White Pebble Exorcism

 White Pebble Exorcism

1.

They were returning – the animals that had fled so many years ago.  Probably, it had something to do with the abundance of smaller creatures on which the big beasts fed.  During the corona-virus, hunters stayed home and so there were more deer and wild turkeys.  Someone glimpsed a puma stalking the big demented-looking birds strutting in circles inscrutably at the edge of a corn field unharvested because shattered by hail.  At the end of Winter, hungry deer came into the villages and chewed bushes and ornamental trees into bare clumps of brown sticks.  A bald eagle as tall as four-year old boy stood in a ditch next to the road tearing strips of jerky-colored flesh from a dead possum.  Boars with black bristles and yellow tusks hid in the thickets.  Down at the boat landing on the big river, a fisherman glimpsed a zeppelin-shaped monster lurking in the shallows.  No one expected to see bison on bare hilltops dipping their brown beards into the winter-cured yellow prairie grass but packs of coyotes gathered there to sing at the stars.  

2.  

There was a bad intersection near the Reservation’s northern edge, a crossroads that had claimed several lives.  One of the roads ran to a town that was mostly taverns and liquor stores just outside the tribal territory.  The other highway was a two-lane blacktop that rose and fell like roller coaster, crossing the steep brown hills and the hollows between.  That highway invited speed because it ran from no place to nowhere and the few cars and trucks traveling that road were hurrying to be someplace else.  The two highways intersected at the top of bald ridge among stony outcrops and zigzagged electrified barb wire fences.  There was no stop sign or other signal because the frequency of traffic, at least on the east-west road over the hills, was negligible.  Some yellow caution signs were posted near the crossroads, but they had been shot full of holes and were bent and crumpled because heavy grain trucks turning at that place crimped them back away for the intersection.  Every year two or three wrecks happened at that place and, usually, there were fatalities.  

3.

One wet and stormy night, a pickup loaded with drunk kids coming back from the town at the Reservation border smashed into a van hauling elders home from a church meeting.  Two of the young people died and the driver of the van was flung onto an altar-shaped boulder next to the road.  Several of the old people returning from church where badly hurt and, after discharge from the hospital, had to convalesce in the nursing home that the tribe operated on the hilltop overlooking the old agency.  Lawyers filed dram shop cases against three of the taverns in the nearby town, but the lawsuits failed because the bar-keepers were untruthful and no one could reliably identify the bars that had sold booze to the kids.  The town was full of taverns and all of the saloons looked alike and, in any event, the kids had been drinking in the car as well – cans of malt-liquor empty and full were strewn all around the accident scene and the crash smelled like a brewery.

Families put up white styrofoam crosses at the intersection’s roadside and there were plastic flowers as well and, even, a pyramid made from whiskey bottles and beer cans although this was thought disrespectful by some and removed in the middle of the night.  People said that the place was cursed and that there were evil spirits haunting the intersection.

4.

Doris visited her mother Emily, also known as Sweetwater Bird, in the nursing home.  The old woman’s hip was broken in the crash and both of her knees were black with deep wounds the size of silver-dollars.  The wounds were too big to heal properly and the doctor at the tribal clinic said that Emily would need skin-grafts, surgery that would require an ambulance trip to the hospital at the big city and several weeks of convalescence there.  Emily told her daughter that she was afraid to go to the city because nothing good ever happened there to native people.  She said that something had to be done about the crossroads where the accident had happened.  The intersection was like a grizzly bear or a cougar – it seized people in its terrible jaws, mauled them, and spit out their bodies.  

Emily distrusted ambulances and didn’t want to spend the money for transportation of that kind.  She recruited her two of her nephews to drive her to the hospital in the city.  Their route from the agency took them over the roller-coaster road to the intersection where the accident had happened.  The styrofoam crosses were yellow but the plastic flowers, the color of frosting on a birthday cake, remained bright and vibrant.  The electric fence among the boulders made a faint humming sound.  From the hilltop crossroads, the land spread out in all directions, mottled by the shadows of clouds passing overhead, hilltops blue in the distance above the brown flood of the river.  

Sweetwater Bird said a few words in the language she had spoken when she was a girl.  Doris didn’t understand.  “What is that?” she asked.

“White Pebble Ceremony,” Emily said.  

Doris said she didn’t know what she meant.  Emily told her nephew driving the van to slow down a little.  

“It makes me nervous up here,” she said, gesturing to the road side where broken glass and beer cans glittered.

Emily said that the “White Pebble Ceremony” was a way to banish evil spirits and purify a place where something bad happened.  It was more powerful than sage.  Those who knew how to perform the ceremony were members of the Shell Society.  

Doris had never heard of the ceremony or the Shell Society.  It was something from the old times.  Her mother wasn’t nostalgic for old ways and had been a staunch Catholic all her life.  So Doris was surprised to hear her words.  When she was growing up, Doris’ mother said that it was bad back in the old days: “We were just wild Indians,” she said, “wandering around the country and looking for death.”

5.

After her mother’s surgery, Doris went to the Cultural Center at the Agency and asked about the White Pebble Ceremony.   A young woman paid to teach the old language to the people’s children said that she had never heard of this ritual.  She said that the tribe had once been divided into many societies before it was destroyed by the White people and, probably, the Shell Society was a group of men entrusted with certain specialized ceremonies.  But she wasn’t sure about any of this.  The books on the shelves at the cultural center were mostly political, about tribal sovereignity and self-empowerment.  The books counseled fidelity to old ways but didn’t specify what those ways had been.

6.

Doris had a friend who worked in the Registrar’s office at the tribal headquarters.  This woman said that there was a fat green book kept where she worked that people sometimes consulted to confirm their ancestral allotments.  At the end of the 19th century, land titles were issued to families living on the reservation.  The big green book, heavy as a brick, contained an alphabetized listing of all families residing on the reservation in the year 1906 when the volume was published.  In effect, it was a sort of census naming heads of households and specifying by number the allotment granted to each family.  The allotments were numbered and there was a large, very fragile map printed on onion-skin that could be unfolded from where it was glued into the back of the book.  The reservation was shown as a jigsaw puzzle of numbered allotments.  In this way, the location of a family in 1906 could be determined.

The book was beautifully bound with a heavy moss-green cover on which there was gold-embossed the image of an Indian chief with his head haloed by rays of feathers.  The volume had cream-colored pages with fine, legible print on big sheets with broad margins.  There were many black and white plates in the volume which was styled a “Report to the Chief” of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institute.  The pictures showed dignified men wearing blankets like togas, teepees and lodges built with curved branches and covered with earth, medicine pouches made from the guts of bison and full of mummified fetal animals, agates, and the claws of eagles and bears.  There were weapons displayed, hoes and rakes for farming, diagrams as to how the different clans cut their hair, lists of children’s games and recipes for food that the people had once eaten.  The book was very long and thick and it told how weddings were celebrated, how children were named, and how the dead were buried.  On many pages, there were musical notes displayed in staves and bars and the words for old songs were printed in their original language with annotations explaining as much as was known when the book was written about the meaning and use of those songs.  Several pages recounted in detail how sometimes, in the remote past, a young girl had been sacrificed to the Morning Star.  This offering was to insure the return of the buffalo. 

When Doris examined the book, she was told to take care because some of the photographs were loose and the glue in the volume’s binding had flaked away so that some pages also loose and might be lost if the book were mishandled.  No one read much in the book because it was said to be “anthropology” and this was a science invented by White men to steal corpses and cheat people.  But Doris noticed that the authors of the book were identified as the son of a famous chief in the tribe, a leader said to be both wise and great and remembered even unto the present day and a lady school teacher, apparently married to the chief’s son.  When Doris read from the book, the prose was like the language in the Bible. 

Near the back of the Smithsonian report on the tribe, Doris found a listing of ceremonial fraternities, including the Shell Society.  Several pictures showed men with bare chests and elaborate feather bonnets holding in their hands oddly shaped sticks and whittled rods.  The Shell Society had the authority to exorcize evil spirits and could perform the White Pebble Ceremony to that effect.

The writers of the book had recorded men in the Shell Society chanting the ritual incantation to expel demons from people and places.  The chants were transcribed and the notes recorded on the page complete with quavers, semi-quavers as well as flats and sharps.  The words of the incantation were written as well in the native language.  Commentary to the song said that most of the words were of unknown meaning, apparently borrowed from the Osage and Pawnee languages – the few words that could be deciphered were names of animals and the four directions.      

 

The names of several old men prominent in the Shell Society were listed in the book.  Near the very end, just before the tribal census printed in tiny font, a picture showed a handsome young man in overalls sitting with his wife and two little boys on the porch of his frame house.  The caption to the picture said that the man was “A Prosperous Modern Farmer”.  The young man looked skeptically at the camera.  Doris thought that he reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t place his features.  

7.

Sweetwater Bird didn’t do well in the hospital.  She returned to the nursing home on the Reservation much battered and bruised.  

Doris told her that she had read about the White Pebble Ceremony.  Sweetwater Bird’s mind was ruined and she didn’t know what Doris was talking about.

Covid got into the nursing home and Sweetwater Bird who was also known as Emily died.

8.

Doris traced the lineage of the old men who had been members of the Shell Society.  She found two brothers and a cousin of those men living on the Reservation.  At first, the young men didn’t want to perform the ritual.  But Doris enlisted the young woman who taught their native language at the Cultural Center.  The young woman was also skeptical about the project and said that books of anthropology where “genocidal rubbish.”  But, when Doris told her about the authors of the Report to the Chief, the young woman recognized that the tribal informant was related to her, a grandfather of a grandfather.  She examined the book and denounced it, but was willing to talk to the three boys whose forbears had been members of the Shell Society.  The young woman was attractive and dressed well and she was very urbane and cosmopolitan.  The three men were impressed by her and hoped that she would like them and so they agreed to learn the incantation, the ritual gestures that accompanied the song, and how the words should be pronounced.  

9.

On a windy day in autumn with distended fast-flying clouds overhead, Doris and the young woman from the cultural center drove to the intersection on the hill-top where so many deadly accidents had occurred. The country sprawled out around them, vulnerable to the winds and the droplets of rain spitting out of the sky.  The gale blew dust across the asphalt crucifix where the roads intersected.  The memorials at the roadside were flattened by the storm and the faded photographs of the dead people were torn and fluttered like forlorn butterflies in the wind.  From this place, the reservation seemed enormous and empty, a crumpled landscape of bare hilltops and deep hollow where trees crouched around shell-shaped ponds.  After a while, the kids who comprised the Shell Society arrived in an old Impala with its muffler broken so that the car made a sound like thunder.

The boys started the ritual, but a couple of pickup trucks full of their cousins headed toward the tavern-town appeared in the distance.  The Shell Society brothers stopped chanting and let the trucks pass.  Hip-hop music was blasting from speakers in the vehicles.  The young woman wrinkled her pretty nose as if something foul-smelling had poisoned the air.

The Shell Society began chanting again.  Then, a grain truck labored up the hill and the ritual was interrupted once more.

A third time, the Shell Society began chanting.  This time the roads were empty to the horizon.  It would be disrespectful to describe the ceremony although you can read about it in the Report to the Chiefs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institute published in 1906 on the subject of this specific tribe.  

During the White Pebble Ceremony, three bald eagles swooped down from the dark clouds and made a spiraling kettle over the intersection.

10.

The gods in Washington and at the BIA hesitated for only a couple months.  Then, the Tribe received a grant, mostly for Covid relief but, also, with money earmarked for infrastructure.  The intersection on the hilltop was re-designed.  For half a year, people cursed the road construction that closed the highways and made the trip to tavern-town longer and more arduous, a winding way on gravel lanes down in the river valley that claimed its share of victims before the intersection was re-opened.  But, at last, the work was done and travelers marveled at the new cross-roads: two stainless steel poles supported a chain on which a flashing red light was suspended.  Because it was windy on the hilltop, the light swung to and fro but it was visible for several miles, tolling in the sky light a great red bell.  Turning lanes had been installed and rumble-strips to rattle the undercarriages of cars approaching from all directions to warn them to stop, or, at least, slow down.  A couple of cameras mounted on the poles eyed the intersection and, for a year, the Tribal police issued tickets to drivers observed not stopping for the semaphore flashing red.  Now, if you wanted to kill yourself at the cross-roads, you had to violate a half-dozen laws and exercise real ingenuity.  

11.

In the green book embossed with the profile of the gold Indian chief, Doris read about the Morning Star Ceremony.  She wondered whether the account of human sacrifice involving a young girl was true or just a lie told by anthropologists.  But there were other accounts, fairly well attested.  The ritual seemed to be practiced by the Pawnee.  Doris knew that her tribe was related to the Pawnee but had split away from those people hundreds of years ago. 

The Morning Star Ceremony was brutal and involved torches and war clubs and everyone shooting arrows into the corpse of the girl.  The Pawnee astrologers who supervised the ritual disliked it and would require sacrifice only when certain prominent men dreamed that this was necessary.  But the blood of the girl killed in the ritual renewed the world and adjusted misalignments in the heavens and summoned the buffalo in their great, shaggy herds.  Most of the details were now lost and no one remembered whether the Morning Star was Venus or Mars or, even, Jupiter.

12.

The Shell Society didn’t formally meet after the ritual on the hillside.  Sometimes, the boys got together to play basketball.  But that was the extent of it.

13.

Doris went to the Cultural Center.  The young woman stood at the head of a class of small children teaching them to count in the tribal language.  She was wearing a red bandana as a mask over her mouth and nose.  Doris thought that she looked like a bandit, but, of course, she knew that the young woman was the very opposite of such a person.

After the class was released for recess, Doris spoke with the young woman.  She asked her if she thought it would be good for the buffalo to return.  The young woman said that she was indifferent to such things because she was vegan. 

A few weeks later, Doris send an email to the young woman inviting her to meet.  “I have something very important to share with you,” Doris wrote.  The young woman didn’t reply to the message.   As it turned out, she no longer worked at the Cultural Center and had returned to the City to take a better and more high-paying job working with slum kids.     

14.

The cameras on the hilltop showed a couple of mangy coyotes loping across the intersection.  Something large and dark moved in the background.  It’s open range out there and cattle roam the prairie – the shadow was probably just a cow.