Hazel
GOOD MOTHERS DON’T GIVE their sons marijuana.
Great ones do.
Hazel repeated this in her mind over and over as she drove away from Marion and the house she and Anni shared. It boiled down to simple actions that her body knew even when cloudy.
Open door.
Sit down.
Seat belt.
Keys in ignition.
Leave it all behind.
The Famous Disappearing Act of Hazel Lafournier.
Except she knew in the cerulean-moonlit road that she would turn back.
Stop the car.
Let it idle.
Stare into the woods.
Light another joint.
And then she would return to wake the dogs and explain to Marion and Anni why she drove off. Again. How long had it been since her last incident? Not anytime recent. Not since her marriage and since Marion moved out for the first time.
It must have been at least ten years, maybe two years after Kayden’s death. It couldn’t have been right after because she never would have abandoned Kayla in her time of grief, but it was definitely when Marion was in high school.
Was he mad? She could not remember.
It seemed like something that should be simple to recall. Was a teenage boy mad at his mother leaving?
No. When Marion
was a teenager he
spent his days in his room
listening to sad music and pretending.
On the road ahead of her, the coarse gray of the reservation roads began to turn into a more smooth, slick black. Hazel reached the highway, lit another joint.
And she left again.
THE HIGHWAY OUT OF the reservation that led to Fargo began in a series of wide curves and a few small lakes and resorts. Hazel knew the roads well enough to drive in any condition.
Drunk.
High.
Crying because of her mother’s death.
Crying after her best friend’s son’s death.
Crying because the smoke
filled the car and began
to sting her eyes.
She opened the windows and the smoke dissipated. Her cell phone rang. Either Anni or Marion, but she did not answer.
The winding roads eventually flattened out and the highway to Fargo was just one left turn away, a smooth drive with only a handful of traffic lights, little chance of getting stopped by a cop this time of night.
Only, she did not know whether to turn left or right. She had no idea where she was going to, but she did know that she had options.
She could turn right and visit Kayla Kelliher in Geshig. Or Brenda Haltstorm. The two women she never thought she would leave behind.
She could turn left and find wherever Jamison lived in Fargo. Finally tell him to his face about his firstborn son.
She could turn around and rejoin Anni and Marion, pretend she had never left.
But they knew, and she knew more than anyone, that once a person leaves their life behind, however temporarily, there is no apology that will wipe it away. Hazel and Eunice would always be the mothers who left.
No, that’s not true, she knew. They weren’t like she had been to her mother, vicious, resentful, unforgiving. She could be gone for days and Anni and Marion wouldn’t hate her. It was she who had the problem with leaving, both forgiving her mother and forgiving herself.
The eyes of the wolf had caused her to leave, and now the headlights approaching in the mirror behind her hastened her decision.
Left
Right
Left
Right
Simple as that, she told herself. Simple as that.
SHE WANTED TO WALK out on her second baby’s life because her first had walked out on her. Or rather, he stopped breathing and then left her body without a goodbye. Jamison would have talked her out of it upon her first doubt. Had he known she was pregnant again.
“Did you know some Ojibwe can see the future?” he said the night they met, with a big smile full of dark, tobacco-stained teeth. “I see a lot of you in mine.”
Now she sat in an empty apartment and wished she had never inflicted herself onto that man’s future in any way.
Hazel met Jamison Reyes not long after her twenty-first birthday at a dive bar in Minneapolis. She and a friend from work were shooting pool and tequila and two women alone in a bar were bound to attract some kind of attention. She was not really looking for a man’s attention, but when Jamison gave it to her she seemed to crave it like a fresh pack of cigarettes. The day after, when she woke up in his bed with no memory of the night before, he claimed he saved her from starting a bar brawl with a group of white college girls.
From the moment he first challenged her to a game of eight ball, her impulse to clash was always met. They fought harder and with more vitriol and passion than she and her mother, Eunice, ever had. She had never known a man worthier of fighting with than Jamison, or of making love with, or walking with, driving with, smoking weed with, anything two people in love could do.
Jamison was a fast-moving man and within the first month of dating Hazel he was convinced that he needed everything she could give. He wanted her hate as much as her love, and he wanted to bind her to himself as quickly as he could.
“Indian chicks are the craziest bitches out there,” Jamison quipped one night while pretending to be more drunk than he was. “They’ll just fight you! Won’t even think twice to punch their man.”
Hazel knew where the sentiment came from. Eunice was not an easy woman to deal with, let alone be raised by, and many of her cousins were on track to become the same kind of woman in their sunset years. “I know what you mean,” she told him. Then she punched him in the face.
Her small hand had somehow left a large bruise on his temple, and it did not satisfy her like she thought it would. Her blood still splashed under the skin of her ears and cheeks, and the anger kept down her fear of the retaliation. Give a punch, take a punch. It was only fair, she thought.
Jamison refused to hit her. He sank into the couch and stared at her as if he was waiting for an apology and a kiss. Hazel realized then that it was a ploy; he would never hit her and she now had the guilt of being the violent one. The only touch he gave her was a soft caress of her stomach. Later, she did not know if Jamison had actually said it or if it was something she imagined.
“It’s time . . .”
One month later, Hazel was pregnant, and desperately wishing Jamison had returned that punch. Then she could have left with no guilt.
MONTHS AFTER SHE HAD left him, Hazel received a drunken phone call. He was back up on their reservation and trying to marry the first woman who would let him into her bed.
I’m going to have a great life without you, Hazel. You’re garbage. You deserve the cities.
Hazel hadn’t given much thought to what she deserved. She had survived her mother’s rolling-stone lifestyle after they left Geshig behind, and she made it through her rebellious phase without many scars. She still smoked weed way more than she should, but her life was never a true mess until now.
She loved Jamison. She even missed him sometimes. Their relationship was always what she saw her family members have, so it felt right. Normal. Their children would have no trouble with enrollment because of their shared blood quantum. And she ran away from all that a few months after her miscarriage.
Both of them had been so devastated when it happened that they never discussed trying again. Instead, they just grew silent and distant with each other. Or perhaps that was just her. But after she had moved out and he left to heal the wounds in reservation bars, she couldn’t help but wonder if her second pregnancy was intentional.
The first time she thought about getting an abortion was easy. She had never truly wanted a child before, so why not? The only people who would try to stop her didn’t know she was pregnant.
The second time she thought about abortion, she began to make up ridiculous things to convince herself otherwise. What if this baby is meant to be? What if he’s meant to change the world? Why is it a he now?
The third and last time was after she told her best friend, Kayla, who she had grown apart from after leaving the reservation. Kayla was in the middle of raising her own toddler and was adamant that Hazel should keep the baby.
“I don’t have the money for that, Kayla. I can barely afford rent now.”
“I still don’t understand why you moved to the cities in the first place. You never had to pay rent up here.”
“Yeah, but that means I’d still be living with that woman, and I just can’t anymore.”
“Oh Hazel, you hold too much anger inside. If I could talk to my mother again . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, guilt trip noted and ignored. You know how Eunice is, I just couldn’t deal.”
“Well, how about you move in with me again? No rent. At least for a while until you get your bearings up here. I bet I could get you in with the tribe.”
“Oh no. Never going back to Languille Lake again. Not as long as Eunice and Jamison are there.”
Kayla went silent for three seconds before she said “Oh. So you haven’t heard.”
Hazel’s breath caught in her throat. Could Jamison have drunk himself to death already? Would she be relieved or saddened? “Probably not, if you think I haven’t. Tell me!”
“Jamison enlisted. He’s in South Carolina for training.”
“Why the hell do you know that and I don’t?”
“You underestimate reservation gossip.”
Now Hazel went silent. She took a breath. “I’ll call you back soon, I promise. Bye.”
She sat down, held her stomach, and thought about the father she had never met. Laverne Graycalm. Dead at thirty, widowed, and no legacy except his house on Lake Anders where Eunice still lived. Now her own child’s father, probably off to war. It hadn’t even been over a year since Desert Storm ended, maybe he wouldn’t be in danger . . . but the jawbone.
Bullhead had passed away well before Hazel was born, but Eunice told the story of the jawbone like it was the Nativity. She wasn’t superstitious but couldn’t help but wonder if Jamison would be the next in a long line of men destroyed by their Lafournier Indian women.
His drunken message was still on her answering machine.
Hazel had already destroyed his life. She held her stomach and wondered if she could really do it now.
One day later, Hazel called Kayla back and said the words she never thought she’d have to say again.
“I’m . . . I’ll do it. I’ll come live with you in Geshig. But the moment you do that dumb sitcom thing where you try to get me and Eunice to talk, I’m kicking both of your asses and leaving.”
“I knew you’d come back, girlfriend! You’re going to love Kayden! He’s such a handful but he’s talking now and he—”
Hazel set the phone on the counter and let her friend prattle about her son. Would she turn into that if she really had this baby? What about Jamison? What would happen if he survived? Maybe he wouldn’t come back to Geshig.
She sighed, picked up the phone, said goodbye, and hung up.
It was a hopeless thought that she’d never see Jamison again. She knew as she packed her bag that he would be back. Everyone, even her, comes back to Geshig.
RIGHT.
Just before the car behind her approached, Hazel decided she would turn right. Not to Geshig, not to Kayla or Brenda, and definitely not to Jamison. But somewhere else.
But it would be a job that required daylight, so instead of driving straight to her destination, she went to her son’s house in Half Lake. The paranoid boy of hers had given her an extra key in case of emergencies, and a high drive in the middle of the night seemed to her like it would fit the definition.
The kiddo’s house smelled like too many Glade PlugIns or Walmart potpourri. She didn’t want to invade his privacy any more than she was already doing, so she fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, it was around six a.m. and her phone was filled with missed calls and messages. Just before she could reply, the phone flashed one last breath of life and then died.
Hazel shrugged and decided to let them worry. If it got more attention from both her son and husband, no real harm was done. She left Marion’s house and then went to the nearest open fast food joint in Half Lake, a remodeled McDonald’s in the same lakeshore location she had visited throughout her childhood and later adulthood when she smoked too much and took late-night drives with Marion.
The food was disgusting as ever, but it helped ground her and settle her stomach as she drove through the small, waking city and made for the north highway exit. In a half hour she was near a city called Blackduck and then, after, a desolate town called Alvwood, where the only sign of life was a bar. Beyond Alvwood for another twenty-minute drive was the place she was looking for. A scientific and natural area called the Lost Forty.
Or as her grandmother had called it, the Ghost Acres.
Eunice
“PARDON ME FOR CUSSIN’ in front of a lady, but that’s a load of bullshit,” Laverne said. “None of that was true.”
Eunice laughed and took a drink of her beer. Laverne had asked her where she came from, and she told him the story her mother had always stuck with. Awaazisii, the Bullhead, living alone in the Ghost Acres with her two children by a white man. Until one day, salvation in the form of a half-French, half-Ojibwe man named Lafournier.
“Ask my cousins,” Eunice said. “The Bullheads. Maybe you know some of them.”
“Bullhead, bullshit. You’re bluffin’, little lady.” Laverne spoke in a drawl he had learned from watching pictures in Minneapolis. No matter how much he pretended to be a cowboy, he couldn’t hide his Swedish features, the hazel-green eyes, sandy hair, and sweetheart lips that were trying hard to impress Eunice. “Indians always think they know the real story. It’s cute.”
“You can find truth in any story, Laverne.” She leaned in closer and brushed her hand over his knee for just a moment. “Like how Indian women aren’t afraid to get what they want.”
“Darlin’, you are crazy. I like crazy.”
“Blame my mother.”
Eunice was a part-time alcoholic, and her first shift started in 1958 when she was twelve. Her older sisters Gwendoline and Shirley snuck liquor from their father and tricked her into drinking it by saying it was maple syrup.
The first sip was sweet but only for a moment. Her throat closed at the bitter taste, but she managed to keep it down, and heard their laughter. “Keep drinking. The maple is near the bottom!”
“It tastes like pine sap!” Another cruel act of theirs. Eunice had always felt stupid after falling for their tricks. Not long before, they had convinced her the sticky gray clumps on the red pine bark was candy. They made up for her anger by being the sweetest older sisters for the space of a day, and then it was back to torment. Eunice had tried to stop when the liquor began to hurt but they made her drink more and more until she couldn’t stand up.
They laughed at her, and then Eunice laughed. She cried and laughed until she felt her body sink to the cabin floor and roll around on the dried-out planks. “I’m telling! Papa! Mama!”
The girls hadn’t expected their mother to burst into the cabin so quickly. Bullhead and Tomas Lafournier usually spent the whole day working in the woods, but that day they came back early, as if sensing their daughters were up to something malicious.
It took only one look at her drunken baby for Bullhead to fly into a rage. She grabbed Gwendoline and Shirley by their hair, dragged them to wall, and pushed them to their knees. Eunice kept her mouth shut as she watched her mother beat the girls’ bare asses with a thin cane.
She wanted to laugh at her sisters for getting the punishment they deserved, but the words coming from her mother’s mouth were a mix of Ojibwe and some English swear words. Eunice knew that if her mother was using English, she was furious. Instead of feeling saved from their torment, Eunice began to feel guilty for their welts and bruises. It felt like a weakness, and as soon as the girls spotted it, they used it every chance they could.
After their parents’ deaths, Eunice, the responsible and sober child, was deeded the red pine cabin, but she never felt like she owned it. She watched both sisters turn into alcoholics, wives, mothers, and somehow, she was the one who always felt bad for their trespasses against her. Gwen and Shirley rarely failed to get what they wanted, a few cigarettes here, dollars there, a place to crash, and free babysitting whenever they decided to clock out for a few weeks.
Their hold on her began to wane when Eunice turned twenty. Spring had finally arrived in Geshig after a winter of raising her sister’s children, and at pace with the budding green, she began to leave the house. Her oldest niece Delores watched the other children and Eunice drove to the only bar in Geshig that would serve Indians.
“So let’s say I believe ya.” Laverne grabbed a few strands of her hair and braided it. The weave was nice, but it annoyed Eunice that he did not ask. “Does that mean you’re gonna kill me in the night and steal our children away?”
“You got me.” She pushed his dainty hands away from her hair. “That’s my big plan. Steal your name, your kids, and your house. Far as I see it, you cowboys have it coming.”
“You’ll have to get my hand in marriage first, darlin’.” When he smiled, she saw his teeth, slightly hidden by the shadow of his big, sweetheart lips, and wondered for a moment if she should walk away.
“I’ll try my best.”
ONE YEAR AFTER THEIR marriage, and only six months after his draft, a pair of soldiers came to Laverne’s front door. Eunice held her stomach as they handed her a folded flag and told her that her husband was now nothing more than a spray of red across a lush, green forest.
Another dead husband. Eunice silently cursed her mother Bullhead for losing the jawbone, and then held the flag to her heart. But she shed no tears. Never for a white man.
From that moment, Eunice became a full-time alcoholic, and her only child by Laverne lived the consequences.
Hazel
THE SCENIC AREA HAD an honor system. There was a brown tin box on a signpost that said FEES and it was expected that everyone who explored the Lost Forty would pitch in at least fifteen dollars.
This was my family’s land, Hazel reasoned with herself. I don’t have to pay a dime.
She walked onto the trails, and the first step took her into the world her mother had often spoken of.
The trails were narrow and winding, each dip with a natural formation of stairs from the giant tree roots. The underbrush between the trees was lush, green, and prickly, with some wisps of color scattered around. Pink and yellow lady’s slippers grew in abundance, along with sun-yellow tulips and small daisies.
At the end of the main trail, beneath a big row of a tree root staircase, there was a damp, north-facing plank that led out into the lake that gave this place life in more ways than one. It fed the banks, and the mistake of marking the entire area as a lake saved it from the lumberjacks. Hazel walked onto the plank just until the tips of her toes touched the water. She knelt and swished her fingertips inside the mucky waves, and then rinsed off the grime and dried her hands on her jeans.
The wind blew southward and Hazel turned around. From the bank, she looked up and could see each of the trees of the Lost Forty and knew where she had to go.
Underneath the largest red pine in the state, with lines of bark like an old man’s skin, Hazel found a small area of soft soil just between two of the roots. She looked around, made sure no one was obviously watching, and then began to dig.
It was hard at first, getting the dirt to move away from the knotted, ancient roots, but once the top layer was gone the easier it became to search. She dug down beneath the roots for nearly a foot before she felt it.
A cold, hard half ring of bumpy ridges. She pulled it from the earth and held it in her arms like a newborn. The jawbone. Buried with Bullhead’s ashes, just like Eunice always claimed her father had done.
Eunice
GLASS SHATTERED, AND A rock the size of a fist bounced across the cabin floor. Eunice stumbled to the front door and saw Hazel running toward the road. She waited at the porch, but her daughter did not come back. Until evening she stayed there, her intoxication sinking with the sun, and then she went back inside.
There was no electricity, and the cabin was a mess. No one had been there to take care of it since god knew how long. Eunice didn’t care. She grew up without constant warmth, but Hazel was born in a better time. She was as fragile as children could be in this world that was leaving Eunice behind, just like it left Tomas and Bullhead. The world was always leaving Indians in the dust.
Eunice began to think about all the times in the past four years that she had made Hazel move to a different city with her and then back to Geshig. She only felt guilty about dragging her daughter across the state when she was sober, so like any good mother would do, she never stopped drinking. And Hazel never stopped hating it.
In the stale, foggy morning, Eunice drove around Geshig looking for her teenage daughter. She was not in any of the obvious places, not with Gwen or Shirley, not even with the Haltstorms. Instead, Eunice found her in the back of the library reading old copies of the Geshig Herald.
“I don’t wanna leave,” Hazel said.
“I thought you hated it here.”
“I hate it everywhere. I hate the cities. I hate the cabin. You never let me stay long enough to love them.”
It was the saddest thing she had ever heard. Sadder than poor Brenda’s cries at being kidnapped by her own father. The only home Hazel had known was now a dump, broken beyond repair.
“If you’re not gonna leave, are you gonna stay at the cabin?”
“No.”
“Then what should we do?”
“You do what you want. Leave me alone.”
Like a good mother, Eunice listened to her.
It took less than an hour for Eunice to find a home for her. She went right to the tribal council office from the library, still hungover from the whiskey, and asked for Georgina Kelliher.
“She doesn’t work here anymore,” the young woman at the reception desk said.
“Do you have her address or phone number maybe?”
“I ain’t an operator, lady. I can’t give that shit out or forward you to her, jeez.”
“Well then . . .” Eunice leaned forward and stared into the girl’s face. She sighed and let her whiskey breath wash over her.
“What can you do for me? The tribal council is supposed to serve the tribe and I’m part of the tribe.”
“Ugh. You fuckin’ reek, lady!”
“My name is Eunice Lafournier, and I know I reek.” Eunice thought about the sad cries of her daughter. “Do you happen to have any job openings too?”
The receptionist stood up and walked away. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll put you on the list. Hang on.”
Not five minutes later, the recognizable face of Lindale Kelliher came out to the reception area. “Eunice? Hello! Are you back in Geshig permanently?”
“I don’t know yet, Mr. Kelliher. I’m not in the best situation at the moment.” The young woman stared at her with a smug face, eager to hear some gossip no doubt. “Can we talk in private?”
“Are you having some trouble?” he said, beckoning her back to his office.
“Yes. It’s my daughter . . .” The door to the office shut. “I have a big favor to ask you.”
ON THE WAY BACK to the cabin, Hazel now placated at the thought of living with the Kelliher family, Eunice choked back tears while giving her daughter whatever she could muster for advice.
“The Kellihers are proud. You have to be polite, be careful with every word you say.”
“I know what they’re like, Eunice.”
Hazel wouldn’t take her eyes away from the window, which was better for Eunice because her daughter didn’t see her wince at the tone with which she said her name. “I got no advice for you about boys. The war may be over, but that draft could come back any day so be careful who you give your heart to.”
“Can you just stop talking?”
“If war don’t get them, something will. All goes back to my mom and that jawbone of hers. Remember that, Hazel. Whoever’s face that bone belonged to, he don’t like us Lafourniers and Bullheads being happy.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom, it’s not the old west anymore! No one believes in curses or powwows or any of your parents’ bullshit!”
Eunice stayed quiet for the rest of the car ride, said nothing when Hazel gathered her few belongings from the red pine cabin, and nothing else all the way to the Kellihers’ place east of Geshig.
Before her daughter left the car and left her life behind, Eunice grabbed her shoulder and held her back. “Call us crazy, we’re used to it. But the moment a boy with sweet lips gives you a black-toothed smile, just know there’s nothing you can do to save him. I love you, kiddo, now go on and get off to your new family.”
HAZEL BROUGHT THE CURSED bones down to the plank and began to wash away the soil. It fell away easy as dandruff and what was left only vaguely resembled what she had pictured as a girl. The bones were dark brown, as if made from ebony, and where there should have been nothing but space there was a layer of solid rock. Bullhead must have mounted the jawbone to some kind of clay base.
That, or the jawbone was a fake, and had always been a fake, a bedtime story to teach the children a lesson.
Real or fake, Hazel left the Ghost Acres without looking back and held the jawbone in her hands like a trophy.