Faith

Then I told Victor, I thought we were all riding heavy with illusions. – Thomas Builds-the-Fire, “Smoke Signals.”

I used to carry around an 1863 half dime in my wallet.

It was my grandfather’s. He carried it, too. A wafer-thin, diminutive little coin, with a draped and seated Liberty and beautiful corn stalks in a wreath on the back, it was a bit worn and slightly bent.

For most of my life from about 1982 on I carried it in my wallet. He died in 1977, and my grandmother gave it to me when I graduated from Franklin High School.

At first it was a token of him, and later, it became a symbol, even more, a talisman. I often thought it had his magic in it, that maybe it might have been the focal point of his magic, that his soul itself was the chamber from which it sprang. Later, I told myself that should I ever need to pay Charon, the Boatman, I’d always have his magical silver half-dime for my toll across the river Styx. I feared that my meandering and my restless wanderlust would do me in, and I’d have to wait on the shore for a century until Charon took pity on me and brought me across to my ancestors.

But a few years ago I grew more fearful of losing it. It was so tiny and thin, I was afraid I’d be fumbling for my driver’s license on the side of the road with an impatient state trooper watching closely, and it would slip from my wallet unnoticed. There it would be slung into a cane field by the next passing car, lost forever. So I put it away, and worried ever since.

I’ve told you before, that old man was magical. My grandfather was a polio victim, and one of his legs was affected badly. He had a decided limp, and had to wear two different sized shoes. He was also the tallest man in the family, at least in my day, and though he walked rather slowly, he surely had to be magical because he could be there one instant and gone the next, and reappear yet an instant later. His talisman was ten thousand years of magic handed down from his ancestors. Mine is a half-dime that journeyed with him wherever it was he went for an instant of my time, who knows how long in his?

My father inherited some of that magic. It is, in my mind’s eye, corporeal, a wild, silver power like sterling lightning. My father would sometimes fish the cove the same time my brother and I did, and we’d follow him down Sawmill Bayou but lose sight of him. We’d fish all the way to the point where there wasn’t enough water left to float the little boat and then make our way back out…and there he’d be, at the mouth of the slough fishing. He was magical too, you see, and I have his medicine bag, which I have not opened, not once since he died ten years ago. I don’t know what’s in it, but when I touch it my fingers go numb and hot. It rests in a drawer in the hunt board I built many years ago out of antique fir, and sometimes, at night, when I glance at it, silver flashes seem to glow from the drawer where his medicine bag is kept.

I was not raised with a barrier between here and there, then and now. It is a foreign concept to me, and though I understand the physics of time and space, I do not agree with its preclusion of my upbringing. It is one thing to define by mathematics, another by observation, and I do not think physics relies on enough observation.

Do I know that Bayou Teche was formed when the Mississippi River flowed through that channel ten thousand years ago? I do. But that does not preclude that a giant snake, its tail at Port Barre and its head at Morgan City – or where those places would one day be built – was killed by a thousand warriors and the trench left after its massive body decomposed filled with water and became the snake, teche.

The anthropologists used to come to the house. They’d visit with my dad, learn from him, pick his brain and his spirit for wisdom. His medicine bag would be there nearby, and they didn’t even know it, didn’t feel it. They’d tell him, “You came to this part of Louisiana about 1000 A.D.,” and he’d just smile, because he knew we’ve always been here. Always. One thing you never do, as an Indian man, is let a white man tell you about yourself: You might as well fold up and die then and there. You might as well let go all the Winchesters and small pox blankets your cousins endured out west even if you did not, because they are still embracing your enslavement and your genocide and your lost homeland and homewaters, because we are all relations.

It’s all about faith.

Faith that time is circular in our world, and it can be whatever you want in your world. Faith that physics are a matter of perspective, a subject of paradigm, not law. Faith that your creator does not negate mine, and that they might just in fact be the same one.

I have faith that a little boy named Ustupu was betrayed by his step-aunt and tricked into doing something very, very wrong, and he was punished. His six great hunting dogs were turned into balls of flame and cast into the skies, and Ustupu was doomed to chase them for eternity, crying out for them to come back to him:

Cins-kut, aps-ca!, he cries. Tep-kani, apcuk, Kuc, apcuk, Kapainch, apcuk, Neka, apcuk Ku-tep, apcuk! Come! Come! Come!

It is said that if one wants Ustupu to visit him, he can call him down from the skies, and because of his trying to be obedient, he will come. But because of his forgetfulness and careless aim when on earth, he cannot remain here. Whoever calls him down must also command him to return – in Chitimacha language. If the one calling him fails to do this, Ustupu will remain on earth as the killer of all remaining Indians.

Do I know the words? No. Could I learn them? Yes, but I won’t. I would never utter them. I do not need to test my faith. It is absolute.

In the night, sometimes, the skies are silver and six flames flicker far, far in the distance. During the day, sometimes, great black wings churn gray cloudbanks and thunder roars. If I ever stop chasing thunderbirds – ever lose my faith – what will be left to me?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.