Free Celia's Song by Lee Maracle

end.
    â€œThere is power in naming,” Grandpa had said to his daughter when she told him she was going to send her daughters to the priest to be named. “Names mean something. They encourage children to travel on a certain path. The sides of character are reflected in a name. If you don’t know the meaning of the names, how will you know what sides having them will show? Meaningless names could reduce them to a meaningless existence.”
    â€œThere is power in their names,” his daughter replied. She had watched the men bury the dead. She had wrapped body after body in the crude blankets they had received in trade from even cruder white men because there was no time to weave their own. They all returned home improperly dressed. The shame of seeing her relatives going home half-naked burned her eyes dry with grief. She could not face another round of death.
    â€œBoth things are true,” Celia’s great-great-grandmother sighed.
    THE CANDLE IN FRONT of Celia jumps at the accidental touch of her hand as she mimics Alice’s Gramma throwing up her hands and sighing.
    â€œYou all right, Aunt Celia?” Jacob asks. Celia scrambles to come back to reality and find an answer.
    â€œI was just wondering what happened to Gramma,” is all she can come up with. She twirls a cedar branch between her thumb and baby finger, knowing full well the answer is inadequate.
    â€œShe died,” Rena says as though she thinks Celia is stupid, but she says it with such an endearing flatness that everyone breaks up laughing.
    Busted, Celia thinks to herself, as she picks up the cedar she has just put down. Celia has no clue how to respond to Rena, with her white girl, her Mac shirt, her dry wit, her dramatic performance of every story told. These are too many masks for Celia. Rena’s voice jars Celia and catches her lying. Her words come out wrapped in a sharp-edged mystery, even now when she slops on the endearment. Celia still hears the sharpness. It slices up the possibility of Celia having any kind of relationship with her. It annoys Celia the way it sometimes annoyed her to see the black of the night sky get clouded with an opaque layer of plain blue paint, dimming the stars and ruining the sky’s perfect black. Celia squirms, but just barely.
    All eyes turn to her. She sniffs at the cedar bough in her hand. The room resumes its chatter after a moment of Celia’s silence. Celia withdraws from the room and tries to remember when it was that the houses lost the scent of cedar, yesterday’s pie, or Saturday’s bread baking. Smells that individuated the women’s recipes and defined the very sense of nourishment each woman offered her family. The devotion of the women used to be measured by the scent of their homes, as though the very smell of them marked the caring of the women, detailed the emotion they invested in their children, articulated the special esteem in which they held their men.
    Momma’s home was fussy the way Momma was. Momma put cardamom in her pumpkin pie, crimped the edges, and cut tiny v-shaped nicks in the surface of the pumpkin filling after it was done. While the pies cooled on the counter, Momma would hunt all over the house trying to find spare change. If she found it, she would get Jimmy to cycle to town for whipping cream. That was fussy. No one made fussy pumpkin pie like Momma used to. Now the homes smell of cleaning agents and air fresheners. The old smells seemed to end sometime after the 1970 s, about when they got central heating. Celia sniffs the cedar. She closes her eyes.
    â€œMy life doesn’t smell right anymore,” she says as she lays the cedar out carefully on the coffee table.
    Normally, when I hear something as plain and simple as this, I leave. But I got to thinking that something was going to happen, so I stayed. Sometimes it is hard for a mink to hang in there, but I am curious.
    Rena thinks Celia might be on to something.