Soon I heard Cora rise and scrape her spectacles from her dresser. “Daphne,” she said in a scruffy voice. The nighttime wheel spinner, a cream-and-brown hamster, wiggled her nose with exuberance before burrowing into a bed of cedar chips. A small sign bearing Daphne’s name in precise penmanship hung from the cage. Beside it stood a row of books arranged in perfect alphabetical order (Anne of Green Gables; Apsáalooke Nation: A History of the Crow Tribe; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret). Cora added a handful of pellets to Daphne’s food dish and said nothing to me at all. When she opened the bedroom door and exited, the smell of something savory and sizzling curlicued into my nose. It was forbidden, fleshy food, I knew, but my stomach drummed with desire, and soon I stepped shyly out of my top bunk and into the day, one ladder rung at a time.
IN THE KITCHEN, JIM FILLED HIS THERMOS with coffee and his lunch pail with assorted pickings from the refrigerator and cupboards: an apple, a hunk of cheese, several strips of some sort of jerky, a few pieces of bread, and, from a tin canister painted with ducks, a handful of sunflower seeds. Still, he avoided my eyes. “How did you sleep, Margie?” he asked.
“Oh, fine,” I said. Cora darted a dark glance my way, having caught me in an untruth. I realized she had been as sensitive as I’d suspected to my every move on the bunk above her. She took a peach from Granma’s extended hand and pushed it into her mouth, holding it there while she tied her shoes, careless of the juice slipping down her chin. Granma worked the tangles out of Cora’s long locks with her fingers before weaving them into a single braid that snaked like a stroke of paint down the girl’s narrow back.
“Ow! Basahkáalee!”* Cora yelped.
“All done,” Granma replied, soft and husky.
I stood near the table and sipped from the cup of coffee Granma handed me. I was uneasy in my robe and felt suspended somehow, as if I were waiting for instructions. What do I do here, I wondered, in my new but temporary life?
Jim donned shoes and kissed his mother on the head—“Love you, Mom”—and spoke to me—“Margie, I hope you have a good day and find everything you need”—while Cora stuffed her backpack with a sack lunch and zipped it closed, and soon they left the house together, the screen door squeaking shut behind them, a pair of dancers who had completed a well-rehearsed and prosaic morningtime routine à deux. I watched Jim’s yellow truck disappear down the dirt road, like a sun that chased the horizon instead of rising above it. It was only seven—the earliest I’d risen in years.
“Jim takes Cora to school?”
“Yes, he drops her off on his way to the press,” Granma said as she tinkered in the kitchen. “And Josie, Jim’s sister, picks her up.”
“Oh, Josie’s the lady with the big brown truck? She’s your daughter?”
“She’s my own sister’s daughter. The way we understand things, she is Jim’s sister. We have no cousins here.” Granma said that as a member of her clan, the Whistling Waters, Josie was considered her daughter, Jim’s sister, and one of Cora’s mothers. “Have you ever seen what happens to a single piece of driftwood in a river?” she asked me. Confused, I nodded yes, even though I had not seen many rivers up close. “It gets tossed around in those currents, pushed into rocks, beat up. Have you ever seen a big cluster of many driftwood pieces gathered together against a bank in a river?” I nodded again, sheepishly sipping from my mug. “It’s a strong bunch. Those pieces don’t move. They’re all woven together like a nest, and nothing bad happens to them. That’s why we say ashammaleaxia when we talk about Crow families. It means ‘driftwood lodges.’ ” I thought of Bumble, Raven, Orca, Ptarmigan, and Bear. Without the Operation to bind them now, would they float apart from each other in different directions like stray pieces of driftwood? And Dad and I, what kind of a lodge had we ever made? I frowned. “Sit down,” Granma said.
I sat, and she put a plate in front of me. It was heaped with fried eggs, scraps of the same jerky Jim had taken in his lunch pail, toast, and a puddle of deep garnet jam speckled with tiny berries. I looked at it all, marveling at how good it smelled while wondering how to explain again to Granma about being a vegan. “Oh. Thank you, I—”
“Just eat what you’re comfortable with,” she said. “You won’t hurt my feelings. The eggs are from our own chickens—they live in our backyard. We treat them well. The jerky is called pemmican—that’s meat from a buffalo we got at last year’s hunt, mixed with dried chokecherries. And there’s toast and chokecherry jam. I picked the chokecherries myself last summer. We’re going out to dig roots today.”
“You and Cora?”
“No, honey, me and you.” She smiled, and I noticed she had a few teeth missing. Their absence lent her an endearingly youthful look—as if she were a girl who had lost some baby teeth—rather than an aged one.
I spread the jam over my toast and ate it all in a few bites, thoroughly seduced. The chokecherries wavered flirtatiously from sour to sweet and back again. Gratified, Granma got up and sang to herself while she washed dishes. Still, I sensed her attention. I scrutinized the eggs and, anxious about being a rude guest, reasoned that since they had come from happy, home-raised chickens rather than poor birds crammed into cages with no access to sunlight or fresh air, they were acceptable fare, and ate half of them. I relished the yielding yolks, which were a deep golden hue. They reminded me of Saturday mornings at home with Dad, when I used to cut heart shapes out of slices of bread and fry our eggs inside. I left the pemmican untouched. “Good,” Granma said, snatching it from my plate. “I’ll snack on this when we go digging.”
“Can I help you clean up?”
“It’s done,” she said. “Take your time getting dressed. I like to knit in the mornings.”
Back in Cora’s room, I rummaged through the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase for a sundress. No, I had not seen many rivers up close, only the sea. I had seen the sea and set lobsters free, and let phosphorescent waves wash over my bare running feet. Then I sat on the floor, bent so far forward as to bury my face in the suitcase, and cried, silently, so Granma would not hear. After mere minutes alone, my thoughts went immediately back to the dreamlike incomprehensibility of my situation. Bumble, I knew, had already left Billings to get an early start and was headed out of Montana without me. Dad was preparing for another day at Sunshine Realty, sleepily shuffling his way through a house chaotic (or, as Rasha might have said, quixotic) with attic artifacts. I put my hand on my chest and expected to feel nothing but air, like the vacancy left after a cannonball blasts through a brick wall, but there was skin, warm to the touch inside my robe, and beneath it, bone, and under it all, a beat that still came at regular intervals. Then I heard a rustle and sat up. The suitcase’s contents were damp from my tears. The rustle sounded once more, and it came from Cora’s dresser. Daphne had emerged from her cedar chips to curl her minikin fingers around the wires of her cage and study me twitchily. “Hello,” I said in a clogged and quavering voice. I gathered my things and found my way to the bathroom. It was still steamy and soap-scented from Jim’s shower.
I HAD NEVER KNOWN SUCH QUIET. All I could hear was the movement of grass, the calls of birds, and the occasional creaks of the house, as if it were a living thing that had grown up out of the prairie. Still, despite her silence, I knew Granma was there. In the short bits of time I had spent with her, I had memorized the feeling of her presence. She had a soothing effect on my left ovary. I had grown so accustomed to the sensation of its excitement, its pangs and flares, its melting aches. But Granma, I had noticed, softened it, made it uncoil and breathe a sort of sigh of relief, because there was nothing in her that inspired pity, no strain of sad helplessness, no heart-crushing vulnerability. She had a quality that seemed like it might mend those aspects in others. I didn’t exactly understand it, but already I knew how I felt when I was near her. Showered and with my hair still dripping, I wandered in my lucky red Chinese shoes, seeking her out. I worried for a moment that I had already become the cliché I so feared, the wayward white girl ro
manticizing a wise old Native American. But, apart from a few cantankerous schoolteachers, I had not been around many older women in my life, and I knew it was Granma’s pronounced femininity, not her ethnicity, that attracted me.
She was not in her room, the entirety of which I could see from the hallway—a bed draped in a quilt featuring a giant star made of scraps from old blue jeans, a nightstand covered with framed photographs of faces I could not quite make out. She wasn’t in Jim’s room, which was opposite hers. Giving it the briefest of looks, I saw a brown woolen blanket, a basketball, and a buffalo skull propped against the wall. And she wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room.
She was outside on a makeshift porch of sorts, a square of packed dirt under a place where the metal roof extended out a few extra feet to make an awning. She sat in a chair, knitting. The dog lounged at her feet in a posture of profound satisfaction, her chin resting on a ball of yarn. “Beautiful Belly,” I said, stroking her enormous, triangular ears.
“The chickens are around back,” Granma said after a long time. She had folded the subtlest of suggestions into her voice.
There were eight hens, round and pale in shades of white, cream, and fawn, with bright red combs, and when I stood among them they made worried, watery warbles. They scratched at the ground and examined it with their beaks. I looked into their coop, a structure evidently fashioned in a spirit of improvisation with assorted scraps of wood in varying sizes and shapes, and spotted one lone egg. When I picked it up, it was still warm. I had never seen or touched a freshly laid egg before. I held it out to Granma.
“Good!” she said. “That can go in the fridge.”
When I returned from the kitchen, Granma glanced at my lucky red Chinese shoes. “Those are beautiful,” she said.
“They’re good luck. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.”
“I know what you mean. It’s so interesting, the way certain things we wear seem to help us along. But they won’t be good for digging. We’re going to walk a lot. What else do you have?”
“Some sandals. Well, rubber flip-flops. I don’t wear leather.”
Granma was silent again. She studied her knitting with great concentration. Then she said, “That’s okay. I have some sneakers that will fit you.”
I PULLED THE VELCRO STRAPS of the nylon orthopedic shoes—identical to the ones Granma wore—tightly over my feet. “It’s good to have a spare pair,” she noted. “Sort of like Cora’s top bunk.” They were more cushiony and comfortable than any other shoes I had worn. And, dissonant though they were with my standard sundress, I did not want to take them off. Granma put some snacks (pemmican for her, apples for me) and water in a backpack, which I carried. She took up the antique flour sack I’d seen slung over her shoulder the day before. SNOW WHITE DELICIOUS CAKE AND PASTRY FLOUR the sack read, and I could barely make out an old-timey image of Snow White herself wielding a rolling pin. The Disney princess was an incongruous image on the prairie, an emblem of my own home turf. (I wondered if Rasha, who had watched the Disneyland fireworks through the kitchen window every night during her first months in Orange County, had known much about Snow White—the motherless girl who dodged an unpleasant fate by escaping to a cottage in a hidden place, the girl who was cared for by strangers, the girl who communed with birds.) Outside, Granma found a slender spade for me, retrieved her stick from its resting place beside the front door, and we left.
We walked past the chickens and went on for miles. I saw lots of slinky prairie dogs who poked their heads out of holes in the ground and sometimes darted through the pale grass with expressions of great alarm. Granma was not a fast walker, and it was noon before we arrived at what she called our digging place—a rocky slope at the base of some low rolling foothills. “Let’s eat a little,” she said. She chewed her pemmican slowly, sitting in a small square of shade thrown out like a blanket by a lone tree.
Soon she rose and pointed to a plant. “This is what we’re looking for,” she said. “Ehe. That’s wild turnip. Prairie turnip.” Then she crouched down and used her stick to dig all around the plant. “My digging stick is made of chokecherry wood,” she told me. “It was my grandmother’s. She was a root digger.” She pushed the stick deep into the earth, taking care not to pierce the plant’s root. “It’s the root that we need,” she said. She coaxed the plant and its root out of the soil and whispered a word—“A-ho”—and pushed the displaced dirt back into the hole. Then she pulled the leaves off the root and tossed them onto the ground. “The seeds from the foliage will fall and make more turnips,” she explained. Finally, she put the root into her sack. “That’s what we do.”
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.
“Same thing my grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother did,” Granma said. “Use them to feed my family. These wild turnips are kind of like bread to the Crows. They’re so nutritious, and they have their own distinct flavor. We eat regular, store-bought bread, too. You saw. But these are a special food for us, one that we’ve been eating for a long time. Káalixaalia† gives us so many good things to eat. It’s all here for us.” Granma watched me for a few moments while I stood with my short spade, staring at the ground. “Go ahead,” she said. “Now you try.”
“So … just … dig?”
“Just dig.”
I pushed my spade around the circumference of another of the plants. Its leaves resembled small hands with five fingers, and they greeted me with lazy little waves in the breeze. I thought about Simon digging in his wife’s garden on the morning I’d found him there, with a bucket of flowers beside him. I wondered what it was he’d been looking for, and I knew it hadn’t been the flowers. Soon, the image of Simon faded as I focused more on the pleasurable sensation of pushing a spade into the ground. I heard Granma say that phrase again—A-ho—softly while she dug.
When I accidentally snapped off one of the root’s slender arms with my spade, I forgot my fledgling pleasure and felt a fast flood of panic. I cried, “Oh!” and remembered Agents Fox and Jones and my own uprootedness. I had left so many fragments of myself back home, where the ground had drowned in cement, the dolphins had chlorine rashes, the people had smoked swan for breakfast, and the men had broken hearts.
“It’s okay,” Granma said. “Just keep going.” I managed to lift the root out of the ground and, turning it around in my hands, saw that it was mostly intact. “Perfect,” she said. “Now the top.” I tore the leaves and purple flowers from the root and watched them bounce along the ground as the breeze ushered them away.
“Am I supposed to say that word you are saying?” I asked.
“I’m saying thank you,” Granma said. “A-ho. Yes, you can say thank you, too.” She smiled.
I held the turnip in my hand and told it, “Thank you,” before tucking it into the backpack. When I moved on to another, I recalled the shy, almost secretive beauty of the plants in the Middletown Community Garden, how they had thrived beneath the roaring of airplanes in that realm of chain-link fences and cracked sidewalks, how they had soothed and stilled my heart and mind on many a restless night, how it had never occurred to me to thank them. I wondered if they had sensed how I needed them, how glad I had been to be beside them. Then I stopped thinking about those plants, and of the Community Garden, and of San Diego altogether, of Agents Fox and Jones, of Dad, of the Tierra de Flores tract, of the Operation, of Bumble driving farther and farther away from me, of Ronald Clack and my legal woes left dangling, of darling Jack Dolce and his bicycle basket gifts, of Rasha’s bathroom cabinet relics and of the blood-red poppies that had bloomed out of her. I stopped thinking completely. I just dug, and it seemed all I had ever known were wild turnips on the prairie.
With every push of my spade, I felt myself falling. And the roots, the fragrance of the earth, the salty beads of sweat on my forehead, the A-ho’s and thank-you’s, the cracked skin of Granma’s hands, the inquisitive peeps of the plain brown birds who lined up alongside each other on o
ne tree branch as if posing for a photograph—all blurred together so that each became indistinct from the others, as if part of a tapestry into which they had been deliberately woven.
We dug for hours, until Granma said it was time to head back and meet Cora coming home from school.
“And catch your soap,” I said.
“That too.” Before we left, she walked behind the tree, lifted up her voluminous skirt, and crouched. “Don’t look,” she said, giggling. I heard a stream of liquid hit the dirt. I followed her example a moment later and thought I heard the birds above titter.
When we were halfway home, we stopped to drink. “Do you usually do this alone?” I asked Granma. “I saw you yesterday when we drove past.”
“Most of the time,” she said, “unless I go with Cora when she’s not in school. She’ll come with me a lot this summer. She just turned eleven and she has to learn this. All of it.” I wondered what “all of it” was. “And I hope you’ll come along, too,” she added.
“O-oh,” I stuttered, “y-yes.” I wanted to come along. I wanted to feel that sense of forgetting and falling again, that delicious dissolving. “If I’m still here.”
“Of course.” Granma’s face was flushed and slick, and I thought I saw her hand shake when she screwed the lid back onto her water jug.
“Do you want to sit for a while before we start again?” I asked.
“No no,” she said. “We’ll go,” and the certainty with which she set off made me feel foolish for thinking her fragile.
BACK AT THE HOUSE WE WERE GREETED first by the chickens, who encircled Granma with urgent clucks, then by Belly, who praised her with yips. I washed my hands in the bathroom sink and watched brown rivulets of dirt spiral down the drain. In the mirror, I noted without surprise that a day of sun had awakened all kinds of freckles on the tops of my cheeks and nose, but I was startled by my eyes. I didn’t recognize them at first as my own. They had none of Dad’s swoopy sadness, but were shining and appeared infused with something new, brimming with a substance other than tears. I stared at them and wondered what I had done that was so remarkable besides walk for a long time over the prairie with Granma and lose myself in digging.
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