Tangled Roots

by Marcia Talley

We clinked the rims of our glasses together and sipped.

  ‘You know,’ he mused after a few moments of companionable silence. ‘When you finish with this family project, maybe you can find Amelia Earhart.’

  THIRTEEN

  I had plenty of research pending on my To-Do list before charging off on fruitless searches for Amelia Earhart – or Jimmy Hoffa or D.B. Cooper, for that matter.

  After checking my email for responses to my DNA matches – nothing heard – I went looking for information on my maternal great-grandmother, Jane Drew, and her son, Adam, the great uncle I never knew.

  Fortunately, the state of Vermont keeps meticulous vital records. Since 1779, town clerks were required by law to record all marriages, births and deaths. Most of this data appears on handwritten index cards, images of which can be found online.

  When my great-grandmother married Josiah Drew in 1910, her maiden name was listed as Jane Gillette, daughter of William Gillette and Susanna Cook of Rutland, Vermont. Jane’s age at the time was nineteen, so I calculated she had been born around 1891, which was confirmed by another card recording the birth of a daughter named Jane to a William and Susanna Gillette on October 18, 1891.

  Jane and Josiah’s daughter Charlotte blessed the happy couple in 1912. Before Charlotte’s brother, Adam, came along in 1917, there had been another child, a boy named Josiah Drew after his father, but the lad died in the winter of 1915 when the poor thing was only three months old. No cause of death was recorded.

  Jane’s death, however, was fully documented. She passed away on December 22, 1926 of rheumatic heart disease, a complication, according to the doctor who signed her death certificate, of infantile scarlet fever.

  If only penicillin had been discovered earlier, I mused sadly as I updated my family tree with this new information.

  But what had happened to Charlotte’s brother, my great uncle Adam Drew? After crawling around my databases for an hour, I gradually drew a picture of his life. Adam had graduated from Dartmouth College in 1938 with a degree in engineering. While in college, he rowed crew and sang in the glee club. When 1940 rolled around, he was living with his widowed father, Josiah, in Rutland, Vermont and working as a mechanic, although the census didn’t say where. He’d enlisted in the Navy in October 1942, where he served as a MoMM2c. Motor Machinist’s Mate Second Class Drew had shipped out to Europe on a destroyer, the USS Gleaves, which had been named, I was fascinated to find out, after an 1877 Naval Academy graduate who invented ways to improve the accuracy of torpedoes.

  Adam Drew had survived the war – he was granted an honorable discharge in 1945 – but after that, his online record turned grim. In 1947, two days after his thirtieth birthday, Adam committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a revolver. The Rutland Evening Dispatch carried the story in blunt, no-nonsense terms:

  On Monday, during the forenoon, Mr Drew purchased a revolver. Returning to his father’s house, he seated himself at a table and wrote a brief note, wherein he stated that people were talking falsely about him, etc., and then, without rising from his chair, placed the muzzle of the revolver to his right temple and fired. The ball passed through his head, killing him instantly. Temporary aberration of mind is assigned as the cause of the fatal act.

  Swell. Like red hair, did mental illness run in the Drew family? More likely, I chided myself, young Adam had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which was called shell shock back then. If this kept up, I’d either have to start taking anti-depressants or give up genealogical research altogether.

  Hoping to uncover uplifting news, I went in search of the mysterious Mrs H.H. Westerly, the woman who had hosted my grandmother Charlotte’s wedding. What facts I discovered did nothing to lighten my dark mood.

  According to her obituary in the Bethel Gazette, Mrs H.H. turned out to be my grandfather’s younger sister, Mina Smith. I’d never known my great aunt Mina; like Charles Keene, she’d died in the early years of the Second World War, or so I’d been told. According to family lore, she’d taken a train to Boston for dental surgery and never returned, succumbing in ‘Beantown’ to a fatal reaction, perhaps an overdose of anesthesia.

  I created a record for Mina and connected it to her husband Howard Harrison Westerly. When the screen refreshed, a pennant on Mina’s icon began flapping, and when I clicked on the pennant, there it was: an image of Mina’s death certificate from the state of Massachusetts. My eyes were first drawn, as they always were these days, to ‘cause of death’.

  Ovarian tumor?

  Damn! I flopped back in my chair. Years back when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I’d claimed with confidence, when interviewed by the doctor, that there was no history of cancer in my family. None. And yet, there it was, typed out in black and white on an official Massachusetts death certificate: the Big C, a diagnosis too embarrassing to talk about back then.

  I felt like everything I thought I knew about my family was tumbling like dominoes.

  What next?

  Unlike Adam, who was single when he died, Mina left Howard with four youngsters to raise. He’d remarried within a year and moved to Denver where, according to the census for 1940, he worked as a mining engineer. At that point, we’d lost track of that branch of the family. I figured that some of the cousins I’d recently matched may well have descended from Mina’s line. But in spite of the emails I’d sent out, no one had responded. I was beginning to grow impatient.

  The first nibble came a week later in the form of an email alerting me to a message waiting in my Gen-Tree account. I was at Whole Foods picking out some pork chops for dinner, but as soon as I got home, I stuffed the groceries in the fridge, bag and all, then rushed downstairs and turned on the computer.

  Dear Hannah Ives, the message began. My name is Nicholas Ohanzee Johnson, born in 1996 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I am Ogala Lakota, and I may be the connection you are looking for. Please write back and tell me more.

  When my hands had stopped shaking, I emailed Nicholas back, telling him what I knew about my grandmother, Charlotte Drew, concluding with:

  Although our Native American ancestry came as a complete surprise, we are delighted to learn of it and hope you can help us fill in the blanks in our grandmother’s early life. She was living in Pierre studying to become a nurse and would have come into contact with your family sometime between 1929 and 1932. Do you know where Charlotte might fit into your family tree?

  Hoping to speed up the conversation, I added my private email address and hit send.

  I’ll ask my Great-Great-Aunt Wasula, Nicholas replied almost at once. She might know. She just turned 102 but has a Wikipedia-like memory. Back to you soon.

  But I didn’t hear any more from Nicholas for a maddening three days. I lit candles at St Catherine’s Church for great-great-aunt Wasula’s continuing good health, praying she hadn’t suddenly passed away, taking all that valuable knowledge along with her.

  In the meantime, I met up with a group of like-minded political activists at a real estate office on Old Solomon’s Island Road. Fueled by coffee and donuts, we manned the telephone banks and hand-addressed postcards (the personal touch!) to everyone in our precinct, urging them to vote in November.

  In my spare time, I read up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Located in the southwest corner of South Dakota on a border it shared with Nebraska, the reservation was about the size of the state of Connecticut and was, according to Wikipedia, the eighth largest Indian reservation in the United States. Several years before, Pine Ridge had been in the news when tribal members joined with other Native American activists on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to protest the 1,172-mile Dakota Access crude oil pipeline that runs through North and South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois and has a capacity to move 500,000 barrels of oil per day. The pipeline cuts across huge swaths of native ancestral land. ‘It’s like constructing a pipeline through Arlington Cemetery or under St Patrick’s Cathedral,’ a lawyer for one of the tribes state
d. And where the pipeline crosses the Missouri River, it becomes a real threat to the drinking water supply.

  In truth, the Lakota Sioux had been ‘troublemakers’ ever since Custer made his Last Stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876. That same year, perhaps in retaliation for Custer’s defeat, the US Congress decided to open up the Black Hills to development, putting 7.7 million acres of Indian land on sale to homesteaders and private interests. In 1889, what remained of the Great Sioux reservation was divided into five separate reservations, one of which was Pine Ridge.

  Needless to say, none of this set well with the Sioux. Nerves were on edge, and when US troops descended upon Wounded Knee in order to relieve the restive Lakota of their rifles, a scuffle with a tribesman named Black Coyote – who refused to give up his rifle because he’d paid a lot of money for it – resulted in a massacre. At least one-hundred-and-fifty men, women and children were murdered, and fifty-one more wounded.

  Almost ninety years later, in 1973, Wounded Knee was back in the news, receiving widespread media coverage as American Indian Movement (AIM) and Ogala Lakota activists – petitioning for restoration of treaty rights – staged a seventy-one-day stand-off with US law enforcement that resulted in gunfire and several deaths. The stand-off ended, but the violence continued. In 1975, an armed confrontation between AIM activists and the FBI resulted in the Pine Ridge Shootout and the death of one activist and two FBI agents.

  Nowadays on the Pine Ridge Reservation, eighty percent of the residents are unemployed; forty-nine percent live below the federal poverty line; the infant mortality rate is five times the national average; obesity, diabetes and heart disease are epidemic; and 4.5 million cans of beer are sold annually in White Clay, Nebraska, just over the border from Pine Ridge. That’s 12,500 cans of beer a day. The reservation itself is dry.

  Golly. Why would anyone voluntarily live in such a place? Did Nicholas live on the reservation now, I wondered, or had he escaped to a better life?

  ‘When are you going to tell your sisters about Nicholas?’ Paul asked me as we were eating dinner several days later.

  ‘When all the facts are in, I think. I don’t want to confuse things. Ruth is pretty solid, but I’m worried about Georgina. One minute she’s nagging us to take the DNA tests, the next, forget about it, so sorry I asked.’ I gnawed thoughtfully on a raw carrot. ‘Scott’s got something to do with Georgina’s crazy about-face, you can bet on that.’

  ‘Julie certainly seemed keen,’ Paul remarked.

  ‘Emily, too,’ I said. ‘But Emily’s less likely than Julie to go off half-cocked.’

  ‘Half-cocked?’

  ‘Oh, like painting her face, braiding feathers into her hair, hopping on a bus to South Dakota and spending her gap year on the reservation.’

  Paul laughed, then his face grew serious. ‘From how you describe it, the reservation could use all the help it can get.’

  ‘I know. Maybe there’s something we can do.’ I lay my fork down on my empty plate. ‘But, dammit! Why doesn’t Nicholas get back in touch? I don’t even know him and he’s already driving me crazy!’

  ‘That proves he’s family,’ Paul said.

  FOURTEEN

  As if to illustrate a cosmic connection between us, I received an email from Nicholas the following morning, time stamped 20:18, sent exactly when Paul and I had been finishing dinner.

  ‘Hi, cousin! Can we FaceTime?’

  Taking this as a sign he had information to share, I emailed back, ‘Of course! Name a time.’

  At seven p.m. EDT, with Paul hovering behind me, I powered up the computer, launched the FaceTime app and waited for Nicholas to call.

  In preparation for the session, I’d washed and coaxed my unruly curls into submission with a generous squirt of styling mousse, then fluffed them out around my face in a casual, beach-blown way. Lipstick and a judicious application of eyeliner kept me from looking like a washed-out hag, or so I hoped. No use scaring the kid.

  The computer began to ring.

  Suddenly nervous, I looked back at Paul who smiled, nodded encouragingly and said, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  I clicked Accept, and in less than a second Nicholas’s image filled my screen.

  ‘Hi, cousin,’ he said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said back, feeling tongue-tied and stupid.

  Nicholas’s strong brows arched over dark eyes set handsomely into a round face. His straight nose and full lips would have looked right at home on a Roman statue. He wore his jet-black hair trimmed close on the sides and long on top, swept back in an iconic quiff. A tendril had escaped whatever hair product he used to tame it, dangling fetchingly over one eye. As I pondered what to say next, a young woman swam into view behind him, as stunningly beautiful as he was handsome. Her blue-black hair was parted on the side and cascaded loosely over her shoulders. She waggled her fingers at the camera.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘This is my sister, Mai. We’re twins.’

  ‘Twins run in the family,’ I said. At least on my side of the continent, the ice had been broken.

  I was going to introduce Paul, but he scooted his chair aside and waved me off, letting me know that this was my show, not his.

  ‘I won’t keep you in suspense,’ Nicholas said. ‘I talked to my aunt, and she remembers your grandmother. She says Lottie was one of the nurses who came with the doctor to treat patients on the rez.’

  I pressed a hand to my chest in a futile attempt to slow my racing heart. ‘Does your aunt know how we might be related?’

  ‘Auntie had two brothers, Matoskah and Tahatan, although your grandmother might have known them by their English names, Joseph and Henry. Tahatan, Henry, was our great-grandfather.

  ‘They were cowboys,’ Nicholas continued. ‘Both of them died before I was born, so I never knew them.’

  Cowboys? I must have looked puzzled because Nicholas went on to explain that Joseph and Henry had been Lakota cowboys active on the rodeo circuit.

  ‘Does your aunt Wasula think Henry was my grandfather?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s hard to know what Auntie thinks, Hannah. When I explained about the DNA, she listened quietly, but she stared out the window the whole time I was talking to her. She didn’t say anything for two whole days, so I thought maybe she didn’t believe me, but then she called me into her room. She wants to talk to you.’ He paused. ‘Annapolis is near Washington, DC, right?’

  Although I couldn’t figure out why he was asking, I agreed that it was. ‘About thirty miles.’

  ‘It’s total coincidence, but next week we’re coming to Washington for the big Native Lives Matter March. I’m hoping we’ll be able to meet you then. Will you be home?’

  ‘I will, and I’d like that very much,’ I said. ‘I’ll come to your hotel. Where will you be staying?’

  Nicholas laughed. ‘Not in a hotel. Dad’s driving us down in the RV. We plan to stay for a week or two at a campground in College Park, Maryland. Cherry Hill. Perhaps you know it?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  Situated in a tree-lined park just north of Interstate 495, Cherry Hill was one of the Washington area’s premier campgrounds, offering cottages, cabins, tents and hookups for a gazillion RVs. They had a restaurant, swimming pools, hot tubs, a dog park and recently had gone even more upmarket by adding yurts for glamping.

  ‘Cherry Hill’s not far from IKEA,’ I added. ‘Unless I leave my credit cards at home, I can get into a lot of trouble at IKEA.’

  Nicholas chuckled. ‘Tell me about it. That’s how I furnished my dorm room.’

  ‘Where do you go to college?’

  ‘Went,’ Nicholas corrected. ‘I graduated from Marquette last spring with a major in Finance. Mai and I were luckier than most. Dad’s a security officer at Prairie Wind Casino, so the tuition for Red Cloud High wasn’t a stretch. I got a full ride at Marquette, and Mai …’ He paused and looked over his shoulder. ‘Here I am hogging the computer, you tell her, Mai.’

  Mai gave her brot
her a friendly swat on the head and leaned into the camera. ‘I went to Creighton in Omaha. It’s a Jesuit-run school, too, just like Red Cloud was, and Marquette.’

  ‘What was your major, Mai?’

  ‘Marketing. Nicholas and I, both of us, are working at the casino, at least for now. I’m a floor attendant in the Bingo hall. The pay sucks, but I’m getting experience. Nicholas’s a slot technician, but he won’t be happy until they put him in charge of the auditing department.’

  Nicholas grinned at his sister. ‘Mai’s helping out with the casino website, too. She’s aiming for something in the promotions department, but if that doesn’t work out, I think she’ll move on.’

  ‘You mentioned your father …’ I began.

  ‘Everybody calls him Sam, but his Indian name is Chaska which means “Eldest Son”. My mother’s name is Wachapi. Star.’

  Nicholas grabbed a piece of paper and held it up, closer to the camera. From the boxes and lines hand-drawn on the page, I could tell it was a family tree, but Nicholas’s writing was too small to read. ‘It’s complicated, so I’ve drawn a family tree.’

  ‘Is your family tree online?’ I asked. ‘It might be easier for me to see it that way.’

  ‘We didn’t upload our tree,’ he said. ‘Just the DNA. Dad was reluctant even to do that, but one of his sisters needs a bone marrow transplant and nobody on the rez is a match.’

  I quickly volunteered to be tested, then asked, ‘What issues did your father have with the DNA testing?’

  ‘It’s the fear of appropriation,’ Nicholas explained. ‘Historically, our land, artifacts and even our ancestors’ remains have been taken away, shared and studied. That was beginning to happen with our DNA, too.’

  This was ringing a bell. ‘Ah, I remember reading an article in the New York Times about a Grand Canyon tribe who successfully sued Arizona State for using their genetic samples to conduct research outside the purpose of the original study.’

  ‘The Havasupai, yes. They settled for seven-hundred-thousand dollars, I think.’