“He stood for a moment, staring at the corpse, small for a mammoth, but still large.
“ ‘That’s it,’ ” he said finally. ‘It’s over.’
“ ‘We have the tissue samples,’ said Rosa. ‘And I have frozen every infant that died.’
“He laughed harshly. ‘I never believed in your idea of saving the mammoths through refrigeration; but the advice you gave me – to establish the Institute – was excellent, as is the work you have done on freeze-drying.’
“I forgot to mention that,” my grandmother said. “As I told you. Rosa’s research in Siberia suggested that water was the culprit in the destruction of mammoth cells. Therefore she had investigated ways to freeze tissue in extremely dry conditions, so as to reduce the amount of water in the cells. She was not able to solve the problem of cellular destruction; but other scientists at the Institute became interested in her work as a method of preserving food.
“Hill had failed in his attempt to move south into California. First the crash slowed him, then that damned communist Franklin Roosevelt was elected, bringing trust busters like a hoard of Visigoths to Washington. Hill could see the writing on the wall; and looking across the Mississippi to the grain mills in Minneapolis, he could see there was a lot of money to be made in food. He gave up on the idea of a western railroad monopoly. Instead, Great Northern diversified into food processing. No matter how bad the times got, people still had to eat.
“His first product was the Pemmican line of dried food, designed to be inexpensive and durable. It came off the production line for the first time in 1940; and the U.S. Army became his first important customer. Along with Spam, another Minnesota product, Pemmican brand dried meat, fruit and vegetables helped to win the war. According to G.I. lore, Pemmican had a thousand uses. You could eat it, use it for shingles or to resole boots, for dry flooring in a tent, as shrapnel in a cannon or flak when dropped from a plane.
“After the war, Great Northern Food Products introduced the Glacier line of frozen vegetables. The packages featured romantic paintings of the national park: Hill’s beloved Blackfoot, elk, bison, bears and the vanished mammoths.
“By this time the Hill Institute was back in business, and Rosa was a senior scientist. She might not have been able to save the mammoths, but her work had been key to development of frozen foods. Louis Hill was grateful, though he held the patents to the freezing process, and she never got any royalties. I don’t think she minded. She wasn’t much interested in money.
“She was in her mid-fifties. You’ve seen pictures of her, Emma. I’ve always thought she was as handsome as a woman gets – pure Lakota, with cheekbones like knife blades and the high nose of the Indian on the old-time nickel. Her eyes were as black as space and as bright as stars. Our old stories say we used to be star people. I could see that in her eyes, even though she always dressed like a white, and my relatives on Standing Rock said she thought like a white.
“It’s hard to pick the worst time for Indians. Was it when we lost our land, not through wars – we Lakota won our wars! – but through treaties? Or was it when we starved on the reservations and were shot down by soldiers and agency police? Or when our children were stolen from us and taken to boarding schools, dressed in white clothing and punished if they spoke their own language?
“I think the worst time was the middle of the 20th century, when our elders died, the ones who had grown up in the old days and learned the old ways from their parents and grandparents. White people had their history in books and movies that showed cowboys shooting down the Indians. Our history was in the minds and mouths of those old men and women. When they died – the last survivors of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, people who had known Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and seen mammoths wading in the shallows of the Missouri River – then it seemed as if we might vanish as entirely as the mammoths. A few bodies might be left, shambling drunks or white people in red skins, but we would be gone.” She paused and drew a deep breath, then got up and went for more iced tea.
We drank in silence for a while. The tea was so cold against my tongue! So tart with lemon and sweet with sugar! The sunbeams that entered the room were almost horizontal now. Dust motes danced in them.
“I think it was in this period that Clara, her daughter and my mother, came to dislike Rosa so much. She would come out to Standing Rock in her Chrysler New Yorker – a big, heavy, burgundy-colored car – climb out and stand in the dirt road, looking tired and remote. It was a long, hard drive from St. Paul, and that may explain her expression. But Clara took it as a disowning.
“Rosa always wore slacks, shirts and comfortable shoes on these trips. Even wrinkled by the long drive to the reservation, her clothing looked expensive; and her comfortable shoes shone under their film of South Dakota dust. To Clara, Rosa was a white woman in a red skin. Living on the reservation, watching the old people die and the young people give in to despair, nothing could be worse to her. Rosa had turned her back on the Lakota, so Clara turned her back on Rosa.
“This was done silently. Rosa had money to give, and Clara’s family on the reservation was desperately poor. She took her mother’s money, but refused to visit her in St. Paul – a terrifying place!
“Clara married in 1945. Her husband was a soldier from Rosebud, back from the war: Thomas Two Crows. I don’t know how they met, only that he was very handsome and full of stories. My relatives on Standing Rock told me that later. Somehow the stories – about Rosebud and his travels as a soldier – tantalized Clara, though she was afraid to visit St. Paul. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was a handsome young warrior of proven courage, full of apparent confidence.
“I was born in 1949, the only child that lived, though there had been two before me. Thomas was drinking heavily by then. He died a few years later. He’d been drinking at a friend’s house. After a while, they noticed he wasn’t there. He must have gone out to pee, my relatives on Standing Rock told me. It was snowing, with a strong wind blowing, and he got lost. They found him two days later, after the storm ended, frozen like one of Rosa’s mammoths. If I sound cold when I tell you this, remember that I didn’t know him. He died when I was so young. And maybe I’m angry with him for losing himself in drink and the winter. It was a long time ago, and I should have forgiven him by now. But Clara needed him.
“I did know her, though she died when I was still a child. I remember her sitting in our little house, which Thomas paid for with his soldiering money. She was silent for hours at a time. Her anger made the house seem dark to me. It wasn’t the darkness of night, with stars blazing above Standing Rock; but the darkness of a winter afternoon when the sky is low and gray, and a cold wind is blowing out of the north. As much as possible, I stayed outside and waited for Rosa’s next visit. She came in her big, burgundy-colored car, dust all over the side panels. Once – it must have been in late summer – the entire front of the car was caked with dead grasshoppers. She hated that and spent hours cleaning the grill.
“I’d run to her, and she’d embrace me. She smelled like no other person I knew. Later I discovered it was the scent of fine soap and perfume. There were always gifts for me: wonderful toys, books and her own stories about the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. I gave the toys away. It would have been wrong to keep them, when the children around me had nothing similar. But I kept the books, and I treasured Rosa’s stories. The Twin Cities sounded like the Emerald City of Oz to me. I wanted to visit her, and Rosa invited me many times. But Clara wouldn’t let me go. She was afraid that Rosa would steal me, the way the white people had stolen so many Lakota children.
“Well,” said Grandmother and paused. “This story is about Rosa, not about me.
“She kept at her research, going to the Hill Institute almost every day. The work she did in this period did not lead to any important discoveries. Her real task was making sure that her collection of frozen mammoth tissue remained frozen.
“The mammoths endured nine years longer, the last one
– an old male at the Cleveland Zoo – dying in 1957. It was the end of an era, white commentators said. The Old West was gone, along with its most famous denizens. We heard about the death out in the Dakotas and mourned deeply. The sacred mammoths, our allies for generations, were no more. We and the few remaining buffalo were alone in the terrible world made by white men. Our grief was so deep that people died of it. Most were old people, but that was the year that Clara became sick.
“T.B. killed Clara – and bitterness and grief, I have always thought, though she might have lasted longer in a warmer place. That house was cold as well as dark. What was left for her? The old ways had died, along with her husband and the last mammoth, Trojan. She was losing me to Rosa. She sat in the dark house, in her own darkness, and coughed. Rosa tried to get her good medical care, but Clara wouldn’t leave the reservation.
“Rosa came to Standing Rock and sat with her while she was dying, though only at the very end. As long as Clara was conscious, she refused to have Rosa near her. It was a bad situation, and it did not make the other relatives happy. This was not a good way to leave life. But Clara did.
“When she was gone and in the ground, Rosa brought me to St. Paul. I finally made the journey I had wanted to make for years. What a way to make that journey! I sat beside Rosa in her old Chrysler New Yorker, stiff with grief. The fields of eastern South Dakota went past, flat and green and foreign. Trees, which were rare among the golden-brown hills of my home, became common. They didn’t remain along the creeks and rivers. Instead, they grew in rows between the fields and in clusters around the farm houses, and – finally, as we reached eastern Minnesota – in woods that covered the hilltops.
“All the people we saw were white, their faces burnt red by summer, their hair brown or blond. They gave us unfriendly looks. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Rosa. ‘They may stare, but that’s as far as it’s likely to go. As a rule, Minnesotans don’t say what’s on their minds.’
“This didn’t reassure me. But we arrived safely in St. Paul. Rosa drove me through streets lined with tall elms and bigger houses than I had ever seen before. The lawns were as green as the Emerald City. Sprinklers flashed in the sunlight like diamonds. I felt utterly lost. Now I began to cry – not for Clara, but for myself.
“ ‘It will be all right,’ said Rosa.
“I was still crying when we arrived at her house. I stopped once we were inside, awed by the house’s size. Two full stories and three bedrooms! One bedroom would belong to me, Rosa said. The house was old, built more than fifty years before, but Rosa had installed a state of the art bathroom, and a new, electric kitchen. I was entranced and frightened. How could I use objects so clean and shining? Clara had made do with an outhouse and a well.
“There was television set in the living room. On top of it stood a mammoth family, carved out of honey-colored ivory. It was mammoth ivory from Siberia, Rosa said, thousands of years old. A great curving mammoth tusk hung over the living room fireplace. This came from an animal that had died in the 20th century. ‘They lasted so long,’ Rosa said sadly. ‘If we had managed to keep them alive just a little longer, I am confident that modern science would have found a cure for their illness and a way to keep them in existence indefinitely. Well, their tissue remains, and it is my job to make sure it stays safely in the Institute freezers. There are times, Emma, when the best one can do is preserve.’
“Louis W. Hill had died in 1948, though I didn’t learn this until later. His will left a substantial sum to the Hill Institute, but only if the institute continued to maintain Rosa’s mammoth remains on its premises in a safely frozen state, with Rosa on staff as the custodian. Of course, there were scientists at the Institute that thought this was folly. They wanted Hill’s money, but not the mammoths or Rosa. The rest of her career was a fight to keep her job and the freezers full of mammoth fetuses and tissue. It was as hard as trying to maintain treaty rights. But as I said, I learned this later.
“The house’s dining room had two splendid photographs of mammoths by Ansel Adams. Louis Hill had commissioned him to record the Glacier herd in its last days. Adams was not an animal photographer, but mammoths were part of the west he loved deeply; and they were vanishing. He accepted the commission. Both of Rosa’s photographs showed the animals at a distance, grazing in a meadow below tall pines and snow-streaked mountains. Seen with Adams’ eye and taken with his box camera, the mammoths seemed as solid and permanent as the landscape they inhabited.
“I came to Rosa’s house in the summer of 1958, at the age of nine. By mid-August I was settled into my new room. The windows looked into green caves made of leaves, a disturbing sight for someone used to the wide, treeless distances of western South Dakota. When sunlight shone in, it was tinged green, and green shadows danced on my floor and walls. The days were hot and humid, the nights were full of noise: leaves rustling, bugs singing, radios playing, people talking on neighboring porches. The sky, hedged by rooftops and foliage, held too few stars.
“It was hard, but I survived that first summer. Children are resilient! In the fall I went to school. Rosa managed to get me into the University of Minnesota lab elementary school, though this wasn’t easy at short notice. She said I would get a better education and encounter less prejudice. ‘Prejudice against Indians is deeply rooted here. But the world is changing. The powers that were defeated in the last world war have shown us how bad human society can become. Maybe we will learn from this and make the world better.’
“Unlike Clara, Rosa was an optimist. It may not be a more rational way to see the world, but it makes life happier.
“She was right about the education I got at U Elementary and U High. It was good. To this day, I don’t know how much prejudice I encountered. I was shy and lonely, the only Indian student in a school that was entirely white, except for one African-American family and a single Asian-American student. For the most part the other students were polite and left me on my own. Once or twice, a few were cruel in an ordinary, adolescent way. The other children stopped that behavior. I was not to be a target or a friend.
“You have to remember that I wasn’t Indian in an obvious way. My last name was Ivanoff. It was the only thing that Clara got from Sergei, except possibly for Russian sadness. Rosa thought it would be better to use Ivanoff than Two Crows. ‘White people are more likely to take you seriously, if you have a white name,’ she told me. I could have used Stevens, which was her white name, but I think she wanted that small memento of Sergei.
“My eyes were blue; my hair was brown and wavy; and I was a lot lighter than I am now, because I was so bookish. Either I was inside reading, or I was outside under a tree reading. Sunlight scarcely ever touched me.
“I don’t think it was prejudice which kept me alone, though I can’t be certain. I think it was my bookishness and inability to understand the other students. What on earth made them tick? Their lives – made of dates and grades – seemed small and confined, like the neighborhoods hemmed in by houses and trees. Their plans seemed equally small: a college education, followed by a good job and marriage. Surely there was more to life than this. I wanted something larger, something as wide as the sky over Standing Rock, though I didn’t know what. So I read science fiction and dreamed.
“My one friend was the Asian-American student, Hiram Fong. His sister was retarded; we used that kind of language in those days; and he was his family’s hope. They were betting on a sure thing, Rosa told me. ‘Hiram is as smart as your grandfather Sergei.’
“How can I describe him? He wasn’t shy like me, but he had a cutting wit that scared the other children; and he was far too bright to be popular. Half the time I didn’t understand what he was saying. Almost no adolescents in any era understand irony, which was Hiram’s favorite kind of humor; and few adolescents of the time understood 20th century physics, which was his passion. My twin loves were biology and literature, though I wasn’t interested in analyzing works of fiction, any more than a fish wants to analyze water. I simply
wanted to sink into them and live among words the way a fish lives among underwater plants.
“We both liked science fiction. That was the bond that held us together. And we liked each other’s families. Hiram’s father was a research doctor at the U. His mother had an advanced degree, I think in psychology, but stayed at home to care for Hiram’s sister, a sweet Down’s Syndrome child, who did far better than such children were expected to do in the 1960s.
“Their house was like Rosa’s, large and full of books and artifacts. In the case of the Fong family, the artifacts were from China: silk rugs and porcelain vases, framed examples of calligraphy, opium pipes. Opium was a wonderful medicine, Dr. Fong said, if used prudently and with thought. When shoved down people’s throats by the British empire, it was a curse.
“Like Rosa, the Fongs saw a world differently from most of the people I knew, and that made me comfortable with them. Although they didn’t like frozen food – Mrs. Fong always used fresh ingredients when she cooked – they respected the work Rosa had done. ‘At present, we have a limited need for frozen tissue,’ said Dr. Fong. ‘But I’m sure the need will increase, and your grandmother’s work will become increasingly important.’
“ ‘Maybe we’ll be able to make people someday,’ said Hiram as he picked over his dinner with flashing chopsticks. ‘Out of frozen parts, like the Frankenstein monster. Or maybe we’ll be able to freeze people and wake them a thousand years in the future. That sounds more interesting than frozen peas.’
“ ‘There will probably be more practical uses for the techniques which Rosa Stevens has pioneered,’ said Dr. Fong.
“Mrs. Fong, who was a reader, said, ‘The monster wasn’t made from frozen parts. He might have turned out better if he’d been fresher. Cynthia, please don’t play with your food.’
“Hiram and I graduated from high school in 1967. The United States was at war in Asia and at home, against its own citizens. You must have studied this in school, Emma.”
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