The Beadworkers

by Beth Piatote

  They both laugh.

  “Someday,” Silas says.

  “You think someone will look past this?”

  “No reason to look past it.”

  Silas searches his mind for something more to say, but everything he comes up with sounds trite. It’s what’s on the inside. No. Any woman would be lucky to have you. No. You are more than the sum of your parts. No, no, no. Then he remembers a story.

  “There were these two brothers,” he says. “They farmed out there, between Umatilla and Pilot Rock. One day there was a problem with the baler; something was stuck in there. And as one brother was trying to repair it, the other brother accidentally hit the lever.”

  Joseph winces.

  “Yeah, it was bad,” Silas says. “The one brother lost both arms. He almost bled to death. And then the other brother was really messed up, because he was responsible. And people wondered how the one who was hurt would do—what would happen to him? Would he be able to work? Would his wife still love him? But you know, he survived okay. People took care of him. A few years later, he had another baby, his wife loved him, things were pretty good. It was the other brother who came apart. He started drinking. His wife left him. His life was ruined.”

  They sit together quietly then.

  “What about you, Uncle?”

  Silas shakes his head.

  Joseph tells Silas that he wants to hear the tapes. He knows that this is what Silas wants, and perhaps why Silas has come. Joseph sees his uncle’s wounds.

  So one morning Silas brings the recordings to Joseph’s bedside. He pushes play and the words roll out from the laptop speaker. Joseph watches as Silas tips his head back, eyes closed, and listens. Silas is still as a monk.

  Joseph can’t make out the stories, but he recognizes the rhythms of speech, and he catches words here and there. Sometimes he hears a man’s voice in the background, or a dog barking. A child speaks, then seems to leave. The women laugh a lot, but sometimes their tone is serious, and sometimes a long pause connects words or thoughts. These silences are dense with feeling. The sounds make Joseph long for a world he barely sensed and never truly knew. He hears screen doors creak open and closed, the low hum of a generator, a radio voice that goes on, then off. Joseph pictures his great-grandmother’s house as he knew it from photos: the gingham curtains, a bowl of apricots on the counter, peonies blooming in a vase, a table ringed by wooden chairs. He listens to the mix of their voices and the ambient sounds, and the hospital room is filled with that time, which does not move forward or back, but rests in the lap of the present.

  Joseph hears a word he recognizes.

  “X̣áx̣a·c,” Joseph says. “Grizzly Bear.”

  Silas stops the recording.

  “Yes,” Silas says. “They’re talking about a man, Fierce Grizzly Bear. He was attacked by Grizzly Bear, and he fought back. The bear’s paw left deep cuts across his chest.” Silas drew his hand from his left shoulder to his right hip, fingers curved like claws, to demonstrate. “But the man survived. As he was recovering, intense visions came to him. Grizzly Bear came into the man’s dreams and gave him permission to use his wounds as a symbol of his bravery. After that, the man beaded a bandolier with five parallel lines, tapered at both ends, to show Grizzly Bear’s claw marks from the fight.

  “So my grandmothers, they’re telling the story of how this design started to be used. Not just by Fierce Grizzly Bear, but by certain powerful families. It was a sign of respect. They’re talking about an old photograph of six Indian scouts, and three of them are wearing bandoliers with this design, five long claw marks across the chest, going left to right.”

  “I think I know that photo,” Joseph says.

  “Maybe so. It’s in the Council chambers.”

  “Mom’s making a bandolier for me. Woodland design. Like I survived a fight with a florist.”

  “Hey, that’s fierce too!”

  Joseph rolls his eyes.

  “You know why she’s doin’ that, don’t you?” Silas asks.

  “She always does that design.”

  “She misses your dad, and it reminds her of him. They had that rivalry about where the floral pattern came from—he said we got it from the Ojibwe and she said that they got it from us.”

  Joseph smiles, remembering. His parents used to tease each other a lot. He thinks of their wedding photo, his father wearing the beaded sash and moccasins that his mother had made. Woodland design.

  “She wants things to go back,” Joseph says.

  “It makes her feel better,” Silas says. “To feel like she can do something.”

  “She can’t. No one can do nothing.”

  “She can’t do nothing.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not agreeing with you, son. I’m telling you: she can’t do nothing.”

  Joseph sighed.

  “Maybe a design will come to you and you can tell her.”

  “My dreams aren’t like that.”

  “Doesn’t have to be a dream,” Silas says. “Could be some other way.”

  After a moment, Silas gets a notebook and pen from his bag and restarts the recording. Joseph thinks about his mother and the flowers blooming under her fingertips. He thinks of her pulling each thread, drawing snug each bead to hide, one by one. He watches Silas write words and fragments.

  Joseph closes his eyes, perhaps to sleep. The sound of the old language flows around him; he feels he is floating, or riding a great river. When he sleeps he can forget what he has lost, but then he wakes to his mismatched limbs and he remembers. This is what life is now.

  Katydid

  The last time I saw Ada, she was working at a dry cleaner’s. I didn’t even know that she was there. I was just picking up a suit, and she came around from the back, almost floating it seemed, beside the motorized carousel. She wore a green-and-white striped smock and her hair in one long braid down her back.

  “Hey,” she said. “I thought that was you.”

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s great to see you.” It wasn’t a lie exactly, but it wasn’t as if I had known that she was there, or as if we had stayed in touch much since that summer. The clothes were swaying gently on thin hangers behind her. “How have you been?” I asked. “You look good.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I got rid of Roy.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “How did you know?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, he was on the road a lot.” She crossed her arms in front of her body, looking a little past me. “We lived with his cousins, you know? And then he wanted us to get our own place, so I packed everything up, and the day we were going to move he didn’t show up.”

  “Oh god,” I said. “Just like—”

  I stopped myself but she knew what I was going to say. Two minutes with Ada and I’m already regretting my words.

  “Duane,” she said. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to say sorry for Roy and sorry for Duane and sorry for what I said, just now and before; I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.

  She smiled faintly and reached for the carbon receipt book.

  “Hey, I can give you my discount,” she said, flipping it open and sliding the cardstock flap under the carbon. I wondered how many times she’d performed this exact set of tasks, how long she’d been ringing people up, giving them discounts, plucking their sweaters and drapes off the carousel.

  “Uh, thanks, but you don’t need to do that,” I said, fishing in the side pocket of my purse. “I have a coupon. Twenty percent.” I produced the paper.

  “My discount is better. Twenty-five.”

  I felt her eyes on me. I felt the weight of my watch on my wrist. I wanted to say, It was a gift. The watch, but what sense would that make? So I said thanks that would be great.

  I owed her twelve dollars. She rang it up and asked about my life.

  “Still cleaning teeth,” I said. “That’s good. Nice and calm at the office. Pays the bills.”

  “You still with that Norwegian?”


  “Swede. Remember? ‘Never—’”

  “Never go with a Swede!’” And we laughed at the private joke between me, Ada, and Love Medicine fans everywhere.

  “No,” I answered. “That’s done.”

  “I thought so. I saw him, and it wasn’t with you.”

  I nodded. Ada was about the fiftieth person to mention this to me. “I heard about that,” I said.

  “Aw, Bert,” she sighed. “Don’t feel bad. That guy was a cold fish.”

  I had to smile at that.

  “You have a new man now?”

  “No one special,” I told her, which was true.

  Ada cast a sideways glance at my dry-cleaning order. Two men’s shirts and a suit. She looked back at me and raised her right eyebrow.

  “It’s for my boss,” I said, which was also true.

  “Overtime’s a bitch,” she said.

  We both laughed a little, and I asked her for her number.

  I carried her phone number around for a long time after that, in the pocket of my wallet where I usually keep my fortunes. A TRUE FRIEND IS EVER TRUTHFUL. HARD TIMES ARE NOW BEHIND YOU. IN THREE MONTHS YOU WILL RECEIVE GOOD NEWS. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER: 5.

  This is the truth: Ada and I used to be close. But that was before Oklahoma, before the road trip, before our friendship became collateral damage in her father’s war against himself. Or perhaps it was a drive-by in a street war, or any one of a hundred Indian wars going on at any given moment. Friendly fire cannot be ruled out. Time has not clarified what happened that summer or why, or how to mend it.

  Ada was the first real friend I made when I came to Salem, having freshly emancipated myself from my previous life. We met at the All Nations Community Center, a place that, among other things, held the urban Indians together with salmon and protests, beadwork and a drum. At first, I wasn’t sure how to fit in, being on my own with no family. I took my cues from Ada, who was still in high school but close to my age. She knew her way around the community because she’d grown up there, and she became my way in. Ada was kind that way. She saw the orphans and took them in. The two of us would work in the kitchen, washing dishes, mashing potatoes, laughing with the older ladies, and getting out of the way when told.

  Then the drum would start, and Ada would drop her apron for a shawl.

  Ada rocked the fancy shawl and she knew it. She was a slender girl with a light step and graceful wings. When the drum started, she would wrap her arms in her shawl and placidly close her eyes. The fringe would swing and whisper, then settle as she stood perfectly still, still as a tomb. Then, right when the beat hardened, her wings would fly open and she would lift and turn, coming back to life, just as the story goes. The dance floor rolled like a field of butterflies then, her blue shawl the shimmering promise of spring.

  Watching her from the kitchen, I wished that I could fly, too. I had, very recently, left my redneck hometown in a rather colorful fashion. By “colorful” I only mean salacious, good for local gossip. I didn’t burn down any buildings on the way out or anything like that.

  Alas, we all have regrets.

  I was just nineteen and scared to be alone, but there was no way I was going back. I had made my way to Salem, which to me was a real city, and the first thing I tried to do was “find my tribe,” as the hippies say. Hippies love to glorify the tribe, which is both amusing and irritating to me. If you’re going to go tribal, you can’t just take the good—the sharing, the ceremonies, the aunties, the Rez cred—you got to go the whole way. You got to walk through the minefields. You got to take the pettiness, the jealousy, the physical abuse, the diabetes, the bigoted uncle, the family that hates your family since the missionaries arrived. If you’re a woman, you got to accept that your body is prime real estate, and if you don’t reproduce for the tribe, you’ve joined the occupation.

  Ada and I bonded over the reproductive imperative, seeing that we were of that age and there was no way around it. She was solidly dedicated to the cause, which is probably why she put up with Roy for so long. I couldn’t seem to find an Indian man to put up with. I envied her and worried about her, and she felt the same for me.

  Three summers ago, Ada and I shared a mutual need to take a road trip to Pawnee, Oklahoma, for the Fourth of July Homecoming Powwow. She wanted to find her Indian relatives and I wanted to spend a week lying awake at night on the floor of a double-wide, waiting for the heat and the roar of katydids to lift. More to the point, I wanted to do for Ada what she had done for me, which was to clear a path when I needed it. Some things were uncomfortable and some things were beautiful, and some things were both. In Oklahoma we saw things we’d never seen before: armadillos, fireflies, scissor-tailed flycatchers. Comanche Nation license plates. An all–Indian line of customers at the post office. And Ada saw her grandmother’s smile, and the gnarled hands of her grandfather, and a whole pageant of disappointment that only a lifetime of imagining your family can produce.

  We were washing dishes at Culture Night when this whole plan got hatched. Ada was saying that she had just seen her bio-dad Duane in a recent episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and that he had a part on Walker, Texas Ranger coming up soon.

  “You’re the only person I know who, when people talk about TV dads, could say, ‘My TV dad is my actual dad,’” I said.

  “Yeah, except that my dad never plays a dad on TV,” she said. “Or in real life.”

  “Well, it’s not like there’s an Indian Cosby Show. Although that would be awesome. The dad would work for Indian Health Service and the mom would be a lawyer at NARF, and they would be ostentatiously middle class.”

  “What about the sweaters?”

  “Right. The dad would have a huge collection of loud ribbon shirts.”

  We riffed on this for a while. It’s surprising how much material can be mined from making Indian versions of things. Or perhaps it’s not surprising. Making Indian versions of things is a time-honored skill, like cornhusk weaving or cooking with rocks.

  I confess to Ada what I’d never told anyone: that my TV dad was Michael Landon from Little House on the Prairie. Like my own father, Pa was handsome and white and a hardworking farmer, who wanted more than anything to have a son. He was admired by the townsfolk and loved by his wife. But unlike my father, Pa forgave and helped his children when they made mistakes and broke the rules, and sometimes he even laughed at their misdeeds. He did not punish them for being willful; he never hit them or locked them in closets or pressed their faces against the wall and told them that they were good for nothing. He did not fill the little house with his backhand or his howl, so that the children would run outside and beg the trees to hide them.

  I don’t say this to her; I just confess that Michael Landon is my TV dad, and it’s my Secret Shame. She laughs and promises not to tell anyone.

  Eventually we came back around to Duane, and I ask Ada if she has plans to meet him, now that she was graduating high school, or if that would be too weird for her adoptive family.

  “No, they’re cool with that,” she said. She said she’d thought about trying to go to the Fourth of July Homecoming Powwow in Pawnee, because Duane usually stopped by that way. Being the itinerant type, he would regularly circle through Oklahoma, because apparently Pawnee is right on the path between Hollywood, where he got bit parts, and Edmonton, the far end of the Plains powwow circuit.

  “Your dad is old school,” I said. “He’s gotta roam.”

  Ada was drying a giant stockpot at that moment. “Yeah,” she sighed, setting it down on the counter. I picked it up and carried it to the cabinet. When I came back, she was in the same spot, holding the dishless towel in her hands, and staring out the window.

  “We can roam, too,” I said.

  The last time I saw Ada, it was about a year ago, at the dry cleaner’s. I was picking up a suit and some shirts for my boss, Rafael Cloud, and I didn’t know that she would be there. Rafa ran the only Indian-owned dentistry office in the city, perhaps the State. I had vo
lunteered for the pickup because it had been an unusually hectic Saturday and Rafa couldn’t get away, and his wife was out of town, and he needed his suit to go to church on Sunday. So it was this combination of unusual circumstances that led me to Ada.

  After, when I stopped at his house intending only to drop off the suit, the coupon, and the change, Rafa invited me to join them for dinner. I wasn’t expecting it but I wasn’t surprised either—it appeared only as Indian hospitality to me. Rafa’s two boys were freshly showered and doing their homework at the kitchen table. Their house felt cheerful and warm, and I had no other plans. Rafa made a cup of tea for me, and I sat in a stool at the kitchen island, watching him mine bones from the side of a salmon. I told him about seeing Ada and about our Oklahoma road trip, but I didn’t tell him how things had fallen apart with her, or how much I missed her.

  For some reason, we ended up talking about Termination. He told me how psychologically and spiritually damaging it had been for his tribe, the Klamath, to one day receive letters saying that they were no longer Indian. I knew what Termination was, but Rafa’s stories were the closest I had ever come to understanding how it might have felt, how deeply existential it was, for an entire tribe to be shattered like that.

  Between these stories, we shared roasted salmon so tender it melted on our tongues. We told other stories too, and made jokes and laughed with the boys. It was the first time I’d ever had what I would call a personal conversation with Rafa. It was also the first time I’d ever done anything for him outside of the office, and the first time, technically, that I’d ever touched his clothes.

  And because these things happened this way, the story of my loss of Ada and my life with Rafa became braided together, so that I could no longer separate what I felt for each of them.

  The spring before we went to Oklahoma, Ada mowed lawns, took on extra babysitting, pooled all of her graduation gift money, and sold enough peyote-stitch keychains to buy a $300 round-trip airline ticket to Tulsa, plus gifts for her Oklahoma family. At Culture Night, folks made and gave us beaded earrings and bolo ties to take for gifting. Roy came through with some men’s chokers and two beaded medicine bags. I pulled my $300 ticket out of my savings account, and her parents, who didn’t have much to spare, offered to pay the cost of the rental car. The Drum at the community center gave us an honor song, and folks pressed tobacco bundles and small amounts of cash into our hands, telling us we were doing a good thing. As the Drum sounded, I was struck by the durability of Indian ways. Each small gesture, each prayer, each bit of food or wrinkle of cash in the palm—these elements combined to make a path for us. Once we made it to Oklahoma, we would stay with her grandparents and cousins in Pawnee, and her dad would meet up with us at the Fourth of July Homecoming Powwow. Her family, to celebrate the reunion, would even hold a Special for her.