by Will Weaver
I was thinking of my last letter. It must have sounded silly, me writing about staying in Flatwater and eating supper at a restaurant—it’s not as if I haven’t taken trips or eaten alone before!
But doing it in Flatwater was the different part. People in Flatwater come in pairs, like mittens or boots. In the restaurant people stared at me because they knew who I was and they wondered where Martin was. I said it felt funny. Exciting is a better word. I felt like I had a secret. And you know what the secret was? It was that I didn’t feel lonely being alone. I didn’t feel like I was missing something or someone. This sounds crazy, but I felt more like someone who had long ago lost an arm or a foot, had lost one so long ago I had gotten completely used to buying one left mitten or one right boot.
I don’t feel like I’ve lost you, though. I don’t think children can be lost ever—even when they’re dead. I’m sure of it.
Love, your mother
November 18, 1972
Dear Guy,
Today I looked out the kitchen window to see what was taking the milk truck so long. Martin and the driver were fighting, hitting each other and rolling on the ground. Through the window it was like I was watching men fighting on TV, with the sound off.
I ran outside and stopped it. Martin had a gash across his eyebrow but the driver wasn’t hurt. Apparently the driver had scratched the milk-house door when he backed up.
Helmer watched the whole thing from his window.
Love, your mother
November 20, 1972
Dear Guy!
Got your card today!! California! I was right, my dream, I mean. It must be very green there with lots of flowers. The postmark said San Jose. I looked that up on the map. It looks to be about fifty miles south of San Francisco and the same distance from the ocean. I’ve never been to an ocean, though Lake Winnipeg always seemed like one to me.
Please send a street address next time. But don’t if you don’t want to. Don’t worry, I won’t give it to anyone. I left your card on the kitchen table where Martin would see it. He made a big deal of not looking at it, but later when he thought I wasn’t looking, I saw him holding the card.
Helmer is doing better. We’re arranging for him to come awhile for Christmas.
Unseasonably cold these days—minus eighteen and strong northwest winds.
Love, your mother
November 22, 1972
Dear Guy,
Nine years ago today, President Kennedy was shot. I remember how you liked him so. I remember your scrapbook. You shouldn’t have burned it. The day the President was killed I was standing at the sink peeling potatoes. I heard it on the radio. You and Tom were outside in the yard fooling with that bike-powered sled you made. I turned the radio off. I felt like no one should tell you the bad news. I felt that if you never found out you would remain nine years old and happy forever.
Love, your mother
November 23, 1972
Dear Guy,
You were happiest with Tom, I always knew. Sometimes with me, when we were alone. Once in a while you were even happy with Martin, but that was always when you and he were working on something where you had tools in your hands or some machine between you.
I remember thinking that for the first time when you were twelve or so. It was June and Martin was driving the tractor and baler. You were behind on the wagon, bucking bales.
I had come to the field with lunch. Martin and the tractor came down the field with you behind. Martin was in front, the baler was in between, and you and he were connected only by the iron pin that joined the wagon to the baler. I remember thinking that that was just the right distance between the two of you. I remember crying.
I always thought I would cry when you left home. But I haven’t. So far.
Love, your mother
November 27, 1972
Dear Guy,
I hate Thanksgiving. How’s that for a confession? Thanksgiving, most holidays for that matter, are always so much work. That, and everyone is supposed to feel happy and thankful.
Holidays should come naturally, I think. People would celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas in June or October or whenever it seems right for them.
But that would mean not many holidays around here.
Sorry. I’m kind of down today. Will stop.
Love, your mother
December 10, 1972
Dear Guy,
A foot of snow, twenty degrees. From my egg money I bought a pair of cross-country skis. I’ve made a trail around the windbreak, I suppose it’s about a mile around the trees altogether. The first time I made the circle I thought my heart was going to pop. But it gets easier. In the trees I saw a pileated woodpecker, plus a partridge sunning himself. Hope an owl doesn’t get the partridge.
After I’ve skied around the windbreak the farm always looks smaller. It must be because of the deep snow.
Here’s some more news. I signed up for an evening class in Detroit Lakes, an English and creative writing class. A professor from Moorhead State will teach it. When I told Martin he said, “But you already know how to write.” I told him to expect me gone on Tuesday nights, 6–10. The driving will be difficult when the weather gets bad. But it’s the class, not the driving, that scares me. I know I’ll be the oldest one there.
I’ll save the rest of this letter to tell you how it went.
Love, your mother
Terrible, that’s how it went. I got to Detroit Lakes two hours early. The professor was an hour late. And when he walked in he was not at all what I had expected. He was short and burly, mostly bald with a curly red rim of hair. He looked Irish. I was expecting for some reason to see someone who looked like Walter Cronkite. Anyway, this red-haired man walked into the room smoking a pipe and glaring at us. Without saying anything he handed out photocopies of some poems by Rod McKuen. “Read these,” he said. “When you’re finished we’ll talk about them.” Then he repacked his pipe and started working on another stack of papers he had brought along.
After about twenty minutes he seemed to remember we were there. Everyone had finished reading by then, but no one dared make a sound. He looked up.
“Well now,” he said. He smiled for the first time. I began to think maybe he was nice after all. “Did you like the poetry?” he asked. “How many of you liked the poems? Raise your hands, please.”
I thought the poems were pretty good, certainly better than I could ever write. I waited, then raised my hand with everybody else. He counted our hands, then turned to the blackboard and scrawled, “McKuen 19, Poetry 0.”
“What the hell is the matter with you people?” he shouted. “This is not poetry—this is dog shit!” Really, he said that.
We have to write something for the next class. I don’t know if I’ll go back.
Love, your mother
Guy smiled and leaned away from the stack of envelopes. He counted them. Close to one hundred letters. He took out his pocket knife and slit open all the envelopes, then dug in the glove box for a paper clip. If bound, the accumulated letters were as thick as a book.
January 19, 1973
Dear Guy,
I finally turned in my first poem to Dr. Corley. I got it back with a big red “Lousy!” marked across it. The poem was about sunset. He also wrote that if he had to read one more poem about “the sun’s dying gleams” he would kill either himself or possibly the writer or both. He told me to forget rhyme and meter. He told me to write about something I knew a lot about, something unpleasant.
So I did (and it wasn’t about Martin). I wrote a poem called “Seventeen Ways a Cow Can Die.” You know, as a calf from scours or pneumonia or from getting trampled. Or later from too much green grass. Or as a full-grown cow from eating barbed wire or from calving paralysis or milk fever . . . The poem was just sort
of a list. But Dr. Corley gave me an “A+ + + + + + + + + + !” on it. He wanted me to stay after class and talk about it. We even had coffee together in the student cafeteria before he drove back to Moorhead and me home. He’s really a nice man underneath.
Love, your mother
Guy read ahead, skipping, skim-reading through the next several letters. Dr. Corley’s long comments on Madeline’s poems. Robert Corley’s extra books for her to read. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Plath, Sexton, Rich, Le Sueur. Bob Corley and Madeline talking books and family after class at Hi-Ten Truckstop on the edge of Detroit Lakes. Bob. Bob’s wife, who didn’t understand poetry any more than she understood him.
Guy skipped farther ahead and found the letter he knew was coming: “. . . told Martin I had car trouble and that I stayed with a woman from my class. Bob told his wife the same thing. Afterwards I felt both terrible and excited. I didn’t want to go home ever again. But I went.”
March 2, 1973
Dear Guy,
The class has been over three weeks now. Bob said he would send me some more books, plus a poem he wrote especially for me. But he hasn’t. What an idiot I am.
Love, your dumb mother
May 4, 1973
Dear Guy,
I think I’m getting over being angry. I’ve done a lot of walking. That seems to be good for me. I usually walk ten to fifteen miles a day. I like the way I feel after I walk—empty, flushed out. Right now I just got back from a very long hike and I’m writing a letter which, for once, has nothing to do with me.
I’m glad I will not have to send this letter. It’s about Tom’s parents.
God, I hate to write this.
They were killed last night. Their house burned, the oil burner exploded, I guess. Something like that. The coroner said Warren’s blood alcohol was .28. Apparently Mary tried and tried to drag him out but she couldn’t. The fireman got her out but she died early this morning in the hospital in Flatwater. The funeral for both of them is the day after tomorrow.
I want to send you this but I can’t. Because if I do, you’ll come home. I’m so, so sorry.
Love, Madeline
Guy let out his breath. He looked up from the letters, looked through the windshield of the Mercedes toward the west pine hills of the reservation. He turned the key in the ignition. As the engine idled he read the next letter.
May 6, 1973
Dear Guy,
The funeral for Tom’s parents was held in the Catholic church in No Medicine Town. It was so cold in that building, like it was still winter inside. Tom was there. He has longer hair now, nearly to his shoulders, and he was wearing a beaded turquoise necklace. He just sat there in the front row, staring straight ahead. I watched him. He never cried. His face was like wood or stone.
After the service in the church there was the burial outside. It felt good to be in the sunlight. There was dancing and drumming. Zhingwaak drummed. He’s very old now, stays in the rest home in Flatwater in the winter but comes back to the reservation in the summer. He can still drum like always. The dancers were mainly older people, women in their jingle dresses and the old men in vests and rabbit bones and white feathers.
Tom just stood and watched the dancers. Just stared. I was going to walk up to him, tell him how sorry I was. But then he suddenly walked forward to Zhingwaak. Zhingwaak didn’t miss a beat as Tom came closer. Then Zhingwaak handed another drumstick to Tom. The two of them began to drum together. They fell into this double rhythm that brought goose bumps onto my arms and down my back. It was strange. There were only the two of them drumming, but when I closed my eyes it sounded like there were three or four or more drummers.
I listened with my eyes closed for a long time. The old women began to wail. I started to cry. When I could see again Tom was crying too. His face was all shiny and his tears were falling on the deerskin of the drum. They left dark spots there. He and Zhingwaak just kept drumming harder and harder.
I never did get a chance to speak with Tom. When I went out to lock up the chickens, the wind was in the west and I could still hear the drumming.
Love, Madeline
Guy sat back in the Mercedes. He let the letter drop. Then he got out. He took a long walk around the grove and out to the old washout where he and Tom used to play. When he returned to the yard he got in the car and drove to No Medicine Town.
He walked without slowing past the surprised secretary. Ahead, through the open doorway of Tom’s office, came loud voices. Guy stepped through the door. Inside, Tom and an Indian in tribal dress were arguing; it was the same Indian, Sonny Bowstring, who had handed out fliers at the Price-Whittaker lakeshore sale.
“. . . Tom, your folks—I didn’t know . . . ,” Guy said from the doorway.
Tom turned. The other Indian stared. Tom let drop the papers he was holding. “I’ll be gone for an hour,” he said quietly to an Indian woman typing on a computer.
“You can’t walk out of here,” the other Indian said. “We need this stuff taken care of—now!”
“I’ll be gone for an hour.”
Bowstring pounded his fist on the papers Tom had let fall. “We wait and we wait and we wait . . . ,” he began, his voice rising. “For a hundred years we wait and now we wait some more just because you and some white dude—”
Like a snake striking, Tom jerked forward and slammed Bowstring up against the wall. He held him there; the Indian’s moccasins dangled.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Tom said in a flat voice. “I want you to go chew some pemmican or do some beadwork for about an hour. It’ll help your nerves. Then when I come back we’ll start where we left off, okay?”
Sonny Bowstring’s eyes glittered blackly at Tom, then turned to Guy.
***
“Your parents—I just found out,” Guy said, outside the building. “An old letter from Madeline. If I’d known . . .”
“If they’d known,” Tom murmured. He took a deep breath, then let it slowly whistle away through his front teeth. He looked down to the ground. The sun was out, the dirt was wet from the melting snow.
“My father. My father had been drinking hard,” Tom began. “It was cold for May, that year. He was pouring fuel oil from a can into the oil burner. Something happened. The can exploded, then the house. My mother tried . . . She didn’t make it. A very short story,” Tom finished, turning to Guy. “One column in the Flatwater Quill. ‘Drunken Indian burns down house, two killed.’ Something like that.”
Tom was silent. He drew his finger along the gray paint of the Mercedes. “Sometimes I think the newspaper people have that story already written. They just change the names. Change car wreck to burning house. Leave the drunken Indian part. That always stays the same.”
They were both silent.
“Get in,” Guy said. “Let’s take a drive.”
Tom blinked. He looked briefly at the Humphrey Tribal Center, then back to Guy.
Guy turned east. He put in a cassette tape of The Byrds’ Greatest Hits and began to drive. He drove and they talked, at first hesitantly, then openly, about where they had been, what they had done. Tom talked first.
24
When he left the hotel and the basketball team that cold Sunday morning in March in Minneapolis, Tom walked for two days and nights. Any street, any place. Just walked. Eventually he arrived back on Franklin Avenue at the office of the American Indian Movement. AIM found him a room, mostly heated, and that spring a job with an all-Indian roofing crew. That summer he worked on the rooftops of Minneapolis among air conditioners and pigeon shit, carrying buckets of tar, wearing tennis shoes that weighed ten pounds apiece from hot asphalt hardened on them.
Then the fall. A broken scaffold rope, a drop three stories into a crab tree alongside an apartment building. Two months in St. Mary’s in traction. Plenty of time there to think.
Long talks at night with an old black hospital orderly named Clements. Clements worked the graveyard shift emptying bedpans, dusting. Clements began to bring him books, not the pulp paperbacks that most people read while they were in the hospital, but Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, books by James Baldwin. The books belonged to his son, Clements said. Clements said he himself didn’t enjoy reading all that much; when he handed the books to Tom, Clements squinted and tilted the books as if to focus their titles.
One day Clements brought not books but a visitor. The visitor was a man who was Clements himself, only a lot younger. Younger and taller and straighter and dressed not in a white smock but in a yellow, camel’s-hair overcoat and underneath a gray flannel suit with a striped tie over a light blue shirt. The man was Clements’s son. His name was Frederick Douglass Clements and he was an attorney for the Urban League in Washington, D.C.
When Tom was released from the hospital he went home to convalesce with Clements. Once a week, on Sunday night, Fred called his father from Washington, and once a month Fred came home. Not long before Tom was ready to go back to roofing, Fred invited Tom to come with him to Washington.
“The first time I walked around in the Capitol Building I felt like I was in church,” Tom said. “You know, wanting to whisper. Looking at the detail work of the ceiling, the walls, the floor. I couldn’t stop looking at the details. But then I began to watch the people there, the men with their briefcases and suits and ties. They never looked at the ceilings or the paintings on the walls. They just walked down the halls in little clusters of briefcases. They argued. They went to meetings all the time and to the bars afterwards.
“I couldn’t figure out what it was they did all day,” Tom continued. “So I started to follow them around. Aides, lobbyists, congressmen, senators, I didn’t know who was who except when I recognized some of them from newspaper photos. It didn’t matter to me. I followed anybody that looked like he might know what was going on.” He laughed. “Once I was following this senator and suddenly two guys in gray suits and wires in their ears grabbed me and hustled me off to a basement room where there were lots of phones and television monitors. I had to call Fred. He came and got me. I told him what I had been doing. He didn’t get mad. Rather, the same day he took me to a shopping mall, made me get a haircut, bought me a gray suit and striped tie, a cheap gold watch, and a leather briefcase. The next morning he stuffed my briefcase with two Washington Posts and sent me back to the Capitol.