Calendar Mystery 13: HALLOWEEN FESTIVAL
Characters:
Chris Josephson, 29, creative writer, professor, owner of Sandy Point
lighthouse
Frank Zanetti, 24, detective sergeant
Sebastian Ericson, 19, artist
Vera Ericson, 60s, Sebastian's grandmother
Peter Red Crow, 19, farmer near the Ojibwe town of Orr
Simon Red Crow, 24, Peter's brother, Chris's housemate and Ojibwe tutor
Tom Dorsey, 20, college football quarterback
This one's for Dave again, with thanks for moral support and comments.
On the day before Halloween, Sebastian tested his artistic skill on a scene of football scrimmage. He set up his easel in the campus stadium and prepared a line-drawing depicting five players in action. Not a panorama of scrimmage, but five was the maximum number of human figures that he could reasonably depict in a charcoal sketch. Sebastian recognized one of the players as Tom Dorsey, the quarterback, because his photo appeared often in the sports pages of the campus newspaper.
Following his usual custom, he sketched the players as nudes.
One of the team members saw the unfinished sketch and shouted, "You queer!"
This attracted the attention of his teammates. Sebastian tried to explain his method for drawing human figures, but they wouldn't listen. They toppled his easel and scattered his portfolio of sketches. Led by Tom Dorsey, they paraded him into the locker room, where they stripped him naked. They bound his hands behind his back with a rolled-up tee-shirt, gagged him, and forced him into one of the lockers.
That evening, Vera told Chris and Simon Red Crow that Sebastian had gone missing: "Whoever is behind the Calendar Mystery has struck again!"
Maybe. Maybe not. It was time for a peyote ritual. Chris summoned Frank and Peter Red Crow. These three, together with Simon and Vera, sat in the lighthouse loft, in a circle on the ceremonial carpet, and ingested peyote. They waited for inspiration from Manitou. What they got was a strange oracle, spoken by Chris in his role as an apprentice shaman:
"Sebastian resembles Dionysus, the god of wine. Dionysus is one of the younger gods, a child of Zeus and Semele. To establish his worship among the Greeks, he came to Thebes in the form of a man; fair-skinned with soft curly hair, slender and pale except for red cheeks. He looked like a beta male, someone who had never been outdoors; the opposite of a wrestler or a sportsman.
"The woman of Thebes loved Dionysus. They organized dances in his honor and called themselves Bacchae. But Pentheus, the youthful king of Thebes, was opposed to this no god. Dionysus allowed himself to be captured by Pentheus's palace guardsmen. Pentheus accuse him of corrupting the women of Thebes. He confiscated his staff and cut off his curly locks. His guardsmen tied his hands behind his back and locked him up in the stable with the horses.
"Dionysus freed himself and joined in the dance with the Bacchae. He was the only male who was allowed to participate in this women's ritual. And because it was secret, Pentheus decided to spy on the bacchanalian dances. He climbed up a pine-tree and watched, seated on a pine bough. During the dance, the pine bough snapped and Pentheus slid down the pine-tree, landing in the middle of the dance. The Bacchae tore his body to pieces in a cannibalistic frenzy. All that was left of Pentheus was an assortment of white bones, scattered in fields and forests. And his head, which the Bacchae mounted on a stake and carried it during their final triumphal dance."
"What does it mean?" Frank asked.
"Manitou caused me to remember something that I already knew," Chris said: "the story of Dionysus as dramatized by Euripides in a tragedy called `The Bacchae'."
"I knew the classics would come in handy someday," Frank quipped.
"Sebastian is in some sense parallel to Dionysus," Chris continued, "but we must sort out the details that might be relevant."
Simon knew the Ojibwe tradition: "When a shaman speaks an oracle, it's up to others to interpret it. Only then can the oracle be accepted as valid as an omen."
"The Dionysus story has already begun," Frank said. "That means that he's being held captive, but where?"
Peter Red Crow spoke up: "Sebastian told me that he was going to campus to try his hand at a football scene."
Frank and the Red Crow brothers drove uphill to campus. On the football field, they found his easel, and sketch paper scattered on stadium benches.
"If it was football players who did this, where would they go next?" Peter Red Crow asked.
"To the locker room. Where else?" Simon replied.
They broke into the locker room through a window, and wandered through the shower-room and the aisles of lockers, calling for Sebastian. Simon heard him banging his head against a locker door. The door was secured by a padlock. Simon stayed at the locker with Sebastian, while Frank and Peter searched the coach's office until they found a long-handled pair of shears. Simon cut the padlock open. They freed Simon from the locker. As he was naked, they dressed him in a football uniform.
"Arming the hero for battle," Frank quipped.
"How about a helmet?" Simon grinned, holding one up.
"Sure, why not?" Sebastian replied. The foursome escaped through the broken window and drove to Sebastian's boardinghouse, Sebastian in disguise as a football player. Peter and Simon carried his easel and what was left of his sketches.
Sebastian declined to make a formal complaint. There would be no police report, but he declared: "I intend to finish this sketch."
"Can you get it done in time for the festival tomorrow?" Peter asked. "Make it part of your exhibit. That would be cool."
"I'll depict the players as nudes. That'll fix 'em, if they come to the festival." Sebastian said.
The festival on Sandy Point was family-friendly, no booze allowed, and because Halloween fell on Saturday, Father Andrew and Chris scheduled it from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, closing early enough for the children to prepare for trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods. A contingent of Ojibwe women sold feathered head-dresses, festival costumes, woven baskets, and embroidered blankets. They helped children and grown-ups apply war-paint in geometric and symbolic designs on their faces, and on the torsos of those willing to go shirtless on the last day of October.
Sebastian got war-paint on his face and torso. The Red Crow brothers persuaded the Ojibwe elders to "fulfill the omen of Manitou" by accepting Sebastian as one of their powwow dancers. Tom Dorsey and his teammates recognized Sebastian at once. They wanted to watch the Ojibwe powwow, but feared that Sebastian might `out' them for their false imprisonment of him on the previous day, so they snuck into the lighthouse, where they observed the powwow from an open window in the loft.
St. John's two bagpipers, Scott McGiver and Alex Hamilton, contributed a Scottish air to Ojibwe chants, "a breeze sent by Manitou to add mystery to the powwow," Amik Ziibaang said. As a duet, they performed the Highland Fling', the Pitlochry Battle Song', and `Loch Lomond' to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Brexit.
During one of the dances, Tom Dorsey placed a bottle of red wine on the windowsill. As the sill was installed at an angle to deflect rain-water, the wine-bottle slid off and shattered on the antique anchor below, spattering wine on the red and white stripes of the external wall of the lighthouse. People looked up. There was Tom Dorsey in the window, and on each side of him, the faces of two black teammates. On this occasion, Frank was on duty as a `police presence'. He signaled for the footballers to descend, but Sebastian intervened and told Frank to leave them alone. Even so, the five footballers volunteered to clean up the shards of broken glass. The Red Crow brothers fetched a box of latex gloves from the kitchen in the caretaker's house, and offered them gloves to prevent them from cutting their fingers on the glass.
Sebastian approached the footballers. He signaled to his friends to keep their distance. He offered to show them his `scrimmage sketches', which were on display in the festival's auction ground. The first was a line-drawing. The second was a half-finished sketch depicting the footballers as nudes. Sebastian had obscured their identities by blurring their facial features. The third was a finished sketch, depicting the men in football uniforms. In this one, the faces of all five teammates were recognizable. On this occasion, they listened while Sebastian explained his method for sketching human figures: "I start by depicting them as nudes. Then I sketch in the clothing. Otherwise, the clothing looks flat, as if no one was wearing it."
The result of this meeting was reconciliation. Tom Dorsey started to apologize for his rough treatment of Sebastian the day before. "Never mind about that," Sebastian said, cutting him off. "That's in the past. As for my sketch depicting you guys in the nude, that was just a draft. I brought it here for revenge, and for that I'm sorry."
Sebastian started to take down the offending sketch, but Dorsey prevented him. "Leave it be," he said, and to his teammates he quipped: "He's a pretty good guesser, don't you think?" The teammates laughed at Dorsey's allusion to genitalia.
One thing that Sebastian, the artist, has in common with Goran Bixo, the author, is a theory about nudes, whether in a sketch or an episode. It's not really about nudes' per se; it's about the male gaze' in a double sense: the objectified male nude' and the male gazing at a nude'. It wasn't possible for five footballers to show up nude at a family-friendly Halloween festival, but Sebastian solved the problem by sketching them as nudes in a draft-version of the charcoal sketch of scrimmaging college boys.
"What do you think of my solution?" Sebastian asked.
Sebastian's three `scrimmage sketches' were among fifty items donated for the auction to benefit the Church of St. John the Beloved. Jim Landon, the church's secret benefactor, bid $750. "That's $250 more than I would have charged for a commission," Sebastian whispered to Father Andrew. Four of Sebastian's Ojibwe sketches fetched $500 each: one of four elders dancing in festive array; one of Amik Ziibaang passing a tobacco pipe to Peter Red Crow; one of Amik seated at the entrance of the ceremonial wigwam; one of Simon rescuing Chris in the Boundary Waters.
"That adds up to $2,750, far more than any other donation," Peter Red Crow remarked to Sebastian.
The auction continued. Steve Blazer, the auctioneer, reminded the crowd that each item was donated to benefit St. John's. The items on offer included homemade afghans, embroidered linens and towels, antiques from diverse attics, and gift cards from several stores in downtown Duluth.
Not to be outdone by Sebastian, and to everyone's surprise, Frank Zanetti stepped forward to offer himself for sale at auction. "Who'll give $200 to socialize for an evening with one of Duluth's finest?" Steve Blazer called out. He was good at his job. The bidding rose to $1,000. "Remember, this is a charity auction for a church," Blazer reminded the crowd.
Vera bid $2,000. She had planned to donate that sum anyway, so why not spend an evening with Frank?
"$5,000!" boomed a previously unheard voice from the rear of the crowd.
"I hear $5,000," Steve Blazer echoed. "Going once, going twice, final item sold to the gentleman in the red and black flannel shirt!"
The mystery-bidder counted out fifty $100 bills at the cashier's table. Frank walked up to the man, who introduced himself as Jesse Kovic.
"I'm on duty until five, but I could meet you wherever you want, unless you want to schedule another evening," Frank said.
"This evening is fine," Jesse said. "I don't do restaurants or bars. We can meet at my boardinghouse on the West side. We can spend some time watching the neighborhood children trick-or-treating.
ETHNIC APPROPRIATION AT SANDY POINT LIGHTHOUSE was the title of an unfavorable review in the campus newspaper, signed by The Third Wave'. The subtitle: Powwow Purity Tainted by Bagpipes'. Chris could see at once that the anonymous author was Marsha Newsome. She faulted the Ojibwe dancers as subalterns' who colluded with the white male patriarchy' for recolonizing' the Indians' by mixing the races', Native Americans' with Scottish pipers, and the dance was marred by the appearance of a disgusting albino hermaphrodite'. She faulted the Ojibwe women for commodifying' their culture, and wrote: "It would have been better for them to stay on the Indian reservation weaving baskets and beating wild rice into boats with a paddle."
"What reservation?" Simon asked. "She thinks that because we're Ojibwe, we belong on a reservation."
"Newspapers always print the truth," Chris replied, "except when it's a story about an event that you've seen first-hand."
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