“Abuse?” My parents were so screwed up after being beaten up at residential schools, I would let my boys run me over with a truck before I raised a hand to them.
He says more stuff, like the boys were dirty when they came home and we feed them junk.
I can hardly talk. Shana takes the phone away from me and scribbles notes. She’s good at stuff like that.
Dumb old Fred. Dumb old Indian. Suckered by the system again.
Before we can figure it out, Mrs. Saunders has it rigged so we have to have “supervised visits” with my boys. We’re even supposed to pay for some chaperone. We don’t have the money.
“So I can’t see my boys?” I ask my lawyer.
He sighs and says, “I know some supervision visitation providers who don’t charge that much. Maybe your band council can help you out.”
I press the phone against my jaw. The construction season’s almost over and Shana’s saving up her waitress tips for school. I wouldn’t ask her to spend more on my boys anyway. We could hardly afford the Happy Meals, but we did it because the toys made them smile and maybe think of us a little before they broke. I can hardly get the words out. “I don’t think so. Can’t you fight this?”
“I’ve got a lot of cases on the go, Fred, but I’ll try and make this a priority. At least get you down to nonprofessional supervision provider so you don’t have to pay for it.”
Great. I start squeezing the phone receiver so hard I imagine the plastic splintering in my fist. “How ’bout the fact that I didn’t do nothin’!”
More sighing. “I know, Fred.”
Sure you will, white man. It’s a real “priority” for you. I got to do my own thing.
Shana puts up with me for the next week while I try to figure out what to do. I’m not eating, I can’t sleep, I’m walking around in the middle of the night and getting up at 6 to work. I even try to split up a tree that fell down two years ago in Shana’s backyard. It’s a messy job. I break the chain saw. I’m pretty useless with an axe. But I’m not drinking. And I’m not using.
“Sorry,” I tell Shana when, for the first time, she wants to have sex and I just want to crash.
“It’s okay.” She kisses my cheek. “Just do the dishes for the next week and I’ll forgive you.”
That makes my eyes pop open. But she simply laughs and drags the covers over me. The quilt is soft. I sleep. And Saturday morning, when I should be seeing my boys, I know what to do instead. Go see Phil.
White people love to talk about native elders, but they’re hard to come by. My parents were so screwed up by the schools where nuns beat them for speaking Mohawk or priests raped them just because they felt like it. My grandparents are dead and I don’t really know the elders. They probably wouldn’t understand my baby Mohawk anyway.
But I know Phil. He’s a smart old guy. He used to have a job at CN Rail before he worked his way up at the paper mill and then retired on good money when the mill closed. Now he writes for the local paper. So I drop by the diner. Shana brings us coffee on the house.
Phil pushes his paper aside and asks, “What can I do you for?”
In a low voice, under the grill’s sizzle and plates clattering and chairs bumping, I tell him what’s going on.
He pours two creams and two sugars in his coffee and stirs it around until he finally answers. “She’s in a lot of pain.”
“Who?” For a second I think he means Shana, whose long legs just walked by.
“The grandmother.”
“The grandmother? Come on, Phil, you going to side with a white woman instead of me?”
He shakes his head. “Not taking sides. I think she just has a lot of hurt and she’s taking it out on you. Probably ever since her daughter died. She had Noelle late, a change-of-life baby, if I remember right.”
I stare at him. Who is he, Sigmund friggin’ Freud? Who cares how old she was when she had Noelle? “So what do you think I should do?”
“Get rid of that hurt. Then she won’t hate you so much.”
What a wise guy. I feel like hurling my coffee cup at him. I only put it down gently because it’s Shana’s place. “Thanks a lot.” I sling a ten on the table.
“You’ve got to solve this yourself,” he calls to my back.
Yeah. I knew that already.
Saunders, Francine (née Ferguson). Passed away on November 10, 2009. Survived by her grandsons, Jake and Thomas Redish. Predeceased by her daughter, Noelle, and husband, Jacob.
It should be a good Christmas. The best ever, in fact. One of my buddies gave me a tree, said it was a cast-off because of the dead needles. Shana rigged it so you can’t even see the brown bits. She and Jake are hanging the balls, and Tommy and I are throwing tinsel at it. Mel Tormé’s roasting chestnuts over an open fire, and things would be just perfect except for a few things.
I was going to take care of Mrs. Saunders. I really was. I wanted to bash her head in, but in the end I decided Phil was right. I set up an appointment with one of our mediation counselors. Mrs. Saunders would never set foot in Akwasasne, let alone allow an Indian tell her what to do, but all I could do was try.
Until she upped and died. She seemed okay, or at least her normal mean self, sending the boys to bed without any veg stew supper after Jake gave her “too much lip.” Then she made them go to church the next morning with a neighbor. Said she wasn’t feeling good.
They came home to find her dead in her own puke. The neighbor called 911, but it was too late; they took her to the emergency room anyway. We asked for no autopsy. Because she was almost seventy and had a heart condition, the coroner dropped it.
Sometimes I wish he hadn’t.
Maybe I’m too suspicious. But I looked up what mushrooms do to you. The real deadly kind. You feel okay for twelve hours and then you start puking. You end up going pretty quick.
“Daddy!” Jake hollers, holding up the box of my mom’s old Christmas stuff. “This one stinks! I think it’s the candle!”
“Throw it out, then,” I suggest. I’m looking at how he and Shana have their heads close together. Their hair is growing back, but Shana shaved both their heads after Mrs. Saunders died.
“I’ll just throw out the candle,” Shana says, and I smile at her because I still love her and she’s such a good mother to my boys, even though I get goose bumps every time I see her butch hair.
Tommy tugs my pants. He wants me to kneel down. I do. He clambers in my arms and I lift him up to hang tinsel on high. His prickly little hair stands straight up now. He asked Shana to cut it off when she did his brother’s.
I’m the only one who kept a crew cut. I feel really guilty. I don’t know why. But when Tommy hugs me and Shana asks me to help Jake with the star, I can’t help humming along with old Mel Tormé. Shana looks cute with short hair, kind of ’80s punk rock. And Jake trusts me enough to hold him high while he crowns the tree with a silver and gold star.
Part II
SOUTH
On drowning pond
by A. A. Hedgecoke
Charlotte, North Carolina
I saw Jimmy earlier this week. Just before the discovery of yet another fallen victim to the drowning way. He was still the same Jimmy, drunk — wasted. Crouched on the curb across from the market with a half-dozen longtime cronies and their women. Women who have been on the down edge so long their bodies have masculinized and hunched with the depression of life lost to drink, hard sex, smoke.
I saw him and I remembered Jolene, her beautiful smiling face, shining hair. Thought of her unrelinquished love for a man who’d only one wife in his heart. Thought of this bottle he’d fully committed to, of his smell, his ways. How she must have longed for him. Leaving her there the way he did, looking down on her maybe, thinking he was quite the man for taking the young passionate breath she’d had, in his making over of her brown body. Thought of his sudden losses of memory, and willingness to go on in life so soon and in such close proximity to her passing, and I wondered if he ever as much as poured a drink on the ground in her memory, or if he held that drink so precious to himself even a gulp would be too much to spare.