I broke every glass. I broke windows. I threw out your possessions. You didn’t apologize. You explained what a friendship is. You explained that, while she asked to cuddle you, you didn’t proposition her.
The only thing, socioeconomically, practically, or rationally, I can do, is ask if you could abstain from speaking to her again.
The next day, I looked at the wreckage of our home. You forgave me with a resignation I saw in your face.
It had rained, and your chess pieces were already buried in the soil of our backyard.
We drove to Santa Fe, aware of my fragile state. You gave me your phone to look up directions in the middle of our long drive. Instead, I saw messages you sent to your Laura.
She wanted to see you months back. You explained to her that you would stop by after you visited your ex-girlfriend in the hospital, me.
And, to my surprise, you told her that you missed the smell of her on your pillow. The thing you told me the first nights we were together.
The first night you ever cooked for me, probably the way you cooked for her, you told me you loved me. I believed, after seeing how familiar you were with her, that your love was a slimy reproduction.
While I cried—while you drove—I punched you. You didn’t swerve, but you held your eye with one hand. I cried over your reprimands. I cried over your shock, for hours, until we arrived at the hotel.
Because I can function in the external world, I showered and went to my first workshop at school. You drove me, because you feared I would hurt myself. You followed me in, because I asked you.
It was an Indian renaissance. Somehow it was more Indian with you there behind me, with a black eye. Somehow it was more Indian because I was pregnant. There was a medicine wheel in the academic building, so large and proud to be Indian that I knew I was home. There were Indian writers, and we smiled at each other, as if this was a sovereign land and we belonged.
You were a bystander to my joy. You had a black eye, and we covered it with excuses.
It was then I realized I was partly my father. I hurt you because I felt justified. You deserve a body without violation.
At residency, you did harmless things. When I came out of my first workshop, you were talking to a woman: a memoirist, who wrote about being a dominatrix. When I approached you both, you immediately introduced me. She asked you for your full name. She did not ask me for mine.
When we got home, she had already sent you a request to be friends on social media.
“This is what writers do. They network,” you said.
That night my brother told me on the phone that Indian women were crazy, and white men never expect it. He told me I was not my father. We lamented together about the past.
He explained that my father was much worse than punches. Our father didn’t like our brother Guyweeyo: the oldest brother from another father. Our protector. He often punished Guyweeyo by pulling him into a room and locking the door behind them. We all have problems from that time. Problems I forget: We wet the bed as toddlers and children. I couldn’t go to people’s homes because of my accidents. The problem followed me into the third grade. None of us attended school frequently. All of us had substance abuse problems, which are still welcome over the very sober pain of remembering. Ovila told me that he doesn’t know what our father did to Guy.
We lamented about Isadore. When Isadore was taken away, I often held newborn Isaiah, incapable of looking at him.
We managed to piece together a night I took a bottle of aspirin, thinking I could kill myself. I told him that, in my sleep, I reached my arm over to pull Isadore closer to me in bed, and he was not there. I was terrified in the dark, searching with both hands to find my son. It took moments, maybe minutes, for me to realize that he was gone. He had been taken away.
I walked into the living room and Ovi was sitting down, holding a cup of tea. I didn’t want to burden him with my pain. I think I forgot that Isaiah was even in his crib asleep. My pain was selfish.
I went into the bathroom and swallowed a bottle of aspirin. It was funny then, somehow, because Mom had only died several months before: her douche and hair dye and tweezers were still in the bathroom. I had to search through her things to find the bottle.
I told Ovi what I did, and he laughed at me. He said that I should go and barf, because aspirin isn’t fatal. He went to get me water, and, before he could return, I ran to the bathroom and made it to the sink. I threw up slimy, smaller white pills.
I had to hold myself against the walls to return to bed. My stomach hurt so much. My C-section scar ached. I laid down on my back, and he opened my door. He sat down and observed me.
He smiled as I groaned.
“Do you need an aspirin?” he said.
It was the most painful laugh. I remembered my new baby in the crib, who slept every night like clockwork, like a gift.
Ovila nursed me to health, and I nursed my baby. He made barbeque ribs and bought me pastries and served me orange juice. We had never had a relationship where either of us showed affection. He nursed me back into motherhood.
He nursed me back into leaving the house and taking adult education classes. When I realized the reservation was an insufficient place to learn, he let me leave without argument or concern.
I drank your beer in the hotel room in Santa Fe. You literally waited on the other side of the door for me. When I opened it, I had to face that I was part monster. I cried, and you didn’t ask me to apologize, you didn’t direct attention to the broken vessels on your face, the large black eye.
The next day at school I was pale from not sleeping and sick of myself.
After the residency, when we got home, I drove to a parking lot and called an abortion clinic. They immediately allowed me to speak with a doctor. I explained the situation: I am violent, I have hit myself in the face to cope with worthlessness, I hit you, and I wanted to die. I wanted to take pills I still had from before I was pregnant. Also, I want to live.
The doctor said she was confident that, given my circumstance, a late-term abortion would be considered necessary. I asked her for the price, and she directed me to the receptionist. It was roughly four hundred dollars, if, after consultation, it was approved.
I called you to ask for the money, and, instead, you pled for the baby’s life. I hung up. I was familiar with the baby’s life, but I couldn’t think of that. I made more calls to foundations for women, clinics, groups, and then called back the same doctor. I was willing to sell my car or anything to have sanity again.
“When does my baby have bones?” I asked.
“This is something we should talk about in the consultation,” the woman said.
I knew immediately that the Thunder Being inside of me had good bones. I thought of the bones from my lineage, which had been cemented inside the walls of residential buildings. I thought of my ancestors. I hung up and drove home.
In the next weeks, our baby in my womb reminded me of my brother Guyweeyo: willful and scared.
He kicked before the doctors predicted he would. He hiccupped each night at eleven.
I believed my mother spoke to our baby in my sleep. I think they devised a way to punish me for even thinking that a Thunder Being inside of me could be bad.
For a hundred days, I vomited. The projection of solids from my body felt like Baby Guy was crawling out of my throat. I heaved until my face became blotchy. We believed it was an allergic reaction, but our doctor said it was blood vessels bursting from the strain of puking so often and so hard. No pill worked against the nausea.
I realized, after looking at my silhouette, seeing our small person expanding my reflection, that pain didn’t burden me. Trying to forget damaged me the most.
Your eye has long since healed. I chose to be lethargic instead of angry in the last months of our pregnancy. Each night, I rested my head in your lap, and you placed yo
ur hand on my stomach. He kicked you, and I felt my mother raising her hands to me in the way Salish women do in ceremony, to say “thank you.”
When the day came, I wasn’t sure I was in pain enough, because the baby had conditioned me so well. We went into the hospital anyway, and Casey Guyweeyo was cut out from me, larger than he should have been. His skin is milk, and his body feels electric and unforgiving. He seems like the child my brothers, my sister, and I—could have been.
6
i know i’ll go
I preferred abandoned over forsaken—and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It’s something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can’t afford to think of lack—I’d rather be liberated by it.
Coffee cups run cold when I remember my father. Sometimes my hands shake.
My father died at the Thunderbird Hotel on Flood Hope Road. According to documents, he was beaten over a prostitute or a cigarette. I prefer to tell people it was over a cigarette. I considered an Indian death myself, while walking along the country roads of my reservation, before I really considered life. His death intruded, as I could not fathom being a good person when I came from such misery.
I found newspaper clips about my father. Ken and four men abducted a girl. There aren’t any details. There are documents about his murder and the transitional housing program he was in when he died. He was homeless, and social welfare gave him a hotel room, next to prostitutes and younger, more violent men. There was nothing easy about his memory or what he left behind.
He was an anomaly, a drunk savant. He took his colors, brushes, and stool when he left my mother. It was harvest, and the corn stalks were gold and waving. I was constantly waiting outside on the porch. I ate blueberries and spit out anything too ripe—a purple liquid. I remember staring at my spit on the porch, wondering about waste and if I was hungry.
His hair was black and coarse. He was wearing a baseball tee shirt and jeans covered in rust acrylic.
As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on a page, to impart the story of my drunken father. It was dangerous to be alone with him, as it was dangerous to forgive, as it was dangerous to say he was a monster. If he were a monster, that would make me part monster, part Indian. It is my politic to write the humanity in my characters, and subvert the stereotypes. Isn’t that my duty as an Indian writer? But what part of him was subversion?
Our basement smelled like river water and cedar bough. He carved and painted endlessly in the corners of the room. While I sat in his lap, he taught me our icons. Eagle was Mother, and bolts were Thunder Being, and his circles were the universes. It meant so much to draw a circle well. He practiced and let me watch. I remember when he left, my mother started to paint again. I remember that, while my father tried to draw a circle with his own eyes and hands, my mother used coffee cans. I resisted the iconography and found myself more interested in why Salish work wasn’t true to life.
My therapist asked me to speak to my father and mother in a session. I told my father that a bird is just a bird. A mother is a tangible thing. Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We’ve become too symbolic and never real enough.
My therapist asked me to speak to my mother and I couldn’t.
My father was soft looking sometimes. I liked to sleep in the crook of his neck. He smelled like Old Spice and bergamot. His hands shook when he was not drinking, at his worst. And when I held his hands he seemed thankful. He delighted in my imagination. The grass was always high in our lawn, and he often let me use the hose to fill buckets and wash tires—I pretended it was a snake.
My mother wanted to heal him. I remember several trips to visit him in rehab. She sent him to islands, and I remember wearing a lifejacket, crossing water to somewhere in Tofino, British Columbia. I remember each hope given to me by my mother: that our father would be okay and things would be different.
In the past, I wanted to tell her that some things can’t be loved away, but I think she knew that.
We left my father a few times. We stayed in my uncle’s home. Mom took all four of us, along with my grandmother. We all slept in one room, and I had chicken pox. I slept in a green upholstered chair and had an accident. My brother Ovila was the only one awake. He told me to undress and took off his shirt for me to wear. I went back to sleep with a sour stomach and woke up as my father was forklifting me from the chair to his van. He always found us.
Once, I packed my bags, mimicking my mother. With a bag of dolls and wooden cars, I told him I was leaving. I told him I would not come back until he stopped drinking.
“Come here,” he said.
“No,” I said.
He promised me he would quit and then left.
My brothers told me that he didn’t really leave. I misremembered. My grandmother saved money and asked our cousin to kill my father. The man beat him well, and, when my father came home, we were gone. He ruined every artwork we possessed. He tossed every can of salmon and beets that my grandmother had prepared for the winter. He took jewelry and money.
When we got home, everyone told me to wait on the porch. They went inside and cleaned while I stared at my spit. For years, they were happy to let me imagine he left on his own regard.
After my mother died, I went to find him. He lived in a town called Hope. He had a new family, and our van sat in his front lawn on bricks. When he answered the door, he told me he knew who I was. He had a thin, dirty white shirt on. He looked ill, and his face was gaunt. His hair was still black in some parts.
His wife, Winnie, was my older sister’s childhood friend. My father had met her when she was a girl, visiting my sister. After years with Ken, her front teeth were gone. She smiled at me and said my father had old videotapes of theater work I had done in the community. I had five new brothers, so young. They looked like the archetypes my own family had formed in the presence of my father. I found myself in the youngest child, who formed bonds too quickly and needed holding.
My father and I sat across from each other in lawn chairs in his basement. I resisted the urge to sit poised like him. Instead, I held bad posture and slunk in my chair.
“You have my nose,” he said.
I said I missed him, feeling awful that it was true.
“The best thing I could do was leave.”
“I know,” I said.
“Your mother was a good woman. I told her I was an asshole, and she took me in—like a wounded bear.”
“I know,” I said.
A month after this, he showed up at my house with a white documentary filmmaker. I answered the door but could not let him in the house. My brother Ovila was still scared of him, still angry and confused.
“They’re doing a documentary about me,” he said. “About my art.”
I was anxious, standing there with him at my door.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll go.”
I hugged him in my driveway. I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her. Even she, who was as tall as him, and bigger, had to come to my door with backup. Even she was scared of him. I didn’t know any better back then.
The National Film Board of Canada debuted the documentary as a piece with immediacy and no external narrative. I’m a woman wielding narrative now, weaving the parts of my father’s life with my own. I consider his work a testimony to his being. I have one of his paintings in my living room. “Man Emerging” is the depiction of a man riding a whale. The work is traditional and simplistic. Salish work calls for simplicity, because an animal or man should not be convoluted. My father was not a monster, although it was in his monstrous nature to leave my brother and I alone in his van while he drank at The Kent. Our breaths became visible in the cold. Ken came back to bring us fried mushrooms. We took to the bar fare like puppies to slop.
&n
bsp; His smell was not monstrous, nor the crooks of his body. The invasive thought that he died alone in a hotel room is too much. It is dangerous to think about him, as it was dangerous to have him as my father, as it is dangerous to mourn someone I fear becoming.
I don’t write this to put him to rest but to resurrect him as a man, when public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, and a transient.
I wish I could have known him as a child in his newness. I want to see him with the sheen of perfection, with skin unscathed by his mistakes or by his father’s. It’s in my nature to love him. And I can’t love who he was, but I can see him as a child.
Before my mother died I asked her if he had ever hurt me.
“I put you in double diapers,” she said. “There’s no way he hurt you. Did he ever hurt you?”
“No,” I said.
If rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this? There is a picture of my brother, Ovi, and me next to Dad’s van. My chin is turned up, and at the bottom of my irises there is brightness. My brother has his hand on his hip, and he looks protective standing over me. I know, without remembering clearly, that my father took this picture and that we loved each other. I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.
7
little mountain woman
I feel like a squaw. The type white people imagine: a feral thing with greasy hair and nimble fingers wanting. My earliest memories, and you, and the baby, have turned earth in my body. I don’t know what I am anymore.
You have made me feel sick of myself.
I killed a ladybug when we were walking, and you looked at me like I was wild. I am the mother of your son. I don’t think you know how poor I used to be—that my house was infested with ladybugs for so long. My brother and I went mad when they wouldn’t stop biting. We tried to swat them with brooms and towels. We tried to corner them. Their death smelled like a puddle and wouldn’t leave our home. My mother didn’t come home when the bugs overtook the living room. She was working three days on and three days off, and, between that, she was with Larry: my sister’s father, who resurfaced in her life, twenty years too late. Just in time for my mother’s midlife crisis.
Heart Berries Page 7