Thunder In Her Body (15 page)

“I have no conscious recollection of ever living here, but I’m drawn back to this place from time to time.  This is my special place,” and he took Lynette’s hand, “and I want you to share it.”
  He guided her up the one step that, apparently, had been reinforced or replaced.  The door swung open easily with an eerie, crypt-like whine.  They stepped inside and Lynette was shocked.  She expected the interior to be as dilapidated as the exterior, but it wasn’t.  All of the walls in this one room house were covered with white pine, D-cut small logs held together with wide bands of white chinking.  They looked hand-hewn and resembled rooms she had seen in her
Log Homes
Magazines.
  The windows were obviously original with their distorted panes.  She could see where insulating caulk had been expertly applied to keep out the elements.  The floor was covered by deeply stained, recently laid, hard wood.  The only separation in this one room was a half-wall to the right, which was not anchored either to the front nor the back wall.  It was only attached to the floor and the ceiling.  Behind it, she later discovered, was a porcelain toilet with a flush tank overhead.  An old, large, #2 galvanized, grey tub sat exposed next to the opening, and a small square table sat against the far wall with a blue and cream wash bowl and pitcher on it.  That table had the same grey, worn look as the exterior of the cabin and Lynette guessed it had been used by Blaze’s mother.  Next to the half wall sat a large kerosene lantern atop a very small, roughly hewn, square dinner table with two mix-matched wooden chairs.  In the middle of the room stood a black, pot-bellied, cast iron, wood burning stove.  Its metal pipe bent sideways and exited the back of the house through a hole covered with what looked like a smoke-blackened metal pie plate.  And to the far left of the room was a bright, clean twin size bed frame with a bent and twisted grey metal headboard.  From the crisp edges beneath the plastic, Lynette surmised that was a new mattress on the bed, but there was no box spring beneath it.  Beside it was another worn, wooden grayish night table, and on that sat a second large kerosene lantern.  Other than that, there was no other furniture in the room except a wooden shelf above the bed.  There were no cabinets and no drawers.

It was a pitifully humble place, but it was clear that Blaze, or someone, had done a tremendous amount of work inside.  The ceiling was sheet-rocked in between ancient beams; the interior was clean except for a little dust and for the most part, the cabin was well-insulated and weather-proofed.  The interior would have been described in a hunting and fishing magazine as “rustic but adequate.”

“I live in two worlds,” Blaze said solemnly.  “This is the world I came from, with some obvious alterations.  The other is the world I’ve sometimes chosen to live in.  I’m comfortable in both,” he admitted.

“It’s a wonderful place, Blaze,” she spoke up, a bit misty-eyed.  “But I can tell you that I feel a lot of pain and sadness here,” she said.

“I know.  I feel it every time I come here, but when I’m here, I try to bring joy, the joy of living.  I try at least to envision my mother, at some time or another, happy here,” he spoke with hope.  “I’ve never brought another woman here,” he confided.

“Stay here with me tonight,” he asked Lynette, reaching out to grasp her hand.

She smiled softly, “Sure.”

Lynette had not noticed but in the back of Blaze’s pickup truck, he carried a medium sized Coleman chest, two, 2 ½ gallon jugs of water, a new metal bucket, a couple of paper bags, and a large plastic bag.  She hadn’t even thought about what they would eat or how they would manage here.  Again, she was satisfied just to be with Blaze.
  He banged the water jugs and cooler down loudly on the floor next to the dinner table.

“Why are you slamming everything down?” she asked because it seemed odd.

“Trying to make sure all the slithery things know we’re here so they can leave,” he said, but he wasn’t joking.

“I appreciate it,” she said sarcastically.  “There isn’t but one slithery thing I want around me,” she quipped with a wink.

Blaze liked her bawdiness.  She was a woman quite comfortable with herself, and wholly sexual. Now he wouldn’t feel guilty if he occasionally went a little
off color
in his remarks.  With the closeness and passion he felt for this woman, he knew there would be times when he would slip into the profane in sharing himself and meeting her needs.

Blaze set about getting things ready for the night.  He poured two-thirds of the contents of one of the water jugs into the overhead toilet tank.  He handed Lynette a gallon jug of what turned out to be lamp oil, not kerosene, which she used to fill the receptacles in the lamps.  She went outside looking for firewood, but Blaze warned her not to pick up anything off the ground.  Instead, like everything else, he had everything they needed.  There was already some firewood in the stove, and he’d brought a small bundle from the store.  It was probably enough to get them through the chilly night, but if not, she decided they’d just have to snuggle closer.  The dark comes quickly in the mountains and it overtook them almost before they knew it.  Lynette lit both oil lamps and was really surprised at the amount of light they cast throughout, what could not have been more than 400 square feet of cabin space.  Blaze handed her a huge, bulky black lawn and leaf bag full of new, unwrapped linens, a blanket, two pillows and a heavy quilt.  She removed the package of toilet tissue from the bag first and placed it in the bathroom area, then set about making up the bed.  It was all so simple.  They had everything they needed out of a few packages.

Food had not been a priority on this day; they had not taken time to eat lunch; there had been more important things to do.  It occurred to them almost simultaneously that they were famished.  Inside the cooler, instead of ice, soda and cold stuff, were cans of food – beans, corn, butter, potted ham, a block of cheese, ½ dozen eggs, a 12 ounce package of bacon and a vacuum sealed package of flour tortillas. There was an old cast iron, round griddle, best used for making or warming tortillas.  Blaze told her that he kept it in the tool box in his truck.  Wrapped in a brown lunch bag were disposable shakers of salt and pepper, plastic knives, forks and spoons.  There were also two tin cups.  How odd, she thought.  Lynette had been a girl scout for several years.  Her mother had been a scout leader, so camping, of a sort, came natural to her.  Blaze watched as she sorted through the provisions.  Surely she would complain, he thought.  She turned to him.

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?  When did you put all this together?” she asked knowing that they hadn’t spent that much time apart
that day.

“I work miracles,
Lynn,” he joked.  And surely he had!

She liked the way he called her
Lynn.  It was familiar.  To the world of work, she was Ms. Lynette Beatrice Trudeaux.  To Blaze, she was Lynn – his Lynn.  They ate the beans with a dollup of butter melted in it cooked in the can on the wood burning stove.  They spread potted ham mixed with the whole kernel corn on the flour tortillas, rolling them into individual tubes. They drank water from the tin cups without benefit of ice.

“Water tastes so fresh and so much cooler in a tin cup,” Lynette remarked, holding up her cup as if to make a toast.

“I come out here and stay for days sometime,” he shared over their simple meal.  “It’s peaceful here on the reservation and I’m at home, literally.  I decided a couple of years ago to fix up this place so I could be even more comfortable and I kept as much of my mother’s things as possible.  Some stuff had just rotted away to nothing.  I placed all those things in a pile and had a closure ceremony all by myself.  I sent the possessions, or what was left of them, up to her in the smoke.  They tell me she was a good woman,” he said softly.  Blaze reached over to a narrow metal box he’d somehow brought into the cabin without Lynette noticing it.  He pulled it in front of them on the table.  Without words or ceremony, he lifted the tin lid and extracted a folded packet made of animal hide, tied with dried strips of rawhide.  Gently, even reverently, he unfolded the packet and from it he lifted a small piece of red cloth.  It was a faded red piece of what looked like blanket material about the size of a large dinner napkin.  He lifted it up and let it hang over his palms like an offering.

“I found this under the floor boards when I tore out the rotten wood.  It had a note with it, written on a scrap of leather, in a hand I didn’t recognize.  It said ‘
keep as memory of
days when this hung over our doors.’
  I took it to the elders and began to ask around.  Why would my mother keep this small piece of a blanket?  It hurts to even speak these words to you, Lynn,” he said.  “What I learned after many questions, and talks with many sources, mostly old people who had the memories, was that an Apache leader took a knife and cut a blanket up into pieces back in the late 1800’s when we were being robbed of our lands, our freedoms and our lives.  He and his people were being sent to a far away place – far from the deserts and mountains that they knew so well. Sometimes all a man had was one blanket, so this was an act of defiance and a command to remember.  These pieces were distributed among some of his people, with the same note written and placed with each one.  They were passed down from generation to generation.  I was told that these pieces were brought out and laid on new born babies, over which a blessing of the ancestors was said.  This is a reminder of when we were free.  When the Athabascan language was spoken all over these lands.  I have to imagine that my mother laid this on me – this piece of hand woven cloth that signifies the spirit of the Apache.  Red for the blood of the warrior.  It’s not big enough to have kept me warm, but it carries the memories, the blood and the spirits of my ancestors.”  Then he was quiet.  Lynette observed the cloth, but did not touch it.  The faded red color made her think that it was a natural die, so it must be very old.  The settlers and soldiers brought the artificial dyes, which were brighter and kept their colors longer.  The weave was tight but the piece was frayed on all four sides and there were two tiny holes up near one corner.  Her eyes rimmed with water as she understood how sacred this was to him. That this tiny piece of cloth, and this humble abode was all Blaze had of his physical heritage.  He folded the cloth back the same way it had been, careful not to make any new creases in it; then he folded the hide back and re-tied the bundle.  When he placed it in the tin box, he closed the top carefully and quietly.  His hands rested on top of the container.

Lynette had no material thing to mark the blood of the several nationalities that flowed through her veins.  Through her research, she’d uncovered the names, places, and partial histories of some of her ancestors, especially that side of her mother’s family who had been African or half-white slaves, but nothing they had ever touched remained to her knowledge.  There was no dreidel that an ancestral Ashkenazim child from her mother’s other side had played with; no piece of wool woven off a Scottish sheep from whence her father’s side originated; no piece of German china; no ancient French artifact.  Nothing but stories about her ancestors passed down from generation to generation, and her recent DNA results.   She envied Blaze for that tattered piece of cloth.  Feeling a real need to be close to him, she rose, went around the table and sat on the cool floor at his feet, leaning her head on his knee. She wrapped her arms around his strong leg.  He stroked her soft hair.  They both watched the flames dance in colors of red, yellow, orange and blue through the window-paned door of the wood stove.

Bl
aze sat on the side of the bed and began taking off his clothes.  His movements were silent.   Lynette was deep in thought when she noticed him stride across the room, lift the pale of hot water off the wood stove and pour most of the steaming water into the large galvanized tub in the bath area

“Take your clothes off,” he said sweetly.

She did as she was asked but she kept on her long blouse, though it was fully open down the front.  Blaze poured some of the cool water into the hot, tested it with the back of his hand, then removed his jeans and stepped into the tub.

“Come here,” he motioned to Lynette.

“In the dim light, she removed her blouse – modesty be damned, she thought!  She stepped into the tub as he held her hands for safety, and they knelt down together as best they could in the big, round enclosure.  He looked into her eyes.  He did not touch her.  He looked at her face.  Would she understand the meaning of this moment?  Did she comprehend the seriousness of this act?  He cupped his hands, lifted the warm water in them and poured it all over her head and face.  She opened her mouth to protest, but he said “Sshhhh,” and she was quiet.  He scooped up more warm water and poured it over her shoulders.  Again he dipped his cupped hands into the water and poured it over her full breasts.  He rubbed her breasts, and lifted them with each hand.  He scooped up more water and poured it over her back and rubbed the fluid down onto her buttocks, massaging the bottom of her cheeks the way a mother puts baby oil on her infant.  Still again, he scooped up water and poured it over the bush of hair covering her hidden area and rubbed the water in between her legs.  He poured water on as much of her thighs as he could reach and rubbed the water front to back and then to the front again.  The heat from the wood stove kept the night’s chill from her but she shivered in excitement anyway.  He knelt there looking at her, and said nothing.  His arms hung down at his side with his palms turned up to her.  It was then that she realized what was happening.  She had read about rituals like this in primitive societies.  She had seen this depicted in movies.  Her classmates had discussed the symbolism and intent of this ritual in her anthropological studies. 
This was a marriage ritual.
  It was the bonding of lovers in the sight of the Creator where no civil official need be present.  It was the cleansing of the body, to purify the spirit.  This was the preparation for Oneness.  This was a serious and deliberate act.  Understanding it – understanding what he was doing, could she go through with it; should she go through with it?