The Tao of Nookomis

by Thomas D. Peacock

  Even though my old heart was beating about as hard as it could without giving out, I stayed and visited with the old woman and her grandkids. And as old as I get I will never forget my grandmother’s teaching that we shouldn’t stare, but that was a hard rule to follow that day because I couldn’t help but look all around the small, one-room cabin. For hanging from the rafters and off all of the walls were dried plants and roots of all shapes and sizes, and a corner table and counter were covered with mason jars filled with various teas and liquids of all sorts.

  “My medicines,” the old woman said, who I now knew as Zozed (Susan). And we left it at that because although my mind was filled with unanswered questions, my demeanor is not to question because another of my grand-mother’s teachings reminded me that to do so would be most impolite. She was kind and her grandchildren, although very quiet, were as well. She offered tea and I accepted. We exchanged conversation.

  “I live down the way a half-mile or so.”

  “We just moved here.”

  I wanted to know from where but didn’t ask. “I think I saw you at the casino buffet breakfast a few weeks ago.”

  “Yes, we were there.”

  “Was that you walking down Blueberry that day?”

  Not a reply, just a twinkle in her eyes and the hint of a smile. We switched to weather. “It was really foggy that day.”

  “It’s going to be winter soon. I suppose we’ll have to move in to town then,” she said.

  Soon it would be getting dark, and I knew it was time to leave. One of the children came to me and gave me a small beaded item. A gift.

  “What is it?” The young one just smiled and stood there.

  “A wood tick,” the old woman said, “a beaded wood tick. Hang it from the rearview mirror of your pickup. It’ll look nice there.”

  “I’d like to visit with you again.”

  “You are always welcome here.”

  So for the next several weeks I went often to their little shack in the middle of the field to visit Zozed and her grandkids, all who seemed to live in the old way without the conveniences of electricity or running water or government food commodities. I never did ask her last name. In fact, I was almost afraid to ask for fear it really might be Bear. And I who am an old man felt like a child in her presence, this woman who was so old her face was as smooth as a baby’s, whose bluish-black eyes probably needed cataract surgery, who spoke to her grandchildren in the tongue. And I have to admit that my curiosity did get the best of me because I couldn’t help but ask questions about all the plants and roots hanging about their little home, and she would go from plant to plant and to the different teas and tell me what it was, or what it was made of, and its uses.

  “Maybe next spring when I come back I’ll take you out when I do my gathering and you can learn right along with my grandkids,” she said.

  “I am just an old man,” I said, “too old to learn anything new. I’ll probably forget as soon as you tell me.” But I knew in my heart this old lady was many, many years my senior, and her mind was quick and sharp, and she remembered.

  I think the approach of winter announced itself with all my aching joints speaking loudly at the same time, almost screaming snow and cold. When I awoke one morning I thought I’d go visit the old lady one last time before she moved in to town for the winter.

  “I have a daughter who lives in Duluth so we’ll go there for winter,” she had said. So after my morning oatmeal I started the walk to her place, bringing them a gift of some maple sugar cakes I’d gotten some months ago at the tribal council’s elder dinner. I hardly got out of the driveway when I could heard the voices. Laughing, swearing, some dogs barking—hunters, just down the road toward the lake, not far from my place. Then I could see them clearly and they had a bear spread out in the bed of a pickup. And I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did. I almost ran down the road to where they were, and I don’t remember exactly what was coming from my mouth as I did but I’m sure it wasn’t morning niceties. “You get the hell off out of here,” I remember saying. “This is Indian land. You don’t have any business here.” And as I got closer to their truck I prayed it was not one of my bears. Not one of my bears, I was thinking. And those white guys just looked at me like I was crazy.

  Then I turned and walked as fast as I could up the road and down the tote road and through the bush to the field, to the little shack. And by then I was out of breath and almost in a panic. The door opened and the old lady was there, and once inside I saw they were all safe.

  “What’s wrong,” she asked, and I had to lie and say everything was fine, and I was so relieved I could have hugged them. So that day I know I overstayed my welcome, I just didn’t want it to end, for I knew I might not ever see them again, because when you’re old you never take the coming winter for granted.

  “We’ll be back in the spring. We will see you again. You come here again in April and we’ll be here. You’ll see.”

  WINTER WAS LONG and cold and there was plenty of snow. There were many times my road went unplowed for days while the trucks busied themselves in other, more settled parts of the reservation. And we all know that in winter it gets dark early, and stays dark for what seems like forever, and that we awaken in the morning and sit for hours before first light. I’ve spent so much of my life alone like that, it seems. And with each season the winters seem to have gotten longer, and darker. Loneliness sets in. My old friends seem to do the same thing I do and stick close to home so I don’t see much of them either, except once a week or so when I make the drive in to the village to do lunch at elderly nutrition. And my sister and niece, maybe I see them once a month if I’m lucky, although it seems to be almost a lifetime between their visits. My sister is getting old as well and doesn’t like driving much in the winter, and Andonis is busy with volleyball, basketball, and who knows what else. So when they do visit I cherish the time I have with them.

  “Why don’t you come and live with us in the winter?” my sister sometimes asks.

  “I miss you, Uncle.” Andonis follows. “You can have my room.”

  I beg them off for I have old habits and ways and also cherish the quiet and being alone. I have the birds and deer to feed. They would starve without me. And don’t forget the neighborhood coyote. I would not know how to live without my privacy, not even without the loneliness that goes along with it. For even loneliness becomes like an old friend.

  So the days pass and winter has its way with me. I busy myself feeding my animal neighbors. Days are spent out in the shed tinkering with things where I build up the fire in the barrel stove to keep warm and burn all of the garbage and scrap wood, and the cedar and balsam that can’t be burned in the house stove. There I sit in an Adirondack chair I made from a kit many years ago and whittle and make things from basswood. I talk to the dog and he flops his tail on the dirt floor of the shed, lying next to the stove for warmth, and I scratch his belly. In the afternoon I make a ritual out of walking the half-mile up the road to the mailbox to collect my mail, mostly grocery circulars and junk mail trying to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance, and when I return home I take a nap. I always cook dinner and set out the table the way it should be, with my napkin on the left with a fork, and spoon and knife to the right of the plate. My evenings are spent reading and working on puzzles. Sometimes I pick up the old guitar that sits in the corner gathering dust and try to tune it up, even though it needs a new set of strings, and sing out of tune some old song I use to know, making up words along the way. I am almost always in bed by nine.

  And I dream of spring.

  Winter passes.

  By mid-April most of the snow has melted, except the piles along the ditches left by the plows, and I’m on my way to town to get dog and bird food, more deer pellets, a new flannel shirt, and to meet up for lunch at the casino with the friends who have survived winter. And as I bump along on Blueberry near where it junctions with Raspberry Road and the old Pageant Grounds, where the old-time
Indians use to dance for the tourists in the summer nearly one hundred years ago, I see the sow bear standing away near a cleave of woods and open field. And I bring the truck to a stop and roll down the window and speak to her as she walks, moving away from me at an angle into the woods.

  “Boozhoo. Aaniin.” All of the Indian I know. “Hello, my friend. I missed you all winter. It’s good to see you again. I’ll come see you soon if it is okay.” Then I pull away as the bear disappears into the old-growth cedar and yellow birch.

  I visit and have lunch with my friends and stop at the hardware and feed and grocery stores, then stop at my sister’s for a haircut. The day passes quickly, and it’s getting dark before I finally make my way home.

  The next morning I take the walk to the old shack. Wood smoke is coming from the blue metal chimney protruding from the roof so I know she is home. I knock. And when the old lady answers and invites me in I notice right away she is alone.

  “Your grandkids?” I ask.

  “Oh, they stayed in Duluth with their mother. She’s sober now, and she got cable TV and the Internet, and they have this Play Station. An old lady like me can’t compete with that.”

  And I say, “But they will still come and visit you often, I bet, they’ll miss their grandma,” and she just smiles slightly as she makes her way to pour us some coffee.

  We visit often now, all spring and summer and into fall, my new friend. And as promised, she has been teaching me all about her medicines, one by one. We go far out in the woods sometimes to gather.

  “Put that tobacco down before you gather. And leave some of the plants there to grow and multiply, always. Don’t take it all.”

  There are the ones gathered early in the spring, before the new shoots. There are ones gathered from new shoots. There are the roots harvested during each of the three seasons. The leaves. Flowers. You dry some. Boil some into a tea. Pound some into a poultice. Mix some together.

  “Bitterroot is good for sore throats. You chew it like this.”

  “This squirrel tail you chew and put on a cut. It will stop bleeding.”

  “Brew swamp tea for colds.”

  “Strawberry root, you boil it and put it on skin eruptions.”

  “Resin from this tree you grind into a powder and put on sores.”

  “Roots from wild celery will cure tuberculosis.”

  “These flowers from the boneset you pick just before the first frost and make into a tea and it will stop a fever.”

  “For heart trouble you use sturgeon potatoes, gathered in the fall.”

  “Bear root and catnip, you mix them for fainting and when one’s heartbeat is weak.”

  My new hobby, I call myself the plant guy nowadays. And I know so little about my culture I don’t even realize what I am learning, that this is ancient knowledge, that I am becoming a keeper of the bear medicines. That I should thank the old lady for her gift of this knowledge, that I should bring her tobacco and offer it to her for this knowledge. So now my old trailer house looks like the old lady’s shack, with jars of teas and roots, and plants tied together drying and hanging from the ceilings and on shelves.

  And then one day in late fall when I go to visit her, to learn more about the plants, she tells me she will be leaving soon.

  “I’m going to go live with my daughter now. I miss my grandkids too much. They got cable TV and I like that Old Country Buffet.”

  She’s laughing and so am I, but my heart is breaking at the same time, my friend and teacher, my elder, the bear woman.

  “I need to know so much more,” I say. “You’re the only one who can teach me.” But she says that I only need to pray and ask the Creator from now on, and all of that knowledge will come to me.

  THE SNOW CAME EARLY this year, bringing its quiet hush over the land. And I settled into my winter pattern as I have done for all of these years.

  Then one day my sister comes to my door. “Andonis has taken ill,” she says. “You need to come into town to see her. She’s asking for you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “She has some kind of fever, so I took her to public health. They say she has auto immune, maybe from a tick or something this past summer.”

  “Wait here,” I say. “I need to get my medicines.”

  ANDONIS RECOVERED FULLY, of course. I knew she would. And even though I can’t speak the tongue, I still had my medicines, and I prayed over her in the only language I know. Then when she felt better I gave her that beaded wood tick, the one given to me by one of the young bears.

  Boozhoo. Aaniin, Creator. Daga … (please). I learned a new word, it says a lot, goes a long way.

  I know that a lot of people think I am just an old man who doesn’t know anything and isn’t useful anymore, and few seem to care about what I’m thinking or have to say or care what will become of me. I know that. I can feel it when I talk to most people as it is in the sound of their voices and look in their eyes. I mean, I am just this old bachelor who lives in a trailer house out on a dead-end road on the fringe of the reservation, and I don’t get too many visitors except for a sister and niece and a couple of old fart friends, so not that many people really know me. And I don’t have a lot of the cultural knowledge that so many of the young people seem to want from the “elders,” as they call us now.

  But I have that bear knowledge and know them plants.

  And I’m teaching it to my niece so it will carry on.

  Acknowledgements

  Wolf story from Benton-Banai, p. 8