by Roger Wall
At first I thought he was joking, introducing these new twists into our story to keep me entertained. The part about dropping to his knees to pray to a Catholic god especially made me want to laugh. But he wasn’t grinning or smiling. His eyes were bulging wide open. He licked his lips and opened his mouth wide to suck in air. I’d never seen him so terrified.
“At most I thought there’d be some warning shots to herd us into trucks for arrest and relocation. But demolition? Whew! That was a surprise!”
He chuckled and then hawked up and swallowed some phlegm. The damp sour air that we shared settled over me and made the hair on my skin stand up. I set my half-empty soup bowl on the willow floor and studied Otis’s sallow face for a clue to what he might say next. He squirmed against the juniper wall as though ants were crawling over his skin.
“I thought it was heavy trucks! A police action. A display of force. Some arrests. But murder and destruction. Whew! That was a surprise!”
“My parents were there? Your vision . . . I thought . . .”
“You always liked bedtime stories.”
“And you liked telling them!”
Otis’s knees fell to the side, and he shifted again, struggling to stay upright. For a moment he lost his balance and extended an arm to keep from falling forward. He coughed again.
“Oh, you cried all the time, missed your mother’s tit!” he moaned. “Your parents came home drunk. Hollered in their bedroom. I kept you in the basement with me. I slept better down there.”
Then he bent toward me and confided in a wheezy whisper: “Bunch of old people. A few young men with rifles. What threat were we?”
“Wait a minute, Otis. You said my parents . . .”
“Oh, gardening was women’s work. All that talking. It never stopped. Digging a basement, I became a man again!” he bellowed.
“Otis, what are you talking about?” I cried out.
“Things got worse before they got better. Only one diaper for you to mess up. Had to let you go naked on the bottom. A couple of times I thought about letting you die, just to shut you up. I was so lonely, no one to talk to, and all you could do was cry. I started singing and reading out loud. Anything to drown you out, make me feel less alone. Thankfully, you learned to speak early on.”
“You knew where they were?”
“I hated it. That night. End of everything.”
“Why didn’t you warn them?”
“I was so scared. And then the nightmares came. Luckily you slept through those.”
“Why didn’t you go out and bring them to the basement?”
“I didn’t want us to live like savages, like the rest of the continent. I wanted us to be free, to live a pure life. With respect for humans and in harmony with nature. Like before the white people. When the Indians lived here.”
“You mean your ancestors?”
He gazed beyond me and focused on the wall of the cave.
“I was very sad when Malèna died. And now I’m leaving you,” he said.
I thought he would cry. He disgusted me.
“Yeah, well, don’t worry,” I said. “I can gather and trap. I know how to swim and paddle and sail the canoe, too. I’ve gone all the way to White Earth Bay and am going to sail even farther.”
“Oh, I did a lot of dumb things when I was young, too. And you’ll do a lot more before you grow up,” he said and started rubbing his back against the juniper trunks, as though he were scratching a bite, unmoved by my boasting. Then he flattened his eyes in a slit of concentration and stared at me.
“You need a wife,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.
“A wife? A wife?” I started to laugh. I slapped my thigh and hooted. Death was making him crazy. Or maybe living with a lie for so long had finally cracked him up.
“I had a lot of girls before I met Malèna. I enjoyed them all, but not as much as your grandmother. You’ll see. A strong young man like you will have his choice.”
His wheezing filled the silence in the cave. I thought he had said all he’d wanted to say and would settle into sleep. But instead he cleared his throat and hawked. He pointed a finger at me: “You’re more of a son to me than a grandson. You were the only child I ever raised. Maria was grown when I met her, already married to Javier. She wasn’t my child. She was Malèna’s daughter. I didn’t know her very well.”
“She wasn’t related to you?”
“No, but I didn’t care about that. They were good people, Javier and Maria. But they shouldn’t have come to White Earth River. I could take care of Malèna better than Maria could, and I didn’t need them to take care of me after Malèna died. They should’ve stayed in Bismarck.”
He spoke as though he were talking about the morning clouds and what shape they would take by afternoon.
“They were on the playing field.”
“Hmm.”
“We could’ve warned them. They could’ve been with us.”
“Funny how these things work out.”
I felt the lattice of willows pressing into my bottom. Nothing existed except the foul air at the back of the cave.
“I don’t have your blood, then, only my parents’ blood.”
Otis ignored me.
“I never knew my father,” he continued. “He left my mother when I was an infant. She was a white, but Sammy convinced me that my father might have been Hidatsa. He said we’d get a blood test, prove it. Sammy knew a lot about the Hidatsa, how they had lived along the Missouri. He’d read their history and whatnot, knew more than the handful of old Hidatsa and Mandan and Arikara living in our retirement village. He taught me how to preserve seeds, which plants had the most nutritional value. We wanted to return to another time, one before there was a government. When the Event happened, I thought a prophecy was coming true, even though Sammy didn’t live to join us in this future.”
“You’re not Hidatsa, then. And I’m not either.”
“You’ve been Hidatsa almost since you were born. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have my blood or even that you don’t like to sing. You’re my son.”
“No. Our blood isn’t right. None of it is.”
“You’re my son.”
“Are we whites, Otis?”
Otis slouched against the wall and stared straight ahead at the juniper trunks—not at me. His hair was loose, falling down around his shoulders. His face seemed to have become softer and fuller from his confession. Although his skin had kept its yellow tint, it didn’t seem as leathery and tough as it had earlier in the day. His wrinkles seemed to have filled in. He looked younger. In a way, and this may have been the dim light playing tricks on me, he looked more like a woman than a man.
A few minutes later, he lowered himself to the bed and began to snore.
I stirred the coals in the clay stove and added pieces of driftwood and waited for them to pop and flare. Fat on the stove grate melted and dripped into the fire. Smoke curled toward the roof of the cave. I breathed in the greasy fumes.
It was dark in the cave now, except for the fire. To light up the cave, I propped the piece of mirror against the clay chimney so light from the flames was reflected into the room.
In the dim light I began pacing, quietly rummaging through the few belongings we had, searching for an account of what had happened the night the machines had come or of his “conversion” to Hidatsa, notes or a diary that Otis had written during those first lonely days, perhaps hidden among the sheaves of paper on the shelf: planting schedules, my writing and arithmetic exercises, sketches of the valley from the cave. Or in one of Otis’s dresser drawers (he had two, as did I), tucked behind a shirt or pair of jeans. Or in the wooden stand between our beds where he kept the black book of photographs.
I found no written record in any of these places, only the book of photographs in the wooden stand. And although the images were old, I hoped they would give me some clue to how Otis’s mind worked, a glimpse into why he’d gone to the trouble of creating the story about his phony vision
.
Many of the photographs had faded to brown and white, and some were torn and creased, but at least they proved that certain moments of Otis’s past had occurred as he said they had; the tattered paper evidence couldn’t be altered.
I sat on the willow mat, across from Otis, with the album opened on my lap. If I tipped the pages at the right angle, I could see the images. I wondered: What would it be like to stand in front of the tall buildings in the photographs, to kneel in front of the statues in parks, or to sit at tables arranged with platters of food as I smiled and held hands with a woman like the one in the photo, Otis’s wife, Malèna? Would I be as handsome as Otis in dark pants with a crease down the front of them, a white shirt, and a dark coat? Would I cut my hair short and slick it back with grease or water? And my wife, would she be as tall as Malèna was standing on her toes in black shoes with thin high heels? Would my wife’s hair be long and dark and tied in a ponytail that hung to her waist? Would she wear a tight-fitting, pale dress with buttons up the front that sparkled like stars and a wide shiny belt that cinched her waist? Or a long, white lace dress that covered her feet? Would my wife clutch a handful of flowers?
Otis had told me stories about his working days, when he led a crew that built office and residential towers in Rugby, North Dakota, during the first wave of construction in the creation of the continent’s new capital city, the Center. I remembered the names of the men on the crew, who in one photo stood in a line with Otis. All were dressed in heavy work clothes. They stood perched on a beam, with arms around each other, those on the ends holding onto vertical risers for balance. Behind them in the distance, metal and glass buildings glistened in the sun. “To Otis, number one. Working with you has been an ‘express’ ride to the top every time! Best wishes for a happy retirement.” Below the message on yellowing paper was a row of signatures.
His crew had named Otis after an elevator because he worked fast and pushed them to do the same, which was why they did well in the Center, why Otis could afford to wear fancy clothes and take Malèna to restaurants where there was never a shortage of food.
I had been cultivating around a hill of corn the first time I had called Otis by his nickname. “Hey, Otis, give me that trowel,” I had said. “Here you go, number three,” Otis had chuckled, using the endearment he reserved for joking with his men to let them know he was boss.
After that, I had stopped calling him Granddaddy. And Otis was much easier to say than Johnny Silvertooth, his full name. He seemed to like being reminded of his life as the head of a team of ironworkers racing to build the new capital of the North American continent.
But this life, his working years when he and Malèna were young, had money, and went out to restaurants, was a different time, one in which the new continental government was forming: abandoning the coasts, the southeast, and much of the southwest; moving desirable people inland to regional cities, mapping out industrial and agricultural preserves. Perhaps at first Otis believed the government’s lies about its adapting to a hotter climate and building a continent for the future. Being isolated in the interior on the edge of a productive agricultural region might have convinced him the government was to be trusted, that his work in building the Center was noble. The White Earth River co-housing retirement project would also help him think all was going according to a plan, which was why he probably cursed Tony LePerle so much: he exposed the government’s brutal policy of culling and wrecked the arrangement Otis and the other retirees had. How could Otis ignore what the government was doing and think that he’d escape it?
The photos of Malèna and Otis offered no hints about what might have led Otis, that night when the machines came, to choose our life rather than some other one. The photos only honored his life with Malèna. I wish I had one or two photos that documented our survival in White Earth River, from the time before Otis’s confession, before our life started to end. Of course, I couldn’t have known that it would end so quickly. And, we didn’t have a camera.
Otis coughed and mumbled something. I closed the black book of photographs. He opened his eyes slowly and stared down at me.
“That’s just a glimpse,” he said. “A life that was old when I made the record of it. Must’ve been the late thirties. Twenty-forty-five was when I retired.”
Otis rolled on his side and faced me.
“Sometimes I miss that life. There’ll be no restaurants in the juniper.”
There aren’t any here, either, I thought. I thumbed through the pages of photographs until I found the one of a brick house.
“My mother and father lived here,” I stated.
“No,” Otis said, without looking at the photograph. “That’s where Malèna and I lived in Bismarck. Maria had moved out before I met Malèna. Ours was a late-in-life marriage . . . Tortas of all types—rice, pear, nut, ricotta, chocolate. The ricotta were my favorite. So sweet. I don’t know which went first, her heart or her lungs. We went to the hospital together, on the train, but I came home with only a handful of ashes and a piece of bone. That’s all Government gave me. I dug a small hole, not like the deep one you’ve dug for me. But I worry that the heat of the oven destroyed her spirit or that I’ll have to struggle to find her. You know, she’s spoken to me.”
“Yes, that’s what you said.”
I believed this because I wanted to think he’d speak to me and fill the silent world that he’d warned me would come when he died. I looked at him, expecting to see a mournful expression, but he was smiling. His eyes sparkled as though he were savoring a private joke.
“She was so beautiful. Exotic. Full of life. Most of all I’ve missed sleeping with her, her head on my shoulder. Even if we hadn’t been together all day or spoken a word or had an argument, sleeping entwined like that reunited us. And sometimes we would make love. That’s what I’ll do after I die, in the juniper. It’s up to me to find her.”
Make love. The expression jumped out at me, as kissing had earlier in the day. Otis had never used those words, make love, before.
“You’ll find her,” I said, “You were always able to track animals.”
“Yes, and you’ll be lucky, too. You’ll meet someone to love, like I did. Then your rooster will crow and your wife will scream with pleasure. I’ll hear you singing of your happiness. I’ll see your children running in the garden.”
Bismarck, White Earth River, the spirit life: Otis was floating back and forth, remembering what had happened and make believing about what would never happen: A wife. Children. I barked a short laugh over his expression “rooster.” I knew he was referring to the penis, although he had never before used a nickname for either his or mine. And the crowing bit: Did he know that sometimes at night as I slept and dreamed my penis grew large? I waited for Otis to say more, but he only sighed and rolled onto his back.
I studied the photographs again and tried to imagine the life he and Malèna had shared, the moments of tenderness and secrecy that Otis had alluded to but had never spoken of so openly. Each had pursued his own life, Otis as ironworker and then as town . . . what?—digging a basement seemed to be his greatest accomplishment—and Malèna as baker in her parents’ business and then leader in the town’s Catholic church. But they had had a special, secret life together, too. I tried to imagine how White Earth River would have been different if Malèna hadn’t died before I was born. How she would have treated me like a son, or a grandson, as Otis did. How she would have prepared our meals. She was probably a better cook than Otis or me. Would we all have slept at the back of the cave together? Would she and Otis have lain in his bed entwined on the cornhusk mattress and made love while I slept in the bed across from them?
“Make love” was a funny expression, like other “make” expressions, make tea, make noise, make sense, but different, I knew, a private expression for something that only Otis and Malèna could do, lying close together and probably touching and kissing. The other expression, “scream with pleasure,” I hated. Why would I want to make my wife
scream with pleasure? It reminds me of “scream with terror,” which is what I imagine Otis and my parents did over the sound of the clanking machines.
I was tired of looking at the photographs and couldn’t wait until morning for Otis to answer my question, so I tried to wake him up. “Granddad, what’s make love?” I asked. Otis didn’t answer. I could hear fluid gurgling in his lungs, a wheezy breath coming out of his mouth. I closed the black book of photographs and watched his chest rise and fall.
In the gray-blue light of morning, I lay on the cornhusk mattress, a goose-feather pillow flat under my head, and listened for Otis’s breathing. I couldn’t hear it and couldn’t see his chest rising under the folds of the rabbit-skin blanket.
I got up and walked over and unfastened a button on his flannel shirt. His heartbeat was weak. His chest didn’t seem to be rising; then suddenly he gulped for air. When I tried to sit him up, to help him breathe, he moaned a long “Nooo . . .”
I pressed my hand against his cheek. It was cool.
“You didn’t eat enough rabbit last night and now you’re getting cold.”
I smoothed the soft fur of the blanket, snugged it up around his neck, and tucked it under his shoulders.
“You want some tea? I can start a fire and make some.”
I waited for an answer, but Otis didn’t speak.
“No? Okay. Maybe later.”
I knew what I had to do. At the beginning of the previous warm season, I had lain with Otis on a deerskin in the garden at night to scare off the birds and rabbits that tried to steal seeds and munch on the new shoots. We had spooned together, Otis’s body warming mine throughout the night. Now, it was my turn to offer the same comfort to him. I touched his cheek and thought of the thin draft that reached our beds, the dampness that seeped from the earth through the wall of junipers.