A Quality of Light (23 page)

I
slept late the next morning. The crunch of tires on the graveled driveway woke me and I crept downstairs to find a scribbled note on the table saying they’d return by lunch time. I felt grateful for their absence. I stayed in my room all morning, aching with bruises and an unaccustomed heaviness. I did not move from my
bed, shifting from shallow, fitful sleep into thick, purple wakefulness. They missed lunch, and by the time I heard them return, it was late in the afternoon. The whistle of the tea kettle and the scrape of chairs told me they were seated at the table, and I walked slowly downstairs to face them. They greeted me with half smiles. I hitched my chair up to the table, my eyes brimming with tears.

I’m sorry,” I said, shakily.

“No, Joshua. We’re sorry,” my mother said, smoothing my hair and wiping the corners of my eyes with a finger.

“Why are you sorry? It was me. I was horrible.”

“No, you were right. We should have helped you understand. We should have helped you know yourself. Your Indian self, not just the self you became with us,” she said quietly.

“That’s right, son. You have nothing to apologize for. It’s us,” my father said. “We went to speak with Pastor Chuck. We didn’t know what else to do. We had no way of understanding what it was you were going through. We had no way of knowing how to go about helping you. We never once thought that we needed to offer you other things.”

“You are both an Indian and a Kane, Joshua,” my mother said. “We were wrong not to teach you or help you to learn how to be both instead of just one. We were selfish thinking we could recreate you. God created you to be an Indian as well as our son, and we got so busy teaching you as our son that we neglected to help you learn to discover yourself as an Indian. And that’s wrong.

“But, son, we couldn’t tell you what the world was like — what people are like, what to expect from them, how to
be.
Because then you would have gone out into it with our perceptions, our fears, our views, and that’s wrong. That’s what the parents of the kids who beat you passed on to them. It would be just as wrong of us to send you out into the world carrying our beliefs and attitudes, even if they are Christian. You have to find out things on your own, make up your own mind, reach your own conclusions. We just have to be here to guide you, to help you choose.”

“Yes, son,” my father continued. “Even if the world hurts you sometimes, we have to let you feel that. Even if it’s confusing and
scary, you have to feel that too. If we protected you from that, we’d be wrong again. But you have to come to us when you feel all those things and tell us so we can help you see your way through them. Go through them together, learn from them together, so you won’t lose yourself in the process.”

“Either of your selves,” my mother said.

“I should have told you,” I said quietly.

“Told us what, son?” she asked.

“About school. About the teasing, the hassles. How confused it made me. How scared. But I thought it would stop. I thought it would go away. And I didn’t want to trouble you with nothing.”

“Something that troubles you is never nothing, son,” my father said. “It’s something. Yes, you should have told us, but that’s behind us now. What we need to do now is move forward.”

“To what?” I asked.

“To finding a way to teach you about your Indian self. To teach us. And to finding a way to forgive those kids,” he said.

“Forgive them? You need to forgive them too?”

“Certainly. Do you think you were the only one who wanted to sail into town and beat the dickens out of a few people?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“You wanted to do that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh, yes. When I saw you lying in that bed in the hospital all bruised and battered, I wanted to find those kids and beat them to within an inch of their lives. Their parents too.
Especially
the parents.”

“But you’re a Christian.”

“So? Christians get angry too, Joshua. Anger’s something we all have. The trick is to learn how to control it rather than have it control you.”

“Remember Jesus in the temple?” my mother began in the earnest, pious tone she used when she spoke of biblical things. “He erupted in anger at the buyers and the sellers. He allowed Himself to feel the rage, allowed Himself to let it out. If our Lord can be human enough to be angry, then we certainly ought to be.”

“You’re not mad because I swore, because I pushed your hands away?” I asked.

“Well,” my father said, “we could have done without the cussing, but the important thing is that you let out how you felt. And it’s okay. It’s okay that you were angry with us. It’s okay to feel vengeance, to want to hit back. It’s okay to be angry because you don’t know how to react to things in life. Anger’s never right or wrong, son. How you
act
out of anger is, though. That’s the sin.”

“Did Johnny sin?” I asked, looking back and forth at the two of them. They exchanged a long look, one that spoke volumes in a second or two, and I knew in that instance how incredibly close and connected my parents were to each other, how devoted they were to me. It was my father who spoke.

“Well, son, we should all try to be free of anger. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it or feel sinful because we do. It’s a part of us, something the good Lord gave us to help us deal with ourselves and others. So being free of it means understanding why we have it. Being free of it means controlling
it
instead of
it
controlling us. That’s freedom. Do you follow, son?”

I thought about it. I said, slowly, “Johnny didn’t know why he was angry. He just blew up. He didn’t control it, it controlled him.”

“Yes. So, I’d say that John was wrong but I don’t think he sinned. Mother?” my father said.

“Yes. You sin when you’ve been taught what’s right and what’s wrong and you choose to behave wrongly. I don’t think John’s parents have ever taught him that. He only knew to fight. To hurt back. But that doesn’t make him a sinner, Joshua, it makes him ignorant.”

“Johnny’s not ignorant,” I blurted.

“I don’t mean ignorant as in rude and wicked, I mean ignorant because he doesn’t
know.
There’s a difference,” she said.

“Those town kids are ignorant, then, huh?”

They smiled.

“Yes, son. They’re ignorant,” my father said and squeezed my shoulder gently.

“So I should try and help them know? Help them know that Indians aren’t dirty, stupid savages? That
I’m
not?”

“Yes,” they said together, quietly.

“I know why I had the anger then,” I said.

“Why is that, son?” my father asked.

“Because of ignorance. Theirs and mine. They’re ignorant of who I am and so am I. We all only see one part of me. They only see the Indian and I only see the Kane. They hate the part they can see and I hate the part I can’t see. Wow.”

“And we’ll help you see that part of you, son. I don’t know how just yet but we’ll help you see it. I promise,” my father said.

“Joshua?” my mother said.

“Yes?”

“Do you know why we chose your name?”

“No, Mother, I don’t.”

“Well, your father and I spent a lot of time thinking about your name before we signed the adoption papers. We wanted it to be special. We sat at this table and we wrote down all kinds of names and we couldn’t find one that we really,
really
liked. Then, one Sunday, Pastor’s sermon used the story of Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho with his horn. And on the way back in the car that day we decided we wanted to name you Joshua — after a great warrior.”

My mouth fell open.

“A great
spiritual
warrior,” she continued. “Someone who was never afraid to call on God’s help to help in all his battles. The walls of Jericho that Joshua destroyed are the walls of ignorance — the walls of people who don’t know God’s way. They’re big and mighty walls, but Joshua brought them down with one blast of his horn. His horn is a metaphor for God’s teachings. When we heard that story that day, we knew your name should be Joshua because something told us you would use God’s teachings one day to bring down walls of ignorance. Maybe this is that time.” She reached out to hug me to her.

“Wow,” I said quietly. “I’ve got two warrior names.”

“How’s that, son?” my father asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s kind of a secret.”

“Oh,” they said and smiled.

As I lay in bed that night I thought about the two warrior names I had been given. It could be no coincidence that they both
reflected the same message. I knew how to live as Joshua, but learning how to live as Thunder Sky was going to take a great effort, and although I didn’t know that night where or how to start, I did know that the answer would come, that the two halves of my being would come together. I thought about Johnny and our blood brother pact to be loyal, good and kind, how the promises of childhood travel with us through the years, metamorphosing, galvanizing themselves to withstand the pressures of age, maturity, the world. I thought about my parents, how we shared that same pact, unstated but lived nonetheless. I thought about loyalty, goodness and kindness and how they felt better than the hard ingots of anger they replaced. I thought about warriors.

As sleep folded itself around me that night, I prayed for the strength to be a spiritual warrior. I drifted into dreams of Johnny and me dancing around on the crumbled walls of a great city, its bricks and facades strewn around our feet, its cornices and columns shattered, our exultant cries shimmering across the great song of the universe like a grace note — the muted vibrato of a great trumpet.

I
didn’t mind Galt. It wasn’t real different from home. They called it a training school, but hell, I’d been trained that way all my life. All the adults ignored you until you made it absolutely necessary for them to recognize you. People yelled and screamed at each other even though no one really knew each other. You ate together but no one talked. You were never sure from one day to the next who was going to be around and who wasn’t. So adjusting wasn’t exactly one of the great theatrical stretches of all time. I actually liked it. I didn’t have to worry about getting slapped and pushed around by some drunken boob and the lights stayed on after seven o’clock every night. Guys would be crying in their cots at night because they wanted to be home. I’d have to smother my face in my pillow to keep from laughing — home was my prison and Galt was a day at the beach.

There was this Indian guy there named Staatz. Real big, muscular, long haired and mean — a real take-no-shit warrior. Staatz hated white people. He’d been there since he was fourteen and he was seventeen then, so he’d done quite a bit of time. Normally, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with some skinny white kid like me but he heard I was in there for assaulting four guys and when he found out it was an Indian I was standing up for, it was like he adopted me. We’d sit on his cot for hours talking.

Staatz was from a big family and all of his brothers were in the Movement. The Indian Movement. He’d grown up hearing them talk about working for it and he knew everything. That’s why he hated white people so much. He told me about broken treaties, about reserves with no running water, no electricity, about Indian agents, about not being able to go to high school or university, about kids being taken away from their families and given to white people, about drunks and addicts and suicides, murders and all the shit stuff that comes from having your people kept under.

I was amazed. This was a vision of Indians I wasn’t prepared for. Until then I’d believed that everything was sweat lodges and sunsets, the whole romantic noble savage stuff. Staatz told me about smallpox on blankets, about whole tribes being thrown into slavery and how they committed suicide rather than live as slaves, about women and children dying under the thunder of cavalry guns, about having ceremonies and rituals outlawed, about graves being robbed, religious artifacts stolen, about the Indian Act and how they had to ask permission to do almost everything we take for granted. He told me about Indians being the real explorers of the country, not just dumb brown lackeys in canoes. About the Iroquois Confederacy and how it was a model for the US Constitution, about council fires, how Indians had such respect and honor for this land that Indian soldiers would volunteer to fight for it, even though they weren’t allowed to vote in it.

He talked about the black civil rights movement. Indians were Canada’s niggers, he said. They suffered the same indignities, and they needed to find a common front to gather on to fight the same fight the blacks had fought and won. He talked about the Movement members taking over Alcatraz prison, claiming it as sovereign territory, and the
impassioned declaration they sent out to the media and the government. He told me that direct warrior action was the only answer to the problem. It wasn’t an Indian problem, Staatz said, it was a white problem. He said that confrontation was the only way to be heard.

I got angry at all the stuff he told me. Angry at the unfairness of it all. Angry at the short-sightedness, at the unnecessary death of cultures, angry at the fact that I was one of the race of people who’d made it all happen. Most of all, I got angry over the sudden demise of my romantic vision, my innocence crushed like all those teepees and wigwams. Staatz was going to be a warrior. He told me that a warrior fought for his people. Fought to get them out from under. Fought to protect them. He told me I was a warrior for protecting you. And that’s when I knew, Josh. That’s when I knew that somehow the cosmic signals had gotten crossed and I was born with the heart and soul of an Indian imprisoned in a white man’s body. That’s when the seed was planted. The seed that would sprout and grow into the warrior consciousness that was my destiny. The only thing I needed to fulfill.