Tamarack County

CHAPTER 33

A sweat was about many things: cleansing, healing, connecting, understanding, accepting. To unfamiliar eyes, it might seem a simple ritual; it was anything but. A good sweat demanded a respect for the nature of the process, which required patience, focus, endurance, and vulnerability. A good sweat could be cathartic and enlightening. A great sweat could be transcendent.

Stephen hoped for a good, enlightening sweat. What he received was, in its way, transcendent.

He’d chanted prayers, sweated until the blanket under him had become drenched, lost track of time, gone into a darkness not of his own making, and had emerged, at last, in a landscape that was alien to his experience. It was a barren, unnatural place, not constructed of earth or even of stone but of concrete. There were no trees, no flowers, no grass, nothing underfoot but black asphalt and nothing rising around him but gray walls. Above was an empty sky, not just cloudless but bereft of spirit, and that patch of sky was confined within a false horizon created by the gray walls. The air was not the air of Tamarack County, which even in winter, was fragrant with the perfume of pine. What Stephen breathed was the foul odor of pain, fear, distrust, loneliness, and anger. Especially anger.

In all the gray of the walls around him, there was only one door. Stephen walked toward it. He wanted to be out of this odious, alien place, and he hoped that the door would be the way. But as he neared it, he heard a sound from the other side, a low growl that was not like that of a dog or wolf or any other animal he’d ever heard. He was afraid. He stepped back. He wanted to turn away and run. But there was something about the door and what was on the other side that held him, that compelled him to stay. And now it was not just fear he felt. It was pain and distrust and loneliness. And that anger, anger like a great hunger trying to consume him, to suck him into itself, to make him part of it.

Stephen stood before the door, feeling all the foulness on the other side, both compelled and repelled, paralyzed by those competing impulses. Then he heard at his back the voice of Henry Meloux speak clearly and calmly: “This is your way. Open your heart to the other side of that door.”

The struggle ceased. Stephen reached out, turned the iron knob, which was as cold as a chunk of ice, and swung the door wide. For a moment, he stood in a blinding light, blinking against the intensity of the glare. He heard the growling and saw a dark figure silhouetted against the light, approaching. The figure was the size of a normal man, but as it neared, Stephen saw that the eyes were like burning coals, the same eyes he’d seen in the face of the majimanidoo in his vision the night before. In another moment, he could make out the face clearly, the face of a normal man, the face of a stranger.

Stephen spoke. “Who are you?”

In reply, the stranger said simply, “Welcome to the light.”

Stephen came out of the vision, found himself in the dark of the sweat lodge, feeling the air cooling around him, understanding that this round of the sweat was finished but uncertain of the meaning of what he’d seen. He left his blanket and began to crawl clockwise toward the flap that hung over the entrance. As he reached out to push it aside, the flap was drawn away and sunlight blasted into the lodge and into Stephen’s eyes, blinding him momentarily.

“Come out,” someone ordered, a voice familiar to Stephen. He’d heard it only moments before, in his vision.

He crawled out and stood up, blinking against the sunlight, which shot directly into his eyes. He saw the form of a man silhouetted against the light. A moment later, he could make out the face, the same face he’d just seen in his vision, the face of a man he did not know.

What Stephen saw now that he had not seen in the vision was the large handgun the man held pointed at his heart.

“Who are you?” Stephen asked.

The stranger smiled and said to him, “Welcome to the light.”