And yeah, I know it's weird, but the tribe actually houses all of the teachers in one-
bedroom cottages and musty, old trailer houses behind the school. You can't teach at our school if you don't live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors.
Some of our teachers make us eat birdseed so we'll feel closer to the earth, and other
teachers hate birds because they are supposedly minions of the Devil. It is like being taught by Jekyll and Hyde.
But Mr. P isn't a Democratic-, Republican-, Christian-, or Devil-worshipping freak. He is just sleepy.
But some folks are absolutely convinced he is, like, this Sicilian accountant who testified against the Mafia, and had to be hidden by that secret Witness Relocation Program.
It makes some goofy sort of sense, I suppose.
If the government wants to hide somebody, there's probably no place more isolated than
my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy. But jeez, I think people pay way too much attention to The Sopranos.
Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And
for some reason I don't understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.
"All right, kids, let's get cracking," Mr. P said as he passed out the geometry books. "How about we do something strange and start on page one?"
I grabbed my book and opened it up.
I wanted to smell it.
Heck, I wanted to kiss it.
Yes, kiss it.
That's right, I am a book kisser.
Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.
But my lips and I stopped short when I saw this written on the inside front cover:
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO AGNES ADAMS
Okay, now you're probably asking yourself, "Who is Agnes Adams?"
Weill, let me tell you. Agnes Adams is my mother. MY MOTHER! And Adams is her
maiden name.
So that means my mother was born an Adams and she was still an Adams when she
wrote her name in that book. And she was thirty when she gave birth to me. Yep, so that means I was staring at a geometry book that was at least thirty years older than I was.
I couldn't believe it.
How horrible is that?
My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang
books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.
And let me tell you, that old, old, old, decrepit geometry book hit my heart with the force of a nuclear bomb. My hopes and dreams floated up in a mushroom cloud. What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you?
Hope Against Hope
Of course, I was suspended from school after I smashed Mr. P in the face, even though it was a complete accident.
Okay, so it wasn't exactly an accident.
After all, I wanted to hit something when I threw that ancient book. But I didn't want to hit somebody, and I certainly didn't plan on breaking the nose of a mafioso math teacher.
"That's the first time you've ever hit anything you aimed at," my big sister said.
"We are so disappointed," my mother said.
"We are so disappointed in you," my father said.
My grandmother just sat in her rocking chair and cried and cried.
I was ashamed. I'd never really been in trouble before.
A week into my suspension, I was sitting on our front porch, thinking about stuff,
contemplating, when old Mr. P walked up our driveway. He had a big bandage on his face.
"I'm sorry about your face," I said.
"I'm sorry they suspended you," he said. "I hope you know it wasn't my idea."
After I smashed him in the face, I figured Mr. P wanted to hire a hit man. Well, maybe
that's taking it too far. Mr. P didn't want me dead, but I don't think he would have minded if I'd been the only survivor of a plane that crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
At the very least, I thought they were going to send me to jail.
"Can I sit down with you?" Mr. P asked.
"You bet," I said. I was nervous. Why was he being so friendly? Was he planning a sneak attack on me? Maybe he was going to smash me in the nose with a calculus book.
But the old guy just sat in peaceful silence for a long time. I didn't know what to do or say, so I just sat as quietly as he did. That silence got so big and real that it felt like three people sat on the porch.
"Do you know why you hit me with that book?" Mr. P finally asked.
It was a trick question. I knew I needed to answer correctly or he'd be mad.
"I hit you because I'm stupid."
"You're not stupid."
Wrong answer.
Shoot.
I tried again.
"I didn't mean to hit you," I said. "I was aiming for the wall."
"Were you really aiming for the wall?"
Dang it.
He was, like, interrogating me.
I was starting to get upset.
"No," I said. "I wasn't aiming for anything really. Well, I was planning on hitting something, you know? Like the wall or a desk or the chalkboard. Something dead, you know, not something alive."
"Alive like me?"
"Or like a plant."
Mr. P had three plants in his classroom. He talked to those green things more often than he talked to us.
"You do know that hitting a plant and hitting me are two different things, right?" he asked.
"Yeah, I know."
He smiled mysteriously. Adults are so good at smiling mysteriously. Do they go to
college for that?
I was getting more and more freaked out. What did he want?
"You know, Mr. P, I don't mean to be rude or anything, but you're, like, freaking me out here. I mean, why are you here, exactly?"
"Well, I want you to know that hitting me with that book was probably the worst thing you've ever done. It doesn't matter what you intended to do. What happens is what you really did.
And you broke an old man's nose. That's almost unforgivable."
He was going to punish me now. He couldn't beat me up with his old man fists, but he
could hurt me with his old man words.
"But I do forgive you," he said. "No matter how much I don't want to. I have to forgive you. It's the only thing that keeps me from smacking you with an ugly stick. When I first started teaching here, that's what we did to the rowdy ones, you know? We beat them. That's how we were taught to teach you. We were supposed to kill the Indian to save the child."
"You killed Indians?"
"No, no, it's just a saying. I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture."
Man, at that second, I hated Mr. P hard. I wished I had a whole dang set of encyclopedias to throw at him.
"I can't apologize to everybody I hurt," Mr. P said. "But I can apologize to you."
It was so backward. I'd broken his nose but he was trying to apologize to me.
"I hurt a lot of Indian kids when I was a young teacher," he said. "I might have broken a few bones."
All of a sudden, I realized he was confessing to me.