Carole Maso - Ghost Dance

“Live,” he said, “or die!”

There were flames everywhere: flames in my mouth, flames in my hair. There was no stopping this. Blue flames, orange, white — everywhere. “Why?” I shrieked with the last part of me before the brain closed down. “Oh, God,” I sighed. “Why? Why?”

I grew large and rose above the flames. “Did you think you could kill us just like that, you stupid bastards? Did you think we would just forget?” I laughed. “Did you think we’d be quiet forever?” My voice grew enormous, my body the tremendous body of rage.

“There is no getting away with it. There is no escape. We will speak and bear witness. You can poison us, you can hack us into little bits, you can burn us in your furnaces, and still we will live. We will never stop speaking. We will glitter in the palms of your hands forever.”

At some point we must have fallen because when I opened my eyes we were on the ground and covered with snow. All along it was what they had had in mind: Jack on my back with his teeth in my neck, his blue hands like claws curled around mine, my hair stuffed in his mouth, my mouth frozen open, caught forever in the center of a sigh.

“We’ll die here,” I said, sobbing, crawling from underneath Jack, separating from the beast our bodies made. I stood up and looked at him from what seemed a great distance. “Wake up,” I said to him. “Get up.” The snow seemed to muffle my plea, but he must have heard me because after a few moments he slowly opened his eyes and it seemed to me that he smiled. “I’m OK,” he said. “Go. Run now.” I saw myself again for a moment lying in the snow. “No,” I said, and pulled myself up, out of my mother’s body, which lay motionless in the snow.

I turned and moved away. I was waist deep in snow. I lifted myself out of her. The pain was terrible. I trudged forward through the snow. I moved as fast as I could but I did not know where I was going.

My body ached, my heart ached.

Far off on the horizon I saw something moving through the white on the line of the Hudson. I moved toward it. I gasped. It was beautiful and white and sailing toward me.

“Daddy!” I cried out as he pulled alongside me and I stretched out my hand, which he grasped, and I helped him ashore. “Daddy.” We stood together there in the snow. His clothes were singed. He held my hand tightly. He must have tried to find her withered hand and hold it, to touch what he sensed was her. “Why?” we said together, looking into the white sky. Why? He had seen the car in his rearview mirror, and it had seemed to float into ours as if in slow motion. “It could not have been going more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour,” he cried. It had entered her slowly and with a certain grace. But it exploded into fire anyway.

“Why?” we cried into the sky. “Why?” And with our chanting over and over of the word why , I saw Marta again, who had first taught me that impossible word. She had placed it into my mouth before I could possibly have comprehended its full meaning. She had given it to me far in advance, and now she too stood with us there in the snow. “Why?” we asked, the three of us.

“Where was the sense in it?” Grandma lifted herself from her shallow grave and shook her fist into the blurry air and asked for sense, demanded it. Surely, I reasoned, if we all stood there together and shouted in unison, why , the answer would come clear. Surely we deserved some explanation, something. We might even ask for her back.

And Sabine, too, stood up, up from the snow and walked out of her dress like she once did long ago and said to the sky, right alongside my grandmother, in her large naked voice, “Dites-moi! Pourquoi?” and certainly such a sad and angry chorus of voices in the middle of the snow, in the middle of the night, would have to be answered — if not in words, then somehow. Surely a streetlight would dim for a minute or brighten. Surely there would be some consolation, some solace, some way into this impossible question. Why? Why?

Sabine stood next to me and looked around for the missing one. “Fletcher is in New York, too, no?” she asked.

“No, Sabine,” I said, but, hearing her words again, I moved forward, leaving the small band of angry, demanding people for a moment. I dragged myself through the snow. “Fletcher is in New York, too?” I walked through miles and miles of snow, until I reached the glass booth with its phone book. Turin, I said over and over as I made my way to him. There it was, above my name: Fletcher A., West 18th Street.

He shakes his head sadly back and forth as I close the book. He looks so sad. He seems so very sad. “Oh, Grandpa!” I cry. “Please don’t look that way.”

“Try to forgive them,” he whispers.

I plowed toward him through fields of snow. Whatever was about to happen, there was no changing it now, no stopping it. Now it was inevitable. There was no way to step back. He would be there — had been there for some time.

She had been a model of courage once.

I dragged my aching body through the early morning. I was burning hot. I was freezing cold. I had come a long way to this place. It had taken me so long to get here, to travel these twenty blocks to him.

I climbed the steps to his apartment on the third floor slowly. I pushed open the door, which was slightly ajar. He stood turned away from me looking out the window into the snow. His back was huge and brown and muscled; he was naked to the waist. His hair was long and straight and hung to the center of that great back. He looked like a strong, strong man. Only his arms dangling at his sides revealed the degree of his surrender.

He turned to me. His eyes were pale lakes of pain in the dark, rugged landscape of his face.

“Fletcher,” I whispered.

“There’s been a terrible accident in the snow,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you, Pale Moon.”

“I’m here now.”

“I knew you would come.”

I nodded.

Now he moved those massive arms and crossed them at his chest. “They’ve killed our mother,” he said, “and they will die for it.” He stared straight into the exploding fire he still saw before him. “They killed her as if she were a deer or a jackrabbit or a dog.”

“Fletcher,” I said.

“You must prepare now,” he said gently, “for the dance.” There was a long pause. He just stared at me. “God, you look so bad, Vanessa,” he whispered, and his blue eyes brimmed and threatened to spill over.

“Oh, Fletcher!”

“We will do the Ghost Dance,” he said. “Everything will be all right. There will be sweet grass and fresh water.”

He was nearly a hundred years away, the century about to turn; he was thousands of miles away.

He gestured out the window where there was only snow. “The bison and buffalo and elk will return. There will be plenty of food for everyone. The dead will come alive again, and it will be like old times. You remember, Pale Moon.” He smiled and closed his eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered, “oh, I remember.”

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll help you out of these clothes.” They were frozen to me. “I’ll prepare the steam lodge for you.”

He ran a hot bath and placed large rocks which he had heated in the oven in the room with me. “Breathe,” he said in a low voice, “please breathe.”

I lowered myself into the hot water. I watched the dead make their first attempts to rise like steam in a dance of heat. “In case you come back disguised as a stone,” I cried, and placed my hand on top of a flat, gray rock, searing it.

I settled into the steam. We will see her again, I thought. My heart opened. I was sweating hard. For an hour I lay in the heat.

I stepped finally from the steaming room wrapped in a towel. “Put this on,” he told me and handed me a beautiful, fringed tunic painted with symbols: sun, moon, stars. Eagle feathers adorned the bottom. “This is your Ghost Shirt,” my brother said. “It is impenetrable to bullets or any weapon. It will protect you from all harm. Go on,” he said, “do as I say.” He held my shoulders and looked directly into my eyes. “They will never hurt us again.”