The Lovebird (25 page)
THAT NIGHT BEFORE BED
, Cora was especially spirited. Her eyes still had the glint of a day spent digging on the prairie—the same glow I had been so surprised to see in my own. And maybe it was because we had gathered roots together, or because she had told me the story of No Intestines and the Bighorns, or maybe Granma had pulled her aside for a private talk, but for the first time, she spoke to me with some friendliness, some familiarity. “Do you want to pet Daphne?” she asked, standing before me in her nightgown. Her hands, the twin birds, flapped at her sides. Of course I did. Cora opened the cage.
She cupped the hamster with exquisite care. Daphne curled one of her own fairy hands around Cora’s finger. “One of my relatives got her at a pet store in Billings,” Cora said. “Her name used to be Roxy. Then my relative moved away to Great Falls with a truck driver and said I could have her. I changed her name to Daphne. It’s my favorite.” Daphne hunkered down happily in Cora’s hand, clearly enamored of her mistress. “I think she’s happier here.”
PRAIRIE DOG(Cynomys ludovicianus)
ONE END-OF-JUNE AFTERNOON
, Granma and I stood together in the kitchen, surrounded by hundreds of wild turnips, the spoils from our digging excursions. Jim was at work, and Cora had accompanied Josie on a trip to Crow Agency to visit friends. Before Cora had left that morning, I’d passed my long letter to Simon into one of her fluttery hands, and she’d agreed with an officious nod of her head to mail it for me. “No problem,” she’d said, studying Simon’s mouthful of a moniker on the envelope with an inquisitive squint. “You can count on me.” She was warmer with me now than she had been in weeks previous, but it was a warmth tinged with wariness, and her smile as she slipped out the screen door had been but a fleeting flicker.
The turnips lolled on the countertops and on the glittery Formica table. They appeared alive, like terrestrial starfish. Granma showed me how to weave the limblike offshoots of the roots together to make a braid. We would store the roots that way, braided together, and she would pull them off as she needed to make wild turnip flour for thickening stews and baking breads. “Cora does love to do this,” she said, “so we’ll make sure to save some for her to braid when she gets home.”
“How did you learn about all these things?” I asked. “Digging roots and storing them and using them for food? And chokecherry jam? And pemmican?”
“I was like Cora,” Granma said, “a
káalisbaapite
, a grandmother’s grandchild. That means my grandmother raised me and showed me everything she knew. My own mother was gone. She was sick from drinking. She was lost to us.” I thought of Dad and wondered if that was the best way to describe what he had always been: lost to me. Still, it was possible to miss someone who had never even been entirely there, and I longed to see the delicate drape of his eyelids over his Irish eyes, to pull his glasses gently from his sleeping face as I had so many times when I was younger.
“My grandmother knew all the secrets of the earth,” Granma continued, “things my mother’s generation had been told they were supposed to forget. I think my grandmother was very disappointed that she could not help my mother, so she turned all of her attention toward me. She took me—my big sister, Ruby, was raised by some other relatives. We lived right on this spot—it was a different house then, one that my grandparents had built—and we walked together all over this prairie. She managed to keep me here with her until I was Cora’s age—that’s when two men in suits came and took me away to a boarding school for Indian kids.” Granma made a mistake in her braiding and unwove a few roots so that she could start again. “It took me many years to find my way back to my home,” she said.
“You were really taken away?”
“Mmm,” she nodded. “It happened that way sometimes. The law said we had to go. They had already come out here looking for me twice before, and my Granma told me to hide under her buffalo blanket, which I did.” Her hands shook a little while she twisted the roots. “Eventually, though, they figured it out
and found me, and I went. But I hollered and carried on the whole way.”
“How long did you have to stay at the boarding school?”
“Seven years, honey. Until I graduated.”
“Did you learn a lot?”
Granma was silent, and for several moments all I heard was the soft rustling of our work. “It was more like I unlearned a lot,” she finally said. “You see, my grandmother was very traditional. Even though she lived after the turn of the century, and after the reservation had been established, she really clung to her old ways.”
“Things like this?” I said, lifting the beginnings of my braid off the countertop. It smelled of clean earth, and I resisted the urge to press my face into it.
“Yes.” Granma nodded. “And she was a healer. She understood all about plants, and she loved animals, too—the prairie dogs were her helpers. She began teaching me what she knew when I was a very small child. So I grew up in the Crow world that my grandmother had been taught to keep by her grandmother. And that
she
had been taught to keep by
her
grandmother. And so on, all the way back to No Intestines. Remember him?”
I nodded, thinking of Jim’s vertical line and ink-stained hands.
“My grandmother taught me every day. I spoke the Crow language, ate traditional Crow food, prayed Crow prayers. I was a happy girl. I slept under a heavy buffalo blanket beside her every night. And every morning, at
iisakchihpashé
—that’s dark face time, when the Creator comes closest to the earth—I felt her rise and go outside to pray.”
With a sudden flutter in my belly—the kind that comes with unexpected discoveries (a shiny quarter on the ground or a lost red resin bracelet found)—I realized what Granma had
been doing every morning before dawn when the screen door squeaked and I heard her step outside. She had been praying. I couldn’t imagine forcing myself out of bed every morning at dark face time to pray. Even thinking of it filled my limbs with a lazy feeling. It would be easier to stay awake until dark face time, like Rasha had done when she’d worked on her perfume recipes while living at her cousin’s place. Maybe that had been a sort of prayer, too—the effort to create an invisible kind of beauty.
“So that’s what you do every morning? Pray like your grandmother did?”
“Yes, honey. But I haven’t always done that. You see, when I was taken away to the boarding school, I was emptied of all those things my grandmother showed me and filled up with other things, new things. It was all part of assimilation—that was the word they used at the time, people like the two men in suits and the teachers at the school. They said Indians had to be reeducated in white ways and become functioning members of white society. It wasn’t okay for us to do things our way anymore.” Granma peeled a lingering strip of skin from one of the roots. “Did you like school, Margie?”
“No.” I recalled shuffling self-consciously through high school with a stack of books, my only companions, perpetually pressed to my chest. “I was really lonely. I kept to myself, and my dad was …” Granma looked my way with interest, and suddenly I felt protective of Dad, too protective to talk about how once he had cried in front of everybody at the Father-Daughter Dance because he drank and was irredeemably sad. “… and … yes, I just hated it.”
“I hated it too. At the school I went to, some kids actually died from sickness. I think they died from homesickness, homesickness so strong it broke their hearts. Oh, I used to feel so sorry for the kids at the boarding school,” Granma said. “That was
why I hated it so much. I always felt so sorry for everyone. They lost their homes and families. They were made to forget their language and were punished if they tried to speak it. They were made to forget their prayers and religion, and given new prayers and a new religion. They really had lost their entire world. I used to feel so sorry for them, so sorry my chest just
hurt
. And then, sometimes, I realized I was no different from any of them. In fact, I
was
them. Of course, after a while, most of us got used to it. And after seven years, well, I was a very different girl coming out than I had been going in.”
“After you graduated, did you go back home?”
“My grandmother had died while I was in school. I didn’t feel like I had a home to go back to. If I went back to the Crows as I was, with my hair all curly from my permanent, speaking my slangy English, wearing my hat and gloves and a cross on a gold chain around my neck, knowing how to read, write, and type, it wouldn’t make sense. I was no longer a part of the place I had belonged to as a girl. I would feel like …” Granma hesitated, hunting for a word. “An
akihkéetaahawassdaawe
—an astronaut. Someone who’s been to a different planet.
“And also,” she went on, “I was afraid that if I returned to the reservation, that would make me a failure. At the boarding school, they had taught us that the reservation was no kind of home, no kind of life. It was poor and behind the times, they said. They wanted us to be a part of the so-called civilized world. I didn’t know if I believed that. Actually, I didn’t know what I believed at all. But I got a job as a secretary in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
I stared at the turnips to hide the surprise in my eyes. It was so hard to imagine Granma as I knew her—Granma with her floor-skimming skirts and button-down cowboy shirts, Granma with her Snow White flour sack and root-digging stick of chokecherry wood, Granma with her grin full of gaps—as a big-city
secretary, a professional girl in stockings and a silk blouse, wielding endless papers and pencils and pens instead of knitting needles.
“Really?” I said. “A secretary?”
“Mmmhmm. I did it for about twenty years, too. It wasn’t always easy. My skin wasn’t light enough. That always posed some difficulty. And I lost a few jobs because my bosses thought I was disrespectful for never making eye contact.” She poked me playfully with her elbow. “I guess that’s one habit the school never managed to extinguish. But for the most part, I did pretty well. I always had a nice apartment, all to myself. But,” she paused, “that was just it: I was always alone.”
I nodded. I knew what that was, to be Always Alone. I remembered what Simon had once stopped to ask me in the middle of Latin class on that long-ago day when he had turned his attention, his hyacinths and gemlike eyes, his unlit cigarette, entirely toward me, and I had warmed and blushed in my chair. I asked a similar question of Granma. “Did you have any friends?”
“No,” she said. “Not really. Boyfriends came and went. But it was hard for me to make connections. I felt so different, inside, from everybody. I didn’t know how to explain myself to myself, much less to anyone else. I didn’t feel Crow. I wasn’t white. I was just in between.”
I pictured her as a girl the same age as me, working in a world she could not quite call her own, strolling the crowded city sidewalks with a sideways gaze so as not to intrude upon another’s space with her eyes. I could see her hands, smooth and agile, clasped tightly around the straps of her prim purse, with no bits of Montana earth lingering beneath her fingernails. And I saw her as a thirty-year-old woman, a lonely woman who ate dinner while standing over the stove, who missed the grandmother she remembered and wondered about the mother she didn’t, whose
face sometimes took on a secret startled look when an old Crow word, coughed up by some cranny in her brain, flew like a lost bird into her head and then back out again. And for the first time, I felt a mournful twinge in my left ovary for Granma—not for the way she was now, in the kitchen, silver haired and sure of herself, but for the way she had been then. “It makes me sad,” I said.
“What does, honey?”
“Thinking of you like that. So alone. Like you said. In between.”
“Well, I didn’t stay that way forever, now, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here with you today. I came out of my shell eventually,” she said. “What happened was, I began to hear about something that was happening in Minneapolis. I kept reading about it in the newspaper. The American Indian Movement. They called it AIM. A group of Indian activists had come together because they were tired of police brutality in the city. And then it developed into something more. They began saying that Indians should be proud of who they were and reclaim the knowledge, the traditions, the identities they had lost. One night, after work, I drove over and sat in on one of their meetings. I looked around me, and it was as if all those kids I had felt so sorry for at the boarding school, they were all grown up, and they wanted it all back, everything that had been taken from them, from their parents, their grandparents, from all their ancestors.”
“What were they talking about?” I asked. I thought of Bumble, Raven, Ptarmigan, Orca, and Bear, how they had looked the first time I’d seen them sitting around a table at Gelato Amore.
“They wanted to end the poverty of Indian people,” Granma said, “get back the millions of acres of land that had been stolen from the tribes, and see all the broken treaties made right. For the first time since I was a little girl, I started to feel excited. This was
something I could do, I thought, and then that empty, lonely feeling seemed like it would leave me.”