Rez Life

by David Treuer

  Which brings us to stoicism. Ojibwe are not usually described as stoic. We’re not usually described at all. This is just fine with most of us. We have been called some choice names in the past, though. “These people are a wild, barbarous, and benighted race, and are, perhaps more than any other people under the influence of the chiefs, head men, and Prophets,” suggested one writer. I would have to disagree.

  2

  On August 3, 2007, I drove past one of the signs on the southern edge of my reservation on my way back to Bena, our ancestral village. My grandfather had killed himself earlier that day. Eugene William Seelye, an eighty-three-year-old veteran of D-day and the Battle of the Bulge—a man who left the reservation only once in his life and made a promise never to leave again, an Indian man who dodged thousands of bullets—shot himself in the head and died alone on his bedroom floor.

  My grandfather was not an easy man. He was not one of those sweet, somewhat bashful elderly Indians you see at powwows or feasts or at the clinic, willing to talk and tell dirty jokes; not the kind of traditional elder that a lot of younger people seek out for approval and advice; not the kind of woodsy Indian man who will take you hunting and explain, patiently, how to lead on ducks or where to find the best mushrooms. When we were kids and my cousins and I came into the house from playing, more often than not he would say, “Get the hell out.” He was, and everyone will tell you this, a hard-ass.

  His looks reinforced this impression. He was thin and rangy. He wasn’t especially tall, but he seemed tall. He never changed his hairstyle. His full head of hair, black, then gray, and finally all white, was cut longish and combed back and held in an Elvis-type pompadour with Brylcreem. In many pictures he poses without a shirt on. He was tough. He was the only person I knew who had a sword hanging on his wall. The family story was that it was a Nazi officer’s sword and that he took it off a German corpse. Once, when I was a teenager, I got up the nerve to ask him if he had gotten it from a German during the war. Hell no, he said. That’s a Knights of Columbus sword. It ain’t a real sword. I asked him where he got it. I traded a Luger for it. I asked him where he got that. Where you think, boy? I shot a German and took it.

  We had never been close while I was growing up. He scared me. We didn’t have much to say to each another. I wasn’t the only one who felt small next to his anger, his rage, his perpetual dissatisfaction. He didn’t have a lot to say to anyone. When, as a girl, my mother saw him working without a shirt on and saw the scar that circled his shoulder, she’d asked him what happened. Got shot was all he said. He didn’t say that after surviving D-day and the Battle of the Bulge and many other battles in France and Belgium, he and his patrol had crossed into Germany near Aachen (not half a mile from where Charlemagne had reigned as emperor). He did not say that the man in front of him, a guy named Van Winkle from Arkansas, stepped on a land mine. The mine blew off Van Winkle’s legs and blew apart my grandfather’s shoulder. He told us nothing about any of this.

  In the 1950s he was living with my grandmother and their four children in a small two-room shack in the small village of Bena on the Leech Lake Reservation. The shack had been built around the turn of the century and at that time it was the only house with walls and a ceiling in the village—the rest of the dwellings were wigwams made from bent poles and covered with bark. All six members of the family lived in this run-down thing. No running water, no bathroom, a woodstove on which to cook. The family was terribly poor. My mother remembers one winter when they had only thirty-five cents to their name. My grandfather took the thirty-five cents and bought a plaque that read: “The Lord Shall Provide.” That night at dinner my grandmother served the four kids, but instead of serving him she put the plaque on his plate. If he’s going to provide and you’re not, then eat that. See how good it tastes.

  He was offered a job eight miles away—still on the reservation, only eight miles down the highway—that included a good salary; a fully furnished house with plumbing, electricity, and heat; and a beautiful view of Leech Lake itself. My grandfather turned it down.

  It’s only eight miles away, Gene. Eight miles.

  I made a promise to God that if I made it home I’d never leave again. This is home. I plan to keep my promise. I’m not fucking leaving. He never moved away from Bena and never traveled off the reservation if he could help it.

  Our small ancestral town of Bena has a population of around 140 and a bad reputation. Even though it sits on a major highway and a lot of people drive through it, it is really known for only two things: a cool-looking gas station that’s on the national register of historic places, and the number of outlaws who call it home. Gerald Vizenor once called Bena “Little Chicago” because of the rough handling outsiders sometimes get there. Vizenor has not been forgiven for that. He doesn’t go to Bena much. It’s got, in addition to the gas station, a bar and a post office. It used to have three gas stations, two hardware stores, two grocery stores, seven hotels, and two bars. My grandmother’s father—known to everyone as Grandpa Harris—owned both bars during his life. A full-blooded Scot from Chicago, he had somehow ended up in Bena in the early part of the century. After spending most of his young life in logging camps, he eventually bought the Wigwam Bar, sold it, and then bought the Gitigan (Ojibwe for “garden”) across the street. He married my great-­grandmother, an Indian. An irony for you: at the time my grandmother’s father, ­Harris, owned the Wigwam Bar, my grand­father’s grandmother still lived in a real wigwam made of bent willow saplings and tar paper across the sandy street a hundred yards down the road. During the 1930s and 1940s, it was illegal to serve liquor to Indians. So ­Harris Matthews sold whisky and beer to his in-laws out the back door and they drank back there but came in the front to dance. Harris was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole. Once he was fixing the roof of the Gitigan and someone walked by and asked, What are you building, Harris? A whorehouse? He replied, If I was building a whorehouse I’d have to put a roof over the whole fucking town.

  I got the news that my grandfather had shot himself on the morning of August 3. I was in Bena by early evening. I passed the “big house,” which is what everyone calls (without irony) the house my grandfather lived in. It isn’t actually big, just bigger than most of the other houses in Bena. His new Chevy Silverado was in the yard. I pulled to a stop at my grandmother’s trailer, just down the hill.

  Cars huddled around my grandmother’s trailer and I heard voices coming from the porch, the deck, and inside. It was packed. Some people were already drinking beer; most were not. My favorite uncle was staggering around the living room without his shirt on and gave me a hug. My grandmother sat on the couch with my mother. My grandmother was the one who had found him. Other relatives—my uncle Diddy and aunts JoAnne and Kay, and friends Rocky Tibbets and his brother Buddy—milled around on the deck. Buddy had the sideways look in his eyes that he seems to get when he’s been drinking all day. Some of my first cousins were already there—Nate, Josh, and Justin. Sam was driving in from South Dakota. Jesse was back in jail and wouldn’t make it. The trailer was warm and well lit, and I felt folded into the soupy, complicated, and comforting trouble of family almost immediately.

  The next day was beautiful. It was early August but it was sunny and crisp and clear. My cousin Sam had arrived in the night with his girlfriend and they were tangled up on the couch. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; this is obviously a family trait (one I don’t share). They woke up and we talked a bit and then they left for the café to get some breakfast. I talked my grieving mother into going down to the café, too. After breakfast we drove back up to my grandmother’s trailer and I asked her if there was anything I could do. There’s always something to do. That’s one nice thing about Indian funerals whether Catholic, traditional, or a mixture of both. There’s always something—­gathering sage, cooking, digging the grave, getting tar paper to cover the mound of dirt until a gravehouse can be built, building the rough box, carving and
shaping the clan marker, getting drunk. I actually like digging the grave. It’s mindless and communal.

  My grandmother asked me to do two things. Would I be willing to write a eulogy to read at the service? And would I go up to the big house and take care of the bedroom? Clean it up. We want to make it look nice in there, she said. She was shaky. Her eyes watered constantly. We just want to make it look nice. And your uncles, well, you know; they just can’t go in there. She asked me to do this not because I had been close to my grandfather but because, compared with the rest of the family, I hadn’t been.

  It felt strange to be in the big house without my grandfather there. He had spent eighty of his eighty-three years in Bena. Sixty of those years had been spent in that house. Whenever I came over to visit him I’d find him sitting in his chair by the window, the police scanner on—with the scanner, he could often follow the progress the police were making tracking down our relatives. He’d smoke and drink coffee. If he was lucky he’d have peanut brittle or beans to eat.

  A stack of books and the Bible rested to the left of the chair on the small end table laden with all sorts of other things: two broken watches, glasses, a screwdriver, long and unreadable information about his medication. The chair was empty now. But his cigarettes and lighter were on the table, as though he were about to smoke. Someone had written “Dads” on a Post-it and stuck it on the pack. Without the possessive it made me think of fathers. Dads. Parents and mothers and cousins and brothers and sisters and all of us and how we could have ended up like this. I sat at the table across from the chair and smoked one of my own cigarettes. When I was finished I walked back to his bedroom.

  A narrow iron-frame bed. A dresser stuffed with socks, mostly the nonslip hospital kind, and T-shirts. A drawer full of medical supplies. A large oak table mounded with clothes and the weird effluvia that are a product of living in the same place for a long time; a broken printer, two dusty bedspreads, a boom box, and a portrait of my mother as a high school student, painted by his brother-in-law while he was in prison. A small safe served as his night table. When I opened it I found a few bundles of one-dollar bills, banded into stacks of 100, some rolls of quarters and silver dollars, and my cousin Vanessa’s cheap gold necklace. This was the necklace she had been wearing when she got into an argument at a party and drove across two yards, up a ditch, and onto the highway, where she was struck by a passing motor home.

  I looked down at my feet. A small throw rug was turned at a funny angle. What looked like grape juice had blotted through it in places. When I lifted it I found the blood.

  And then I got to work.

  I emptied the dresser, removed the drawers, and bagged the clothes on the oak table and the contents of the safe. I lifted the safe out of the room and lugged the mattress through the narrow door. I saw that, unbeknownst to anyone, my grandfather’s dog had been waging war against him by shitting under his bed. That dog’s turds, no bigger than those of a cat, were hard, preserved, nested in the humus of hair, dust, and dead skin that had collected there. I choked on the dust. The whole room smelled like my grandfather. Especially the blood—it didn’t smell like “death.” It smelled like him; sweet, smoky, thick.

  I took a break and wandered through the house until my older brother Anton arrived. I was glad he was there. He has the right personality for such jobs—calm, seemingly unperturbed.

  Anton and I lifted out the heavy furniture until all that was left was the small rectangle of a room and the smaller, more potent, more significant rectangle of the braided throw rug that covered what was left of my grandfather’s brain. We weren’t doing a great job and neither was the rug. It tugged at the feet, and carrying furniture while stepping over it was hard, and in short time the rug had been stepped on and flipped over and bunched up. Quite a lot of blood showed through. We tried not to notice.

  We moved the bed frame out to the garage. Since my grandfather, in addition to being a hard-ass, was somewhat sentimental, he held on to a lot of junk. For instance, he had saved all of his father’s logging equipment, and so one wall was covered with two-man Swede saws, crosscut saws, axes, peaveys, and the like. In the far corner hung a small hand drum. I remember hearing about this drum from my mother.

  When she was a young girl, growing up in Bena in the 1940s, everyone was Catholic, or at least acted Catholic. Her parents made all the children get dressed and go to church on Sundays even though they themselves did not attend. The Catholic church in Bena is a small, very modest building with the footprint of a very small house. The usher was a man named George Martin, an old, quiet man, who lived across from the church with his wife. My mother said that everyone was scared of George because he was rumored to be a medicine man. Whenever a dog went missing everyone would say, George must have got him. Watch your dogs or George will get them. Every Saturday night you could hear him singing medicine songs on a water drum. The drum, whose sound can carry for miles, sounded throughout the village. But then, on Sunday morning, George would be standing by the front door of the church in a brown suit, showing the good people of Bena to their pews and helping to pass the plate and tend the grounds. He never took Communion or knelt or joined in the prayers. Before he died he gave my grandfather—a man, it should be said, who had absolutely no interest in hand drums or traditional songs or anything of the sort—the hand drum that he had used when he played the moccasin game (a team gambling game involving singing and sleight of hand). George was the last grand medicine man from Bena.

  My brother couldn’t stay long. He has seven children ranging in age from six months to fifteen years. I told him I’d finish alone. I did.

  The day had grown warm and as I cut the carpet and rolled it the dust and dander rose into the air and choked me. It was not hard work as far as tearing up carpet goes, but it wasn’t fun. The carpet tore easily, and that was a blessing. Nonetheless, I took my time. I stopped occasionally and wandered out into the main part of the house and sat across from my grandfather’s chair and smoked cigarettes, still a little shocked that he wasn’t there. When I went back to the bedroom and was confronted by the patch of blood, brain, and lymph, I had the strange feeling that my grandfather—all of him, his body and self and words, his whole life—had somehow disappeared into the floor. I began to resent the carpet. So cheap. So easily torn. So incapable of holding my grandfather’s blood, which had soaked through the carpet and into the subfloor.

  I began to curse. I cursed that carpet as I’d never cursed anyone in my life. On I went. I hated that cheap, thin, blue, foam-backed, glue-down carpet more than I have ever hated anyone or anything. That carpet, that cheap cheap carpet, that carpet the same color as the reser­vation is colored on some maps of northern Minnesota. And just as torn, dusty, and damaged. Just as durable. Just as inadequate. We all struggle to do our jobs—the job of living, the job of dying, the job of muddling the two—but that carpet didn’t do its job. It didn’t keep its end of the bargain.

  I left for home in the early evening to write the eulogy and it wasn’t until eleven o’clock that I finally crawled into bed. I couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t say I was traumatized by my grandfather’s death or by cleaning up his blood and brain. But when I closed my eyes all I saw was blood. I read for a while and then shut off the light. Again, blood. I didn’t “think” anything. I wasn’t “sad.” I didn’t lie there in the dark pondering the greater import of what had happened. I didn’t dwell on lost opportunities or missed chances. But every time I closed my eyes I saw the blood and pink curd of my grandfather’s brain. I couldn’t distract myself, and nothing turned into anything greater: no greater catharsis, sadness, or realization. When I closed my eyes I began to hate this, too: our Indian life. Our reservations. Is this what it’s all about? Is it just this? Our brains on the floor? Is it just this? Our blood splattered all over the rug? The Native author Greg Sarris said recently that reservations are just “red ghettos.” I’ve always disagreed with that wa
y of thinking. There has to be something more. But when I closed my eyes that night I couldn’t imagine what else we might be up to, or how better to describe our lives.

  Eventually my thoughts turned to other thoughts—about my cousins, siblings, aunts, and uncles and the place we call ours. I thought about my cousin Jesse, the one who couldn’t make it to the funeral because he was back in jail. Earlier that summer Jesse had overdosed on methadone. The year before he was hit by a train; his car was pushed down the tracks for over a mile. Surprisingly, he lived, but not without some damage. Jesse is a big likable guy. The methadone overdose put him in the ICU. When my brother and I went to visit him he was still sedated and he had a breathing tube down his throat so he could not talk. His girlfriend, fresh out of treatment, was there.

  He’s drifting in and out. Can’t talk because of the tube, she said.

  The room smelled bad. His hospital gown was open to his waist.

  Yeah, he was awake this morning. He can write but it don’t make a lot of sense. They don’t know. They don’t know if it’s from this or the train wreck. He makes some sense though.

  We made small talk but it was hard. Every few minutes Jesse jerked in his sleep. His arms and legs flailed and then he quieted down again. When we ran out of things to talk about I looked around the room. I’ve grown to hate these places. I looked at Jesse. His chest was shallow. I noticed that he had a tattoo on his stomach. It was gang-style, large letters following the arc of his rib cage. REZ LIFE. We watched TV and then I picked up the loose typing paper from the side table. Some of the writing was that of my family and of Jesse’s girlfriend. A lot of it was covered with Jesse’s attempts at communication. She was right. A lot of it didn’t make sense. Words and letters trailed off or drifted, rudderless, across the pages. WHAT HAPPENED? I DID? And then a few pages later: THEY GONNA THINK I DID IT ON PURPOSE FUCK. And then later: I GOT LOTA HEART AND STRENGTH MORE THAN THEY THINK.