A Bright House

~ 34 ~

“My Dearest Melinda :

You are the love of my life, but we both know that I cannot remain here with you in the way we have been living. In fact, my time to leave Saskatchewan has arrived. I must rejoin those of my kind before the snows come. I have wanted to tell you of my birthplace. Of the truth of my name among the Cree brothers and sisters who have become my earthly family. I do not think that you would have been able to understand all that I would have had to reveal to you, were we to able to stay together, but you love your husband. You love your son. Our son. I know in my heart that you will take care of him and protect him from these things he need not know. Not until he is ready will he be shown. As these words meet your eyes, know that I love you and have always loved you. We shall not meet again. - Delsin”

From the three folds of paper, a small photograph had fallen face down to the floor, ignored until after Ray’s disbelieving eyes had read the neatly handwritten note. He then moved to pick up the photograph and hesitated. Back to the letter again. To. Read. It. Very. Slowly. “Our son” imploded behind his eyelids, closed to sudden temporal lobe lightning. He gasped loudly and lowered his face down into clenched fists, the paper falling away.

No tears followed, not then. He pressed the flesh of his cheeks hard into the middle knuckles of each hand as what was left of his mind in that moment became tangled with shock. Pieces, like dominoes, began to topple and yet fall into place. Fall into the tiny shadows of his denied perceptions because they couldn’t have been true; not back then as a confused child and certainly not now in the blast crater of epiphany.

He managed to focus long enough to reach for the picture, to turn it over. The timeless chiseled features of a Cree, possibly in his forties, looked back at him from a faded sepia setting. The outdoors had etched its raw powers across his handsome attributes; high cheekbones, a strong jaw, the ancient mouth and eyes, wide nostrils... a permeation of composed dignity. Ray stared into the image and flicked his gaze at the long braid that he had dropped back into the cookie box. “Our son”... what an impossible bolt of awakening, to discover that his beloved mother had taken a lover. One many years her senior.

Possibly... (Townes felt tears on the simmer, tuned into a distant signal) possibly a shaman. “Shape taker” he spoke into the face on its small matte finish paper. The back of the portrait held a tiny two word pencil mark : Delsin Schacapot... having grown up in a province and near a capital city with a large First Nation population, Ray knew this first name to mean “truthful one”. The sudden irony was piercing. At twelve years of age, this Cree would have gone on a vision quest. Ray, believing his blood father to be the man just buried in Toronto, at twelve was a boy grappling with his peculiar differences. When Delsin’s rite of passage took him to days of isolation on a wilderness walkabout, Ray’s own passage from boyhood had involved increasing confusion.

The Cree as a young man embarking on his vision quest would be shown his future pathways, often through a guiding spirit that took the form of an animal. Townes looked at the wise and weathered face of a man who was very likely his biological father, and thought of the large feather from Jenny’s shed. An untraceable DNA. Lost in the midst of this, Ray heard the telephone from his room. There were clients scheduled for “voice readings”; three sessions over the two hours before his bedtime... he would have to call each one to reschedule. Tears filled his eyelids then. He carefully placed the braid, photograph, and letter back into the tin box. The weekend promised to be a juggernaut.

It was with a start that Ray awoke several hours later. Into pitch dark from a slippery dream state that bore the face of the man become revelation who had been hidden within the flooring of one family’s homestead. He awoke and felt his temples wet from tears, but could not remember the sobbing of only astral moments before, where time becomes elasticity and madness beneath the lens of earthbound vision. His clock radio sat, darkened by a purposely positioned hand towel, to the left of his bed. Ray had no interest in the time that had passed between laying down and suddenly awakening, but felt immediately that perhaps everything impacting his emotions had in fact been a dream weave. Would that it be so, he thought.

It was believable to him in those initial reawakened minutes that from the point of hail impacting the house until this jolt from sleep, he had been dream walking. With a deep breath he pushed up from the bed, found the floor, and stepped slowly into the long hallway which separated four generously proportioned rooms and anchored a much smaller bathroom at the rear of the second level. His mother’s bedroom door was as closed as usual but in approaching, Ray began to remember the reality of what he had found there; a veneer of thin hope for it all to be a dream, fell away when he turned the knob and pushed... the floorboard was exactly as he had left it, to one side of its decades old position.

With a semi-conscious state of mind, unquestioning, Ray walked to the opening and once more retrieved the cookie tin from its no longer secret place. It took some doing, but he was able to quell the uprising anger within his bosom. With a retracing of hallway steps through the anything but dead of this night, he carried the tin to his room and took a sitting position propped against headrest. Less gingerly this time, Ray lifted the three items free. He placed the folded note atop his night table. He propped the little photograph up against his reading lamp’s base, not bothering to gaze at those strong-boned Cree features.

Then, very deliberately and already plunging toward the within of his mind, Ray wrapped that thick black braid around his right hand, tucking the loose end between index and middle fingers that no longer trembled for the touching... he used his left hand to pull the lamp chain and once again douse the intrusion of artificial light where it was surely not needed or welcome; illuminating hard new truths on a differently spinning planet.

In darkness, then. Darkness, then IN. A man of tactile focus, Townes shut his eyelids to truly feel the room around his body. Absence of light, very close to a touching of his senses. It was a space for solace, balance, and had been friend to him since far back into his childhood. With every nerve ending of his fingers and palm, Ray listened to the energy of a rope of hair. His fingers gently closed and relaxed. Closed and relaxed around the texture of his mother’s secret. Keeping anger at bay was the foremost challenge. Deep-hearted pain borne of rejection; that was the crux at first. He pushed back at his ego, not allowing it what was so easily fed upon. With ultra sensitive fingers, Ray read the story of what he held as it told itself through visceral and language-removed sensations; pure emotion signal.

With his left hand he pulled from beneath him another braided lock that was decorated in beads and brightly colored bands that had been his liking since the advent of puberty. Those dominoes began to tumble into place again. He spiraled through his light doused space, both bedroom and mind scape, connecting the two braids where only short hours before, this reality hadn’t been visible. Underfoot. Years of waiting within his mother’s floor. Waiting for a timing key.

We are born into preferences and components of individuality that are not always ours to choose, perhaps. Was Ray’s adoption of First Nation beliefs and appearance a predetermined inevitability? Surely not, as he grew up in a land that has been home to various tribes for upwards of some forty thousand years since their trek across the Bering strait during times of antiquity when it had formed an ice bridge from Asia. Surely not, since his closest school friends had been comprised of Cree, Blackfoot, Assiniboine, Chipewyan, Saulteaux, Nez Perce, Shoshoni, Sioux, Sarcee, Gros Ventre... these were the children with whom he shared the greatest common ground. Empathy. Meeting and growing up to know the elders of the many Saskatchewan lodges, Ray had connected more deeply with their reverence for a Great Spirit.

Their direct relationship with land and sky. It was to be easily expected, then, that he take the path he did... and yet... (he clenched for a moment, hard upon both his own braid and that purportedly of his biological father) a sudden scald of tears to presage his nasal passages clogging, the fracturing rhythm of his chest then rising and falling unevenly... “Delsin Shacapot” he spoke through cloying bewilderment. Two words that lived on his tongue both foreign and known. How can that be? As though existing between the alien, denied, and recognized.

“We shall not meet again” he further spoke, having to breathe through his mouth for the tears and mucous, allowing both to manifest without interference or control. Such a finality in that line; one that bespoke more than the tone of a lover tearing himself away from that which will not work for the good of all concerned. Falling upon a sword to spare further agony. Ray could not find generosity in his heart for this Delsin the Cree, as he wept and swallowed back fear that empty early morning. It was shortly after speaking Shacapot’s exit declaration aloud that Jenny came to mind. So clearly, she did. He could almost touch her face within the closeness of dark. This it would be, he knew.

This specific time held every resonant indicator that he had been intuiting since first laying eyes upon her. He not only knew her somehow, but he remembered her. That his presence and energy had so quickly relaxed Jenny’s guard now seemed several layers deeper than his initial impression that he had calmed her through his own comparative openness, tranquility. A law seemed written between them, always beyond revealing, alive through the unspeakable. With his thoughts wrapped into dual threads, one named Delsin, one named Jenny, Townes began to settle down into a quieter receiving state... he could not “see” yet, his blood-father’s face or any psychic impression of his past, but she was there and very present. He wondered if at that very moment, Jenny was with him. Did she perceive of this sudden twist in his course?

As Jenny was abandoned by her biological parents, left to perhaps perish on a beach, so now did Ray experience a fresh stab wound. Abandoned by his blood-father. An action directly linked to the eventual erosion of his beloved mother’s will to live. It explained to him almost every moment once witnessed by his caring but confounded eyes. Melinda had loved his father; he had seen them at their closest, their best. Just as he had watched them under duress of finances, either working together or tearing each other apart. Just as he had longed for a brother or sister, acutely sensing somehow that it would not come to be. How then, with all of these clairvoyant abilities cursedly upon him, did Ray never once envision his mother with someone else? It had been the curious truth of his “gift”, and one that is common amongst seers, that those closest are in some way shielded from it. How on earth did his poor mother carry on?

How was it possible that she was grievously wounded and could find it within, to continue? On a dark night of the soul for a man dedicated to light, he felt himself entering the bottleneck. Stroking the two braids inexorably connected across time, space, circumstance, he was found within loss but without answers. So much of his spiritual education had taught him to relinquish the search for tangible answers, for this noesis was a realm maddeningly limited to their perceiving. The answers were slippery entities. Capture was not in the vocabulary. Acceptance and continued asking; that was Ray’s credo. It was the stalwart strength to continually ask that propelled him. A quantum of accept don’t accept. With two days before his trip to Ontario and quite possibly something packing its own finality for change, Ray lived on the cusp. Friday’s bleed into Saturday would leave a stain.

One thousand two hundred and sixty six miles east of Ray Townes within the first sixty minutes of three sleepless hours in a bedroom always his, Jenny had an orgasm. Her lover had appeared from a nowhere smudge between dream vignettes, at first physically unrecognizable but bearing an energy and touch that quickly undid the strings of logic. Both fast asleep and deeply aroused, this last feeling a lingering halo from an entire day of coping with womanly thoughts of Ray Townes, Jenny’s lover materialized atop her bed. He was in energy, at first awareness, a synthesis of Scott and Ray, though she was unable to be sure and in the beginning emotional reactions to his fingers, it was rapidly not necessary to know...

He ran a hand up under the sheets, from a caress of her arch to the smooth flow of calf, around into kneecap, up and resting briefly his wide warm palm across the midpoint of her thigh. This then was Jenny’s only decision moment, but in the dream his touch was exquisite in ways both reminiscent and enticingly new-sweet. She looked to his outline in her bedroom’s window, backlit with distant alleyway lamps. He was at once the familiar silhouette of Scott and in a flash fire of carnal want, Ray. The morning’s replay would lose so many of that dream’s many sensory explosions, but she did retain the sheer power of tipping herself almost savagely over a precipice into hungering for him freely. It was her, then, sitting up to meet him with her lips, on fire from his hand where it rested. She lifted his t-shirt, tossed it into room shadows, pressed more urgently into his mouth.

Not a word was uttered. Their breathing found unison, and home, and something timelessly known, between them. Details later recalled were carried to some unreachable place, but Jenny’s body reacted to the memory of him lifting away the bed coverings, his weight upon the mattress, hands at her hips before that very deliberate yet gentle removing of panties; forever down the length of her legs. She had reached to touch him, startled by his arousal through denim trousers; startled by her boldness in the heated recall of what it once was to make passionate love. He, Ray or Scott and both, did not enter her. She accepted the warmth of his body on top of hers, and beautiful astrally accentuated kisses beyond waking description. They melted her core. It was his hand, then. After he moved to the left of her, kissing her deeply. His warm gentle palm pressing into Jenny where want lived as liquid flame.

That was all. He kissed her mouth in the center of their willingness. His hand pressed down sweetly as she moved against it, lifting and falling back, eyes even in dream pressed shut for the power of what was happening. A rising awareness of anticipation crept forward, from the bed where Jenny slept and dreamed. That was all. That was everything.