Okyek Meh Thih smiled at this, but he wasn’t ready to believe that his grandfather was alive and well inside the chick.
It had robust health and became strong, and the People called him Chak with much affection, and so his name was Chak. He became full grown in twenty months, bigger and more vibrant than any of his brothers who flew among the treetops.
Chak would go to the swarms of purple giants who winged among the upper canopy. Sometimes he would join them for days at a time, but always he returned to the Caretaker, and then he would be on the Caretaker’s shoulder hour after hour. Okyek Meh Thih wore shoulder pads of layered hide to protect his flesh from Chak’s giant claws.
He was reminded of the inscription every so often, as he cared for his People and attended to their problems, physical and emotional. Sometimes they would come to him with sleeplessness from bad dreams. As his grandfather, long deceased, had explained to him, this came when Chuh Mboi Aku’s own powerful sleeping mind sent wisps of itself into the minds of those who were sensitive to him.
Okyek Meh Thih had a tool that his grandfather never had. It was a book on psychotherapy. An anthropologist had gifted him with it decades ago. The anthropologist had been a friend, and had perceived the intelligence in Okyek Meh Thih. “You would be a professor if you were to come to America with me.”
“I’m quite happy here and my People need me. Would I and my People be happier if I were to go to America?” Okyek Meh Thih asked the anthropologist.
“No, of course not.”
That settled that. Okyek Meh Thih loved his book and he used his smattering of reading skills to absorb it, until he knew the entire book and his reading skills were much improved.
The book had almost been lost once. It was two years after the anthropologist had visited.
“We saw the film on public television and our hearts went out to you,” said the missionary. She was a stem woman with her hair pulled back and knotted so tightly that her mouth was taut and her tongue snaked out like a lizard’s. The mouth was good for nothing. She couldn’t catch flies with it for all her tongue flicking, and she couldn’t speak any sort of common sense.
“Please explain again what you are here to do for my People,” Okyek Meh Thih asked. “I do not mean to offend, but I cannot understand.”
The missionary took his hand. “We’re here to help you with your plight.”
Okyek Meh Thih thought he knew the English word plight, but he didn’t understand the missionary’s meaning. “We have no plight.”
“We’re here to raise you up from your misery and filth and to give you the gift of civilization.”
Okyek Meh Thih was rarely so confused. “We have no filth and no misery. Perhaps you have found the wrong People. I understand there are sometimes many Peoples featured on public television.”
“This filth! This misery!” She was becoming exasperated as she pointed to a cooking pot and a sleeping hut. Then she shot an accusing finger at a young woman who was bringing a gourd of water. “This immorality.”
“Ah!” Okyek Meh Thih said. Now he remembered the warnings of the anthropologist. The missionaries would come with visions of what was moral and what was not. Altering the Peoples to meet their own definition of morality was what they strove for. Somehow, a great deal of their efforts revolved around the hiding of the breasts of the women. The People, the missionary pointed out with much indignation, wore no clothes at all.
Indeed, the missionary and her husband and her four young adult helpers went to great lengths to impress upon the Peoples that the human body was a sin. Seeing it was a sin. Allowing it to be seen was a sin.
When the chief missionary became exasperated by the People’s inability to understand her edicts, Okyek Meh Thih stepped in and offered her a compromise as a gesture of politeness. The People would agree to don clothing for one day if the missionaries would go naked for one day. In this way, both Peoples would share their experience and develop greater respect for one another.
The lady missionary didn’t see this as a reasonable compromise. In fact, she became enraged and violent. She disrupted Okyek Meh Thih’s village temple and she found his book on psychotherapy. “Filth!” she named it, and threw it into a cooking pot.
Okyek Meh Thih retrieved it, cleaned it in pure water, and set it out to dry in the sun.
Then the woman missionary turned her rage on the bird, Chak. “Who put English filth into the mouth of this evil beast?”
Okyek Meh Thih answered that the beast wasn’t evil, and he asked her to refrain from saying so, for she insulted the People in a way she could not understand. As for his bawdy poetry, it had come from the anthropologist.
“The creature learns our words with much skill, so my good friend taught the poetry to the bird. My good friend assured me the poetry of the bird would be of much assistance to the People when the missionaries came.”
The woman sputtered. The bird chose that moment to perch above her and recite one of his favorite poems.
For fifty-odd years the old maid
bitter and angry she stayed
she’d be way less grumpy
if she’d just try some humpy
’cause what’s more fun than getting laid?
The woman went into paroxysms of fury. “Did you hear it?”
“Pushed your button!” the bird squawked excitedly.
The woman found herself the center of attention, and she turned more red than any human being the Caretaker had ever seen. She responded in the only way she knew how.
“That bird is possessed of evil! It is God’s will that it be removed from His earth.” She snatched a burning stick from a cook fire and attacked the bird.
The great purple macaw laughed and his head followed the pretty flames swinging back and forth under its branch. The People were mortified. Chak was more than just a favorite pet of their Caretaker and a friend of all the People—he was, maybe, the embodiment of a revered forefather.
The People, all of them together, escorted the missionary and her companions away and invited them never to return.
The anthropologist’s book was swollen from getting wet, but still legible after it dried, and from it Okyek Meh Thih found a method for dealing with the People who came to him dreaming of the old god called Chuh Mboi Aku. The book told him that most dreams among all human beings were about one subject only.
“It is a phallus,” he would tell them. “You dream of the fertility that blesses you and your family.”
“But in my dreams, the thing came out of the jungle was tall as a mountain,” the dreamer might tell him. “It rained down hot on the jungle for miles in all directions, farther than the People have ever ventured.”
“You dream of the magnificent semen of your bloodline, so powerful it has touched even other Peoples,” Okyek Meh Thih told them. “Did you not share your semen with the women of the People of the River Down the River when we met for our Feast of Peoples? I think your great semen has blessed those Peoples just as it has blessed ours.”
This tale worked well with men, as well as with women, and it transformed their night terrors into delight. His grandfather would have been proud of him.
Rarely they came with the other tales of Chuh Mboi Aku—the dreams in which they laid their eyes on Chuh Mboi Aku himself, who was possessed of multiple tentacles that writhed and snatched up prey. “Those are phalluses,” Okyek Meh Thih told his People. “You are dreaming of the many wonderful penises of your blessed bloodline and the splendor of those penises, for you and your brothers and father and sons and nephews all hunt well for the People and protect the People and spread your wonderful semen magnificently among the Peoples!”