The Lovebird (26 page)

I could hardly believe Granma’s words. Our lives had been so different and yet so much of what she told me was achingly familiar.

“I had saved up so much money over the years, living as quietly and working as hard as I had, that I was able to quit my job and give all my energy to the movement. I wasn’t a leader, but I was always there, on the sidelines. I was there when we seized the BIA headquarters in Washington, D.C. That was how I met Bumble’s mother. I was so happy she was Crow like me. I was at all kinds of protests. I helped to burn down a building and two police cars. I was always writing pamphlets and flyers. It was my life. I put all my effort into it. I wanted to make a difference. Maybe you know that feeling?” Granma stopped braiding and studied her roots with intensity, waiting for my response.

“I do.”

“I got involved with one guy in the movement,” she continued, “then another. Sometimes it seemed like we were all working toward the same goal, but other times it seemed like we were all in our private worlds, all floating in different directions.”

“Like driftwood?”

“Exactly. There was so much unhappiness. And too much anger. And, eventually, too much violence. In 1973, we had a standoff at Wounded Knee, over on the Pine Ridge reservation. Back in 1850, the U.S. Army had massacred 150 Indian people there, including women and children. We returned to that place to hold a protest. But then it turned into something else. And the FBI got involved. People started shooting, and one of the men I’d had a relationship with was killed.” Granma shook her head, remembering. “I had touched his body, known him well, knew his laugh, cooked him food, even seen him cry. And then he was
gone, and for what? I started to wonder if anything we had done had really made a difference at all.”

She considered for a moment. “It’s not that the movement was a waste. It wasn’t. But … for me, well … The feelings I had wanted to escape from were still there. And the things that I had wanted to reclaim, the peace I was searching for, it still felt so far away from me.”

Granma’s braid of roots had grown so long she pushed one end of it into the sink to make room on the counter. My own was short. I was too absorbed in listening to her to get much done.

“And part of me,” she continued, “was just so tired. After Wounded Knee, a lot of my friends were in trouble with the FBI and they had to go on trial. I pulled away from everyone and everything. I slept a lot. I was so tired, honey. You can’t imagine. And I started to have a memory, all the time, just before I fell asleep, of quietness. I guess it was more like a memory-feeling, you know? And it wasn’t just the complete absence of sound that I was remembering, that I had not known since I’d gone away to the boarding school, but a real deep quietness, in my body, in my mind. I think I was remembering my childhood, and lying beside my grandmother under her buffalo blanket. And that’s when I decided I wanted to go home.”

The afternoon was at its ripest moment, at the peak of richness just before it would begin its descent into evening. Granma looked through the window at the gold sky. Her eyes were dark, her mouth closed tight but still mobile, as if struggling to separate the words she wanted to speak from the tears that had collected around them. She was equal portions happy and sad, and in the space between the two there hung her beauty, a weathered and generous beauty born of strength.

“When I drove into Crow Agency,” she finally said, “I was forty years old. I had not been on the reservation since I was eleven,
when the two men in suits took me away. I found my way back out here, back to this piece of land. The house my grandparents had built was still standing, though it was empty and all torn up inside—plenty of animals had made themselves at home in it over the years.” This charmed her, and she laughed. “But it was mine. So I lived. I got a job at a market in St. Xavier, and I worked there in exchange for groceries.

“And sometimes, waking up in the morning, I felt it, that old quietness, coming back into me, as if I had only been away for a month, a week. I felt … home. I found that what I had been looking for, what I had been missing, had been right there, all along. She was here, right here, waiting for me. It was her, and even though she’s everywhere, I found her here.”

I wasn’t sure if Granma meant her grandmother, her mother, or someone else. “Then after a while, I met Jim’s father,” she said. “That’s Ray.” Her face bloomed open when she said his name, and a russet gladness colored her cheeks. “He was a good man, ten years older than me. We met at the Baptist church over in Pryor. I used to go every Sunday. My friends back in AIM would have questioned me for doing it. I don’t know why I went the first time. I guess I was ready to be among people again, and the people there were nice. I kept going because I was curious about Ray, and he kept going because he was curious about me. One Sunday, after the service, a bunch of us were standing around outside in the sunshine. I went up to Ray. He was standing all by himself. I asked him, in a low voice so nobody would hear, ‘Do you really believe any of this stuff they tell us in church?’ I don’t even know what got into me, why I asked him that.”

“What did he say?”

“Ray didn’t say anything at first. He really squinted in that sun, I remember. I thought to myself, ‘He’s handsome.’ Then he stepped a bit closer to me. ‘Actually, Evelyn,’ he said, ‘I do, in my
own way, but I still believe all the things my grandmother taught me, too.’ Well, I rushed over to my car and drove away as fast as I could. And when I got back home, I climbed under the covers. I had a terrified feeling, but I also couldn’t stop laughing. You see, honey, I just knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked. But Granma didn’t seem to hear me. She was living the story as she told it.

“Ray came out here to visit me. I knew he would. And I knew exactly
when
he would. I was waiting outside for him in a dress and sandals with a pot of coffee heating on the stove when he came. And after that, he and I were never apart. I had been just about freezing to death in the winter in my grandparents’ old house, and so we tore that down and built this house together, and we lived out here as a pair. We told everyone we were married, and we were, in the Indian way. He was quiet, never had much to say, and after my years in the city and my time with those activists, I thought, ‘I like this guy. He’s so calm.’ And he was kind to me. When he talked, he talked to me in Crow, and then,” she sighed, as if with relief, “I began to remember. I remembered a lot of things. I went for a long walk every evening. When I saw certain plants, like these turnips, and touched them, and smelled them, I remembered what my grandmother had taught me. Smelling the prairie, seeing it, feeling it … it all came to me through my senses, and I remembered. It was like she was calling me back. Back to my home and back to myself.”

Josie’s truck came growling up the road. Belly ran alongside it as fast as she could, celebrating its approach with staccato barks.

“Ray and I didn’t think we could have any children,” Granma said. “Then Jim came along when I was forty-four. He surprised us, and we were so glad.” I thought of Jim as a baby wearing an endless succession of hand-knitted blue hats, baby Jim the surprise with no line between his eyes. “Ray died twelve years ago. And now there’s Cora.”

Granma stopped braiding and pressed her hands close together. We could hear Cora’s high, strident voice rising above the rumble of Josie’s truck as it pulled up alongside the house. “… and wild roses in dark pink and light pink beads up the sides …”

“It will be better for Cora,” Granma said, almost to herself. And then she did something I hadn’t anticipated. She took the dangling ends of her long braid and wove them into the dangling ends of my shorter one, so that our two braids became one very long garland. She did it so swiftly I hardly saw her hands move. “This makes sense, doesn’t it?” She smiled up at me. “And I think everything is going to turn out for you, too, Margie.”

Cora came through the screen door as if a gust had blown her in, and she tumbled breathlessly into the kitchen on her tripping feet. “I mailed your let—” she started to say before laying her blazing brown eyes on the garland. The rhinestones on her spectacles had a stellar quality—just like, I thought, the tobacco seeds of No Intestines’s vision. And I realized at that moment that the glasses—wherever they had come from—had been destined for Cora. What had at first seemed incongruous and even burdensome on her babyish face actually made perfect sense. The glasses were shining like stars. “You braided?” she bellowed. “Without me?”

“No no, Grandchild. We saved you all of these roots to braid, and when you’re done, we’ll add them on.” Cora examined the remaining roots and decided they were sufficiently plentiful.

Later, after Jim came home from the press, he stood in the kitchen, streaked in shades of indigo and slate and midnight blue that echoed the sky outside. He watched while Granma gave instructions and Cora and I stood on chairs and hung the long garland of braided roots on the wall, affixing it here and there to nails that had evidently been set in place for that purpose years
earlier. “Here? And here? How’s this?” Cora asked. The garland was so long we had to hammer in new nails to hold it up, and even drape some of it across the tops of the kitchen cupboards. “I think we have enough,” Granma said, “to keep all of us full for a very long time.”

6
LARK
(Sturnella neglecta)

JIM RETURNED FROM THE PRESS AN HOUR LATE
one night, and he came bearing gifts.

Granma knitted in her recliner while Cora and Josie played a game of Go Fish under the glow of the star-shaped lamp. They were accompanied by another relative, Fern, age four, whom Josie was looking after for the night. Fern held her own cards but mostly watched, laughing impishly whenever Cora told Josie to go fish. Cora uttered the command with great solemnity, though I could see her twitchy efforts to stifle a smile every time. Josie, who since my arrival had begun to address me less as a curiosity and more as a misguided if well-intentioned soul, invited me to play.

“Join us, Margie,” she said, peering into her fan of cards through the curtain of her long bangs. She looked stately sitting with her elbows on the table, her brown skin smooth, her teeth white, her bosom imposing, like a T-shirted queen of Crow Country, proud of her generous proportions.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just read.” I sat with my
Wheelock’s Latin
opened on my legs, which were sticky with summer night warmth, but I could no more give it my attention than I could engage in even the most uncomplicated of card games because
I was nervous. Jim was coming home. I listened for his truck. I looked over and over again at the screen door. I thought about retreating to my bed and staying there, but I couldn’t allow myself to cave in to such a cowardly impulse—I, who had set San Diego’s most popular eatery ablaze!

This had been happening for weeks, the nervousness. I felt like one of Cora’s fluttering hands. Although Granma had explained that Jim’s avoidance of my eyes was not a sign of dislike, I was still uncomfortable in his presence. In fact, much to my own confusion, I was even more ill at ease than I had been before her reassurances. Still, I resisted the temptation to flee when I knew his homecoming was imminent. I forced myself to wait, to watch him come through the door, to notice what he might say or do. And, most confounding to me of all, there was something delicious, something almost unbearably rich, in all of it—the nervousness, the waiting, the watching. I looked down at my lucky red Chinese shoes. And now that he was an entire hour later than usual, I was damp, quivery, even a little nauseated, and my head ached.

Time slowed down when I finally heard the purr of his truck, so that it might have been another hour that elapsed between his parking and his appearance in the house. During that span of time I stared into the pages of
Wheelock’s
(
victus
, food;
aeternus
, forever;
mell
, honey). He carried a giant plastic sack.

“I got paid today,” he almost sang. “I stopped by Sammy’s Secondhand and brought us back a few presents.” He dropped his lunch pail and thermos on the floor and shook the bag enticingly, like some sort of ink-splattered, summertime Santa. As always, his exuberant smile ran in the direction opposite to the little line of hurt between his eyes.

Fern squealed with uncontained anticipation. Cora slapped her cards on the table and rushed to his side. “Whad’ they have?” she piped. Granma and Josie both beamed at him with the kind
of excitement they might have felt as girls when confronted with the prospect of any kind of treat. Watching them all, I knew: Jim was beloved by his women. I was overwhelmed by the idea that in his bag there was a gift for me, that somehow I would be enfolded into this familial love, and how could that be possible? I was Margie, a stranger from California, a criminal, a kook. I feared I might drown in the atmosphere of unspoken affection and, no longer able to resist the urge, I scooted out of my chair to make my weird, worried way down the hall to the safety of my bunk.