“You got to get everything closed out,” he said. “That’s the purpose in a ceremony like that.” Confused spirits can be “trapped something terrible. Time was, everyone in the world had ceremonies for that. Now it’s mostly lost—especially where there’s no traditional medicine people left.” He got up. “I’m tired. I done a lot of work tonight.”
“How did he get stabbed?” shouted Boyd. Mad Bear sighed as if the grief was new and he’d seen it through the young man’s eyes. The boy with the flint in his pocket and the pledge on his lips had walked a long trail to a store. When he came out with a six-pack, a dog that had always been friendly went after him. A fracas ensued, and the dog’s owner drew his knife to stop it. Mad Bear’s young friend kicked out at the dog, maybe even at the knife. That was how he’d been hit. The wound had seemed just a scratch in his hip, but it bled as he walked. He weakened, rested by an old cabin, and fell asleep. The steel point had come in over the flint one in his pocket. It must have sparked off it.
BLOODY MARY
One of the Niagara’s best-known Native American ghosts haunts the Saylor Community Building on the Cattaraugus. Her fame is so widespread that even Tuscarora and Tonawanda folk will tell you about Bloody Mary. Still, her story is counterintuitive.
The fact that they give this ghost a name presents the first problem. The Iroquois seldom personify their ghosts. They know the apparition of a late person when they see one, and they’ll give it a name when they know it. But the site ghosts they report, named or not, behave not like the ghosts of entertainment, but like those of parapsychology: quick, quirky images, not always fully formed, seldom dramatic or self-aware. So often no one knows who the apparition may represent.
Problem two is the name itself. Bloody Mary is a white contemporary bogie—the ghost of a woman who either killed her children or whose child was stolen. (Stand in front of a mirror and call her name three times and she just might appear as a reflection.) This urban legend may be only a quarter-century old. It’s also a cocktail named for an English queen, the daughter of the notorious Henry VIII. Mary I (1516–1558) could have gotten her nickname from a couple of false pregnancies or abortions. More likely, it came from her penchant for killing Protestants.
The Saylor’s Bloody Mary is a character—and a player who may have a connection to the fabled bogie the Legs. An edgy babe, dark-haired, seductive, dressed in black and red, she turns up at the occasional dance. The Saylor is dark, and the music rocks. She catches the eye of a married man who likes to run around on his wife. She’s a quick laugher, and he’s impressed by his own form. His friends are watching. Who knows what she looks like to them? Like a vampire or the European fairies, she has glamour, the power of casting visual enchantment on herself or other beings and objects. She goes to “freshen up” and agrees to meet outside. That’s the last he sees of her—in this form.
The man walks home, dejected, and soon uneasy. Trees stir around him; footsteps follow. If it’s his would-be conquest, she doesn’t answer his weakening calls, and those strides are not those of a woman in heels. Soon a massive pair of female legs and pelvis races round him in the dark. He detects the smell of menstrual blood, a dozen times greater than normal. There’s a collision. He gets home, out of breath and terrified, but the effluvium is with him. His appetite for conquest is dimmed. Even if his wife lets him live.
THE CHIEF OF THE BLUE HERON
Leon Shenandoah (1915–1996) was the Tadodaho of the Six Nations. This is a title, and a different word in all the Iroquois languages, but there’s no mistake about the man who bears it. The leader of the Longhouse folk, the Tadodaho, is the Fire Keeper of the Onondaga and the only member of the Six Nations to wear the single feather of the great blue heron. This inspiring bird and its feather in the ancient headdress have come to symbolize this chief of chiefs. The man who bore it to the end of the twentieth century had power in his hands and play in his heart.
Mike Bastine and Ted Williams used to visit Leon often at Onondaga. One thing that impressed Michael the most about him was his forgiveness. Leon’s daughter was killed in circumstances that looked like murder to many. It was the direst event of his life. Still, he swore off vengeance and never gave way to bitterness, even when people around him vented against murderers. The worst Leon ever said was, “Sending them to the Land of the Elders is too easy. Let them stay here awhile longer.” His verdict was always final.
The Graceful Bird
On the night of July 22, 1996, Mike and Pam Bastine were driving home from a camping trip in the Catskills. It was about ten, and they were on Route 20A near Varysburg, about twenty miles east of their Wales Center home. One of those longErie County hills bottomed out at an intersection by a streetlight. A pale shape was ahead of them, at the very edge of their side of the road. Michael had to swerve to miss it. Still as a coatrack in a sheet, it could have been
