys finished it way ahead of Father Mullen. I always figured the priest probably had a much longer prayer that they would teach us at seminary. But then, we occasionally had visiting priests who could finish faster than us.

            She made several more circuits, and stopped walking. She nodded her head and spoke softly looking directly at the pillar as if she were assenting to a companion with whom she’d just concluded a conversation. Then she turned toward me.

            “You have the seeds?” she asked.

            I nodded, and stood holding up the foil package. She took it from me then handed it back. “Here, you hold.” And then she slowly turned and sat on the rock next to where I had just been seated.

            “Sit, please,” she invited. “We’ll talk.”
            I sat.
            “You and… your friend… you in trouble?” I looked away toward the pillar.             “Trouble?”

            “Sometimes, people who stay at Mae West, come there to be… invisible?”

            I frowned, pretending ignorance, though recognizing the name Mae West as what Shadow had called the hideout.

            “Mae West? Umm… ,” I hesitated, trying to think of an honest answer that would not compromise Ode’s secret hideout or Willie’s secret, either.

            “Mr. Rankin’s place?” she added. “Fred and Comes-with-Thunder said they found you with Mr. Rankin’s car.”

            “You know my uncle?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

            “Your uncle? Hmm.”
            “Great great-uncle, actually my grandmother’s uncle.”

            “We are friends a long time, Mr. Rankin and me. Good… old… friends,” she said with a relaxed smile. “So, you and Willie… you have come there to be invisible?”
            I understood her to mean by invisible, “hiding out,” and nodded.
            “Is someone trying to hurt you?” She got right to the point.
            “I don’t know… maybe… . We were shot at once, but… I don’t know.”

            “So, your uncle, he sent you to Mae West?”

            I shook my head. “He doesn’t know that we were there. I lived with him in Chicago, but he went away to Arkansas, but… I thought he was supposed to come here… to…? Mae West? Willie.. er… we… needed his help.”

            “Ah… I see,” she said reaching into a pocket on her skirt and pulling out a picture postcard. “He was to come, but had a change of plans. This postal card came from Arkansas.” She handed it to me.

            In bold script above a drawing of an old man asleep with his feet up on a disorderly desk was written, “Silence! Genius at work–Hot Springs, Arkansas”. On the back, in a handwritten script–not Ode’s–it read: “Cancel Mae West: stroke.” There was no signature. It was addressed to Mae West, General Delivery, Black River Falls, Wisconsin; and postmarked Nov. 11, 1962.

            “That’s not his writing,” I observed. But I was excited… she had news of Uncle Ode! “You heard from him? Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

            She nodded, “I know. Probably someone had to write it for him, I think. He has friends there.”

            “Stroke?” I asked.
            “I don’t know… yet… . Do you know what a stroke is?”
            “Not exactly… . But Sister Mary-Alice had one… and… and… she… died!”

            “Not always fatal… strokes. Someone would tell me… if it was.”
            “Oh,” I sighed. “Do you know… ?”

            “This is all I know for sure. No news since this,” she said, referring to the post card. “Now that the storm and the holidays have passed, Grandson will go to the post office again… maybe there will be new instructions. You’ve been at Mae West for a while,” she said, matter-of-factly.

            I nodded.

            “From the post card,” she said “I understood I would not be… needed… there. So Fred and Cora and I didn’t go. Then you arrived. Other times, Mr. Rankin has said, ‘In some cases, it is better not to know things.’ So we let you be invisible.” She added, “But, I DO know SOME things, anyway.”

            “So… you knew we were there?”

            “Hard to miss: chimney smoke, generators, lights, waving at jets.” She paused and looked directly into my eyes. “New graves on the ridge… .” Then, from her medicine pouch, she pulled out Red Bird’s flint knife. I looked at the knife and then to her face. Her face did not frown and speak the “I gotcha” I expected. Instead, her eyes were wide with a hopeful anticipation, looking for an answer like a child gazing at wrapped presents under a tree. I thought she might be suggesting we had killed the man we buried.

            “W-w-we… we… . I mean… the man we buried… it was his knife. But w-w-we … didn’t k-k-k-ill him,” I stammered. “W-w-we just found him… his skeleton, I mean. We just thought… I mean, Willie just thought… we couldn’t just leave him there… he should have a d-d-d-decent b-b-b- burial…”

            “You FOUND… him?” she looked at me incredulously.
            “The skeleton–we buried–it was his knife. At least that’s what we figured… .”
            The creases between her brows turned into deep crevices as she looked down at the knife. “At Mae West?” she asked.
            “By it. In a cave… in the rocks… at the top of that highest of the hills… where you saw me wave at the jets,” I said. The other wrinkles around her eyes and mouth started to move open and closed.

            “He also had a flute and bag of jewelry, too. We put them all in a box and interred them with him, but I… er we forgot to put the knife and the flute back. But…”

            Then she laid the knife into her lap and covered her face with her hands. Her breathing stopped for a long minute before her shoulders collapsed with a great sigh, followed by several deep breaths and exhalations, as if she were about to cry… but didn’t. Slowly her breathing became regular again.

            “We think he had been dead since ancient times,” I said. “The flint knife–Willie said it was probably neolithic… . She knows about that,” Grandmother stopped me, raising her right palm toward me, “stuff,” I finished.

            “I KNOW this knife… I KNOW… you did not kill… the man you buried. I… I think… it was ME… killed this man. My willfulness killed this man. This knife… ,” she placed it in the palm of her hand to show it to me, “it was part of a war-bundle from my mother’s clan–a very sacred relic. You know what I mean–relic?”

“Yes, we have those, too,” I said. “You see this… this knife didn’t kill HIM–it SAVED him from a big cat–a cougar, maybe… .” I told her the whole story of Willie jumping in the cave and not being able to get out, and finding the man’s skeleton with two broken legs and the knife in the skeleton of the cat.

            “We figured he died of starvation,” I continued, “or blood loss… stuck in the cave with no way out… as WE would have been… if… I’d have jumped in too. We couldn’t just leave him there though.”

            As she listened to my story her torso began to rock back and forth very slightly. By the time I had finished she was swaying like an old nun praying the Rosary, bending and nodding with each bead. Then it struck me that she said she thought SHE had killed him… . She seemed now even more distraught. I remembered my mother with the scissors in her hand. But this time rather than running away I decided to stay with her. I reached over and touched her shoulder.

            “So, really, ” I said, “ it was just an accident of fate… that this knife… was… . I mean… was he part of your family? The knife couldn’t have killed HIM it was stuck in the cat’s sixth cervical vertebra. I’m sorry if I…”

            She raised her hand again, which I took to mean “Stop,” so I did.

            “It’s finished, then,” she said, not looking at me, but to someone standing beside her. Her eyes were misty, and then she looked away, bowing her head.

            I sat silently for several minutes waiting for her to explain what was finished, but she said nothing while her eyes followed something into the dark empty corners of the cavern. I noticed no change, the trickle of the water continued, the four lamps were still burning with an occasional spit or pop; and nothing moved except the shadows from the lamps. The dark spaces remained dark.

            “Wh-what’s finished?” I finally asked.

            “Oh! I’m sorry, son. I forgot you were here,” she said, reaching out to touch my hand. “I’m afraid I was somewhere else; visiting another time… MY story,” she said with a long relieved sigh and a smile. “You’ve allowed me to know the end of my story.”

            Coming from such an old person that phrase sounded ominous, yet her face spoke of joy and hope.

            “Story?”

            “I’ve been waiting here… eighty…? Ah… yes… most of eighty years… to know the end of that story… . So don’t be sorry… be happy,” she said, as if convincing herself, too.          “This is a great gift you have given me–to help me write the end of my story.” She looked longingly at the knife and touched the runes on its grip. “This is a much better ending.”

            “Ending?” I inquired.

            “Happened long time passed. Will take some dreaming for this old relic… and this one, too,” she said pointing to her head, “to gather loose ends together. We will tell stories later. First, more important medicine must be made.”

          The next day Conrad and I walked to Black River to see if there was new mail about my Uncle.