I opened my eyes and looked up into the pine tree tops for the owls. If they were there, they were hidden by the gray light. The spider legs crawled faster and I shivered. I really didn't like not seeing the owls. Not at all. I closed the baggie and dusted my hands.
My stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. The tingly feeling still coursed through me, slightly breathless, but exhilarated now, with something expectant, almost like joy. I wondered for an instant what herbs had been in the herbal emetic, and if they did anything other than empty my stomach.
I snaked through the trees upstream in the general direction Aggie had taken, the earth sucking at my flip-flops as if it wanted to pull me within. The world smelled fresh and new, the clean tang of fresh fish, duck and goose and hawk, the distant reek of skunk; even the mold smelled good if that was possible.
Just as the trees opened out at a sharp curve of the bayou, I caught a whiff of burning pine. In the center of a tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting on flat stones, naked except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes were folded neatly beside them. U ni lisi, grandmother of many children, tended a tiny, smokeless fire.
I turned my gaze away, wondering why so many of the Cherokee rituals seemed to involve getting naked. Knowing I was supposed to follow suit, I stripped to the skin and folded my clothes on the far side of the fire beside a third stone that I assumed was mine.
Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs in a pile to the side. Right. I was supposed to pick them up and scatter them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Trying to bend so I didn't expose my backside to the two women, I picked up the sap-rich branches, the bark scratching my unprotected skin, and walked clockwise around the fire, dropping a thick layer of the branches in a circle. The sap made my hands sticky but the act of bending and lifting settled my mind. Any lingering self-consciousness was gone by the time I closed the pine bough circle. The faint morning breeze died again and the air went still, heavy with possibility. Waiting.
At a gesture from Aggie, I placed the last of the green boughs on the fire. The scent of pine smoke billowed up; Aggie had said no evil could cross the circle or enter the fragrant smoke; it acted as a ward against malevolent spirits. Finished, I sat, the stone cool beneath me. The old woman stood and faced east. Her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a half-empty balloon, her breasts heavy and pendulous. But there was strength in her limbs and something quietly powerful about her form as she raised her hands to the rim of sun. As they lifted, yellow light pushed through the tree trunks and touched her face. Warming her. Pine smoke rose and swelled, curling around her, gray in the dawn.
I shivered in the morning light as she began chanting. The language was Cherokee, some of which I remembered, the version older than what Aggie and she spoke, the cadence formal, whispered as much as spoken. I placed my palms flat on the ground for balance as her words brushed over me with the smoke, rising and falling. Rising and falling. The world seemed to undulate beneath my hands like the tides of the ocean, though I knew it didn't move.
The chill pulled my skin so tight that it ached all over as if I'd jumped into an icy creek. Smoke batted at me, swirling, filling the protective circle. Tears gathered fast in my eyes to fall across my cheeks and splash on my chest. The smoke, I told myself, just the smoke. But the deeps of my mind knew it was something else, something more, and so did my Beast, who hunched deep inside, far back in my consciousness, head on paws, killing teeth hidden.
U ni lisi's words had a rhythm and life of their own, ancient and powerful and full of the memories of the past. When the chant ended, she dropped her arms. Nothing but the soft susurration of bayou could be heard. The skin of my face was tight with drying salt; fresh tears ran through it, burning.
She opened the beaded bag hanging around her neck. From it, she pulled a tablespoon of the native tobacco and held it in her left hand. With her right, she added other herbs, Aggie calling out their names in English for me. "Sage for cleansing. Sweetgrass for life and joy."