A Bright House

Ray normally played music in his truck but opted for silence during the half hour drive into Regina. He had a notion that information might come to him suddenly and sporadically, as he felt raw and yet in tune, split so wide. Turning around near the barn to depart, he felt an impulsive pinch and stopped, backed up toward the house. Moments later he was kicking up dust on the dirt road with the medicine pouch beside him. The two phone calls had met with little success; his old buddies from high school, now husbands and also young grandfathers, could not recall a Delsin Shacapot. Ray would drive first to La Ronge’s lodge, where he could show the Cree’s portrait to anyone present. It was, however, the pull of his meditation place along the North Saskatchewan river’s bending shore that truly called him.

With no music playing and just the sound of crunching dirt and gravel beneath his tires, Ray at first thought only of his mother. The revisionist memories renewed and he felt as though answers were forthcoming to explain the way she used to look at him from time to time. How it must have torn her heart out to see so much of her lover within the features of their son... he wanted so badly to feel compassion within this diamond-hard reborn ache, but couldn’t summon it. He caught himself, several times, clenching his teeth with two hands tight on the steering wheel; not quite anger or any one emotion readily identifiable. A full mind and body tension.

With some effort, Ray was able to reduce his intensity by the time he parallel parked near the La Ronge lodge’s building on the outskirts of Regina proper. Of course, when he approached the front door to knock he had the strong inkling that he should have called ahead. Several minutes and hard rappings later, Ray decided that the true path of this Saturday had always been to the river bank. His gut told him that Delsin Shacapot was a shocking puzzle piece that would not be quickly revealed. He would drive to the North Saskatchewan river banks of his heart’s calling, then, and the rest of it could wait.

A half hour outside of the basin of Last Mountain Lake, Ray braked, pulled into a widened section of shoulder. This two-lane road was quiet, perhaps in some part due to the thickening cloud cover and increasing winds. He had driven to a sound of air rushing through his barely open window, when peripheral clairvoyant images started flashing and sparking around his normal vision. They were lightning quick and repetitive, feeling so insistent, but he could not focus within the center of what was being shown. Pulled over and parked, Ray slowed his breathing and very deliberately poured another black coffee from the old Thermos he had taken along with him.

There the road remained strangely empty, with great silent expanses of acreage spreading outward in all directions save for scattered pockets of brush. With coffee in hand, he climbed down out of the cabin, walked around the front of the truck, and stood with his back to the passenger door. The expressive color tonality of his eyes would have appeared ethereal and dynamic to anyone sharing that space and time with him. Especially Jenny, he thought, letting his concentration slip aside for a moment as he roved the horizons of his soul; Saskatchewan. He was a man who loved mountains, Pacific rainforest, Alberta Badlands, but it was this flattened sky-domain that truly sang his heart.

The first long sip of strong coffee was accompanied by a brighter, clearer flash of what had been distracting him. This would later echo to a greater degree, several hundreds of miles to the east. It was a feeling and shimmery opaque visual of rain and windshield wipers from within a moving car. Dread... and something slippery helpless. It was gone before he could examine the emotions... this did not return until hours later.

For that moment, Ray stood in puzzlement and resisted a new urge to clench his entire self. A belly swollen cloud cover moved quickly across his prairie vista, though the temperature was pleasant enough to allow for a shirt and light jacket. Back to the distant horizon, facing northeast, he fixed those vivid eyes and felt his thoughts stray almost by necessity to the memory of some Cree poetry that one of his childhood friends had shared. The very edge of that recollection brought with it a rapid upswell of emotion.

The wind and his heart conspired to reawaken tears from their waiting place. Ray sipped again, allowed his eyes to gently spill. He remembered and spoke words from decades past. It was very similar to the experience of hearing a very old and favorite song, instantly summoning forth the memory of lyrics sweet. He found it interesting that the name of the friend who had taught him these poems could not be retrieved from the distance of his recollection.

“For a long time we thought this boy

loved only things that fell

straight down. He didn’t seem to care

about anything else.

We were afraid he could only HEAR

things that fell straight down!

We watched him stand outside

in rain. Later it was said

he put a tiny pond of rain water

in his wife’s ear

while she slept. And leaned over

to listen to it.

I remember he was happiest talking

about all the kinds of rain.

The kind that comes of heron’s wings

when they fly up from the lake. I know

he wanted some of that heron rain

for his wife’s ear too!

He walked out in Spring to watch

the young girls rub wild onion under their eyes

until tears came out.

He knew a name for that rain too.

Sad onion rain.

That rain fell straight down

too, off their faces,

and he saw it.”

He finished speaking and softly marveled at the simplistic beauty of Cree wisdom; its deep as blood connection to all within the domain of a Great Spirit. His early teenage years had been fraught with confusion and an urgent seeking for identity, not unlike any young person in the throes of imminent rampant change. Because Ray had been friends with so many native children, it became the most heartfelt resonance that he knew.

Their spiritual ties seemed to echo his own most private intuitions; a love of earth and sky. His burgeoning clairvoyance had felt so keenly to be an unbreakable tether to these very things; by fourteen he knew that his unusual abilities would be intended to heal, assist, bolster his sensitivity and compassion. To have a wife, he thought, with the residual of his voice still hanging there amidst the prairie gusts. He sipped the coffee again and could feel his thoughts splaying in all directions with the winds. With closed eyelids he swallowed and envisioned vibrant circular ripples of his essential energy, his life a pebble tossed quite specifically, in endless ripples that began compacted to flow outward with increasing circumference.

The every-hue rings of his being, racing across grass and tilled earth, picking up velocity, growing ever more vivid in all the color spectrums of possibility. He opened his eyes but did not see anything but what his mind had been viewing; for a moment there were countless versions of himself, perceivable if not “visible”, each one stopped in place to turn toward where he stood with his feet on Saskatchewan soil.

It was as close to out-of-body as Ray Townes had ever known. For a beautiful aching moment, the world lost its mathematics. Science and religion, politics and division; it all fell away into the kind of insignificance that a broader more attuned perspective will provide. What was kissing his face then, moving his hair, rattling the panels of his old pick-up truck; it surely brought him something ineffably comforting, even if eventually everything wasn’t going to be alright. One strand, one pathway, one of unknowable circumstance and outcome.

This was the now moment of Ray’s entire subjective life agenda. He thought of a wife not yet his, not in this lifetime perhaps. He thought of a large family home shared with tenants, and one that he would not be able to bequeath to Townes progeny. Then he thought of Jenny. Right there, in front of his footfalls and choices. Another Cree memory spoke from within his depths.

“Quiet Until The Thaw

Her name tells of how

it was with her.

The truth is, she did not speak

in winter.

Everybody learned not to

ask her questions in winter,

once this was known about her.

The first winter this happened

we looked in her mouth to see

if something was frozen. Her tongue

maybe, or something else in there.

But after the thaw she spoke again

and told us it was fine for her that way.

So each spring we

looked forward to that.”

His voice trailed off and he realized that the tears had ceased. Jenny had been there, for years of spiritual exile, in her own winter. He felt a spasm of caring for her then, intense enough to nearly double him over. With a shake of his head, Ray tipped the Thermos lid to empty its contents into roadside grasses before making his way back to the truck’s cabin. Prior to keying the ignition he impulsively reached into the medicine pouch, using his index finger to feel the feather. His back began to itch somewhat during the recitation of remembered poetry, all along the surface of his thunderbird tattoo. The day was continuing to echo in high strangeness. Potent significance. He wished that he had better slept. He wished that he had been spared the revelation of Melinda’s bedroom floor. He started the engine and wished that he had known his Cree father.

Into the early afternoon Ray drove. His mind becalmed by the ongoing mostly empty road and a thick weariness of body, he drove and simply remained open and receptive to whatever might arrive. He passed the region of Prince Albert and entered the final stretch of countryside that would then bend around North Battleford, taking him to his river winding place of beckoning. What thoughts he did have were practical and terse. It occurred to him that a call to the Saskatchewan Indian Culture Centre in Saskatoon might point him in the general direction of Delsin the Cree.

That idea was immediately supplanted by the astoundingly pure recognition that his blood was half First Nation. How the clarity of that had slipped his mind was both elusive and surprising. The tattoo had stopped itching by the time traffic picked up near Prince Albert. He thought then of the Viking runes that adorned his hands. The many types of dream catchers, stones, carvings and jewelry from various pagan beliefs. He had been on a lifelong vision quest, then? The ultimate chapter of his Ray Townes journey had been written expressly for this timing? It clicked into place, puzzle piece into puzzle piece notch; a seemingly reckless impulsive thunderbird tattoo that is in fact a blatant signal?

Not very long after these thoughts, Ray experienced a vivid episode of both foreshadowing and déjà vu, though it would take the passage of hours and many miles of distance to illustrate it. Firstly, when perhaps twenty minutes removed from where he would park next to the river, came an initial pelt of fat raindrops. They slanted across the windshield from left to right, spread far apart, landing with exaggerated splats. Ray slowed down and flicked on the wipers, feeling odd once again; tingly. Feeling peripheral.

He noted the diminished traffic that became only he and that narrow road. A thin band of tree line flanked each arc of the North Saskatchewan river here. The clouds seemed almost to touch down, but were not fog. It could easily have been contributed to emotional duress and a lack of quality sleep, but the road seemed suddenly fluid beneath his tires. It felt as though his truck hydroplaned. Slowing further, checking the rear view mirror, Ray silently cursed himself for deciding upon a day-long drive and sojourn... but he had been following his instincts, hadn’t he?

I am half Cree. His vision settled on a distant lump within the centre of roadway, just past a curve that ran left along the river. As he approached and through the lazy sideswipe of windshield wipers, he could see that the lump was moving. Delsin Schacapot. At perhaps two hundred yards, what would later clairvoyantly announce itself as foreshadowing became visually evident. Two mornings from now, I see Jenny again.

The movement of what lay ahead erupted into a scattering of two sets of wide wings when a pair of massive turkey vultures arose from their meal. Townes watched them lift off. They stayed relatively low and flew into the thin band of trees adjacent to the river. Within moments he was near the thing upon which they fed; an entire hind leg of a white-tailed deer. Nothing more. This being a route not usually used by truckers, whatever hit that animal must have sustained damage but was perhaps large enough to take the rest of the carcass with it. He saw a quick mental flash of a three-legged deer, hobbling away to die in the little ridge of forest.

“Oh, I hate seeing that” Ray spoke over raindrops, and with his words came the eruptive déjà vu.

It ignited a sensation of remembering but held no details. Within the ensuing minutes from its onset and waning, when he pulled off the road into a dirt path that would lead down to the river, the cold unsettling rush of almost being able to relive something not possibly his to know... had pooled behind his ribs. It hammered at his heart. These were the precognitive reflexes twitching, and it didn’t feel well within him. As never before in the mortal life of Ray Townes, this clairvoyant and benevolent human, his every molecule knew a taste of fear. As earlier, he killed the engine and forced himself under control. His watch was no liar. He looked at its battered face and found a comfort in the solid truth of it. Two hours and no more, or he would be driving back through rain

and darkness.