The Purification Ceremony (16 page)

    Why feathers? I asked myself. Why feathers from ravens and owls? The killers were sending a message. But what? The raven was a scavenger. The owl, a bird of prey. I couldn’t see the connection.

    I took the feather and placed it under a tumbler turned upside down on the table. It was close to midnight now. I remember suddenly feeling more tired than I had ever been before. I lay down on the bed in my long underwear, then brought the loaded rifle in bed with me.

    I did not fall asleep for a long time. I did not want to sleep because I did want to close my eyes and hear the creaking of the building in the wind and the flick of snow against the windowpanes. But despite my efforts I heard sleep coming, and as hard as I tried to fight, I couldn’t. The talons of it came over me and I passed like a shadow into the night.

    

    

    THE NEXT MORNING, the sky had barely flattened toward sunrise when, against the dove whistle of the wind outside, the floorboards on the cabin porch creaked.

    I had been up for nearly an hour, huddling under the blankets, waiting in the cold for the light to come because I forgot to bank the stove the night before. Dawn would give me courage. Until it came, I told myself, I would not open the door to get kindling. Who knew what might wait in the darkness?

    The boards protested weight again. Chewing at my lip, I slipped from the bed with the rifle and padded across the cold floor to the curtained window. I peeked out, trying to see the porch, but all I could make out were the butt-ends of the log pile.

    A moment passed, then two. The boards groaned a third time. I turned down the gas lamp until it sputtered and died, then eased the chair out from under the doorknob. My heart felt ready to stop forever, but, gun in my right hand, I took the latch with my left and yanked the door open.

    Kurant scrambled backward on his heels, dropped his flashlight and skidded onto his fanny when he found my gun barrel thrust in his face.

    “What are you, crazy?” I squeaked. I had gone fluffy inside.

    He crabbed backward on his elbows through the snow that had welled behind the woodpile, sputtering, “I was trying to figure out if you were awake yet! I wanted to talk. I’m… I’m… I couldn’t sleep and… I wanted to talk.”

    “No, you’re scared.”

    “I am not.” He brought his legs under him. He wiped at the icicles that clung to his mustache. “I mean, aren’t you?”

    “Of course.”

    “Well, then…?”

    “Bring some kindling,” I said, actually glad for the company. “My stove’s out.”

    I built a tepee with the sticks over the embers buried in the ashes. I put some scraps of paper in below and blew. It smoked, then flamed, and I added more sticks until the interior of the stove crackled. Kurant intently studied the feather.

    “What do you think it means?” I asked.

    Kurant started. “I don’t know. Why? Why would I know?”

    “I didn’t say you would. I just figured somebody like you, a writer, would have a theory.”

    “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said quickly. He glanced away and made a whisking motion in the air with his hand. “I mean, I did, but mostly I just thought of the way Grover hung there. All night I thought about it… and I kept asking myself — what makes a human want to hunt another human? What makes a human want to hunt anything?”

    There was a passion in his voice I hadn’t heard before.

    “So you weren’t being honest when we got here, were you? You are against hunting.”

    He shrugged. “Let’s say I don’t understand the impulse.”

    “I think there’s more to it than that. You’re a vegetarian?”

    “When I can be,” he admitted. “Here it’s impossible, so I do what I have to do. It’s my job. But that’s besides the point. What’s your take on the feathers?”

    “Maybe they’re meant to answer your question: what makes a human want to hunt?” I said. And then I had a thought that chilled me more than the dank cold inside the cabin. “Or maybe the feathers are not what we’re supposed to be seeing at all. Maybe they’re just a calling card. Maybe it’s who’s being hunted that’s the message.”

    “I don’t get what you’re…”

    “Hunters,” I said. “The hunters are being hunted.” Kurant dropped down hard in the leather chair. He chewed at his mustache, then murmured, more to himself than to me, “This is worse than anything I could have come up with. I thought I’d looked at it from every angle, but I didn’t consider brutal irony.”

    I was about to ask him what that meant when a knock came at the door.

    “Diana?” Griff called out. “Cantrell wants us. Now!”

    “Give me five minutes,” I called back. I turned to Kurant. “If you don’t mind, I need to shower and dress.”

    The writer left. And as I got into the shower, I couldn’t help remark again that he reminded me of Kevin in his mannerisms, sure of himself and yet, in some ways, weak.

    After Kevin had given me the ultimatum to get back the money, I stayed out of the woods for a week and acted the dutiful wife. I told myself to call Cantrell, to cancel my slot.

    But I kept having the dream of the buck running and I put it off. That weekend I made plans to take Patrick and Emily to the Arboretum in Brookline, a safe alternative, I thought, to the big woods that beckoned.

    But nature’s canvas and woman’s design are often at odds. In the car, I felt myself drawn out of the city, out past the densely inhabited suburbs toward the more rural areas, all the way to the Quobbin Reservoir northwest of Springfield. We parked near a logging road and I led the kids into the woods. They had never been in a real forest before and I could see their discomfort: Emily sucked hard on her thumb and Patrick held my pants leg even when I told him to run ahead. But after a couple of hours, the woods worked their magic on them. They dashed up the trails to show me a mushroom growing in the black soil or a trout darting in the shallows of a brook. They froze in amazement when a doe and her fawns crossed a ridge in front of us.

    “Can we follow them?” Patrick asked.

    “Go ahead,” I said. “As long as you’re downwind, they won’t smell you.”

    Patrick ran after the deer, only to catch his foot on a root and fall. He squirmed on the ground, crying and holding his ankle. We were miles from the road and it took me hours to carry him out, especially with Emily crying that she was tired and hungry. I hadn’t brought enough food or water. Then she fell and cut her chin.

    I’d told Kevin we’d be home from the Arboretum by noon. We returned long after dark, after a two-hour trip to the emergency room to get stitches in Emily’s chin and a cast on Patrick’s ankle. Kevin was wild with worry and demanded to know how it had happened. I told him simply that we’d been out for a walk and they’d both fallen.

    “I was chasing a deer way out in the woods,” Patrick said.

    “I was hungry and slipped on a rock,” Emily said.

    “They’ll both be fine,” I asserted cheerfully.

    ;’Have you gotten the money back?” he asked.

    “Tomorrow,” I promised.

    Two days later, without warning, he went to see an attorney. He painted me as a troubled woman whose behavior constituted a threat to the kids and used the hospital reports and the withdrawals from our savings account as evidence. He filed for divorce and a restraining order.

    I got the order in the parking lot outside my office. I raced home, furious, but by the time I got there, the locks had been changed. My clothes were boxed in the garage. I demanded and got a hearing in family court. The judge asked me all about the money I’d spent and the late-night disappearances and taking my kids to the woods unprepared. I explained as best I could without bringing up the dreams.

    He must have sensed that I was telling much less than I knew.

    “I’m not convinced you are as much a threat to your children as your husband has alleged, Ms. Jackman,” he said. “But I’m concerned enough, based on some of the things you’ve done recently, to ask you to undergo a psychological evaluation. If everything comes back okay, we’ll talk joint custody.”

    I could see what was going to happen, what a psychologist might find out about me, about my past and how it was worming its way through my mind, how it could be construed as something destructive — to me, to the people around me. I’d lose Emily and Patrick for sure. It sickened me, but I understood that getting custody in the long run meant possibly losing them for now.

    “I don’t think I need to talk to a psychologist,” I told the judge. ‘Tm their mother and I love them and that should be enough.”

    “Then I’m going to have to limit your access,” the judge replied. “One hour every two weeks until such time as you agree to an evaluation. Next case?”

    The months living alone in the apartment before flying out for the hunt had been the longest of my life. I tried to make each visit and telephone conversation last, to imagine for myself and the kids that the situation was only temporary. It seemed to work with Emily, who was still young and has always possessed my mother’s unfailing optimism. Patrick, however, knew. And because he is so sensitive and introspective, I could hear his pain every time we spoke, every time he asked, “When are you coming home, Mommy?”

    “Soon, honey,” I said to myself as I dressed. “I promise you, soon.”

    “Two of the snowmobiles run okay enough to make the trip,” Cantrell announced. “But no one’s worked the trail out of here in three years. I don’t know what we’ll face between here and Camp Four.”

    We had come outside on the back porch of the lodge facing the game pole. The snow flew sideways in sheets. The hanging deer were rimmed in ice crystals. They twisted and swung in the wind like dancers frozen in attitudes of free flight. Gray, nameless birds braved the gale to alight archly between the outstretched legs of the stags and peck at the ruby meat. The faces around me were haggard with exhaustion.

    “I need three volunteers,” Cantrell said.

    I raised my hand. So did Griff, Nelson, Phil, Kurant and, to my surprise, Arnie. I wanted to use the phone to call home, to talk to Patrick and Emily. It seemed very important to hear their voices, as if that music alone could keep me safe until the plane returned.

    Cantrell looked us over, then pointed to Griff, me and Arnie. “Griff will drive the second machine. Arnie and Diana will ride shotgun, watching our backs.”

    Phil jumped forward. “You’re taking a woman and a guy who falls apart on a bumpy airplane ride over me? Listen, man, I was in ’Nam.”

    “ ’Nam!” Butch laughed. “Phil, you talk as if you walked rice-paddy hamlets in the Mekong Delta. You were a supply sergeant at the Army auto works in Saigon.”

    “I was still there, man. You and Arnie were smoking pot, protesting and hiding from the world at Penn State. But I was there.”

    “I didn’t smoke pot,” Arnie said.

    “I did,” Butch said. “But so what, Phil. It’s still not like you had combat experience or anything.”

    Kurant began his protest before Phil could respond. ‘‘You’re trying to keep me away from the story, Cantrell. I won’t stand for it.”

    Nelson stood there shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe he wasn’t going.

    Cantrell gestured at his lead guide first. “Tim, I need someone with a head on his shoulders to be in charge here. And, Phil, I’m sorry, ’Nam or no ’Nam, the last thing I need on this trip is someone who flares up like you do.”

    Cantrell jerked his head in Kurant’s direction. “As for you, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the press’s ‘right to know.’ Arnie goes because he’s a doctor and will follow orders. Diana, because she… well… she says she has some feel for whoever’s doing this.”

    “Feel? What the fuck does that mean?” Phil cried.

    I said, “It means I’ve tracked them, and that gives me some understanding of how they move. And at least three times in the past couple of days, one of them has been watching me. I felt it. They could have killed me if they wanted, but for some reason they didn’t.”

    “Uh-huh.” Phil snorted. “And there’s a lady on television back home can give you the million-dollar lotto number if you stay on her nine hundred line long enough.”

    Kurant was staring at me. “How did you feel it? Them watching you, I mean.”

    “A feeling, a hunch, you know?” I said, not wanting to open that door any further than I had to. “Let’s leave it at that.”

    “What does your crystal ball say, Madame Diana — women aren’t in season?” Earl asked snidely.

    “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t studied their regulations.”

    “Hey, little man, I don’t see you volunteering,” Lenore snapped.

    “I hate snowmobiles,” the tycoon sniffed. “The things are a menace.”

    Lenore scoffed, “What he doesn’t want to tell you is that he broke his ass bone falling off one during a hunt in Manitoba last year. Earl, you’ve got the balls for business and women, but when it comes right down to life and death, you got no spine.”

    “Why, you… “

    “Shut up, the both of you!” Cantrell commanded. “I’m sick of listening to your constant bickering.”

    Earl paused, then looked at Lenore. “We bicker?”

    Meanwhile, Phil’s shoulders seemed to become part of his ears. “So she’s got a feeling for him, so what?” he said. “Seems to me you want someone along who can shoot, not talk New Age crap.”

    Cantrell glanced from me to Phil and back again. Doubt had taken hold. Phil wasn’t protesting Arnie. He was protesting me. Because I was a woman. Because I was in a man’s terrain. We face this our entire lives. Having to prove that we are worthy, that we can stand in the forest. But (Catherine had taught me never to back down. Men, she constantly reminded me, are convinced more by action than by word.