As You Were

by David Tromblay

  You tripped on the stairs and fell into her, begging her question: “Are you going to start this summer by royally pissing me off?”

  For nearly knocking her down, she shoves you back, knocking you down instead. Luckily, the wrought-iron railing was there to break your fall. But that’s not what you’re told to tell the dentist.

  You tell the dentist what Grandma tells you to say, and she waits until the next Wednesday, when you finally get it right and stop stuttering your way through it, before everyone piles into the station wagon and drives back to town.

  THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

  WHEN YOU’RE LITTLE, THERE’S TALK of Irishness and being cousins with the Hayes potato people. Irish, to you, means Lucky Charms and bagpipes. You only need to hear them play a single time to know their music forevermore.

  It’s most likely your forevermore began while watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade splayed out across the carpet in Grandma Audrey’s living room.

  You can’t say with any certainty where you stood along Grand Avenue, but you do remember hearing them play for the first time, in person, during the Spirit Valley Memorial Day festival. It’s impossible to forget that ear-piercing sound Dopplering down the street, sending a shiver across your skin.

  Once you heard their song described as the missing link between noise and music.

  You hear this music, the music of your people, the supposed music of your soul, leading so many somber processionals that you don’t know what to think of yourself. It’s not joy or pride or a compulsion to dance that fills your heart when their song rings in your ears, but the urge to back away behind Grandma and Grandpa and the wall of all the parents and stay there until the pipes are long out of earshot.

  During the sixth grade, the convention center hosts a citywide Polka Fest for schoolchildren, where everyone is made to dance competitively, in rigid formation, to a boisterous blend of accordion, tuba, and clarinet. It’s a square dance of sorts, but not the same as the square dancers on Hee-Haw. There’s four of you, yes: two boys and two girls, but that’s where the similarities end. It’s a hybrid of polka and square dancing, according to an early morning internet search.

  While learning the steps, both you and your dance partner have your eyes fixed on the teacher, Mr. K, as he demonstrates the dance steps he wants you to emulate. It’s all you can do not to laugh while watching a hockey coach dance the polka with an imaginary partner. Polka is in his blood, but he’s all alone up there because he too is too afraid to touch a girl in the sixth grade.

  And that’s when it happens.

  Everything about this day becomes seared onto your soul, right down to the retracted basketball hoop hanging overhead while you watch Mr. K plod across the stage overlooking the school’s gymnasium/ cafeteria. You know it’s going to happen. It’s part of dancing with a girl, but she grabs your hand way before the teacher ever says to; no one is even supposed to hold hands for this one. Instead, it’s one of those dances where everyone interlocks arms and swings around in a circle—changes partners—interlocks arms again with that new person, spins around with them, then it’s back to where you started. But this redheaded girl is clamped onto your hand, letting you know it’s too late to change partners.

  You don’t pull your hand away or even open your fingers to let her know it’s not okay, that it’s not what you want, that you don’t want to hold hands, and maybe that’s because it’s the first time you can remember someone touching you without trying to hurt you.

  So you give her hand a squeeze too.

  Mr. K tells Polack jokes most of the school day when he’s not yammering about hockey. Grandpa Bub tells his Ole and Lena jokes about Swedes and Norwegians and Finlanders. But when you ask Grandma, “What are we?” she replies, “What kind of goddamned dumb question is that?” blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke your way. Then she adds her favorite adage to punctuate her annoyance: “When God was handing out brains, you thought he said ‘pains’ and you said you didn’t want none.”

  Through the cloud, you see her arms folded, her ankles crossed. Her top foot shakes faster and faster until you get the hint to leave the room.

  You’ve seen pictures of her when she was a little girl. Her hair was close-cropped, a bob haircut of sorts, and formal dresses with big buttons running all the way up to her neck. She went to boarding schools; you’ve heard her talk about boarding schools, but they weren’t in the English countryside like they are in the books you read at school. She brags about her education and shows you the swirling cursive she learned when she was a little girl. And like when she was little, you have someone pace behind you with a yardstick while you read, listening to you, waiting for you to stumble over a word. When the rhythm of the words leaving your lips slows, the creaking of the floorboards stops, and she says, “Sound it out.”

  If you can’t, she cracks you across the knuckles. If more help is needed, she digs her fingernails into the meat of your neck, walks you to the base of the stairs, sends you to your room.

  That must be where your love of literature comes from.

  After the advent of the internet, everyone can research their family roots. The truth behind Dad’s black hair and ever-present tan stares back at you in black and white from a single line on a ledger, dated 1891. His grandfather, your great-grandfather, is cataloged as a three- year-old

  Chippewa

  Catholic

  Cultivator.

  Considering the surname is Québécois, a vague geographic understanding is where it ends. But his name is an action verb, and Anishinaabemowin is a verb-driven language, so that’s something.

  You see a flyer for a wild game community feast and veterans’ powwow following the fall deer hunt and know you have to go. The powwow is a spectacular celebration and proud display of an enduring culture. The emcee reminds all in attendance of this over and again in a mix of Anishinaabemowin and English, which is all but drowned out by the sound of the jingle dresses and the vibrant regalia adorning the fancy dancers. The grass dancers too. Then you notice some of them have sleigh bells bound to their ankles. It only takes one or two of them chasing after a toddler or hustling over to an elder for that sound to drown out all others, and there are dozens of them. The euphony outshines your eardrums until the emcee’s microphone cuts off with a sharp squeal. It’s time for the Grand Entry.

  The host drum is told to make them dance.

  Your shoulders drop, shudder, with each beat of the drum. Four men make the drum thunder, calling to the Creator. There’s one man situated in each position on the compass: north, east, west, south, or so it seems. It makes the most sense from the little you know. They sing in cadence until it melds into one unified voice. The cacophony of their song holds your undivided attention. It’s impossible to ignore. The song of the drum sinks into your chest, massaging your heart until your heartbeat matches the rhythm of their music. Your music.

  It’s not the elders who lead the way into the circle of hay bales for the Grand Entry but the warriors. The veterans of the United States Armed Forces carry the official flags of the four branches along with the flag of the Nah-Gah-Chi-Wa-Nong, established by the treaty of 1854. Some are elderly, of course, vets of World War II. Some wear traditional dress adorned with patches earned in combat as well as those indicate of how high they rose in the ranks. Others wear simple street clothes.

  An old man will grab hold of your shoulder and say something, but his words won’t rise above the sound of the drums and bells and voices ringing throughout the community center.

  He pulls you back into the ranks.

  He wears a red ball cap with a golden eagle, globe, and anchor.

  He is called Chibenashi.

  He is an old Ojibwe warrior.

  He writes about Vietnam in the form of poetry and short stories.

  He does it because it helps with the trauma of combat.

  He sometimes calls it his brain taking a shit.

  He makes you realize surviving the peace is
up to you.

  The two of you have a great many conversations. Sometimes it’s an elder talking to a young man, and the young man listening. Sometimes it’s a Marine and a Sailor-turned-Soldier shooting the shit.

  Once, someone asks why you’re sitting in a tent meant for the ogichidaa, the Fond du Lac veterans, so you explain you were born there, and you served most of your adult life, and your father is a Finlander and Indian and—and Jim cuts you off, erupting in laughter, saying “He’s a Finndian!” and waves the guy asking about your Indianness away.

  When you tell Jim you’ve begun to write, too, that you’re going to school in Santa Fe to surround yourself with Native storytellers, he says, “Just make sure it’s true. Everything else—the periods, the commas, the punctuation—will all fall into place.”

  WHAT SHE SAID

  “YOU DON’T LOOK INDIAN,” she says. You think about asking her what an Indian is supposed to look like: Tonto from the TV, or Blackhawk from the Chicago hockey jersey? Or do you explain how Dad liked redheads, and Great-Grandpa Joe knocked up a Sámi woman because she threatened to leave the logging camp in the middle of winter—leave them without a cook—if someone didn’t make her a mother. Together they made Grandpa Gene: a Finndian.

  Should you bother telling her about Grandma Audrey? Irish and Innu Montagnais. Her family found their way here from somewhere along the border of Labrador and Newfoundland. On the way, they lived in Ontario, then Iowa, then somewhere in South Dakota. Wisconsin too. At least, it’s where she went to boarding school. Maybe that’s why Dad said he is a Fugawi Indian.

  “You don’t have a Shinnob name,” she says. She’s right, you don’t have an Indian name. Not like one you get during ceremony, but one like the kids you went to school with: Green Sky, Light Feather, Martin, Rising Sun, Smith. But when you look at the map of where Great- Grandpa Joe came from, you see the name of a dormant volcano—translated from Anishinaabemowin into Québécois, or by a Québécois, or however that language works: Baapagishkaa.

  “I don’t want my daughter wasting her time learning a dead language,” she says. Her daughter was fathered by a friend of yours, who was adopted out to a white family back before they passed a law to stop any more separations. It’s because of white people the language is expelling a dying breath. But how do you say so without silencing her words too? Or do you say what needs to be said and stand there looking like an angry Indian who doesn’t look Indian?

  “You’re not enrolled,” she says. “I’m only half, but you’re—you’re less than. My babies have to be enrolled. I can’t date you anymore if you’re not enrolled, you understand? You need to get a hold of them in Canada and get a status card.”

  This makes you quiet, makes you think, and the more you think about it, the more you wonder if that’ll be the measure of a true Muslim in a hundred and fifty years’ time. Still, you refuse to register your dogs with the city.

  “You’re a bad Indian,” she says. “You cut your hair. You don’t live on the reservation. You went away and joined the military. They probably made you leave, made you join so they’d shave off all your hair. I saw on a television program; it’s how they make you show your shame. What did you do? You’re not a drunk like all the Indians at the casino. You must not know how to be an Indian. You must be a bad Indian.”

  You try to explain to her, but she explains to you she doesn’t care to know, it’s not something that’ll enrich her life. You can hear her misspelling her words when she talks. But you’re not a bad Indian. Simply saying that is as stupid a thing to say as telling a little girl she’s not acting ladylike as if all ladies are meant to act the same way. But you are bad at being Indian. You have the blood, but not the culture. Anything you do manage to learn comes from a book or someone else’s elders. Donning regalia feels like playing dress-up.

  When you were in high school, you kept a tarantula next to your bed and handled it like other kids did a guinea pig. You didn’t know crossing paths with a spider is one of those trickster tales that send real Indian kids running scared like they’d seen a glitch in the Matrix.

  When a neighbor killed a coyote to keep his chickens alive a little longer, you took in one of the pups and named it Wile E. He bit you once hard enough to taste blood, and you backhanded him. After that, he took kibble right out of your hand. He slept right next to your bed, got between you and whoever entered the room. He stayed with you until he remembered he was a coyote and every other animal in the house was food. There’s not enough time to go on about all the coyote means to the breadth of the five hundred or so Native nations without slipping immediately into cliché or echoing a million other tellings of the coyote trickster tales. The only thing you knew at the time was how Jose Chavez y Chavez called Billy the Kid the Oblero in Young Guns II and he was supposed to be Mexican and Indian. Weird how he didn’t consider his Mexican-ness an Indian-ness.

  But your ignorance doesn’t end with your adolescence.

  It bothers you beyond words when you see a crow bounce off a windshield and struggle to get itself to the shoulder of the highway before being run over by another motorist. It’s winter, so you know if it lies there on the concrete, it’ll freeze to death before the night is through. There’s no reason for its suffering when there’s a wildlife rehabilitation center about a mile away as the crow flies. When you try to get hold of it, it flaps its wings and swims across the freshly fallen snow, except it can’t stand up. The receptionist says it’ll make a full recovery, it has fluid on its spine and needs some antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, so you swipe your bank card, and for your donation they give you a bumper sticker.

  When you sit and mull this all over with a Lakota poet who brings plenty to the table of conversation, he comes to the conclusion it might be it’s your father who is the trickster.

  Dad talked about how he wasn’t a complete failure as a father, how he could serve as an example of what not to be, and how not to act, and, because of this, you became and accomplished everything you did. Not because of your own hard work, but because he showed you what you didn’t want to be. This is how alcoholics operate: able to justify anything and take credit for imagined undertakings.

  So, when she says, “You don’t look Indian,” what you hear is, “You don’t look like your father,” and you have to stop “Thank God” from exploding past your lips.

  He wasn’t a bad-looking dude. He got married three times. Each time, his wife was nineteen years old—too young and immature and stuck around too short of a time to figure out what was really wrong with him. He wasn’t a bad Indian, either. He was a bad man who happened to have some Indian blood.

  If you looked like Dad—like an Indian—you’d have to look into his eyes every time you look into the mirror. You’d see him every time you brushed your teeth or plucked a nose hair. Still, trying to tell this story is like when someone asks why a marriage didn’t work. The explanation falls short, and the person asking the question fails to realize the stuff they’re hearing is only the parts of the story the narrator is willing to breathe life back into. You know if you tell them everything, they’ll go numb, like you. Then the stories don’t quite sting as much and you’ll scribble down a splattering of what has popped into your mind.

  But this is not a tell-all.

  Some credence has to be given to how, when the story begins to show him as a shiftless old drunk who can be knocked out by a fourteen-year-old kid, they’ll question who it is they should really feel sorry for, who the real monster was. You also have to consider what does it make you, beating some brain-damaged drunk and running away without making sure he’s okay? Was Dad a trickster trying to teach you something about yourself, or was he a wiindigoo?

  NOTE TO SELF

  TWO DAYS AFTER YOU FINISH putting the first draft of this down on paper, Dad is diagnosed with cancer, again. It’s terminal this time. Past the point of no return. He’s not going to get any better. He’ll only get worse and one day die. The doctors won’t treat his ailme
nts any longer. They’ll only set him up on a mix of sedatives and medications meant to ease his pain until he can no longer register the reality of his own body rotting from the inside out. They won’t say what kind of cancer. Turns out it’s colon cancer that made its way up to his brain and into everything in between. The bones too. They won’t say how long he has, only that it is now in God’s hands.

  He missed a follow-up appointment after his last cancer treatment—right around three years ago. But the doctors said he was done. Cured. That’s what Dad told Debbie. He decided against wasting anyone else’s time or money after that. Yet one morning, when he tried to sit up, he couldn’t. His back wouldn’t bend. The bones were mush. The muscles too.

  This is all secondhand information, mind you.

  He does die, but it takes you another half-dozen drafts to say what you need to say.

  With his last breath, the last bit of angst drips out of your pen. He’s gone. Ashes to ashes. Cremated with the remains of his checking account.

  Before your next birthday, the doctor shoves a camera up your ass to look for what killed your dad. There’ll be no escaping being your father’s son until your dying day.

  Full physicals suddenly become even more so. The EKG says bradycardia. It is normally a good thing for someone who runs or bikes or works out in any way, shape, or form, but it’s bad because you sit on your ass all day typing this out. There’s an arrhythmia, too, and the nurse says it is so bad they can’t give you some shot they were supposed to because it could send you into cardiac arrest.

  Someone once said that writing this book might save your life.