The Witch Tree, page 28
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Shared healing
A Datura Books paperback, 2025
Copyright © Wayne Johnson 2023, 2025
Cover by Sarah O’Flaherty
Set in Meridien
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Michael,
and for my beloved Opichi…
Wednesday, April 7, 1982
The North Woods, Minnesota
Late afternoon, the snow began to fall. It swept down out of the Canadian arctic, then into the Rainy River Basin and onto County Road 17 and into Red Lake. It eddied and snaked over the shoulders and into the ditches and was caught in the high, yellow grasses and in the birches and elms and maples further in. On the marshlands, the snow first fell on cattails and duck grass. Everywhere it came down, filling first the hollows and shallow areas, then drifted through the woods. The snow danced and eddied. It spun in dervishes. It filled the ditches and licked out boldly across roads in undulating snakes of white.
On the north shore of Lake Superior to the east, the wind-driven snow bent the branches of a nearly four hundred-year-old cedar, stirred the dibindowin hung in the pines around it, the charms making a sibilant, glass clatter, as if in conversation.
The snow came down heavier, the wind driving it, and the sun set.
Contents
BOOK I
1 On the Red Lake Reservation
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
BOOK II
10
11 Sally
12 Buck
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24 Eli
25 Sally
26 Buck
27 Eli
28 Buck
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40 Sally
41 Buck
42 Sally
43 Buck
44 Eli
45 Buck
46 Sally
47 Buck
48
49
50
BOOK III
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Acknowledgements
BOOK I
1
On the Red Lake Reservation
A big man accustomed to the cold, he forced himself up the road, boxing his arms for warmth, only this afternoon he was unprepared. His car, a distance behind him, had coughed twice and died, but he would not be deterred from his purpose, and he kicked through the falling snow, the heels of his boots skittering all directions on the now ice-crazed asphalt. Around him, the snow fell silent over a sea of grass, there endless, desolate muskeg. He tucked his chin into the collar of his jacket, put his head down, butting the wind. His breath was warm, but it made him shiver for a dampness become more penetrating.
To reassure himself, he patted the pocket of his jacket, the gun knocking against his side, then lifted his head and tested the air. There was that ashy, new snow smell in it and a ringing, somber quiet. He wondered if someone might come along, though this late it was unlikely. Angling up a steep, sloping hill, he followed the now veering centerline. Box elders grew beside the road here, and stunted pin oak and the cane of red willow. He stopped and lit a cigarette, just to get his bearings. A breeze had kicked up, and he cupped his hands around the cigarette to get it started, then thrust the works, pack and matches, deep into his pocket. His hands were so cold he could barely feel them, but that was nothing unusual. During hunting season in the stands it had been colder by far; only, now, he’d rushed from the lodge wearing cowboy boots and an unlined jacket, had no hat or gloves. For solace, he imagined himself hunting in his Sorels and parka, his Winchester 30.06 slung over his shoulder.
For a time that made things better. Just another day out in the muskeg, he told himself, though it was anything but.
Some time later, he bent into the wind, the snow icy on his now all but numb forehead and his body telegraphing dire signals to him, ones he ignored. The light had turned gray and flat, and the going was all the more difficult for it. A sort of silent panic had sprung up in him, and the road broken now, in it pot-holes big as wheelbarrows, which he circumnavigated. He crossed the road to the soft shoulder where the footing was better and made good time, saw himself buying a cheap car, maybe in International Falls, and driving Highway 71 down to 2, 2 east to Duluth, then 35 south into Minneapolis.
“Listen,” his brother, Eli, had confided, calling the lodge, “Ruben LaChapelle’s headed north and he’ll stop at the Ramblers.” The Ramblers was a border-town watering hole and outfitter. “I need you to ask him something. Just, ‘What does it mean?’ And, brother, if I disappear before you can call me back, you get to the bottom of it. Promise?”
“Eli?!” he’d barked into the phone, but the connection had been cut off, only static for an answer.
The last he’d heard, Eli was working at an auto body shop with their ne’er-do-well cousin, Ruben.
Thinking on it, Ruben and his brother, he forgot his footing, pitched head over heels down an embankment, the ground pummeling him.
At the bottom he shook himself, dug the snow out of his collar, then, feeling something was off, he patted his jacket pocket.
Nothing there, and he bellowed up into the snow-filled sky, “GOD DAMMITALL TO HELL!”
On his hands and knees, he dug like a burrowing animal in the grass and snow, and when he couldn’t feel his hands, he beat them against his thighs, then stood, taking in the muskeg around him, a wasteland of tamarack, and scrub conifers, and here and there a stunted ironwood.
He had to get to Eli. The thought made him breathless, as though he were suffocating.
And Ruben? Ruben had been following the railroad tracks into the reservation when he’d been hit by the Burlington Northern, his body strangely burned in places. Or so said the police who’d stopped by the lodge, asking if he had any idea how Ruben had come to be out there.
Bad luck and whiskey, he’d quipped, to shut them up.
What he hadn’t told them was, it was all too obvious from the photos Ruben had been tortured. And when he hadn’t given up what they’d wanted? They’d left his body on the tracks. But had they done that as a warning, or a come on? And if not for Eli, then who?
All of it, Eli’s call, Ruben dying on the tracks, and the police grilling him the day after, had been worse than suspicious.
And there’d been the accident, last autumn, in which Bear, the older of his two half-brothers, had been killed. The two deaths couldn’t be related, reason told him. Ruben’s now – and Bear’s. But his heart said Murder. His heart said, First Bear, and nine months later Ruben. Spooked at Eli’s call, he’d jumped into his car. Driven hard, into the snowstorm until the car died.
Up the road now, to the west, the last of daylight was being sucked down into the muskeg. All right, he thought, it was ten miles or so into Fort Frances, if he just… pushed it, he could make it. He’d start a fire, warm himself, and if the snow let up, he’d head out again. If not, he’d build a lean-to and get going in the morning, when he could make better time.
He reached for his cigarettes, for the matches in the pack, and his stomach turned, and he scrabbled deeper into his pocket.
Turned the pocket out and a wad of gray lint dropped onto the snow like a dead mouse.
Mo! he thought. Shit!
His eyes on the curled lip of the road where he’d come down, he tried to calm himself. Already the snow was covering the signs of his fall, and he went up and down the ditch, raking his hands through the snow-covered grass, determined to find the cigarettes, but… nothing.
His ha
God, yes! His match container. Such was his habit of preparation, he hadn’t even thought of it. A gift from his father, he’d carried it with him from the time he’d been old enough to go out alone. Dug it now from the coin pocket of his jeans, a thumb sized brass cylinder.
The threaded end locked with a loop of carbon steel, and he forced it back with his thumb. Hallelujah, he thought, Thank you, Sister Seraphim! God does help those who help themselves! Only, gripping the container in his fist, his entire body willing it to open, he couldn’t get the cap to budge. So bit down on it, twisted, angrily, and the machining abrading his molars.
In a near rage, he dropped into the ditch, patting the snow, looking for – something, anything he could use to break open the match container.
And like that, he found a stone that fit in the palm of his hand, then scaled the embankment. Went farther up the road, to a stand of jack pine, where he cleared an arm’s width of asphalt.
He didn’t want to flatten the match container, just loosen the cap, and he lifted the stone and brought it down sharply on it, then stooped, trying to make out what he’d wrought.
The brass cylinder had shattered, the matches, Farmer’s, blue-nippled heads, scattered, like a fan. He swept them into his pocket, tore grass from the shoulder, then gathered pine detritus from the shoulder, made of it kindling and, with a piece of the fractured cylinder shaking in his cold-palsied hands, he jabbed at two matches clutched his insensate fingers.
The sulfured tops came off, and he dropped them. Took up four more, only this time he carefully struck them, the matches coming alight, and he thrust them into the grass at the heart of the kindling. Which smoldered, until he fed the remaining matches, flaring, into it, and the kindling catching fire, and he went up the hill behind him. Tore at dead branches, a veritable glee in him, and when he’d gotten an armload, he went back down.
The fire had picked up, but in burning was more fragile. He stooped with the branches.
It was then he heard it in the pines. A distant, throaty roaring, this something sweeping down on him.
He zipped his jacket open, spread his arms wide, making himself large, his jacket a sail, but the gust scooped the tinder, embers, and ash up into his face, and he clawed through the air.
Where one last, bright spark lifted high over his head and, tumbling end over end, it went out.
2
He was determined to follow the road, but now he was having difficulties with even that. Walking. His feet were distant, his hands no better, there only painful intimations of a body no longer his. The snow drifted in currents, luminescent. His trick knee hurt, and he had a tendency to walk to his right because of it, to veer off in that direction.
His mind wandered. Eli. The Twin Cities. Something wrong. What was it? Now he was guiding tourists, in August. The boat turned a lazy circle in the water, the sun hot on his back. He eyed the water and let himself fall, and the road hit him, a slap from the hand of God.
Dazed, he shook himself and got to his feet, knocked the snow out from under his jacket and bent into the wind. His teeth had stopped their incessant chattering, but that was a bad sign, too. He’d tried to stuff some grass in around his chest but it had gotten wet and had only dampened his shirt, then frozen.
Lights? A shed? A house? But there was nothing, just the muskeg, giving way to yet more scrub oak, then to grassy muskeg yet again, all endless muskeg, not so much as a telephone pole or power line.
Was it ten miles into Fort Frances now? Or less? How long had he been walking?
Could he get back to the car? Or was Fort Frances closer?
In the middle of the road, he bit his lower lip and tasted blood, but couldn’t feel a thing. His forehead was as hard as a sheet of glass and his feet were no longer a problem because they were no longer there.
The snow caught in his eyelashes; it seemed as though he were looking out from a cave. And outside, everything was darkness.
Slipping, he fell and hit his head again. Got, staggering, to his feet. No matter. He was drunk. But he didn’t drink anymore. And what was he doing out in the snow without a hat on his head? Or–
Right. It was April, that’s what it was, and… there’d been something he needed to do.
He let his hands drop to his sides. Turned, this way. Then that. Both directions seeming the same. Snow. A sea of it.
Ah, but here were his footprints! He followed them a distance, and the footprints, filling with snow, became more insubstantial, as if, he’d simply floated off, had become a jiibay, a ghost.
The footprints ended in both directions. He stood in the middle of the road, the snow coming down.
It was important to know which way he’d come, though, he thought. But which way was that?
At an intersection he stopped again. To the right, the muskeg gave way to a series of bare, loping hills. To his left was just more road and darkness and snow. What the hell, he thought, he would just keep moving, and he’d remember at some point where he’d been off to.
All of this now, God’s will, he thought, and laughed to himself. Old Seraphim at St. Mary’s Indian Boarding School had always said that, when something awful happened, It’s God’s will.
“Well, here you go, Seraphim!” he shouted, up in to the falling snow.
He laughed and held his arms out, then stumbled, catching himself. The wind had stopped, and it was dark and quiet and still.
The snow was falling so heavily it covered everything in smooth, flawless, perfection.
A high whistle had started in his head, which, just now, he recognized as his own breathing. Death near, only he wouldn’t give in to it, not when he needed to get somewhere.
Right. His brother, Eli. Eli needed him. And Ruben was dead, and Bear, it was all… connected. And this, now. This too, his being out here, had everything to do with it.
But what?
Staggering up the road, he’d come to a forested area, more ironwood, and now cedars, here a cathedral ceiling of skeletal limbs, and in the humming in his head voices of those he’d loved.
Nodin eta’ ningotan. Don’t be afraid, it’s just the wind, his mother, Martha, said. Didja bring me anything? his brother, Bear, asked. Nandotan, his father said, mino’ gondaagan… What are you doing? Where are you going?
He lifted his ear, his right, cocked up, a funnel…. Michael! said a voice he didn’t recognize.
He looked around him, here just more snow-drifted road and trees.
Michael!
Ha, he thought. He was talking to himself now.
Where are you going?!
He chuckled. “Where else?” he called out. “Aoda’nawine’ hindinose!” I’m walking to the spirit land. “With you. I’m going to hell, you fucker! You lying son-of-a-bitch!”
Slipping, he fell into a drift, then got to his knees and brushed the snow from his face. But why go farther? He staggered up the road, then fell again – Oh, Christ! Really?! – but stood, again.
He had to get somewhere, do something.
Michael! came the voice again, as if out the very dark, Tell me your true name, and you’ll live….
Oh, what shit, he told himself, that old thing, why, it was Old Man Debundunk’s cautionary tale coming to him, the one about the boy who’d lost his name and with it his soul, Old Man Debundunk, who, at his father’s insistence, he’d spent time with before he’d been sent off to St. Mary’s, and Old Man Debundunk having joked with him that going forward he’d be… “Gashkendam Gaag, The Lonely Porcupine,” and laughed, Ha ha ha! Poking him with his finger, he’d added, he’d have to ganawenin, keepsafe his true name there, tell no one, not ever, and he’d laughed again, Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, only it had been a deadly serious business.
And wasn’t that the voice he was hearing now, Old Man Debundunk’s? Who, even from the grave, was trying to scare him?
Sure, that was it, and he turned in the direction of the laughter, saw Paugook in the trees, grinning: Silver-white bones and skull, arm beckoning. Paugook, guide to the truly lost.
This way, Paugook beckoned. Over here. In the trees, it’s warm.
“Right,” he laughed. “You go fuck yourself, Pus Breath!”
He’d reached the foot of a hill, one high and looming over him, and he kicked his heels into the crusted snow, ascending it.
His boots slipped, and time and again he went down on all fours, climbing and barely arresting a fall. Glanced to his right. Paugook made obscene gestures, jumped giddily, laughing. Had his wiinag out, pumped it, suggestively. Let’s take on the Windigos, Michael, let’s show them who we really are.
