* * *
I am going to complete the pages of Zeal before we get off, because I can send them back with Chris. I’ll address them to my printer, and maybe even ask them to retrieve my mailing list from the last issue. I can picture those last issues neatly stacked on the shelf just beside my plastic box of stamp rolls and scissors. I wish that I could occupy myself, now, writing the addresses of my three hundred subscribers out on stacks of manila envelopes—if I just had manila envelopes!
Dear subscribers! You mean so much to me!
That is not how I’m going to begin my editor’s note, or introduction to this issue, but that is how I feel. Grateful for their constancy and support. I owe this issue to them and it occurs to me that perhaps—would it make sense? Should I add something personal about my own pregnancy, and tell them how profound the physical experience has been in shaping my views on the Incarnation? It is surely not necessary to include many details about the father—a cursory note will be enough. The more I think of it, the more convinced I am. This pregnancy is nothing short of momentous, and instructive, and I should share whatever truths I’ve gleaned from living through it. If the printers think that there will be trouble, perhaps they can distribute it underground. I don’t know. But I do think it is important that I share with my subscribers the truth.
Dear Subscribers,
This may be your last issue of Zeal magazine, and so I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for showing your support by sending in your checks and keeping up my subscription list. I have news that may upset some of you, but I think it only right to come forward and say that I am pregnant, and that so far the pregnancy has gone well in spite of the relentless persecution that I have suffered along with every other pregnant woman in this time. I am writing now from a secret location, and am indebted to people whose names are unknown to me. By the time you open this issue of the magazine, I may very well be holding my baby in my arms. I hope so. I have learned a great deal about the subject of this issue—the Incarnation. That my body is capable of building a container for the human spirit has inspired in me the will to survive. It has also shown me truths.
Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.
I have seen a young woman in labor endure more pain than Christ did in his three-hour ordeal on the cross. She suffered continuously for twenty-four hours. And I have heard of labors lasting much longer. To bear this child, I will go through whatever pain I must. I can’t help wishing for an epidural, but this is why I’m writing. This is the Incarnation. The spirit gives flesh meaning. We’re only meat bundles, otherwise.
I believe in this issue that my colleague Father Mirin Thwaite sheds light, just as Bartolomé de Las Casas did in arguing for the existence of the souls of indigenous tribal people of colonial South America, that the children born during this present time will be possessed of souls whether or not they are capable of speech, and should be considered fully human no matter what scientists may conclude about their capacity to think and learn. I mean, I still don’t know what’s going on—but had to throw that in.
Also in this issue, another paper on the Incarnation concerns the actual moment of Immaculate Conception, and examines textual and artistic evidence that the orifice of impregnation for the Blessed Virgin Mary was her ear. Taking into account recent left brain/right brain studies, the author concludes that a word whispered in the left ear would have affected Mary’s right hemisphere and caused the deep flood of emotion so crucial to mom-child bonding. This emotional “baptism” may have allowed Mary to go forward, even knowing that great suffering was to result from her baby’s birth. I can only say, from my point of view . . .
* * *
Sera is awake—it is as though I can feel her thinking above me in her hammock. I’ve been jolted out of the knife blade of radiance that was enabling me to write, and I’ve scrambled back into my swinging bed, the most comfortable place to ride. The movement is lulling, the air is greeny black. Yet I fight sleep. Fear comes over me and I struggle to stay awake—I do not want to lose control of my thoughts and go back to Orielee’s murder. Instead of lessening, growing dulled with time, muted, the memory or dream is growing more and more powerful. Each time it’s worse. I am experiencing it as a drama that unfolds with such swift violence it shakes my bones.
This can’t be good for you, the stress.
We jolt on and on. Miles. Eventually, it occurs to me that maybe I really do need to confess what happened, get it out of the interior of my mind. And since there is no priest I have only one person who can hear my confession.
“Mom?”
But now she’s fallen asleep. I call her, louder; she wakes and answers, a little grumpy, “What is it?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Uhhh.”
“Really bad, Mom.”
She sounds extremely tired, moody, and groggy, but I’m overcome with the urge to clear my conscience. Maybe I can confess to her in her sleep and that way I’ll feel better, having spoken aloud, and she won’t know what I’ve said and what I’ve done.
“So Mom, I have to tell you something. It’s been eating away at me and I can’t sleep very well, can’t sleep at all, really. So anyway, Mom? Here goes. I killed, I had to kill someone, Mom, back at the hospital. See, we were just about ready to leave when this nurse named Orielee, she was okay though she wasn’t trustworthy and she definitely was a snoop, the nurse discovered that we were hiding our rope in the heating vent. Mom?”
“Yeah . . . I’m listening . . . ,” she mumbles.
“Good, okay, so then Tia and I thought maybe she had not seen it or she wasn’t going to give us away. And we had jumped up and were walking behind her, I mean, we couldn’t have looked guiltier! Maybe we wouldn’t be here, maybe we would have let her go, but then as she was going out the door, she laughed. That laugh, it just said everything, you know? You know, Mom? Mom?”
“’Course, honey.”
“Okay. So Tia had ripped off a strip of her hospital gown—she was taking that apart to make a bag to carry down her stuff. She threw this strip around Orielee’s neck and started strangling her with it. Of course, there was no getting out of it once she started killing the nurse—we couldn’t exactly stop and say excuse us, could we? I didn’t know up until that time that Tia even could speak, but she glares at me and says, Little help? That strikes me as funny now, sorry! Little help! And she’s killing this poor nurse with a pretty name who is going to betray us. I thought it would be the Slider who found out, but no, it had to be Orielee. I’m sorry, but I wish that it had been the Slider, because she was so easy to despise. I keep thinking, now, of how somebody had to discover Orielee stuffed in the closet, hanging off the clothes hook. That would be a sickening shock, huh, seeing her? I tried to turn her face away from the door, and we’d covered her head with a pillowcase, but still. So anyway, what I’m telling you, Mom, is that I committed a murder. I have to go to hell now, I think. I don’t know if I can be absolved or not—I’m saying lots of prayers, of course. I’ve got my rosary in my hand this very minute. But if I do have to go to hell, I’d like to know what it will be like. What do you think it will be like, Mom?”
“Huh?”
“Mom?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What will hell be like?”
She’s silent, but she stirs around a little and soon I can tell, even in the dark, I don’t know how, that she has finally risen to consciousness and opened her eyes.
“Did you ask what will hell be like?”
“Yeah, what’s your version of hell?”
“I think, honey, well I sort of think it’s right now. I mean, things always could get worse, knock wood, if they should catch us, but Cedar”—her
voice gets very gentle, as if she’s really shocked that I haven’t figured this out—“hell is what’s happening right now, here on earth.”
“I never thought of that, really.” I let the notion settle in. Then I wonder. “Politically or otherwise?”
“By otherwise, you mean everything going backward?”
“Turning around to the beginning. Maybe that’s not the same as going backward.”
“Well, it is for me.” And her voice is so sad, when she says this, beyond tears. Pure loss. The Catholic definition of hell is just that—pure loss. Loss of God. There’s fire too, but I think it is more the metaphysical torment of unknowing. The flames of eternal confusion. So perhaps according to this definition she really is in hell. I am stricken with this, and want more than anything to make my mom feel better. Nothing I can say will really cheer her up. I also realize that she most definitely did not get the gist of my confession, and I do not feel at all that I’ve lightened my shame and guilt. But I can tell her something else.
“Here’s something strange, Mom, please—just hear me out. I have this feeling, as I carry this baby into life, that things aren’t really going backward. Things aren’t really falling apart. All that is happening, even the purest chaos, physical and personal, even political, is basically all right. I know it seems naïve. You might even say it’s hormones. But the feeling is so powerful that I have to tell you. I am happy. Awful things are happening all around us, true, and I have done the most terrible thing of all, but I am happy at the very pit of myself. I feel this stupid joy. A sense of existence. A pleasure in the senseless truth—we happen to be alive. We didn’t ask for it. We just are.”
She’s quiet, but it is a listening and considering silence.
“That’s all I’ve got to go on, right now, Mom,” I add. “So maybe if you’re thinking of a way to talk me out of it, you shouldn’t.”
“No,” she answers, “I wouldn’t do that.”
Later on, she says, “I really wish that I could feel it too.”
And I say to her, “Mom, when you see this baby, I think you will.”
“I hope so,” she says in a very small, doubtful voice, in the dark.
We don’t talk for a long time after that. But in my mind I answer her, swinging in the blackness, my heart pumping fast with a love that is burning richer and hotter with every fresh new cell of blood, every icy flash of neuron, a love of you, a love of everything. Fierce, merciless, sticking to the world like blazing tar, this love expands. And I’m thinking—of course you will be happy when you see my baby, yes, you will be overjoyed. He is the light of the world!
Part III
October 26
Full of dandelion greens and gas-station ramen, I lounge in a cushy fake-leather desk chair. An attention to my comfort is the only notice I am shown here—no hiding me, no concern about gravid female detention. Eddy sits at the head of the tribal council meeting table. He has won another election in which he did not mean to participate, but opportunities within the chaos were too good to pass up, he said. He is still working on his endless memoir, only there is, he says, a bit more redemption. The meeting table is expanded by the addition of several heavy-duty plastic banquet tables, because there is a crowd here. It is standing room only although we are not in the usual meeting room but on the community college basketball court. Behind him, a hand-drawn reservation real estate map is unrolled across the wall. The land parcels on the map are carefully platted out and colored—green, yellow, purple. Eddy explains that like almost every other reservation, ours was lost through incremental treaties and then sold off in large part when the Dawes Act of 1862 removed land from communal ownership. Some land was parceled out to the Ojibwe, the other land was “excess” and homesteaded out to white people. If the land included lakefront property, it was declared excess with an eye to the growing number of city people who wanted to escape to a cool rustic home during the heat of summer. On Eddy’s map the land owned by non-Indians is yellow. The green is State Forest. The purple is tribal. Most of the map is yellow, some green, a bit less purple. The room is full of tribal members, more are clustered in the doorway, and the halls are stuffed with people too. Nobody says a word. They are waiting for Eddy.
He stands up, and when he speaks his voice is light but resonant.
“Hello, my relatives,” he says. “Every week from now on, we meet, same time and same place. Over the next month you will see this map change. The green parcels can already be colored in—changed directly from green to purple. We have secured state land. The yellow is what we are working on now, and I think we are being reasonable. We’re not taking back the whole top half of the state, or Pembina, Ontario, Manitoba, or Michigan, all our ancient stomping grounds. We’re just taking back the land within the original boundaries of our original treaty. We were all set to conduct a compassionate removal of non-tribal people living on our land at present, but I am relieved to tell you that we haven’t needed to put removal into action. They’ve all removed themselves. The lake-home people have gone back to the Cities. Let us bow our heads and pray for their plight.”
Heads bow, words are muttered. Behind Eddy, my little sister, who has gone from Goth-Lolita to Overheated Preppie, is wearing a tight oxford shirt the color of Pepto-Bismol, shiny brown penny loafers, a ponytail, and tight little-boy khakis. She is looking at another map on a flip chart and using a purple marker to shade in the land parcels. Her marker squeaks on the glossy paper. A woman in an elaborately beaded hair clip makes a motion to speak. Eddy recognizes her.
“There’s been trouble.”
Eddy nods. “Most of the yellow parcels that you see are clustered around the lake, and these are ninety-nine percent lake homes. Uninhabited at present. We have used a lottery system to reclaim the property for our homeless, or tribal members living in substandard housing. We have also begun to house our returning urban relatives. As half our population lives off res, we’re set to double in this crisis. We will gain back many of our urban brothers and sisters, and enjoy the benefits of more teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, artists, poets, and gang members. Yes, there has been trouble. We have had to take some unusual means to solve problems. We have mobilized our police force, our Ogitchidaag. We tried to conduct compassionate traditional police work.”
Eddy sighs and looks around the room.
“But some people just keep fighting our compassion, you know?”
Little Mary finishes the last bit of coloring and stands back from the map. Everyone looks at the map, quietly, the people behind me craning to see. The map is substantially purpler now and there are little gasps, murmurs. A few of the old people looking on are weeping silently with their chins thrust out. I see an older man wearing a cap that says Iraq Veteran. Tears are streaming down the lines of his face, down his neck, into the collar of his shirt.
October 28
I have pumped up the cushy blow-up mattress and made my nest on one side of Little Mary’s room. I am lying on my hip with a pillow between my legs because my back hurts. She is curled in about two acres of yellow and green crocheted afghan. I have one too. The result of Grandma’s knitting. Mary’s room is tipping back into derangement again, but she seems to have made heroic efforts to control the understory. No strata of mashed insects, soda cans, and chip bags. Just clothing. At the moment there is no place I would rather be. Though I am supposed to be moving somewhere else, probably farther north and safer. This feels like a burrow. The hills of her balled-up clothing almost feel protective.
“So.” Mary leans over the edge of her bed, looks down at me. Her eyes are completely outlined in swoops of purple eyeliner and she’s done lavender eye shadow up to her brows. The purple, she says, is a political reference to tribal clawback of treaty land. She’s still wearing the Pepto-Bismol blouse and has added a huge green bow to her ponytail.
“The baby? Are you scared?”
“I’d be crazy if I wasn’t scared.”
She nods, flops down on her stomach
, folds her arms, and rests her chin on her wrists. She tells me that she’s been talking a lot to Grandma. She tells me that Grandma has hinted that we have “supernatural” blood.
“What does that even mean?”
“Maybe we’re, like, Rugaroo people. The ones who change to wolves?”
I can believe it of Little Mary with her fangy smile and blazing witch eyes. She has changed her lipstick to magenta pink—it glows in the dull light.
“Do you know if you have a boy or girl? Or twins?”
“I had an ultrasound, then more ultrasounds while I was in the hospital. They didn’t let me see the last ones, but the first one I saw. I still don’t know the gender, but I have this feeling it’s a boy. There was only one baby. Nowhere to hide another.”
Little Mary turns over in her bed, stares up at the ceiling, her hands on her little caved-in belly.
“This sucks so bad,” she said. “I wanted to have some babies, maybe, like someday.”
She turns over and looks down the edge of her bed. The dusk is deepening and the room is quickly transformed and obscured by shadows. She bites her shiny hot pink lip and frowns at me.