June 14, 2002

• some blood and the tiniest bit of tastefully presented incest

  “Adult themes” this time

  When a topic such as past lives comes up it’s a safe
  bet it will be controversial.  The mere mention of death is enough
  to push some people’s buttons.  If you’re in the majority for whom
  the idea of death is scary, then you’re probably uneasy in the presence
  of human remains and wouldn’t enjoy every aspect of a career as a
  physical anthropologist or forensic pathologist.

  To others death is an obsession, not scary but
  fascinating and morbidly attractive.  I think this is the group to
  which my soulmate Greyfox belonged when I met him.  He has a
  collection of death memorabilia:  memorial plaques, promotional
  materials for funeral homes, and various objects decorated with skulls
  and bones.  He hasn’t added to the collection in years now,
  and only a few useful items from it are on display around the
  house.  Whether that change came about through his recalling his
  own past lives and deaths, or whether it came as the influence of his
  walk-in’s personality, or a little of both, I don’t know.

  Greyfox’s new more casual attitude toward death
  could also have come from his shamanic work.  As soon as we had
  started working together, while still on our honeymoon, we were called
  on to do some entity releases for people living in two haunted
  houses.  In the first of them, the phenomena were more or less the
  ordinary things one finds in hauntings:  cold spots, odd noises,
  and one strange apparition.  The homeowners would sometimes see a
  couple in nineteenth century formal clothing dancing a few feet above
  their floor.  The heads of the couple were never seen, because
  they were above the level of the house’s ceiling.

  For that family, I did my talk thing to calm the wife
  and subtly try to convince her that she might find better things to
  keep as marks of distinction than having a haunted house.  She was
  waffling between fear and fascination, and her husband was firmly on
  the side of making these things go away so he and the kids could sleep
  undisturbed.

  Meanwhile Greyfox smudged and prepared himself and
  went into trance.  In the journey state he talked to the spectral
  couple who had lived in a house that had once stood on that land, a big
  old Victorian pile whose ground floor had been near the ceiling level
  of our clients’ new ranch-style. 

  It had been an older man just married to a pretty
  young woman when a snake startled their horse, the carriage overturned
  and his lovely young wife died instantly.   Gravely injured,
  he died a while later, but didn’t want to let go.  He still didn’t
  want to go when Greyfox confronted him.  The shaman’s first ghost
  was used to giving orders and getting his way.  After some
  argument, Greyfox called his grandmother to come over and guide the
  two.  Nana easily led the man’s wife across, and he followed her.

  Our second job came about as soon as the word got
  around about the first one.  It was different.  This was a
  big double-wide mobile home in a mid-town trailer park.  The owner
  was embroiled in legal action trying to get the seller to take it back
  and refund her purchase price.  Since she had moved in there, she
  had become depressed, disturbed, and desperate to find a
  solution. 

  We found only one entity there, a young male murder
  victim who was happy to pass on over into the Light.  But we also
  found psychic imprints of blood, murder and mayhem that, while
  validating to the woman who had seen some of this herself, only
  confirmed her in her desire to obtain legal redress from the ones who
  had sold her the trailer.  Counseling and purification with salt
  and smoke were all that the two of us could think of to do for her.

  We didn’t find out the eventual disposition of her
  legal case, but we did learn more about that trailer.  It had been
  a known crime scene, part of an investigation of a ring of “coyotes”
  who were paid to guide illegal immigrants over from Mexico. 
  Apparently the ringleader found it expedient to leave some of his
  clients to die in the desert and to kill some others, as well as at
  least one of his co-conspirators.  The trailer’s seller, who had
  the blood cleaned up, the rooms repainted, and the trailer moved
  about forty miles, failed to mention the history to his prospective
  buyers.

  If those two little vignettes brought to you no
  chills or odd sensations in the pit of your gut, then you might be a
  hardened skeptic or a member of a third group of people to whom
  death has no more significance than punctuation:  a period
  with which to neatly end a sentence.  Then comes a little space,
  followed by a whole new sentence.  Thus one can see, perhaps, how
  a belief in reincarnation could be vastly comforting to one who was
  trained to fear death.  As I have said, my own beliefs went
  through several phases before I decided to stop believing in things
  where the truth of the matter is unclear.

  What follows is one more vignette from what Greyfox and I recall of our history together:

  We were Randy and Catherine. The folk at home on the bayou
  pronounced it cah-TREEN. Boy and girl twins we were. The time , I
  think, though I cannot be sure, was early in the twentieth
  century.

  Mama was a young woman, Papa’s second wife. We had older brothers
  still at home who helped Papa with the trapping and hunting and fishing
  that supported the family. Sisters, aunts, cousins and all the big
  extended Cajun family came together for weddings, christenings and
  funerals, but when parties were over we scattered into the bayous and
  for weeks or months might not see anyone but our own household.

  My mama missed her own mama and papa. When our papa was home, Mama
  tended his needs and stayed silent and out of his way. When he and the
  older boys were away from the house, she would sit rocking back and
  forth on the porch or in her room, weeping and wringing her skirt in
  her hands.

  Randy and I grew up there wild, constant companions to one another.
  Was he beautiful to me because of his own delicate lips and deep eyes,
  or because I saw myself reflected there? I know only that we clung
  together and he was my joy and consolation.

  We explored our world side by side and together we explored the
  world of each other’s bodies. Brother and sister, children of one womb,
  together from conception, as we grew to be man and woman, we became
  one. To us, we had always been one, one heart and soul in two bodies
  made to fit together for the pleasure of each other.

  One hot afternoon we lay together in a pirogue tied to the dock. At
  first we felt the gentle rock-rocking of the current, and then we felt
  nothing but each other as the pirogue rocked to our motion.

  That was when one of our brothers discovered us and turned my world
  upside down and took all the joy from it. My Randy was dragged off of
  me and up from the dock to the shanty. I pulled my clothing together
  and ran behind. My burly older brother was slapping him and screaming
  that he had ruined his own sister, that God would have His judgment on
  Randy’s poor soul.

  Papa was mad, wild screaming furious. He was blaming Mama, yelling
  at her that she’d neglected her children and left us to our damnation.
  She only cried, cringing back into a corner, shrinking as though
  willing herself to vanish away.

  The boys and Papa made a plan. Randy would be sent away, to town in
  New Orleans, outcast from the family. As a ruined virgin, there was no
  life left for me but to keep house for my brothers and Papa and look
  after Mama and wear black all my days.

  For one endless winter I pined away, apart from my heart, my soul
  ripped in two. Then I stole away and floated and ran. I found New
  Orleans and along the way found trouble aplenty, but always the thought
  of my Randy, his lips and his eyes tender upon me, led me on.

  No one in the city knew my Randy. Someone said there had
  been a boy, one whose face looked like mine, found dead on the street
  one cold winter dawn. He’d gone where the dead go, Cemetaire Saint
  Louis, and that, I decided, was where I would go, too.

  I slept on the graves, I sheltered under the eaves of crypts. I
  begged food for a while out of habit more than hunger, I suppose.
   No bread could feed my craving.  Nowhere in this world was
  that other half of my heart and soul.  I sat in the cemetery and
  waited, and died.

  **In Greyfox’s collection of memorabilia is an old hand-colored
  picture postcard of Cemetaire Saint Louis in New Orleans. I found it
  there after he had moved here to live with me, long after I’d first
  told this story to the reporter in New Mexico who first published it.**
  

  • 1:30 pm
  • 6 Comments