The Purification Ceremony Read online

  "Done," Griffin said. He handed the outfitter the quiver. "That's deer blood, for your information."

  Cantrell took the quiver. One arrow had dried bubbles of blood on it. I watched every blink, every hand movement, every muscle in Griff's face as if my life depended on it. Which at that moment it did.

  Cantrell said at last, "I'll be keeping these a while."

  Griff nodded, but I could see he wasn't happy.

  "Mike," I said, "I want to get out of here. Now."

  Cantrell chewed on his mustache. "Not till we check those tracks and get our story straight."

  "What story?" Griff asked. "For Christ's sake, Patterson's been murdered, scalped, gutted and hung from a tree."

  "More to it than that, I'd say," Cantrell said, his voice rising. "The Mounties investigate killings up here. We don't tell no one, especially the other clients, till I can radio them in."

  "Why not?" I demanded.

  "I got two reasons. One: could be one of the other guests, and by telling we found a body, we let 'em know that we're

  watching before the Mounties can fly in. Two: because me and Sheila risked everything to lease this property; if we go back now and tell 'em without a cop standing there, they'll panic and there goes our dream."

  "Or maybe there's a third reason," Griff said. "Maybe you killed your guide."

  Cantrell's features hardened, but his voice remained steady. "I won't honor that with a response. My wife's been through some damn hard times the past ten years because of me. She deserves more than to have it end like this. What's it gonna be?"

  Griff and I glanced at each other.

  "You don't have to make your decision 'cause of me," Cantrell said. "Do it for Sheila."

  I hesitated, then said, "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Which is more than you're giving Griff."

  Griff said, "My conscience is clear. If yours is, you'll call the Mounties the second we get back to the lodge."

  "You got my word," Cantrell said.

  "What about Patterson?" Griff asked. "They'll notice him missing."

  "Already figured that out. Last week, when we flew out to get supplies, there was a bad stomach bug in town. Sheila got sicker than a hound after we got back. Three days of fever, puking, the trots. I'm gonna say Patterson got it and is laying low in his cabin so none of the clients get sick. No one'll go near him."

  "What took us so long to get into camp?" I asked.

  Cantrell gestured to Griffin's buck on the back of the snowcat. "Griff and Patterson were tracking that deer when the kid came down sick. Took us a spell to get him and the buck back to the machines. And you couldn't figure out how to drive it. I came to your rescue."

  "We're not leaving his body here," I said, remembering my father. "There are coyotes."

  "Wolves, more like it," Cantrell said. "We'll get him into the icehouse. We don't use it this time of year and it'll keep his body cold until the Mounties can take a look. We'll wait until morning time to check your area, Mr. Griffin."

  Two hours later, Arnie was on his feet in the dining room. The pediatrician's arms and hands mimed a rifle in action. "About noon, two doe stepped out where I could see them, just feeding along, and then a third, but her tail's out straight and she's acting real nervous, you know, kind of glancing back at the thick stuff they'd come from."

  "Buck behind her, my man," Butch said. The recording-equipment salesman had tied his long hair back in a ponytail. He had a thick gold hoop in his ear I hadn't noticed before and was wearing a colorful embroidered denim shirt.

  "You know it." Arnie grinned. "Only the fourth to come by my stand this morning. But the second I see this one, I know he's a shooter. Long tines. That two-foot spread between the beams. And the size of his body! My old man never would have believed it."

  Phil bunched up his massive shoulders and shook his shiny black head as if he couldn't believe his misfortune. "And you saw him first through the binoculars I lent you?"

  Arnie grinned again. "Clear as day, thanks, Philly boy."

  "Don't mention it," he grunted morosely. "Guy comes unprepared. I got to lend him everything. And he shoots the big one. Man, the world's against me today."

  "Hey, I said thanks didn't I?" Arnie protested. "Anyway, I'm getting the gun up on him, praying I don't miss, and . . ."

  Dinner was like one of those hallucinations that bubble up during a high fever, discordant and random. I heard the conversation at the table, but my mind jarred under the clash of distant voices and strange, contorted images. Look at them all celebrating their deer, I thought, oblivious to the darkness outside. Or, worse, one of them rejoices in the darkness. I studied each as a psychiatrist would, searching for any hint that one—and I still had not wholly ruled out Cantrell or Griff—was a killer. Griff had acted strange this morning. What was that he'd said to me just before leaving the cat? The woods can be an unforgiving place. And Cantrell. I knew he was a hunter. He'd seen death. But the way he'd come up with that plan to explain away Patterson's absence—so quick, so cold. The body right there beside him.

  We'd parked at the edge of the lodge grounds and sneaked Patterson into the icehouse before returning to the cats to drive them in with the headlights blazing and Cantrell hitting the air horns. Two huge whitetail bucks hung from a crossbar behind the lodge. We parked in front of the dead animals and made a show of working the iron gambrel into the hocks of Griffs deer before hoisting it up alongside the others.

  The rest of the hunters as well as Sheila, Nelson and Theresa straggled out to see what had taken us so long and to pay their respects to Griff and his deer. Cantrell's performance was flawless in explaining our late return and Patterson's sickness. He delivered the story with equal doses of drama and humor. And never blinked.

  Earl Addison acted the tycoon and ordered, "Just keep the kid away from us until he's done being sick. Last thing I want is a bug when deer like this are being harvested."

  "Don't you worry," the outfitter replied cheerily. "He's already in his cabin. Sheila will take of him, seeing how she's already beaten the flu."

  While Griff's buck was substantial, it paled in comparison to the deer Arnie and Lenore Addison had shot.

  Arnie's six-by-six typical appeared to make the Boone & Crockett record book with very few deductions for asymmetrical points. Lenore's had just missed the book, but was bigger in body than either Arnie's or Griffs, close to three hundred pounds dressed.

  At the dinner table, Lenore was saying, "You know, Earl, if you'd just shower before each hunt, maybe you'd see a good buck."

  "I did see one," Earl said. "He just wouldn't step out." She rolled her eyes to the rest of the table.

  "He wouldn't step out," Earl insisted.

  "Whatever you say, hon."

  Kurant took notes as fast as he could while wolfing down his meal. He claimed to have taken several photographs of large deer with his telephoto lens. "They came out of nowhere," he said in awe. "One second they weren't there, next they were. Never heard a thing."

  "That's how they are," Phil said. "Like they come from a different world."

  I'd been toying with my food and suddenly lost all appetite. I caught the journalist looking in my direction and decided I'd better get him talking. "So you enjoyed your first day out?"

  "Got a bit cold, sitting there," he admitted. "But yes. What I'd really like to do, if you wouldn't mind, is tag along behind you tomorrow. See how a tracker works."

  I caught Cantrell's quick headshake at the far end of the table. Why was he so obsessed with keeping this a secret? Then I saw him glance at Sheila, desperation in his expression. If he was hiding a more evil motivation, he was doing it perfectly. I'd have to give him the benefit of the doubt one more time.

  "Maybe later in the week," I said to the writer. "I worked a big buck today and was just starting to figure him out when I lost light. I want to get right back in there tomorrow. It won't be the time for a beginner."

  Kurant took the rejection good-naturedly. He
had a nice way about him that made you want to talk. "Fair enough, but I'm holding you to your promise."

  I wanted to get up from the table and go to my cabin, but I feared leaving early would raise suspicions. As the dinner progressed, I noticed Earl, who sat to my right, becoming increasingly drunk. We had moved back to the great room for coffee. Lenore had left to use the rest room, I was standing next to the bar and I felt Earl's hand brush my fanny. He leered at me. "Must be something, running after those deer the way you do, sugar. Get to know your quarry up close and personal, I bet."

  I put my hand on his hand. Emboldened, Earl tried to start a circular motion. Before he got halfway through the first arc, I dug my thumb between the knuckles of his mid-die and index fingers. At the same time I grasped the blade of his hand and twisted it out and away, a self-defense move I once learned. I batted my eyelashes demurely. "I just think sitting on your butt all day like you do, Earl, must be a bit boorish."

  Earl winced and struggled to get his hand back. I would not let him. "But yes," I went on, "when tracking you have to know when to push and when to lay off."

  I wrenched his hand and released it. Red-faced, he massaged his wrist and smiled wolfishly. "You're a spunky one, aren't you?"

  Lenore returned and picked up the tension immediately. "What's going . . . ?"

  "Your husband thought we might get in a little after-hours hunt," I said. "I wouldn't play along."

  For a split second Lenore's cool demeanor cracked and the sort of helpless pain you witness in the children of alcoholic parents was revealed, only to be masked again with that chiseled, arch expression she habitually wore. The rest of the room fell silent.

  "Little man, I think we better have that discussion again about how Texas regards division of property," she said stonily. "It ain't pretty."

  Earl glared at me, then at his wife. Then he laughed. "Hell, I didn't mean nothing by it. You know I was born a flirt, sweet thing. Can't do nothing about it, no matter how hard I try."

  Let's go to the cabin, Earl, before she breaks your wrist," Lenore said. "Or I do."

  Earl looked at the rest of the crew sheepishly. "Boys, have pity on me, I'm in the doghouse for sure."

  Nobody responded. And after the Addisons departed, Butch mumbled something to me about "jerkdom appearing at every economic level." The others yawned nervously and filtered out the front door. I lingered until it was only me and Cantrell.

  "Called yet?" I asked.

  "Waiting until it cleared out," he whispered. He glanced through the doorway to the dining room toward the swinging kitchen doors. "First I gotta figure a way to tell Sheila."

  "You just tell her and get those Mounties in here!" I insisted.

  Cantrell's eyes flashed. "I know my business, Ms. Jackman. I'm doing the right thing here in my own way."

  "I just wanted to make sure," I said. I did not yield my gaze.

  We remained that way for several moments until Cantrell mumbled, "Taking care of it, right now." He disappeared into the kitchen.

  Out on the porch of the lodge, I peered up at the moonlit sky. Here and there I could make out the forms of elliptical clouds driven east by high-altitude winds. A troubled sky, resounding against the nothing at all of the infinite night beyond. My great-uncle Mitchell used to stare at the clouds on such nights for hours.

  "Night clouds show us the presence of Power," he once told me. "Power moves across the mind like the shadows of clouds cast on the peaks and the ravines of a mountain. We see ourselves and the shapes of our other worlds in them."

  Mitchell. He was past seventy by the time I was aware of him, with skin like old boot leather and a Mona Lisa smile and long silver hair that took forever to dry after he'd been caught outside in the rain, which was often. He had tobacco breath and a soft, gravelly voice. He loved beech trees, waterfalls, snow geese, moose calves, the Cabela's catalog, unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, strong coffee, cheese doodles, televised wrestling matches and Bugs Bunny, whom he considered wise.

  Mitchell's mother was a Micmac from up near Cape Bretton, Nova Scotia. As a young woman, she'd fallen in love with a Penobscot from Old Town, Maine.

  She'd come south for love and lived among the Penobscots until her death. But she taught her oldest son, Mitchell, much about the Micmac view of the world. As such, he believed that there was not one level of existence, but six: the World Beneath the Earth, the World Beneath the Water, Earth World, Ghost World, the World Above the Earth, the World Above the Sky. But underlying and permeating those worlds was a single life force called Power. He believed that everything he could see and touch and taste and smell and hold was a manifestation of Power. We were Power. The trees were Power, as were the stars and the moss and the wind. Because of that, he referred to the birches and the fish and the deer and even mountains as living things like us.

  In the Micmac language, my great-uncle Mitchell was a Puoin, or shaman. Mitchell was my baby-sitter and my first teacher.

  To be honest, I had always thought about Power as a concept rather than a reality, much in the way I imagine some Christians must regard God. They've had no personal experience with God and so think of Him as a construct.

  Mitchell and my father tried to teach me to actually sense Power, but tragedy struck just as the real lessons were beginning, and I left home forever.

  Long before that, however, when I was a little girl skipping after Mitchell, the lessons were much simpler. We picked blackberries and blueberries and gathered acorns and butternuts. Soon after that, the old man made me help Katherine clean her fish so I would understand that meat comes from flesh, that it does not just appear in grocery stores by magic. We always put the bones of the fish back into the rivers so more fish would come to our lines, which had been the Micmac belief for generations.

  I served an apprenticeship in Mitchell's vegetable garden on the flat near the trout pond. There he taught me to sow seeds and tend plants as if they were part of our family. Which, to his mind, they were. Once, when I was six, I forgot to water the garden during a drought. I'd never seen Mitchell so angry; he puffed so hard on one of his Pall Malls that it ran and scorched his lips.

  "Plant's no different than any other living thing, you care for them with respect," he scolded. "Tonight you go to bed without dinner so you understand their needs."

  I never, ever forgot again.

  In the fall when I was too young to accompany my father and Mitchell on their hunts, Katherine became my guide. She returned every evening to be with me, no matter how busy her schedule in Augusta. She cooked my dinner and read to me before bed. On Saturday mornings she took me °n long hikes along rivers. It was on these walks that I learned how beavers built their dams and how the rabbit Population lifted and fell in a seven-year rotation and why squirrels hoarded for the winter. I learned to build box nests for wood ducks so their young would be safe from snapping turtles. I learned where the otters were likely to make their slides in winter.

  The October I turned five, I found a crow's egg nestled in the pine needles during one of those hikes. I brought the egg to Katherine, who had wondered over it, saying it was a remarkable thing that the egg could have survived the summer in the rookery without breaking. On the way home I dropped the egg and the mess inside dribbled out onto the rocks. I wept. She gathered my face into the crook of her neck and she rocked me until I slept in the warm autumn sun. We did not get back to the house until twilight. My father and Mitchell were waiting for us on the porch. When they heard the story, they seemed prouder of my reaction to the loss of the egg than its discovery.

  "That egg was a gift," Mitchell told me that night before I slept. "The crow is a seer. She sees things from the sky that others do not. She feels things others do not."

  "Just like you, a little crow," my father said.

  "And so I was named," I whispered to myself on the lodge porch. Down near the dock, the shadows moved and my hand flew to my throat. I was alone, silhouetted, vulnerable. Then a whistle came out of the da
rkness and Grover shuffled toward me.

  "Hello, Miss Diana," he said softly.

  I lowered my hand deliberately and smiled at the gentle soul. "Hi, Grover."

  "Miss Sheila feeds you good after a long day in the woods, I think. Mr. Jimmy always said if you hunt you gotta eat. Miss Theresa says that, too, but she got that from Mr. Jimmy, eh?"

  ;'Do you miss Mr. Jimmy?" I asked.

  "Every day," he said.

  It was suddenly important to me to know how he would be cared for in the long run.

  "None of his daughters or his son comes to see you here?"

  Grover scratched at his lip, saddened by my question. "They never likes Grover, 'specially Ronny, that's Mr. Jimmy's real son."

  "Aren't you his real son?"

  Grover shook his head. "No, miss. Not like he married my momma or nothing. I'm not a real son."

  "Mr. Jimmy said that?"

  "No, miss."

  "Ronny, then?"

  He scuffed at the snow and wiped at his nose with his sleeves. "But Ronny don't come to the lodge in I can't remember when, so it doesn't matter, eh? I eat now. Been down to my rock to listen to the loons, but didn't hear none tonight. Probably all gone south by now. But Momma always says I lose time when I'm on the rock, so I eat now, long as Miss Sheila's still in the kitchen."

  "I think so." I patted him on the shoulder as he passed. "Eat and sleep well, Grover."

  "You, too, miss."

  I waited until he'd gone inside, then hurried back to my cabin. I latched the door shut behind me, then shoved one of the table chairs under the knob. I drew the drapes and immediately regretted the caged feeling.

  I stripped, and without understanding exactly why, I took the photograph of Emily and Patrick to the bathroom. I set it on the sink. I stepped into the shower, leaving the curtain parted slightly so I could see them.

  I leaned against the back wall of the stall and turned on the water as hot as I could tolerate. The steam created a veil between me and the photograph, but I could still make out their almond-shaped brown eyes, Kevin's eyes.