The Orenda Joseph Boyden (24 page)

He steps back into the shadows, his clothing allowing his body to all but disappear, his pale head glowing like a moon. He knows what he does, I suddenly recognize. He knows he pushes us to get angry, because he knows that when we get angry we’ll pull that anger apart in order to inspect it. He wants his words to offend so we’re forced to consider them for a long time.

If people were sleeping earlier, they’re awake now, talking and gesticulating, the Crow’s having ignored the custom here of visitors not offending with harsh words the graciousness of the host.

“But maybe he knows no better,” a man says to his woman. “After all, he comes from a place we can’t imagine.”

“He knows,” I hear the woman answer. “He’s lived among us for a long time now.”

The Crow emerges from the shadows once more and everyone falls silent. “I have just a very little bit more to say. No one made me come here. I knew already before I travelled across the great water your practice of burning, of eating flesh. That doesn’t cause fear in me, this custom of killing other humans. I already knew your nature, your custom of covering each other with fire. I knew all this. Still, when I left my home, I thought, ‘Those who cover me with fire, those who eat me, I do not fear them.’ Because I know it won’t be long I would feel the pain. But inside the earth I fear very much. I would not ever lose consciousness.”

Then he raises his arms to us. “And I am afraid for you,” he whispers. “I come to warn you about the fire.”

A log in one of the cooking pits pops, sending a small shower of embers into the air as if in emphasis, startling a few children nearby.

“I come all this way,” the Crow says, “to warn you of this danger. I do not wish for you to be consumed.”

With that he recedes into the shadows again, finished his speaking for the night. I don’t like that he’s been given the last word, that we’ll all go to sleep soon with those words in our heads. The same creature I once laughed at and even pitied, I see, has grown into something I hadn’t imagined.

GLITTERING EYES

The raven has begun to stink. I don’t care so much, but the women of the longhouse complain now. They don’t understand why I wanted to keep him whole. Eventually, Father, wouldn’t his brain and entrails refuse to rot anymore? I study his eyes carefully for the first days here after we return from preparing the fields for planting as the women teach me their songs and how to sew. The eyes, they’ve already changed to the colour of clouds before rain and have sunk into the skull, flies buzzing about. I sprinkle ash from the fire into the sockets and see how the claws clench like fists as the muscles dry by the fire the old women keep burning for me. I keep the bird stretched out as in flight, and he’s as long as my arms reach wide. His beak’s bigger than my finger, slightly curved and black. The feathers of his neck are thick and blue-black when the light from the smoke holes strikes them. He sleeps by my bed. He is all I found when the women asked me to go out and find that which only I will recognize, and I think I surprised them with my discovery. This raven, he certainly surprised me.

A week’s gone by now, though, and I’m told I must act. The women, on some days just a few, on others a bigger group, I think they found it strange I brought home a raven pierced through by an arrow. They’ve gathered in this longhouse to lead me into womanhood, but I don’t feel ready for it. I can see they want to ask me where the raven came from, if I’d shot it or it was pierced by somebody else, but I won’t tell. Images of that boy’s back, of his strong legs, wake me up the first
nights. Porcupine Quills. I don’t know his name, but this is what I’ll call him. I hate him for his assuredness, for his pride. I want to touch his body with the tips of my fingers, the nine I have left. I want to taste his skin.

I use a sharpened clamshell and run it from the chest to the tail, parting the feathers as I go, opening the raven to the light. I gag when I reach my hand in with the shell to cut out the lungs and the heart and the stomach. The old women are right. This should have been done already.

I collect the stinking entrails in a pile, and when the raven’s cavity is empty, scraped clean of what it once held, I take more ash and rub it inside my bird, feeling the heat still despite his death, and then I lay him on his back, his body open to the world so it may cure. I scoop the guts in my hands and decide now they need to become ash, stoking the fire until it burns hot, then casting the guts in, the heart, the lungs, the fire eating them all as I whisper prayers to the orenda of this creature, asking it to protect me and to teach me as part of it roasts, then blackens, then turns to ash. I can feel the eyes of the women watching me. They can teach me some things but they can’t teach me all of it.

—

TODAY AFTER WORKING
in the fields we make sleeping mats out of corn-husks, the women showing me how to weave them tight, tying off the ends every length so they won’t unravel. They’ve also shown me how to peel and roll hemp on my thighs, creating twine the men will use for snares and fishing nets, and how to grind the surplus corn that we’ll trade with the Anishnaabe this autumn for furs and meat. I’ve watched them carefully and learned how to fashion bone awls, and sinew from the muscles of deer and moose. With these tools, they show me how to stitch birchbark drinking and eating bowls.

One woman, Sleeps Long, the one closest in age to me but who’s
probably twice as old, the beautiful one with the pretty blue and grey tattoos around each wrist, I watch how she uses a thin needle made from a marten’s cock, how she works it with careful patience to sew porcupine quills into patterns that blossom over the days into flowers that she says will be a gift for her husband. It isn’t until the afternoon she holds the breechcloth up to me, her long neck proud, that I recognize the designs and realize where I’ve seen them before.

That night I lie awake on my sleeping mat, the women around me snoring gently, and I picture the boy who killed the raven, Porcupine Quills. He’s hiding in a tall cornfield, and, as if part of me is a bird, I see myself from above looking for him in the field. I watch myself open my arms and this makes the wind pick up, a wind that grows strong enough to flatten the cornstalks so that Porcupine Quills has nowhere to hide, a wind so strong it erases the pockmarks from my face and body, a wind that somehow replaces my missing finger. And that is when Porcupine Quills stands from hiding and walks out to me, opening his arms as he approaches.

—

THIS MORNING I TAKE
Sleeps Long’s hands in my own and admire her tattooed wrists. Two snakes, intertwined, wrap around one, and on the other a songbird clutches a branch.

“I dreamed both of these,” Sleeps Long says. “I think the snakes are meant to be my husband and me. The bird, I believe, is my son.”

“You have a child?” I ask her.

She nods.

“How old is he?” I ask.

“He’s in his fifteenth spring,” she says.

“You must have been very young,” I offer. She smiles at the compliment. “And what’s his name?” But before she can answer, I blurt, “I’d like a tattoo.”

“And what would the tattoo be?”

“I’d like a tattoo of the porcupine quill patterns that you sew,” I say.

She laughs. “Yes, you are a strange girl indeed.”

I take no offence to this. She doesn’t mean it as an insult. I’m used to it. “And where would you like this tattoo?” she asks.

I point at my throat, but thinking better of it, I drop my finger so it hovers over my chest.

She laughs again. “Well, maybe when you’re a little older,” she says. “I suggest you wait until after your first moon, at the very least.” She glances at me. “It will be soon, I think. But for now, how about, instead of decorating you, we decorate your raven.”

Sleeps Long suggests we use cornhusks to stuff the raven’s cavity. She likes my idea of keeping it whole rather than separating it out to use the wings as fans, as some of the other women have suggested. “What will be the point of a complete dead bird?” one of the old women asked. “Why not make it useful by using its parts?” But something in me wants my raven as I first saw him, a bird that sits complete and watches me while I sleep, that holds my place in the longhouse when I’m away, that causes strangers to step back and stare. There’s power in that.

With the cornhusks stuffed into it, Sleeps Long carefully sews the bird back up with her sinew and marten’s cock, joking to me as she does that she once knew a boy whose own wasn’t much bigger. “All I felt was this pricking. Not pleasant at all.” For the first time I can remember, I laugh. She looks at me then as if I am some new animal she’s never seen before. Then her eyes crinkle and we laugh together.

“We have to remove the brain,” she says once the raven is sewn shut. She pinches her nose and points at the head and sunken eyes. “Can’t you smell it?”

I shake my head. “I don’t smell death anymore.”

Sleeps Long’s eyes are no longer crinkled. “You’re not the only one who’s suffered loss,” she says. She lifts the raven off her lap and places it beside her. “The people who were once your own killed my father and brother when I was your age.”

I shrug my shoulders. I want to ask her if she witnessed it with her own eyes.

“What the men do, what we do, it’s a circle,” she says. “It’s been a circle for a long time.” I watch her with my eyes turned to the side. “We were once all the same people, but we’re not anymore.”

“I’m not the same as you,” I say, now looking directly at her. I feel your anger, Father and Mother, burning in my guts. You were taken away from me, not allowed to be with me anymore, when I most needed you.

“How is this grief explained?” Sleeps Long asks. “How is it digested? I have never figured that out.” She looks around her to see if any of the old women are near. “We hurt one another because we’ve been hurt,” she whispers. “We kill one another because we have been killed. We will continue to eat one another until one of us is completely consumed.”

She straightens her spine and lifts the raven back onto her lap. “Let’s remove the brain now,” she says, “and replace the eyes with something special.”

She slits the neck open and, using an awl, pulls until its long black tongue hangs out. She then carefully works the awl into the head from below, scraping and cutting as she goes, until the tongue and the muscles that held it in place, and then the eyes and their tendons, and finally the yellow mush that was once the animal’s brain lie in a small pile beside me.

“Do you wish to bury it or burn it?” she asks, obviously having noticed what I’d done earlier with the other entrails.

I lift the pile in my hand and again step to the fire, throwing it all in. It’s done. That which will rot is gone. The rest of the animal, its tendons and muscle, will simply harden. I’ve been careful to keep the shape of the animal so that it stands, wings stretched out and up, its neck and head arched defiantly.

“Do you think we can dry it so its mouth is open, like it’s calling out?” I ask Sleeps Long.

She nods as she strings her awl with thin sinew. “You’re going to have to keep a close eye on it as the tendons shrink,” she says. “You’ll be very careful for days to try and make it how you want it, and then you’ll begin to get forgetful, and then before you know it, you’ll wake up one morning and the bird will be a shrunken old woman with one wing pointed up and the other straight out with its claws curled up into balls and you’ll never get it to stand.”

“I won’t get lazy,” I say. “I already see how I know it will be.”

Sleeps Long picks up the raven with both hands and holds it above her head. “It’s very big,” she says. “I’m not sure I’ve seen a bigger one. How’d you come about it?”

Instead of telling her that her son gave it to me, I say, “You mentioned something about eyes.” I point to the sockets, black holes now that make the raven look frightening in a way I don’t want it to. “Look at how scary that is,” I say.

Sleeps Long digs around in her sewing pouch and pulls out pieces of tanned hide and quills and finally shiny, polished pieces of shell. I didn’t know she was a wampum maker. She sorts through the shells until she finds two that are a bit bigger than my thumbnail. “What do you think of these?” she asks, holding them up to the light of the smoke hole. The shells, polished to a high shine, appear as if something glows from within them, like the colour of the sky just before the sun comes up, and as Sleeps Long twists them, the light hitting them in different ways, they change colour all the way to the sky just after sunset. I don’t know what to say. She knows it, smiling as she bends to the work of slipping one into the slit of the raven’s throat and pushing her fingers up into its head until the shell flashes, streaked with a bit of blood, from the raven’s eye socket, winking at me.

“But how will it stay there?” I ask. It’s too beautiful, more beautiful than I could have dreamed. It needs to be just like that.

“I’ll stuff the head with something, maybe corn silk. That will keep them from shifting, and as the blood dries, it’ll secure them even better.”

I clap my hands in happiness as she works to slip the other shell in and then sends me to look for corn silk. When I return with a handful, Sleeps Long holds the raven so it stares back at me, its eyes sparkling as if they’re on fire, making me feel like I’m on fire, too.

“I’ve come up with an idea for how to make it keep the shape you desire,” Sleeps Long says. She explains how we’ll hang the raven upside down and from its claws above my sleeping place so the wings will spread, how this will allow the neck to arch just right. Sleeps Long holds the raven in her hands, her breath ruffling the feathers of its head as it watches me so that it looks alive, my bird watching me with its shining eyes so that I can barely make sense of what the beautiful woman says.

—

FOR THE NEXT
many days I wake in the morning, opening my eyes to my raven who hangs upside down above, watching me. I check him carefully to make sure he holds the shape that he must and that his claws, big as my hands, still hold the stones I found, talons gripping them to keep their shape. When I first entered this longhouse, a couple of the old women sat me down and explained the coming days wouldn’t be easy since they knew I didn’t want to be here, but that I’d end up liking it. One of the old women said she’d dreamed just that. In my head, I called them crazy, dried-up witches. I won’t show them, though, that they were right.