At the back of the property was a small building, a wood hut with a metal roof—a sweathouse—and smoke was leaking from it, smoke that carried the scents of my past, herbed smoke infused with distant memories, all clouded with fear and blood. Smoke that spoke of the power of The People. Tsalagiyi—Cherokee, to the white man.
I turned off the bike and set the kickstand. Propped the helmet on the seat and walked up the drive, shells crunching under my feet. Not much stone in the delta; they used what was handy, shells. I took the steps to the porch, and pushed the bell. It dinged inside. Almost instantly, a slender, black-haired woman in jeans and a silk tank opened the door. Her face was composed, her eyes were calm, but she didn’t speak. She just looked at me. Waiting. “Egini Agayvlge i,” I said in the speech of The People. “Will you take me to sweat?”
For a long moment, she said nothing, studying my face, reading my body language, which always gave away too much to her. “I have taken one to sweat today already. I am tired. Come back tomorrow.”
She started to close the door and I said, quickly, “Please.”
Her eyes narrowed, but the door stopped closing. “Dalonige i Digadoli, Golden Eyes Golden Rock,” she said with something like asperity, “you have hidden yourself away from the eyes of your own spirit, hidden yourself away from me, so that I cannot help you. What do you seek?”
“To know why nothing matters but finishing a job. To know why I’d compromise everything to see through to the end of a responsibility I accepted, even when it hurts me and the people I love. To see why I remember an image of a bearded man, tortured and hanging from antlers.”
“You killed a man in your hotel room,” she accused, her tone without heat. “You killed the sister of your friend. I saw it on TV.”
I closed my eyes, weariness making me sway on my feet. “Yes.”
“Go add wood to the coals. Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts and unnecessary pain. I will come.” The door closed in my face. Rudeness from an elder of The People was almost unheard of, but I had a way of pushing people’s buttons. Go, me.
In the back of the windowless hut, hidden from the street, I stripped and hung my clothes on a hook, ran cold water over me from the high spigot, dried off on a clean, coarsely woven length of cloth, and tied it around me. I ducked and entered the low sweathouse, stepping onto the clay floor.
I hadn’t told Aggie what I was, but she knew bits and pieces of my story and probably guessed a lot more. I had originally come here, 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, and before I was found wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of human language. I kept coming back because she was doing much more than I asked. She was showing me also who I was now.
Finding an elder here in New Orleans shouldn’t have been a surprise—The People lived all over the States—but it still felt like a weird coincidence the universe tossed my way, like scraps to a dog. Like fate or kismet or whatever, though I didn’t believe in any of that stuff.
I stirred the coals and added cedar kindling. Flames rushed up and lit the twigs, sending shadows dancing over the wood walls. Aggie had done some work (or hired it out, but I was betting on her doing it herself) in the sweathouse. She had added some more river rocks to the fire ring, and I pushed them closer to the flames. They were already warm to my hands, but not warm enough for what Aggie wanted. She had replaced the seating. A six-foot-long log had been cut in half lengthwise, sanded smooth on the flat sides, and lacquered until the benches shone. Then they had been placed on low cradle-shaped stands so people could sit on them instead of on the clay floor. These low benches were slightly higher than the old ones. I was guessing that old knees were more comfortable at that height. Maybe she was the president of the local elders, and they held elder meetings here. Assuming she wasn’t the only elder round about. And assuming they held meetings. . . .
I was clouding my mind with inanities. I had a feeling that Aggie would make me wait until she thought I had gotten past that part of the process to make an appearance. “Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts and unnecessary pain.” Yeah. She’d make me wait. I sighed and added more wood. Time passed. The wood crackled and hissed. I moved from the log to the floor, sitting as modestly one could in a sweathouse, and I sweated.
When the coals had burned down and the rocks had taken their heat, I dipped water over them with the hand-carved wooden ladle, from the Cherokee stoneware pitcher that I coveted. Steam rose, and I sweated some more. When the coals were a red glow below a coating of ash, I reached into a woven basket and pulled out a tied bundle of dried herbs, like a very fat cigar: twigs of rosemary, sage, tobacco, which was a new one, a hint of camphor, other things I couldn’t identify, lots of sweetgrass. I set it in the coals. The herbs smoked and the smell filled the sweathouse.
I closed my eyes and dropped into the dark of my own soul. Into the cavernlike place where memories of the Tsalagiyi resided. The firelit, smoky cave of my soul home. I had been here before, in this half-remembered cavern with its sloped ceilings and shifting midnight shadows, with the far-off plink of dripping water and the scent of burning herbs, of the steady beat of a tribal drum, hypnotic and slow.
I heard the door of the sweathouse open, a shaft of light across my lowered lids, quickly darkened as the door closed. Bare feet padded close. Aggie sat across from me in the cavern of my soul home. I couldn’t smell her scent, only sweetgrass and smoke and a single breath of the cool, damp air of the cave of my soul.
Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded us, steam rising from red coals and heated rocks piled in the center of my spirit place. She started music—drums, steady, resonant. I think I slept. And dreamed.