Albert's Manuscript / Fiction$15.95
$15.95
ALBERT’S MANUSCRIPT, a novel by P. Jamie Lee
When a troubled young Lakota man goes in search of his dead father, he tumbles into the spirit world and receives a vision that will guide the rest of his life.
What Albert encounters there reaches far beyond his own story. He learns of an ancient movement through time, the mysterious Wind of a Thousand Years, and a path toward a future that has not yet been written.
Prophetic and lyrical, Albert’s Manuscript explores the mystery of what connects one generation to another and the part each of us might play in the world that is still becoming.
The story and vision within Albert’s Manuscript later inspired Jamie to create The Bead People and The Wind of a Thousand Years.
Read a little below . . .
Read a little here . .
This is not the opening chapter but the scene where Albert's meets First Man. The story is of a young man who is taken into the spirit realm and taught some essential lessons about the human race.
Excerpt
My breathing eased and I looked up. The blue satin path we’d been following shifted to silver gray, rose up before me like ground fog, and then transformed itself into a stormy-looking gray wall. I felt suddenly dizzy and lost my balance for a moment. Reality seemed a slippery, changing thing in this world I’d tumbled into.
When I regained my balance, the gray storm was now a solid gray wall that reminded me of a picture of a stone castle I’d seen once. An arched doorway was cut into the stone and we entered into the room of the Wind where I was to take my first full lesson. The room was cavernous, and when I turned to say something to Grandfather, he and Unci had disappeared and I was alone.
I looked around. The walls rose around me like thunderclouds or smoke and yet they appeared solid as well. I stood for a long time looking for Grandfather and Unci but they were gone. Fear was at my heels again, and my breathing quickened. I closed my eyes to calm myself and when I opened them again, a small, bony, dark-haired man was standing in front of me. I couldn’t determine his age.
“Greetings,” he said, extending his hand.
I took the hand, and noticed its cool, leathery feeling. “Who are you?”
He smiled, showing a set of perfectly white teeth which appeared to glow against the dark lips and face. “I am First Man of the Wind. Come. Rest. We will talk.” He squatted to sit and by the time his bottom met the ground, all around us had shifted again. Now it appeared that we were in a small forest clearing, a friendly fire crackling not twelve inches from First Man’s feet.
I smelled smoke. This constantly changing landscape was making me sick to my stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut almost fearful of opening them and having the scene shift once again, adding to my vertigo. The man waited until my dizziness had passed and I could again focus my eyes on him.
“How is it you have come to the realm of the ancestors?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I was angry, riding my horse like a maniac one moment and here the next. I don’t understand.”
First Man nodded. “People travel from your realm usually for one of two reasons. They seek someone—or they have a question.”
I smiled. “Can it be for both reasons?”
“Yes, it can. Tell me.”
I am not a talker. I especially was not a talker at that age. Normally, I swallowed all my words and pain as if they were small stones until I had a belly full, and booze was all I knew that could make a belly full of stones livable. But there, before the blue flame of First Man’s fire, I talked. By my estimation in this strange realm, I talked for twenty hours, one hour for each year of my miserable life. It was like puking, this talk. I told First Man how my people suffer, a river of suffering. I told him the whole story—how the white man came and killed the buffalo and then killed us with disease, with guns, with starvation, with stealing land, with whiskey. He still kills us, I told First Man, but now with commodities, with the courts and, sometimes, with kindness.
Finally, I told him, the white man doesn’t need to kill us any longer because now we kill each other—or ourselves. I realized as the words spewed forth that my volcano had finally erupted, and the hot lava, steam, ash, and debris had flowed out all around me and left me empty in the center of a deep cold crater.
I was empty. And it was this emptiness I feared more than anything, even death. I looked at First Man and said, “If you take away my anger, I will have nothing left.”
He said nothing. I waited in the silence and the emptiness. The fire crackled: it had not changed in the long day of my talking even though no one added wood or tended it. I looked around actually expecting to see in the landscape around me a land burned and buried in the hot flow of lava. It had not changed either except in the far, far distance I could hear the low thrum of a drum, coming from deep within the forest. The sound made me want to weep. I could hear squirrels chattering, birds singing, and all seemed to sing to the drum. “What is that?” I asked First Man.
“It is not our concern. Not yet.”
His mysterious answer puzzled me, but I set my curiosity aside and sat up straighter. The emptiness was becoming familiar; not so fearful. Finally, I answered his question. “I come for both reasons. I want to ask why all of the killing . . . and I seek my father.”
“Yes, of course,” was all he said. He stared into the flame for a long, long time and then he began to talk.
First Man talked for twenty hours. I don’t know why I have these specific times in my mind. There was no sun rising and setting, no sense of thirst, hunger, or the need for rest. There were no clocks or watches, no morning birds or late night howl of coyote or wolf. Only the thrumming sound gathering around me and, yet, I must say he spoke for twenty hours.
It was during First Man’s twenty hours of talking that the empty crater of my being filled up with his story of The Wind of a Thousand Years.
Since that time, I have spent my life recalling all the details of what he told me, and now I recount it here as best I can. First Man of the Wind is the keeper of that story. He is also a Watcher.
