Her Kind, a novel (3 page)

The sun set in the east today.

This reversal was how it appeared to me as the river reflected the setting sun into my east window.

Reflection.

A mirror of light to beauty.

Perhaps the reflection is showing me one last time.

Harry tells me not to talk like that when he brings me my pills this morning, but I know they count the days now, and I am guilty of doing the same.

My Anna Viola’s name was not even properly engraved on the family mausoleum. At least in death someone might have paid some respect. But, 30 years prior, Henry had told the engraver that her name was Annie V., as that is what he had always called her. Why would he not rethink it for perpetuity? And who was to listen to me back then to correct it after he was gone?

He was the one who had called us Rosie and Annie. For many years, he was the only one.

It was likely my last outing today.

One knows these things when we are in our final days. Harry and Lillie May kindly drove me to our mausoleum at Pine Hill to pay respects to our family and so that I could see that my name had been engraved as I wished.

Of course it was stated only as Rose E., as if the engraver had run out of room for my second name, that eternal brand of my mother that I would not escape even at death.

E.

Like a branding for life on a soul that had no idea what it was to carry it forward.

Of course, I had been relieved when Emma died. I can say this only now as I write these words here without fear of retribution, recrimination, her silent rebuke.

My words matter here.

For far too long they resided only in my mind, repeated only to myself, shared in silence.

Such a very loud silence!

If I have held these thoughts to myself for these 90 years, only she knew what it was to carry such grief in this resounding silence from which we came to know from her. We left her in the protective circle that silence can offer when you own no other boundaries.

I can still picture that stoic face: jaw set as if haughtiness were in her nature. But any elitism was a very false perception of Emma. Today, I like to believe I can finally forgive her rather than pity her.

Pity can be so self-righteous.

Annie would tell me I was so cold-hearted when I would say that I never felt any warmth from Emma, but I was really not saying it to be cruel or selfish. Perhaps my brother Harry felt some warmth. He seemed to be the only one of us she ever let close.

Piqued, drawn Harry. Her only son who had lived.

Propping myself up to balance on my cane as the third leg of this old stool, I traced my hand down the list of names on the east side of the mausoleum this afternoon.

I tried to touch, to remember Emma’s grief, the reason for her distance from me. From us all.

I had to stop then. Take a breath. Look again.

I knew this story too well. And its aftermath.

That’s what they used to call the four of us who had lived.

The second family.

Some still claim Black Hawk’s son survived that last battle at Bad Axe, the last ambush planned to rid the Sac from this great riverfront someone later named River Road.

Once and for all.

Retreat.

Removal.

Exclusion.

Nasheaskuk had pressed himself into that dry bluff dirt, angled amid billion-year-old protrusions arched with toes that hung on, panting to live out that sweltering dog day as he peered down to see his sisters bloodied, and one floating just below him at water’s edge like a bloated muskrat trapped in its own shore fortress.

He turned away then.

He had the sight even from this distance as his grandfather had always told him he would.

You will outlive them all.

Pyesa had declared it. When you do, he had warned, you must remember never to bow before those that imitate our thunder. Their sticks and drums only mimic the source of here and hereafter. Yours is from the deeper source.

You are whirling thunder.

Do not respect their power as it is fired by a great fear. Hatred has much fury at its outset, but it will always eventually turn back on itself. He had said the words as if carving them into his skin. It felt that hard and painful.

He was very young and did not really ever understand the meaning until now when his toes were aching and he admired even his own persistence to hang on.

The test is patience, his grandfather had always reminded him. He used that now and it was working. It gave him something other than what he saw and heard below.

Nasheaskuk could hear those words as if his grandfather was behind him, whispering with that rolling depth he used for the most important of messages. But it was overpowered by a softer, low murmur of his grandmother. Her lower octaves always underscored his grandfather’s loud clap of words. Together their force lifted him and now he adamantly kept those toes encamped on a blistering hot rock as if he were a volunteer tree rising perpendicular to the bluff.

A solid young tree, strong enough to bend with whatever came at him. He would not break.

Grandmother took his hand and he felt it, but no tears could fall now. He was a warrior and had turned his heart off and emotion would have to come later, only after this white man’s harangue with guns not words. She, too, would not have cried for the mother and her children, a slaughter of people for their secrets, but would have stood with him and prayed for their spirits to quickly depart so as to not feel the pain of this ugly cowardice. An ambush by those who could not understand their own stance.

They continued to fire with their false-thunder, an embarrassing impersonation of the power of the great river spirit, our great mother of waters who loved us all as only his grandmother had taught him. He clearly heard her say this and so his toes remained in place till it was over.

It had been all that saved him that day.

Nasheaskuk stood in line with others who had survived that last battle along with those that had never resisted the new great father as they said goodbye to the Mesquakie. Chained at the wrists and ankles as if he were owned now by something other than himself.

All who had been forced to cross the great river, camped along the soon-to-be Parkhurst where Eleazer had arrived, and then pushed on again, and again, eventually to Stroud where Mary and the others would be born.

It was the thunder calling us home; Black Hawk had told him when he decided to not follow his people to Oklahoma.

The real thunder.

I will follow you soon enough, he had told him before they had bound his legs in the chains. He called out from the line of warriors that stood with him.

Quiet.

A guard had called out to him, but Black Hawk kept up his words.

Whirling Thunder, you must lead them now. We remain proud as our pride is never lost. As they pushed him away, he said one final word as if it came straight from Peya.

Remember.

Do not hang your head as we are Thunder Clan, rolling our presence louder than the new great father who faces a false mirror each morning, seeing himself as the source of all—believing his false wisdom will change the world order.

Retribution is never for free.

False acts and orders cannot control forever. This mirror is made of glass and will one day shatter into the shards of his deeds. Shards that will one day seek his own blood for what he has done.

He does not replace Great Father. Will never be.

Remember now that the stars will blanket your sleep the same as they do right here. It was what Black Hawk had shared in his last good-night before the slaughter as he and his eldest son had turned to watch their very last moon rise over the great river.

His father had no idea what he had done.

So it goes with family secrets.

You think they are buried or that somehow time has erased them. In our family we liked to say that some people would take secrets to their grave. We liked to believe that once all the carriers of the skeletons were dead, there was no one left to tell.

But secrets are really more like the mudpuppies, the great river bottom feeders.

They live unsuspected, unassuming in the deepest, darkest waters of the great river, but eventually they are caught and brought up to the light. I have come to learn that more energy is put into keeping the secret from the light than was ever put into examining them in full view. My family has been no exception.

Too painful, some might say.

Too hard, they wouldn’t say.

Courage? I don’t think so.

Yet, I have learned that family secrets are viciously motivating, even transcendent over space and time, generations and countries, oceans and rivers.

But once a mudpuppy appears, having fed for years on the larvae and waste of the river bottom, it undergoes a metamorphosis.

The secret is dissected by the light.

When my sister Annie and I were young, we liked to believe we could keep each other’s secrets. But we learned soon enough that secrets are never really kept. We liked to believe that we were the guardians of a sisterly trust;
never, ever, swear on the Bible, spit thrice, never betray my sister.

But even if a secret is never shared aloud, it exists within the secretkeeper.

Like the 100-year-old catfish at the bottom of the river, secrets are eventually caught and brought to surface to be examined for all of their oddities and comforting homeliness. Yet, the longer they thrive at the river bottom, they need continued care and feeding as they grow and grow and grow.

I once saw an 80-pound catfish on the front page of the
Davenport Gazette
. It was the ugliest-looking fish, almost prehistoric. The aged being had been brought up, brought to surface and exposed to the sunlight off the fisherman’s pier down on the levee by the green tree. Exposed so that all of us could view the wonder of its lack of spectacularity,

its peculiarities,

its ugliness.

An ugly beauty.

It’s like that with secrets.

Along with the entire horror aura when brought into the light, we can’t help ourselves from looking. We have to look.

We are taken in by horror.

It’s like trying to squelch a laugh in church; it finds its way out. Joy can be like that; so can secrets.

So if we are not afraid to steal that peek at what we may perceive is ugly, we might, just might, be able to see the glimmer, the gleam of something beautiful.