This Good Land

Sparks floated lazily above the fire as the twilight blue sky slowly turned black. Surrounded by our children, their little ones nestled in their arms, I felt the hard-earned contentment of old age.

My life might have ended much differently. I never followed a fixed pathway or dared imagine a happy future. My life in the world from before was too hardscrabble for idle dreams. I was content to sit in silence, the crackle of the fire and the crash of the waves upon the sand ample reward for a life well-lived. But the little ones had waited in obedient silence long enough. Tell us the story, grandpa, our eldest grandson pleaded. Tell us the story of your travels through the dead lands again.

I smiled as their faces beamed hopefully in the light of the dancing flames. Gesturing at the sky as it darkened, the night’s first stars beginning to appear, I spoke softly, the little ones straining at every word.

Imagine a sky dark with clouds that never rain, I began. Imagine a river filled with water that you cannot drink.

The youngest, having never heard the tale, shook their little heads in disbelief. They had known only abundance and fresh water. They could not imagine the blackened remains of trees lining the river’s banks in the dead lands, or underbrush bent under the weight of its own rot.

I tried to describe the radiation suits that we wore before passing the red warning sign telling us to turn back or die, but my youngest granddaughter interrupted.

What is raydeeayshun? she asked.

I told her that in the dead lands radiation makes people sick and die, but to her it sounded like Bad Juju and she told me so with a disapproving frown on her face.

Nuclear fallout is part of my history but thankfully not hers.

It was very Bad Juju, I agreed. But we didn’t know how far we needed to travel to escape it and wore the suits as a protective charm.

After the first few hours we stopped hearing the birds. Even the flies that had followed us for days disappeared after we passed the red warning sign. As the sun set that first night, I believed that my companion and I were the only living things in that terrible place. After traveling for a day and a night our Geiger counter still chattered angrily every time my companion turned it on.

When my granddaughter made another face, I whispered – It’s a Bad Juju finder. The younger grandchildren giggled till the eldest shushed them.

My companion was a member of a ruling clan. Spoiled and lazy, he complained about the food, he whined about the cold at night and gasped and groaned like an old man in the heat of the day. He refused to paddle even though it would have made the trip go more quickly if we had worked together. After three days of his “I’m better than this” outbursts I began to dream of tossing him in the river.

When I first met him, he bragged of the honor he would receive from his clan on his successful return. But as the days slowly passed, and the terror of the journey began to taunt his dream of greatness, he spoke less and less of his hopes. A sense of his own doom began to take hold.

On the last day in the dead lands, he lay in the bottom of the canoe moaning, rocking back and forth with his arms tightly wrapped around his chest. To have killed him then would have been a mercy. But I was exhausted from paddling, hungry and thirsty, as well as fearful that the dead lands might never end. I continued stroking the paddle firmly through the water, the canoe gliding across the dark water arrow-straight long after both my arms had gone numb. As the daylight began to fade that evening, the Bad Juju detector finally went silent, and I turned the boat toward the nearest shore and beached it.

After dragging it onto the bank with what little strength remained, I staggered to a dry patch of ground and collapsed. For the first time in my life, I made no effort to set up camp or take any actions to protect it. I fell asleep when my head hit the ground. But when I awakened with a start hours later, I was surprised to see stars once I wiped the sleep from my eyes. The hairs rising on the back of my neck, the terror of the surrounding unknown briefly overwhelmed me until I remembered the dream that awakened me.

I had walked deep into a wild wood, the trees surrounding me so tall and heavy with leaves that the sun did not reach the woodland floor. A short-eared owl landed on a branch a few paces before me. But each time I approached him, he flew to another tree and landed where I could see him. Following him as he flew from tree to tree, I continued to walk through the wild wood as if he guided me. My mother taught me that our ancestors’ spirits will sometimes give warnings or guidance using revelations in the night or in our dreams, so I was anxious to learn what I should do.

But as I approached the edge of the wood, he flew up into the trees, my eyes following him until he disappeared into the leafy overstory. Beyond the trees, sugar cane grew as far as my eyes could see. I had never witnessed anything larger than a small family garden in my life and could not imagine that such plenty existed anywhere in the whole world. I heard a voice call out of the cane field as if the Earth itself spoke in the elder tongue, the music of its voice so rich and sweet that tears filled my eyes. It was at that moment that I awoke.

When I first awakened, I feared the strangeness of my surroundings. But once I fully remembered the dream and the beautiful voice calling out from the land, I feared it no longer. My heart began to understand in that moment what took my mind several weeks to fully comprehend. Closing my eyes, I felt buoyed by hope for the first time in my life.

The following day seemed even more dreamlike. Although the water that morning was still murky and the opposing banks littered with rotten wood, by midafternoon the river had begun to clear, and marsh grasses appearing at its edges.

By the time the sun began to set, both sides of the river were covered in tall pines and the water teamed with fish. After beaching the boat, I speared a few and cooked them in a pan with acorn flower and a handful of herbs. It was the first meal that my companion ate without complaint.

That night I laid awake a long time. I truly believed that we had found the land prophesied by our ancestors. I had never seen any place so alive as this one. But I also knew that my companion’s hope of returning with the good news was a lark, however strongly I wished to believe it. I had paddled through the dead lands for three days and a night moving with the current. If we had found the good land, I knew we would never return alive to tell it.

Even assuming my companion was capable of doing anything other than whining, we could never make the same trip against the current. The river would beat us like everyone else who had attempted the same. It made me wonder how many of those who came before us had found the good land and never attempted to return at all.

The next morning it rained, large individual drops at first, warm with promise. Then it came down in heavy, lashing sheets. Stripping off my clothes, I stood naked in the downpour as the sky flashed and roared, years of grime and filth streaming off my flesh. My companion huddled beneath a pine, paralyzed with terror.

When the storm ended, I waded into the river and used its water to finish the cleansing the rain had started. I wore only a hunting knife strapped to my back and a Corie necklace my mother had given me as a child. As birds sang in the surrounding pines and the sun shone through a break in the clouds above me, a sense of deep peace overcame me. I stood unmoving in the river in quiet contemplation for a long time till my companion’s rasping voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Get your things, we’re leaving.”

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I thought but did not say. I did not even turn to answer him.

“Did you hear me?’

“Do as you like,” I said over my shoulder, before diving into the water and beginning to swim lazily down-river.

“Have you forgotten who I am?” he yelled angrily from the bank.

‘Have you forgotten where you are?’ I thought with a smile.

I alternated between swimming and floating on my back for a long time. I felt that fortune had smiled upon me for the first time in my hard life. The further I drifted from the bank where I beached the canoe, the freer I felt.

The sun rode high in the sky before I finally swam to the opposite riverbank and left the water. I strolled through the surrounding trees, the ground beneath my feet soft with layers of rot, the sunlight pleasantly warm upon my back. Eventually I entered a glade where a doe and two fawn’s nibbled the surrounding grass. The doe looked up at me but did not bolt. She returned to her feeding as if I represented no threat at all. Naked and armed only with a knife, I could not have hurt her even if I had wanted.

But the further I walked through the trees, the more I connected it with the wild wood from my dream. Although I half-expected it, the owl did not appear to guide me. Much like the dream, however, I eventually arrived at the wood’s edge, the path that I followed coming to an abrupt halt before a field of sugar cane. In the distance I could see women working in the cane field. It was only then that I realized that people already live in the good land. My heart sank.

We had no claim here, no clan. They would kill us or drive us out. The sudden realization of the precariousness of my situation caused my hands to involuntarily tremble. I knew now why no one who had braved the dead lands had ever returned to tell the tale.

As I ran frantically back toward the river, I imagined the worst. I saw in my mind’s eye raiders attacking our camp, destroying our canoe and taking our weapons and equipment, all hope of escaping this place lost forever. I imagined my companion feathered with arrows and bleeding out by the shore. Before I saw the cane, I had not cared whether he lived or died, but the thought of facing this threat alone seemed worse than attempting a return through the dead lands with him.

When I finally reached the shore where I had beached the canoe the night before it was already gone. Everything was gone. My clothes, bow and quiver, fishing spear were all gone. I could see where my companion had dragged the boat back into the river, his footprints backing into the water before disappearing. I was stranded in a strange land naked and all alone.

What did you do, grandpa? my granddaughter asked.

I climbed a tree, I replied with a smile.

Climbed a tree?

A very tall tree. From its heights, I searched the horizon for a place to hide where I could see warriors coming before they saw me. The sun had already dipped below the horizon by the time I reached the top of the hill that I spied from the tree. Just beyond the hill’s crest an old hunting lodge covered in vines and tucked into the surrounding trees stood in defiance of time. The door had long since broken off its hinges and mice scampered away when I stepped into the old building.

Miraculously, it had an iron potbellied stove in its center, still loaded with dry kindling. Gathering pine needles, I placed them atop the wood and began striking the flint I found on the stove with the blade of my hunting knife until the sparks lit the needles and gently blew on them to encourage the kindling to ignite. Once the kindling began burning hotly, I closed the stove, the heat radiating outwards warming the room.

I found an old blanket inside a chest of drawers and sat in front of the stove with it wrapped around me. Although I don’t remember lying down, at some point I fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke I was no longer alone. Sitting up in alarm, I stared blinking at a young woman, her features palely lit by the moon as it shone through the open doorway. Her eyes gazed intently out of a blood red mask, her hair and flesh white as ash. From each of her ears hung golden cories on thin gold chains. They were nearly identical in size and color to the cories strung on my own necklace.

“Your friend left with the canoe,” she said. “But he won’t get far.”

“Why not?” I asked, fear creeping into my voice.

“Can’t paddle. Couldn’t keep the canoe straight. He kept running into the banks. Almost flipped it over.”

“Is anyone following him?” I asked nervously.

She knitted her brow in confusion. “Why would anyone follow him?”

It was all very strange. When the members of one clan passed secretly into another clan’s territory, there was always a price to pay. Since she wore the same clan decorations as me, why wouldn’t that be true here?

But after several moments of awkward silence, she changed the subject. “Mind if I sit with you? I’m getting cold.”

“Not at all.” I wrapped part of the blanket around her as she sat, her shoulder pressed against mine. “Is this Corie Clan territory?” I asked.

“No … Lightning Clan,” she answered softly.

“Why do you wear the golden cories?”

“They were my grandmother’s. When she was a girl, the Corie and Lightning Clans were rivals. She was the youngest daughter of the Corie Clan chieftain and was exchanged for the youngest daughter of the Lightning Clan chieftain. Its sometimes used to enforce a peace.

“Did she return to her clan?”

“No. When she came into her womanhood, she married a member of the Lightning Clan. Before she died, she gave the cories to my mother and then she passed them on to me.” She lifted her right hand from her lap and surprised me by fingering one of the cories in my necklace. “Are you Corie Clan?”

Her fingers slipped from the shell and rested softly on my skin. The intimacy of the gesture surprised me, and I almost forgot that she had asked me a question. “Yes,” I finally answered.

Resting her head on my shoulder, she whispered “I’m sleepy.” I laid down on my back and she moved her head to my chest. I felt her breath, slow and steady, tickling my skin, my last thoughts before surrendering to my own sleepiness, that I desired her at my side forever.

In the morning I awoke alone, the blanket tightly wrapped around me as if the woman that visited me in the night was no more than a dream. Searching the lodge in the light of day I located a pair of pants in a drawer and put them on before stepping outside to see if the woman was nearby or just a figment of my imagination. Instead, I saw a broad chested man with arms crossed standing in the clearing as if waiting for me.

Gazing at my necklace he said, “Corie Clan,” as if a statement of fact rather than a question and I simply nodded. “You need to come with me.”

I thought about making a run for it, but I figured – correctly as it turned out – that he was not alone. Instead, I followed him out of the clearing and into the woods on almost the same route I had taken the afternoon before. When we arrived at the river, three canoes were beached a short distance from where I had beached my own when my companion and I had first arrived.

The trip downriver seemed to take hours, but other than the men in the canoes, I did not see any other people until we arrived at our destination. My captors ignored me. Unfortunately, this gave me plenty of time to imagine the worst. Their actions seemed so routine that I wondered how often others crossed the deadlands and were rounded up by their patrols.

I began hearing voices well before the Clan lodges appeared in the wood line surrounding the narrow beach. Several outrigger canoes rested on the sand. In the distance, an outrigger entered the inlet between two narrow strips of palm line beaches at the edge of the cove and headed toward the beach. On the boats that had already pushed ashore, men were carrying nets teaming with fish to the lodge nearest the landing. Everywhere people laughed and shouted to one another, all of them unanimous in their lack of interest in the raggedy man captured on the edge of their clan territory.

My captors brought me to a meeting lodge, set high upon stilts, where I sat waiting for God knows what. Much like the journey down river, the wait was far longer than I would have hoped. Even the key leadership of the clan seemed disinterested in my story or determining what to do with me. The sun had begun its downward journey toward the western horizon before a pair of boys brought me something to drink and eat. But fear had robbed me of my appetite. I tried to remain calm, but in truth, I was terrified.

The chieftain arrived with his guards once the sun had dipped below the horizon and I was bade to stand and bow. He gazed calmly at me without speaking, his eyes starring at my face and moving slowly downward to the raggedy pants that I wore. “You passed through the deadlands,” he said flatly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not alone, I think?”

“No. I was acting as a guide.”

“Where is your companion?”

“Attempting to return through the dead lands.”

“Why did he leave you?”

I sighed. Why I answered as I did, I still do not understand. “This land does not suit him.”

He rubbed his chin as if trying to make a decision. “But it suits you.”

“It chose me,” I said simply.

“What if I do not choose you,” he said wryly.

I shrugged. “That’s not something I can control.”

“Give me the golden cories that you wear around your neck and you can stay as long as you like.

“Command me to fight your enemies, give me only menial tasks, tell me to bow before your Gods. All these I will gladly do. But I cannot dishonor my ancestors by giving you what was given to me by my mother on her death bed.”

“I could take it by force.”

“You could. I would gladly fight man-to-man with a champion of your choosing and in doing so maintain my honor. I have done so twice already and still wear the necklace. But if threatened with many warriors I would surrender the cories with my honor intact.”

“But I would surrender mine with the theft?”

I dared not answer and so remained silent.

“Every member of the clan has sworn to fight our enemies, and none are too proud to work the meanest of tasks. But if you choose not to give me the cories in exchange for the right to swear your allegiance to the lightning, you can stay only if you marry a woman that I choose for you.

“How can I support a wife? My canoe was taken by my companion along with my fishing spear and hunting bow. Let me prove myself worthy first and then choose me a wife.”

Although he smiled, I could see the irritation in the tightness of his jaw. He gestured to one of the guards and a few moments later the woman in question was led into the meeting lodge. It was the same red-faced woman who I had dreamed of the night before, but with her eyes cast downward as if fearing to meet my curious gaze.

“Her father and mother are dead,” said the chieftain in a tone that brooked no further contention or interruption. She has inherited their lodge and garden. She inherited her parents’ voyaging canoe and is as accomplished a wayfarer as any in our clan. You are an outsider and a member of a tribe with a long history as an enemy of our people. I do not owe you any consideration at all. Take her as your wife and consider it a very great fortune at the behest of the Lightning Clan or return to whence you came.

“I will take her as my wife,” I said, resisting the smile filling my insides. Save for the blood red tatoo that began just below her eyes and disappeared in her hairline, she was even whiter than the woman I had witnessed in my dream. I learned later that people believed she was a ghost that walked among men. Perhaps that is how she was able to even enter my dreams.

Is that true gran’ma? our eldest grandson asked. Did you enter gran’pa’s dream … or did you meet him in the hunting lodge? He asked her cheekily.

My wife stared at our grandson in mock horror. Now you know your gran’ma would never do such a wicked thing, she said indignantly.

It was then that I noticed that our youngest granddaughter had dozed off and I knew I had lost my audience.

Thanks for the story, dad, my son said as he stood, but it’s getting late and the children need their rest.

I never get to finish the story, I thought with a sigh. But once we had the beach to ourselves, my wife leaned her head on my shoulder. This dream that you had, she chided me, why do you always leave out the best bits?

How would you know? I replied, it was my dream not yours.

She tweaked my nose. Come on old man, it’s time we got some rest, too.

The following morning, my wife led me to our voyaging canoe, now fully outfitted for an ocean journey. Looking at the sea with longing in her eyes, she asked me, Do you remember our first voyage?

I will never forget it, I replied simply. But you and I are old and the seas are dangerous.

They are always dangerous. They were dangerous when we journeyed our first time together and you were only a novice wayfarer. Your no novice now.

I’d try to talk you out of it, but I know better. And you know damn well that I would follow you anywhere. But that doesn’t make this a good idea.

Think of the story you can tell the grandchildren when we return!

I smiled my assent and she hugged me tightly.

Our children and grandchildren gathered to say goodbye. Our daughters wept as if we would not return and even our son’s eyes were wet with concern. They helped us push the canoe into the water.

The winds were favorable that morning, quickly filling the sail. Soon we were skimming rapidly across the water of the cove and rapidly approaching the inlet leading to the ocean. My wife’s eyes gleamed with joy, for a brief moment her youthful beauty reappearing as she maneuvered the canoe into the choppy ocean waves. That’s how I like to remember us.