She turns to me; her delicately slanted eyes have a dark shine to them, a wary challenge. Of course she has always known what she can expect from me, and she has counted on that.
“And do what?” she asks.
“Let’s be wholesale importers and go traveling. We’ll have a house on Grandma’s land and I’ll write. The history of the drum. Everything Bernard told us. Or poems. Poems to Netta. We can do anything.”
She ignores the fact I’ve mentioned Netta. Pretends not to hear.
“On what money?”
“Let’s sell the house, too.”
“No, we can’t, we can’t do that.” She shakes her head, staring at me as one does in the first shock of panic or betrayal. She tries to right herself. “You’re talking wild stuff!” Her mouth sags a little to one side and I see, with the most wrenching tenderness, how old she really has become. It never was my sister’s loss, or the loss of my father, that bound me to this place. It was my loyalty to my mother and the determination that she should not live a life of grief alone. But I see now that she has done that anyway—for what has my presence been to her but a reflecting mirror? I have matched the gentleness and precision of her life with mine. We’ve really been one person, she and I. But we must go deeper now, and perhaps apart. We must see what each of us is made of, what differing stories. I have always been afraid of talking to my mother on this level, of breaking through the comforting web of our safe behavior. We have knitted it daily and well.
“Where were you that day?” I ask.
“What day?” She doesn’t look at me. She pretends this is a normal question.
“The day she stepped out of the tree.”
“Jumped?”
“No, she stepped off a high branch. Daddy let me drop. She saw him let me fall. Maybe she thought I was dead. I don’t know. She just stepped off. The car was gone. You were off somewhere. Where?”
Now she looks straight at me with the crust of toast in her fingers, and sees that I am going to wait until she answers me. She swallows her bit of bread.
“She stepped from the branch,” she says.
She nods and shuts her eyes as though looking into herself, and I know she has always seen another picture and believed another story: which one exactly doesn’t matter—it is just that it had to do with forgiving me, which she has done every single day. And I fear that she cannot stop forgiving me even now. But then she opens her eyes, and with the air of having made a decision, she speaks.
“I was with someone.”
“You had an affair?” I ask this stupidly, for now I’m the surprised one.
She nods and says quietly, “I was not home very much at all. Don’t you remember?”
I’m quiet and at a loss for a moment, then I ask, suddenly shy, “Did you love him?”
“Of course.” She is looking down at her hands. “Inordinately, foolishly,” she whispers, then looks up at me. “But that is the way people should be loved.”
We stare endlessly into each other’s eyes, which is a very hard thing to do with your mother. It is scarily intimate to gaze into the source of your life. But I know what freedom she is offering to me now. I am in that moment so truly alone that my breath goes out of me, and I feel a bit light-headed. I have to close my eyes and then I have a strange sensation. First, I feel her flowering above me, a leafed-out tree filling the sky with darkness, growing best at the expense of what’s beneath. Her guilt has been greater, deeper, and so black I’ve lived in its shadow. But suddenly, the sun is shining directly on me; I feel it. The brightness and steadiness and softness of light warms my skin and fills the room. When I open my eyes she is still there, but she isn’t forgiving me anymore. No, it is I who am forgiving her.
As a result of having his marijuana crop, the main source of his winter income, destroyed last summer, Tatro has finally discovered what kind of Indian he is. He has done this not by tracking his bloodline back through dusty genealogies, but by consulting a shaman. Broke, he decided to start over. Find a new path. My sly revenge has backfired, as most revenges do. Elsie actually likes him to bend her ear, she finds him entertaining. So it is my own fault that I learn, contrary to any expectation I might have formed, that there are a number of practicing shamans right here in New Hampshire. A sort of underground network surrounds each shaman—people who know people who know people…that sort of thing. Through these contacts a person who needs to consult a shaman can trace his or her way to the center of the web.
Later on that day, Elsie is talking to Kit, who has stopped by on his way out to hunt, though I’m sure it isn’t even bow or muzzle-loading season yet. Maybe he is putting his marijuana crop to bed or preparing a new spot for next year. I try to edge past them, but Elsie won’t have it.
“Excuse me, I’ve got to—”
“Stay here,” says Elsie. “Kit’s telling me something very interesting.”
“So they don’t advertise,” she goes on.
“Oh, some do. There are little newspapers that go in for that sort of thing.” He is very serious. “But of course the really good ones don’t need to, they are known by reputation.”
“Their powers, I suppose.”
He nods and tells us that the shaman he consulted gave him a blanket and a water bottle and then put him out in his backyard to fast for four days. The shaman made a circle around him and told him to stay in it. Then the shaman went back into his house and lived his ordinary life while Kit sat in the circle through a sunny afternoon, a cold night, a light drizzle in the morning, and so on. Four days of it. From time to time the shaman came out of the house and burned sweet grass or sage and fanned the smoke onto Tatro. During the four days, Kit was supposed to have a vision that would give him his financial bearings and tell him about his own tribal origins. But he didn’t really have a vision, it turned out. He ended his fast dizzy, sick, calm, but utterly miserable because he’d found no answers except, perhaps, that he should visit an employment agency. It was on the way home that it happened, though, like a thunderclap.
Driving the two-lane highway, Kit passed a sleek RV, only to find there were a line of them before him, all the same, going no more than 50 mph. Irritated and anxious to get home, he passed another RV and crept up behind the next one. Kit wasn’t the sort to putz along in the group and he was determined to travel at his own speed. He made it around six before he realized that they were all the same make—Winnebago. But that didn’t faze him. No, he said, he had to be hit on the head by the spirits to see it. As he passed another RV on a slight uphill, a red Jeep Cherokee came barreling at him out of nowhere. As Kit swerved, his first terrified thought was I should have stayed with the Winnebagos. Even as he wrenched back into the right-hand lane, he braced himself, sure he’d smash into one of them. But to his surprise a space had opened. The Winnebagos had seen his plight and parted to take him in. All of this happened in a second or two, the miss and entry each only cleared by inches. As Tatro floated on, driving, half out of his body, the terror left him and in its place there grew a singular joy. He was safe, he was at ease, taken in, accepted. He belonged.
We all gave that a long beat of silence.
“So you think you’re a Winnebago?” I ask.
Kit Tatro puts his hands up, and Elsie smiles and won’t speak.
“We prefer to be called Ho-chunks,” he says.
“There was a Cherokee. Why couldn’t you have been a Cherokee?”
“Remember, the Cherokee nearly killed me. I figure that we might have been traditional enemies.”
I hope he’s kidding when he says that, but he doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor about this.
“So your vision consists of a brand name. You are a brand name?” I can’t help myself.