Content warning:
Now that I am back in our homelands, I am haunted. I dream of faces hovering over me, taking my blood. They suck at my veins like infants at a bottle. I see needles and crimson IVs, engorged bags hanging above my inert body like a mobile. My heart pumps the blood out, out, out. Where are they taking it? I wonder.
Then I awaken. This is not dream, but memory: They’ve already taken my lifeblood. Black bruises marred the skin where they punctured my hands and feet, my forearms, over and over again, but they’re faded now, turning green. The bloodless wonder. The walking corpse.
I don’t know how I got here, exactly. I awoke one day a week ago and clawed my way out of a hole beneath this abandoned camper in a trailer park in Happy Camp. It’s not the Happy Camp I remember, though. This one is later, older … or newer? As far as I can tell, I am not. The first thing I did was shower. The second thing I did was massage the crick in my neck with stiff hands, my fingers ever so slowly loosening up, fighting the lack of circulation.
Mary Bartholomew is the only person in the trailer park who has talked to me since I arrived. Most folks keep to themselves. The first time I meet her—on my second night of consciousness—goes like this: She knocks on my door and says, I bet you could use a beer, and since I can’t drink … She looks down at her obviously pregnant belly. I invite her in and she says, The dreams are probably bad right now.
She sits. Her dentalia shells shimmer. She wears a hat, woven like a basket. Recognition pinches at the base of my skull. The scent of hazelnut fills the room. I guess we are the same age—late teens playing at being adults—but she seems older than me.
How do you know about the dreams? I ask.
You’ve got to talk about what they took or you’ll never get it back.
She tells me they called her Mary Bartholomew. But I prefer Mars Bar, she says, taking a candy bar from her pocket. She peels the wrapper like a banana, offers me a bite. My one vice while I wait on the little one. She smirks. Her eyes match the chocolate.
That night, she had prepared a campfire in the ring outside. I followed her out, inhaling the sharp scent of burning pine. We do this each night. I don’t talk much the first few, sipping shyly on beer I can’t really taste. Mars Bar is patient. Her presence is familiar somehow.
One night, near the end of my fourth beer and fifth cigarette, I finally tell her what happened to me. When I say it aloud, it becomes irrevocable: my blood. They took my blood.
Every night I dream and I remember more, I tell her, tapping my forehead with the tip of my pointer finger. I shift in my camp chair to catch more heat from the fire, though it’s no use.
Shit, dude, she says. Let’s get it back.
What do you mean?
They’ve taken other things too, you know. My father’s land for one.
When Mars Bar says the word father, I flinch. A far-off image enters my mind: a pale face framed by a dog collar, a wooden cross glowing on his chest. I can almost feel the switch strike my shoulders. There are scars there. I’ve studied them, pale in the halogen bulb above the medicine cabinet. My whole body is pale. Unfamiliar. It angers me that this priest is the image that the word father evokes. When I try to remember my own father there is nothing in my mind, like he was sucked out with my blood.
Yeah, they took his land, Mars Bar continues, taking a slow bite of chocolate. Scooped it up with a backhoe to move elsewhere one day. No notice. No nothing. They hid it—for what they thought would be forever. She smiles wryly. Nothing’s forever.
Mary Bartholomew’s father found it eventually, his land. After long nights of driving around, he saw Coyote lying on the side of the road near a sign. Roadkill, that Coyote. When her father pulled over, he saw Coyote was just playing dead, waiting to see what kind of man he was. Was he the kind that stopped?
It’s that way, Coyote told him. Coyote showed him where they were storing it, his land, and a way into where they were keeping it that no one knew about. To go this way, one had to get very small. Coyote showed him how.
But how will I get it back? her father asked.
Little by little, said Coyote. They won’t even notice.
So that’s what he did. One styrofoam cupful at a time, he worked to restore his land. He made one trip a day whenever he could.
The thought of him pouring cups of dirt into the pit they’d dug in his yard made me happy. And it made me sad.
Once Mars Bar learns they’ve taken my blood, she asks around, trying to figure out where it may have gone.
They can’t get away with this stuff. It’s messed up. She says this over my yellow formica breakfast table, having let herself in to await my morning scream as I awoke, once again, cold and afraid. She is talking at me before I am even coherent.
After coming up empty on leads, she spoke with an elder who told her we should follow the old ways to get my blood back. This elder says I’ve been deviled bad, and it will take ancient Karuk medicine to heal me.
Or maybe you can’t be healed, she says. Some people can’t. She looks down and rubs her belly before looking at me again.
I can’t be healed? I’m not sure this is what she’s said. I rub my eyes as I slink into the seat across from her.
But we have to try.
I wonder what it might feel like to be whole again. Will I remember who I am? How I came to the so-called school where they stole my blood? I remember Happy Camp somehow, but I cannot remember myself here. I cannot see my relationship to the town or the people. It’s strange, sensing familiarity without memory. I shuffle through the streets at night, in the cool dark when only the stars observe me. The stars, and an old woman who rocks gently on her porch at the end of a lane at the edge of the town proper, rocking and humming. I don’t need food or water. That is, I can eat and drink, but I don’t have to. Am I alive? I wonder. I push this thought away. I am walking, talking, and thinking. Clearly, I am alive.
Mars Bar doesn’t return that evening, so I down a six-pack she left me and stumble to bed, wishing I could feel drunk, wishing I could black out into blissful nonexistence. But that night the bodiless faces suckle at my veins again—burping with contentment after they finish—then fly upward until they are out of sight among the stars. I awaken in the wee hours of dawn, the soft moment when the stars disappear but the sun has not yet risen. I wonder in the stillness what they took from Mary Bartholomew, besides her name.
Mary Bartholomew’s father woke one morning to find his tongue behaving strangely. Each time he said a word, two came out: Ayukîi/hello, áama/salmon, and so on. The way of it was that he had two tongues in his mouth. Hûut áta naa vura napri’áxakhitih?/How did I get two tongues? he asked himself.
Just then Horsefly flew into his house. And Bluejay, she followed.
Horsefly said, We know you have a problem.
Bluejay said, Relax, I’m a doctor.
Mary Bartholomew’s father knew all about Bluejay’s “doctoring”—that is, enough to suspect that she had given him this extra appendage, only to offer to “cure” it and charge him for the pleasure. But he was afraid to speak.
Then Horsefly said, Open your mouth.
We have a plan, said Bluejay.
Her father thought for a moment. A double tongue didn’t seem like Bluejay’s usual game. Even if Bluejay had caused his second tongue, it didn’t change the fact that she was likely the only one who could doctor it. In fact, it made her expertise more valuable, for she would only have afflicted him with something she and her minions could cure.
He opened his mouth. Then that Horsefly, he flew in and bit off one of Mary Bartholomew’s father’s tongues, right at the root. He bit it right off and painted his face with the blood. Then he gave the tongue to Bluejay. Then that Bluejay, she smothered the tongue in the marrow of a deer’s cannon bone and put it in a basket.
You keep that tongue there, said Bluejay. You hide that tongue from the flat hats when they come around. Then someday, you put that tongue in acorn soup and feed it to your children’s children’s children and then they will talk the old talk again.
Mary Bartholomew’s father nodded.
Bluejay burst into a slurry of kach-kach-kach-kach. My fee, she said.
And so Mary Bartholomew’s father paid her price (fresh acorn soup) and hid that tongue for later.
The first thing we try is tobacco.
It’s not really tobacco, explains Mars Bar, but that’s what the flat hats call it. There are many varieties of so-called tobacco all around the Karuk lands, all of them seen as different plants by the old timers, depending on their location.
Mars Bar is setting up my little bedroom in the camper for peak healing potential. The shades are drawn against the late afternoon sun and I lie on the bed, head toward the foot, staring at the dingy ceiling panels.
No one quite knows how they used it, she says. We used to have beautiful pipes, so we must have smoked it, but for medicine it was more likely burned as incense.
You don’t know for sure? I ask, craning my neck to see her. The room spins.
You got another option?
I sigh.
So, let’s try this, then. Mars Bar sits on the floor near my head, criss-cross applesauce. Indian style, I think, amused. What are you smiling at?
Oh, nothing.
She lights the “tobacco” and inhales deeply.
Now breathe with me.
I do as she says, breathing in deep and long, holding, then pushing the air out. She gives direction every now and then—relax your neck, close your eyes, breathe, focus on your heartbeat, breathe. She begins a story about a Karuk who made pipes out of soapstone to sell to the flat hats, so they would crack and they’d have to come buy more.
After a while her voice fades. I’m somewhere between sleeping and waking, entering my dream from a new point. But this time, I can look around at will. I see myself. I also see the bodies of others beside me, faceless bodies being drained. Who are they? I try to focus, to see their features, but I keep seeing the eyes of the other trailer park residents. When I survey the rest of the room, I am met with blackness. Not darkness. Blackness, void. I recoil as a man’s face appears in the black, floating through space. It is old, grandfatherly. His hands appear, one holding a rosary, the other a cane. I cry out.
Bloodless. Bloodless! Mars Bar is leaning over me when I open my eyes. She studies me. Did it work?
I shrug my prominent shoulder bones, then regret it as the crick in my neck spasms. She touches my forehead and draws back quickly. Her hand feels hot. Or my skin is ice-cold. No blood, no warmth.
Maybe I did something wrong, she says.
We sit at my table with mugs of Earl Grey. My mind runs through my vision again.
Mars Bar looks out the window. Her dark hair shimmers in the sunset under her basket hat. You’re not the first to have your blood taken away, she says.
I take a sip of tea, focusing on the scalding heat.
Indian blood is very powerful, you know, she continues, tracing the handle of her mug with her pointer finger. Spill enough blood and suddenly you own a continent. A little more, and you can kill all the buffalo, poison the fish, level the forest. And on and on. A little Indian blood can build golf resorts and drill oil and industrialize agriculture and win the Space Race. They sacrifice us on an altar of manifest destiny. Every time they break this earth for something new, they’re doing it with bloodied hands. They’ll always need more.
Had my blood been used to pollute a waterway for a petrochemical giant? Or to propel another phallic rocket into space?
I saw others. Just now, I explain. I couldn’t see their faces, but they were there. Mars Bar is quiet and still. I don’t tell her about the other face. My tormentor. I don’t want to do the tobacco thing again.
She smirks. Fair enough. We’ll try something else.
What about the others? The ones who were with me? Who’s helping them?
Mars Bar looks away from me and shrugs. You’re here, they’re not.
What about you? Who’s helping you?
As if, she laughs.
A week or so later, Mars Bar appears with a pickup truck that I assume she borrowed and we light out just after sunrise. She drives the twisting back roads with one hand on the wheel and the other on her stomach. She doesn’t tell me where we’re going or what we’re doing in the deep forest. The gravel road hurls rocks at the truck.
Oh, look, Mars Bar says suddenly, talking loudly over the noise, A’ikrêen!
What?
Duck Hawk. Falco peregrinus. It’s a good omen, Bloodless.
We park in a turnout. The lush forest hems us in, the trees and brush leaning like eavesdroppers. Mars Bar dives into the bushes close to where we’ve parked, heading up a knoll dense with thorny brush. Rattlesnakes quiver all around us. I take uneasy steps. I’m not worried for myself—their venom cannot be pumped through my bloodless body—but for Mars Bar and her offspring.
On the way we stop eight or nine times. The world swirls as I haul myself up the steep incline. A headache creeps from one temple to the other. I apologize at each stop, but Mars Bar doesn’t seem bothered. Crouched in the underbrush, snakes all around, she seems at peace. How many times has she done this before?
We finally reach the crest of the hill, then descend into a clearing. Mars Bar consults a notebook and studies the ground until she spots a plant with white flowers. Mars Bar digs. She pulls out one of the plants by the root. It is shaped like an infant’s hand, fingers curled into a fist.
Mars Bar cuts off one of its little fingers and hands it to me. Eat this. For your head.
I obey, then look at my own hand, white as a snowdrift in sunlight.
Mary Bartholomew told me that after they took her father’s land, they also took his water. One day he went out on the porch and the river was gone. It had up and left without a word of warning.
He found Frog and asked her where it went, but Frog didn’t know. Then he found Turtle and asked her, but she didn’t know. Salmon was flopping in the river bed, and he knew he had to do something, so he said to Salmon, I’m going to swallow you and keep you safe in my stomach until we can find where that river went.
Then he drove into town, and on the way he saw a large aqueduct. That’s where the river is, he thought. He turned to follow the aqueduct, which was filled with many other rivers too. He drove a long way. The water was leaving by numerous means: people were drinking it, and they were using it to find gold, and to grow plants, and also to power their televisions so that they could watch documentaries about how the river left and how scientists were trying to understand who took it and how to put it back. And they were swimming in it at water parks with BIG SLIDE™, which he saw on advertisements on their TVs.
All the time Salmon was kicking around in his belly. Salmon wanted out. Mary Bartholomew’s father didn’t know what else to do, so he went to a waterpark and let Salmon out, and they swam together.
The BIG SLIDE™ was fabulous, she told me, as advertised.
Back in the trailer, Mars Bar is preparing kíshvuuf incense and brewing kíshvuuf tea. This is the name of the plant we’ve collected. It is one of our most powerful medicines. My headache has abated.
Mars Bar is chattering, as usual. Kill the Indian, save the man, she says. She laughs at this and pokes my arm, which leaves an indent that won’t go away for an hour. See, they consider that they’ve left you with an advantage.
What do you think they’ll use my blood for?
My blooded days still escape me, but the kíshvuuf is rooting around in my synapses, sparking connections. Emotions rather than specific experiences linger in the afterglow. Snatches of conversation in words I don’t understand escape me as quickly as I remember them.
I study Mars Bar, who has not answered my question yet. She touches her stomach.
Sometimes, Bloodless, it’s better not to know.
She rises to pour the tea and passes me a cup. She’s never asked how it feels, my bloodlessness. Part of me wants to tell her in great detail, but maybe it’s beside the point. No one wants to hear about how I am aware, at all times, of the absence of my pulse. Or how it feels when my heart contracts out of habit, but doesn’t send any liquid coursing to my extremities or into my brain or to the follicles of my eyelashes. Maybe she already knows.
You must understand, says Mars Bar after a long pause, they have this idea that Indians are magical. They know we have connections to the Ikxaréeyav—the Spirit People—and yumarêempah, the paths of the dead. Before, they used our blood for mundane, earthbound things. But it’s the magic they’re after, now. They think it’s in our blood, our language, our baskets, us. She touches my chest and startles at its coolness. Then she touches her stomach protectively. We’re the next step in something big. That’s what I think.
Did you learn this from your father?
No, I—don’t know where I learned it, exactly.
I can’t remember my father. Or my mother. Do you? Remember your mother?
Of course, Mars Bar says, standing abruptly. She sets her mug in the sink, her back to me. The kíshvuuf may help with that—with your memory, I mean. It helped—others.
I notice her hesitation, but I let it be. What if it doesn’t? You said not everyone can be healed. What if you … ? I trail off, unsure what I meant to say.
Yes? She turns, her eyes expectant, cheeks flushed. For a moment I catch a glimpse of someone from my past. But it’s just the kíshvuuf, no doubt.
Nothing. I’m grateful for your help. I am. Just—I reach for her hand, but change course at the last moment, remembering how she flinched at my coldness before. You can tell me anything, you know.
For a moment, the dam of nonchalance she’s constructed cracks and I think she will tell me everything. Instead she says, I know, Bloodless. I know.
The kíshvuuf has not healed me. For short periods it alleviates my acute pain, but my blood has not returned, so the problem persists. My dreams are more vivid than before too. After a while, even in my waking hours I see white faces with blood-rimmed mouths. A growing part of me wishes for death over this liminal life. I shuffle agonizing miles each night to keep myself awake, but now, with the waking visions, there is no real relief. I circle the town, always turning back when I hear the old woman humming on her porch.
Concern colors Mars Bar’s face when I tell her of my deteriorating state. We are sitting by my camper next to our fire. The wood pops, sending sparks into space.
We’ll think of something, she says.
But the weeks wear on. I take the kíshvuuf each night. On nights when I take a high dose, there’s a pressure in my sternum, like I’m supposed to go somewhere. Like I’m running late. I wander the length and breadth of Happy Camp, searching for the source of this sensation. I learn the town’s every crevice and alley. Sometimes, past my haunting visions, I see other things that I know aren’t there: old massive trees where houses are now, men playing stickball in a field, a fire gently cleansing the forest floor. From a distance, the old woman on her porch is overlaid by a younger version of herself instead, a version who looks at me keenly before I turn away.
Mars Bar and I sit in silence by the fire most nights. I sip on kíshvuuf, and she rubs her pregnant belly, which never seems to grow. Sometimes I stay until the fire fades into oblivion; other times I stand abruptly to wander the town. Mars Bar never follows, but I know my wandering makes her sad.
One night, I come out of a particularly dense stupor to find myself in front of the old woman’s house, closer than I have been before. The old woman beckons me to her porch with a barely perceptible wave that I think I may have imagined. But I go to her. I sit down on the edge of the small porch, my feet dangling, although I’m not far enough off the ground for that. My feet should touch the ground. My legs have shrunk. This alarms me. How will I ever get back to my trailer with such short legs?
You need the brush dance. She does too. But she won’t tell you that.
What? I turn around, but the old woman just keeps rocking, acting like she hasn’t said anything. I look back down at my diminishing feet, unnerved.
The dance to heal a dying child.
But I’m not dying, I say, blinking hard at my minuscule shoelaces.
You’re not exactly a child, either.
I turn to look at the woman again. She is very old. Her chin bears the traditional 111 tattoo. Without thinking, I reach a hand out, three fingers raised to trace the lines, a motion I feel I have done before, long ago, while held in strong, gentle arms. But my hand is too small; my arm is too short. Childlike. Infantlike. I concentrate hard on my next words, forcing air out of my lungs mechanically, forming my lips and tongue into shapes that they resist.
It will give me my blood back?
Maybe, says the woman, no longer old, yet not exactly young. Healing can be different for different people.
Thoughts slip through my head like summer eel. I am quiet for a long time before I have captured enough words to form a sentence.
Will I remember my parents? I ask.
But I have posed my question to no one. I’m no longer on the porch, but back at the fire pit by my trailer again. Maybe I have been here all along, the porch itself a vision wrapped in other visions. Mars Bar’s chair is empty. She left at some point while I was thinking, wandering in my mind, maybe minutes ago, maybe hours. The fire is almost out.
Will I remember myself? I ask the stars. If any of them answer, it will take millions of years for the message to arrive.
Mary Bartholomew’s father went to visit his mother and father and grandparents one day only to find they had disappeared. It had been a while since he visited, but still. He thought it was strange they weren’t where he left them.
In their place was a notice from the Son of Smith Museum in the Capitol. Preserved forever! Mom and Pop make their debut in DC! Living expenses subsidized by the US of A!
Mary Bartholomew’s father was unsure what to make of this. Had his parents run off to join the circus? Would his grandparents perform as acrobats? Would they earn a living wage and be granted healthcare?
He packed up his truck and headed to DC.
He arrived on a Tuesday at 3:32 and went to the Museum. He found whole groups of grandparents of various nationalities lying around in exhibits. They looked sad. Languid. Out of sorts and out of place. As he came to the end of one display, he saw his parents and grandparents. Some of their favorite things had been taken away and put in a case next to them.
Help us, grandson! they said.
We want peace, grandson!
Talk to that man about it, ordered his own mother, pointing to an office door. I gather he’s in charge here, but he won’t listen to us.
There was a man in the office with very large glasses on.
I’ve come for my parents and grandparents, Mary Bartholomew’s father said.
Do you have identification?
Her father got out his driver’s license.
No, I mean, identification that would show they’re your family.
Her father fished around in his wallet and got out another card that said what tribe he was from.
Who are you claiming again?
My mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, and I think I saw a few more generations back in there, and—
Hm, those descriptions don’t match our cataloguing data. Do you mean woman #1 maybe? Man #83? Woman #552? Man #77?
Mary Bartholomew’s father stared at him. I don’t know, he said to the little man in the big glasses.
Do you have identification?
I just gave it to you.
No, for them. The man sighed. How do I know you’re actually their son?
Because I know them. I know where they were buried.
Well, so do I. I’ve been studying them. Anyone could figure that stuff out. I can’t just take your word for it.
Sir, they must come home with me.
The man gaped. I can’t take down an exhibit willy-nilly! They need to be preserved!
Preserved?
For historical and anthropological purposes. Whoever buried them—
Look, mister, said Mary Batholomew’s father. All they want is to go back to their graves. Where my ancestors—
Then, as I said before, you’ll need to return with identification that proves beyond a doubt that they’re yours.
What kind of identification?
Well … we could take a blood sample, said the man after some thought. If it really means that much to you.
Mary Bartholomew’s father ended up giving them a blood sample. After waiting ten years, it was processed and the results proved beyond a doubt that it was his parents in the exhibit.
So they came home? I asked Mary Bartholomew when she paused. She shook her head.
Still waiting.
How do you know about the brush dance? Mars Bar’s tone is accusatory. She looks taken aback.
I’m allowed to talk to people other than you, you know.
Mars Bar crosses her arms and props her hip against the counter. She raises an eyebrow at me.
I read about it, okay? At the museum.
I really had. After that night, the vision of the old woman, I’d gone looking for her, but she wasn’t there—neither was her porch. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. So, I went to the museum, which was closed, but the gift shop was open and it had a few books on Karuk stuff and I read all about the brush dance.
Mars Bar stares out the window. A fucking brush dance. I don’t think this is a good idea.
I don’t hear you coming up with anything.
Wow.
Mars Bar. I just—want to be healed. I want to be normal again. Don’t you?
She startles slightly, composes herself. I don’t need to be healed.
No, I just meant … I meant wouldn’t you want to be healed. In my place. That’s all.
She exhales annoyance. All right. I’ll talk to someone tomorrow about getting a crew together. I’ll tell you where to meet them.
You won’t be there?
No.
I study the lines of her face, the way her hands guard her middle. You’re afraid.
She snorts. Or maybe a pregnant lady doesn’t want to get up in the middle of the night for some stupid dance. She stares at me for a long moment. It’s not going to work.
It might, I say, simply.
We pause for a long moment. Mars Bar flips her hair over her shoulder, looks out the window again, sighs, looks at me again. Stop looking at me like that. So I don’t want to come to the brush dance. So what?
I shrug.
I’m not scared. She shakes her head as she opens the trailer door. You go. You get healed. I’m not coming. The door slams behind her and I hear a dog bark somewhere nearby.
Mars Bar leaves me a note the next day, taped to my door, telling me the brush dance will take place that night and where I should go. I want to find her, to try to convince her to come with me. It feels deeply important. As I search for her, my mind wanders. If the brush dance is successful, will I remember everything? Do I want to? I can almost feel again at the thought of being fully alive. No more half existence. But I try to temper my expectations.
I’d asked Mars Bar on that night I first confided in her whether I was one quarter of a person before they stole my blood, whether my dad was one half, his mom whole. Mars Bar had rolled her eyes and pointed to my legs.
Like, what part of you existed in that case? she’d asked. Were your legs your one quarter or your torso or your head? Or was it a mix by volume of different parts adding up to one quarter and, if so, how did you walk around?
Are you whole? I’d asked.
I’m not the point here, she’d said.
I think about that too, as I search for her. Eventually, I give up and curl up on my bed for a catnap. Figuring out Mars Bar is like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle without the box. She seems to be alone, her baby bump isn’t growing—I have no way to know where she came from or if she is who she says she is. What I do know, what I can sense in every gesture, is that they took something from her that goes much deeper than blood. It’s something she cannot tell me—maybe she can’t even tell herself.
I’d asked her before who was helping her. I think it’s me. Or at least, I’m supposed to be.
I enter an uneasy sleep. I dream that I find my blood. They have taken enough of it to make a whole other person and it looks at me with its bloody eyes and waves at me with its bloody hand. Waving? Or beckoning?
Get back inside me, I say to it, the blood creature. It smiles and replies to me in a language I don’t know, but I understand that it is refusing to be a part of me again. It’s calling for me to join it. It is across a great crimson river. It stands on the far bank, crying out in the voice of my ancestors. With each word, I expect the rap of a cane on my shoulders, and I wake in my cold white body in the camper, aware of a warm presence beside me.
It’s time to go, says Mars Bar.
When I asked Mary Bartholomew where her father was now, she got quiet. I stared at the fire, whose flames didn’t warm me. She stood and walked into her camper, and I thought I’d driven her away, but she returned a few minutes later with her laptop.
She passed it to me. She had a Wikipedia article open about a nearby university. I stared at the picture of her father performing for spectators. The description, in a tone that was chipper and bright, delineated a life of servitude and confinement. The final picture on the page was of his skull on display.
He became an entertainer, she said.
We have coated ourselves in deer cannon bone marrow for the trek to the ceremony, a trick her father once taught her. Mars Bar offers no explanation for her sudden appearance, and I can feel that she is still apprehensive about attending the ceremony.
Tonight is a good night for it, she says. We will have the moon on our side.
I nod knowingly, knowing nothing. We arrive at a clearing near the foot of a large hill. Above us, the Milky Way runs soft white against the black sky.
Mars Bar has four friends who are going to help us with the brush dance. Their names are Káruk, Yúruk, Máruk, and Sáruk. I have seen them around the trailer park. In fact, they’re some of the only residents who ever acknowledge me. As I understand it, they are all related to each other in different ways. Like, Káruk is Yúruk’s sister, and Yúruk is Sáruk’s cousin, but Máruk is someone’s auntie. I can’t keep it straight.
To my surprise, they are joined by someone I recognize: the old woman from the porch. I am told that her name is Doctor Katy. When she nods at me, I pretend not to recognize her. She wears full regalia tonight, woven from materials in the world around us. She holds a staff. The aromas of kíshvuuf and tobacco mix with the smoke of a fire where the cousins are gathered.
After brief introductions, I sink gratefully to the ground, exhausted by the walk. Mars Bar stands a little ways away from me with the dancers, and their conversation quickly outpaces my comprehension. She looks older in the firelight. Is she speaking a different language? I sit up straighter and strain to hear, ignoring Doctor Katy’s intense eyes, which have not left me since we arrived. The dancers’ expressions are the kind you make when an elderly relative mistakenly calls you by your parent’s name or tells you a story for the eighteenth time. I begin to see her against a different backdrop, inhabiting a traditional Karuk village, then a square, gray building. I blink hard, trying to clarify the scene. Mars Bar glances at me, and the spell is broken; she reconstitutes in some fundamental way, changing back to the Mars Bar I know. That last scene makes me nervous. We should leave.
No. Doctor Katy speaks suddenly, and when I meet her gaze I do not doubt she knows my thoughts. She walks to the others, who nod and take their places in a circle around me. Without any further delay, they begin their song and their dance. Mars Bar moves to join them, but as she passes by, Doctor Katy grabs her elbow and firmly guides her toward me instead, near the center of the circle. Mars Bar bristles at Doctor Katy’s touch. A look of confusion rather than anger colors her face. She and Katy share a wordless exchange. At last, Mars Bar relents. She sits near me. Our eyes meet. Hers are wide. We should leave, I think again.
What’s wrong?
Nothing. Mars Bar watches the dancers, circling us tighter and tighter. She grabs my hand. She does not flinch at the cold this time. I grip her hand tightly myself, calculating the timing to stand, jump between the dancers, and tear off into the night, back to Happy Camp, away from this fire, this song.
The rhythm quickens. The dancers envelop us. Doctor Katy chants in counterpoint standing across the fire, just inside the circle. I don’t understand her words, but they pound in my chest like my unblooded heart. As the rhythm reaches its peak, she approaches me with slow, deliberate steps. She looks into my eyes for a moment, steadying me with her strength; then she bends down and places her mouth in the crook of my arm. I recoil, but Mars Bar stays my escape. Doctor Katy sucks hard at my skin. Her teeth dig in, leaving saliva-soaked indents behind. Quickly, she moves to my other arm, my hands, my feet. She is sucking everywhere the blood was taken from. When she’s finished sucking my limbs, she turns to the fire and vomits. Then she turns back to us, and I wonder what else she will suck out of me, but instead she goes to Mars Bar, whose grip tightens until my fingers creak under the pressure. I feel her wish to flee. I feel our joint inability to move.
Doctor Katy examines Mars Bar’s pregnant belly. She tenderly traces her finger from one side to the other. I jump in surprise when Doctor Katy keens to the heavens, a doleful howl like a coyote. The music continues, faster now, and Doctor Katy again vomits into the fire.
The fire rises, its heat pulsating. The world changes. The trees are younger, suddenly, the dancers too. The ground thrums beneath us, and I feel that familiar sensation at my sternum. My mind races. Crystalline images, memories, which were just on the verge of consciousness after the kíshvuuf, are rushing forward in a torrent. I am living days in nanoseconds. I look up and see the Moon’s face. An image materializes from before the blood was stolen from me: My father pointing at the moon and showing me the Moon’s wives—Rattlesnake, Grizzly Bear, Frog. I am entranced, but a sound is growing beneath the rhythm of the dancers that pulls my attention away. A rushing sound. The river.
The river is rising. Calling. I must go.
My eyes meet Doctor Katy’s across the fire. This time, she doesn’t argue. Take her with you.
I stand abruptly, pulling Mars Bar up. She’s reluctant, still wrapped in her pain. Come on, I say. We leave the firelight and the music fades as I head riverward, the compass within me pointing unwaveringly now. The pull is irresistible. It is a couple miles away. The moon’s beams guide us on our journey through the woods, the dense brush scratching at the bone marrow coating our skin, tugging at our clothing.
Mars Bar stumbles, disconnecting our hands. My momentum carries me onward a few yards. By the time I turn she is standing, turned uphill, but looking back over her shoulder at me.
Her eyes search my face, trying to communicate something. I hold my breath.
I go back for her, though it is difficult to move in the wrong direction. She looks at the moon and cradles her stomach. Tears shimmer on her cheeks.
I touch her arm gently and she turns to face me fully. There is blood gushing from her abdomen and between her legs, staining her deerskin dress. The world tips sideways crazily. Mars Bar’s hand steadies me, leaving a bloody print behind. As I digest this scene, wondering how I will get her to the river, a great whooshing fills the night air and a deep breath fills my lungs. A giant vulture alights on a large boulder to our left. Suddenly, I am steady again, and awake—really awake.
No, gasps Mars Bar. It cannot be.
What? What is it? She speaks with fear, while I—I am all wonder and exhilaration.
Atipimáamvaan. Bloodless, it cannot be. I knew that you were—but me?
What?
The vulture—Atipimáamvaan—lets loose a croaking screech, then lifts off. I run after it under my strange compulsion, pulling at Mars Bar, but she stumbles again, crying out in pain.
We have to follow it, I say, gripping her arm tightly, frantic.
Bloodless, I—
Mars Bar falls to the ground, so I heft her up, supporting her weight easily. For the first time in months, I am strong. My legs are solid beneath me. My breath comes easier. My senses quicken. Do I imagine it, or is that truly the wind in my face? Can I, indeed, smell the odor of death on Atipimáamvaan as it guides us toward the river? And why is this comforting? Mars Bar’s head lolls as I fall into a rhythm, like the dancers around the fire. My feet march in time with theirs. My breath moves with their song. I see them in flashes, and feel for quick moments that I am still there, by the fire. That this is the dream.
My heart pounds in my chest, still pinching my insides in that bloodless way. Atipimáamvaan brings us right to the riverbank. A canoe awaits, piloted by A’ikrêen.
No! You can’t do this to me! Mars Bar thrusts herself from my arms and plants her feet on the riverbank. I won’t go!
Atipimáamvaan and A’ikrêen look at each other for a moment before Atipimáamvaan takes off again. Mars Bar drops onto the bank. She rocks gently.
I stand with one foot in the canoe. The urge to climb in nearly overpowers me. But I cannot leave her here. I must help her.
A’ikrêen cocks his bird head curiously.
Wait for us. I return to the shore and grab one of Mars Bar’s hands as she moans. I sit beside her, holding her small hand between my ungainly pale ones. The baby?
She shakes her head. No, Bloodless. No. She moans again. Oh, no, no, no.
What then?
There is a long silence. The current sputters gently. Crickets chirp. A breeze wends its way through the treetops, not touching us below. Everything recalls the rhythm of the dancers, which is the rhythm of the earth. The stars stare, silent sentinels observing our misery.
I remember. She says it softly, just above a whisper. Her eyes are focused on the distance. I remember everything.
Tell me. She turns away. Mars Bar. I cup her cheek in my hand. She is feverish. I look into those dark eyes of hers, trying to refocus them on me. You’ve got to talk about what they took or you’ll never get it back.
She stares at me as her own words echo back to her from that first night of the fire. Then she crumples into me, embracing me.
I remember … I remember dying, Bloodless. She sits up and looks at me. Don’t you?
I startle, pushing back from her slightly, but she is lost in her own memories now.
It was the headmaster. The baby—it was—they didn’t want it, you see? But I hid from them. I ran and I hid. She touches her bleeding stomach. She addresses her next words to it, tender and quiet. I told you we would be okay. She looks at me with fresh tears welling in her eyes. But then one day … it was too soon, I thought. Too soon. I went back. I had to. I needed help—the pain. They took me inside. And then, after pushing and screaming, they cut me and I—I heard it. I heard it crying. Just a small thing. Such a little cry, but that was my baby. My baby. Not theirs. Not his. But they took it away. Oh, Bloodless, they took it away from me. I didn’t even get to touch it. I don’t know where they took it. And by then I had lost so much blood, so much …
Mars Bar grabs my arm. What if it’s still here, Bloodless, here in this world? What if I’m leaving it? I can’t get in that boat. I can’t. I don’t care if I’m—. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, leaving bloody tracks on her face. Her lip quivers. I wanted to hold it. I wanted to see it, just once.
I understand. I didn’t. I couldn’t. How could anyone?
It was the fever that killed me. And I died in that—in that horrible—
I know, I say, pulling her into me again and stroking her long hair. I know.
I see A’ikrêen looking at me over Mars Bar. His intense eyes capture mine for a long moment.
So, we really are dead, I say. Both of us.
Yes, she breathes. I had forgotten. For a very long time, I think.
Your baby. It might be grown by now.
Her eyes widen. She studies me for a long moment. Yes. You’re right.
I look around at the moonlit forest. It is fading ever so slightly.
We have to cross the river, I say, to myself as much as to Mars Bar.
She looks back up the hill toward where the fire is, the dancers, Doctor Katy. A breeze brushes our cheeks and she inhales deeply, closing her eyes. She breathes heavily out of her mouth.
It’s time, says A’ikrêen. Yumarêempah awaits.
Yumarêempah. I remember this. The paths of the dead. We are going to the Boneless Lands.
Mars Bar rises, holding fast my hand in hers. She is still reticent, but I sense her trust in me. We enter A’ikrêen’s canoe, sitting carefully at its center, and he paddles upriver, easy and swift. Through narrower passages, bushes and trees tug at our clothes. The bone marrow protects us from scrapes. As we go, I am filled with unbidden memories of those dark hallways at the school. They wash over me with piercing clarity, but the pain has drained away.
Of course. I turn to Mars Bar. You were there.
Yes, she says. Before you. I was the first.
The first. Yes, she was not there at the same time as me, but she was in the same spaces. I’d felt her in that place where they tried to erase us. Mary Bartholomew was the first they murdered there.
I was the last.
I place my other hand over hers and smile. She smiles back.
Above our little vessel, the Milky Way—Yumarêempah—traces the river’s path, flowing with us. We lie down to watch. The two are becoming one, water and sky, a river of stars. Gradually, we are unmoored from gravity, floating through the pure cosmos. The cool air chaps my cheeks. I am warm, I think.
Images move through water and sky. Ancestors and descendants float near in vessels of their own. Two young Karuk maidens pass by us in a canoe and I wave as one smiles at me. Then a ship, a star ship, with great sails drifts above. I can almost touch it. A face peers out. Other people appear—a woman running from an explosion, a girl dressed in regalia dancing with unfettered joy, Doctor Katy as a young woman getting her chin tattoo.
I haven’t felt any time passing, but I notice that the deer cannon bone marrow coating has worn away now, and our clothes are gone. Branches have scraped our skin. I bleed.
Suddenly, I see myself in the images above. I sit up, awed. I am surrounded by my family. My father teaches me about fire, my mother cradles me after I cut my finger, my blood dripping from the tip. She says something, and at last I can hear her. At last, I can remember what it is she is calling me. Tears flow from my eyes into the air, joining the river that we are passing through.
Slowly, I lie back again in the boat beside the woman I know as Mary Bartholomew. She loops her arms around me as I rejoin her, and for the first time since the brush dance began, the pulsing rhythm of the earth quiets completely. Instead, I hear her heartbeat, and it is familiar.
My name was Amváamvaan, I say softly to Mars Bar. She stirs, awaking from a deep reverie.
I am Yuxtharanpírish. Amváamvaan, she whispers, and the sound of it is like coming home.
Yuxtharanpírish, I whisper back. My eyes are heavy, my body is warm, my blood is flowing.
In the land of our ancestors, at last, we sleep.
Editor: Hebe Stanton
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