sky. “He didn’t do this thing you think he has.” Her knotted hands gripped the edge of the sink. “He done some bad things, I know, but nothing like this.”
I nodded.
Her eyes stayed on mine. “You believe me?”
“I do, but you are his mother.” She smiled a becoming smile for somebody with that much chewing tobacco in her teeth, but it faded a little when I asked the next question. “How is it you know why I’m looking for him, other than what I’ve told you?”
She nodded her head slowly. “I have a way with these things, powers that I use for the good of my family and my people.” She gestured toward the wall. “And somebody called me this afternoon on the telephone.”
She cackled a brief laugh, and I shook my head. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me who it was that called you?”
She hung her own dishrag over the faucet. “Artie.”
“He called you?”
Her smile faded completely now. “He said you were looking for him; that a woman was dead, but he didn’t do nothing.”
I rolled down the sleeves of my shirt and snapped the cuffs. “In all honesty, Mrs. Small Song, all we want to do is talk to him. He had an argument with a young woman over at Tribal Services last week-had words with her. This week she ends up dead and somebody tries to run me over with Artie’s truck-I think that warrants a conversation, don’t you?”
She said nothing for a while, and I started thinking that I should’ve known better than to confront an Elder, a medicine woman, and a traditional in such a way.
“After the claims settlement in 1963, my husband and me built this house from the logs of our old days house. My husband died not too long after that, and like so many do in great sorrow times, I took the religious road and became a peyote person. My oldest son was also religious, and he used to go to meetings with me. Five years later he died in the Vietnam, and I stopped going to meetings so much because it reminded me of him.”
She paused for a moment and bent her head just a bit, her gaze landing on the base cabinet.
“I went and got baptized on the egg-dyeing day, but after a while somebody told one of the priests that I had been seen at a peyote meeting. One day at my confession, the black robe asked me if I was still praying to that dried-up old peyote and calling it God.” She smiled. “I told him no, that I pray to God, but that I sometimes still use the peyote medicine for when I am sick. He said that the peyote was a church and that I could not go to two churches, so I stopped going to the black robe church.” She continued to stare at me. “Do you go to the churches, Ahsanta?”
“No. My wife was the religious one in our family.”
She nodded. “My religion became my own. I would go visit sick and hurt people-that’s when people need religion, not just on Sunday mornings or Thursday nights. Some people got better after I visited with them and people started calling me a medicine woman, and after a while, I became one, I guess.” She pushed off from the sink and turned to face me more directly. “I tell you these things because I have had a two-part vision about you, and I would like to talk to you about it.”
I wondered what the old woman’s motivations were. “About me?”
“Yes.” She struggled with what she had to say but finally spoke. “There’s someone who would speak to you, but I don’t know who he is. He comes to me in my visions in a great bear shape; does this mean anything to you?”
I could feel the scouring of wing tips against the insides of my lungs. “Could be.”
“You have other family?”
The next words came out carefully. “I do; a daughter, and she’s expecting my first grandchild.”
She worked the chew in her jaw as if the words were tough and needed tenderizing. “The bear-person tells me that you must keep your family close; that there are those who would harm them.”
I thought about my experiences on the mountain a few months back, an adventure I wasn’t sure I’d ever be over. I thought about Virgil and the bear headdress he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, and about how I still wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. I thought about his grandson, Owen, and how I knew most certainly that he was dead. Virgil or Owen had delivered a pronouncement upon my future or that of those close to me, some warning of impending disaster that I had put out of my mind-until now.
“Where is your daughter, Ahsanta?”
“Philadelphia, but she’ll be on her way here tomorrow.”
Her head nodded as she thought. “That’s good; it will be easier for you to keep an eye on them when they are here in the good country.”
Boy howdy.
“What’s the second part of the vision?”
“That you should come to church with me. Tonight.” She nodded.
I leaned an arm on the kitchen sink and lowered my head to look at her a little more closely as Henry, Lolo, and Nate entered through the kitchen door. “Go to church with you tonight?”
“Yes, the bear-man says that you should do this.”
I looked up and could see Henry looking at me, his eyes a little widened. I glanced back at the old woman and asked. “Which church?”
She grinned at me with the tobacco between her teeth.
There is a federal criminal penalty exemption for the religious use of peyote by members of the Native American Church. The consumption of the small, dried button cactus is older than the Controlled Substances Act by about five and a half thousand years.
Fair is fair.
I’d heard about the ceremony but had never taken part in the rituals, let alone in the mescaline-based substance itself. Henry said that he had been behind the moon four times and around the moon innumerable times; he also said that it was like driving on the highway, then rolling down your window and tossing your head out, which didn’t sound like something I wanted to experience.
The Bear dropped us off at the trailhead and sat there in the driver’s seat of Rezdawg. “I was not invited.”
The medicine woman was waiting by the grille guard of the truck, her head bowed and her hands stuffed into the folds of her skirt.
I leaned an elbow on the door of the vehicle I hated more than any other and twisted the ring on my little finger. “That means you can’t go?”
“No.”
“Can I invite you?”
“No.”
“Can I get her to invite you?”
“No.”
I nodded and glanced back at the ninety-pound woman who was taking me hostage. I turned to the Cheyenne Nation and could see just the slightest smile on his otherwise stoic face, which was pressed against his fist.
“Chief Long is not going to report me to the DEA, is she?”
He shook his head. “She is going home and going to bed.” He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “I was not invited there, either.”
“She doesn’t like you.”
“No.”
“Any idea why?”
“No.”
“You’re just a font of conversation tonight, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I sighed and looked at the old woman again. “Big medicine.”
He shrugged. “It is a great honor to be invited.”
“I don’t want to have flashbacks.”
