by Beth Piatote
Annie glanced up from her bowl and asked Mae to look after the beans. The pot was heavy; Mae lifted it gingerly and clamped the lid slightly askew with her thumbs, lugging it to the edge of the platform and tipping the pot to drain off the soaking water. This took time and finesse, but she managed it, then delivered the pot to the stove top, covering the beans in fresh water. The pot would dutifully simmer all day, while the crew was in the orchard.
“Mae, I had a dream last night,” Annie said. “I was picking cherries.”
They laughed. It was always the case that two or three days into the harvest, everyone would be dreaming about picking cherries—or strawberries, plums, peaches, hops, or apples—whatever crop demanded their attention. Sometimes these dreams would morph into gigantesque wildness—trees multiplying across an endless plain, or fruit appearing the size of lambs, or canvas drop cloths knee-deep with the ruby flesh of plums. When the chiefs were summoned to this valley in 1855 for treaty talks, the Americans said this: you will walk in blood knee-deep if you do not sign. Now the valley was bursting with orchards, and the Indians begged the agents for passes to follow the harvests all summer. They were migrant workers in their own land, a fact they accepted by day but questioned in their sleep.
“I’d like to count those bushels I picked all night,” Annie said.
“Once I dreamt I had to eat everythin’ I picked,” Mae said. “Worse than the pickin’ dream.”
“Ooh, I get that one, too,” Annie replied. “All summer, same dreams.”
Mae hadn’t eaten a single cherry or other piece of fresh fruit for nearly a year, either in waking or in dream life. After a death, a person ate only dried food for a set of seasons, until the memorial. Jim died in September, after Jeannette had gone back to Chemawa. Mae’s friends brought her offerings of smoked salmon and dried venison all winter. She tasted every recipe on the reservation. Now, in late spring, new cherries dripped from lush branches. She contemplated a small bucket of fruit that had been set aside for eating—the farmer always let them have whatever they could eat. She tried to conjure desire for the sweet, juicy taste. But she felt nothing. Perhaps some part of her had died. Perhaps it was just the natural antipathy of the day harvester for the harvest.
She could see that everyone was up by now and headed to the stove. Everyone would take coffee, and most would eat food they brought from home. The farmer’s wife had left them a large glass jar filled with milk for the children, though they didn’t care so much for the grassy taste, and sometimes complained of stomachaches after. In the schools, they learned to drink weak coffee, and this was now the universal drink.
There was no leisure to the morning routine, save what one could steal by singing or joking in the course of work. Mae tied her hair, still too short for braids, in a bun at the nape of her neck and popped on her hat. On the first days, she had tied it back in two low ponytails, like a girl. She had surprised herself when she looked in the mirror. A girl! So far was she from the world of flour-sack skirts and long stockings. Her hands were already chapped and rough from the work, dirt ground into her nails and pads of her fingers. She could feel the sandpapery texture when she rubbed her fingers together.
Still, there was every morning an optimistic sky.
She did not want to admit that there was anything good about her new life, stark as it was. But she did feel something like relief that without Jim she felt less judgmental—or perhaps simply less aware—of her own hard edges. Next to him, she felt that she was always overwhelming him a bit with her opinions, her loudness, her physicality. Not that he ever said so. No, he would never say so! He was quiet, and when confronted with things he did not like he was absolutely silent. He had that way about him. His death was the greatest silence, of course.
No one knew how it happened. One night he didn’t come home from town, where he had been playing the fiddle at a dance, and early the next morning they had found him. Mae felt that this great mystery around his death had attached to her. She could feel it sometimes in the way the others regarded her, as though she were moving about the world with the word HOW? blazed across her chest. Some days she wished she could be like Hester Prynne, except instead of an A she would wear a scarlet question mark. She imagined herself beading an elaborate? in a contoured floral pattern, with a sky-blue background, and affixing it directly to her dresses. She and her friends at school had loved Hester Prynne, the most Indian heroine a white man ever invented. They believed that when Hester disappeared at the end of the book, she had gone to live with the Indians who were always present, watching from the edge of the forest. The Puritan town fathers, the girls thought, reminded them of the Agents back at home.
Not knowing the how of Jim’s death deferred Mae’s query as to why. Why would he be taken from this world so suddenly? Why should she be left all alone? It was true that Jim had a weakness for drink, but why should that define his final moments, his life? It was only his gentle nature, his sensitivity, that made him weak. The pain of the world seeped into him, and he had tried to wash it out with work, with drink, with music. He had been tall and lanky, and had dressed in western shirts and straight-leg denims to play fiddle on Saturday nights in town. He would wear a white straw Stetson and a pair of elaborately beaded floral cuffs—red tulip motif, green leaves, and white background, with copious fringe—on his wrists. He was quiet, but he could dress loud! Mae used to call him Jackson Sundown. When he was on stage, sometimes she would feel the sorrow of his bow pulling across the strings—but he would quickly turn from it, the bow suddenly skipping like a child, the fringe of his cuffs animate with dance. When he played, none of them could stay in their seats—his reels and jigs brought them out. This year would be the first time that the labor camp would be without his playing on Sunday nights. Getting through the first time of everything without him—the first Christmas, the first birthday, the first feast—was the sum purpose of this year. The last feast would arrive in late summer, and soon after would be the anniversary of his death. Just one day, Mae would tell herself, although she knew it wasn’t true. A sudden loss like that colored all the days around it, rendering the days before and after into bright, stinging hues, until the event of his death spread over many days, a season unto itself.
In the immediate shock of Jim’s passing, Annie and the other ladies had brought Mae willow tea for the pain. Ah, this had been soothing. Later, once the why questions set in, they brought her small dry cakes made of ground roots. She received these not with pleasure but with equanimity, with bland recognition that he was gone and she was still here.
A crow cawed loudly from a tree just then. Annie’s husband, Frank, was yelling, too, telling them to load up in the truck to get to the fields. Mae noticed something odd then. A blue Ford truck loaded with workers—with men, all men—passed by them on the highway. Frank and some of their men waved. And some of the braceros waved back. Mae watched the truck disappear over the hill. She strode across the camp toward Frank’s truck, hurrying now. That crow cawed again.
“I hear you!” she called to the crow. But this only made the crow louder and chattier.
She stopped under the branch where the crow continued to cackle at her. She put her hands on her hips and studied him. He regarded her evenly.
Look up, the crow said.
She was, in fact, looking up. She was looking at the black crow with deep glassy eyes, perched in a verdant wreath of cottonwood leaves. She allowed her gaze to shift, to move to the sky beyond, cloudless and bright, and in the distance she could see the snow-tipped blue mountains. The valley had changed, she thought, but the mountains were the same. In the mountains, the qées was filling the meadows; the huckleberries were opening their leaves, drinking the sun. In the mountains, butterflies were massing in brilliant crowds beside the creeks, whose sparkling waters sang and skipped down the hillsides, finding a way, again, to the river.
Indian Wars
The News of the Day
The mirror fell off the wall, and Mar
cel knew that his father was dead in another country. Marcel reached his hand to his breast pocket and withdrew his watch from its place near his still-beating heart. The face told him the time, and the minute hand obediently ticked forward. Marcel sat down. He looked at the watch again. He thought of his sister laying the plates on the table for the evening meal. He thought of his mother, face tilted toward the sky, lifting her hand to suspend a crystal snowflake in the window of his father’s shop in Paris.
Marcel sat there, staring at the wall that had so recently released the mirror, at the faint outline where sunlight had faded the surface.
Marcel heard the handle of the door click open. Charles entered the room, his books and a newspaper tucked neatly in his arm, pressed snugly against his black overcoat. His shoulders bore the evidence of snowfall, but the flakes were quickly disappearing into the darkness of the wool. His eyes took in the surroundings: the unmade bed, the mirror sprawled on the floor with a jagged crack across its face, Marcel’s troubled expression. Charles closed the door quietly behind him. Charles crossed the room to his desk, slipped into his chair, and unfolded his newspaper. He sat, straight-backed, and opened the pages, the grayish newsprint like a sagging flag in his slender brown fingers. From behind the paper, Charles did not observe Marcel, although it would have been easy enough to do so. Charles was a man who respected another man’s dignity.
Marcel continued to stare at the wall.
Charles shifted in his chair.
Snow floated silently from the sky in the fields beyond their shuttered window.
There had been no good news for months. Every day Charles would fortify himself to open the paper, scanning it quickly for dispatches from the correspondents at the Agency. It had been less than two weeks ago that Sitting Bull had died at the hands of Indian police. Sometimes, when he could voice the words, Charles read the news out loud to Marcel, who listened attentively. It was one of the many things Charles appreciated about his friend; Marcel did not resist hearing stories of the military campaigns on Indian lands. Marcel did not flinch at stories of starvation at the Agency or the persistence of the Ghost Dance; he neither defended nor decried the Seventh Cavalry. Marcel could take it in with perfect equanimity—the gift of his foreign blood. Why this was such a blessing Charles could not precisely express.
Occasionally the two men spoke to one another in French, a convergence they discovered soon after they arrived, from separate worlds, at Boston College. It had started as a little joke between them, when Marcel had cast a sly smile at Charles during a lecture on the French and Indian Wars. Their alliance was a conspiracy against history, a challenge to the end of the Seven Years’ War. By fate the two men had the same French surname, and this fate is perhaps the reason why they were assigned to share a room in the men’s hall. Roommates for the past three years, now the pair spent their Christmas holiday virtually alone on the grounds in Boston. Neither could return to his own country.
Charles’s name was borrowed from the Jesuit fathers. From them he had adapted his tongue to French and Latin and the Eucharist, and as each of these alien tastes had dissolved in his mouth, he felt hungry for more. The first foreign languages came a little easier to him than English. For Marcel, it was much the same—first he spoke his mother tongue, then Latin, then English. When the two friends needed to speak most easily to one another they fell into French. But Charles remained always alone in his own first language.
In their quiet room, Charles fixed his eyes on the front page. A FIGHT WITH THE HOSTILES. BIG FOOT’S TREACHERY PRECIPITATES A BATTLE.
Marcel groaned softly as he allowed his body to collapse onto his bed. Marcel stared at the ceiling. The familiarity of this repose provided him some comfort, as he gave his mind to thoughts of his father. In August Marcel had begged his parents to allow him to stay home in Paris, to help his mother run the bookstore after the stroke. But Marcel’s father had insisted that his son return to his studies. Now Marcel could think only of his need to hear his father’s voice again.
Marcel wasn’t sure if Charles had made a noise, or moved, or what precisely, but Marcel became aware of his friend. Marcel turned his face toward the desk.
The words came out dry and mechanical. “What is the news?” Marcel asked.
Charles did not answer right away.
Then Charles cleared his throat and held the paper away from his chest.
“There was a battle,” he said.
Marcel sat up. “And?”
“Many were killed. It says here . . . ”
Charles cleared his throat again.
“It says here that Big Foot’s braves turned upon their captors this morning and a bloody fight ensued. The trouble came when the soldiers attempted to disarm the Indians, who had surrendered to Major Whiteside. This move on the part of the troops was resisted, and a bloody and desperate battle at close quarters followed, in which the Indians were shot down ruthlessly and in which the lives of several soldiers were . . . sacrificed.”
Charles paused. His eyes scanned the column. He continued: “The Indians were shot down wherever found, no quarter being given by any one . . . It is doubted if by night either a buck or a squaw out of all Big Foot’s band is left to tell the tale of this day’s treachery.”
Charles closed the paper and laid it to the side of his desk.
Charles shifted his body slightly away from his friend. He pulled open the desk drawer and extracted a small wooden box. He carefully withdrew a quillwork amulet attached to a leather cord. He ran his thumb across its gentle form, a little blue lizard.
“Non,” Marcel whispered. “Cela ne peut pas . . . ”
Charles nodded. He could not turn to his friend. Charles would not look at the mirror, the door, the bed. He could see only his mother’s work in his hands.
Outside the snow continued to fall.
A rap on the door shook the stillness of the room. Both men looked up.
“Telegram!” came a voice from the other side.
Charles rose, crossed the room, and calmly opened the door. Marcel watched the black-rimmed paper pass from the dispatcher’s hand to Charles. Marcel buried his face in his hands and waited for Charles to deliver the news. But Charles did not come to Marcel’s side.
Marcel heard a noise then, the crinkle of paper like the hush of a falling leaf. Marcel slowly turned his gaze to his friend. Immediately he saw why Charles had remained in place: the telegram was for him.
Fish Wars
My parents are fighting again. I pull the covers over my ears to try to muffle the sound, but my mother’s whisper cuts through every layer and my father’s voice seeps like water into a boat. They’ve been doing this lately. Fighting. But I can never quite hear what they are fighting about. I roll over and look at Jolene but she’s sleeping like a log. Or she’s faking it. Either way, it’s easy for her to shut it out, since they aren’t really her parents. I wonder if they will get a divorce.
I start to imagine them setting us down at the kitchen table and giving us the news. My little sister would bawl and say she wants to stay with our mom. And Lionel would say he’s big enough to just move out on his own. Move in with his friends, ’cause he’ll be eighteen in June anyway. Jolene would say she’s going back to Alaska to find her dad. Mom would be sitting there, calm as a tree, but Dad would be cracking some joke and trying to make everyone laugh, and it would be killing me to think of my dad living all by himself. But what kind of girl doesn’t pick her mom? And it would all come down to me: Do I stay with Mom or pick Dad?
Right in the middle of this I realize that something has happened. They stopped. I hold my breath. Then pow! I hear this loud thump and I think one of them has slammed something into the table. A fist, a coffee mug, a bowling ball. Okay, maybe not a bowling ball, because that would probably be really loud. And nobody here bowls. So okay, that was stupid. No bowling ball. But something, something hit the table. And right after that I hear the door crank open and the sound of my dad’s boots crushing g
ravel. Next sound (predictably): pickup-truck door. Then the Ford squeals because Dad twisted the key too hard in the ignition. Way to make an exit, Dad! The wheels scatter rock as he pulls out of the yard.
I wonder where he is going. Worse, I wonder what it will be like when he comes back.
Two weeks ago, I was at a slumber party at my friend Nicole’s house. Nicole’s family lives in town, not on the Rez, although there are plenty of white families like hers who live here. There were seven of us there, which turned out not to be such a lucky number. At first it was really fun, because Nicole’s big sister Karen was watching us. She made us three Totino’s pizzas and let us drink all the pop we wanted. I love Fresca, so I had some of that, and then Jolene and I split an Orange Crush. Karen was drinking Tab. She’s the drill mistress at the high school, which means she (a) is in charge of the drill team, and (b) did not make cheerleader. She’s still popular, though, even without being a cheerleader. And she was really nice to us, and showed us how to do a French manicure. Turns out it’s easier than it looks.
After dinner we go downstairs to the rec room. We tell Karen we’re going to listen to music and make crank calls. She seems cool with that. Lisa, a girl in my class, says she brought a surprise for us, and I think it’s going to be candy bars or makeup. She gets her pillow, where she has stuffed her pajamas and toothbrush, and pulls out a record album: Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow . . . Right! I was not expecting that. More surprising is that when she opens it, there are two records in the sleeve: Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory. I wonder if this is something white families do to store their albums. She looks kind of embarrassed and says her parents won’t let her listen to that one. Nicole grabs it and puts it on. We listened to Dick Gregory, and at first we are all excited because we think there will be some dirty jokes. But there aren’t any, just a lot of jokes about “Big Daddy” in Washington and the war and Cuba and how people in Minnesota have funny laws, like not allowing oleo. He said a lot of things I thought were pretty interesting. After it’s over, Nicole says she wants the Cosby album, but everyone else (I guess me included) wants the radio. We turn the radio on and right away the Beach Boys come on, and everyone’s pretty happy after that.