It was weeks before Dad was strong enough to go home. Most of the stamps we found were so fragile that once dried, when he tried to handle them, they disintegrated into a minute confetti. I saw him try to reconstruct the Benjamin Franklin Z Grill stamp myself. I’d found that stamp in the beet field attached to a rotting root. Perhaps the chemicals in the fertilized soil had attacked the paper. It was no use. When he lifted the stamp with a tweezers, it fell into a little heap of incredibly precious dust, which he caught as it sifted down.
My father took a deep breath, then looked at me.
A moment passed. He asked me to come with him to the back door and watch half a million dollars vanish.
Ready? he said.
And we stood together in the sun as he blew across the palm of his hand.
Road in the Sky
ON THE DAY that Aunt Geraldine finally married Judge Coutts, with all of us in attendance, there was a herringbone trail of clouds running east to west that resembled a dusty road. I noticed it before anybody else spoke of it, I think, and pointed it out to the judge. I’ll walk that road with Geraldine, he said at once. Tears came into his eyes.
They were not married in the Catholic church (a disappointment to Geraldine and my mother). Besides his lingering outrage at Shamengwa’s botched eulogy, my mother said that Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins. He told Hop Along that he could not regret having sex out of wedlock and refused to be sorry, although he said the priest could feel free to absolve him anyway. Father Cassidy said he would not solemnize their vows under such conditions. So they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy — Mooshum’s old allotment land.
They said their vows and were pronounced husband and wife. Judge Coutts kissed Geraldine and people hugged all around. We could see from the judge’s face that he felt immediate relief, as if he were a man coming out of surgery, still half-anesthetized, but understanding that survival was now assured.
Our respective families had become accustomed to having within the ranks an unwed couple living in sin. Aunt Geraldine seemed surprisingly willing to accept her role as the family scandal, and Judge Coutts had always been afraid that she liked the part, in fact, too well to relinquish it. Now he kept looking at the sky, clutching Geraldine’s hand and pointing upward.
Now I don’t have to walk that old dusty road alone, I heard him say, in what I guess was a slightly dizzy, maudlin fit. She touched his face with her handkerchief and said, Buck up, Judge. Tears were streaming from his eyes and he didn’t know it. His mother was still alive enough to be there — a tiny, gnarled lump of a lady in a silver wheelchair.
“Listen,” she said, beckoning him close. “Stop crying. You can’t have people thinking you’re soft.”
But she was smiling, everyone was smiling, there was a giddy air of resolution. Approval arched over them like a rainbow of balloons. Corwin played for us of course — he was the only entertainment. When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way. But Corwin’s playing of a wordless tune my uncle had taught him brightened the air. As I walked away I kept on hearing that music.
Judge Antone Bazil Coutts
The Veil
AFTER THE WEDDING we got into the car bannered Just Married. White balloons, cans, and plastic fringe dragged from the bumpers. I took Geraldine’s hand and held it on the seat between us as we rattled all the way to the Knights of Columbus hall. We’d been allowed to rent it even without a church wedding and now, I knew, from the KC kitchen ovens great roasters of meat soup, baked beans, frybread, potatoes, and roasted chicken were being lugged to the serving table. We’d pass by and fill our plates, eat in an exciting good-natured garble of cheer. Our wedding cake was four white-on-white layers embellished with glittering sugar roses. When it came time to cut the cake, I put my hand over Geraldine’s fist as she gripped the knife. We smiled for pictures as the knife melted through the base of the cake.
Clemence removed the top for us to take home — a cakelet. The plastic groom was painted into a judge’s robes and the bride wore a white suit. Her shoulder-length hair was black and waved like Geraldine’s. Evelina had made the souvenir. “I’d like to keep this on my desk,” I said, plucking the tiny couple off the cake and stashing it in my pocket.
So Geraldine and I began married life, at last.
WE HAD DECIDED to save our money for a real honeymoon and go somewhere exotic later on — it was enough that we’d just be allowed to reassume our domestic life. We had the weekend before us. Someone, probably Evelina, had taped a sign on the front door. No Visitors. We left the sign up and entered our house, closed the door, stood in the little hallway. I removed Geraldine’s white boxy hat with its pretty mesh veil. Then I put her hat back on, suddenly, and drew her veil down over her face and kissed her through the veil. The stiff little holes printed on her mouth then caught between our lips and tongues. In that moment, we coveted each other so intensely that we walked straight into the bedroom and did not emerge until late in the evening, dizzy and at peace. She remembered the little cake and fetched it. We froze the cake top to eat on our first anniversary. We made toast and tea and brought our plates and cups back into the bedroom, which wasn’t in its usual order. Geraldine’s suit was crumpled across a chair, the coat splayed open to reveal the glossy satin lining. Her small wedding hat had whirled into the corner and the veil seemed to have dissolved like sugar icing. Geraldine took a bite of toast and a light sift of crumbs scattered across the yoke of her robe and her naked collarbone. I leaned over and brushed the crumbs off; my hand lingered and then slipped inside, to her dark nipple.
I don’t think, said Geraldine, I really don’t, but then she gave me that smile, close up, and slid over me, opening the robe.
I WONDERED IF we’d ever leave that bed. I didn’t want to. Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. I lay beside her in the dark. She was a silent sleeper, grave and frowning through her weighty dreams. As I do sometimes to fall asleep, I imagined myself hovering above ourselves, then rising, dissolving through the roof and taking a dark ride over the reservation and the neighboring towns. It did not work this time, but had the opposite effect. My brain became too alert. The adrenaline and unaccustomed naps had revved me. My thoughts spun. Life crowded in, the trivial and the vast. I thought of everyone who’d come to our wedding. I was moved all over again by how the Milk family had embraced our marriage. Their happiness had been genuine and there was nothing held back, nothing of the faint disapprobation I had feared, not even from Clemence. My long involvement with a married woman off the reservation, in Pluto, was surely known to them. I had no illusions that I’d kept my doomed first love private from anyone but C.’s husband. Yet they seemed to have shrugged away my past. Geraldine, after all, had made me prove myself.