We wouldn’t be back at Aunt Babe’s house until two years later, the afternoon in 1970 after Louis’s funeral, which would be in most ways but not all a different type of gathering. After the funeral, the dining room would look bare, the chairs moved back against the walls and the table set with a lace cloth, potato salad, sandwiches, and a bottle of Dubonnet, and while the room was still death cooled and the rest of the living not back yet from the mortuary, so quiet with nobody talking yet, Auntie Girlie and Sis would go up and pour themselves an inch, once they had set out the silverware. Auntie Girlie would let Sis go first and ask, as she lifted her own glass to her lips, “How’s your Dubonnet?” Sis would consider before she talked, like she always did, and frown seriously and answer after four or five beats, “How’s yours?” in her deep and solemn voice, and they would almost laugh, then laugh. That party after Louis’s funeral would be quieter than tonight’s, chilly in early afternoon lit by white daylight, light entering in horizontal blocks from the windows, light as penetrating as a bar closing time, and more revealing in its own way. And it would take the aunts Sis and Beryl and Girlie, who would drive together all the way to town from the reservation, and that day even Shirley and Babe, with their ways as tender that afternoon as the flesh on their upper arms, as tough as their eyes as they lifted their chins to point the direction we would walk into that fog of the unseen, that unknown and inevitable future, to warm the room and break that frightening awkward silence, speaking kindly to us, Louis’s grandchildren, their words silver strings connecting us to the rest of the family, affirming and confirming our right and proper place among the wounded.
“Here, want to fix a plate for your dad? Take this one with the flowers. Go ask him if he wants a cup of coffee, first.”
“You girls all have such pretty hair, so shiny, eh?”
“Look at her. Doesn’t she look like Marguerite?” Our grandmother Maggie died before we were born, and we were each of us girls like her, the aunts told us: Artense, who secretly liked pretty things, brave Suzanne, generous Jeannette, graceful Eveline, bashful Jeanne with our dad’s quizzical triangular eyes, all of us like our brave, generous, graceful, bashful grandma, who liked pretty things, who’d looked out at the world with those quizzical triangular eyes like our dad’s. And she would be, as she had always been for us, missing, aandakii, the Ojibwe word for “somewhere else,” joined then by our finally eternally missing aandakii somewhere-else grandfather Louis, their absence shockingly tangible, permanently and unexpectedly massive in that bright, cold, cleaned dining room.
But that would be nearly two years into the unseen future that was inevitable as the past: for tonight we were between funerals, and the light in front of the house was yellow, soft through the lampshades in the front room, brighter and sharper in the dining room through the white handkerchief-patterned overhead light fixture. In the kitchen the light was cool blue-white from the florescent ceiling ring, light that thickened and weighted the air, causing the smoke from the cast iron pan of frybread to hover in webs and veils that stuck to our clothes and hair when we walked through the swinging door from the front hallway, where through the beautiful framed oval glass of the front door Uncle Sonny and Uncle George could watch people come up the sidewalk to the front porch, stopping at the door to turn the beautiful egg-shaped iron doorknob, feeling the raised floral design that felt so cool and right, fitting everyone’s hand so beautifully. Once in the door, the men slowed or stopped, but the women, their hands full, walked past the old uncles to the swinging kitchen door, into the hazy kitchen, where the aunts and their mother were taking turns at the stove, slowing or stopping only then to talk and drop off what they’d brought—crackers, a bottle of Silver Satin, a saucepan of boiled wieners—and wind up at the dining room table, loaded tonight with food and bottles and cans and ashtrays. When we walked in the house, my mother and I went to the kitchen first, Patsy carrying a plate of her magical peanut cookies, me a bowl of my own specialty, red Jell-O with bananas and whipped cream, passing my father when he stopped by the two old uncles sitting on folding chairs in the hallway, in shadows not touched by the lights. My father said, “Say hello to your uncle Sonny,” who raised one bony yellow hand from where it rested on his cane, weighted by a heavy ring with a red stone, “and your Uncle George,” who stated solemnly, “I haven’t seen you in many moons,” and smiled. His smile caused the frame of his glasses, Indian Health Service–issued thick black plastic, to shift crookedly across his wrinkled cheekbones; the heavy glass lenses were two white gibbous moons rising and setting as he nodded slowly.
My boyfriend, Stan, was right behind me. He was a white boy. This was his last night home before he left to go away for college and I’d decided this was it, it was time for him meet the rest of us. “I didn’t know Indians really talked like that,” he whispered behind me. Uncle George heard. He snapped me a look so quickly that I would have missed it if I hadn’t expected it—the two white moons rose again and set and then looked down on the plate of food on his lap—after seeing him take in my boyfriend and his starched oxford cloth button-down-collared shirt with amusement earlier. I was mortified but in love; Stan was an exotic, the son of a minister, and was fascinated by us, our family, our neighborhood, our community; he would learn and eventually become one of us, but how could I know that then, in love but mortified. Stan was going away to college in the morning; he would meet college girls who would be dressed like resurrected Indians, white college girls with pretty teeth, white college girls playing Indian in fringed leather jackets and headbands and beads, while back here in the West End, and up on the rez, at Mozhay Point and at Sweetgrass, we kept on biting the dust.
Cousin Butchie had come in right behind us and stood there with two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which he was trying to balance in his left arm so that he could shake hands. Uncle George looked from Stan toward Butch with his lips; Stan understood. He took the beer and led my cousin around several small children, who were playing Candy Land on the floor, and over to the couch. Stan used a church key on the beers for both him and Butch, remembering to be watchful and alert because of what he’d heard about Butchie’s being accident prone. So as not to hurt Butch’s feelings, Stan clowned, opening the beers with a flourish and presenting Butch’s with a deep bow and “Your beer, Sir.” Uncle George watched approvingly; I felt relieved.
We didn’t want Butch to lose another finger, like he did at the cannery, where he worked, and which wasn’t his real job. His real job, his occupation, was to be Butch, waking before the sun each day and stumbling gently through the hours simple and pure in his thoughts and ways, his temperament sweetening what life gave us to chew and swallow. Our job was to watch out for if he held his cigarette backward with the lit end too close to his face and for what was in the chair he was going to sit in and to let him know if he didn’t notice the streetlights changing color when he took us out in his car. Stan was doing all right; he didn’t point too quickly at anything or call Butchie’s attention to things that might cause him to have to turn suddenly and spill his beer or collide with the spirits, motions, and thoughts of other people in the house, tonight or in the past or future.
There was an empty chair at the dining room table, next to a white girl with red hair. She seemed almost asleep, hunched over a plateful of food, her left hand holding her rum and Coke in a circle OK. She raised and turned her head when I pulled out the chair to sit and stared at me with round green eyes that were unmoving, unblinking, and set as marbles in marble for a moment before they began to drift upward and to the left, then back to my face. Shirley, the most sociable of the aunts, said, “Artense, do you know LaDonna Muldoon? She’s from next door. Did youse know each other from school?” and stepped into the kitchen, where someone was calling, “Shirley! Where does Babe keep the hot pads?”
The girl stared at me as if horrified but unable to look away, with those unblinking green marble eyes that set, drifted, set, while I took a plate and filled it, stared without speaking when I offered her the bag of potato chips. I realized that she was not frightened, fascinated, or shocked but only physically stunned by the inability of the potato salad and broiled baloney and cheese sandwiches to soak up her rum and Coke at the same speed she’d swallowed it. She finally blinked, as I imagined a turtle would, slowly, enjoying the burn relief of lids over dry eyes, turned to her drink, took a slow-motion sip, turned back to me, and asked, “Hey … gotta c-c-c-cigarette?”
“She doesn’t smoke,” my mother answered for me. She was sitting at the end of the table, perched really, on a kitchen stepstool, with a straight back and an eye I had felt on me as long as I could remember, through walls and over distances and now across Auntie Babe’s dining room table.
“What’s her name, Muldoon? Muldoon, pleased to meet you.” My dad spoke from the window, where he was sitting against the sill, leaning into the window and stretching his legs so that he almost was the same height as if he’d been standing up. He was as amused by LaDonna’s name as Uncle George had been by my boyfriend.
“We were in school together, we know each other,” I began to explain, and LaDonna turned again, slowly and carefully, to see if she could recognize me, appearing to try to focus each eye separately. Because her head was drooping a little, she turned from one side to the other, using only one eye at a time, toward first my right, then my left breast, then because her hair was beginning to lose its teased and sprayed shape, the bird’s nest at the top of her skull sweeping a red wing across her face anyway, that eye disappeared while she thought, “Where would I know her from? Smoking in the girls’ bathroom? No…. Detention room after that fistfight in the Special Class room? No…. Benched in gym class with the rest of us who left our gym suits at home, that’s right.” Muldoon nodded. “Artense … gotta c-c-cigarette?”
Two aspirin took twenty minutes to abate the relentless pounding in my jaw, then I could sleep for twenty minutes, until the surge of my heartbeat to the blood vessels below my molar rolled in waves that increased to the inevitable hourly relentless pounding. Walk between the beds to the hall to the bathroom, take two aspirin, wait twenty minutes, sleep twenty, and wake as the tide rose again. Once, as I sat up in bed, knees up, with my hands flat on my knees and my forehead resting on the backs of my hands, Eveline woke and looked at me for a minute, her face turned toward me and her head not moving and her eyes not blinking, just watching me through those eyes brown by day and black by night, and I wondered, would she think this was just a dream, would she remember. She was the third of the sisters, and after high school—that would be six months after Louis’s funeral—she would get her first job, working for Mr. Fix-All, who squeezed her rear end every time he passed back of the counter where she clerked, and so she didn’t go back after the first day. Then she would go to work at the hospital busing trays and loading the dishwashers and wondering if this was as good as it would get and my mother told her to stay there because maybe she could meet a doctor and get married, which of course was not going to happen, why would a doctor notice some skinny young Indian girl who sure she was pretty but why would he ever look to see her bus his tray after he had left, scrape his plate, and throw out his trash, and besides, she was too bashful to ever look at somebody like that, anyway.
All the last week I had pressed cloves into the hole in my molar every few hours. Relief was burning and sweet smelling, sweet tasting and brief. The last several days I had poured Patsy’s recommended treatment, a half-teaspoon of whiskey warmed bowl-side in my hand for a minute, over the tooth, between aspirin doses. When I exhaled that relief expelled in fiery fumes that burned my eyes.
In the dark, watching my sister’s eyes slowly close in her worried and pretty face as she fell back asleep, I knew this would have to be the last night.
When I got up in the morning and looked in the mirror, my face was yellow, my eyes two peeholes in the snow, as my mother would say. My jaw was a lemon. My limp and sleep-starved hair shone with oil and clung to my head and neck so that from the back I looked sleek and greasy as an otter. I had thirty dollars, so I called a dentist and took a bus downtown to his office where he handled me too roughly and used both hands to hold the chrome vise he used to twist out my back molar. The dental assistant, a beaten-looking birdlike blonde, reached to hold my hands in hers as he started to pull. He growled at me from his clenched teeth to let go of her hands. She kept her nervously sympathetic blue eyes, forget-me-nots damp and trampled limp on a sidewalk, on mine while he writhed and sweat large teardrop-shaped patches under his arms until with a wrench that pulled my head to the left then the right then the left again he waved my tooth, large, gray-green, long-rooted and bloody, with a hole down the center and side, darkened from the cloves I’d pressed into it, in front of my face. The drained assistant feebly put the tooth into a tiny brown envelope, which I put in my coat pocket, and apologetically charged me eighteen dollars, which left me a girl without a job and twelve dollars to last until I found one. I caught another bus home and rested the left side of my hot face against the cool and greasy window, watching my life thus far, and my father’s before me, in the west end of town, rolling dreamscapes of hills, frame houses, corner stores passing across my unmoving and consuming eyes. Artense. Twelve dollars, no job. No Stan, really. Gone to college, dormitory, roommate, nowhere near the West End. Back in the summer, he said. He wasn’t really mine, anyway.
When I got home, Patsy had her car coat on, that white corduroy one that she let me borrow once in a while, and the wig I’d bought her when I’d been working, dark blond with light streaks, and a green headband. My dad would be out in front of the house any minute to pick her up. She needed me to watch the kids because they had to go to the hospital. Louis was dead, and somebody was going to have to identify the body. She buried a handful of clean hankies in her coat pocket and fished out a pack of Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. “I know I’m gonna have to be the one to do it; here, have a Life Saver. Did they pull your tooth? I made hamburger gravy; fix the kids some supper.” Her gestures were hesitant, not her usual quick moves that made it look like she was ready for anything, had prepared and practiced and knew what to do; in those gestures I saw and realized that each day was as new for my mother as it was for me, including this one, and that she wasn’t really that much older than I was.
She was wearing my sister’s tennies and the mood ring my brother bought her at Target (on her it never varied color from the violet blue of serenity and general well-being). Her skin was smooth and tender around her gray eyes. Here’s a true story: A neighbor lady said to me once, “You have a beautiful mother, Artense,” then did one of those free-association things and said in the next beat that I looked just like my dad. My dad and I still laugh about that, and it’s what, how many years ago, now? I always liked to look at my mother and never thought to envy her. And she had some big plans for us all. What they were, neither of us knew. But they were big.
The room was getting noisier, and all that cigarette smoke had softened the yellow light to a gold, swathing and veiling those who hadn’t been netted in the kitchen. Somebody who decided to make toast didn’t know that the pop-up on the toaster didn’t work anymore, and so my eyes began to burn from acrid microparticles of scorched bread. Small bits of red Jell-O that slopped off the spoon as people filled their plates sparkled like rubies on the dining room table until they melted into sticky drops that ran into larger puddles that stuck to the oilcloth. One ashtray, a small tin saucer left by the Stanley salesman, caught fire when Uncle Sonny put out a cigarette against a smoldering empty matchbook on his way through the dining room to look for Uncle George’s crossword puzzle book in the kitchen. Uncle Sonny didn’t notice, but Cousin Dennis was young and quick and he put it out by pouring a little beer into the ashtray.
A tall man in wool hunting pants and a sleeveless undershirt came through the kitchen door with a bottle of purple wine under his arm and two thick white coffee cups in his hands. He handed one cup, full of black coffee, to Shirley’s husband, Ed, who was on the wagon, and nodded to my mother. “Hello, Poddy Jean.” They were children together, and he was the only person who could call her that besides her sister, Piggie Onn. My mother, who would nurse her one beer all night, said hello to Rollie and no thanks to a Manischewitz. He stood by her, gaunt and quiet, his skinny arms hanging off his bony shoulders, which hunched a little as he talked with my mother about his wife’s long sickness. He drank his wine from a mug, sipping carefully like it was scalding hot coffee, as if he was afraid he’d burn his tongue.
The kitchen door swung open again for a mixed-blood James Dean, handsome in his ducktail haircut, muscular, short, with a barrel chest, slender legs, and beefy arms, which stretched the rolled-up sleeves of his white T-shirt. He said hello to Shirley and asked about her mother’s broken hip, how was it healing, was she getting around, holding Shirley’s hand while he talked, and then for a few seconds more, like she was sixteen years old. His dark hair, navy blue eyes, brown arms, and white teeth were dazzling. His engineer boots made a deep and hollow stamping sound as he walked over to our end of the table. At a powwow last summer, I had watched those boots do a two-step version of that same walk, those shoulders of his dipping slightly first to the left, then to the right, suspended on a separate plane above his forward-facing hips and bowed legs as he danced. Across the powwow circle a fancy shawl dancer in blue and silver had accelerated her hop, raising her knees and lengthening her steps, nearly sprinting to catch up behind him so she could watch.
“Frankie…. Frankie, how you been?” LaDonna jerked her head up and became almost animated, her smile big and fuzzy as her voice. “Frankie, what you drinking there?” Frankie stood behind us and leaned over so that his head was between mine and LaDonna’s, resting his upper body weight on his hands, one on the back of each of our chairs. I imagined his chest muscles jumped, inches from the back of my head. “Frankie, you want a rum and Coke?” She folded her hands on the table and leaned forward over them, as though praying, then straightened and swayed into the back of her chair, looking up in further supplication.
Aunt Babe carried in another cookie sheet of hot sandwiches, split hamburger buns with broiled cheese and sliced olives arranged on top, which she placed on the dining room table. Frankie inhaled deeply. “Doesn’t that smell great?”
LaDonna shuddered and lowered her head to the table.
“Babe, you fussed. Look at that, Patsy. Daughter, you really fussed,” admired Babe’s mother and our family’s matriarch from the easy chair that Rollie pulled up to the table for her. Grandma Lisette had stopped frying sliced baloney ring and frybread in the kitchen, turned off the stove, and was ready to enjoy herself. Her plate was full, her shiny face round as the plate and damp from work, unlined and happy. “Patsy, try yourself one of those pretty sandwiches. Look, they’re just toasty and crispy looking.”
My mother picked one up between her thumb and first finger and took a small bite, then her third sip of beer of the evening. “Babe, these are the best tuna sandwiches I ever ate.”
“That’s because it’s chicken.”
Rollie got up from his place next to me, excusing himself, “Forgot to say hello to Sonny,” and Frankie sat in the chair he vacated. “Hi, Artense.”
Artense. My name. He could have said it under so many different circumstances. He pulled me out of the way just as I stepped off the sidewalk in front of a car, and said it again and again out of relief and gratitude for my life—Artense. He kissed me and was nearly out of breath with the experience—Artense. He asked to spend the rest of his life by my side, where he could watch me adore his dancing—Artense.
“Hi, Frankie,” I smiled, my head down, and thought about what else I could say that could continue this conversation. I was nearly eighteen, almost a woman, and should finally be able to talk with him as a woman would to a man. I raised my head and inhaled, waiting for words to continue.
“What do you do now, you done with school? You working?” The moment had passed me by but Frankie was considerate enough to continue and take me with him.
“She’s going to start going to the junior college this fall,” my mother answered for me.
“Oh.” Frankie, his turn to be the tongue-tied one, thought for a moment. I could see him searching for something to say to somebody so impressive and foreign. “Do you like Manischewitz?”
“She doesn’t drink,” replied Patsy.
The police had found Louis lying where he had fallen, in a half-frozen puddle in the alley behind the Stevedore Surf and Turf, where Stan and I had gone to eat after the prom. While Louis was still conscious, he was able to tell them my dad’s name. Then his lungs congested and filled quickly with pneumonia, what they used to call the Old People’s Friend, and he died not long after they brought him to the hospital. Just like she’d thought, my mother had to be the one to identify the body, to tell the police that it was Louis, and she had to be the one to take his wallet from his pants pocket. Inside, there was nothing but my graduation picture. No money, no social security card. Just a black-and-white wallet-sized picture of me. A high school graduation picture, the first graduate in our entire family, and so a very big deal. I suppose that when he put it in the plastic sleeve we must have looked at one another face to face. Louis, unbroken by twentieth-century America and federal Indian policies, the Indian boarding school, alcohol, jobs hard and dangerous and impermanent, a life’s playing field set on the edge of a cliff. Louis, on that day as he would be on the day of his funeral, handsome still in a used coat and green pants from the county work farm. Louis the soft-voiced incorrigible. And his granddaughter Artense in black and white, perching on the photographer’s wooden stool the same way my mother sat, ready to fly, in a secondhand sweater, hair shingled and teased on top, smile a mask that almost did the job. Artense, who did as she was told and would graduate from high school. Artense, unbroken but yet untested. He was fifty when I was born. A half-century gap in our experiences. Fifty years. Our lives coincided for less than twenty.
Frankie found something he could say to a girl who would be going to college. “So, Artense, what class did you like the best in school?” He had poured four fingers of purple Manischewitz into a glass decorated with decals of flying ducks and opened a can of Coke for me with the little church key attached to his nail clippers. “Did you take history? I used to like history. Did you study about George Washington? What did you think of him? Do you know that some people think he was a better president than Abraham Lincoln? Why would they think that? What do you think about that, Artense?” I was tongue-tied. Frankie was flirting with me—with me! And he must have been five or ten years older than I was, I thought. A man. He’d been in the navy, and he’d been around the country, and he worked at the packing plant, and he’d bought his mother a color TV, and he rode a motorcycle. A man. I could see over the neckline of his white undershirt that his chest was smooth, with a few delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair, and when he reached across me to pour a little Coke into LaDonna’s empty glass (‘Frankie! Frankie, how are you doing? Where’s the rum?” she pulled one hand out from under her head to pat his arm, tender-looking skin the color of vanilla caramel), I could see below the stretching sleeves of his clean T-shirt delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair in his armpits as well. He smelled like cigarettes, wine, and spearmint gum. I looked down at my lap, then, because he was turned toward LaDonna, over at his. His jeans looked new, crisp dark blue and rolled up on the bottom. I turned around and could see on the front room couch Stan steadying Butchie’s hand, the one holding the can of beer, which Butchie was waving as he made a point. Stan had no chest hair. He was still a boy. His pants were chinos, with creases. His sister ironed his shirts, his mother sorted his socks. He would be leaving in the morning to go away to a real college and live in a dormitory. At almost eighteen, how could I know that one day he would be one of us? All I knew at the time was that he was going to leave. At almost eighteen, what I did know was that he wasn’t really mine, any more than Frankie was.
Frankie unrolled a pack of Marlboros from his T-shirt sleeve and flicked it toward me with a little snap of his wrist (bone and muscle flexed, knit), and two cigarettes (one for me and one for him!) neatly slid out, just like in the commercials. “Artense, sugaswaa?”
I looked over to my mother’s perch, which was empty. I reached for the cigarette.
“Frankie? Frankie, you want … hey, Frankie.” Frankie turned toward LaDonna, who was looking at the ceiling now trying to remember what she started to say, concentrating, thinking so hard that she looked sober. From her point of balance, the balls of her feet planted on the floor, she tipped her head farther and farther back as she looked up and up at the light fixture then beyond that and suddenly LaDonna, though still in her chair, was on the floor, lying on her back, her plaid skirt flipped up so that her underpants showed, big white ones so loose they looked all creased and dented, above her long skinny white legs, and she realized where she was and looked at Frankie and me, so surprised, and I reached down to pull her skirt to cover those underpants (they’re so big, I thought; they must be her mother’s). She didn’t say a word. Frankie quickly tipped her chair back upright. She smiled then, seeing the room back where it was had been, and laughed just once, a fuzzy blue chuckle.
“Muldoon.” From the windowsill, my dad called her name. “Frankie. Did Muldoon get knocked out?”
“She’s good, Buster, just lost her balance is all, didn’t you. You’re good, aren’t you, LaDonna?” said Frankie. LaDonna leaned back into his arm that was across the back of her chair. She was smitten.
“Muldoon,” said my dad, “you’re going to be all right.”
Aunt Babe’s house was quiet and cold after the funeral, and the air clear, no smoke from frybread or cigarettes, a sharpness of clarity painful to inhale and painful to look through. Louis’s sister, Lisette, sat on a chair out in the kitchen; she had waved her daughters and nieces away as she would a flock of seagulls. No, she liked it in the kitchen. She would come out in a little while. Dennis, home from basic training, half knelt at her side, on one knee, holding her hand that rested on his other knee. In his army uniform he looked like Louis when he played the trumpet in the band at Harrod boarding school, Lisette thought to herself. Remember that picture she used to have of Louis in his boarding school uniform, holding his trumpet? Whatever happened to that picture? It was a picture postcard, remember, that he had addressed to his mother but never sent. He had left it for her under the door to the girls’ dormitory, the last time he ran away from school. Above the high collar of his uniform coat with the braid and the buttons his face was stern and serious, so unlike him. He held the trumpet upright on his knee, like a bayonet; she had thought that Louis looked like a soldier. “Like Dennis,” she thought, as she sat holding her grandson’s adult hand. They had the same mouth, smooth and full, tender, red lipped, and snub nose, and those dark gray-brown eyes that almost looked blue. The same round moon face, with the same deep cowlick like a whirlwind above the left eye. Dennis and young Louis.
“Want some coffee, Grandma? I’ll get you some.” Dennis looked into her face, and she thought how he used to do that when he was small, standing where he now knelt, at the same chair, his feet on the outside of hers, his forearms on her knees, his face so like Louis’s as he looked right into hers, that mannerism Dennis’s alone, so unlike Louis yet so essentially Louis. She nodded yes and reached to wipe a cake crumb off her grandson’s lower lip. He rose gracefully, tall and adult in his army uniform, poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove, added canned milk and sugar, and knelt again next to her chair. He held her soft old hand in his again, and she remembered little Dennis’s small, star-shaped hand holding hers while they walked to the store, to the post office, to school on the first day, a little boy’s hand that fit inside hers.
Louis’s hand had been that same size when he started school. The huddle of children had been herded off the train at the Harrod train depot by the school’s disciplinarian, a man who carried a doubled leather strap that he absently, menacingly waved back and forth. He lined them up in pairs, shortest first, tallest last, to get on the wagon that would take them to the boarding school. The smallest boy, Louis, was led by his big sister, Lisette, to the front of the line, where she gently removed his hand, trusting and damp, from her own and joined it with the hand of the smallest girl. As she walked to her own place at the end of the line, the little boy turned his head to watch, stepping from the line, still holding the hand of the little girl.
“Stay with your partners,” the disciplinarian said sternly. He tapped the little boy’s shoulder with the strap, then slapped it with a wet sound against the palm of his hand.
Miles away, and further away by the minute, a teenage boy drove a hearse up the county road to the cemetery. In the back, inside the coffin, Louis wore my dad’s clothes, his suit and shirt and tie and socks (he didn’t really need shoes, the mortician said; that wouldn’t show). The mortician’s son sang with his favorite radio station on the ride and said to the coffin in back, “You don’t mind if I turn this up, do you?”
Louis watched us from the great distance that he had covered over the past four days of his long and arduous walk westward to the next life.
At the end of the fourth day, she was waiting on the other side of the last river, among the stars, her dark hair neatly knotted at the back of her neck, her white blouse reflecting the silver-blue of starlight. The night wind blew and lifted her dark skirt to one side; below, her small feet, which were laced severely at the ankles in ladies’ boots, like a teacher’s, stepped closer to the shore; the heels left the ground as she rose to her toes, clasping her hands as if in prayer. The sight filled his eyes as he waded into the river and swam; then as his feet touched bottom again he nearly galloped through the cold and heavy current. The rocks on the shore warmed and dried his feet those last steps.
“Maggie,” he said, his feet light as smoke. “Maggie.”
“Nishimoshe, my sweetheart,” Maggie sang in her light and silvery voice, “a long time I have waited for you to come over to where I am.”
“Wijiiwagan,” he answered, and folded his hands over hers, covering her prayers with his own.
And so Louis joined his true love, Maggie, and they joined the others who watch us from far beyond where the sun sets, the past that birthed the present that even now births the future. They pray as we pass into life, they pray us through our lives, they pray as we pass out of life; when we die, they pray our steps across the walk west. Thus blessed, we live and die in an air hung with their prayers, the breath of their words on our faces and bodies, their spirits among us, trying to see and hear and understand. Wegonen, what is it, we think. Amanj i dash, and I wonder. We ponder this all of our lives, not realizing what we already know.