The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  Steeples, stairs, windows, cars—all of them were spatial objects that defined the limits of my physical reality. Grandfather, the minister, my parents and siblings—all of these beings are aspects of my birth home, an infinite human construction that I revise with each memory.

  *

  Houses are our turtle shells, and within them we are alive in a suspended, sheltered time. From Grandfather I learned to look for meaning in corners of conversations. Because we watched, we knew how nervous hands can tell more stories than words. I learned how families gather within house walls to converse in private, sometimes wordless ways not possible in pink-brick churches. From his patience I learned how to trudge forward and, no matter what, keep going.

  Perhaps Grandfather spoke seldom because his ears were attuned to another language, one that hardly existed in its full form. He had the rhythm, the social forms, the gestures, but not the vocabulary or grammar of Delaware.

  As the youngest child, I never could speak as well as anyone else, but as soon as I could, I wrote, and the page became my audience, a silent partner that always listened. In time I wrote letters to all my grandparents. Grandfather Bruner never wrote back, but that did not matter to me. I knew he was there, opening my envelopes. My mother continued to insist that I write him, so I did. Perhaps this writing about him is a continuation of those letters I once sent to his address, general delivery in Newton.

  In fourth grade a teacher showed us how to write poetry. I composed a verse about the redbird in the backyard, the one I exchanged whistles with, mimicking its piccolo language. Then I started keeping a diary and next a journal. All these I kept hidden from my family, my own form of double silence. As my mother raged or gave approval randomly, I had control over what I wrote.

  Indeed, I spoke so seldom that I did not have an accent like anyone around me. When I had my first job at a local soda fountain, people thought I was from a foreign country because my muttered words were indistinct. My vocabulary came from books, not conversation, so I mispronounced many words. In addition, my mother and father spoke with some archaic forms, like warsh for wash. I worried about how the spelling for Washington Street, where we lived, did not match our pronunciation, Warshington. For root we said r-yuuh-t, instead of rute. Instead of yes, we said, ye-ow. William Conrad, the radio actor for Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, used the same pronunciation, but not many other people outside the family. I was self-conscious about speaking, so writing was a more reliable medium.

  My parents gave me a children’s illustrated encyclopedia one Christmas. I loved the entry about alphabets. I learned how the old-time Algonquin and Iroquois people living in the Northeast had glyphs embedded in wampum-beaded belts or etched on bark or stone. These are emblems that become active when spoken aloud. I read how scripts are magical as they travel through time, like the letter M deriving from the Egyptian hieroglyphic for “water.” Glyphs train readers to look for multiple meanings, so they suggest literary complexity.

  Words can ignite joy. When my older sister Mary read storybook fairy tales, sometimes I would sit transfixed for hours afterward and go over the illustrations, repeating scenes. Syllables can wind around images and create entrancing spectacles.

  As a small child, I seined conversations for magic, but my family nearly had lost the ability to narrate anything more than episodes. A few times they joked, and once that terrified me more than any scolding. My mother said she had pulled a muscle in her leg. She laughed and said my father should take her to the backyard and shoot her like a horse. By then I knew what guns were, and death, and so I feared my mother would be killed. I could not understand why everyone else laughed. This was a rough humor that took getting used to, a version of “Indian humor.”

  Silence can be as hostile as thrown knives. Even as a child, I knew the difference between evasive chatter in our household and tense silence. I learned to plumb depths of meaning. “The postman is late,” my mother could say, and “The milk needs to be used before it goes sour.” These commonplaces could be a prelude to an explosion of her temper. Or not.

  I watch how people tell their stories through sighs, sideways glances, pauses, and motions of their hands. These were like movements of wind on water—irregular intervals but always continuous. I learned how to write my own story, shape and edit it, improve it, and create performances on white sheets of paper that always listen to my voice. I built my own carapace to protect my words.

  *

  Winter is the time for gambling. I shuffled a deck of cards as soon as I could hold them in my small hands. I learned sideways riffles, fancy cuts, and how to stand cards on end and tilt them like dominoes into a smooth river. My grandfather played Casino with me—the four-card game with Big Casino and Little Casino. He showed how each hand is a compelling skirmish, and no matter what the outcome, it has to end. The cards must be reshuffled and dealt out again.

  Whether he was winning or losing, he demonstrated the trash talk that cardplayers use to intimidate each other. “Cut ’em thick, beat ’em quick,” he said. It was like the chatter in baseball—“Hey, batter, batter.” I loved the rhymes and repeated them for days. “Cut ’em thin, bound to win.” It was a charm that improved my luck. This is how I learned poetry, not as ornament but as spells. By the time I was born, everyone except my oldest sister was tired of children’s books, and so card playing was my first exposure to verse, training for my future as a poet. Words created real consequences. We played for money, and any magic boost was allowed.

  I calculated points of winning cards, good arithmetic lessons, and learned how to lose and hide my disappointment. Pain washes away with the remix of the next hand. Always a new chance lies in the future. I learned to quit while I was ahead.

  Cards have their own livery. Queens are beautiful women framed in ruffled, delicate ovals. The kings are remote rulers in square-pleated shirts. I mistrust jacks and how they can threaten, trade places, and ruin hands. They challenge the kings and sometimes win. But nowhere are there princess cards to match the jacks.

  Jokers, with their harlequin patchwork and grotesque grins, remind me of European court life from fairy tales. Never are they direct help. They turn up unexpectedly in other people’s hands and give them an unfair edge. Sometimes they appear in my own straight runs or flushes, upsetting plans. They fall on the floor or stick at the back of a drawer. For some games they are removed, so their mutability is physical as well as being mathematical interruptions. They are the tricksters, the random factor, patchwork yellow-and-black charlatans within the rows of reds suits paired with black.

  In the old days winter games were training for children and serious occupation for adults. One Delaware game was puim, similar to poker but with sixty short marked reeds—red and black, like suits. The shift from sixty reeds to fifty-two playing cards must have been an easy transition. Dealers shuffled them, dealt, and then points were counted—not much different from all-night poker games in which my grandfather had some of his grandest triumphs and worst defeats.

  My brother, a mentor in this art, taught me to read people’s minds when gambling. He played cards with me for hours, and when he had an extremely good or bad hand, I could feel the energies that guided his strategies. The air became more charged, or the room felt flat. When he saw a straight heart flush in his cards and could not restrain his response, I knew. But despite my best efforts, by the end of the games, overall, he won. He was a kid himself, just six years older than me, but he was my teacher. Even while playing with a beginner sister, he used every opportunity to memorize odds for each play, and he became a skilled gambler.

  Brother was smart and funny and patient, like my grandfather. He told me Grandfather was kindly, a grownup who played games with him when others would not take the time. But once, as a childish bravado, Brother ridiculed him in a card game. Grandfather would never play cards with him again. When he made a vow, he kept it.

  Card games taught how chance is a genuine force, random but powerful. An offhand remark
to an adult could be taken as an insult and cause unexpected loss. Dice, which seemed inanimate, could engage unseen powers, outside the logical workings of reason. Delawares had a dice game played with two-colored plum pits, hubhub, shaken in a basket. The black pits, or dice, connected to the cold winter of dark nights. Red- or white-colored dice were the summer and warmth. Today’s casino businesses on reservations link to historic games of chance. In our frame houses with leaky windows and no insulation, the extremes of weather were vivid. We lived without air conditioning until the mid-1960s in the hot, dry plains, where 115 degrees is not uncommon. The binary of seasons paralleled the dice colors. Both cold and hot weather drove people to shelter, where gambling games passed the time. Tragedy and good fortune could strike unexpectedly at any time, like lightning, and both could disorder the daily routine.

  I never knew if my grandfather gambled with dice, but when I grew up, my brother, who was close to him, always had playing dice in his room. Brother taught me to shake them in my cupped hands, concentrate, blow my breath on them, and throw. The concentration phase, a chance to alter the spin, was a mental challenge, the part where we could send messages to the cubes.

  As I played these winter games, I saw numbers as individual characters. The sevens slink like cats, pause, and pose. They have an elegance. Elevens are difficult to count. Twelve dots create rows of eyes. The ones are solitary. Threes are “treys” and so have a slangy nickname and are friendly. Algebra came later, but this narrative was my first connection to numbers.

  Dice with black, etched dots clacked with a satisfying sound. They were made of bone or ivory then, not plastic. We played, truly, a game of bones. This was during the polio years, when a boy my brother’s age died a few blocks north of our neighborhood. Louise Erdrich writes about this serious side of chance when she describes charms of powerful Ojibwe gamblers: “Gamblers in the old days kept a powder of human bones—dried, crushed, pounded fine—to rub on their hands.” Around us people died in blizzards, and summer tornadoes killed others. We heard stories of businessmen losing everything in one dice game. The random factor was a stark reality. When my siblings and I played dice, winning was serious business as we learned the odds of failure and the transience of success.

  Besides dice and cards, my brother had dozens of miniature plastic toys, much more numerous than dolls. He launched platoons of World War II army soldiers; Crusaders with lances and broadswords; a few cowboys with neckerchiefs and lassos; and many Indians with drawn bows that could be pointed any direction. I wanted to have a box full of powerful fighters like he did. I stayed on his good side so I could watch him arrange fields of fighters and even hold a few.

  Brother taught me to “Indian wrestle,” starting from a position of locked legs, and how to lob knives at a wooden board. We played mumblety-peg when my mother was out of sight—a game of chicken in which one person throws a blade as close to the opponent’s foot as possible, and the one who flinches loses. When our father was not around, my brother taught me to load and shoot the .22-caliber rifle. Weapons were summer entertainment, the red suit. Winter, noir, was when indoor games of cards filled our minds. We were just a few years from life-or-death Old West games of faro and high-stakes poker. My brother learned the spell of gambling from his grandfather, and he passed it down. The lineage went back as far as anyone could remember.

  Today a bronze Kaw Indian man with drawn bow stands on top of the Kansas state capitol building, his arrow pointing at the North Star. The bowstring is taut. This is the first gesture in a story or the first card dealt in a hand. I want to be that figure. I want to shuffle and deal a new hand, in control of my fate. I want to stand at the statue’s height and notch an arrow, draw the bow full length, and pierce the heart of the most remote winter star. I want to return to those early days, load the dice, and change my grandfather’s luck.

  *

  All of us kids in the neighborhood, girls or boys, played cowboys and Indians. We saw westerns at the movies and Gunsmoke on television. We brandished both chrome-plated six-shooters and bows and arrows. Western history was the backdrop for our games, and sometimes we had more vivid lessons.

  When our Girl Scout troop went to the local museum, we saw a human skull with an embedded arrowhead. In those days human remains were often parts of exhibits, a practice now outlawed. The curator Mr. Soden, a man who looked like Doc on Gunsmoke, said it was skull of an Indian killed by another Indian. At the time, the 1950s, we were children, and the skull was creepy yet compelling. Mr. Soden said it came from Pawnee Rock, about two hundred miles farther west. As a child, I figured we could be warned in time if there were another raid by Pawnees. The possibility did not seem unrealistic to us children. Many of us had Native heritage, but none of us admitted to being Pawnee, fearsome fighters and not to be taken lightly. The violence of one Native man against another was a surprise, though, undercutting the cowboy and Indian oppositions on television. Another skull was a settler with an ax blade gash. Wood axes were important in the nineteenth century as tools and also could be makeshift weapons. This detail did not appear on popular television either.

  We saw a Victrola with a wax cylinder, and as Mr. Soden played it for us, we heard Enrico Caruso’s tenor murmur across the decades. This was in the basement of the Civic Auditorium, in a tiny room with small windows that admitted only snippets of light. The dim past was laid out in orderly rows of exhibits, like gravestones, and the semidarkness made the past even more similar to death.

  In the basement-level tomb of history only the faintest sounds could be heard, like the distant cry of a tenor. Mr. Soden showed how the departed are far in the distance, behind us, and only a bit of indirect light sifts through dust motes to lighten the shadows. Yet under brick streets in this hidden room, the past could continue its momentum through bedrock.

  When we played “guns” and chose sides, I picked the Indians, no question. We had a series of storybooks that I learned to read to myself. I followed a Lakota boy and girl on roan ponies through gorgeous grassy hillsides. I read this book series often, and the landscape attached to my imagination. It was the only book we had about the grasslands, where we lived. When the neighborhood kids chose up sides and counted who could have arrows and who could have rope lassos, I chose the arrows. I also chose cap guns. Why not both?

  My grandfather grew up as both Native and a cowboy. As a boy, he helped his grandparents and uncles run cattle on their land. As long as Grandfather lived, he wore plaid flannel shirts, sometimes with pearl buttons. He kept his hair short at the neck, but his fine hair crested in a thick pompadour, like a rodeo star.

  When I was small, I had some flannel shirts like Grandfather’s. I let my hair grow as long as my mother would let me, and I tore out the prickly bobby pins. In summertime I tolerated pigtails and braids. For whatever reason my mother allowed my tendencies toward being a tomboy. I had a few fights as a kid and felt I could protect myself, especially after boxing lessons from my brother.

  This is what people expected of women when I was growing up. Indeed, my mother often told me I needed to be prepared to take care of a family in any emergency. It was never a woman who died in her dire scenarios, always a man, so a woman had to be ready for many roles. We were cowboys and Indians, we were women, and sometimes, also, we were men.

  *

  Today I remember the old people clearly, parents and grandparents. They described crystal radios made from wire wound around oatmeal boxes. My father’s first radio was a marvel, and as he explained it, I could see the miracle of capturing radio waves out of the air and making them tangible. We had no television until I was twelve, so radio was our constant companion.

  The dark plains around us were transformed into a friendly ocean of radio waves, especially at night, when most stations had signed off. In the grasslands, with few elevations, reception is most clear. In the 1950s and 1960s I remember broadcasts from New Orleans and Chicago. Hearing Jimmy Reed at 1:00 a.m. was life altering. Wichita radio statio
ns played Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. They and other musicians traveled the railroad through Kansas and stopped to pick up extra cash. Local bands also wailed away in broadcasts but disappeared in morning light. In the unknown measures of prairie space, radio voices and distant grandparents all swirled together.

  Music lessons were part of our childhood at a time when most families had pianos in the front rooms. Mexican American classmates played in musical groups for their community. African Americans and other classmates were in garage bands that sometimes produced professional musicians like Kelley Hunt and drummer Jack Mouse. I practiced scales on the piano but could not coordinate the layers of treble and bass notes. My father’s clarinet was in a closet, so that one-note instrument became mine. After some years of practice I advanced enough to play in a local college jazz band, under mentorship of a long-suffering teacher, a bebop jazz musician, Larry Alderson. Music was a refuge for me at a time when words came with difficulty. I was so shy, I could hardly speak in most classes and then only awkwardly.

  My classical music teacher presented one of the most important lessons of my life. This was Mr. Liegl, born in Vienna and a former clarinetist with the Minnesota Symphony. He berated me weekly for my lackluster performance. I knew he was justified. One lesson, as I played assigned pieces for him, he stopped me.

  “Pianissimo,” he said, “does not just mean low volume. The tone should be alive.” He tapped the music stand with his wooden pointer, fortissimo. “Pianissimo means controlled passion, not absence of passion.”

  Something clicked. Nothing is empty, not even the spaces between sky and earth where nothing is visible. My emotional climate, also, is never neutral. Although I may be silent, my body feels a wide range of inner life. Silence has a meaning beyond void.