Seized

by Lynne Cantwell

  “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace,” the pastor intoned – and now that bothered me, too. If the Sioux goddess was to be believed, Jehovah had no interest in peace. Or, really, in us. He was concerned about humanity only insofar as it gained Him worshippers. To that end, conflict was more desirable than peace.

  The idea that God was only in it for Himself made me squirm in my pew. I found it very hard to believe that Jehovah didn’t care about humanity at all. But I felt I owed it to the goddess to plow ahead, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. I decided to approach it strictly as an exercise in logic, divorced as much as possible from any value judgments or knee-jerk arguments instilled in me by my upbringing.

  I mumbled the words to “Angels We Have Heard on High” while following my train of thought to what seemed to me to be its logical conclusion.

  If God was only in it for Himself, where did that leave us? I guessed it meant we had to live up to our own ideals, to the best of our ability. If there really were no Heaven and no Hell, then all we had was the here-and-now, today – and the only thing that mattered was to be true to ourselves.

  A theologian, I reflected, would attempt to argue further about the source of our ideals. “If they weren’t instilled by God, then how did we get them? We were made in God’s image, after all,” he would say. I dismissed that line of reasoning as immaterial to the matter at hand. For my present purposes, it didn’t really matter whether we developed our own personal morality through nature or nurture, by hardwired installation at conception or by socialization. It mattered only that we had one at all, and that we felt it deeply enough to hold ourselves to it, whether God ordered us to or not.

  And anyway, I thought with a twisted smile, if we were made in God’s image and if God were only in it for Himself, it explained a lot of selfish and greedy human behavior.

  I was reminded, then, of my employer and the clients we took on. I thought about how we were led, willingly or unwillingly, down a path on which compromising one’s ideals was the first corruption. Even the purest of heart would end up tainted, if she worked long enough for a law firm that accepted such dirty clients as Leo Durant.

  Just like that, I knew what I had to do.

  As if on cue, the organist began playing the recessional. I cast one more look at the cross above the pulpit – less comforting to me now, if no less familiar – as I donned my coat and followed Mom out into the darkness of the new day.

  Well, that was fruitful. I’m more conflicted than I was to start with. I was going to need more time, and probably more study, to resolve the confusion the goddess had sparked in me. I knew I was unlikely to get either one any time soon. But at least I’d come to a decision about something.

  Before I took action, though, I needed to know whether White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman had told me any truths at all.

  Back home, over hot chocolate and store-bought Christmas cookies, I broached the subject. “Mom, what really happened to my father?” I asked.

  “He died in combat in Vietnam,” she said, as usual. But I heard a new wariness in her tone.

  “Please,” I said. “The last U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam in ‘73. You would have had to have been pregnant with me for a couple of years.”

  She opened her mouth, brows knitted, as if ready to argue with me.

  I knew it. I had known it all along. I was going to have to push her.

  Part of me howled – your own mother! how could you! have you no decency left at all? – but my need for certainty overruled it. “Come on, Mom, tell me the truth,” I said, and pushed. Just a tiny bit.

  She stiffened as if affronted. Then she sagged, all the fight drained out of her. Sighing, she rose from the table and went into her bedroom.

  “Mom?” I called, going after her. I was worried that it hadn’t worked – that I’d damaged her somehow, that forcing her to break down her defenses had broken her. Or that the push had backfired, ruining our relationship irreparably. I was worried that she would shut the door in my face and refuse to come out ‘til I was gone, and then never call me again.

  But she had simply gone to rummage in her closet. After a few minutes, during which I stood warily in the doorway, she pulled out a shoebox that was taped shut. Pushing past me, she went back to the kitchen, where she pulled a knife out of a drawer and began to slit the tape on the box.

  “I wondered how long it was going to take for you to figure it out,” she said as she worked.

  “You deliberately misled me,” I said.

  She nodded, still struggling with the box.

  “Why?” I wasn’t pushing now. There didn’t seem to be any need. Like a ball rolling downhill, my original nudge seemed to be gathering speed on its own.

  Finally removing the lid, she pulled out some photos and tossed them across the table at me. Then she sat down and put her head in her hands.

  I picked up the photos and studied them. The first was a studio portrait – possibly a high school graduation photo – of a young man with straight black hair, skin the color of Joseph’s, and a nose shaped exactly like mine, wide across the bridge and bulbous at the end. The second was a photo of the same young man in a powder-blue tux, standing next to a youthful version of my mother, who was clad in an evening gown. The third picture was of the same young man in a military uniform, standing in front of an unfamiliar house.

  “Your father,” Mom said, not moving her head. “Andrew Michael Sauvage.”

  “You dated in high school,” I said, “and then he joined the service.”

  “He was drafted,” she said. “One of the last to go, and one of the last to come home.” She looked up at me. “Physically, he survived the war, but he was different when he came back. Angry. Bitter. Always on alert for danger that wasn’t there. He would react to things in real life as if he was back in Nam.”

  “It’s called PTSD,” I said. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

  “Yeah, well, in the ‘70s, they just called it ‘crazy,’” she said. She’d folded her hands on the tabletop and was kneading them back and forth. “He tried to get help from the VA, but in those days it wasn’t recognized as something that could be treated. The last straw for his family was when he stabbed his brother because he thought he was Viet Cong.”

  I shuddered. “What happened? Did he go to jail?”

  She shook her head. “The family refused to press charges. They sent him to his relatives in South Dakota instead, to try to magic it out of him.”

  “South Dakota?” I said in surprise. One of my law school classmates had been from South Dakota, and she had once told us about the desperate poverty on the Sioux reservation near her home in Pierre. Wide-eyed, I asked, “His family lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation, didn’t they?”

  As my mother nodded and slumped back in her chair, the last link dropped into place for me. White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman hadn’t lied to me. Not only was I an Indian – I was her kind of Indian.

  Mom looked at me dead-on. “I swear to you, Naomi, I never knew until then that he was an Indian. He told me he was French Canadian. Turned out some trapper had married into the family back in the 1800s and given the family his last name.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Start at the beginning, Mom. You met him in high school.”

  She rolled her eyes and heaved a dramatic sigh, but she responded. I had to believe this was as cathartic for her as it was for me. “Andrew transferred into my school during sophomore year. He was exotic-looking; all the girls were after him. But he seemed to like me best.” She smiled a little, remembering. “We started going steady in the summer before our junior year. He gave me a promise ring for my eighteenth birthday. And then he got drafted and was gone.

  “That’s when I got my associates in nursing and started working as an LPN. I dated a few other guys, but I never forgot Andrew. And then he came back, and we started dating again – but he was different, like I said.

  “I had an apartment with two other women, and our boyfriends
would sometimes spend the night.” She shrugged. “It was the ‘70s. Everybody did it.”

  “I’m not judging you,” I said quietly.

  “Good,” she said with a piercing look. Then she looked away again. “Anyway,” she resumed, “he started drinking a lot – to make the voices stop, he said. Then there was that incident with his brother, and he left.”

  “Did you find out you were pregnant before he left, or after?” I asked.

  “Just before,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t tell him about you, Naomi. I was afraid of him by then – afraid he would hurt me. Or you.” She reached into her housecoat pocket and extracted a tissue, then dabbed at her eyes.

  “So you said you didn’t know who my father was.”

  “It was either that, or admit to my parents that I’d been sleeping with an Indian,” she said. “It was bad enough that I was pregnant out-of-wedlock.”

  I nodded with a half-laugh. “Grandpa would have flipped. He didn’t have much use for any ethnic group but whites.” Then I said, very gently, “Did you ever see him again?”

  “No.” She’d given up on the sodden tissue; tears now trickled down her cheeks. “He never came back, and I never tried to contact him. He might well be dead by now.”

  “You still love him, don’t you?” I said, as gently as I could. She nodded, and then buried her face in her hands again.

  “I was so ashamed,” she sobbed.

  I got up and put my arms around her.

  After a few minutes, her shoulders stopped heaving. She said, her voice trembling, “You don’t hate me, then?”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” I said. “No, I don’t hate you. You’re my mother. What’s done is done. Anyway, being Indian is cool nowadays – although I wish you’d picked a guy from a tribe with money.” We both laughed, although Mom’s laugh was shaky.

  “I wish you’d told me sooner, though,” I went on. “I’ve gone through my whole life thinking the only relatives I had were yours. Now it turns out there’s a whole bunch of people I’m related to that I’ve never met.” A thought struck me. “Do my father’s parents still live here?”

  She shook her head. “They moved back to South Dakota not long after Andrew went.”

  My mind started clicking. “It shouldn’t be too hard to locate them. I’m sure the tribe keeps track of its members.”

  “Oh, no, Naomi!” Mom cried. “You’re not going to try to find them, are you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” I challenged her. “Look, I know you were embarrassed and ashamed at the time, but that was thirty-seven years ago. Thirty-seven years, Mom. Grandma and Grandpa are both gone, and their bigoted opinions died with them. Not only is it water under the bridge, but the bridge washed away long since.”

  “Still and all,” she said. “Don’t contact them. Please, honey.”

  I raised my chin. “I’m not going to make that promise. I can think of any number of legitimate reasons that I would need to break it. For instance, I might have to construct a family medical history.”

  “I never thought of that,” she said quietly.

  We were silent for a few moments, during which she dabbed at her eyes with her soaked tissue. Then I said, “So when the white buffalo calf bowed to me, it brought it all back, didn’t it?”

  Her head snapped up. “I thought you had forgotten all about that,” she said, staring hard at me.

  “I had,” I said. “Something happened recently that reminded me of it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Did those Indians contact you?”

  Oho! Now we’re getting somewhere! I decided to play dumb and see where it took us. “What Indians? All I remember is the little buffalo lying down in the dirt, and the farmer making a big deal about it, and seeing my name in the paper, and you getting mad.”

  “You bet I was mad,” she said. “That farmer was a shyster. He claimed to be an Indian himself, you know, but he was as white as new-fallen snow. And he had big plans for you after that field trip. He told me he wanted to put his farm on the map, and you were going to help him.” She looked disgusted. “He wanted to put you in a buckskin dress and have you do ads for his farm. I put the kibosh on that but quick.”

  “He’s the one who told the paper, isn’t he?”

  “He told everybody. I still can’t believe I turned down Jane Pauley.” She smiled, a little regretfully. “But I wasn’t about to turn you into a sideshow. And besides,” she said, “your Indian connection would have come out sooner or later.”

  “Heritage,” I corrected. “My Indian heritage.”

  She sighed. “I guess that’s right. Andrew would have been my Indian connection.” One side of her mouth quirked up.

  I grinned at her, then tried to get her back on track. “So which Indians were you talking about a minute ago?”

  “Oh, this old man and his teenage boy showed up at our door,” she said. “It was about a week after the field trip. Most all of the to-do had died down by then, and I thought I’d put the whole thing safely to rest. But then, here come these two Indians, knocking at our door.”

  “What did they say?”

  “The old man did all the talking. Said some Indian god had told him that you and his grandson were going to work together someday to save the world.” She laughed dismissively. “It sounded like a load of hooey to me, and I told him so. He insisted that he had to meet you, to see you with his own eyes. That’s when I got scared. I thought maybe they would try to kidnap you and take you back to their reservation and sacrifice you to their god or something.”

  “Nobody does human sacrifice any more, Mom,” I said. “Nowadays, it only happens in movies about Satanists.”

  “Well, I didn’t know for sure,” she defended herself. “Anyway, the point is, I was scared. So I told him that we were a good Christian family and he could just take his mumbo-jumbo and put it where the sun didn’t shine.”

  “You didn’t!” I laughed in surprise.

  “Well, not in exactly those words,” she admitted. “But I did threaten to call the cops if he didn’t leave.”

  “Well, it must have worked, because they’re gone now,” I grinned.

  “Put the fear of God in ‘em, I did,” she grinned back.

  Mom’s story certainly jibed with Joseph’s version. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to call him and tell him everything. I yawned and stretched, making a big show of it. “Holy cow, it’s nearly two a.m. I’m going to turn in,” I said. I hugged my mother again, and kissed her cheek. “Merry Christmas, Mom. This is the best present I’ve received in a long time.”

  She laughed ruefully. “Me too. I never realized how much effort I’d been putting into keeping up appearances all these years. I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. As if I can breathe again.”

  “I’m glad,” I said as we walked down the hall, arm in arm. “Goodnight, Mom.”

  “Goodnight, sweetheart,” she said. “Sweet dreams.”

  “You too.”

  A few minutes later, I pulled the covers over my head and called Joseph. His phone rang several times, then rolled over to voicemail. Disappointed, I left a message for him, saying that the goddess had been right about my heritage and that I’d come to some other important decisions as well. I told him I’d be back in Denver the following night, and hoped to catch up with him soon. I ended the message with, “Merry Christmas to you and your grandfather.” Then I pulled the covers off my head – it had gotten kind of stifling, trapped under the blankets – and drifted off to sleep.

  The only thing I remembered of my dreams the next morning was the hooting of an owl.

  Chapter 7

  Mom and I both slept late on Christmas morning. We had exchanged gifts the modern way, by Internet shopping, back when I wasn’t planning on coming home. We laughed as we confessed that we had each opened the gifts the day they arrived. But I’d bought a package of Denver mints from a DIA gift shop so I wouldn’t arrive empty-handed. After a brunch of eggs, fruit salad, and coffee
, I presented them to her with a flourish. We demolished them as we sifted through the rest of Mom’s shoebox full of memories of my father: prom tickets, folded notes on yellowed notebook paper, and her promise ring at the very bottom of the box. Bemused, she slipped it on her little finger. Then she caught me watching her; she turned pink and slipped it off.

  “Leave it on, for God’s sake,” I said. “You’re out of the closet now.”

  Her shoulders straightened. “I guess I am, aren’t I?” she said, and put it back on. She looked ready to take on any number of disapproving relatives – dead or alive. “Too bad it won’t fit on my ring finger any more, though.” She surveyed her hand, knuckles swollen with arthritis.

  “I bet he wouldn’t care, as long as you were wearing it.”

  She waved a hand at me. “He’s probably married, with a passel of kids,” she said. Then she sighed. “Or dead of the drink.”

  “Or,” I suggested, “widowed, or never married either, and waiting for you.”

  “Don’t you dare try to find out, missy,” she said, wagging her finger at me.

  I smiled archly. “How about this? I promise not to tell you if I do.”

  She pouted, but she didn’t argue.

  I sifted through the pile of Mom’s memories and pulled out my father’s high school graduation picture. “Mom,” I asked, suddenly feeling a little shy, “can I keep this?”

  She hesitated. Then she said, “Sure. Why not.”

  I spent the first half of the flight home staring at that picture of my father, Andrew Michael Sauvage. My brain was overflowing with questions about him and about his life since he left Indiana. I realized that I might have siblings. My childhood longing for a sister, born of playing endless rounds of board games and dress-up alone, suddenly sprang to life. Excited, I hauled out my laptop, logged onto the in-air Internet, and made a cursory search for my dad – to no avail. I would have to wait until I got back to work and could use the firm’s contracted people-finding service.