A Bright House

Worse than any hangover was the feeling of Ray’s Saturday morning. He must have dropped off into ragged sleep, because he awoke hard and cotton-mouthed with sunlight angling through the curtains. For the weight of residue stuffing his skull, a sunny day would be last on the wish list of preferred weather. Ray, flat on his back, eyelids half opened, wanted a heavy pelting rain to beat down upon the Townes property. Hail. Even hail would be more suitable than a day of brightly lit painful thinking. As coffee brewed and Ray waited for it at the kitchen table, he fought an irrational urge to tear up the entire floor in his mother’s bedroom. Anger seemed to gain a foothold in his normally balanced rationale, and certainly a night of minimal sleep with maximum shock would contribute to that imbalance. But no, he didn’t sense that Melinda’s room held further disclosure.

It became by the minute increasingly obvious, if not blatant, that the timing of this most affecting life story detour had been set in place precisely for the unfolding. The Great Unfolding. He walked to an antique hutch with a glass door, caught his reflection within a pane and noted with blunt clarity that he strongly resembled Delsin Shacapot. The glass door swung open and Ray’s wide cheekbones, squarely set jaw, sculptured brow bled across untold centuries. He removed a large mug, fought an urge to slam the hutch closed, then pulled in a deep breath.

Tumult inside his cranium would not be helpful with time so desperately of the essence. His flight to Ontario only two mornings away... now this emotional detonation and jigsaw puzzle. A vast noisy waterfall of thought strands impossible to combine wanted ownership of his focus, in hundreds of directions at once. He poured the first deep mug and decided to drink it black, sagging down into one of the pine chairs around his family’s large rectangular table; built by the hands of Ray’s acting father. Sunshine streamed into the generous space, illuminating a golden dance of dust motes. And at what dividing line do biological and acting fathers merge, separate? Delsin, for whatever ultimate reason, chose to leave. Ray was raised and loved by another man. A man as much or more his actual father than he who had inseminated an egg. However... he hunched forward over the mug to look at his reflection within its contents... yet another thought strand that would dangle.

The coffee was harshly strong, scalding hot. He gulped it back and formulated the day’s first order of business; to drive into Regina where he would hopefully find an answer or two at the lodge of La Ronge First Nation. He’d gone to high school with a couple of Cree who belonged to that lodge. There existed a slim hope that one of their elders would remember a Delsin Shacapot. Back to the thoughts of fathers... Ray’s clairvoyant lens was not working well with regards to the shock of this discovery, only hours old.

He had no way to know if Delsin’s decision to leave, to completely sever ties with the mother and son, had birthed within that man a lifetime’s pain. It was hard, sitting there drinking bitter coffee in bitterness, resentful of a bright sunny morn, to be compassionate toward a blood-father who did not want to know or love his child. He received an impression of Delsin’s face then, like a quick flashbulb on a vintage Kodak, and stood up suddenly. It faded to black and had arrived and departed without linguistic information. Ray then acted upon something impossible to describe as language or emotion, but rather sheer intuitive impetus.

Moments later he had reentered his bedroom. From the closet he removed a medium sized piece of luggage to set it beside the cookie tin on his night table. The Cree face of his father still rested upon a lamp base, and this time Ray took a long look. Anger had dissipated during the staircase climbing and now mushroomed into a spreading sadness, deep from his abdomen then up quickly as lava flowing through the heart. “So you are my father...” Ray reached for the long thick braid strand on the table top, then unzipped his carry-on bag. He placed the braid within, partially uncoiled on top of the large feather of unknown species origin that lay inside. His imagination expected something to take place. He watched the hair and feather, touching, and waited. “Crazy” he spoke to the room.

It came to him strongly then, clearly, that he would make a medicine bundle to bring on the trip east. With a sudden flooding weariness, he sat on his bed heavily, still looking at the feather and braid. Traditional medicine bundles contained key items such as a strand of hair, a feather... this was so powerful for Ray, who felt an incredulity at the blatant dark humor of what was anything but funny. Something wanted him to follow its energy. An entity or collective sentience, this he could not ascertain, but the hunch was potent. Ray Townes, for all of his years doing good spiritual work, growing as a mortal man and immortal spirit, felt as though he had become a domino.

Whatever path he would now follow, no matter the orchestrator, seemed to be opening up before him in a telegraphed mocking manner. So, a medicine bundle, then. Ray would empty his favorite First Nation pouch, handcrafted for him by the mother of a Nez Perce school friend, of its assorted fossil rocks. Over the course of his many wanderings along the Saskatchewan River’s banks, he had collected these wonderful stones. They were integral to Ray’s psychic work, often held within the palms of both hands before he entered a session.

He would use a freezer bag for the river stones in order to bring them to Ontario, and with the Nez Perce pouch and its contents, hopefully strong medicine would accompany Ray for this most troubling journey. A square room at the right front portion of the home had once belonged to his father. His parents hadn’t slept together at any point within recollection, but the elder Townes rose before dawn and Melinda was a light sleeper who required her eight to ten hours... this bedroom was the repository of family photographs.

Ray entered the room as he always did after the suicide of his mother; gingerly. He knew not how the seeing of her face on father’s fireplace mantel would affect him on a given day’s entry. Some people who are left in the endless pain wake of a suicide, are able to gaze upon the images of their sadly departed; it helps them to cope. For Ray, these were photographs that existed by necessity in a closed off museum of a room. He could willingly expose himself to the pain when his mind failed in summoning up the visage of his dear Melinda.

It was a powerful room, and a space to be used sparingly. From the array of portraits in their little assorted frames, Ray selected one that would be most resonant; a young Melinda Emma Townes as she glowed in youth’s bloom. After her marriage. Before the birth of her son. Within a love kept secret, now revealed. Her hair was down, flowing to perfection around her slender neck, draping the slope of shoulders. It was an outdoor photo taken in front of the house, and with its angle of view was always able to pierce Ray’s heart most efficiently, for beyond the glowing features of his pretty mother lay a section of front veranda that time would inevitably alter into the horrendous.

He lifted the ornate brass frame away from mantel dust, able to numbly stare into his mother’s sunlit face. Ray like the sun he thought, wanting to chuckle, not liking the taste of it. It is a rough task, to gaze upon a loved one with revision in mind. How would he ever look upon her photographic image or any of the indelible imprints of his memories, without suffering this revised history? Here in its little frame, glossy black and white moment of stopped time, his mother smiled for one man and loved another. Loved them both, he knew, for she would not have stayed. They were brutally hard years during the late 1930s, especially for farming. In his blood, without question he knew that she would not have stayed had she not loved her husband. As scandalous as it may have been in those times, Melinda could have had her pick of a man willing to love her and help raise her boy.

Yet, with these revised and newly clarified recollections of his mother’s periodic distances and palpable sadness, Ray felt a deeper truth. She had, for whatever reasons, given her heart to Delsin Shacapot. His was the decision that in all likelihood drained her of any will to carry on elsewhere other than within the maternal duties ahead, under the roof of a husband who genuinely loved her. Such is heartbreak. Only one woman had ever broken Ray’s heart, and he stood in his father’s room holding her portrait for long minutes before returning to his own bedroom. With unthinking fluid movements, he removed the feather and braid from his carry-on to wind the hair loosely around that massive quill length. His fingers seemed to itch with energy coming from these two items, which he placed into the river rock pouch. Next was the folded letter, slightly opened so that he could tuck it inside and around the feather and braid. Medicine was already coalescing. The hardest moment of all, since his awakening from Friday’s living nightmare, arrived when Ray had to pick up the Cree’s photograph and hold it beside that of his mother. He could not stifle the gasp.

Somehow and beyond question, they were an energy fused. He stood with his arms outstretched, staring through fully blown open vision. Melinda and Delsin, left and right hands respectively, and their combined psychic emanation was one. Not only did Ray reel from the knowing of their union as he had discovered it, but it ran deeper, like a ceremonial sword into his guts... theirs was a union of ageless timeless proportion. It changed the shape and light of his bedroom. He felt the floor tilting wildly beneath his sock feet. Two lengths of curtain slowly lifted themselves free of the floor to reveal a melting steam radiator as it collapsed into itself in little bursts of implosive every-color.

He blinked heavily and opened his eyelids to see the couple within his fingers had turned to face each other, tears streaming from profiled eyes. A second gasping choke brought with it a loud crashing glass splintering shock bomb; he whipped his head around to see the chest of a huge bird of prey exploding inward through the bedroom window. And it vanished. All of that split second’s cerebral horror blinked away in an instant. The most powerful flash he had ever received. Ray’s legs went limp and he sat hard upon the mattress, the two photos falling to land almost perfectly beside each other on the floor. A mimicry of how he had just held them at arms length, undeniably a mockery or clue or both... so it was that Ray Townes, a very unique and light seeking-soul, came to the most critical crossroads of his fifty and then some years. He would sit on the edge of his bed for a half hour, not thinking at all, immersed into listening to his breath and gazing down at Melinda and Delsin.

On Bright Street during the early dawn hours of that same morning, Jenny prepared for work with a toasted bagel and orange pekoe tea. As the miles between her and Ray nonetheless found them both sitting at kitchen tables, the ingredients of their thoughts couldn’t have held more differing energies. Jenny found herself in the bosom of new emotional territory; some manner of transition between what was and what shall be. She had no solid idea concerning the details of Monday’s rapid approach and all that lay beyond, and in her mellow body and mind space that Saturday morning, it wasn’t important. Scott... the pain of his name and memory... it had become toothless somehow with increasing rapidity since the entrance of one Ray Townes into Jenny’s world.

Again she had to view him as a catalyst, even as her mind repeated its savior motif, because every lucid thought within her recognized the truth of her own reawakening. She, was doing this. It was willed. Ray bled like an open wound into the same calendar Saturday that held Jenny sweetly. The warmth of dream recall still affected her physically as she sipped her tea and watched the clock. Without hesitation, should it come to pass that Townes wanted her intimately, she would open herself to him like the petals of a long dormant flower.

Eleven o’clock of the pivotal Saturday in a man’s life story found Ray Townes with his medicine bundle packed. For purely unconscious reasons he bound the small portraits of his mother and her vanished lover together, face to face, with one of his favorite lengths of sweetgrass. As he did this, a peripheral flash motion from the hallway caught his attention in the same instant of his inner vision flinching. For the ensuing few seconds as he pulled his river rock pouch tight, the tiny phosphene sparkles leapt to and fro within the room; seen without photons, felt without actually being present.

It was a part of his clairvoyance that Ray had long ago grown accustomed to, if not happy for. With the medicine bundle zipped into his carry-on bag, Ray made his way to the shower. He had slowly, gradually calmed to a state of grim resolve. No amount of attuning could reveal what the day further held for him, and he would logically go first to the La Ronge lodge in Regina, then to a long favored stretch of North Saskatchewan river several hours removed from the city.

Before he left, however, Ray once more entered the room where his mother had spent so much of her time, sequestered. On his knees he carefully fed the floorboard back into its grooved space, not thinking, and feeling like a soul vacuumed, displaced. Mirror mirror in the sky, how and why the tale of i... and as Ray tapped the last two nails into place, the ones that had lifted and revealed things within an onion skin, didn’t the sunshine of earlier succumb to a sudden cloak of cloud?