Songs of the Dead (31 page)

She's crying now. “I don't think salmon will be outraged by the arrival of the demons. I don't think the few remaining leatherbacks will either. Nor redwoods. Nor white pines. Nor cows in factory farms. Nor pigs. Nor any others. Nor will I. I'd imagine most nonhumans are praying day and night for the demons' arrival, and the question most nonhumans—and most indigenous, and those others who love life on this planet—are asking is: Why are you taking so long?”

twenty three

on the run

We're on the last leg of our journey back west, flying from San Francisco to Crescent City, California, on a plane that holds about twenty people. I'm looking out the window. The propeller spins, shredding the flesh of thick clouds. I wonder how much it hurts.

I turn to Allison, say, “You're right.”

“Of course I'm right. I'm a woman, remember?” She smiles. “About what?”

“I think the
wétiko
disease causes brain damage. You know that question I always ask about whether politicians and CEOs and corporate journalists—and in fact most members of this culture— are stupid, or are they evil?”

“Or both.”

“Maybe the disease causes people to become really stupid.”

“Public discourse would suggest this is the case.”

“Maybe it causes them to act against their self-interest, like the ants who climb to the tops of blades of grass and clamp on tight. Certainly people are clinging just as tight to systems that are killing them. And maybe it turns them into idiot savants, into people who can't think clearly but who can send a rocket to the moon. . . .”

“And who can build really big bombs.”

“And who have a gift for making money.”

“And maybe it causes them to hallucinate, to
actually
perceive money as worth more than life, to
actually
perceive heaven as worth more than earth. It's not that they're poor deluded souls who just don't quite understand. They are
incapable
of getting it, just as people with Alzheimer's or Mad Cow are incapable of remembering or thinking clearly, just as humans are incapable of seeing ultraviolet and bees are incapable of seeing red.”

“One characteristic of sociopaths” she says, “is that they're incapable of feeling certain emotions, including joy, sorrow, regret, and especially empathy or compassion. Incapable. If, at a very young age, your caregivers don't nurture you—if they don't bond with you and you don't bond with them—you may very well not develop the capacity to care, to
feel
. If that's the case, it doesn't matter what therapy you get later, the neural pathways simply aren't there.”

I respond, “I once had a friend who contracted measles as a fetus. The disease scarred her eyes. She has something like three percent vision. You and I could talk to her all we want, we could sign petitions, we could file lawsuits, we could beg, plead, bribe, but it wouldn't matter. It
couldn't
matter. She is incapable of seeing. Of course in her case she can empathize, very well, actually. But the point is that when certain diseases cause certain damage, there is nothing you can do about it.”

We deplane on land that used to belong to the Tolowa and Yurok, to the salmon, the steelhead, the redwoods, the grizzlies. Now it belongs to the
wétikos
. Or at least they claim it.

Allison's parents—George and May—pick us up, drive us home. May has—as she always seems to—cooked a delicious meal, this time carrot soup, homemade bread, mashed potatoes, and chicken with homemade noodles. Over dinner George tells us stories. I've heard most of these before, but he tells them well, and so long as it's only the fourth or fifth time, I don't mind.

I remember one of the first times I met him he told a long, elaborate story about a premonition of death he'd had when he was a teenager, and how a dog and a cat had saved his life. I'd been utterly fascinated and unable to understand why everyone else fled as soon as he began: Allison to clear the table, May to wash dishes, and Allison's sister Vi to feed the cats. Eleven or twelve retellings later I understood, and began helping May to dry dishes and put them away.

Tonight he tells a story I've never heard. May helps. It's from Allison's childhood.

“We always encouraged Allison and Vi to take as much freedom as they could handle,” George says, then turns to May. “Do you remember the time Allison decided to sleep in a cardboard box in the basement?”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “You got her a box from the appliance store and I made up a little bed for her, and she took her stuffed animals.”

George continues, “She slept down there for probably two months, then one day she said she wanted to come home.”

“How old was she?” I ask.

“Twenty-three,” says Vi.

“Oh, she was not,” responds May. “I think she was six or seven. She said she wanted to go on a trip, and every day she would tell us where she and her box had gone the night before.”

“And then do you remember,” George says, pointing his fork at no one, “the time we gave all her toys to the McNallys?

“Why?” I ask.

“Oh,” May says softly, “the McNallys were so very poor. The father used to be a roofer. He was working at some business and fell through the roof, landed flat on his back. He fractured his skull, broke his back, and then got a terrible attorney who talked him into settling for about $5000. This was a long time ago, but that was still not nearly enough for them to live on.”

“And then do you know what the attorney did?” George asks. “He got a job with the insurance company about three weeks later.”

May continues, “So George used to go down to the grocery store—this was before they were all big and automated—and he sometimes told the owners to just charge us the next time the McNallys came in.”

“So Allison donated her toys? How nice!” I say.

“So Allison donated her toys? How nice!”

Everyone laughs. Allison rolls her eyes.

George says, “Not hardly. We took them from her.”

“Why?”

“She was a messy child,” says May.

George says, “You should have seen her room. Games and books and clothes all over the floor.”

“That was normally okay,” May adds. “We usually just closed the door.”

“But it got to be too much,” George continues. “We couldn't even get the door shut. And she started leaving her stuff everywhere. In the living room, the kitchen, our room, Vi's room, grandma's room—this was before she died, obviously. So we told her to clean up her mess.”

“What did she do?”

May answers, “She ignored us.”

“How old was she?” I ask.

Predictably, Vi answers, “Twenty-three.”

“Oh,” May responds just as comfortably, “she was not. I think she was nine.”

“I think she was ten,” George says.

“No, it was the summer Vi got chicken pox, so she must have been. . . .”

Silence.

I say, “What happened?”

“Oh, Vi was really sick. I remember giving her oatmeal baths to help her feel better.”

Allison sighs, then says, “I think he means with the toys.”

George says, “We gave them away. We kept saying, ‘You need to clean up your mess,' and she kept ignoring us. Finally we said, ‘If you don't clean it up we will. And everything we have to clean up you're going to lose. You'll never see any of it again.' She didn't believe we would do it.”

“We realized,” May says, thoughtfully, “that it was time to teach her about consequences, and about responsibility.”

George again: “So we cleaned it all up, and everything on the floor we gave to the McNallys.”

May adds, “Oh, how Allison cried. She cried for a couple of days, and afterwards pouted until she realized that wasn't doing any good. The toys were gone and she wasn't getting them back. At that point she got on with her life.”

The next day I tell George about the demons. He already knows about me falling through time, but we haven't yet told him why we left Spokane. I'll leave that to Allison, if she so chooses: they're her parents.

George listens carefully, then says, “Let's go outside.”

We do. It's a sunny day, hot for the cool coast of far Northern California, maybe seventy degrees. George and May moved here five years ago when he retired. Vi moved to live near them. George and May live in a meadow on about forty acres of second growth redwoods which they bought to keep them from being cut. The land has become something of a sanctuary for wild plants and animals increasingly surrounded by lawns—which are nothing more than heavily poisoned clearcuts—and houses. They routinely see bears, foxes, and other wild creatures who have been pushed out of their homes.

He takes me to a huge brier at one edge of the meadow, says, “You know what these are.”

I nod. “Himalayan blackberries.”

“Invasives,” he says. “They take over everything, and if you try to cut them out the thorns get into your hands. And have you ever stepped on a blackberry with bare feet?”

I acknowledge I have not.

“You don't want to do that. I know someone who got infected that way and the red lines started moving up his leg. He had to go the hospital and have surgery.”

Even without the infection I can't see wanting to step on a blackberry thorn. They're huge.

He says, “Living on the East Side”—that's what a lot of people on the coast call the areas east of the Cascades or Siskiyous—“you probably haven't encountered these plants very much, but they're everywhere out here, and they crowd out a lot of native species. It's a big problem. And even if you do pull them they just come right back. The roots are very persistent.”

I'm wondering what this has to do with demons killing people.

He asks, “How healthy do these plants seem to you?”

I look more closely. “They look terrible.” I've seen enough blackberries to know that normally the leaves are deep green, solid, vigorous. These are limp, fading, growing transparent, with holes and red and black splotches.

He turns over a leaf. The underside is covered with yellow and black pustules. He says, “Himalayan blackberry rust. It's a very targeted disease, only affects this species. It arrived a few months ago, and you can see it's already killing the plants.”

I don't say anything. I still don't see the connection.

He makes it for me. “This is what happens to noxious invasives. They take over for a while, but at some point the land finds a way to get back in balance. When you overrun an area, eventually some disease kicks in, brings you down. That's just the way life is. And we're not exempt, no matter how much we like to pretend.”

I understand.

He continues, “What you say doesn't surprise me at all. And in some ways it doesn't matter whether we're talking about real physical demons sucking out people's insides or whether these demons are symbolic representations of what some disease is going to do to us. Either way it's going to happen.”

I nod.

“The big surprise to me,” he says, looking at the wilted blackberries, “is that it hasn't happened already.”

Allison is so very much her father's daughter.

Allison and I drive north of town. We park at a trailhead. She walks to a beach to sit and read. I walk parallel to the ocean, always a half-mile or so from the shore. I can hear the waves, and when the dunes turn to sandy forest I can hear the slight breeze in the trees. It's hot. I walk. The path climbs, then levels off. Below me to my right, on the inland side, I see some large ponds. I sit. I look at the water. I feel as though I'm going to fall through time, but I don't. Still, I feel something I can't quite identify. I walk back to the trailhead, then down to the ocean. I see Allison sitting. She doesn't see me. I look at her for a few moments, enjoy her profile, the texture and color of her hair blowing in the wind coming off the ocean. I walk up to join her.

The next few nights the place makes itself the setting for my dreams. In one, I'm running along the trails by the ponds. In another, I'm beneath a pond's surface, using a reed to breathe. In yet another, I'm in the middle of a great ocean, and the land there rises to make an outcrop, an island, a continent. Grasses, then trees, grow in the soil. Birds fly in to land on the branches.

I don't know why I'm having these dreams. I don't know what they mean.

Still more dreams. I see great auks. I see Carolina parakeets. I see passenger pigeons. I see Eskimo curlews. I see Quagga. I see Steller's sea cows. I see silver trout. I see Ridley's staghorn ferns. I see marbled toadlets. I see Rodrigues little owls. I see Sampson's pearly mussels. I see Crimson Indian paintbrushes. They have all gone away, because they don't like how they are being treated. They've gone to the other side, to the other sides, to where the muse lives, where the dreamgiver lives.

They are waiting, waiting until it is safe to come back to this side. Sometimes one or two come to check whether things are better here, but then they go back and let the others know that things are not better, that things are worse, and worse.

This is what I dream after I walk at that place.

I wake up. It's dark. Allison is next to me. I say, very softly, “Are you asleep?”

Her voice, clear, “No.”

“I know why the demons haven't come.”

Silence.

“They're waiting to see if humans are redeemable. . . .”

More silence.

“. . . or if we've all either been killed or lost to the
wétiko
sickness.”

Still more silence.

“We're being given one last chance to clean up the mess humans have made. If we don't clean it up, the demons will. And if they do, they won't discriminate. They'll kill as many of us as necessary, and if that isn't enough, they'll come back and kill more, and they'll keep coming back to kill us until the
wétikos
are gone.”