"Then I will take you to sweat. And afterward, if you are ready, I will take you to water." The words were similar to the traditional words of the shaman, the tribal helpers. Shamans and elders would assist, free of charge, any who asked, even the white man, for healing ceremonies, council, or more practical help.
Today, Aggie One Feather was hoping to bring me into contact with my true self, my spirit self, to steer me on the road to spiritual healing. And though I had not told her what I was, she knew bits and pieces of my story; perhaps she had guessed much more. I was hoping she could help me find the child that I once had been, so very long ago. Before Beast. Before I lost my memories. Before the hunger times, which I remembered only vaguely. Before I was found wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of human language. Finding her here in New Orleans shouldn't have been a surprise--the People lived all over the States--but it still felt like one of the weird coincidences the universe tossed my way occasionally. Since it brought me closer to learning about my past, this time it was a welcome one.
Aggie lifted a stoneware pitcher of water and a long wooden ladle, which were ready on a table by the door. Both items looked like traditional Cherokee ware, and though I tended to have very few possessions, I suddenly wanted to own a pitcher and ladle like them. I curled my fingers in, to keep from stroking the pitcher, as she led the way outside and around back.
The sweat lodge was a low wood hut with a metal roof, located at the back of the property, hidden in the drooping limbs of trees. The smell of wood smoke was strong here, and wisps of smoke, nearly invisible in the pale half-light, wafted from a circular opening in the very center of the roof. I stood beside the doorway, watching as Aggie stripped off her jeans and T and draped them over a wood hook on the outside wall. Naked, she wrapped a coarsely woven cotton cloth around her and tied the overlapped ends above her breasts. Covered from underarms to knees, she entered the lodge. Heat blasted out. The door swung silently shut.
There were a dozen such hooks, each with its white covering, similar to Aggie's, some long, some shorter. Feeling oddly uncomfortable, I stripped and tied a makeshift robe around me, leaving my clothes on a second peg and my boots against the wall. The covering was dry, and must have been hung since Ada passed. My hair was still in a fighting queue, tight to my head. I left it that way. Barefoot, I stared at the door. I had been all around the lodge in cat and human form, but this was the first time I would go inside.
I put a palm on the rough plank door and pushed gently. The darkness inside reached out to me, warm and solid. Holding the door open with one hand, I stepped in, ducking my head to avoid hitting it on the low door header and roof supports. My bare feet stepped on a hard-packed clay floor, level with the outside ground.
A memory came, unbidden, of another sweat lodge, this one with a long step down into the dark, the floor scooped out, flat and smooth inside, but a foot deeper in the ground. A single snapshot-type memory. Then it was gone. But the vision left me with a calmness that settled against my skin like the scented dark of the lodge.
Without asking, I knew that the floor of this sweat lodge had not been dug out because the water table was so high here. Water would have collected in any depression.
I released the door and it closed behind me. Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded me, steam rising from red coals and heated rocks piled in the center of the small hut. Beast yawned deep inside and settled herself in my mind. She liked the warmth.
I stood hunched over, my head brushing the roof supports, letting my eyes adjust. The fire was built on a low bed of rocks, other rocks ringing it. It had been burning a long time, long enough for the heat to feel alive and powerful, as if she had known I would come today. Around the fire were low seats made from logs that had been shaped and rounded for sitting. Aggie was on a log on the far side of the fire, her eyes on the coals, her hands busy in a basket beside her. There were other baskets woven from grasses, each with a woven lid hiding its contents. The pitcher was on the ground beside her, the ladle inside.