Points

My grandfather called them points instead of arrowheads.  The first time he took me point hunting, I was very young.  It’s one of my first memories, walking beside him through the pine forest near my house – the Paranormal course today -  after a summer storm.  The loblollies spread bright green overhead like a screen against the dark blue sky, and ferns the color of lime peels pushed up from below, from our bright red Virginia clay.  After a hard rain, the clay gets shoved around, layers upon layers of soil re-shuffled. It leaves the little rocks exposed. 

That first time, and right away he showed me a point, a big one, quartz, washed clean and white by the rain.  I scooped it up from right beside a huge loblolly pine in a clearing, an easy find. In hindsight, I’ve come to suspect that my grandfather planted it there so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed.  

He knelt beside me, held it between his thumb and forefinger at arm’s length, and he dropped his bottom jaw as low as he could to exaggerate his admiration.  Then he drew it in close, right up against our faces, and he spoke seriously, “This is an artifact.  Do you understand that?  The last person to touch this was a wild Indian.”  

Later, I became that wild Indian, or at least I tried.  I practiced with a little compound bow in my yard, arrows making a loud thwack against the pie plate that I pinned to a haybale.  I learned to feel the wind switch directions, to draw back when the wind gusts and shoot when the wind subsides, like a wave.  I lost almost every arrow in my quiver chasing grey squirrels. I painted my face.  

One October, I bought a 3-pack of metal broadheads, sharp enough to shave the hairs growing dark from my forearms.  They were bright silver, a dangerous mix of aluminum and steel, and I threaded them into the tips of the straightest arrows I had remaining.  My dad eyed them suspiciously, but he nodded his head, and he pulled me into the bathroom by my elbow and turned off the light.  From his pocket, he brandished a small flashlight, opened his mouth, and pointed the little beam of light at the back of his throat. Behind his tongue and above his tonsils rested a long, jagged scar the color of a pearl.  He confided in me that, a few weeks before, he’d been in a rush to go hunting, running up a flight of stairs with an arrow in his hand, and he had tripped.  

“Just a target point,” he explained.  “A broadhead would have come through the back of my neck.”

A month ago, I found a point with my daughter.  We were strolling through a stand of jack pines near the bottom of the twin lakes trail at Blue Ridge School, doing trailwork together again, right where it spoons the edge of a dry wash that had flooded the week before.  It was misty, overcast, grey: poor light for arrowhead hunting.  But as I raked the flooded debris away from a low spot in the trail, I kept an eye downward out of habit, searching the edges for the white speck of a point.  And there it rested, my daughter’s first, washed down from the mountain and cradled in the corner of a grove of beach trees.  She cupped the little treasure in both hands, the way she holds warm water to wash her face, smiling, and the clean point glimmered white like her toothy grin.   

It shocked me when my grandfather’s voice - my dad’s voice - spilled out of me when I spoke to my daughter there, and I told her everything I could remember.

That the Monacans used quartz because they could make a sturdy, sharp point without too much work. 

That they used to paddle up these creeks and rivers in canoes, the Rivanna, the Mechums, the Moormans, long before those rivers ever had those names.  

That they shot deer mostly, but also sometimes elk – elk! – and they floated their kills back downstream.

Her face was bewildered as she listened, like she didn’t recognize me.  I spat up facts about these things that no longer exist until she interrupted me, “Daddy?”  

But I couldn’t hold it in, all these things that I forgot I knew came spilling out from some kind of wound in my mouth, like blood.  

That the Monacans would trade quartz points with the Iroquois to the North in exchange for flints, churts, and warmer furs.  

That the Monacans and the Iroquois were all gone.  

That we’re standing on stolen land.  

Avery pleaded again, “Daddy!” 

I stopped, and it was absolutely quiet, just a grey mist falling through the dark pine trees. Avery didn’t follow up with a question.  She took my hand and we walked back down the wash to our car as the daylight faded.    

But lately when Avery walks in the forest to do trail work with me, she sings, and I see that she’s looking down.