by Beth Piatote
All right, our next caller is Lisa in Madras. She’s thinking about Dave tonight, and this one travels the airwaves straight to his heart: Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.” Hope you’re paying attention, Dave! Joanna smiles at the DJ’s commentary. There are so few of these shows anymore. How do people manage without them? So unfortunate that yearning lovers are reduced to sharing their actual feelings without the persuasive ventriloquism of R&B or country or even grunge. This is another strike against the modern age.
And here’s a real good one, all acoustic. From Aaron to Sandra, here’s “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty. Joanna draws a quick breath, and for a moment she cannot move. She hasn’t heard this song since Jim Boyd came down from Colville to sing it at Will’s funeral. That was Will’s request, to have her famous, gifted cousin sing at his farewell. You belong among the wildflowers / You belong on a boat out at sea . . .
And now Jim is gone too.
Sail away, kill off the hours / You belong somewhere you feel free . . .
Joanna’s hand jumps off the wheel to turn off the radio. She feels it has wounded her, cut through her when she was not expecting it. She remembers what her grandmother told her, that there was no Nez Perce word for radio. That is, there was no one word for radio. Every family made up their own word, and this revealed a lot about what people thought of it. Some people made words that meant “the thing that talks all the time” or “the thing that gossips” or “the thing that sings.” Joanna fixes her eyes on Mount Hood and drives steadily toward it, only her breath as company now.
What is the radio to her? A voice without a body. A force without form.
The thing that woos.
The thing that wounds.
The thing that remembers.
The sliding glass doors admit Joy to the lobby and instantly her body recalls times past, when her family spent days and nights with Will in the oncology ward, praying for a recovery that never came. Not at this hospital, but no matter. To her, all hospitals smell the same: clean and anxious.
She heads to the fourth floor. She nods at the nurses when they look up from their station. Joy feels a pang in her chest, wishing Naomi were with her now. Passing the station, Joy feels she is trespassing on a secret social world that only the nurses share; the hospital is their own little city. Joy finds Joseph’s room and stops at the door, her heart pounding. She looks in and sees him sleeping; she sees the bandages on his face and the tubes snaking up his arm. She takes in the shape of his body under the sheets, the stumps of arm and leg on his left side. She thinks she might vomit.
She steps back and breathes.
She goes in, walks straight to his side. She fixes her eyes on his face. She wants to wrap her arms around him but has no idea how. So many tubes and wires! She wedges herself between the bed and a monitor and gently places her palm on the top of his head. He stirs and turns his head.
“Joseph,” she says, and he opens his eyes.
The sound of monitors is not the song of birds.
The scent of disinfectant is not the aroma of skin.
The blood of strangers delivered by gravity and a needle is not the blood that runs through your mother’s heart when she carried you.
Joanna arrives at the door and pauses. She sees Joseph sleeping; she sees Joy rise from the chair beside his bed. She sees nobs of blanketed flesh where once were muscular limbs.
It seems that time has stopped, but Joanna knows that it is only she who has stopped. She is so close to him now, and for one moment she feels the chasm: he on one side, and she on the other. A mother is the vanguard of her children, but Joseph went out ahead. She sees that he has been changed, and yet he is still exactly himself. At once she makes her way, reaching with both hands to him, eager now as the day he was born to draw him to herself.
On the way home from Wilda and Earl’s house, Silas is singing to himself. He gradually becomes aware of the tune: “Waiting in Vain” by Bob Marley. He ponders the significance of this. He notices, for the first time, that girl rhymes with Earl. Silas smiles. A little joke that he will keep to himself.
If summer is here, I’m still waiting there / Winter is here, and I’m still waiting there . . .
Is this what all heartbreak comes down to? Silas wonders. Timing?
Silas sings to himself, and thinks about the venison stew that Wilda made with the deer that Earl brought home. I don’t wanna wait in vain for your love . . . If there were a Song Dedication Hour on the local station, Silas would send this one out. But there isn’t. And he can’t.
It’s painful for Joseph to talk at first.
The first thing he says is: “I never liked M.”
“What?” Joy asks. “Are you serious?”
Joseph half smiles. “No. I just said that to make you feel better.” He licks his lips. His throat is dry. He looks up at Joy. “I always liked M. I’m sorry you broke up.”
Joy does not know how to accept her brother’s comfort. “Thanks?” she says.
“You’re going to be okay,” he says.
“You, too,” she says, and squeezes his hand.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry!”
“Just kidding. That’s my good hand. I mean, that’s my hand.”
Joy laughs, even though she doesn’t want to.
The next time Joseph talks, he’s angry. He’s angry at his mangled body; he’s tormented by his memories of the moment just before. He was running, trying to get to cover. Then. Nothing.
Over and over, his penultimate step plays in his mind. The sun pressing down on him. The ground vibrating with explosions. One fluid step, then another. Then.
The silent movie plays the same loop over and over again. Black-and-white. Time stuck in a loop.
He wonders where his leg was lost. On the street? In the hospital? Who was the last person to touch his hand?
He never says why me? He just says: godDAMNit.
At home, Silas unloads the tapes on his bedside shelf. They sit in a tidy stack, silent. He has no equipment to play them, so he can only wonder what they hold. He knows that the tapes contain his grandmothers’ voices. He hates to admit it, but he’s not uncomfortable with this state of suspension. It seems the only way to keep the past from crashing into the present. A part of him doesn’t want to hear them; he doesn’t want to hear words he once knew or feel his failure to remember, to speak. At the same time, he aches to hear them again; he remembers how the older ones used to talk, how they laughed and joked. He longs to be at their table again.
The morning of the fifth day Joseph receives two visitors: young men, both Marines in civilian clothes. Buff and healthy. The taller one has a perfect fade, sharp cheekbones, and a prosthetic arm. Joseph wonders when the VA started making prostheses in different flesh tones. The shorter one has blue eyes and a receding hairline. They tell Joseph that they’ve been exactly where he is now: injured in combat, missing a leg, an arm; feeling alone and angry and scared. Discouraged. Depressed. Hopeless. And guilty that they survived when others didn’t.
Whatever you feel is the right way to feel, they say. You are not alone.
Your guys are alive because of what you did.
Before they leave, the physical therapists arrive.
Time to stand up! they say. This is what it takes to heal. The PTs maneuver Joseph to the edge of the bed. There is an elaborate choreography of shifting tubes and monitors and catheter bag. Joseph winces in pain; he groans; he yelps and curses. Joanna slips her body under Joseph’s right arm. The tall marine anchors himself to Joseph on his wounded side, hands on ribs and back.
As Joanna leans into Joseph’s side, a clear vision comes to her: Joseph at Grand Entry, with new regalia. She imagines him leading the procession with the other vets. A red bandolier bag with a wide sash across his chest. Floral design. Elaborate cuffs with long fringe. New moccasins, fitted to the prosthesis. And then there would be parades! He would ride, and his Appaloosa would wear a spectacular martingale and beaded bridle. Joanna
’s mind races forward; she knows what she must do.
On the count of three they rise.
Joseph’s words fall hard between labored breaths.
Now what? he asks.
The next time Joseph talks, he cries. Joanna is alone with him. She doesn’t hear him cry; she sees his shoulders shake. He brings his hand to his face, covers his eyes.
“Joseph,” she says, coming to his side.
He shakes his head. No, no, no. When he speaks, his voice is high and thin.
“I lost Dad,” he says. He cries harder, places his hand on his chest. Eyes squeeze tight and tears roll down the sides of his face.
“No,” Joanna says. “No, you can’t lose him.”
But she knows what he means. She knows that he has, again, lost his father. When Will was diagnosed, he and Joseph got matching tattoos on their left calves, an image to represent Will’s Indian name. Who ever thought Joseph would lose his leg? But he did lose it, and he blames himself because that part of Will was something he was meant to have forever. Of course he would feel this way, Joanna thinks. A new loss unstitches the grief that came before. She tries to comfort Joseph but she cannot properly hold him. She gives him her hand to hold, her voice to soothe, but it is not enough.
Joy is moving through her days without fire, without light. Her heartache is replaced with emptiness, and she feels less alive. In the fresh cut of grief, the city had kaleidoscoped with color: children in orange raincoats and commuters on blue bicycles erupted through the gray slate of rain. The world had been saturated with senseless, brilliant color, but with time a dull buzz like static had set in. She misses that intensity now.
Joanna brings Joy a new kettle. She tells Joy to stop pining over M.
“You can’t spend your life wishing for the past,” Joanna says. “Look at your little brother. He’s not wallowing. He’s picking himself up.”
Joy resents the comparison. No one can compete with a man who is trying to walk with one leg, she thinks.
Then she feels worse.
To her mother she says: I’m not pining.
The next time she visits Joseph, she brings a legal pad. Joanna holds it perpendicular to Joseph’s leg and he presses his foot against it. Joy makes four attempts to trace his foot but either his foot jerks away or her hand slips.
“Jeez, Joy, just give me the pencil,” he says.
“You can’t even bend.”
“Yeah, and I could still do better than you.”
Joy sighs. “Look, do you want this or not?”
Joseph makes a tiny motion with his chin to indicate Joanna, who at that moment is flattening the blanket under his heel. The sudden hush is obvious.
“What?” Joanna asks, looking up.
“I do want them,” Joseph says.
Nice cover, Joy thinks, and gets it on the fifth try.
At home, as Joy is cutting the pattern, she bursts into tears. I can’t do this, she says. Joanna slips her arms around her daughter.
“He’s not the same,” Joy says. “We’re not the same.”
“He has a long road ahead,” Joanna says. “And so do you.” She strokes Joy’s hair. “But this is what it takes. No matter how you feel, no matter what you are going through, you’ve got to have your hands on what is good. You’ve got to be touching the good in life.”
The forecast is for a cold winter. It is late afternoon, and Silas puts on his coat to cross the road and feed Joanna’s horses. Dark clouds shift above, and a bitter wind charges over the hill. Silas tips his face to the sky and watches two red-winged blackbirds pester and poke at a hawk in flight. As long as the birds stay in the air, we’re good, Silas thinks. He watches them fly to the north.
In 1788 the winter was so cold that crows froze to death and fell out of the sky midflight. Silas knows this because he studied the Lakota winter counts, saw the image repeated over and over, the crows cast down like ebony hail. He no longer takes it for granted that flying birds will continue on their aerial path. What did the people think, he would wonder, seeing the crows tumble down from the sky, shiny wings flat and twisted like broken kites? Did it seem like the end of the world?
What was it to see those new terrors? Bright red paint punctuated the winter counts: bodies covered in pustules, a gunshot wound pouring blood, an impudent flag planted on a military fort. Amid these scenes were images of the remarkable, if not the apocalyptic: a year of plenty of buffalo, a year that the river flooded, a year when they stole five Kiowa horses. It was never the end of the world. And it was always the end of the world. Five hundred years into this, and Indian people are still seeing new horrors. Facts of nature that were known and safe—that flying birds would stay in the sky, or that songs would bring people home—suddenly become strange and unreliable.
Silas stops at the mailbox and finds three bills and the tribal paper. As he holds the thin envelope from the utility, he feels pleased that his solar panels were a prudent investment. As an employee of the Natural Resources and Sustainability Division for the tribe, he takes pride in leading by example. When he came back to work for the tribe, he had been asked to work for the Language Program, because as a child he had lived with his grandmother, who only spoke tito·qatímtki at home. He had told them no, he had forgotten everything. To himself he said: It’s buried too far down. So now he focuses on solar panels and First Foods habitat, which seem, on the whole, fixable.
He opens the electric bill and sees that his solar panels are providing excess energy, so much, in fact, that he is selling energy back to the utility. This development evokes in him mixed feelings: pride in success, yet discomfort at contributing to a corporate energy enterprise.
He unfolds the paper and reads the banner: Tribal Council Declares State of Emergency over Youth Suicide.
Silas looks up at the birdless expanse.
What is happening? he says to the sky.
He goes inside and repacks the tapes.
Joanna fills in the background with light blue beads, and Joy is working on the petals of a flower. The PTs have taken Joseph down the hall, so the two are alone in his room.
“I like that spot of green in your pattern there,” Joanna says. “It reminds me of Alice.” Alice is Joanna’s best friend.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It makes me think of her. Because when she was young, she ran off with this Aleut guy that she met at Chemawa. Peter Kashevarof. She always said those schools were good for getting Indians married off to each other.”
“I can’t picture Alice running off with anyone. She’s so religious.”
“She was in love! And they didn’t run off so much as they got married and went back to his village.”
“Mom, that’s the opposite of running off.”
“Well, she left school to get married, so it was . . . dramatic. Anyway, she was living with his family up there and they had three little children. And then he left her. In a helicopter! Just flew away. Can you imagine?”
“Yes.”
“Joy, really? Can you imagine being left on a tiny island in the Bering Strait with three little children and no support except his family, who blames you for his leaving?”
Joy stops beading and considers the question.
“I can’t imagine anyone not liking Alice.”
“The point is, she was far from everything she had known before, and she had these little children to look after, and her heart was broken. She was so young too. This was the 1970s, and the mail only came once a month on a helicopter, and on that day the whole village would go down to meet it. That was it for contact with the outside world! One day she was waiting there, ice and snow everywhere, feeling so low. And as she’s scanning the tundra she notices a tiny little spot of green. A little tiny spot of grass peeking through, and she feels some hope. That’s what got her through that hard time.”
“I think I need more than a patch of grass in the snow.”
“I know. We all want more than that. But sometimes that’s all you get
.”
Joseph gets stronger every day, and so does his anger. He says he wants his dreams to stop, but the painkillers force him to sleep. Joanna calls Silas and asks him to come.
Silas is a good uncle, so he makes the drive to Portland. He drops off the tapes at an audio shop to be transferred to digital, and stays with a friend who always has a bed for him when he’s in town. He takes Joanna to lunch before she heads back home for a few days. Then he heads to the hospital.
“Laymíwt!” he greets his nephew. Joseph smiles at the nickname, even though he’s tried to outgrow it all of his life. In the old stories, the laymíwt, the youngest one, is always the hero.
“Hey, Uncle,” he says.
“You picked up any eagle feathers yet?”
“Yeah, during surgery. My doctor dropped one. Had to stop everything! Everyone standin’ around, waiting for me to come out from anesthesia. You’d think doctors would do better at tying them feathers down.”
Silas smiles at the joke. Things seem not so bad. He pulls up the chair and tells Joseph about the tapes.
Joseph tells Silas that Joy has gone back to work and visits in the evenings. Silas asks how she’s doing.
“She’s better than she thinks she is,” Joseph says. “She’ll find someone new.”
“Probably,” Silas says. He gazes out the window at the city, his view pixelated by the steady transmission of rain on the window.
“What about you?” Silas asks. “Anyone special?”
“Do nurses count?”
“Everything counts.”
“Oh, then. No.”