Rise, then Descend Read online

  He South steps forward with no assistance from the medicine men and lays his hands on the wet block. He flies in the sky. He is pure. He is chosen. To give his hands to the ground and his head to the sky and his blood to his people and his life to the Sun. The chanting swells and he looks at the Sun and he sees the sun in the Sun and the axe falls and his hands aren’t his they won’t move or tremble or twitch and there is his blood all over the block mixing with the others’ running on the ground and the pain where his hands were, his arms in the air, his hands still on the block until a medicine man puts them on a platter to deliver to the southern border. South holds his right arm up to the sun and his left out to his people and connects them through his pain, all the pain flowing into him from the ends of his arms. Birds have no hands. He flies. The eastern sun fills his eyes and his peoples’ cries fill his ears and his hands’ blood fills his nose as he lays his head on the red puddled block and leaves it there.

  ***

  He steps onto the top terrace breathing hard heart pounding sweating secret December secretions under his layers, and looks at the trees at his level and the fields at his level and the parking lot at his level. He is no higher than he began. He brought the land up with him. He’s not so tired. He is strong and ingenious and unprecedented. He leveled the mound, flattened it, graded it, and without a plow, like those called Cahokians, like they leveled their land that appeared flat but was not truly until they leveled a grand plaza on which to build hills. True level is not natural. True level is an achievement. From where he stands, the mound never existed. Each of his steps pushed the mound a step underground. He’d been climbing an ancient step machine. With the pole things you move back and forth. He redecides that he pulled the land up with him, even if that doesn’t rid him of the poles in his hands or their tremble. He buried Monk’s Mound, all the Cahokia Mounds and whatever was buried in them, even the interstate overpass and the abandoned Venture and the forgotten trailer park of the unemployed or unwanted or disposable and made a level place with nowhere higher to go. The land bears no relief. There is nowhere higher to go. He is no bird, no everpresent raven. No bald eagle wintering on the Mississippi. He descends from ground level to ground level and turns around to climb back up to ground level.

  ***

  She descends the mound slowly in the pouring rain, the Sun’s trash in a basket on her back and in other baskets on other backs before and behind her. She looks through the rain to what mounds she can see to the south: those in the plaza bordering the palisade and just barely the burial temples on the mound built by the Sun at the beginning of time when they were great and strong and the gods rewarded them with the knowledge of how to build mounds, when not just the Sun walked among them but all the ancestors, and then she takes another step. They descend slowly. Slowly not because of the heaviness of the Sun’s trash – it is heavy: fine cracked pottery and broken shell bead jewelry and chipped flint arrow heads and barely worn deerskin shirts and foreign ceremonial totems that mean nothing to her and jars of mildewed offering corn and meat bones with bits of meat on them and still edible if soft squash and fertility figurines trashed because of the gift of new figurines that to her eye, admittedly a trash hauler’s eye, are not as well made – she and the other trash girls will pick through their baskets before they dump them in the pit and trade their findings with each other if it is mutually beneficial and say nothing to each other or anyone else about it to not offend the Sun and get their hands chopped off, though everyone knows, it’s why their role is so prized, the enriching of their families form the Sun’s trash – even those coals, this ash, the bits of black they send down because the fire pit is ever filling, to clean the fire pit for wood sent in from distant settlements, will fill her fire pit and burn down yet further to cook whatever there is to cook and warm their hands even if it’s not enough to sweat in the lodge – what they will talk about is the word that today’s the day the cornfields along the creek began to flood, again, and how that doesn’t mean the fields’ productivity will go to the other fields, for yield is not something constant like sun or transferable like trash but something falling like rain. The trash is as heavy as she’s used to. She descends slowly to kill time. They descend slowly to make their task last and be considered a full job’s worth. Slowly to not finish early and be told to do something else to justify themselves. She shuffles slowly through the mud, pausing to look into the driving rain, the sun nowhere to be seen, to bring the end of the day faster.

  ***

  The sun wherever it is descends. The clouds stop spitting. The cars and trucks on the interstate roar west into the wind and roar east with the wind, pulling their rising then falling roar with them. They leave nothing behind but the wind and a dull monotonous self-cancelling roar, like the wind. The sky is gray, the road gray, the grass gray, the wind gray and he has nothing to say but what the fuck but he doesn’t say it. Not in this place. Not with his mouth. He turns to cross the terrace and descend the steps – maybe done for the day, or maybe the day done with him. Time to be dead to the world and rise again tomorrow, or not.

  Over the top step bounds a red stocking hat and orange jacket and blue snow pants running. There is a boy in that fuck you of color somewhere. He stands with the poles, waiting, the boy approaching then blowing by him to the lip of the mound and asking no one in particular, the air maybe –

  This is it?

  In his head he answers without his thick tongue mangling –

  Yes.

  Sorry. You blend in.

  I’m carrying poles.

  Where’s your skis?

  How you hope to hold a job disrespectin’ your elders?

  My dad said there used to be a church up here. Lousy location for church. No handicap access. You made it though, huh?

  Not a church.

  The poles help?

  A living to be made.

  You okay mister?

  A temple. The seat of government, the house of the chief, the home of the sun.

  Least the sun’s in the sky, huh?

  We are in the sky.

  Sun’s not even in the sky today. But that’s winter I guess.

  He won’t slur the boy or shame the dead or deform his thoughts with his mouth. He dumps words into the necrosis in his head, the lobe or whatever starved for blood –

  I only know what’s told me. One thousand some-odd years ago, one of the biggest cities in the world was here. Its peak was short and remarkable, like a hill in the middle of nothing. Like cursing the sky. Built this mound, biggest in the Americas, for the sun –

  Cold up here, huh?

  Words are clay and loam and topsoil and sand and gravel and stone and refrigerators and garbage in his head. Words rise without his slack jaw. Words pile basket-by-basket, mounding –

  Platform mounds had buildings on top, government or homes of the rich and powerful. Cones and ridge mounds were for burying. Mounds were covered in white clay to shed rain. A plaza at center for play and work and ceremony. Suburbs in every direction. To the north across the interstate and creek was an industrial center – made fine pottery and arrowheads and shell beads. Skilled labor jobs. Good jobs. Made hoes using flint for the blade, big technological advancement. Flint came from the south somewhere, near the river. Lots of trade, lots of offerings to the sun, lots of economy. The city and the sun grew till they shrank.

  You don’t have to not talk. Your words aren’t any harder than the museum’s.

  His words are cement. They clog his mouth. The boy wants to build with them. They squirm out of his head, hot cicadas crawling out of his skin, abandoning their shell and buzzing prehistorically –

  Grew corn.

  Like now.

  Except more colorful, like you. Red, white, blue, whatever. Smaller. A color for each direction maybe. City and houses and lives were mapped on north south east west and sky above and earth below. Sun holding it together. Built a circle of poles four hundred feet across out west there to track sun’s
passing and keep time. Built it and rebuilt it and rebuilt it. With precision. Was a feet of engineering, like this mound. Don’t make a mound this big by just piling dirt. Ain’t a sand castle. Been here a thousand years.

  And then what?

  The boy thinks him slow. The boy hasn’t broken down a drop of his spewed toxic refrigerant. The boy repeats himself but slower –

  And then what?

  Nothing.

  What happened?

  Nothing happened. They died or they lived and died or they moved away and died. Probably didn’t have enough to eat. If they had more, more people’d’ve come and then they wouldn’t’ve had enough. Cut down all the timber. Soil eroded. Sun eroded. People gave up on the religion or the religion gave up on them. Could’ve been weather got colder or could’ve been they had too much. Built a palisade. Whites showed up a hundred years later and it was all gone but mounds.

  Who was the last Cahokian standing up here, looking out?

  There’s your parents. You run on back. Don’t want them seeing you talking like some archeology of youth to a trembly stroke museum with a limp lip.

  Who was the last sun?

  Same sun’s still around somewhere, gone to set. Cahokia’s just some name somebody gave ‘em. Go on. There were no Cahokians. You’re not here and I’m not talking.

  ***

  He stands alone among the stars. Is this the night the sun won’t rise? There is no corn. They move away by all four directions and without them he is weaker. He will not be able to hold the sky and ground apart, to keep the spirits separate from the rotten bodies, to create the space for his people to live and plant and eat and dance. The sky is heavy and the ground swells up and he is cold and the fire is low because he doesn’t have wood to build it up and inspire. The Sun is cold and hungry. He has taken all there is to offer. There are those who want his head, who think that will change anything, who think he is a false Sun, that he no longer has the faculties to perform his function, that he is diseased, his brain worm-holed, his hand unsteady, his words slurred, that he needs to be relieved of his duties, that he needs to be the one who sacrifices, that he needs to be laid off in a bog unburied. His head, he imagines, they will have. His duties and his head. Perhaps tonight is the night the Sun will not rise. He stirs the coals until he finds a bit of orange. He is in the sky with the stars, but he is not. He is on a swollen bit of dirt, lifted up, made an example of. Nothing but a mosquito bite, an irritation on the land. There are stars, but he is not sure what it matters. The problem is there is not enough, and if there were, they’d want more.

  ***

  He lets the boy and his parents go down before him because he’s decided to go down and come up one last time and he doesn’t need the awkwardness of saying hello and goodbye to them again, and them staring at him, wondering if he works here, but no, not with those poles, not with that lip, afraid to ask anyway, who he is, this soaked man who appears to have been here all day and who has nothing better to do than limp around this mound and talk to little boys as if they were adults working together building refrigerators and assorted appliances and drinking coffee and who doesn’t go home to the house he doesn’t have and who watches them for what he knows is too long until they reach the parking lot and turn on their headlights and drive off.

  He leans on his poles as he descends step-by-step. He got his exercise today, too blessed much, always too much or too little, that’s the way. Legs ache. Good steps though. Not slippery, well constructed by someone. The park or the state or researchers. People. He reaches the bottom and it’s gray and he shouldn’t be here but there isn’t anywhere he should be and this monument’s stood the test of time so far and he’s never been good at tests and so he goes up one last time step-by-step a hundred some-odd feet, air chilling as he ascends and he wondering if he can go till the sun rises again. Then wondering nothing. Feeling no cold. Climbing, with poles. An occupation, doing, building a mound under his feet, rising by refrigerator by freezer by cold box under his feet, no no, no history and the mound is already here someone else built it it’s someone else’s life. He just steps, climbs, rises. He gets to the top. He doesn’t stop. There is no more mound only dim sky and clouds underlit by headlights and street lamps and the cold electric glow of industry and commerce and sprawl but he doesn’t stop. He keeps going up. One foot front of the other he rises.

  ***

  END

  About Nick Stokes

  Nick Stokes writes fictions, plays, novels, nothings, arrangements, pieces of prose, and other undefinables. He lives mostly or mostly lives in Washington; he packs mules in the backcountry of Montana; he's been elsewhere. Among other explorations, circa 2014, he's working on an immersive (anti)-choose-your-own-adventure novel. His novel AFFAIR was recently serialized and released as an ebook by The Seattle Star. He's been a finalist for many awards; he's received a few. His other writings can be found in dark crannies, in magazines sometimes known as journals, and around the web for dirt cheap or less. For dissemination, refer to https://www.nickstokes.net.

  Other Titles by Nick Stokes

  Novels:

  Affair

  You Choose ... (forthcoming)

  Novelette:

  1 Day

  Stories:

  An End

  Rise, then Descend

  What Never Happened, an Observation

  (others forthcoming)

  Short, Flash, or Nothing Prose:

  (numerous but for the moment you must search the web and on occasion read paper)

  Connect with Nick Stokes

  Author Website:

  https://www.nickstokes.net/

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  Rise, then Descend was first published by Crab Orchard Review (craborchardreview.siu.edu).