by Rose Christo
* * * * *
Over the next few days I took the boat out on the ocean and trapped sea otters. I brought them home and skinned them, put the meat in the icebox and dried the fat and pounded it into pemmican bars. The snow came down heavy and thick. The Give-Away Dance was coming soon, the polar night. The elders were going to tell their winter stories. Ayas Otatayokiyan had been my favorite story since I was a little boy. Rabbit was old enough to hear it now.
I picked Rabbit up from school one day and his teacher caught up with me in the front yard. Rabbit threw a snowball at his classmate and Miss Theresa tightened her scarf around her neck.
"We're being shut down," Miss Theresa told me.
I didn't know what she meant. We didn't have anything on this island capable of being shut down. There was a diner the crab fishermen from the mainland sometimes frequented, and the power supply that came from the river. But--
"They want to bring back the boarding schools," Miss Theresa said.
My father had gone to an Anglican boarding school. He'd walked away from it with all sorts of ideas about how uncivilized we were. He'd never let my mother hear the end of them. Sometimes I thought she was relieved the day he abandoned her.
"You're not sending my kid to a boarding school," I said.
"They'll arrest us," Miss Theresa said. "They'll send the BIA."
"We're not even citizens," I said.
"I know," she said.
It had always been this way. The Long Walk and the Trail of Tears. The smallpox blankets. Sand Creek and Bear River. Wounded Knee. Lincoln said they should kill all the Indians and half-breeds by mass hanging. Chivington went around cutting off women's genitals like war trophies. Squaws, he called those women. Squaw comes from otsiskwaw, a Mohawk word. It means cunt.
We weren't good enough to be citizens of our own country but we were good enough to be put down like animals, policed like criminals. I was good enough to fight for my country, to kill people who hadn't done a thing to me, but I didn't get a say in where my son went to school.
"He's not going to a boarding school," I said.
I watched Rabbit when he chased a small girl in dizzying circles. She yelled at him, her braids flying.
Miss Theresa's face rumpled with sadness. She'd been to one of those schools. The elders, they never really talked about those days.
Sometimes the people who don't talk say the most. Sometimes silence speaks for itself.
* * * * *
At home Rabbit added numbers in his math book, swung his legs under the kitchen table and sang me half of a song he'd learned in music class. He got half of the words wrong, too. I told him if he finished his homework before supper he could listen to Charlie Chan. I didn't know what a six-year-old kid was doing listening to Charlie Chan.
"I'm gonna be a detective," Rabbit told me.
"I thought you were going to be a moon man," I said.
"That too."
I went into the bedroom and opened the wall closet. Inside the closet the down beds were rolled up against the side wall. Pleated trousers lay together in a messy pile. I dug through the debris with itching fingers.
Underneath a pile of old star blankets was my mom's caribou bone harp. She hadn't played it in years. I didn't know how to play it myself. I ran my fingers down the brittle, sinewy strings, careful not to break them.
Mom told me once that string instruments bear their owners' impressions. If you play a violin or a harp long enough, the strings learn how to bend to your fingers. If somebody else tries to play a song on your harp, it won't sound right.
I put the harp aside, my hands cold. I unfolded the star blankets, orange pendleton with blue starbursts, beige wool with ice-blue borders. The musty smell brought me back to childhood. When you give somebody a star blanket, you give them your heart. Maybe it was telling that Mom had never given her star blankets away. She must have knitted dozens of them over the years. She'd wanted to share her heart with someone; but no one would have it.
My fingers stilled. I thought of the last and only time Mom had worn Cree clothing. Dad was away on the mainland and she got out her ribbon gown, a shimmery blue-gray with black silk applique. She put on the dress and an old pair of mukluks, sealskin, embroidered with iridescent abalone beads. She looked like a princess. She told me ribbons were a sign of peace in our culture. They tied us together like the tenuous threads of humanity. No wonder silk deteriorates over time.
Dad came home early that night. Mom didn't have time to change into her civilized clothes. He caught her being a barbarian. He beat her so hard her ears bled. I draped myself across her. I was too small to cover her. Sometimes I think that's why I grew up to be so tall.
I stirred free from my memories. I folded up Mom's star blankets in slow and faltering hands. I could hear Rabbit in the next room over, mimicking the narrator on the radio. If the BIA wanted to send him to a boarding school they were going to have to kill me first. I would rather have died than watch my son turn into my father.
* * * * *
The snow settled on the ground in a crisp and glittering blanket. Tiny little wintersweets bloomed all over the tameless blue permafrost. The petals were sheer, a creamy egg-yellow wrapped around scarlet, and they shivered in the wind, shaking off the snowflakes on their fanning leaves.
Early in the morning I went with Rabbit to the wharf and we watched the sun bleed burnt orange. A fur trapper wandered around putting out all the sweetgrass lanterns. Ice floes tumbled out into the shallow ocean from the Sugow River, gleaming like raw diamonds. The beluga whales wallowed around in leisurely circles. One of the babies swam right up to the berths where the boats were moored and Rabbit leaned down and stroked his leathery gray head. He sang, the whale, a soft, clear song. In the next few months he'd turn white like his parents and learn the songs of the past.
The first ferry of the day docked at the pier. Road workers from the mainland came down the apron ramp and milled off to the diner. I didn't know that the diner was open at this hour. A mail carrier with a thick brown tote bag sat down on one of the long willow benches. He rifled through letters, calling out the clan names stamped on the envelopes. I was surprised when he called out mine.
"Did I get a letter?" Rabbit asked, feeding snails to the belugas.
I picked Rabbit up and we walked over to the mailman. I took the letter in my free hand. I didn't have a good feeling about this. The last letter I'd gotten was from the Selective Service System. "Order to Report for Induction," the paper had read.
I sat on the bench, Rabbit on my lap. I tore open the envelope with my teeth. I should have looked at the return address. The moment the letter fell on my lap I recognized the loopy handwriting--
Hey Chief,
How are you? Is the weather OK in Eskimo Land? If you piss and it's cold out does your piss freeze?
I got some real bad news. I don't know if Irish wrote to you but he wrote to me. Milk died. They think it was consumption or something but I think he was coughing back in Hiroshima. He was real young too. It's a shame.
OK, I guess I'll see you at the wake. I wrote the address on the back. Say hi to the polar bears for me.
Terry
For a while I sat completely still. I read the letter three times. By the third time it didn't make any more sense than it had the first. Milk couldn't have died. Only last month I'd talked to him at Fort Lewis. He was sixteen. He was somebody's boy. In a way he was our boy.
Boys aren't supposed to die.
"Daddy?" Rabbit said, tugging on my shoulder. "Can we eat bannock today?"
I folded up the letter. I tucked it in my shirt pocket. "Sure," I told him, my hand on the back of his head.
My head felt tight. My throat ached. The war wasn't over. Not if it was still claiming lives.
* * * * *
When I took Rabbit back to Fawn's house I asked her if I could take him with me to Utah. She told me no, in no uncertain terms.
"I don't want him around those people," she
said.
She leaned heavily against the sundial outside her house. Her back was turned to me. For a moment I thought she was in pain. She had a stomach condition, Fawn. I'd always suspected it contributed to her crabby personality.
Turned out she was only lighting up. She spun around and took the cigarette out of her mouth. She blew a cloud of poison breath into the air.
"You know you're not supposed to inhale," I told her.
I'll never understand cigarettes. Some white guy saw us burning kinnikinnick, probably for prayer, and decided it would be a good idea to put it in his lungs. Kinnikinnick doesn't go in your lungs. You might as well stuff superglue down your throat.
"He's not going to Utah," Fawn said.
She was dressed in white women's clothes, a pink sweater and saddle shoes. Sometimes she went to the mainland, worked the typewriter for a legal firm. You wear Indian clothes on the mainland and they'll look at you like you just finished killing Custer.
"Fawn," I said. "These are my friends."
She wrapped a skinny arm around her stomach. She coughed, hard. Whether it was abdominal pain or cigarette smoke I didn't know. She didn't want me to know. I still worried about her. She was Rabbit's mom. That made her the most important woman in my life. Never mind that she was the only woman in my life. I had a cousin in Saskatchewan, but I guessed she didn't count these days.
Fawn wiped her mouth and sucked on her cigarette. Just standing next to her I felt kind of nauseous.
"He's not going," Fawn said.
I knew better than to argue the matter. I knew I didn't have that right.
* * * * *
I left at night, so Rabbit wouldn't miss me. Luckily he had school the next day. If I took the railway straight from Tacoma I could visit Milk in the morning, be back again by nightfall. It all hinged on whether I could go forty hours without sleep.
It was six o'clock when the ferry chugged past Vancouver Island. The sun was gone already and the sky was blue-black. A dash of mauve twilight hung over the bloated harbor, the fisheries, the muddy coast. I gripped the rusted railing in my hands, listened to the boat motors cutting through smooth water. Nearby a pair of elderly women sat tittering over a fashion magazine. It was scandalous, they said; you could see the model's ankles and everything.
Milk worked in packing. He couldn't hold his liquor. He was heavy on his feet and a light sleeper and he was dead, somehow, and that didn't make sense. I remembered his smile and it cut through me like a serrated knife.
"That Marilyn," I heard someone say. "She's a real American gal."
Milk liked Lena Horne. He used to hang her picture over his bunk. The day she came and sang for us in Bavaria his face went as red as Irish's hair.
Milk couldn't be dead. Dead boys don't have favorite hobbies, favorite pinup girls. Dead boys don't smile at you when you sneak them extra water rations in boot camp.
The ferry docked in Washington a little more than an hour later. The giant white lighthouse pierced the darkness with its warm, blinking yellow windows. Buoy bells clinked loudly on the whispering waves. Merchants cussed at one another and pried open their wares with their crowbars, the wooden crates creaking, collapsing.
My rucksack on my shoulder, I stared ahead of me at the flat Nisqually Plain. It looked so empty, so vast, I couldn't imagine how anything lay on the other side. I couldn't imagine how I was supposed to cross it.
The truth is that I didn't want to cross it.
* * * * *
On the Mount Rainier Express I pinched myself twice to keep from falling asleep. The mountain cloaked the train window in a clammy, ominous shadow. The shadow broke when the sun rose and my eyes felt like sandbags, my head heavy on my shoulders. I tried to eat a bar of pemmican. I couldn't. I kept thinking about Milk.
I got off the train at Logan, swapped for Bingham and Garfield and sat between a mother and her crying baby and a heavyset man who stared at me for the entire ride. I wondered if I'd broken some kind of rule, if I was supposed to sit at the back of the train. But if that were the case, the conductor never said. I guess I've never been very good at numbers, because by the time we pulled into Salt Lake City it was noon, a little later than I'd intended. The heavyset guy shifted his weight around and squeezed past me and said, "They just don't make them like they used to." I hoped he didn't mean me.
Bender & Lester Funeral Parlor was jammed between a dry cleaner's and a bowling alley. When I walked into the dingy brown lobby I could hear the slamming and cracking of bowling pins next door. On my right a standing placard beside a sealed door bore Milk's name in horrible white lettering: Jim Lukaszewicz. I think that's what really did me in. This kid was dead. He was there one moment and gone the next, like snow on your hair, like leaves on a birch tree. He was a soldier, a warrior. How could a cough kill him when Jerries couldn't?
Two-Ply waited outside the door in a nice pair of gray slacks. He had a pretty-looking oriental girl with him and she stood frowning, fussing, touching her hair. Two-Ply smiled when he saw me. I didn't think to return it, all things considered.
"Why haven't you gone in yet?" I asked him.
Two-Ply raked his nails through his hair. "There's no colored entrance," he said.
"Does there need to be?" I asked.
"You sure you ain't an Eskimo, Chief?"
I pushed open the door. I grabbed Two-Ply’s arm and he stumbled after me. His girlfriend raced after us in a panic.
The chapel was dark on the inside. A few pews stood against the walls, nothing more. The coffin at the back of the room was wide open, a wreath hanging from the lid. The round woman sobbing her eyes out must have been Milk's mother. The bony girl with the short curls might have been his girlfriend. She looked our way and I let go of Two-Ply. She frowned vaguely.
"Chief," Pogue muttered, over by the wall. He was wearing his army uniform. He had a man with him, middle-aged, big and square and blond.
I went over to the casket and Milk's face was stark white. He was missing the baggy circles under his eyes. In all other respects he could have been asleep. He had on a nice suit and tie, something I'd never seen him wear before. His hands were folded on his chest.
"Polack bastard," Irish said.
Irish sat in the front pew. His face was shiny and red, like he'd been crying. The girl next to him could only have been his sister. She had his blazing hair, his sharp nose.
Pogue's father went over to Milk's mother, took her by the shoulder and talked to her in a gentle voice. I reached into my rucksack, tired. I took out a sprig of sweetgrass and laid it in the coffin beside Milk.
"Muskawisewin," I muttered.
"What are you doing?" Milk's girlfriend said.
She looked at me crossly. I didn't immediately understand. Sweetgrass is for spirit, for purity. The elders say it's the oldest plant in America. I guess it never occurred to me that white people didn't know that.
The chapel door swung open just then. Fox came inside like a blustery gale. He took one look at Milk's coffin and lost every shred of color in his tan face.
"Do you think we should sing hymns?" Two-Ply said.
Milk's girlfriend gave Two-Ply a venomous stare. I was glad he didn't notice. Irish broke down crying again and Pogue shuffled toward him awkwardly, reaching for his shoulders. Fox spun around and fled the room like a ghost was on his heels.
"No good," murmured Two-Ply's girlfriend.
I didn't know what to do. Milk would have known what to do.
I closed my rucksack and went out after Fox, the chapel door banging closed behind me.
Outside the funeral home the clouds were dirty and gray, molting scraps of feathery white snow. Fox sat on the cold sidewalk, his back against the brick wall. His long, skinny legs were bent, round shoulders hunched, head buried in his hands. Maybe he heard my soles on the pavement. I drew near and his head shot up. He looked like a specter, haunted and sick.
"He was just a kid," Fox said.
I sat down next to him. The ground und
erneath me felt like ice. I liked that. It helped me think.
Fox dragged his hand through his hair. His hair looked clean, a lot thicker than it had when we were in the army. A light snapped off in his eyes and he calmed down, at least outwardly. He stretched his legs, his hands on his knees.
"I know," I finally said.
"How many people do you think are going to die from this? That bomb, it..." Fox drew off. "Any one of you could die," he said. "We were all exposed to it."
"We knew this from the start," I said. "We knew we could die."
"The war's supposed to be over," Fox said. "It's not supposed to kill us after we've already won it."
Fox's coat was corduroy. It must not have been heavy enough, because he shivered right through the fabric. I thought it was the cold, not Milk, that had him shivering. He'd blown apart live human beings before without so much as flinching.
"He was a good kid," Fox said.
"What about you?" I asked.
"What about me?" Fox repeated, at a loss.
He looked different and the same. I can't explain it. I can't explain the way my pulse felt fast, the way I felt dizzy and sick and comforted all at once.
"Are you alright?" I asked him.
"Well, sure," he said slowly. "It's not like I've--"
Fox cut himself off. He looked at me, then away. It was frustrating, not knowing what was on his mind. But I thought I could guess.
"Are you still in Whitefish?" I asked him.
"No," he said.
It scared me almost as much as Milk dying. If he wasn't in Whitefish I didn't know where he was. I didn't know whether he was safe.
Something was wrong with me, and I didn't care.
"Who found out?" I asked him.
"Customer," he muttered, rubbing the nape of his neck.
I didn't think to ask how. That squid from the 12th Naval had figured it out. Maybe there was a trick to it. Maybe I didn't know how to see the world except in shades of Indian and Non-Indian.