Crossings

by Jon Kerstetter

  The trip to the hospital was a blur except for one detail. Suddenly my mother was kneeling beside me inside the house, pressing a large white cloth around my wrist. In the many times she retold the story, she always mentioned that the white cloth I remembered so well was a Kotex pad wrapped around my wrist. She held it in place and “pressed for dear life.” One of our neighbors drove us to the hospital in Green Bay. There, a surgeon repaired my lacerated artery, stitched me up, and put a soft-shell cast on my arm.

  Many years later, when I was old enough to mow the lawn on my own, Mom would remind me of the Oneida lawnmower incident whenever I brought the mower from the shed for the summer’s first mowing. She always mentioned how “deathly afraid” she was that I would lose my hand and how fortunate I was that I did not. She told me how she had prayed to God for the bleeding to stop and how grateful she was for the neighbor’s and the doctor’s help. As she relived the story she often made a face—half smile, half frown. I interpreted it as part gratitude and part rebuke. When she got that look, she tightened her lips and said some Oneida words that roughly translated meant “Dammit the hell anyway” or another phrase that meant “Oh, the devil.” Then in English she said, “Thank the good Lord.” Often she took my hand and rubbed the scar on my wrist. Then, after a pause, she would shake her head and laugh just a bit. It was the kind of laughter that buffered memories of near disasters and made them seem less frightening, while also reminding me that I was still vulnerable.

  —

  Those early Oneida years also brought good things, like eating Sealtest ice cream bars while sitting on a milk box near the storefront window of Mom’s “drugstore,” a small, poorly stocked rural store that sold over-the-counter medications, veterinary supplies, and a limited variety of sundries and groceries. The store belonged to my father, Lawrence Baines Kerstetter, who had left it to my mother, Margaret Archiquette Kerstetter, after their divorce. She was pregnant with me during the last year of their marriage, and soon after I was born, Mom was left with the store, child-support payments, and three children: Jimmy, five years old; Joanne, nine; and me, months old. She was always reticent to discuss exactly why the marriage failed, except to say it was complicated by the day-to-day pressures of living on an Indian reservation with little prospect of anything except month-by-month survival. “Those were hard days,” she occasionally reminded me when I was older. And when she did so, her voice cracked and the furrowed lines in her forehead deepened.

  Mom did what was necessary to get by. We lived upstairs from the store. She mended our clothes, planted a vegetable garden that my brother and sister tended, and dried corn and fruit at harvest. At times we had enough of whatever we needed. Often we did not. During the harder times, Mom borrowed from neighbors; they borrowed from us. Mom spent nothing on things regarded as unnecessary, fancy clothes or entertainment or travel, yet she was able to save enough money to buy occasional ice cream treats and shoes once a year for each of her kids. She made toy dogs from the oxtail soup bones left over from dinner. She dried them on the windowsill and used India ink to paint faces on them. I used to line those bone dogs up and pretend they were a family.

  Eventually, perhaps naturally, Mom decided that she needed to leave Oneida for a steady job and the possibility of a better life. That is what she told me when, as a senior high school student, I asked her why she left Oneida and if she ever regretted her decision. “Leaving home was the only way,” she said with resolve. Some choices were hard and painful but they had to be made, because not choosing could “make you or break you.”

  Despite whatever hesitation she may have felt, in the early summer of 1955, Mom left the Oneida Indian reservation for a job at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Brigham City, Utah. With borrowed money for tickets, she took a bus from Green Bay to Chicago’s Union Station, where she loaded two steamer trunks, three large suitcases, and her children onto a Union Pacific passenger train westbound for Utah.

  Our first home in Brigham City was located at the corner of Seventh South and Main, about a quarter mile from the guarded entrance of the federal Indian school property. Mom rented the rear portion of a filling station. Instead of a front yard, we had blacktop, gas pumps, and a bell that dinged when cars pulled in for service. The house had a large basement with a coal bin and a small root cellar where Mom stored vegetables and canned goods. Some evenings we ate dinner on the screened-in back porch. It had holes in the screen and slanted a bit toward the backyard. During summer evenings after the gas station closed, I played “kick-the-can” with my brother and sister and the neighborhood kids. We used the gas pumps as home plate, and when we stole home we jumped on the black rubber hose that made the service bell ring.

  The neighbor kept chickens in his backyard and traded one chicken for two pints of jam or a quart of Mom’s bread-and-butter pickles. He used a large tree stump as a chopping block. Hatchet in one hand, flapping bird in the other, he pressed its neck on the stump. Whack! He tossed the headless bird to the grass, where it ran crazed until it finally keeled over and twitched its final twitch. Jimmy and I laughed and chased that wild, possessed carcass, flapping and falling and running in circles. When it stopped, I grabbed it by the legs and marched it to the back of the yard where we all plucked it. I hated that part because the chicken stank of blood and its feathers would stick to my overalls and shirt. Jimmy said I was born to be a chicken plucker.

  My first birthday in Utah was November 15, 1955. About a week later I became sick with a sore throat and a cough. Mom rubbed Mentholatum on my neck and had me gargle with salt water. The minty smell of the thick ointment seemed to make it easier to breathe, but within a few days I developed a high fever and painful lumps in my neck. Mom thought I had the mumps. She made Joanne stay home from school to watch me for a few days. Mostly I slept, but Joanne woke me frequently to feed me sips of broth and put cool washcloths on my forehead. When Mom got home from work, she bathed me in cool water and gave me Aspergum to break my fever. I could hear myself wheezing, especially when I took big breaths. I don’t recall exactly how many days I was sick, but I remember Mom coming home from work at lunchtime to check on me. I could tell she was worried because her face became stiff and she spoke abruptly to Joanne using Oneida words.

  That evening a doctor came to our house carrying a black leather bag. I was lying on the bed in the bedroom next to the kitchen. I had thought perhaps a country doctor might be thin and small, with gray hair and dark glasses, but this man was a tall, black-haired giant with thick hands and a deep voice. He spoke gently yet with authority. I felt apprehensive and shy, but also comforted. He introduced himself as Dr. Smith.

  “Johnny,” he said, “can you sit up straight on the edge of the bed for me?”

  Dr. Smith felt my neck and checked my ears. He asked me to open wide and pressed an oversize Popsicle stick on my tongue. “Say ‘Ahhh,’ ” he said, as he looked down my throat with a bright light he had strapped around his head. He listened to my chest with a cold stethoscope, thumped my back, and asked me to breathe deeply.

  “Take a deep breath,” he said. “Breathe deep…Again.”

  While he was taking my temperature he whispered to my mother, “Diphtheria,” and told her I needed a shot of penicillin. My eyes tracked his face and hands as he spoke. As Mom listened, she frowned and bit the corner of her lip. I had never heard such complicated words or the tone the doctor used to describe my illness. I gathered both meant something serious. He had that concerned look that gave cause for worry, yet he also projected a sense of confidence that made me feel like things would work out okay.

  I watched intently as Dr. Smith opened his black bag and pulled out a tiny bottle of white medicine that looked to me like thick creamy milk. He cradled the bottle with his left hand, holding it upside down at eye level, then plunged a needle through its tiny rubber-stopped neck. The needle seemed to me at least six or eight inches long. He filled a glass syringe by placing his right thumb through a metal ring and slow
ly drawing it back. He flicked his finger against the sides of the syringe and then gave a small squirt that made a vanishing white arc over my bed.

  I cried and stiffened as my mom laid me over her lap and pulled my underpants down. Dr. Smith tried to assure me. “Hold still, now, we’re almost done.” I felt the cold wet swab of alcohol on my skin and then the sharp stab of a needle deep in my right buttock. And as quickly as it had begun, the shot was finished. I didn’t know that milk would sting and burn more than anything I had ever felt before.

  Dr. Smith made several more house calls during the following week. He smiled warmly and said very few words. He always carried his black bag with its creases and scuffs. It smelled like a cross between my mom’s leather work gloves and medicinal alcohol. Its snap-open top held the bag wide open, the fat leather grip resting against its thick black seams. He put the bag on the side of my bed one day. I peeked in. Bandages—lots of bandages. Dark purple iodine bottles from which he doused gauze pads clamped on a medical instrument to paint my throat. Several bottles of milky penicillin, glass syringes, and all sorts of gadgets. I recognized the stethoscope that he always pulled out first then strung around his neck like an extra necktie. A small brown bottle with a lid full of holes was the alcohol dispenser that he so vigorously pumped, saturating three or four cotton balls to clean my skin before giving me a shot. Once I learned what penicillin felt like, the word “shot” was enough to start a few tears running and a total-body stiffening. The smell of the alcohol dispenser would trigger the same response.

  The entire experience with Dr. Smith captivated me. His professional demeanor and his authoritative yet soothing voice, his black bag with its blend of medicinal smells, the precision instruments and the medicine with its sting. Whatever the reason, whatever the magic, what I experienced as a child in the care of a country doctor was something I felt a connection to, however rudimentary or childlike in understanding. Doctoring drew me in. It seeded my mind with an interest for all things medical and scientific.

  —

  We lived in the gas station house for five years until the late fall of 1960, when Mom found a better house for us on East 5th South, just a few blocks from Fife Sand and Gravel Pit and across the street from the cemetery. The house was a two-hundred-eighty-square-foot shoe box with cracked asbestos siding and a flat, tar-papered roof that leaked like a sieve when it rained. Mom converted the dugout basement into bedrooms for Jimmy and Joanne. The only indoor plumbing ran to the enamel kitchen sink in Mom’s bedroom. Sometimes, especially in winter, I used to piss in a green Mason jar because I didn’t want to use the outhouse at night.

  In the early summer of 1962, Mom decided to move back to Oneida. Jimmy was a junior in high school. Joanne had left home to attend a licensed practical nurses training program at Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had just finished the fifth grade. Mom boarded up the house and booked a train to Chicago and a bus to Green Bay. As she would later explain, it was more a move to overcome her isolation as a single parent and reconnect with friends back home. She also wanted one more chance at making a living at Oneida. Mostly, the move held the promise of a place where we could all belong. I didn’t know much about belonging, but it did seem like we were always struggling to fit in as an Indian family in a larger, non-Indian community.

  When we arrived, we stayed at the farmhouse of Mom’s closest friend, Priscilla Manders. I had never seen my mother happier. Priscilla and Mom stayed up late and talked for endless hours speaking in the Oneida language. The strange-sounding words had a musical rhythm that English did not. I noticed the tonal rise at the ends of some words, and how that inflection could alter the meanings of things. Mom and Priscilla told stories around the kitchen table, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. They traded memories about Indian relatives who had died. They retold stories about reservation life during the Great Depression, how families gathered wild berries and survived by eating corn husk soup and dried squash. Men left Oneida to find work in the big cities like Chicago or Detroit. Their families banded together and waited. Some of the men never came home.

  “Those were hard times and sad times,” I heard them say before lapsing into silence.

  Priscilla drove us around to see old Indian relatives. I met elderly men and women who greeted me in the Oneida language, then pulled me close and hugged me. One elder, who was a traditional healer, spoke in soft Oneida phrases and smoked a pipe. When I told him I wanted to be a doctor, he put his wrinkled brown hands on my head and prayed. After he prayed, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a small medicine bag and took a pinch of tobacco in his fingers. He rubbed it on my hands and I could smell the earthy aroma. Later, my mom told me he knew I wanted to become a doctor even before I had said anything and that he was blessing my hands to do good things. For days after, when I rubbed my hands together, I thought of them as doctor hands.

  My mother wanted to rent a place of her own but couldn’t afford the available houses. She always stressed the importance of being independent, insisting on doing things without having to use friends or handouts. She had been a young adult during the Depression, and her family had been hurt by their dependency on Indian Affairs officials whose promises had no more substance than dried husks of corn. She wanted reasonable help but shunned dependency on friends and the not-to-be trusted government officials.

  “You can’t depend on anybody,” she would say as she shook her head. “Learn to do things on your own.”

  One Friday, Priscilla drove Mom through the entire reservation. Mom knocked on doors and asked around. She found a small acreage for sale that had been the site of a cheese factory run by a local non-Indian couple. The abandoned factory stood in shambles. When my mother returned for lunch, she made a barrage of phone calls. No, the owner of the cheese factory would not loan her the money to buy the land. No, she could not get a loan from a bank. Her friends advised her to avoid that acreage because the house needed too much work, but Mom told them it had land for farming and plenty of wood for heating. By the next day Mom had made arrangements with the owner. She gave him a one-hundred-dollar deposit to hold the land for ninety days, after which she would have to buy it or rent it. She talked the landowner into letting her move into the upstairs home during the ninety-day hold. No, he would not turn the electricity on. No, he would not fix the plumbing. Yes, she would have to build her own outhouse. The following day we moved in. For me, it was a great idea. Nobody I knew had their own live-in cheese factory.

  The first floor was the business end of the old factory, complete with remnants of stainless steel gutters that ran along the floor and a large flat bin where curds had been stirred. Near the ceilings, attached to the walls by metal hangers, hung disintegrating tubes and hoses that ran to processing vats. A worn and chipped cement ramp stood where trucks once delivered raw milk.

  The living quarters were on the second story. A wooden stairway led to a landing midway up. Beyond that, several steps were missing and we climbed carefully to avoid falling. At the top of the stairs was a large room with splintered floorboards. A wood-burning stove doubled as a heater when needed. There was no plumbing: no water, no toilet, no sink. Two large bedrooms lay adjacent to the great room. The windowpanes were empty; their shattered, dirty glass lay in heaps on the floor. My brother and I cleaned the rooms and hauled the glass out in a bucket. Mom had borrowed some military-style cots with sheets and blankets. We slept as if we were camping. On a few cool nights we arranged the cots in a semicircle around the stove. Every few days we would return to Priscilla Manders’s house to shower and clean up.

  About a month into our ninety-day squatter venture, Mom planned a July Fourth picnic as a thank-you to all who had helped us. People started arriving at noon and stayed until late in the evening. We cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on an open-pit fire. Friends brought fat yellow onions and red and white radishes, boiled potatoes and stalks of celery. There were plates of deviled eggs, jars of sweet and dill pickles, and several muskmel
ons. Mom made her potato salad with fresh handmade mayonnaise and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper that I could smell over the onions and radishes. Throughout the day we ate and laughed, sitting in a circle on folding lawn chairs and blankets. Stories floated back and forth. Oneida words mingled with English words. The tales seemed to enlarge themselves with each new storyteller. Some of the older people gave accounts of young Oneida Indians who joined the Marines or the Army and went off to war and died in battle somewhere in the front lines on D-Day or in the Korean War. They told about military funerals and twenty-one-gun salutes and mothers who received American flags and letters from war officials. The elders named those Oneida warriors one by one, along with the names of the foreign places where they had died.

  One of the named was Oliver Bernard Beechtree, who on October 24, 1952, had sent a telegram to the Oneida drug store from Japan telling my mother that he was outbound for Korea and would send her his address as soon as he could. Oliver had been Mom’s closest friend. If he had returned from the war as planned, they might have married and started a new life together. During the naming, when Mom heard Oliver’s name, she closed her eyes as if to hold back the tears that began to flow down the soft lines of her face. She brushed a few tears away at first, but then just let them fall. When the elders finished, everybody sat still and said nothing. Several minutes later one of the elders spoke an Oneida prayer and then started to sing a chant. Then after a while the stories began to flow once more and the people wiped their tears and laughed again.

  The trip back home to Oneida had been somewhat confusing for me. An adventure for sure, but I also sensed that we lived from day to day never really knowing when and where we would settle, never completely understanding who we were or where we were going. We had arrived at a tribal place of belonging, but I didn’t know, and it seemed Mom didn’t know, what that belonging meant or how we fit in. When I heard those old Oneida people talk and laugh, I could see that they all belonged together and it made me want the richness that they shared: laughter and food and stories and smoke. I saw and felt the special respect and honor they held for their warriors and for themselves. And it felt good—that rich bond of culture and history and family that connected us all.