The Beadworkers

by Beth Piatote

  “Oh,” I said. “Don’t worry. The shuttle goes straight there. No stops.”

  “And which one?”

  “Coliseum.”

  “Is it south or north of the city?”

  “South.”

  “Okay. I’m going to Albany.”

  “That’s bit north.”

  “Yeah, my friend is going to meet me.”

  “There’s no stop in Albany.”

  “Okay. Then the next stop?”

  “El Cerrito.”

  “El Cerrito stop. Thank you for being so kind.”

  I told her it was nothing. It is no hardship to recite the train schedule.

  “We’re going to the ocean, going to get some air. You know there is less oxygen in Nevada? Sixteen percent less oxygen at that elevation.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’m glad to be out of there.”

  “I bet.”

  “This morning I left my cat and my husband.”

  “For good? Or just—temporarily?”

  “For good. Yeah.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt bad about the cat. I’ve left men before. I wondered if I should say something about the cat. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, and then I realized that she was crying.

  “That crazy bastard damn near broke my nose,” she said. A laugh sputtered out. “Now I don’t know what.”

  “You’re doing the right thing.”

  “Tell me I can’t cry here,” she said. “I can cry when I get to my friend’s house. But not here. Can’t be crying in Oakland.”

  People cry in Oakland. But I knew what she meant.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Stiff upper lip, then.”

  I felt awkward saying it, but I felt a moral obligation to be chipper.

  She wiped her eyes quickly with an index finger. “I’ll just cry into my hat,” she said. She choked on a laugh again. “But I forgot my hat.”

  “Now there’s the tragedy.”

  She nodded and choked some more. “You’re good,” she said. “That is a tragedy. You can’t go outside without a hat in Nevada.”

  “No. That sun will kill you.”

  “I can’t believe I left it.”

  I wanted to say that she would get a new hat, but I didn’t want to burden her with metaphors. The bus arrived at the station and we filed out. The woman went to buy a ticket, and I took the stairs to the platform.

  Falling Crows

  The boy who is coming home with part of himself missing is the man’s nephew. The man, Silas, receives the news and hangs up the phone, numb. He wants a drink. He doesn’t want a drink. He wants time to move backward.

  Silas is attempting to become a better sort of man, the kind who allows his feelings to muscle their way to the surface like a crocus. This is what Silas wants. But when he considers his emotional life he sees a bed of angry flowers. Better to keep those underground. His inner life is van Gogh in Saint-Rémy, not Arles. He thinks about his nephew, the littlest one, and he feels a blankness rimmed with fury.

  Water. He hears himself say the word, and his legs carry him to the sink. His eyes watch distant arms operate the smooth coordination of faucet and glass. Action and reaction. Physics. Life was a series of entirely predictable events.

  And yet.

  The boy would be flown to Portland. He would have reconstructive surgery and rehab. He would walk again.

  Silas puts down the glass. He thinks about his sister; he thinks about his nephew, who is not a boy but a man; he thinks about the magpie outside, hopping off a low branch into the grass. He tries to imagine his nephew without a foot, a hand, a cheek. It is hard to do. Joseph had been a beautiful boy with smooth skin and a muscular, pulsing body. To think of him draped in white sheets and swathed in bloody gauze, taped to a hospital bed and only moving the fingers of his remaining hand, was to imagine another person entirely. Silas imagines Joseph’s fingers crawling after the morphine button. Silas shakes his head to dismiss the picture, even as he feels his own hand clench.

  On the same day that Silas hears that his nephew is coming home, he gets a phone call from the Tribal Office. A courier has brought a package. Can he come?

  The boy who is coming home without his leg, arm, and cheek is the woman’s son. The woman, Joanna, is not afraid to see him in his wounded state; she is his mother and wants only to hold him, to feel him breathe, to hear his voice. He is alive, and he has more life ahead. He is a man; he is her boy.

  She is driving to Portland. She prays as she drives. She prays the humble, mercy-begging prayers of a mother who has been saved from the abyss; hers are the prayers of a person just redeemed. The grief will come later, in some ordinary moment: standing in line at the grocery store, folding the laundry, washing the spoon that she has just used to feed her grown son.

  Some time after the shock, some time after the grief, and without her knowing why, she will blame herself. This too will be a sudden confession, banal and absurd, like a can of store biscuits popping open in the heat. Koof! She will hear herself talking then, and not understand; she will say: My son nearly died and it was my fault.

  Joanna is alone in the car because she could not wait for anyone.

  She could have walked across the road to talk to Silas but she didn’t have the time. There was no time! Instead she called him on the phone, asked him to look after her dog and horses. Then she ran out of the house without locking the doors.

  Joanna keeps her eyes on the road, her hands fixed at ten and two, though she recently heard that nine and three were just as good, or even better for modern cars. She doesn’t change the dial on the radio even as the banter between the DJs turns increasingly inane. She does not care about the latest Kanye meme, or what happened to the DJ while she was at the DMV, or about that new app that makes things appear and then disappear. She does not want free concert tickets; she does not want to be the tenth caller. Joanna knows that soon she will drive into range of KWSO from Warm Springs, and she will know she is almost to Portland. She doesn’t touch the dial; she doesn’t waste gestures. She doesn’t want to slow down. She wants time to jump ahead.

  She thinks about the day Joseph came home from school and told her what he wanted to do, that he wanted to enlist. She did not stop him. Like her own mother, Joanna wanted her children to fly away like meadowlarks, free. Joanna thinks about her mother. She thinks about a small replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà, placed on the mantle in her childhood home. It was almost too beautiful to look at: the still-young Mary holding her broken son, sprawled in death across her lap. Joanna thinks about Mary’s placid expression. Mary’s calm face, Joanna had been taught, was the model of pious acceptance. No, Joanna thinks. It could not be acceptance. It is shock; this is what Joanna knows now. Why did Joanna stare at the statue so often? Was it the pathos? Or was it the form? Mary’s body rises up, solid. She is a pyramid, ancient and unmovable. The perfect mountain that is Mary holding Jesus illustrates a basic fact of science: the triangle is the most sturdy structure in all of nature.

  Joanna pictures herself as Mary, imagines Joseph in his man’s body on her lap, limp and beyond the world of cares. When he was small, Joseph would fall asleep that way, with utter unconcern, even after he became too big for her lap. He would sleep through church and council meetings and even basketball games like that. Joseph was her youngest, the laymíwt, and Joanna held on to him as long as she could.

  She wonders if she held on to him too much. If that led to this.

  Joanna follows the road as it turns to run alongside the Columbia. She calms in the companionship of the river, though she keeps the pressure steady on the gas.

  She is Mary; she is the sturdiest structure in nature.

  She is not Mary; she is not.

  A courier is waiting for Silas. He listens to the message a second time and decides to drive to the office. He claps the pickup door closed and contemplates his bare hands for a moment. Is it worth walking back to the house for his gloves? Winter is a
pproaching, announcing its intent with bitter wind. Silas cups his hands around his mouth and blows. His breath rolls off the rough surface. No, he decides, and leans in to start the engine.

  Silas has tattoos on his knuckles, his hands. Not the pretty kind. He has other ones too, fancy designs that climb up his arms, his chest, his back. He drives to the tribal admin building and parks. On his way to his office he stops to visit Wilda, a woman who has seen all of his tattoos and most of his scars.

  He leans on the doorframe of her office. She looks up but doesn’t smile. This is her friendly face.

  “Council’s declaring a State of Emergency,” she says.

  Silas does not know what to say because he doesn’t know which emergency is now an Emergency. Forest fires? Schools? Roads? Diabetes? What to say. Silas is caught between his desire to be a better man and his desire not to implicate himself in Not Listening. He decides to thread the needle.

  “You think it will make a difference?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” she says. “If it’s not just talk.” She takes a sip of tea from her KEEP CALM AND POWWOW ON mug.

  Silas nods. Wilda hates any form of linguistic anemia. Wilda knows that words are imbued with power; she was born to be a lawyer. Nothing annoys her more than empty declarations, whether in politics or advertising or love. She would not congratulate the council for putting a name to a problem that everyone could see on its face. No revelations there; no discoveries in that. To declare a State of Emergency was to pull a fire alarm. Either people would get up and run, or not.

  Silas clears his throat.

  He tells Wilda that Joseph is coming home, and Joanna has gone to meet him. He says it evenly, conscious of how the news will sound to her. He knows that Wilda has made that drive herself, when her daughter, Chloe, was in a car crash with her high-school friends. Chloe survived for several days in the hospital before she passed. Then Wilda became the survivor.

  Silas does not want his words to wound her, to send her back in time.

  “Oh,” Wilda says. “That’s good he’s coming home.” She tells Silas that she will pray for them. He thanks her. Everyone on the reservation prays, either to God or Creator or both. Silas does not consider himself a devotional man. Yet he speaks in sweats and the Longhouse, and never fails to assume proper posture at public ceremonies: hand on heart, turn to the left, release hand to sky. The body makes its own prayer, even without words. Sometimes Silas imagines the light map of North America at night, but instead of showing the concentration of light around the cities, it radiates the steady blink of Indian prayers. That’s a new map: a map of small, bleating clusters around Oakland, Denver, and Chicago, and luminous swaths at Umatilla, Lapwai, Colville, Lame Deer, Standing Rock, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, Lawrence, Window Rock.

  Wilda suggests that Silas come over for dinner.

  He takes in her words. Wilda is staring up at him, and after a moment he realizes that he is standing in the door for too long, as though he were actually attached to the doorframe, as though he were himself a door ajar. He dislodges himself and steps back. He says he needs to get to the office and that there’s a package waiting for him. He says he will come for dinner and thanks her.

  “You can thank Earl,” she says. “He’s the one who got the deer.”

  Earl, Silas thinks as he walks away. Yes, he’s the one.

  The one who is in the hospital bed without a shin, a wrist, or an earlobe is the young woman’s brother. The young woman, Joy, happens to be crying when she gets the news, but the shock makes her stop. For a moment her heartbreak recedes, a wide river dammed. She walks to the living room to sit down on a chair that is no longer there. She goes to the kitchen to make tea, but the kettle is gone. Joy wonders where she can go where she will not see that something is not there. In her home she is surrounded by unmatched pairs: the sofa without the chair, the cup without the kettle, the air without the love. In the kitchen, Joy puts her hand on her heart and prays. As she finishes she turns around and lifts her hand to the sky, a gesture that is part request and part sigh, and part wish that M. would come back.

  M. is not coming back. Joy knows this. But Joy has a stubborn heart.

  Joy’s name is aspirational, which is not to say that she lacks optimism. Joy believes in love; even after M. leaves, Joy does not regret her love. She wants more love, more love. She listens to the black-capped chickadees chattering in the bushes outside. This is the only love she feels now. She wants to fill herself with the sound. Joy tries to find love in everything: the birds, the trees, the rumble of trucks in the street. She believes that love is everywhere, and aches that love is so diffuse she cannot hold on to it. Love is an ax in her chest and a bird in flight. But Joy believes love will not always leave; someday it will stay. Joy may be the Most Optimistic Person in North America. Her parents should have named her Hope.

  Joy is relieved that her little brother is coming home. She is the middle child of three, the peacemaker. Their older sister, Naomi, is a nurse in Toronto with a husband and two children. Joy wonders when Naomi will come, if she will come. Joy does not know the extent of Joseph’s injuries, so she imagines him whole, just as he was before he left. She knows she must go to the hospital, and starts to prepare: brush teeth, shoe feet, jacket body, hat head. Each little task gives her some relief, some sense of purpose. There is comfort in the reliable needs of a crisis. She steps outside and turns to lock the door. Gray clouds, weary of carrying rain, unburden themselves as she walks to the bus stop. She breathes deep the cold, moist air. She feels good to be outside, glad to interrupt the endless wandering around the house. At the bus stop, waiting, she wonders if she is a bad person for feeling relief that one emergency is displacing the pain of another. She feels slightly guilty about this, but tells herself it isn’t math. It’s life. Waiting for the bus she digs her hands deeper into her pockets, and contemplates the PSA poster fixed to the shelter wall: DIRECT PRESSURE STOPS BLEEDING.

  At the office, Silas approaches his cubicle and sees the courier sitting in the chair beside the desk. The courier is a young man in a turquoise Patagonia jacket, holding a box in his lap. Tufts of brown curls poke out from under his dark blue knit cap. He stands when he sees Silas approach the cubicle, cradling the box in one arm.

  “Osiyo, Mr. Shield,” he says, extending his hand.

  Silas smiles, shakes the man’s hand. “’Siyo,” Silas says. “That’s one of only two Tsalagi words I know. Half my vocabulary right there.”

  “But ’siyo and Tsalagi are two words.”

  “Ah,” Silas says. “It’s two-thirds then.”

  The man introduces himself as Adam Sixkiller, and they sit down. Adam continues to hug the box as he explains that he is delivering a package that he was afraid to mail for fear it might be lost or damaged. Adam is a graduate student in linguistics, and had been hired to clean out the office of a professor who had unexpectedly passed away. The professor had studied phonology of several West African languages.

  Adam opens the box and shows Silas the contents: a dozen reel-to-reel tapes. The top box is labeled NEZ PERCE. JANUARY 10, 1957.

  “These are not his recordings,” Adam says. “I don’t think anyone knows that he had them. I want to give them back to the tribe.”

  Silas studies the contents for a moment.

  “Nobody knows that I have them,” Adam adds.

  “You want to take them to the Language Program then?” Silas asks. “This is Natural Resources here.”

  “I could do that,” Adam says. “But I wanted to talk to you first.” He reaches in the box and extracts a tape. He flips it over to show Silas the back: FLORA MEDICINE SHIELD AND BESSIE MONTIETH. “These are your relations?”

  Silas nods.

  “They made all of these tapes. I don’t know how they ended up in that office. There’s no record of the person who made them, besides these two speakers. There’s a man’s voice on the tape but no ID, and I don’t think any linguist would do that. They could be homemade tapes that
someone found in an attic or closet and gave to the university. Gave them to the only linguist they knew, I would guess, because otherwise it really doesn’t make sense.”

  Nothing makes sense, Silas thinks. Making sense is an unhealthy attachment.

  “Do you want to take them?” Adam asks. “These are the originals, and I did not make copies.”

  “No copies at the university?”

  “Not that I could find.”

  “Seems like a strange thing for a linguist to do. To not make a copy.”

  Adam stiffens: shoulders back, chin forward.

  “Mr. Shield, I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation before I am a linguist.”

  Silas nods. He finds Adam’s patriotism endearing. That’s just how the Cherokees talk, he thinks to himself. To Adam he says, “All right then.”

  Adam passes the box to Silas, and he takes it. For a moment Silas feels a flash of pain and perhaps fear; this is the anxiety that blooms from inheriting a dying language. No, not dying, he thinks, only endangered. To be in danger is to be in a state of perpetual vigilance; it is fight or flight every day. Silas knows this. He feels the magnitude of treasure in his arms, and the intense pressure of keeping it safe. Fight or flight. A wave of failure washes over him. He straightens his back. He nestles the box in the curve of his left arm, and extends his right hand to Adam.

  “Wado,” he says.

  It’s Song Dedication Hour on KWSO when Joanna reaches the signal.

  This one is going out from Ted to Doris: “Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson. And good luck, Ted! Joanna listens to the lyrics and feels relieved to think about someone else’s story. What did you do, Ted? she wonders. What did you not do, Ted? If Will were here, she thinks, they would be making up a story and how things went horribly wrong with Doris and Ted. Song dedication shows had been their companion through many long road trips, especially late at night. Along those dark highways, their children sleeping on each other’s shoulders in the back seat, they would string stories like beads into elaborate patterns, usually to make each other laugh. Will could always make her laugh, and the Song Dedication game was one of their favorites. Sometimes, though, they would get stumped. Sometimes songs were too sad, and they had to admit there was nothing their imagined Ted could do that would redeem him for taking Doris for granted all those years.