A Work of Speculative Nonfiction

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1.

Sick with what I hope is a cold, I call to cancel an appointment and the woman who answers must have thought my high-pitched raspy voice was a prank call because she hung up on me. I listen in awe to the digital dial tone on the cold device in my hand. Up against my ear. A low tone predator sound. Be like a plant open to the world, I tell myself. Like the girl you once were in the past. A girl who was not afraid to get dirty, to climb trees, haul herself over chain link fences, run down gravel roads in the dark barefoot. A tomboy who preferred to wear jeans and suede loafers. Long sleeved striped tees under corduroy jumpers. Thick tights under thigh grazing skirts. Now you are old and tragically stern. Hands tight fists. Unfurl I say to myself. Don’t frown or your face will freeze that way. Always a furrowed brow, lost in thought. Worry really. On the lookout for a safe space. A girl come from poverty and vagrancy and chaos. 

Decades since I’ve seen my mother in real life. Only glimpsed in terrible recurring nightmares where half-animal half-human creatures pursue me. A girl with hair thick enough to grab ahold of; long enough to pull. Down to the ground. Cheek against the dirt. Mud tears in her eyes. Trauma is the Greek word for wound, a piercing of the body envelope. A mark left on the skin where a cut, burn or sore has not healed completely. Still, I redial. Again, and again. The number I am trying to call is not reachable. No longer in service. Disconnected. Trust in the world on hold. Optimism switched off. Imagination wide open, finding a path again and again. 

When a young person grows up without intimate examples of what she may aspire to become — whether artist or scientist, or leader in any realm — her sense of herself and her own value remains abstract. Examples which appear in books or on the news, however inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be real to her, let alone influential. She, her, hers, herself, the women of my family tree have been largely forgotten. Anonymous all, they are unknown, though not without unique interest. Especially to me, one of their descendants, a woman who from a young age did not feel I belonged to anyone, even my own mother and father. I was told over and over again when I was a child, ‘You’re no good.’ But I said to myself, You’ve got to keep it up. You’ve got to make your own way. Like my paternal great-grandmother Sadie Holliday who moved west away from all she had ever known.

A sign for Holiday, Kansas was planted in a field of corn high as her head. She wished she could run through the rows slapping her hands against the heaviness. Holliday was her father’s surname. Come from County Down, Ireland with her mother, Eliza. Her father was born there; her mother’s family emigrated from Scotland to the rocky coast of Ireland. They met and married in that old country, then journeyed across an ocean wide as the southwestern U.S. 

She missed her father’s laugh. 

Monotonous click-clack of the train track in her head, brought a new calm unlike the old calm, the only real calm, the silence of the grave. Safe. What did the word even mean anymore? The train cleared the congestion of the city, stockyards, and warehouses. Headed for Lawrence, then Hutchinson, on the Arkansas River, dark green and swollen. She’d left home to join her daughters in Los Angeles, California. She hadn’t seen them in seven years. No one in her everyday life called her “mom.” And yet she was a mother. When they wrote for her to come, and then sent her a train ticket in the post, she took a Greyhound bus north to Kansas City and caught the California Limited. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Line would take her out of the Midwest, across four states and two time zones—right to the edge. 

All at once stupidly hungry, Sadie ate one of the corn cakes she’d brought, along with a piece of beef jerky, and thought about her parents long dead. 

At night she slept fitfully, sitting up, head leaning against the damp window. When the conductor announced that breakfast was being served in the dining car, she lost sense of where she was and awoke with a start. Visited the ladies’ room to freshen up and returned to find a line crowding the aisle in front of her seat. Hungry. But she didn’t have the money to spare. So, she settled down to stare out the window at the beauty of western Kansas. 

Colorado Springs, Co. had come and gone by the time she’d finished one of the sausage biscuits she’d packed. She wiped the crumbs from her mouth and looked at a photo of her grandchildren. Two boys and a girl she had yet to meet, towheads with dark eyes. Black Irish. Dark souled. Her husband Eddie Alonzo always laughed at such talk. Naming babies by their looks afore they’d made any mark on the world he considered useless talk.

In Gallup, New Mexico the train slowed up and stopped to pick up passengers. A man got on. Dressed in slacks and a well-pressed dress shirt, he took the empty seat beside her. She felt penned in. Pulled out her flask and took a swig. 

“Good idea,” the man said. “Mind if I join you?”

“Of course not,” she answered, never to cross a stranger. No telling what you’d have to answer. 

“You tell yourself don’t start this early,” he said. “But I just can’t do that today.” 

“Good for you,” she responded, and turned back to the landscape speeding by, signaling a need for silence.

“My sister is dying,” he said. “It’s very near the end. Cancer. She got it six months ago. First, a melanoma on her back, now it’s everywhere.”

“Have you ever seen anyone die?” she asked him. Turned and looked him full in the face. 

“No,” he answered, and took another sip.

 “It’s just another kind of leaving.” 

“I’ve made promises to her I’m still trying to keep,” he said. “Do you have any siblings?”

“Yes,” she answered. She had five sisters, all dead and gone now save the youngest, left behind in Missouri, who perhaps she would never see again. 

The sun set on that sad thought and arose as they crossed into California. “The Golden State,” the conductor announced over the loudspeaker. First Needles, and then Barstow. Desert turned to small towns and then cities. San Bernardino, Santa Anita, and then Pasadena.

In Los Angeles, at Union Station, she gathered her things, collected her baggage, and departed the train. Her seatmate followed her out. 

“Before you go,” he said, “I have to tell you what I saw right before we arrived.” 

They stood together on the train platform, people streaming by.

“Did you notice?” he asked. “At 9:25 or 9:30, right around there, I saw a very bright light out our window. And I thought, maybe my sister is dying. Maybe my sister has already died. So, I asked her to wait. To take strength from me and wait, and I think she did. I’m telling you, I felt her. I really felt her. Do you believe me? Do you think she might have heard me?” 

In response Sadie squeezed his hand as hard as she was able.

“All I know,” he said, “is when I saw that light, I felt her presence. From a distance, from some strange distance I felt her. And that’s when I knew it was fate that I met you. Because, you know what? You look like her. If she’d been well in her life, she’d have been a lot like you. You get what I’m saying?”

 Sadie nodded yes and said her good-byes. Left him to his thoughts and followed the arrows down the gangway and into the hallway which led into the waiting room of the terminal. 

 1939. Twenty-one years since her husband had died. Gasping for breath, eating the pillowcase, hands thrashing the mote filled air. While she stood in the doorway watching, keeping her daughters from their father even as he died. 

Contagion. Anguished choices to make, and yet she had made them. 

Lord, have mercy. 

2.

I bolt upright in bed and stare into darkness. Two years shy of seventy-one, the age my mother died, the age her sister died, the age their mother, my maternal grandmother died, I throw the covers off and stare through my reflection in the plate glass window just a few feet from the end of the bed. I’m staying in a spa motel built in 1949 near ancient Cahuilla land, in a town developed over the Mission Creek branch of the San Andreas Fault. Creosote bushes sway in the desert wind. Shape shift. Palm Springs a sparkle in the distance, and over it all a haunting presence. 

Raven Mocker. A fiery phantom swaying towards me through the mesquite bushes ageless as a conjurer: withered, time haunted and stained. Come up from the underworld of death and decay and endless sorrow, come to eat my heart, to devour my last beating hours. 

 The Western raven evolved alongside my ancient ancestors, men, and women who tens of thousands of years ago walked across the Bering land bridge eventually making their way to North America. 

There’s a roar in my ears, the sound of thousands traveling across frozen tundra, car tires rolling over asphalt, bare feet shuffling through the slush of an unforgiving trail. I struggle for breath. Present and past overlap, rearrange thought, sparks in the void, the spaces between neurons, releasing centuries of silence, stories from sealed lips, stories locked in synapse and nerve endings, in connecting tissue, in sticky globs of lifeblood. 

The wind picks up. The shape outside grows larger. Within and without intermingle; self-control barely maintained I look away from the monstrous. Try to distract myself. Retrieve my phone from the bedside table and browse through a digital glow of family photos: me in another life, Mama young and alive, Mama’s mother holding a string of caught fish.

I don’t have the right words or the correct medicine to keep this magic out. Laugh lines deepen day-by-day, strange bruises bloom on my arms and my belly; wild curls of silver reflect onto the fiery shape beyond the glass, melding with the avian messenger, arms outstretched like wings. Hyper-vigilant, I watch morning come to lighten the sky. Hear the lap of thermal waters sluicing through the pool overflow. A water fountain sprays up into the dry air. Puddles form in the dirt. Shredded clouds draw a sheer curtain over the San Jacinto Mountains. The window is now transparent. Raven Mocker is gone. I turn my phone off and sink into the mattress. 

A few hours later I woke up to a gorgeous day. Anticipate fresh coffee, ripe fruit, and the hum of reassuring conversation round a communal table. Glance through the window, and that’s when I see it–a spot of blue-black fury. Large as an eagle, with a riff of ruffled feathers on its head, wide wings and a stout beak, the raven glides through the mesquite and creosote bush; dives for the overflow. Behind the bird a purple mountain, between us, the wall of glass, the water and the rocks, the desert air, and a coevolving past, known and unknown legends and myths, some told, some untold.

Mesmerized, I watch as the raven soars towards me, wedge-shaped tail tilting in the wind. There’s an object in her beak. But it’s only when she lands on a large boulder a few feet from the window that I recognize, and name what she carries: a piece of cheese pizza. Scavenged treasure which she plops down into the irrigation waters to soften, then hops into an adjacent mesquite bush to wait. A scavenger. Said to be a harbinger of death. Scrambling on the ground for sustenance. Like my mother trying to keep money in her pocket and wheels on the road. A woman who as a young girl learned to play the odds around the supper table in her family home. I can see her in my mind’s eye. Standing in the kitchen doorway behind her own mother. My Cherokee grandma. The two of them, watching my grandfather play poker. One big smash and grab grift. Eight-year-old June on watch in the kitchen doorway right behind the fat man’s chair listening to the clink of coin and waiting for her Pa’s signal.

Rain rattled the tin porch overhang, rolled in sheets off the roof eaves and trickled down the stove vent in the kitchen watering the dirt under the house where the cats slept. Linoleum underfoot, dusty baskets full of potatoes and beans beside her, the smell of vodka and tobacco in her nose. She loved watching men play poker; loved following the bets, the wagers, and the carefully upped antes. They spoke with smoke in their mouths, moving cigars and cigarettes from side to side with their tongues, eyes vacant, hands in the game, muttering plays. The hanging light above the table shone on a cash pile. Cards rippled in men’s hands. On all fours in the kitchen, her Ma pouring drinks round the table, June caught Pa’s eye on her and the fat man, doing double time. When his wink became a message, she froze. Not him. Not him, not him. 

How could she creep behind him undetected? 

Pa reshuffled his hand, cleared his throat, took another sip from his glass, and nodded. 

Turn them up and bet, turn them up and bet, low voices, all around, looking down at their cards. 

“One bullet and a deuce don’t do anything for me,” one man said. “I fold.

“Nothing but a couple nickels,” another muttered.

“Declare,” the fat man said.

 Pa said, “Four of a kind,” and laid it down.

“You don’t say,” the fat man snorted.

Seats creaked as they all leaned back, hands shifting as her Pa pulled a pile of cash toward his chest one more time. 

“Leave it stay on the table,” the fat man said, “Give us another go at it, why don’t you?”

Pa bent to adjust his boot, straightened up, reshuffled, cut, and dealt again. 

June watched the faces around the table harden into unthinking birds, all beaks and razor eyes. Seats creaked; haunches shifted. Talons clutched cards.

Ma walked behind them and around the table pouring glass after glass of liquor. “That’s some strong water she’s pouring,” the fat man said, wiping his forehead. “Poor thing. Don’t hear anything, does she?” He watched her circle the table and return to stand in the doorway. When he saw June there too, he burned. “What in hell? Has that kid been behind me all this time? Say, this ain’t no clip joint, is it?” He forced a belly laugh, and slipped a hand below the table, using a happy sound to mask a lying move. 

“Calling me a cheat?” Pa asked.

There was always big talk around his table, a challenging boast or brag,  never an actual con but him. Spot the sucker or become one–that was the truth in Pa’s house. 

“Back it down,” one of the regulars said. “This ain’t the hall, man. It’s Ed’s game here.”

The stakes in the middle of the round table deepened. Money fell against the hot sauce, the sugar bowl, the café scale salt, and pepper shakers. 

Ma bent to open the bean sack, scooped a pan full of pintos and put them on the stove to soak. 

June’s eye caught a glint of nickel, stuck in the fat man’s belt, and made a move to alert her Pa. Her motion was a blunder. Potatoes rolled across the wood floor, under the table and around chair legs. Along the wood floor she scurried, trying to corral the spuds, arms scooping, a bug on the floor, a suspicious nuisance. She stopped under the fat man’s chair.

“Scram, girl, you got no business in here,” he said. Threw his best card on the pile and kept his right hand under the table. 

He was not an easy mark. He was a Teamster man and cruel smart.

June watched as he slipped a gun from his thick waistband; saw her Ma crouch down in the doorway. The boom startled them both. Could have been thunder or a hidden cave turning inside out. 

June took off, bolting from her Ma’s kitchen and her Pa’s game, into the rainy summer night. She hit the screen door with both hands and plunged into the outside, down the sidewalk and around the corner, not knowing where or why she was running, only seeing the fat man’s eyes open and close on his own blood. Block after block, through the Joplin streets she ran, though no one came after her. She tore down St. Louis Street, past the cemetery gates, stink weed scratching her legs in the ditches, the moon a pale banana halfway down the sky. She was still going strong some twenty blocks away, past Fifteenth Street, around the curve of the grade-school road, past the mineshaft pond and all the way into Schifferdecker Park. Straight for the bandstand in the center of the grounds, where she dove under and hid beneath its trellised railings overgrown with honey-suckle vine, stinking with night bloom sweetness.

That’s where she was found the next morning. Huddled under the bandstand watching squirrels bury nuts and Blue Jays dive, holding her knees to her chest, rocking, a bump on her head and a picture in her mind, both slow to fade. 

3.

I too am a runner. Not always valiant in the face of misfortune. Meaning brave. In the messy moment. But I am determined. And Furthermore. You can count on me to try harder in the face of adversity. When the stakes are high, I am suddenly brave. Fearless even. Especially for others. My number is on many anonymous lists available to strangers to call when they need support for burdens too heavy to bear alone. A friend in crisis and I’m on the phone listening. If you need someone to hear the long version of your sorrows, you can count on me. I will stand on the edge of a precipice and stare into the abyss with you. But do not ask me to a dinner party. Or to brunch. It’s the day to day back and forth of social niceties which baffle me. The indeterminate unplanned. Everyday. Rituals of living. Which wear me out. Make me beg for a reprieve. Relief from the punishment of casual conversation. Give me the unanswerable Questions. To ponder. Invite me to tap into the deeply buried recesses of the unsaid. In anyone. And I will rise to the occasion. 

Mid-day early fall, year two of the pandemic, I sit in a chair with my headset on, listening. Lost. I can’t find a way into the narrative I’m hearing from yet another disembodied voice, telling me a story which doesn’t always flow. When she digresses, she says, sorry, I have to go back to tell you this part, and I try to hide the anger and yes, the bitterness. And rage at what I am hearing. Another crime. Technologically advanced yet similar in intent to the crimes from the before time, before my mother, or her mother’s mother were born. 

The Great Removal. 

Intergenerational trauma, or passed down trauma, may affect those who descend from survivors of traumatic historical events. I didn’t walk the Trail Where They Died, genocidal displacement did not happen to me or in my lifetime. Still, I carry what happened to my maternal ancestors, in my inward being, real as a date engraved inside a ring. 1838. Slipped on a finger now nothing but bone. Erased before birth. I try to imagine my maternal third great grandmother Charlotte Cah-Haw-Ka Hughes Adair, walking with her family, bayonets at their back. Rounded up and driven to land not their own. 

Displaced.

Indiscriminate killers point toward innocent targets, the woman on the phone says. They make killing easy. Surprise! You have people in a neighborhood sleeping or eating dinner, then all of the sudden, out of nowhere, BAM! Problem solved. Women used to say to their kids go to sleep or I will call your father, she says. Now they say go to sleep, or I will call the planes. Who were your mother’s people she asks, do you know? 

Yes, I answer. I’d spit on a stick, stuck it in the mail and a few months later logged onto a DNA site to find out where my mitochondrial DNA came from. 

And?

Haplogroup C1c found in eastern Eurasia and throughout the Americas and present in the indigenous populations that settled the pre-Columbian Americas. At least 40,000 years ago, C moved across Asia into central and northern Asia. During the ice age, supposedly, some members of Haplogroup C journeyed to North America across the Bering land bridge, one of six mtDNA lineages to populate both North and South America. She rocks. Dropped in time, trapped in time like an insect in amber, translucent and warm to the touch, coming from tree sap in Africa and Eastern Europe, amber is a conductor of electricity, electricity like water, like wind, a current of life. I am as we all are a unique genetic assemblage of potential passed down from my ancestors, in particular I am a mix of colonizer and Indigenous, neither black nor white, red, or brown. Descended from a family tree which looks like a battleground. 

Assaults and attacks, aggressors against water, earth, sky, animals, how long, she says, how long will we let them invade our bodies and our minds with their bully tactics. Condescending and patronizing, there, there, don’t you worry we will take care of you as long as you are good as long as you are quiet as long as you are compliant.

I try to remain neutral. Objective. An anonymous listener. I understand the value of that tactic. After a childhood of horrors, I am grateful to have at last created a stable life. Basic needs met for food, water, and shelter. Priorities clear. Every morning a cup of coffee, a page of “to does” written the previous evening, listing one after another a reason to go on, another day, rendering undivided attention to another anonymous voice asking me to listen. Just listen, become a listener without judgment, actively giving undivided attention, rare in this world I know, to find someone willing to be a listener, urging a speaker on, asking them to take their time. I seldom pressure anyone. Or ask intrusive questions. Ever. 

Are you still there? The voice asks. 

Yes, yes, I answer. Barely breathing. Go on. I’m still here. Beyond disturbed by what I am hearing. Did this happen? I wonder. When exactly. Is it metaphor or…?  (Of course, this tale is metaphorical. I would never betray an anonymous caller’s confidence. Ever.)

The weather was clear, she says. A monotonous low dull sound: buzz or hum from a toy plane that loomed in the sky above an unmanned aerial vehicle. Always watching. You see them during the day, you hear them during the night – they’re always hovering. Impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead the buzz, a constant reminder of imminent death, a constant watch on nearly everything that moves. 

On one recent night, three or four drones were hovering over her home. She took her terrified son outside of their house because she thought it was a target. 

What if this doesn’t stop, if this lasts for hundreds of years? she asks. Your loved one is, for the crime of standing next to someone, is simply… gone. Just a bloody crater and body parts scavenged from around the scene. Dumped in a box. 

Her story like the one you are currently reading has no plot arc or closure, just biodegradable bits of brain, heart, hands, searching for connection before I become dust and star rot, hard as stone. It’s a story within a story, a nested story. Lately, every scroll through social media, every frantic text or phone call is triggering. Firing up old interrogations. Pay attention. Do what you can. Are you listening? Life is a dangerous swim through epigenetic currents. Waves of pain and sadness rise to the surface from wounds delivered generations back. The winds, the waters, move in currents across our only earth. The Mediterranean flows into the Atlantic, the Atlantic into the North Sea and the Southern Ocean. Currents from Africa to South America, from Antarctica to Asia slosh against the shores of every continent. Movement and water, currents, and continents, shifted by internal and external upheaval, over millennia. What was on fire cools to stone, what was hard becomes soft, what was fluid freezes over or thaws.

Describing the overlapping planes of existence is complicated. Character. Plot. On the page or in the physical and/or moral world. A person makes a mistake. Then, they tell themselves a story about the new reality they live in. Where mistakes are made. Were made. Keeping them prisoner to an old action. Whether perpetrator or victim, this new story drives them forward. Blinding them to turns in the road they might have taken. Might still take. To prevent an old action from plotting their course. Changing them bodily. Into a person who prefers to be alone. Weeps over the pain of others. Conflicted over what once happened way back when. When. Mistakes were made. Which cannot be undone. Only amended. Seen anew and repaired over time. And time is mystical and mysterious. And heart breaking. Like an insect trapped in amber the aftermath of wrong action is forever frozen in some long-ago moment. Eternally. Encapsulated. 

Heat arises as I worry about rolling that old stone in my hands seeing myself ossified within my own story. This story. Obsessing over the harm done and overall, what might have been if only.

4.

To be redeemed, released, and transformed. Seen with a loving heart. I grew up longing for such beauty. Always trying to earn love. One of the ways I tried was by using my talents. Drawing, painting, and making pictures. The ones I make aren’t always pretty, but they are and were always true to mine. A gift from the essential me to whoever I was becoming. I mainly draw other women and self-portraits. Most of the sittings were and are planned in advance; but not the drawing I made of my estranged younger sister. One day out of nowhere she came to visit, and I asked her if she would pose knowing it might be too much to ask of her. To sit for hours. It always took time for me to look long enough to see what I needed to see. Thankfully she agreed. I asked her to look at me, but she looked down at her hands the entire time. So, I drew the subtle shading of her eyelids, the angularity of her nose so unlike mine. I captured the carbon black tendrils of her naturally curly hair as it fell across her face. A compositional line which made its way across the width of the page. I chiseled her features out of nothingness. My troubled sister. How I wanted to keep her safe. As I drew, I grew worried. Noted her quivering lips which I drew a carmine pale vermillion. Aware that we all want to be redeemed, released, and transformed. Seen with a loving heart. I gave her too pale skin a blush of lavender, to brighten her no longer girlish cheeks. We talked as I drew, and I am so glad we did. For that would be the last time I saw my sister alive. She died on February 4, 2001, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, at the age of 45, and was buried in Joplin, Missouri.

My sister and I were half-siblings. All of my siblings are half-siblings. I am the oldest of eleven, and yet in many ways I am an only child. I had my mtDNA done because I wanted to know where my female ancestors came from, but more importantly I wanted to know to whom I belonged. Belonging is a problem I’ve been attempting to unravel. My entire life. What does belonging even mean? I wonder. I looked it up. 

Belonging is the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. 

Family is the first group to which we belong. We are all born into belonging. Or not. Sometimes we are handed into the arms of those who are not blood relations. Blood sisters. Blood brothers. Sometimes families are made. We make a small cut in the skin. It bleeds and we press those wounds together. Promising loyalty and support. In the middle of the night, I awake sweat-drenched and dreaming. Beside a sleeping man I’ve made a life with. We have a dog we both love. We did not make our own children together. I have one son who he has never met. And, he has children I have tried to love. Do love. But there is always a barrier there. A barrier to belonging. A blood barrier. I am not their mother or their mother’s people. Blood kin. A member of the same clan. I am the shorter older one with dark eyes who comes from another kind of story altogether. 

1911 brought a wet fall to Bunch, Oklahoma, a Cherokee town in Adair County, nestled in the Sallisaw Creek Valley, at the foot of the Cookson Hills. Bisected by Kansas City Southern Railroad tracks and pitted with betrayal. My maternal great-grandmother, Martha Jane Sixkiller walked to the creek bank to harvest new onions, red-tipped buds that grew along the water’s edge. She had a body ache to doctor easily quelled by an herbal elixir: the juice from wild onions picked on the stream’s edge, boiled hard, and dropped into her throbbing ear. 

She’d use her mother’s sacred formulas and healing practices. As a child, she’d read the passed down formulas alongside her mother, mouthed the phrases with her, and walked to the waters behind her many mornings. Whether the cause was evil spirits, an enemy hex, or human failing, her mother had cured afflictions, prevented illness, and when necessary, pointedly mixed a poison. Her mother had been a powerful conjuror, judicious with vengeance, learned and wise. 

How brief her tutelage with her mother had been, how limited Martha’s own powers were in comparison. Of little help to her siblings when the fever came for them as well, her sister Josephine in 1902 and her brother Andy in 1903. Five years later, Martha married a widower who’d come over the hill from Stillwell to work the train line.

She skimmed her hand along the water’s busy surface. Lifted her shirt and waded into the swollen waters, tiptoeing along the sand bar, legs bare, her husband’s calico shirt falling off her thin shoulders, twisted ribbon tassels caught in her blue-black hair. 

“Turn around slowly.”

She heard a burbled command in one ear on account of the ache in the other, so that when she did turn, she teetered and stumbled forward. 

He dragged her through an opening in the limestone wall covered by brush. 

Her eyes opened to cave night, pierced by stalactite columns, ammunition boxes stacked against them, guns in pyramids, a dirty bed roll, a lantern. Her eyes adjusted to the life of the world below. Big-eared bats hung off the jagged rock ceiling, folded wings wrapped around small bodies dropped from overhead, soft-looking velvet brown amidst the hard rock spiraled between the ceiling and the floor. 

He laid her down, the ground their bed in dim light. Found and counted the ways into her, poking her ear, his first path, with his tongue. A girl grown tall running wild and free, admired by ravens and river rocks, a woman who gazed in mute wonder at the dark heavens, pierced in the guts by a smelly bundle of bones. 

She called to the whirlwind trembling in the trees. Summoned the animals she most revered and beseeched the great luminaries: the sun and the moon, willing them to destroy the evil spirit that took her to this ghost country: tsvsgiva.

Listen! In the frigid land above you, Repose, O Red Man!

Quickly, we have prepared arrows for the killing of the Imprecator, 

We have him lying in the path.

Quickly! We will take his soul as we go along.

We will cut his soul in two.

Quickly!

Thick rock muffled the voice of the distant creek. The swoosh of a thousand bat wings rocking dead air silenced his efforts until, hovering above her, gaze inward, he fell aside, finished. Face up to the cave sky. 

Cloistered in darkness, Martha Jane placed her right hand on his breastbone as it rose and fell in the still cave and began to chant the destroying spell, in a single tone, a drone, hardly a whisper. She called to the dark spirits, bid them into his plans of the morrow, asked them to find him, to tear his soul out of his body, into failure and down into death. 

Tsetsulisi.

 Listen! Now I have come to step over you. Now your soul will fade away, your spirits grow less and dwindle, never to reappear.

Listen! Now you have come to the very center of my soul, never to turn away. Now your grandchildren and beyond have come to the edge of my body. 

She formed her best hex and flung it out conjoined to another, unwittingly mixing the formula for destroying life with a powerful love charm. Syllables close enough in sound and near enough in meaning to collide. Self-schooled, she sang phrases aloud from verses only paper learned. She cursed the bogeyman, the invader, the marauding stranger, the heartless killer, thief of land and home and honor and life.

When she crawled from the cave, she was blanker than darkness, emptier than an ear turned away from the world.         

Ada’wehi ugista ti.

Lonely, lonely, lonely. 

Her girl-child was born nine months later, on a spring day cold enough to freeze up the creek. Bone-straight black hair, deep-set eyes, name tied to the Cherokee roll by six cut notches on her great-great-grandfather’s bow. 

Ornery hell raisin’ was in her blood, and she was deaf as a stone.

5.

I write in the dark. In that murky space between waking and dreaming there’s a certain cadence to my phrasing. Associations arise which are later surprising. I follow them wherever they may lead. Up or down or sadly sideways. I go there. At this point in my life, I have less desire to be perfect. My life. What an idea. A girl in the dark about her parentage. Until she was ten. The age of reason whupped me upside the head with betrayal and abandonment. Left me adrift and thoughtful. Anxious and observant. To one day discover that the dark-haired man who whistled for me to come home at dusk. The man who’d taught me how to ride a bike. The daddy who’d shown up for parent teacher conferences. The father who’d told me to always tell the truth. Telling the truth, he said, is what makes you believable. That man wasn’t the man whose sperm had swum into my mother’s dark womb. No. The man who’d actually begotten me had forgotten me. Cast me aside. As if I were an enemy. Never wanted. Never recognized. Ever. Over time I have come to accept this painful fact. As best I can. As best as one can. Because I must. To think and be and make and love others I had to see that sad reality. Come from a family that never was. I had to accept All which never was. And never will be. Because. At some point the longed for never happened becomes the never will be, ever: never ever in this life. Much of what I have longed for in my life will now never be, still those losses are mine, and I must own them, take those phantom longings into my being where they belong, take them in and hold them close as if they were my own lost children. Or not. Either way. They are only mine to keep. Only meant for me. Wanted or not. To keep close or not. To take in or keep away. At a great psychic distance, where they will hover over me day and night like dangerous ghosts. 

This place in my narrative is dedicated to what remains of one Elizabeth “Eliza” McHaffey, a second great-grandmother on my paternal side who was born May 23^rd, 1827, in Courtown, Ireland. 

Courtown was a harbor town, on the eastern coast of Ireland, the harbor built during the great famine of 1839. Undertaken at the orders of Lord Courtown. With his authority a seaside city became a fashionable destination, with people from Dublin and further visiting. Men on holiday are breathing fresh air, drinking mead, and marrying any maiden of their choosing. Eliza McHaffey who was conceived there and born there was then made to live in the household of Mr. Calhoun, the man her mother married. Until the day Eliza could get away in the arms of her own husband, a shoemaker named David Holiday, a Scot, who she married in County Down on November 24, 1848, when she was twenty-one years old. Left her mother standing dockside knowing they might never meet again. Her son John was born when Eliza and David were in another land entirely, having crossed the Atlantic by ship, the both of them hungry. Departed from Liverpool and eventually arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, their new home for a time. Her sons John and then Alexander were both born in that storied city, John barely walking when they boarded a train for Illinois hungry again and longing for a place to settle. Pregnant with another child as they traveled west, Eliza gave birth to Elizabeth, who she called Liza, in Quincy, Illinois, where she had five more daughters. Amelia, Phoebe, Marietta, Sarah, who she called “Sadie”, and then, a tiny baby she named Ellen. Her last child was finally another son who they named Charles. Eliza birthed nine children in thirteen years. Six of them in a town she abhorred. Quincy, the “gem” city located on the Mississippi River nestled against the extreme eastern edge of Missouri. Some days the heavy sky pressed down on her head so hard she could not think. In 1861, just as the war between the states began, she and David loaded their wagon and crossed the border into Missouri, moved from the blue state of Illinois to a border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. A slave state since statehood in 1821, Missouri was the ragged edge of what was called the American frontier. Eliza and David settled in the town of Pineville, in McDonald County, named for Sergeant Alexander McDonald, a soldier in the war of independence. Pineville was across the border from Arkansas. Within two years bloody neighbor-to-neighbor confrontations in McDonald County had taken Eliza’s two oldest boys, first they lost Alexander and then John. Killed by a band of bushwhackers, confederate guerillas. By the end of September 1863 twenty-two hundred square miles of western Missouri were desolated by an orgy of death and violence. Dreams of prosperity turned to bitterness. By 1905, unable to look man or woman in the eye, Eliza and David moved forty-three miles northeast to Joplin, a mining town near the four state junctions of Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. All her girls gone and married by then, save Sadie, Eliza took to sitting on the porch and yelling out to every passerby. If you can’t look at me straight then don’t look at me, she’d scream. Man or woman no matter, Eliza was done with pro-Confederates who refused to admit defeat. Killers, she’d mutter under her breath. Rocking to and fro in her grief much like she’d rocked on the ship what brought them to this bewildering country so many years ago. Hope in her heart once high, now turned to a hard clod, like the dirt in her yard. Strangled by anger, recrimination, and murderous thoughts, she was done with unanswerable questions. Dangerous as the questions she used to flog herself: but she was your mother how could you leave her, don’t you miss your siblings, why didn’t you take them with you when you immigrated, and why oh, why would her mother not ever tell her just once what she had most wanted to know? Elizabeth known as “Eliza” , always the odd one, the sister different from her siblings, smaller, faster, quicker, drew her last breath on April 8^th, 1905, in Missouri City, Texas, having lived a long life of seventy-seven years. She left this life fifty-five years after her mother. Who knows when her father passed, or who he might have been? The record of her birth simply stated: father unknown.

6.

I feel the change of weather more this year than last. Pull warmer garments to the front of the closet. Paisley and polka dots. Plaids. I want to wear patterned shawls and ribboned skirts. Cover my torso with thick flannel. Camphor and Vaseline. Become a figure in a Joseph Beuys tableau. Swathed in fat. In my dreams I watch my skin split open. Pull up a pant leg and watch blood vessels fall out of my knee. Veins. Flappy and loose like cut embroidery thread, a chalky blue. See this, I say to a character my sleeping psyche has conjured. An amalgamation of seemingly every antagonist I have known: the callous friend, the jealous sibling, my husband’s first wife. See this, my dream self says. I am over the push and pull of power between us. I am falling apart. The sad brutality of a four-year old’s bedtime story—they pooped on my head, and no one scraped it off, she says, and repeats that same sentence over and over like a mantra. I love this story, her sister whispers, enthralled. What is done and what is not done to us, to the weakest among us, painfully apparent before we are out of kindergarten. I listen and recall myself at five bouncing a basketball off the top of a neighbor boy’s head. How his response surprised me. Why is he crying? I asked his angry mother. Staring at me. A small girl baffled, and grief hardened. Tough before her time. 

When I look at old photos of myself, image after image, I see sad eyes in a hopeful face. Buddhists believe we are in essence who we were before trauma found us, and I know this to be true. I also know that I am simultaneously the person whose life was fragmented early on into a before and after, a multifaceted identity made of confusion and desire: an infant born into a fractured family, with turbulence all around, a child who was uneasy, hyperaware and searching for love, a creative and driven young adult whose heightened awareness fueled her, and a woman in middle age who lived sometimes well and often uneasily on the jagged boundary of multiple family systems: bio, adopted, fostered and married in. In the end I am a person who finally, and gratefully, in the last chapter of life, can honestly say to the future: child, I have seen everything. 

I have seen a father cut a man to keep his family whole, blood dripping on a living room floor. I have seen a mother leave everything behind, time and again, pack what she could carry and drive away from all that her children had come to love. I have stared out the window of a moving car onto countless vistas of staggering beauty and awesome blight. Miles and miles of white sand dunes drifting in the wind, and another kind of desert too, gray-green saguaro cacti reaching for the sky. Chocolate covered mountains in the far distance. Dilapidated buildings where children played in the surrounding dirt. And homes with yards like English castles, foliage groomed and shaped just so. I have seen unattended babies in laundromats, snot running down their faces. And I have seen mothers fall down on bent knees, arms open, ready to offer comfort. I have seen hands hold too tightly to what was never an urgent need, and I have seen generosity in those who have little. I have watched in wonder as an old woman raced towards a grandchild, she thought lost to her forever and I have seen that same woman on her way to another plane, free of pain and thirst and longing. I have watched the otherworldly coil of an umbilical cord spiral out of my body taut and multicolored, connecting me to a newborn being. And I have watched that same child walk away vowing to stay lost. I have watched siblings say goodbye perhaps forever and I have watched siblings drive by homeless encampments in search of their long-lost brother. I have seen the night sky in several hemispheres; the human body, broken open and stitched back together. I have seen the results of callous indifference and I have observed wildly different people march together as one. I have seen a boy on a bicycle stop to read his own name on a tombstone. And I have searched a Missouri graveyard looking for the headstone of my own mother. I’ve seen a man die from drink, a starving man cram meat into his mouth, ravenous and shaking. And I have watched a ninety-year-old woman turn her head to the wall when presented with another dose of medicine. I once combed the silver hair of a tiny one hundred-and one-years old woman. Peeked over her shoulder as she wrote these words into a much-used diary: I remember every moment. I’ve seen toddlers hug in daycare and oldsters say good-bye across the top of a wooden gate, knowing it would be the last time they would look into one another’s eyes. I’ve seen neighbors build unnecessary fences and I’ve seen those same neighbors tear those fences down. I’ve watched anxious as a toddler lunged open mouthed to bite the arm of a playmate and I’ve seen that same child share a half-eaten sandwich from her own plate. I’ve observed a masterful teacher guide the conversation amongst a table of students, leveling the cocky and inviting the doubtful to speak. I’ve seen old growth cut down and seeds planted. I’ve watched the flames of a distant fire burn towards me and seen the powerful lie when lying suited them. I’ve seen empty grocery shelves, vacant vacation homes, and abandoned towns, cars with flat tires on the side of rural roads and in cities of abundance, I’ve seen families asleep in parked vehicles. Witnessed a child quiver in answer to the question: who did this to you? Watched a tornado drop down out of a bile-colored sky, lava flow from the molten core of an island volcano, rivers kept flowing, and an urban night sky suddenly lit with visible stars after a devastating earthquake. I’ve seen the cliched long road home and I’ve watched the very vehicle taken to get there wrecked and smoking engine oil on the side of the road, totaled beyond repair. I’ve seen endangered animals kept in cages and escaped pet parrots fly with ravens in the treetops of a neighborhood street. I’ve watched goals accomplished and the last shred of hope vanish in an instant. I’ve seen strangers become family and family remain strangers. I’ve watched jealousy divide and compassion knit the riven back together. I’ve witnessed human frailty, nature’s wonders, and numerous artistic marvels: Piero Della Francesca’s frescoes in Arezzo, Italy, the Pantheon in Rome, the ancient hillside homes of Canyon de Chelly in what is now called Chinle, Arizona, The Watts Towers, Picasso’s Guernica, and an illustrated book made for me by the six-year-old girl who calls me Grandma. And when the time is right. If she has a question. If she ever asks me, have you ever seen this before, Grandma, I will answer, yes. Yes, I have, child. 

I have seen everything. 

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Bibliography

The Cherokee Incantations used in this story have been taken from anthropological research on the magical texts and incantations of Oklahoma Cherokee Indian conjurers.

Sources:

Run toward the Nightland: Magic of the Oklahoma Cherokee

Jack Frederick Kilpatrick

Anna Gritts Kilpatrick

Southern Methodist University Press

1967

Walk in your Soul: Love Incantations of the Oklahoma Cherokee

Jack Frederick Kilpatrick

Anna Gritts Kilpatrick

Southern Methodist University Press

1965

The incantations in Kilpatrick’s volumes were initially accumulated in the research of James Mooney.

Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Seventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 307-97. Washington D.C.

James Mooney

1891

The Swimmer Manuscript. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 99, Washington D.C.

James Mooney 

Frans M. Olbrechts

1932

Myths of the Cherokees, gathered by James Mooney (1861-1921), as published by the Bureau of American Ethnology