Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [69]
By the time we moved to Clarkesville, Ed was deeply involved in Lakota ways. Since these are ways of prayer, he was able to remain Episcopal as well, or perhaps I should say that he was only able to remain Episcopal because of these ways, which offered him concrete means of practicing his faith that teaching Sunday school and singing in the choir did not. While I loved what I saw happening in him, I was also jealous of his new friends and frightened of what might happen if my parishioners learned all that Ed was up to. Even I was undone by some of the stories he told me about talking bugs and helping spirits. I promised to think “angels” whenever he said “spirits,” he promised not to invite any church members to a sweat lodge, and we had a truce that we lived with for five years.
Then Cleto came to visit, blessing our place and putting red prayer ties on our gateposts before I knew he was hoping for a spot to hold a North Georgia Sun Dance. Because Cherokee culture is matriarchal, he asked Ed to ask me. Saying yes seemed small enough reparation for what had happened in the past century. It was the only honorable answer as well, but I was still afraid when I said it. By the time the first cars began arriving that July, I was furious as well.
A huge trash container had been parked at the head of my driveway. Blue porta-potties were scattered throughout my beautiful woods. People I did not know were showing up with their children, campers, tents, and coolers, making muddy ruts in my pasture with their trucks and tying their plastic clotheslines to my trees. By 8:00 the next morning, the neighbors were on the telephone. Could I please ask my guests to slow down on the road? Did they have to come and go at all hours of the night? Speaking of night, what time was the drumming going to stop? Would I give the neighbors some warning next year, so that they could schedule their vacations during the Sun Dance?
I waited for the police to arrive, but they never did. However, a large truck arrived every couple of days to siphon out the porta-potties. “We’re number one in the number two business,” read the slogan on the driver’s door. I watched him lumber down toward the Sun Dance grounds without ever going down there myself. That first year, it was all I could do to stay married. Near the end of the dance, I learned that Ed had invited a church member with Parkinson’s disease to the traditional healing round on the third day. The man had come, too, although I never learned what he made of his experience. All I knew was that he had asked someone standing under the arbor with him, “Does Barbara know what’s going on down here?” One reason I stayed in the house was so I could answer, “No, I do not.”
But, even in the midst of my awful fear and worry, I could sense the blessing settling down over the land. The drum that beat from sunup to sundown began to sound like a heartbeat to me. When it stopped, the branches of the trees seemed to droop a little. The birds murmured in their sleep. When the drum began again the next morning, roosters crowed and breezes stirred the leaves. Through the day people drifted up to the house for firewood, tools, or water. Sometimes I would hear low laughter before I saw them, walking in twos or threes with children trailing behind them. Some had slept so many nights on the ground that they had acquired their own gravity. They moved slowly, as if each step delivered such energy that they were reluctant to lift their feet. They seemed entirely at home in their bodies, entirely at home on the earth, and when they looked at