"Go wait on the front porch. You need to pray and center yourself, and I need to gather my things. Our breakfast can wait."
I sighed. I had a feeling I wasn't going to get nourishment any time soon. Center myself, she said. Something about that thought raised my hackles, and I didn't know why. I was centered. I was always centered. Whatever the heck that meant.
Around front, I dropped down on the porch and waited as the sky began to brighten from the darkest blue of night to the bleak charcoal of early dawn. I was hungry and tired and sleepy. And annoyed, not that I'd let Aggie see that.
Faster than I expected, Aggie opened the front door and walked out, no lights on inside, which preserved her night vision. In the dark, she placed a small black cloth bag on the step and sat beside me with a stretch and a yawn, her manner grave, until she met my eyes. Hers took on a twinkle as if she could see the orneriness squirming beneath my skin. I pressed my lips together to keep from saying something crass and she chuckled softly. I wanted to make claws of my hands, but gripped them together around my knees instead, the knuckles white.
Aggie's expression went from amusement to compassion, which somehow made me madder. And again, I didn't know why. She patted my clasped hands as if to say, "Take your medicine, little girl. It won't taste bad," which surely was a lie. She then began to explain the ritual of going to water, offering explanations on its purpose, and instructing me in my part, as if I was really going to do this.
My aggravation grew until I was grinding my back molars. And I had no idea why I was so irritated. Angry. Whatever. When she paused I said, "So, to put it simply, we throw up, talk to God, and then go for a swim. In a bayou that's full of all sorts of things. Snakes. Twenty-pound rats. And alligators."
Aggie laughed, the sound like water burbling over stones, her face creased into smile wrinkles that otherwise didn't show. "Pretty much. There are ritual prayers, but I can walk you through them."
I was used to doing my praying in church, but somehow this felt natural too.
"Usually women don't have to purge," Aggie continued, "but you are a warrior woman, and my mother and I agree that you must go to water as a man would, at least this first time. After, you will be cleansed inside and out; your spirit will be open, and restored. You will be ready for battle or pain or difficulty, and you will be without the shadows of the past that darken your soul. Come. Sun's getting ready to rise, and going to water is best done at dawn." Aggie stood and reached back to the house, opening the door. From the darkness within, an old woman tottered out, Aggie One Feather's mother. Maybe I was dense, but I hadn't realized that the older woman would be joining us.
I bowed my head to her and murmured, "U ni lisi, grandmother of many children." It was a term of greatest respect.
Her hair was braided down to her hips, the thin tresses black as a raven's wing brightened with rare white strands. She nodded once to me and blinked into the dark, leading the way to the car parked in the yard, a little four-wheel-drive Toyota barely seen in the unlit driveway. Chattering in Cherokee, she climbed into the backseat and buckled herself in, her actions certain and determined. I looked at Aggie, but she was too busy following her ancient mother's orders to notice my dismay. Now I had two lisi to deal with, and it was clear whose word held sway. Elder Grandmother's.
Unable to figure out a way to avoid the ritual, and not knowing why I was feeling so stubborn, I climbed in the front passenger seat. Aggie drove us out of the cul-de-sac and down a series of shell roads, white in the dawn light. Unpaved roads in the Delta states were often covered with crushed shell, and the farther we drove, the sparser the shells on the roadway became until we were on a two-track trail, the car bouncing into and out of potholes and over washboard ruts.
She gunned the engine like a wannabe dirt-track racer, skewing around curves between ever-closer trees, the dark world bouncing in the headlights, which didn't help the state of my nerves or the condition of my hunger. Like the woman in the backseat, who seemed familiar with Aggie's driving, I held on with both hands while my stomach growled and cramped with hunger and Beast pressed paws into my consciousness, kneading, her way of offering comfort. Why did I need comfort?
The old women laughed and chattered as Aggie drove, including me in the conversation from time to time, mostly instructions about the ritual to come, and I wasn't certain whether I was growing happier about what we were going to do or more uncomfortable.
"The old beliefs say that a Great Creator made us," Aggie said as she spun the car around a hundred-twenty-degree curve and back in a graceless swerve. "There was a split in beliefs generations ago, I think influenced by Christians, with some saying the Creator still was listening to us and some saying he had gone back to the Great One, or possibly somewhere creating other worlds, and had left three guardians to watch over us."