The Purification Ceremony (36 page)

    I glanced to my left. My good arm rested on a piece of ice-encased driftwood about eighteen inches long and about as thick as my wrist. I closed my fingers around it and looked back to him, even as I felt him become aware of me again and his face contorted toward rage.

    I swung with every bit of strength I had left, stunned at the blast of black electric current that surged through me when the club struck and caved in the side of Devlin Ryan’s head. Now I was the one surrounded by the black, shimmering halo. I was the negative. I was Death, changer of shapes, stealer of Power.

    Ryan tottered for a second, highlighted in a sudden eclipse. The light faded from eyes still focused on his wife. Then he slumped off me and crashed through the ice into the Dream.

    

    

    I come often now to the burial ground of my parents and Mitchell. It is on a knoll on tribal lands, on an island actually in the Penobscot River, ten miles north of Old Town. You must use a canoe to get there, and lately the water has been high and fast with the winter runoff’s and the spring rains; I have been forced to launch well upstream and ride the current to reach them.

    I have gone six times since ice-out last month, driving the entire way from Boston to Bangor on Friday nights so I can cross at dawn on Saturday mornings. I’ve never had a problem going to their world and returning. Yet each time I step into the canoe and feel the river’s force creep up the paddle into my still-healing shoulder, I fear that this will be the last crossing for me. I have come to understand the silk strings that connect us to this world.

    Yesterday I took Emily and Patrick to meet their grandparents. It was one of those mid-April Maine days when the frigid, clear dawn gives way to a day that flirts with sixty. Nature seducing us with the first inkling of the warmth to come.

    There was fog hovering above the water near shore. The kids had been yawning in the truck until we’d reached the river. But once they got outside, the spirit of the waters invaded them, made them want to be part of it. Patrick helped me get the canoe down from the roof. He is almost nine and I see my father in him with each passing day.

    We pushed off from shore, instantly sucked into the Penobscot’s power. I imagined myself the crow navigating on the feather snow and I let the craft accept the river’s course until we needed to veer off. There was a moment when the white water became a roar around us, when Emily and Patrick turned to me, frightened. Emily said she wanted to go home. Patrick tried to be brave and said nothing. I just smiled and told them to ignore what was under them, that it was a place they need not understand yet. Better to look instead to the island.

    That calmed them. They turned and faced the approaching shoreline with such eagerness that I almost dissolved in the joy that they were once again with me.

    For many months after my return from the Metcalf Estate, I feared I would never have that kind of moment with them, especially after the publication of Kurant’s melodramatic account of the slayings. He called the ten-thousand-word article “Revenge of the Hunter,” and reduced the complex forces that had been in play along the border of British Columbia and Alberta to a simplistic clash of good and evil.

    In Kurant’s eyes, the victims had been “consumed by the throwback barbarism that underlies the culture of modern hunting.” Especially so Cantrell, who committed suicide with a rifle in January.

    He even had a quote from Lenore to the effect that she and Earl would never hunt again. The computer tycoon would be forever confined to a wheelchair and reliant on her care.

    I could not help wondering whether or not Lenore secretly believed that Earl in such a state — unable to chase women and flaunt them in her face — was the greatest trophy she would ever bag anyway.

    Griff and Arnie told Kurant that they still supported hunting, but were unsure if they would go the woods again this coming fall. Phil, not surprisingly, refused to talk with Kurant at all. Nelson and Theresa were trying to negotiate a new hunting lease on the estate, but the Metcalfe heirs were balking at the idea.

    To the writer, Ryan was driven by vengeance against a system that wrongly valued the rights of the hunter over the rights of his wife. He framed Ryan’s story as a failure to embrace the fact that his wife’s death proved hunting was wrong. Instead, the professor had retreated further into the primitive, predatory state and gone mad in the process.

    As I expected, Kurant took no responsibility for his role in aiming Ryan’s homicidal energy north. And he avoided the issue of when he began to suspect that Ryan was the killer. He would have to live with that understanding the rest of his life.

    I was portrayed as the heroine determined to save the band of hunters. Even so, Kurant digressed at some length into a discussion of whether or not, in my final effort to kill Ryan, I had crossed the boundary between self-defense and first-degree murder. I had hunted Ryan down and killed him when I could have remained in the camp with the others. Indeed, there were members of the Canadian Mounted Police team that finally arrived on the estate four days after I killed Ryan who seemed intent on getting me indicted on that charge. But the Canadian judge who looked into the case found that the intensity of the situation on the Metcalfe Estate had created “such an overwhelming atmosphere of mortal threat that it is certain that Diana Jackman killed Ryan in self-defense and in defense of the rest of the survivors.”

    Kurant’s story also revealed that the fourth scalp in the cave belonged to J. Wright Dillon, the hunter who had shot Izzy. His body was never found, but the DNA match with the flesh in logging camp four was identical.

    When I attempted once again to get joint custody of Patrick and Emily, Kevin’s attorney tried to use the events at Metcalfe against me, asking the judge in family court to stick by Kevin’s earlier request that I be psychologically evaluated. After all, how could the courts allow two young children to be left with a woman capable of coldly hunting and killing someone?

    My attorney had argued that it showed I was capable of protecting the children, that the experience had only made me a better mother. Kevin whispered something to his attorney and it dawned on me this wasn’t about the legal process, this was personal. It had to be worked out personally.

    Before the judge ruled, I asked him if I might have some time with Kevin alone, no attorneys. Kevin’s lawyer objected, but Kevin looked at me and I mouthed the word “please.” He hesitated, then nodded. The judge said it was almost lunchtime and we could use a conference room until court reconvened in two hours. I was as nervous as I’d been hunting Ryan when I followed my husband into the book-lined office.

    Kevin stood awkwardly in the corner, fiddling with his starched cuff.

    “How are you?” I asked.

    “Been better,” he said. “I don’t like courtrooms.”

    “I don’t either,” I said. I played with the front page of the Globe lying on the table. “Believe it or not, I missed you.”

    “Uh-huh.” He wouldn’t look at me. I waited until he did.

    “I guess you didn’t think about me at all. Even after all that happened in Canada.

    Kevin seemed startled by that remark. “No, of course I thought about you. I was… worried. How are you?”

    I hesitated. “Better. Better than I’ve been in a long time.”

    He hesitated. “I wish I could believe it.”

    “I know,” I said. “And I know that it’s going to take a long time before you believe it, too. I told you once if you loved me you wouldn’t ask me about my life before we met. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”

    “Diana, I still think — ”

    “Hear me out,” I pleaded, and I told him I’d been unfair to him since the day we’d met, that I’d hidden a huge chunk of my life from him and that was not the sort of foundation on which to build a relationship. Then I told him the high points of it; how I’d been raised, how my mother had died, how I’d run from her death and my father for years, a stranger to myself and, in more ways that I cared to admit, to him.

    “The world changes shape and we change shape as we grow older,” I said, “but from the time we are born to the time we die, we search for things that are true and constant to cling to. I clung to you for years because you loved me… almost without question. And you have to believe me when I say that no matter what I may have hidden from you or done to you, I loved you. And part of me still does.

    “But the past came for me, Kevin, and I’ve had to admit who I am and what I am. I know it doesn’t make much sense right now. But I’ll do my best to explain all the details if you give me half a chance.”

    Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know if knowing the real you will help, Diana. I’m afraid I’m always going to look at you and see this person who lived a secret life. This didn’t happen to someone in a newspaper story. It happened to me! I don’t know if that can ever be repaired.”

    I fought the tears to no avail. They streamed out and I sobbed, “I know. I’ve hurt you and I’m so very sorry. I know that you don’t think we can ever save this marriage, and maybe we can’t. But I’m asking that you think about the happy times we did share. I’m asking you for peace and to share our children. For their sake as well as mine. I need them, Kevin. I need them to be whole again.”

    He didn’t say anything for the longest time. The tears kept coming and I hung my head, sure that he would continue to fight me and that Emily and Patrick might never be part of me. Then I felt his finger brush away the tears on my cheek. “That’s how Yastrzemski used to swipe balls off the Green Monster,” he said.

    I could not stop crying.

    We talked for another half hour. In the end, I agreed to a psychological evaluation. Kevin agreed to a more lenient custody agreement. I have them two weekends a month and every other Monday night. It is a start.

    The bow of our canoe ran up on gravel washed down by the spring rains. Patrick jumped out and pulled the canoe onto shore. The burial island is about a half mile long and a third of a mile wide. As a child, I enjoyed coming here because the girth of the island is grassy and peppered with hundreds of paper birches. I led my children south along the deer trails that crisscrossed the meadow grass, still stiff from the dew that had frozen overnight and now shimmered in the morning sun. Emily found a bird’s nest in the budded low branches of a birch and cradled the treasure in her arms.

    She and Patrick ran ahead toward the southernmost point on the island where the graves are. I felt strangely cleansed in a way I hadn’t in a long time, even though I continue to have flashbacks about the death of Ryan and what I did after I killed him.

    I lay on the bank of the Dream for a long time after I’d hit him with the log, feeling Ryan’s presence beside me, feeling the river trying to tug him toward the other shore. When at last my strength returned, I got up and fashioned a bandage around my wound. Then I pulled him free of the water and stared at the peace in his face. How could a good person like this have gone so far into the night?

    I had to know. I put my lips to his and inhaled all that was Ryan in the breath that remained. I closed my eyes and let his head fall into my lap, hearing in my mind the fleeting musical sounds of a woman’s voice. I felt her warmth around me, cradling me until there was part of me in her.

    I caught flashes of their memory, and just before I sensed the dark part of his world coming into me, I sensed something else, an energy I had not thought to examine closely before, and its dominant presence in Ryan shocked me. I blew out the breath, shaking.

    I dragged his body up onto the bank, covered it with snow and marked the spot with his bow so the Mounties could come to claim it if the wolves didn’t first. When I was done, I was sweaty and my shoulder ached and I was seized by the need to wash.

    I built a fire near his body, then stripped and went to the Dream. The ice water on my skin made me cry out, but I forced myself down into it, feeling it numb me, make me aware, reconciled and yet dead to who I was before I’d struck Ryan down. Back at the fire, sitting there, I felt my reawakening skin sting and itch. That feeling has not gone away. And probably never will.

    I did not talk about what happened after Ryan’s death with the psychologist. Nor did I give more than passing reference to Power or the Micmac legends. She was a toothin woman in her thirties, given to fashionable clothes, and drove a convertible sports car. What could I have said under the circumstances? That I have come to believe through the horrible events at Metcalfe that there actually are invisible worlds constantly clashing in the air around us? That I have embraced a vision of this life forged centuries ago by primitives living in the Northern Forests? She’d have recommended I be kept from my children and undergo years of therapy.

    So I said nothing about the feather snow or the flashes of electric light that passed into me when I killed Ryan. Nor did I tell her that I took Ryan’s breath and that he now lives in me. Instead, I just go about my life as best I can, trying to rebuild it as best I can.

    The canoe trip yesterday was an important step toward the goal. Mitchell is buried on the point where the Penobscot rejoins itself. Katherine and my father are behind him, a little bit higher on the gradual slope.

    “Did you miss your mommy and daddy?” Emily asked when at last we stood before the stones that marked the spots. The warm south wind picked up and blew my hair into my eyes.

    “Mommy?”

    “Yes,” I said. “Every day now.”

    They asked what my parents and Mitchell were like and I told them some of the stories that always come to my mind when I think of them. I told them how my mother embodied all the colors of the trout, and how on days like today my father sang songs to the spring, and how my greatuncle believed that even the smallest blade of grass and the tiniest pebble were alive.