Tamarack County

CHAPTER 31

Nothing came. Stephen’s body dripped salt water from every pore, and he tried to keep his mind clear in order to receive whatever might be delivered to him. He’d participated in many sweats, and he knew it was useless to attempt to force anything. That was, in one way, the point of a sweat. To relax, to release, to remove the barriers of thought, expectation, desire. To be. And because this was never an easy thing, he understood that it sometimes took several rounds of sweating to melt the natural human resistance to the influence of the Great Mystery.

At first, his mind was filled with anxiety. The idea of confronting the majimanidoo of his nighttime vision was a little frightening, and yet he believed it had to be done. His brain worked at digging the image from his memory, the form that lurked in the dark under the elm tree. In his mind’s eye, he saw only the black shape with its two eyes glowing red as hot coals. This was a conscious experience, not a visceral thing, and the image itself didn’t elicit a strong emotional response. He was trying too hard, he knew. He wasn’t letting go. After half an hour, he could feel the lodge cooling, much more quickly than normal, the result of the bitter temperature outside. He crawled clockwise around the pit where the Grandfathers lay and pushed out through the heavy flap of blanket over the entrance. He found Anne feeding the fire.

“Success?” she asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “Would you pull out the Grandfathers and put them back on the coals to heat? I’m going down to the lake to refresh.”

“Refresh?” His sister cast a skeptical eye on the frozen lake.

“I’ll only dip a moment,” he told her.

He walked barefooted through the deep snow that lay between the sweat lodge and the lake, his body trailing steam in the frigid air. Not far to the east, a small stream fed into Iron Lake. It issued from the ground very near to the shoreline, ran only a short distance, and was called Half-Mile Creek. Because the stream maintained its temperature over that brief run, it didn’t freeze, even in the most bitter of winters. Where it spilled into the lake, there was always a half circle of open water twenty yards across.

The bottom was sandy there, the water crystal clear. When Stephen waded in, the cold of the lake gripped him, as if trying to squeeze the life from him. He plunged himself under and felt the cold wring from his body the lethargy caused by the heat in that first round of sweating. He drank the water, and a fine, refreshing chill ran all the way through him.

By the time he returned to the sweat lodge, he was shivering. Anne had placed the Grandfathers on the coals of the fire, and she had two warmed blankets waiting for him. She wrapped him in these and offered him dry wool socks for his feet and a wool cap, and they sat together in the afternoon sunlight and talked while the Grandfathers heated for the next round of sweating.

Anne said, “I’ve read of certain monks who mortify themselves daily by bathing in ice water.”

“Daily?” Stephen shook his head. “Whatever floats your boat. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“I don’t think I’m strong enough. I also think it’s misguided.”

“Why?”

“I think the divine is in the everyday.” She was silent a moment, staring into the fire, which popped and crackled and sent hot sparks flying onto the snow, where they died in little hisses. With a tired sigh, she added, “And there’s enough pain just in living.”

The sun was low and directly behind Anne. Stephen had to squint whenever he looked directly at his sister. She sounded so defeated, so lost, that he felt his heart squeeze as if it had taken its own plunge in ice water.

“You seemed so happy when you left to join the order,” he said.

“I was. And mostly I’ve been happy. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I was happy when I was sure it was what I wanted.”

“But now there’s Skye.”

“And now I understand the full measure of what I might be giving up, Stephen.” She pulled a piece of loose bark from one of the logs they’d brought to feed the fire and tossed it into the flames, which consumed it greedily. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

“How would you feel if you gave it all up for her? Would that make you happy, Annie?”

“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “Probably not.”

“If she really loved you, wouldn’t she understand what she’s asking you to do?”

“She understands, Stephen. And she’s not being selfish in this. She wants me to be happy as much as you do.”

“And she thinks she’s the way.”

Anne looked up at the cloudless blue of the sky. “Maybe she is. Who knows?” She laughed and glanced at her brother. “Hell, maybe I should do a sweat. Maybe the answer would come to me.”

“Or maybe it’ll come to me,” Stephen said and offered her a smile. “Maybe I’ll get a twofer out of this one. I think the Grandfathers are ready.”

He lifted the stones with the tines of the pitchfork, and Anne brushed them clean of embers. He settled them one by one in the pit in the center of the lodge. When they were all inside, he backed out, dropped the entrance flap, and turned to his sister. He found her eyeing a wooded island far out in the frozen lake.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I thought I saw something.”

“What kind of something?”

“An animal.”

“It’s the Northwoods. We have lots of animals here.”

“Actually, I thought it might be a person.”

“We have those, too,” Stephen said. He was chilling quickly. “I need to get inside the lodge, Annie. You might as well go back to the cabin.”

“Half an hour?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be back.” She leaned and kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

Stephen shed the blankets he’d draped about himself, and Anne put them near the fire to heat. He gave her the wool cap and wool socks, and she set these next to the blankets, then she headed away. He took the pan of melted snow, which had been sitting at the edge of the fire, and crawled back into the sweat lodge. He’d left his tobacco pouch on the blanket inside. He took a pinch, sprinkled it over the Grandfathers in an offering, said a prayer to the Great Mystery, doused the stones with water, and let the steam rise up around him. Then he settled in to wait for what might come.