Spiritwalk (11 page)

“Come see me tomorrow?” she asked. “For dinner?”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She touched his jacket, which she was wearing now. “You can pick this up then.”

Blue smiled. “You got a date.”

“And Blue?” She handed him the cut-up sweatshirt. “Thanks for being there.”

Blue held the sweatshirt in his hand and watched her walk to her car.

“Do I hear those heartstrings soaring?” Judy asked Hacker in a stage whisper.

Blue turned to her but he didn’t have the energy to summon up the growl she deserved. “Let’s ride,” he said.

He got onto his bike, Taran perching uncomfortably behind him, and they followed Emma’s car out from the lake and down the road.

WESTLIN WIND

O wild West Wind, thou art of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing....

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “Ode to the West Wind”

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow?

—Anonymous, from “O West Wind,” c.1530

And when you come,
will you remember me?

—Christy Riddle, from “The Old Friends that Autumn Sends”

One

1

She’d forgotten just how big the House was.

It stretched the length of the long block in a facade of old-fashioned town houses that were set kitty-corner to each other, expertly disguising the unalterable fact that it was one enormous building. The illusion was completed by each facade having its own stonework stoop and working front door. She let her gaze drift over the steep gables running from cornice to ridge, the well-worn eaves overhung with vines, the odd dormer window thrusting out from the top floor. Towers rose from three of its corners, but she could only see two from where she stood on Patterson Avenue.

She’d forgotten its size, but not its comfort. Nor its mystery.

In dreams she had come back to walk the long halls and rooms, sometimes empty, sometimes filled with people of every shape and creative persuasion, drawn to the House as once she had been, for the refuge it offered from the less forgiving confines of the world outside. No matter how far she traveled—in distance, or in time—she could never forget any of it. Not the secret park inside with its disconcerting tendency to appear so much larger than it was. Not the Postman’s Room and the long talks with Jamie over tea. Not the Library, where she’d spent longer hours still, reading and writing.

She chose a door at random, her leather-soled shoes clicking softly on the stonework stoop. The scent of lilacs drifted toward her from the clump of blossomed trees two entrances down. Laying the palm of her hand against the door, she felt the swirl of the wood grain press against her skin. Her reflection looked smokily back at her from leaded windows set in the polished wood.

“Hello, Jamie,” she said softly. “Do you remember me?”

For she was no longer the young girl who’d once found refuge in Tamson House. The image the windows cast back was of a tall woman, gold and brown hair falling to the small of her back, gray eyes serious in a fine-boned face. Her faded blue raincoat looked washed-out in the reflection. The leather carpetbag at her feet was no more than a smudge of shadow. She had changed in so many ways. In others, she hadn’t changed at all.

When she took her palm away from the wood, the door swung silently open. A small wind rose up at her feet, tossing her hair. Not until it gusted away did she step inside.

It was very much like walking into the reflection. The sense of smokiness was deeper here. The building’s age lay warm and thick in the air. It smelled as comfortable as the scent of a favorite old shirt, brought out of a drawer scented with a potpourri gathered and dried in the deeps of autumn. The wallpaper was a fading Morris design. The carpet was worn, but still plush underfoot. A hallway stretched for as far as she could see in either direction.

Cocking her head, she appeared to listen to some unseen speaker. She touched a hand to the pocket of her raincoat. A rustle of paper answered her touch; then she turned to her left and began to walk down the long hallway.

2

The elders of the Djibwe taught that there were three parts to a man:
wiyo
, the corporeal body;
udjitchog
, the soul, which is the seat of the will and allows him to perceive things, to reason about them, and to remember them; and
udjibbom
, the shadow, which is the eye of the soul, awakening to its perception and knowledge. When a man travels, his soul ranges before or behind him, but his shadow walks with him.

As Migizi of the Black Duck totem set about constructing
hisjessakan
, his conjuring lodge, his soul rested by a stand of honeysuckle nearby, looking to the west. The sweet smell of the honeysuckle reached Migizi where he worked, but stronger was the scent of sweetgrass and dirt underfoot. He thrust four birch poles into the soft ground, one for each of the cardinal points. These he connected with shorter lengths of cedar, fastening them to the poles with leather thongs. Four connecting one pole to another, then four and four and four again. Sixteen in all.

On one pole, that which faced Nanibush, the ruler of the west, he fastened a small pine bough. Between the north and east poles, he strung a strand of braided leather festooned with
migis
shells, the small bones of birds, and wooden beads that rattled against each other whenever the wind moved them. Over the east and south poles, he hung a number of deerskins, stitched together and so perfectly cured that they were as supple as cloth. Inside the lodge, he placed his
buankik
, his water drum—a hollowed cedar log covered with deerhide and partially filled with water.

His shadow was the first to become aware of the new presence approaching his
jessakan
, warning him with a twitch that started at the nape of his neck, then traveled up, behind his eyes. His soul turned to look down from under the honeysuckles. The shells, bones and beads of the conjuring lodge rattled in a stronger gust of wind; the deerskins flapped. Migizi himself could feel not a breath of that wind, though he stood no more than two feet from the eastern pole.

“Nanabozho,” he murmured.

But he knew it wasn’t the great uncle manitou playing a trick on him. Migizi was familiar with the manitou, enough to recognize and put a name to all the mysteries, great and small. Some came—wind shadows, small thunders—for the smoke of the tobacco Migizi offered from his spirit pipe: they told him secrets in return. Others came only to watch, though they, too, would accept his tobacco.

This manitou took no tobacco, and told no secrets. It came only to watch, drawn to Migizi’s side whether he conducted a ceremony or not. Like the other manitou, it brought only its shadow into his company. Unlike the others, it brushed up against his leathery brown skin and touched his moose-hide shirt and leggings with airy fingers. It traced the beadwork designs of the bandolier that held his sacred tobacco pouch and spirit pipe. It fingered his long graying braids. It whispered in his ear, but the words it spoke were of a language that no Djibwe knew.

It had no name. None that Migizi knew. None, he was sure, that it even knew itself.

It was because of this manitou that Migizi had constructed his conjuring lodge today. He meant to ask Nanibush if this manitou was an errant soul, lost from Epanggishimuk, the spirit land in the west where Nanibush ruled and the spirits traveled after death. For sometimes, because of its strangeness, that was what Migizi perceived it to be. A lost soul of a dead manitou. Not the shadow of a living one. He meant to ask Nanibush to guide it home so that it might be born again, the line of its clan unbroken.

For manitou, like men, had a
madijimadzuin
—a moving line, an earthly Milky Way connecting those who had gone before with those who followed. The Milky Way stars that rode the skies at night were part of an enormous buckethandle that held the earth in place. If ever it broke, the world would come to an end. So it was with the chain of
madjimadzuin
. When it broke, a clan ended.

His conjuring lodge shook again, shells and bones and beads rattling, deerskins slapping against the poles. Taking out his spirit pipe, he filled its soapstone bowl with a pinch of tobacco, which he lit from the coal that he carried in a small clay jar for that purpose.

“Be patient,” Migizi said, not unkindly, to the strange manitou. “I mean to help you.”

He left the smoke as an offering for it, then settled himself on the ground inside the
jessakan
, legs crossed, eyes closed, his shadow settling like a cloak upon his shoulders. He drew the deerskins down until he was enclosed in a warm, dark cocoon. Now the smell of sweetgrass and freshly turned earth was very strong.

“
Me-we-yan, ha, ha, ha
,” he sang softly. I go into the conjuring lodge to see the medicine.

Filling his spirit pipe again, he set it on the ground in front of him. He let a stillness fall over him, a quiet that had its source in his
skibdagan
, the medicine bag that hung from his belt where the dream objects of his totem lay hidden from prying eyes. Untying the bag, he set it down by his knee and fingered the
wadjigan
inside, one by one.

A carved stone. Black duck feathers gathered together with a twist of leather. The polished shell of a baby turtle. Bone beads. The claw of a lynx. A small piece of wood, rubbed smooth by the stones of a river. Clamshell charms, filled with herbs and salves, kept sealed with pine-tree resin.

Tapping the water drum with his other hand, he sang again.

“
Ka-ka-mi-ni-ni-ta
. “ We spirits are talking together.

He lit the spirit pipe and the conjuring lodge filled with its smoke. He alternated then, between the pipe and the drum, the dream objects of his
skibdagan
and the chant.

The
wadjigan
spoke to his totem, Nenshib, the Black Duck. The drum talked to the
animiki
, the thunders, and asked for their aid in speeding his message to where the sun, moon and stars set. The smoke called to Nanibush, the grandson of Grandmother Toad and ruler of the west.

His shadow lay across his shoulders, listening. Outside, the unusual manitou circled his
jessakan
, making its deerskins flap. By the honeysuckles, his soul looked westward once more.

3

The Postman’s Room was on the second floor, in the part of the House that faced O’Connor Street. Laying her carpetbag on the floor against the wall in the hallway outside, she stood in the doorway and looked in. The rush of memories that stirred in her now was the strongest she’d felt since she’d entered Tamson House.

The room hadn’t changed at all.

The old rolltop desk that housed Jamie’s computer, Memoria, shared the west wall with a hearth and mantel, and a sideboard laden with knickknacks and curios. A window overlooking O’Connor Street was set in the middle of the east wall. The remaining wall space was taken up with bookshelves, stuffed to overflowing with fat volumes and slim folios. In front of the desk was an old-fashioned wooden secretarial chair with a swivel seat, faded green cushions and wooden arms. The other furnishings consisted of a pair of overstuffed club chairs near the window, each of which had a small fat ottoman before it, the low table between the chairs, and the double floor lamp behind them, its brass base and stand gleaming in the light that came through the window.

Her memories were so strong she could almost see Jamie sitting there in one of the club chairs, looking up at her appearance in the doorway, smiling a welcome as though she’d never left. As though he were still alive.

She’s never realized just how much she’d missed him.

By the window, a set of small silver chimes tinkled, though the window was closed. Her hand returned to the pocket of her raincoat to touch the letter there.

But then he wasn’t really dead, was he? At least not in the common sense of the word. Because he was still here, in the House. A part of its walls and foundations. Sensing, hearing, smelling, tasting through its wood and stone. Seeing through its windows. And here, in the Postman’s Room, his presence was stronger than ever. As though this was the heart of the House. And that was how it should be. Jamie always had been its heart.

The computer made a beeping sound to get her attention. When she looked at it, the cursor moved across the screen, leaving behind it a short trail of words. She started to step into the room when a voice stopped her.

“I wouldn’t go in there.”

A wind rose up at her feet, rustling the cloth of her skirt and raincoat, flicking the ends of her hair against the small of her back. She turned quickly to find a young man in the hall beside her who took a fast step back at her sudden movement.

His hair was short and dyed an extreme blond, with a quarter-inch of black roots showing. Dark eyes watched her carefully. He had a slender frame and wore jeans and a Billy Bragg T-shirt with the arms torn off. The T-shirt had a logo that read “Talking with the Taxman About Poetry.” He appeared to be in his late teens.

He stopped moving when she faced him, but looked ready to bolt. She found a smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You startled me.” Her voice had the faint cadence of a British accent. “What did you say?”

Her smile and the soft tone of her voice calmed him.

“It’s just—you shouldn’t go in there. Blue doesn’t like it and it makes the House act weird.”

“Act weird?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Lights start flickering and sometimes it can feel like there’s an earthquake or something, shaking things up down in the cellar. You’re new here, right?”

She shook her head. “I used to live here—a long time ago. This room and I are old friends.”

“Well, it’s your funeral. I just thought I’d tell you. And Blue’s not going to like your poking around in there.”