Ghostbread

by Sonja Livingston

  36

  Linny was Lana and Jolie’s cousin. Sometimes she and her brother stayed at Billie’s house. Her brother was tiny and wore a metal brace on his thin right leg. Both children had soft brown skin, short bowl cuts, and Asiatic eyes. They were delicate flowers, and quietly preferred by the adults.

  One night, Linny dreamt of a gagohsa, and soon after there was a healing ceremony. Gagohsa was Seneca for ghost—a spirit who visited people in their dreams, and was chased away with smoke and rattles and chants. But best of all, his exit was celebrated with bread. Indeed, the only bread around for miles was reserved for ghosts.

  From the moment Linny made her gagohsa announcement, I began to eye her. I wanted to know what she knew. As her healing began, I pressed my ear to the door and listened from the bedroom. I heard the shake of mud-turtle rattles, smelled the fire, watched as smoke swirled in from cracks in the door. Chants and ashes were blown over the girl, who emerged from her healing more serious than ever, a rough strap of leather tied to her wrist.

  After Linny’s healing, the women baked ghostbread.

  It was fried into golden wheels in deep cast-iron skillets, or sizzled into hand-sized splatters of dough, or formed into puffy bricks and baked in the oven, only to be slathered with butter and sprinkled with sugar when it was taken out. Light on the tongue and heavy in the stomach, Ghostbread drove the taste of soup away, and was far better than any religion for convincing me of heaven.

  As I threw myself into the bread’s soft interior, I considered Linny and her gagohsa. I was intrigued by everything about the ceremony and considered staging a ghost-sighting myself, but decided against it, thinking that gagohsas probably paid no mind to palefaces anyway.

  37

  The Senecas made much of trees.

  Spirits lived in the wood, they said, and could be captured in masks cut from living trees. The masks had mouths set in permanent scowls, and were meant to ward off gagohsas. Billie said that if the tree lived after the mask was taken, it brought good luck to its wearer.

  At a powwow, I watched from afar as men in masks danced in an open field. I wandered. Whites were not allowed to enter the long house, and in truth, I had not even thought about entering that skeleton of saplings until the moment it was forbidden. I ate a hamburger from a food vendor and watched lacrosse players from other reservations.

  Retracing my steps, I found Jolie and her mother sitting on a long slab of wood made into a bench. We swapped stories about what we’d seen. Then Billie, her long hair falling forward, pressed a stick into the ground and said, “Come on now, we better leave if we want to see the burning of the white dog.”

  Part of a ceremony the Senecas performed; the dog was burnt and sent as a messenger to the Great Spirit. “It cleans us,” Billie said as she led us over to the field.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said, and pulled away from the small crowd beginning to gather around the center of the field. Billie looked at me and laughed, her face wide and brown and friendly.

  “It’s just a part of the Handsome Lake religion,” she said. I’d heard of Handsome Lake, but his name and religion were nothing I’d been able to make sense of.

  “And the dog is fake, if you really have to know,” she said, still smiling. “We wouldn’t hurt any real dog.” Billie turned and took Jolie’s hand then and they headed toward a post that had been stuck into the ground with a small stuffed dog tied to its base.

  “But why is the dog white?” I called after them, rubbing the pale skin of my wrist.

  “Why is he white?” I asked again, but it was too late.

  My question flailed behind Billie, and was taken up by the wind.

  38

  There was a hole in Billie’s front yard.

  The hole was actually the beginning of a basement that had been dug for a larger house back when Billie thought she could pay for such a thing. A few springs of rain and thaw had filled the hole with water, and by the time we arrived, it had become a regular feature of Billie’s yard. A pond, almost. The water in the hole started out clean and woody as sap, but by August, it had lowered itself, and rusted-out bike frames and old tires broke through an algae-laden surface. Kids threw things into the hole, ran around it, stood close enough to feel the tug of danger, then backed off.

  Most water came from a distribution center. We went once a week in pickups and cars to collect enough water for drinking, bathing, and cooking. Drinking water was kept just off the kitchen in a metal basin, where we used a silver ladle to drop it into our mouths. We bathed in the sink, Billie’s sister using her long red nails to wash our scalps. She poured warm water over the backs of our heads, squeezed curlicues of cool shampoo onto crowns of wet hair, and scrubbed. We stood in a line and approached the sink one at a time, heads bowed.

  39

  In late summer, someone threw a party. Families came from other parts of Tonawanda and from as far away as the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations. Kids ran wild and thirsty through the mowed sections of Billie’s land. I lingered near the water basin, scooping cool water into my mouth while other kids yelled and screamed, caught up in their games. Feeling someone’s eyes on me, I looked up. A girl. A stranger, nearly a teenager. She was smiling, and wore pink lipstick and a miniature plastic Pepsi bottle on a satin string around her neck.

  When she saw me notice her, she headed my way. As she moved, the amber liquid in the bottle splashed inside its clear plastic container. The Pepsi necklace stopped my heart—it was the best thing I’d ever seen. I must have stared as she approached, for in an unexpected gesture of kindness, she removed it from her neck and circled it around mine.

  I stood taller suddenly and followed her around all afternoon. When the older girls finally tsked-tsked my presence, she abandoned them and asked if I wanted to bike-ride. I said yes and grabbed the handlebars. I sat on the front half of the gold-flecked banana seat while her bronzed legs pushed at the pedals from the rear.

  “Can you steer?” she asked, her voice a song.

  I nodded the lie, convincing myself that steering didn’t really matter and that riding worth anything was done in a straight line anyway—besides, I had no clue why this girl had befriended me and didn’t want to spoil it all with something as unfortunate as the truth.

  The ride was glorious. We breezed past groups of jump-roping girls, and I imagined myself a bird. A silver-winged bird. All of this, until we approached the hole. Straight ahead. Black-mouthed and ugly. I froze.

  Other kids screamed, adults stood and looked our way, and my older friend asked again about my steering ability, her voice sounding suddenly alarmed. I had no answer as we plunged toward the late summer hole and only wondered what it would feel like to be swallowed by something so rank. I heard the vulgar croaking of bullfrogs, spied a rusted-out fender and calculated the exact place we’d land. I closed my eyes and prepared for our launch, the sound of kids screaming and the wind on my face somehow sharper as we flew at the hole.

  Just then, she slammed her body to one side, stopped the bike with the tangle of her legs, and pushed us onto the hole’s grassy edge. I looked down and realized I’d gotten away with only minor injuries. I waited for her anger. But it did not come. Instead she wiped dirt and grass from my lemon-yellow shorts, and when I tried to hand the necklace back, told me to keep wearing it.

  I wore it for the rest of the afternoon and watched its liquid move as I jumped and ran, felt the solidity of it flapping against my halter top. My neck had never been so proud. When the party ended, she asked if I’d like to have it. And, though it was exquisite, the feel of it around my neck somehow anchoring me, I could not bring myself to receive it.

  So once again I lied, and shook my head no.

  40

  Petey was the one to watch for.

  He was big.

  His fat brown fingers clutched at giant-sized bags of potato sticks, corn chips, cheese curls, or whatever other oversized portion of snack food had been on sale the day his mother went shopp
ing. Though older than me and my sisters, Billie’s baby brother was still a boy, the youngest of all her mother’s sons. Even so, Petey strode around the place like an oily-fingered king.

  We fashioned tall grasses into huts out in the field while Petey sat on an old stump, holding his snack food in one hand, while he fed himself with the other, eating and watching. On days when I had any pride at all, I ignored the fat boy and his greasy bag. But pride was a luxury not always afforded, and most days found me licking my lips and begging Petey for some chips. He wouldn’t share—I knew this, but couldn’t help myself and begged anyway. He beamed, loving the way I wanted what was his and his alone. It made him larger. He’d take out a chip, toss it onto his tongue, and then chew it, loud and sticky, his mouth open all the while.

  Sometimes he even held the bag out to me. I knew the game, but approached anyway. Whenever he lifted his snacks high in the air, he’d watch as my arms flailed, and then push his lips into a tight, rippled “o,” laughing his small circular laugh, his mouth like the tied end of an inflated pink balloon.

  The only one he ever shared with was Steph. She was tough and quiet and could have snatched the bag right out of his hands if she had wanted. Petey seemed to admire her for her bravery, and so from time to time would extend his bag to her. Sometimes she’d grab a handful of cheese balls and split them with me, but usually her pride was larger than he was and she steered clear of the big boy and his bag of snacks altogether.

  I wondered at her strength, almost glad that it wasn’t me he liked; for I knew just how easily I’d have been swayed, slipped my hand into his bag, and stood at his side, his greasy queen, helping rule over a yard full of hungry kids.

  41

  Someone’s father showed up one day, in jeans and soiled leather boots. He walked into Billie’s house like he’d always belonged, legs stretched out, cigarette dangling from his fingers. He’d brought three Marathon candy bars with him. Marathon bars were long chocolate and caramel braids advertised on TV to go “on and on,” and I wanted one of those endless bars of candy more than anything. I lay on my belly and stared at the man as he visited with his woman’s children. I was not above making my eyes pitiful as he unwrapped the chocolate. In fact, I made them as pitiful as possible and directed them at the man whose hands were so red-brown they looked as though they’d been dipped in cherry varnish.

  Fathers were a mystery to me—as arbitrarily assigned as the candy that was in front of my face. Who had one and who did not seemed little more than luck, so I told myself I hardly cared that I had no father to speak of. Still, I wanted that chocolate caramel braid and found myself wondering about the touch of those cherry-brown hands.

  42

  It seems to me that my family packed up and left on the very same day that Billie’s mother came to the house, avoided everyone’s eyes, and made her sour announcement.

  “The welfare knows you’re here,” she said to no one in particular, but somehow indicating us. The words themselves made no sense to me, but I somehow understood that we were being told to leave. Certainly her words were strong enough to make my mother fly out the door.

  She took her rage out on a field of weeds near the house, flinging any belongings that wouldn’t fit in the car—photos, papers, her yellow-stained wedding dress—and leaving them heaped up in angry piles between milkweed and goldenrod. I didn’t understand until much later about my mother’s factory income counting against Billie and her kids, about the tribal council’s righteous discomfort with the stream of white faces running through their land, how my baby sister’s father was hardly ever around, or how his few comings and goings included a certain redhead who drove my mother crazy.

  In the same way it seemed that mere hours elapsed between the old woman’s announcement and our leaving, it also seemed suddenly clear that she had never liked my mother. I decided that the unsmiling face was worse than a gagohsa, and helped load up the Buick. We packed the car with whatever boxes and bags would fit, and my mother stopped at Bell’s Market to buy food for the motel room that would house us for the days and nights to come. Bread and cheese.

  I squished a slice of bread between my fingers, kneaded it into a pasty ball, and shoved it whole into my mouth.

  43

  My mother was crazy for birds.

  That she was in love with all things winged was perhaps the most solid thing to be said about her. The rounded sweep of her cheek, the shy upturn of her smile—even the steel blue of her irises—none of these was clearer to me than her fondness for creatures of the sky. Perhaps because she was as migratory in nature as they were, my mother liked nothing better than to tilt her head upward and trace the departure of birds with her eyes. When a flock of geese passed overhead, she called us out to the yard, thrilled by their honking, told us to crane our necks and follow their movement through the clouds.

  “Hurry kids! Come on now, or you’ll miss them.”

  This mother who pulled gnarled vegetables from pockets of stubborn earth and made them into something soft and warm, who laughed off things like sassy children and hairy-legged spiders, who maneuvered lightly through all manner of political and religious conversation—saying her part, but listening, too—this same woman sounded frantic while calling us out to see birds. Failing to set our eyes upon a flock in flight was a sin of omission to her, and there was more worry in her voice over missing out on a bird or two than when she wondered aloud how to pay the rent.

  It was like a parade to her, all that commotion on high. She couldn’t get enough of the trumpeting, the beating of wings, the buzz of flight. And if whatever yard or porch we inhabited did not offer a big enough view, she’d drive out to the wildlife refuge for a better look at mallards, tundra swans, and snow geese.

  She went there often—to savor a good mood, or to quell a low one. She loved the sanctuary and could spend whole afternoons tracking the take-off and landing of birds. She knew the land, all its plants and animals, its strangled bodies of water. It was hers, like a child—or better, perhaps, because it asked nothing in return.

  Convincing herself that we loved it, too, she herded us into the car, and made her drives to the refuge a form of family recreation. We complained, but she’d pack us into the car just the same, tell us to stop our whining, for heaven’s sake, and try to find something pretty to look at.

  And why should a bird sanctuary be the place my mother most liked to visit? Better than a trip to the cool brick rooms of the Swan Library, better than the luxury of resting among strangers over a cup of coffee at the diner on Main Street, better even than sitting sloppy and happy in a kitchen full of talkative cousins?

  Perhaps she was able to find peace there. With all that silence and sky, perhaps she was able to travel to places far away. Or maybe the refuge, with its unspoiled land, reminded her of home—her first home, the one her father had built from trees growing at the base of granite mountains.

  She talked about him often, her father. He was the only man she ever spoke of without salt on her tongue. To her (and to us, who never knew him) he was a giant of a man, a sort of saint really, and everything the long-dead were supposed to be. Quiet and good-hearted. Solid and hardworking. Honest. She had nothing but love for her father, the woodsman who had learned the art of storytelling as a boy sitting around the logging camps of northern Maine, the copper-haired Swede with a cleft in his chin, whose worn hands carried home bags of sweets for his middle child and only daughter.

  The Iroquois Wildlife Refuge stood just east of Buffalo, between the Tonawanda Indian Reservation and Albion, north of Batavia and the factory job my mother held. Indeed, that was how she first found the place, on break one day from the metal-walled rooms. Though we’d abandoned the big old house in Albion, and had left behind the tiger lilies and bullfrogs of the reservation, we’d still file out of the motel room that housed us and load ourselves into the car for a drive past Old Orchard Creek, into the freshwater marshes and hardwood swamps. We complained, of course, as we pressed
faces and knees into the tight compartment of the car, but in truth, we’d been trailing our mother for years and knew nothing else. For the past four years in fact, those sodden acres and their winged residents had been about the most consistent feature in our lives, more regular than the clothes we wore, the schools we attended, the beds or floors or chairs we slept on.

  And so my mother brushed aside our grumbling as she would have a passing swarm of gnats, hands in the air, batting back the dark-eyed glances and snotty remarks launched at her through the rearview mirror.

  “You kids just don’t know how to have a good time,” she’d say, seeming hurt and genuinely perplexed by our lack of enthusiasm. She must have wondered how such a sad and heavy defect could have taken hold of anything that had come from her. Her mood always lightened, though, as she steered the car onto the marshy refuge road, her lightness becoming excitement as we passed thistle and cattail and finally pulled into the lot where she parked and headed down to the pond, banged-up binoculars in hand.

  Some of us followed my mother down the trail, but a few stayed behind and kicked our feet through gravel while leaning against the car, swatting insects from our hair, and complaining about how hot it was.

  “How long you gonna be anyway?” someone always asked.

  And though she’d be halfway to the pond by then, she’d turn back, glance over her shoulder, and catch our eyes long enough to put a finger to her lips and shush us.