michael schein

The boy listened with his ear against the door for the sound of his mother’s breathing.  He didn’t dare to peek inside, for fear of inciting a new rage; he didn’t dare to leave her, having seen before the effects of this deep melancholia. His father was out in the fields, and besides, what use was he?  It was father’s fault that mother was in this condition; hadn’t he held the reins that terrible night two years before when the carriage overturned and mother struck her head and the blood was unstoppable?  Mother, oh dear mother, how I miss you!

She was right there, behind the white door, but the haggard, bitter, withdrawn thing filling mother’s old bedclothes was a cruel caricature of the mother of Isaac’s memory.  How he clung to that image of an industrious, loving and cheerful woman, always ready to solve any problem, heal any hurt.  But at nine it is hard to hold on to the memories of a seven year old.  Which was the true mother, which the imagined?

“No!  NO!!  You can’t fool me – I know what you’re up to!” came the gutteral cry from within the closed chamber, and that was the real mother now, alternately sullen and apoplectic. Isaac heard a crash from within, the sound of breaking china.  Swallowing hard, he tried the door.  It was locked.

Moans streamed like lava from behind the door, each carving a channel in Isaac’s heart poised to cool to stone.  He pushed his shoulder against the barrier, but it would not budge.  “NO – POISON!” Mother screamed, followed by the sound of furniture scraping, and a clunk against the door.  Desperate, Isaac turned and ran to fetch the stove ax.

Isaac burst into the kitchen frightening his sisters, grabbed the ax, and flew back up the stairs.  Little Oliver, the toddler, exploded in tears. Elizabeth, the eldest, grabbed him up in her aprons, as the four girls rushed off to see what was the matter. And where was that servant Amy, whose job it was to care for their mother?

From inside the room came an eerie sound:  sobs, interspersed with trembly sing-song, “Hannah Cummings, Cummings and Goings, Goings and Cummings, Hannah my dear!”  Interrupted by sobs, so violent they degenerated into clutching gasps for breath.  “Goodbye Hannah, Daddy’s a Deacon, Deacon of Dying, Going to God.”

“Oh Isaac,” cried Elizabeth, “do something, quick!” as she too tried the door, but it would not budge.  “Mother!” called the sisters in unison.

“Children, is that you?” came a voice from within, not quite their mother.  A pause.  “Children?”  A very pulled together, taut voice.

“Yes, mother,” replied Isaac, trying to stay calm. “Would you let us in, please?” Another pause, a very long one, the children barely daring to breathe.

“SAVE YOURSELVES!!!” and a shriek, followed by the sound of glass breaking.  Isaac swung the ax with a strength hitherto unknown, and the door shattered from top to bottom.  Isaac and his sisters joined together to thrust away the remnants of white splinters and the rolltop desk that had been jammed against the door. Scrambling over the barricade, Isaac was horrified to find his mother straddling the window casement, blood oozing from a dozen cuts inflicted by the jagged glass.  In a single bound he was across the room as she pushed off with her trailing foot, and he was just able to grab her arm as she fell, pinioning his legs against the moldings.  She looked back into his eyes, no sign of recognition in her hateful gaze. “Be gone, ye creature of Satan!” she hissed, but he would not be gone, and though he feared dislodging her shoulder he pulled for all he was worth, and the months of barely pecking at her plate made her light and he reeled her in like some unknown sea creature and she flopped onto the glass-strewn floor, bleeding and still, unconscious.

Isaac Ingalls Stevens lay down beside his mother, heedless of the glass, trembling head to toe.  His sisters stood silent, mouths agape; his little brother wailed. The heads of his father and Amy appeared at the doorway, blinking, disoriented, disheveled.  Isaac shot his father a cold look.  He did not permit himself to cry until late that night, when he was alone.

The boy listened to the alien sounds coming from the stream bed just beyond the cedars.  He was on his first quest – he’d been sent to retrieve a medicine stick placed by his father next to the dead snag on She-nah-nam creek.  Flushed with excitement, he had set out bravely, scampering as quickly as legs in their seventh summer could go.  But now, creeping on his belly to the point where sheltering boughs brushed the crest of the bank above the dead snag, his quest seemed doomed to failure. With the tremulous caution of a doe, he parted the verdant curtain a hand’s width, and gingerly peeked out.

What the boy saw gripped his throat like a cougar’s jaws. The creek was crawling with ghost-cheeked men, their chins hairy as any wild beast.  They smelled of death.  Had some demon shape-shifted these creatures from dying wolves?

Leschi let the curtain fall, as he considered his next move.  Of course he should turn and run back to the safety of the tribe.  He remembered well the many times he had been cautioned as a child against the dangers of the forest.  The wolf and bear and cougar and wild boar were terrible, but more terrible still were the enchantments:  dwarves who would steal a person’s reason; stealthy, quick demons of the forest like Seatco, who could entrap a wayward child, dooming him to a life of squalor and slavery.

Yet Leschi could not turn back. To do so would disgrace his family. If he were to turn back without the medicine stick, how could he face his father Sennatco, or his older brother Quiemuth?  Leschi knew that to earn a vision quest he must first pass the smaller tests set for him by his father.  Without a vision quest, he could never know his tamanous – his spirit guide.  Without his tamanous he would be but a shadow, a nothing, worse than a slave. 

As silently as he could, Leschi again parted the curtain of cedar boughs.  There were as many of the creatures as he had fingers on one hand.  They were gutting and skinning otter, the blue-grey viscera disappearing silently in the creek’s hungry current. Leschi was afraid.  Then he remembered the story his father told over and over during the long winter rains.  It told of the time that his ancestors, afraid of drought, had kidnapped Ocean’s daughter, Cloud, only to be punished by the Great Spirit, Sah-hah-lee Tyee.  He closed his eyes, conjuring up his father’s resonant voice:  “Remember this well, children – in fear, there is no wisdom; only death and suffering.”

Steeling himself against fear, Leschi studied the grasses waving under the caress of Laliad, the wind spirit.  He didn’t yet know how he would do it.  All he knew was that it must be done.  Somehow, he would find a way to creep undetected over open ground the length of a longhouse, retrieve the totem, and steal back to safety.  All under the malevolent eyes of the monsters.

Leschi studied the undulations of the river grasses.  Are we not the People of the River Grass? asked his father’s voice.  Yes, answered Leschi.  We are the people that the spirit mink led across the mountains to Tenalquot, the Happy Land, where huge salmon leap from every stream, where berries and bulbs and tall cedars are plentiful, where the squirting clam hides just beneath the sand at the shore.  We are the people of the land of puyallup – more than enough – never too cold or too hot.  We are the people whose ancestors learned the ways of the river that drains the great mountain, who became known as the Nisqually, named for the grasses that grow tall and blossom on the banks of our beloved river.

Leschi prayed to his mother for guidance, though she had perished bringing his sister Skai-kai into the world in his second summer.  He could no longer picture his mother’s face, but she was with him.  She was the breeze in the grass and a voice – a clear sweet song washing over the cradleboard to which he’d been strapped as she bent to her work:

Spirit dances in the rain, in the wave, in the wind,

Spirit dances in rock and tree, you and me,

Our hearts drum the dance.

Listening closely, he could hear her song even now.

With a clarity before unknown to him, Leschi peered out across the expanse of osoberry, horsetail, rushes, cattails, plantain, nettle.  The grasses beckoned to him, pointing the way with their filial fingers. Breathing deeply to fill his lungs, Leschi slipped from his hiding place and scampered, bent low to the ground, around the edge of the demons’ camp.  The light copper of his skin melded with the straw-colored stems and ochre-brown blades shifting in the wind.  The padding of his bare feet harmonized with the susurrus of the grass.  Just short of his goal, Leschi fell to his belly, still as a fallen log.

The dead snag was surrounded by a circle of matted straw, providing no cover for the length of a stone’s throw.  Leschi could see the talisman, a pointed stick carved with the face of Raven, the trickster, stuck in the ground by the tree.  He looked to the creatures, who appeared to be absorbed in their work.  He was downwind, and their scent soured his nostrils like the hamma hamma – rotting fish carcasses that littered the beach.  He paused, asking Sah-hah-lee Tyee to make him invisible.  Then he bolted across the open space and grabbed the medicine stick just as one of the monsters gave a cry, followed by a great unintelligible babble rising behind him as he flew back to the welcoming grasses.  Weaving through and back into the cover of the cedar forest, running like the Cayuse whose hooves barely touch the ground, Leschi heard the demon gibberish fade in the distance, and he gave thanks to his mother and to all the spirits who had guided him through his moment of peril.

That night, safe in the longhouse at Muck Creek, the first rains came.  Soon it would be time to follow the salmon upriver for winter.  Leschi inhaled the warm smell of cedar logs, of woven grasses, skins and dried salmon hanging on the walls, of wet dogs trotting in and out. Clutching the raven totem close to his heart, he burrowed deep into the mound of sleeping boys under a bearskin blanket.  His eyes grew heavy, and his breaths merged with the rain and ancient forest and teeming Nisqually River, with the powerful salmon and sweet crab and musky clams and blue, salmon, thimble, black, straw, elder, salal, goose, and huckleberries of Tenalquot, the Happy Land, the land of more than enough.

Isaac Ingalls Stevens stood stiff and proud in his starched cadet’s uniform with the bright red stripe running up the sides of grey trousers cuffed twice to keep from bagging and tucked into spit-shined calf-high riding boots.  His sinewy trunk, though deceptively powerful, swam a bit within the capacious grey woolen cut-away jacket with its padded shoulders and bright brass buttons.  The plumed hat added welcome height to his otherwise diminutive stature; slipping the strap off his chin, he removed it with reluctance.  He was dusty from a full day of parading and drilling, but a peculiar energy thrummed from every pore.  His hazel eyes gleamed, set in a head that appeared to belong elsewhere, perhaps on a man who wrestles alligators in a traveling exhibition.  Isaac moved about the barracks sharp and smart, always rushing to keep that oversized head balanced on wiry shoulders. Then, as the light dimmed in the western sky, he brushed and folded his uniform with immaculate care, and knelt by his mattress on the floor to pray.

Isaac asked first, as always, for the Lord to watch over his beloved mother Hannah in Heaven, to which she ascended just a few short months after her abortive attempt to fly from the window; and for the Lord to watch over his sisters and his younger brother, back in Andover at the family estate on Lake Cochichewick.  Dutifully, though with less enthusiasm, he prayed to God for blessings upon his father, Isaac Sr., and for Amy, his young stepmother, whom Isaac and his siblings had never forgiven for supplanting their mother.  Finally, as he had every night for the past two months since arriving at West Point, Isaac prayed for “that character of proud disdain and patriotic valor which has inspired the great heroes of history, Alexander, Napoleon, Washington, Jackson, and, God be willing, Stevens.”

Isaac’s meditations were interrupted by laughter and cursing wafting on whiskey fumes from the opposite corner of the barracks, where a knot of cadets clumped around a game of dice.  Gambling, drinking and swearing were strictly prohibited, of course, but since Superintendent Thayer had been replaced by DeRussi, disciplinary standards at West Point had been in steady decline.  It pained Isaac to realize that even his own hero, General Jackson, had himself contributed to this sorry state of affairs by reinstating dismissed cadets who were mere riff-raff – part of Old Hickory’s perpetual but, to Isaac’s mind, misguided, battle against “privilege”.

“Gentlemen,” cried Isaac, his voice bordering on command, “you discredit our service.  To your bunks!”

Silas Casey, a great Irish upperclassman whose large head was perfectly matched to broad shoulders and muscled arms, rose up to cast a bemused look at the little plebe who fancied himself a Commandant. “Quiet, gentlemen,” said Casey, holding his hand up to his ear in mock display, “I think we’ve got mice!” and as the gamblers erupted with derisive laughter Isaac felt a hot flush in his cheeks.  Springing from his bunk he was across the barracks in a flash, nose to Adam’s apple with the startled Casey.

“You, Sir, shall retract that insult!” announced Isaac, with an assurance belied by his stature.  Casey, towering over the plebe, swayed a bit from the effects of the alcohol.  Uncertainty knitted his brow; he wasn’t a bad sort, he didn’t wish to crush this little mouse, only to set him straight as to what’s what.  Strategically, this battlefield appeared well under control, so Casey took a long pull at the bottle, set it down carefully, and with practiced swiftness, grabbed Isaac’s nose and twisted, hard, ‘til the little man went down.

Ha-ha, that done, Casey reached for his bottle, but it was gone, as the mouse shot through his legs, sprang up from behind and smashed it across the back of Casey’s skull. The bigger man tottered in his tracks, licking at a drop of bloody whiskey, a puzzled expression on his face, as the other cadets stepped back to make room for his fall.  When it didn’t come fast enough, this mouse – no, this feral rodent – leapt up and kicked him in the kidneys, causing him to collapse with a hollow wheeze.  It took four cadets to pull Stevens off Casey.  From that day until the day in 1839 when Isaac Stevens graduated first in his class, no one ever again taunted West Point’s littlest cadet.

Leschi trekked day after day, deeper into the forest. Ten nightfalls it had been since he left the summer camp of his people on Muck Creek.  At first, the woods burst with memories of childhood excursions.  Even the comfortable ways and riverbeds were charged with a kind of power, for his heart pulsated with awareness of his quest.  Each day, as he got further from the known paths, deeper into the mountains, he fasted and cleansed himself in icy pools, for it was well known that spirits abhor the smells of greasy food and human sweat.  A few bites of kinnikinnick berries mixed with dried salmon eggs, eaten once a day, was all he permitted himself for the first week.  The strengthening power of this elixir had been passed down through generations of Nisqually herbal women.  After that, no food at all.

Before bathing Leschi asked the river spirit not to take him, but to guide him into and safely back out of the deep pools beneath boulders over which the waters rushed and crashed. Weighting himself with stones marked with his saliva and urine, he dived to the bottom, stayed until his lungs would burst and his brain screamed for air, and then deposited his stones and surfaced to mark and take another load to the churning river depths again and again and again.  Finally, naked and blue and shivering, he crawled to the bank and cut switches of nettle and horsetail with which to scrub his skin until the burning welts bled good fresh blood, purging himself of all impurities, preparing himself physically to receive what the spirits might send.

On the long, hungry marches through forests never marred by human footfall, Leschi prepared himself mentally, listening for the breathing of the Douglas Fir, the sighing boughs of the Western Red Cedar, the whisper of the Sitka Spruce.  Every tree had its own spirit which could, at any moment, reveal itself to him.  Sometimes, after immersion in mountain pools, he stilled his shivering and quieted his pounding heart, making himself scentless, invisible, the better to observe other creatures that swam and crawled and walked and flew all about him.  Spirits often appeared in the guise of fish or serpents or animals or birds; he must be attentive, open, ready to welcome them. If a spirit showed itself and he walked away heedless, he knew that death was the consequence.

Wide-eyed, Leschi watched the blue-green and silver-speckled chinooks, and dipped no net.  He saw the black-tailed deer bound to the pool for a quick, nervous drink, and did not lift his bow.  He sniffed at bear scat, and dug no pit.  He watched as the female blue grouse made a great show of limping away from the nest, but set no snare.  He whistled and chirped in unison with the yellow-bellied marmots on rocky slopes, but raised no club.  But for all his pains, each beast was mortal – no spirit revealed itself.

At night, Leschi built fires and stared deep into flames licking the sky.  It was late summer, a time of mists.  Huge trees pressed in upon his campfire, whispering the gossip of the dead.  He sang all the songs of his tribe, and when he finished, he sang them again.  Whenever he caught himself beginning to nod off to sleep he splashed cold water on his face, jumped up, and danced around the fire.  When the wolves began to howl, Leschi joined in their song, laying down on his back and howling to the swirling galaxies of Sky Women above.

And then, despite himself, Leschi was asleep.  In his dreams, the fierce Tsiatko, a large hairy giant who lives in mountainside caves and smells terrible, stole his returned-from-the-dead mother and carried her to the summit of the great volcano in the East.  Leschi followed, knife between his teeth, and then he was fighting, slashing at the Tsiatko’s huge hands which pressed him back as he cut again and again, until the Tsiatko, spurting green slime from ten tens of cuts, had to fall back and run.  He was victorious!  But when he looked down he realized he was alone, teetering on the edge of a high cliff, and suddenly, he was falling, falling, falling . . .

Leschi woke with a start, an early rain cleansing him from above. The air was dark and heavy with clouds, but lichens and mosses glowed yellow-green through the gloom.  He cleansed himself further in the river, and ritually scrubbed with harsh branches, all the while chanting a special chant given to him in secret by the Medicine Man.   Smearing his abraded skin with charcoal from the fire pit, he climbed through thinning forests of larch pine and Sitka spruce to the crest of the ridge below which he had been camped.  Stepping out onto a rock bluff, the ground dropped ten great firs below to the base of the Nisqually glacier.  Cold air radiated up from the glacier, but Leschi ignored the cold and the rain. He sat, cross-legged, and opened his heart.

Time passed.  The mists rose and fell, the wind carried voices from tree to tree, the great eagle called from a towering snag across the glacial moraine. Suddenly, as if it were but a blanket lifted and shook by a woman, the clouds flew away, revealing the vast snowfields and steaming crater of Ta-co-bet – nourshing breast – the majestic volcanic source of the Nisqually River, and therefore of all life for his people.  A hot wind blew into Leschi’s face; he felt the ground beneath him begin to tremble.  The earth became liquid, and poured in great waves which he rode like a gull, small in the vastness of this volcanic ocean, but miraculously buoyant.

Leschi knew that if he showed the merest glimmer of fear at this crucial juncture in his quest, he would receive only a small part of the spirit’s power.  The mountain spoke in a gutteral, demonic voice, it howled and threw great boulders into the air which landed all around him.  Fighting to remain impassive, Leschi listened for the meaning behind the cacophony, and heard whisperings of great burdens, of the power to lift the entire tribe.  He stood, casually lifting and throwing the massive boulders back into the mountain, as if they were pinecones.  The brothers Enumclaw – thunder – and Kapoonis – lightening – came out of the sky to play with Leschi, throwing boulders and trees back and forth in a great game. Then Kapoonis set down a luminous frozen lightening bolt upon which Leschi crossed the moraine and ascended to Ta-co-bet’s crater.  There he saw the dance of the fire people, as the mountain spirit spoke to him.  The voice now was surprisingly cool and musical as it imparted to him its secret medicine, bestowing upon him great powers of persuasion, wisdom, and leadership. Startled, he realized it was his mother’s voice, so sweet and familiar that he almost missed the warning – “my son, you must never use your powers in anger, lest they turn against the tribe.”

With a searing flash of lightening and clap of thunder, Leschi was catapulted back to his campsite, where he awoke to the chu-weet chu-weet chu-weet chick chick song of the warbler, sun in his eyes, groggy, parched, bruised and scarred.  For the first time in eleven suns he speared and roasted a salmon, gratified to feel the power of nourishment course through him. Then he began the long trek down the Nisqually to return to his people, oblivious to the cloud forming over the crater of his new tamanous, Ta-co-bet.