By then no one would touch the thing. They called in Ted’s father, Eleazar Williams, and its humble appearance fooled even him. Presuming it a dime-store tourist item, he dug a hole not far from his family’s home and buried it.
Outside the house was a drive-in garage near a mock orange bush under which one of the family chickens used to rest in a wooden basket. Every morning before Ted’s father left for work, he came out to talk to the bird, and it clucked contentedly back as if answering him. On the morning after the mask was buried, the chicken was nowhere near its wonted basket. The False Face mask was in its place.
Ted’s father presumed that the neighbor’s kids had seen him bury it and pulled this prank to fool him. He made a fire and burned the mask.
The next morning the mask was back in the same basket, its black mock hair not even singed.
A picture was forming for Eleazar Williams: Against logic and appearance, this was a live one after all. He carried the mask tenderly into the house and commenced the rituals of the tobacco. “Everything will be all right,” he told it in Tuscarora, and started the process of finding its true owners. He had no idea where to turn; the woman who had last owned it was dead.
In the next couple of days, the Williams household observed a handful of incidents that could have been psychic and connected to the mask. As if its work with its former owners wasn’t done, a surviving nephew suffered a mysterious neck complaint. The matter came to an end on a Saturday morning when a knock fell on the Willliams family’s door. A pair of men from the Onondaga Reservation had come for their mask. “This has been missing for some time,” one of them said. “They have a way of coming home by themselves, but this one didn’t, so we decided to do medicine and find it.”
As if they felt the trouble it was causing, the two men seemed to be in a hurry. They took the mask and went straight back to Onondaga.
“You have to feed it,” as the Tuscarora say, “or it will eat you up.”
The Mask Keeps an Eye Out
During his forties—probably around the time of World War I—Eleazar Williams had lived at Six Nations in Ontario, Canada, and trained with Joo Gwadee, a great Cayuga medicine man. On a wall of this healer’s bedroom was a large, clearly live False Face mask. It was there to keep track of things, to be a watchdog.
One night during his stay with Joo Gwadee, Eleazar Williams woke up to the sound of a sharp rattling and a tender whinny, like a puppy calling for a cuddle. He turned on the kerosene lamp and saw the mask on the wall rocking and trembling, even making the curious “False Face talk,” which till then he had never heard. Moisture like beads of sweat gathered above its lips. In terror, he ran to wake his tutor.
The bed was empty and an unearthly glow shot through the window by it and lit the far wall as if hell were celebrating outside. When Eleazar looked out, he saw a neighbor’s house on fire, and two forms approaching in its surginglight: his powerful tutor Joo Gwadee and the old neighbor he had managed to rouse and save. The mask had woken its owner in time. It had “kept track of things.”
What Goes Around . . .
For a long time, many bars and inns in the Northeast had a rule: “No alcohol served to Indians.” London, Ontario, held a watering hole well known as a place where Native Americans could drink, and a certain Canadian Oneida had the habit of stopping there now and again when he was in town. This Oneida man was a wandering farm worker with very little to call his own, but he did have two very small protection masks. These were mini–False Faces, virtual plaques, and he often had them on him. We wonder which powerful old relative, knowing he would need guidance, had sent him into life with these?
After a hot day of work, this Oneida gent dropped into the aforementioned hotel during happy hour for a beer or two with fellow members of the human race. A new barmaid refused him service. “But I drink here all the time,” he said.
“Not while I’m here,” the girl said. “Get out before I call the police.”
Missing the fellowship as much as the beer, the Oneida departed. On the way to his quarters, he talked to the masks and told them about his troubles. It was a habit he’d had for most of his life. It always made him feel better.
The next morning, he told his coworkers all about the experience with the new barmaid. “I bet she gives me a drink tonight,” he concluded, thinking about his report to the masks. After work, he and two friends went to the same bar. They got a shock.
The building was a smoking pile of bricks and planks, surrounded by a crowd. “What happened?” said the owner of the mini masks.
“Big fire last night,” someone told him. “Everybody got away safely. Everybody but the new barmaid.”
Back at his quarters, the Oneida man tossed and turned. At last, in the deepest part of the night, he took out the small masks and talked to them like treasured friends, like godchildren who didn’t know their own power. He told them not to be so rough if he ever spoke to them that way again.
The Senders
A few days before Halloween 2008, a woman called my business line for help with a psychic situation centered on her son’s home in one of the towns at the edge of Erie County. Babysitting her grandchildren at the time, she was calling from the very site. She caught
