Chapter 18: Foundations

Graydon was exhausted. His eyes had sunk into their sockets, dark circles lay sagging above his gaunt cheekbones, and his face bore signs of strain and a weariness beyond his years. For a week he had spent his nights alone in the hayloft, isolated and immersed in his connections, seeing the harm that had befallen the Jacobs family.

His days were filled with work, sweating to clear ditches, cut brush, weed the garden and repair fences around the old homestead. He drove himself hard, stopping only for a brief lunch and a midday rest. He avoided his younger brother. He had few words for his mother, who knew that her eldest son was troubled beyond her counsel. Dee could only look on and tell herself that when he needed her, he would come to her. She sensed that although he was beyond her reach, he loved and needed her.

“So. I hear you’ve been sniffing around some new little girl in town, huh!” His stepfather’s words intruded across the kitchen table, catching Graydon lost in weary thoughts of his own.

“Uhh ... what? What did you say?”

“I said I hear there’s a girl staying down at that taxidermist’s place, that friend you got, that freak with the crippled arm. I hear he’s got a strange girl come to live with him and his teacher wife. I hear that you’ve been going down there a lot. What’s up? You gettin’ a little honey on yer stinger?”

Graydon sat staring, disbelieving. His mother looked down into her plate. Graydon set his fork down and moved his plate away. Words, any response, failed him. What could he say?

“Awww, c’mon, fer crissakes! Yer a growin’ young man. It’s time you learned how to go out and get a little! You know, get her out in the wild woods you love so much, and play a little stink-finger with her? Jeezus, all you do is let yer damned hair grow long. Yer goin’ around looking like some kinda spook, and you don’t do nothin’ like a normal kid! Start actin’ normal. Go after the girl. Get yerself a little nookie!”

Graydon excused himself from the table, ignoring his stepfather’s angry protests: “Hey, shithead, I’m not done talking to you! Git yer ass back here!”

Graydon snatched up his jacket and slipped out of the house, his face blazing with shame, his ears burning. His mind struggled to suppress the hot rage and angry curses rising within himself. His feet found their own path; he walked up the mountain. As he walked he called up strength to stifle his murderous thoughts.

It had been an unsettled, hot, violent sort of day that promised a night filled with thunderheads and lightning strikes. Prayerfully, it would be a night of cloud-to-cloud lightning. The forest was dry, rains were infrequent and scattered, every ground strike was certain to start a fire.

Mike sat with Graydon at their accustomed fire circle, the tiny rock-lined pit in a clearing on the hillside above Mike’s cabin. The pale light of a half moon winked through the towering thunderheads that swept down the valley. Dust-scented gusts spun and clutched at them. Litter and leaves swirled around them. A heavy mat of herbs and grasses smoldered in the fire pit and threw off clouds of pungent smoke to sting their eyes and fill their lungs.

“Young shaman,” Mike began, with a stare so serious that Graydon thought he’d committed some grave offense.

“Young shaman, my friend, my student, this is a hard thing you have begun. Your life in this valley has been sheltered, since the hard beginnings you endured before coming here. You have never been exposed to the evil and depravity you now see. You are unbalanced. You lack the foundation of knowledge, of faith, of certainty necessary to measure and hold evil in perspective. Now you must learn. You must know.

“How is it, you ask, that such evil can be? How can it be permitted? If there is a Great Spirit, a Creator, how could such evil be allowed into this Creation?

“This is a difficult question. The answer is even more difficult, both simple and infinite. Simple, if you accept and understand; infinite in endless argument and confusion if you do not accept.”

Thunder crashed heavily from the fat, pendulous cloud rolling across the face of Virginian Ridge. Graydon stared into the smoke from the small circle at his feet. He felt a thousand years old at this moment. His shoulders sagged with the weight of a thousand burdens. His weary mind opened to his teacher’s words. They sank deeply into his consciousness. It felt like balm to his troubled soul.

“Know that there is a balance in all things. Opposites balance: light and dark, male and female, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, life and death, creation and destruction. In all things, in all ways, there is a balance. Our Asian brothers created a symbol, the spinning circle of light and dark, each chasing the other in an endless cycle.

“Know that there is no physical dark; it is simply the absence of light. There is no poverty; it is simply the absence of wealth. An old sage once asked the beggar: Bring me your poverty. Put it in a bag and spill it at my feet, that I might examine it and know the extent of your impoverishment. That was absurd, of course.

“It is the same with evil. There is no satan, no devil, no demons, no tangible entity that moves man to commit unspeakable deeds. Evil is a choice; a man yields to his baser self. It has been convenient to create a monster, a satan, to blame for our weakness; a satan to bind a congregation to its priests for protection. This is an old and familiar path to power. It is a parent, saying to the child: obey me, or the bogey-man will creep out and do terrible things to you.