The Adventures of Flash Jackson Page 21

  “Grandma,” I whispered. “How old are you?”

  She didn’t smile this time. She just kept puffing on that pipe. I knew there must have been at least a little of the green stuff in there, because I was starting to get kind of drowsy. It was a fragrant smoke, feeling almost like fingers on my face, and I felt like stretching out just for a minute while she thought of an answer. I lay down, trying hard to keep my eyes open. I could hear her start talking, sounding as though she was very far away. She was explaining things to me in a way that made complete sense, though I understood little of what she actually said…her accent, her voice blending with the smoke from her pipe and from the stove, the warm, close air of the shack all conspired to befuddle me.

  She had come from far away, as a young girl, I heard her say. Yes, even she was young once! And she had been chased from her village because of the secrets she knew. They weren’t her secrets—she’d learned them from her mother, and she from her mother, and so on. But people had grown uneasy about it, for some reason, although things were not always so. Once, her line had been respected. They had had a role in the daily rhythm of life. But things changed, as things always change. So she’d fled, rather than be burned at the stake—which was the fate that had befallen her mother—and had walked for many months, until she came to the ocean. It was not an easy journey, but it was made less harsh by the fact that she knew how to keep herself from being seen, and that there were all kinds of good things to eat growing all around. Once at the coast—she didn’t even know where she was, only that she’d walked south and west—she waited until she met men she knew she could trust, small, dark-skinned, bright-eyed fishermen who told her of a place far out to sea where they could catch cod by the barrelful with almost no effort, and beyond that was more land.

  This was the New World, they said. None of them had set foot on it, but they knew it was there. They had learned of its existence from the blond-haired giants to the north, who had already been sailing there every year in their boats with dragon’s heads. The small, dark fishermen would take the girl there, they said—if she would keep them safe on the journey. For she had let them know what kind of person she was, and they knew she could help them with her magic. And she knew this New World was the place she had to go. It was calling her. Why, she didn’t know—but it didn’t matter. Why is not always important at the beginnings of things. It usually only becomes clear at the ends.

  And so she’d landed, some weeks or months later, on a strange shore where no European had yet set foot, and continued her journey southward and westward. There were people already there, also dark, people whose skin was the color of trees, but they understood that she was in search of something and meant them no harm, so they let her alone. She’d walked west and south as though pulled in that direction like a magnet, until she found the place she was looking for—a secret place, filled with some kind of energy, some kind of power. It had drawn her like a promise. She had always dreamed of such a place. You could do wonderful things with this energy, if only you learned how. So she would learn how to use it. And it would be her job to pass that knowledge on to whoever came to her in earnest, asking to know her secrets. And she knew that, while it wouldn’t make her live forever, she would be able to live a very, very long time, with the power of this place sustaining her—though she also knew this meant she could never leave.

  It was an old story. Who knew how many people had heard it before me? And I wasn’t the same person when I opened my eyes, and let them slowly focus on the ceiling. Something in me had changed. Had I been asleep? No, Grandma was still sitting there, smoke still spilling from the bowl of her pipe.

  She kept talking. Sometime long ago, Grandma had had a child, a girl. The identity of the father didn’t matter now. She didn’t even remember who it was. Grandma—I would keep calling her that, though now it seemed like a woefully inadequate term—had trained that girl, and that girl had gone out in the world. Whether she was supposed to go, or whether Grandma had meant for her to stay, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell whether it had disappointed her or not. Then that girl had had a daughter, maybe only one, maybe many, maybe some sons too—and that girl had come back to the woods to be trained. Then she in turn had sent her daughter, and so on and so on. And this was the way it had been done, with the old lady creating a circle of slow time around her, drawing her life out as gently and slowly as possible. She was not a secret—she was only there for those who wanted her to be there, who needed her. The rest of the world need not concern themselves with what was going on in the woods. And she did not concern herself with the rest of the world, either.

  The only question which remained in my mind now was this: What, exactly, was she teaching? And how did I fit into this line?

  As if she had worn herself out by talking too much, Grandma once again fell silent, and remained silent for days, and then weeks. That was fine with me. I had plenty to think about, and I didn’t want to distract myself with conversation. With our food already provided for us, and the weather growing steadily worse, I had nothing to do but sit and ponder and watch her. Entire days passed when I scarcely left the shack at all. Snow fell almost every day, gradually sealing us into our little mud cave. Grandma had developed the art of meditation to the point where she could remain immobile for hours, eyes shut, back stiff, hardly breathing—it was as if she put herself into a state of suspended animation, sleeping when the earth slept and waiting patiently for it to wake up one more time. I tried to do it too, but it was hard. I got better at it with time, but remaining immobile for so long hurt my back muscles, and sometimes my mind would race frantically, spinning its wheels like a car stuck in mud. At these moments I would grow almost insane with boredom. Then I would look at her again, and the sight of her would calm me—If she can do it, I would think, then that means it’s possible, and I can do it too. The only sounds were the steady rhythm of Grandma’s breathing, and the occasional pop as a knotty piece of wood exploded in the stove. Our appetites seemed to decrease with our level of activity, so that on some days I would take only a few mouthfuls of food, other days none at all—only a little water. Chester Burgess had brought a lot of canned goods, fruit and vegetables and so on, and we heated these up by setting them on the stove until they were warm and ate them with spoons. I ate hardly anything, and yet I was never very hungry. Something else was nourishing me, almost from the inside, as it were. Something about where I was was keeping me alive.

  We really were hibernating. And even in this kind of silence and stillness, I was learning. Just by watching her be, I learned.

  After more weeks passed, we developed a different rhythm. Grandma appeared to rouse herself from her constant trances, as though all that sitting still had been a preparation for something, and we fell into another routine. She would explain things to me, about this or that herb, this or that flower—more of the same things I’d learned with her that fall. Gradually, these lessons in simple botany and herbalism gave way to conversations of a much more mystical nature. Grandma knew secrets.

  Here is where I have to draw the curtain—since I also made a promise that I would not teach anything to anyone who was not ready to be initiated, who had not given me clear signs that she was ready to study the natural arts. These things are none of anyone’s business. What I can say about them is this: There is such a thing as magic in the world, and if you don’t know that, it’s because you’ve decided not to know, not because you haven’t seen it. You have seen it—all of us have seen it. Maybe you just didn’t believe it because it scared you. Entirely possible. Nobody’s fault.

  Yet the one thing I still didn’t understand was what it was about the place that was special. Grandma never explained it to me. She freely admitted that the power of this place wasn’t hers to keep—it was not something that could be transported. Maybe it was the water, she said. Maybe it was the rocks. When she had come here, the “Tree People”—whom I took to be Indians—had a ceremonial site near this very place. So they
had known about it, too.

  Come to think of it, she said, it probably was the trees themselves. That was why the people named themselves after the trees. If the trees were to be cut down, the place would lose its power. But she didn’t worry about that happening. Grandma knew that all around her, civilization had encroached on almost every quiet spot. She knew cities had sprung up all over the place, that entire forests had disappeared, never to be replaced. But she said that this place would never be raped of its solitude. No people would ever come here except those who were seeking it out. Not even the “bad boys” who pillaged her marijuana patch from time to time were here to rob this place of its essence; they were not intentionally desecrating it. They were looking for something too, only they didn’t know it, and they were too busy daring each other into acts of foolish bravery to pay attention to what their hearts already knew: that they were walking on holy ground.

  “Bet boys,” said Grandma, shaking her head. “Bet, bet boys. But dey look for somesink. Dey vant to learn. Someday—maybe. Maybe no. Maybe dey stay bet.” She shrugged, pulling her mouth down into a frown, the line of her lips becoming indistinguishable from the crevices that ran across her face like fault lines.

  Winter, usually the slowest season of all, passed purposefully along. I hardly stirred from the shack except to do my business outside and to gather snow for water. When I did exit, I stood for a long while with my eyes shut, adjusting to the glare, taking deep breaths of the clear air. It may sound strange, but I was getting better at breathing; I mean breathing like I meant it, aware of every molecule of blessed air that passed into my lungs, mixing with my blood and coursing through my body. Just this simple act could occupy my attention for an hour.

  It was a long, bitter, cold winter, but it didn’t bother me. I loved the silence of it, and the white.

  Sometimes memories of Frankie would come galloping up to me and thrust themselves in my face, demanding to be recognized. Anything could trigger them. Now it was snow—he and I used to have fierce snowball fights. My favorite thing to do was to peg him when he was leaning out his spying window, because he was never expecting it. He would shriek with rage, come down and rub my face in it. Sometimes, when he forgot himself, he was strong—much stronger than me. But he never hurt me, or any other living thing on this planet.

  Ah, poor Franks, I thought.

  Because I loved him. I did.

  Before I knew it most of the season had passed. We had no visitors and did not celebrate Christmas. We celebrated something else, and I had the distinct impression it was a holiday a lot older than Christmas—but that was one thing I didn’t learn much about, because Grandma didn’t go into detail. Mostly she chanted over an armful of evergreen branches. But none of it was explained to me, and when it was over she threw the branches on the fire, and we were nearly smoked out.

  About halfway into January the weather seemed to ease up some. The cold lessened and we didn’t get any more snow for a while. Not that it would have mattered by then, since we already had so much—a total of maybe five feet had fallen, and none of it had melted. Maybe in town it would have been swept up and gotten rid of by now, but out here in the woods it was settling in under its own weight, gradually acquiring the gentle inscriptions left by rodents and birds. Snow in the woods reads like a diary of every minor drama that has taken place there in preceding days. Here are the tracks of four little feet skittering along, then suddenly stopping where the creature sat up, sniffing, sensing danger—what? Everything all right? Okay then, but suddenly there’s a big swoosh! where an owl’s wings have stirred the surface like a helicopter’s prop wash, and that’s the end of one more mouse. Or rabbit. Or, hopefully, snake—but of course snakes didn’t have feet. Maybe if they had, I could have related to them a bit more.

  One day Grandma asked me what my intentions were as far the future was concerned. Did I want to stay with her? she asked. She still had never paid me a single compliment, never told me I was a quick study or a good student. Sometimes she tested me, asking me obscure questions about something she’d told me weeks before—and I always answered correctly, because by this time I’d opened my mind completely to her teachings, resisting nothing. But there was no sign from her that I’d done a good job. Yet one day in what must have been February she gave me the look that meant she was about to ask me a difficult question, and she from her side of the shack fixed me with her sharp eyes, and said: “Vat you do?”

  Typically understated, it took me a moment to decipher what she was talking about. What was I doing? What would I do? What did I do? Grandma only had command of one tense, the present—you had to fill in the blanks yourself. I took this to be referring to the future, that is: What do you plan to do with yourself?

  “When?” I asked.

  “Spring,” she said. “Stay? Go?”

  I sat looking back at her, directly into her eyes. This no longer made me uncomfortable. Sometimes we communicated solely in this way, for minutes on end.

  “Vat you want?” she asked, after a while. “Vat you neet?”

  “A theater,” I said.

  It wasn’t often I could surprise her, but I did this time. She blinked in mild astonishment and let a smile flicker briefly across the topography of her face, like a small earthquake.

  “Eh?” she said.

  “I want to build a theater,” I said. “For people to come to. Where they can tell their stories.”

  “Hm,” she said.

  She did not speak again for some time—hours later, when dark had fallen and we were preparing to go to sleep, she said:

  “Vy?”

  I was lying on my back on my little bed, looking up at the ceiling. Without looking at her, I said, “I made a promise to Frankie.”

  “Frankie?”

  “The guy who…you know, Frankie? Next door. Frankie Grunveldt.”

  “Boy who die?”

  “That’s the one,” I said, though I knew I hadn’t told her about Frankie’s death—nor had anyone else. Things like this no longer surprised me about her. It wasn’t that she was psychic, exactly. I had the impression that all the news of our part of the world was brought to her by the trees, that she could interpret the sound of the wind in the branches and know with near certainty everything that had happened nearby.

  “Vell,” she said, and that was all she had to say about that. We didn’t discuss it again, but I had the sense that something had been decided for her. She had wanted to know if I intended to stay there for the rest of my days, studying and learning. But I didn’t want to. It would have been a farce. I had needed to spend this time with her, but I didn’t see myself becoming an old lady of the woods like herself. I belonged in the world. I belonged around people. I had come out here to heal myself, and now that had mostly been accomplished—the pain of Frankie’s death had receded to a dull ache, then to a minor soreness. Now it hurt only if I chose to make it hurt, like a loose tooth that you prod with your tongue. I would always carry it, it would always be part of me—but that was better than me being a part of it.

  “You mad at me?” I asked her at some point. “Do you want me to stay?”

  She shook her head, squinting at me through her pipe smoke—plain old tobacco this time. I found myself wondering when, in the preceding centuries, she had taken up smoking, and who had taught it to her.

  “You know vat you do,” she said, pointing her pipe stem at me. “Not me.”

  Which was, when I thought about it, probably the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.

  More weeks passed, and the vernal equinox was only days away—the first day of spring, the day when the earth tilts ever so slightly towards the sun again, like a jilted lover consenting to try it one more time. The sun was beginning to make regular appearances, and after months of gray and darkness let me tell you it was about the most welcome sight of my whole life. My skin had become pure white from spending all that time inside, and I was so weak from inactivity it was all I could do to traipse over to
the creek through what snow remained to gather buckets of fresh running water. The good news was that my leg had been totally healed. Once I got back up to speed, I was pretty sure I could run on it again like nothing had ever happened. I couldn’t wait to try.

  There was another ceremony the night that spring was reborn, again one that I could sense had been repeated time out of mind, since long before Grandma herself walked the earth. Since I understood so little of it, I won’t go into it here—except to say that Grandma chanted and sang in a language I’d never heard her speak before, one that sounded ancient. Maybe this was one of the advanced lessons, something she’d learned from her own mother, who had learned it in turn from the forest people back where they came from. Once, she’d told me, forest people lived everywhere.

  After she’d carried on for a while she produced her special bowl, the simple clay one that she kept hidden in a corner of the shack, and made me go to the stream and fill it. This was one of the things I’d been learning about, and believe it or not most of it was pretty simple. The first step was in learning how to fill it completely full and walk back to the shack without spilling a single drop. Once I had developed the concentration necessary to pull that off, I was judged ready to learn the rest—but it had taken me days just to get to the point where I could do even that. It took forever, walking slowly, holding it level. By now I understood that the whole point of it was to teach me to focus. It took almost twenty minutes to reach the shack walking that slow, and once I made it I was already in a deep state of concentration, which was of course the whole point of making me do it.

  I set the bowl in front of her, going into a low, deep bow as I did so. Then I sat down on my side of the shack and folded my legs under me. Grandma leaned over the bowl and looked down into the water, mumbling under her breath. This had become a matter of routine by now. There was no longer anything about this process that mystified me. It would be years before I was expert at it, of course. It still took me a long time to quiet my mind enough to see into the water. Grandma could do it within mere moments. Now she was doing it on my behalf—scanning the depths, as it were, to see what the future might hold. She had no need of mirrors, or any of the other accoutrements that I had used the first time I’d tried it, back at home. I would almost venture to say she didn’t even need the bowl of water either.