Medicine Walk

"I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There's a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east […] Because I need you to bury me there."

The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered by years.

Truth was, he wanted nothing else because that life was all he'd known and there was a comfort in the idea of farming. He knew the rhythms of it, could feel the arrival of the next thing long before it arrived, and he knew the feel of time around those eighty acres like he knew hunger, thirst, and the feel of coming weather on his skin. Memory for the kid kicked in with the smell of the barn and the old man teaching him to milk and plow and seed and pluck a chicken. His father had drifted in and out of that life randomly[.]

It was the old man who had taught him to set snares, lay a nightline for fish, and read game sign. The old man had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he'd gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He'd come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word father he could only ever imagine the old man.

“All's I'm tryin' to say is that we never had the time for learnin' about how to get by out here. None of us did. White man things was what we needed to learn if we was gonna eat regular. Indian stuff just kinda got left behind on accounta we were busy gettin' by in that world."

"So I don't get what we're doin' out here then."

[…]

"I owe," he said,

"Yeah, I heard that before."

"I'm tired, Frank."

[…]

"That's the first time you ever called me by my name."

Then he strode off and returned in a short time with mushrooms and greens and berries that he crushed up and fashioned into a paste. He gathered a clump of it on a stick of alder and held it out to his father.

[…]

"Sometimes I'll put some pine resin in with it if I got a pot and a fire. Makes a good soup. Lots of good stuff in there."

"Old man?"

"Yeah. At first he brung me out all the time when I was small. Showed me plants and how to gather them. Everything a guy would need is here if you want it and know how to look for it, he said. You gotta spend time gatherin' what you need. What you need to keep you strong. He called it a medicine walk."

“Near as I can figure they're stories. I reckon some are about travelling. That's how they feel to me. Others are about what someone seen in their life. The old man doesn't think anyone ever figured them out."

"Ain't a powerful lotta good if ya can't figure 'em out."

The kid shrugged. "I sorta think you gotta let a mystery be a mystery for it to give you anything. You ever learn any Indian stuff?"

His father lowered his gaze. […] "Nah," he said finally. "Most of the time I was just tryin' to survive. Belly fulla beans beats a head fulla thinkin'. Stories never seemed likely to keep a guy goin'. Savvy?"

"I guess," the kid said. "Me, I always wanted to know more about where I come from."

"'What he done was brave. You know that, huh?"

"Done what?"

"Tellin' you. That took some grit."

"I don't think it'd take much grit to tell what ya already know."

"Maybe. But it sat in his gut a long time. Most'll just give stuff like that over to time. Figure enough of it passes things'll change. Try to forget it. Like forgettin's a cure unto itself. It ain't. You never forget stuff that cuts that deep."

His father moaned and the kid regarded him. "He don't seem much of a warrior to me." He sipped at the tea.

"Who's to say how much of anythin' we are?" Becka said. "Seems to me the truth of us is where it can't be seen. Comes to dyin', I guess we all got a right to what we believe."

"I can't know what he believes. He talks a lot, but I still got no sense of him. So far it's all been stories."

She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories." She stood and put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a pat.

He thought about what Becka had said and worked at finding some pattern to the shards and pieces of history he'd been allowed to carry now. They jangled and knocked around inside him. It felt like jamming the wrong piece into a picture puzzle. Like frustration alone could make it fit the pattern. He cast a look back over his shoulder at his father, who seemed to be asleep, but he'd mumble when the horse's step over a rock or a root made him lurch in the saddle. When the kid looked back at the thin trail they followed he felt worn and makeshift as the trail itself.

"You're supposed to try to get to know me like a father knows a son," he said quietly.

"Jesus. I know that. Think I didn't want that? Think I'da asked you here if I didn't wanna get to that?"

"You lied. All you wanna do is drink and dance and break stuff."

"Wanted to see ya, was the point of it all."

"Well, you seen me."

"I'm your dad."

The kid shook his head. "Ain't got one. Never had one. Wouldn't know what it's supposed to mean 'cept what you show."

His father slammed the door closed. The smell of whisky was high in the air. The kid rolled down his window and backed the truck into the grass and then pulled out into the rut of the road. He took it slow, but the truck still bucked along. […] When they got to the gravel road the kid turned back the way they came and his father settled into his seat. "Happy birthday," he slurred.

The kid let out a breath long and slow and focused on the road. His father passed out halfway back to town.

"Come here when it got too noisy in my head," he said. "'When the old man got too old for the ride he let me make the trip alone and I got to prefer that. Never was afraid. Never seemed to be a place for fear. When ya come to know a thing ya come to know its feel. I know this place by feel nowadays."

"You're a good man," his father croaked suddenly. "The old man done good turnin' ya loose out here. He know how good ya are out here?"

"He knows."

"Jimmy used to say we're a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time Indians, was all about learnin' to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin' to grips with it, not even tryin' to guess it out. Just bein' with it. I guess I wish I'da learned the secret to doing that. […] I never belonged nowhere, Frank. Never belonged nowhere or to nobody," he said.

He took the knife and held it under his ribcage and Jimmy stopped, his body going perfectly still as he stared at him over the rim of his hand. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was peace there and he nodded at him. The knife went in almost on its own and he twisted it like he was trained to do and leaned forward cheek to cheek with Jimmy and heard his last breath ease out of him.

Time was a thing he carried. It took him a long time after Korea to realize that. […] It rankled him, the unease, the slow creep of terror, like being hunted, tracked by some prowling beast invisible to the eye, recognized only by the sense of looming danger at his back. Then, always, time's dank shadow would fall over him again and sweep him into its chill. […] He spiralled downward and the measure of his days was the depth of the shadow itself. He wandered. He sought a place that carried no reminders, believing that a place existed that was barren of memory and recollection. But he bore time like sodden baggage.

“I never told no stories.”

“You should. When you share stories you change things.”

“Says you,” he said.

“If you told me one of your stories, you’d get lighter.”

“Don’t know as I have any worth the tellin’.”

She smiled at him and touched his leg. “You could let go of something maybe you carried for a long time. I could know more of you. Get bigger with the knowing of you.”

“I recall standin’ on the porch early one morning with a mug of coffee, looking out across the lake, an’ I felt like for the first time I could stand this life. I could settle. […] She brung that alive in me, Frank.

“It got me to wonderin’. Got me wonderin’ if time could make goin’ back to other things possible too. Goin’ back to other people, other places. My mother and such. Never ever thought them kinda thoughts before. Found myself wonderin’ if returnin’ was somethin’ a man could do, if ya could walk back over your trail and maybe reclaim things. They were odd thoughts but she hadda way of getting them into my head.”

“You were scared ya couldn’t be what ya had to be,” the kid said.

“More’n that,” his father said. “Scared I couldn’t be what I never was. I never told her about Jimmy, about my mother, even though she told me I could tell her anythin’. I was ashameda myself, Frank. Bone deep shamed. I was scared if I started in on tellin’ about myself I’d break down an’ I wanted to be strong for her. I really did. But layin’ there knowin’ how weak I really was brung on the dark in me. The dark that always sucked me back into drinkin’. I woke up to the belief that I’d always lose or destroy them things or people that meant the most to me cuz I always done that.”

“I knew what he meant, Frank. I got made better too. But not better enough on accounta when she needed me most I wasn’t there an’ she died cuz of that. I looked at the two of you on that rocker an’ all’s I could do was walk away. All’s I could do was walk away because I guess I come to know right there that some holes get filled when people die. Dirt fills ’em. But other holes, well, ya walk around with them holes in ya forever and there weren’t nothin’ in the world to say about that. Nothin’.”

When the kid dropped off to sleep himself he didn’t know. He dreamed there was a man and a woman seated on a blanket. They were talking and their heads were bent close together, but he couldn’t see their faces or hear what they were saying. Then he was on the porch of a house he didn’t recognize. The sun was going down. The sky was alive with colour and he could see it bending and receding above the fields. A woman was there. She stood in the middle of the field, looking at him. She waved with both arms and he waved back at her but it was his father she was waving at.

He closed his eyes for a moment and when he looked down into the valley again he thought he could see the ghostly shapes of people riding horses through the trees. […]

He watched them ride into the swale and ease the horses to the water while the dogs and children ran in the rough grass. The men and women on horseback dismounted and their shouts came to him laden with hope and good humour. He raised a hand to the idea of his father and mother and a line of people he had never known, then mounted the horse and rode back through the glimmer to the farm where the old man waited, a deck of cards on the scarred and battered table.