10
Thicker Than Water, Thinner Than Time
Flathead Indian Reservation, Jocko Valley, Montana, July 1993.
The stranger who sat on a chair at the edge of the clearing was Clara Victoria, my birth mother. She was surrounded by tall pines, whose tops swayed gently in the cool breeze, a breeze that never brushed the forest floor. The chair’s fabric wove its own simple pattern, crafted against a natural world. Beneath her feet lay a carpet of short pine needles, long fallen and red, leftovers from countless seasons.
As I stared at her from my vantage point, my first thought was, She looks so Indian, just like one of those Edward S. Curtis photographs that capture the harshness of time laid on the softness of Native skin, burnishing it to dark copper, creating arroyos where none previously existed, a blurred prairie scene in the background. Prominent cheekbones broadened Vic’s face, and like Albert, her eyes had an Asian appearance.
I shared her genetic material, same as Ronni, my blood sister, eighteen months my senior; same as James Allen, who is a little over a year younger than me. James Allen was not at the gathering. No one knew where he was, although people gestured vaguely to the west when talking about him. Perhaps he lived in Portland, perhaps in Spokane. He drifted in and out of their lives. Out of her eight surviving children, three of us had been removed from the home by social workers in 1960. I was the only one who had not returned. Until that day.
Every so often someone from the small gathering wandered over to talk with Vic, their quiet voices further absorbed by the fallen needles. And then, sometimes, her laughter erupted, rising low in her chest until it escaped, airy, through her throat.
“Baby! Go get me a beer,” she demanded, then laughed as the small child, probably three or four years of age, ran toward the creek, where the beers were left in its frigid waters to cool. She ran, as fast as her chubby legs could carry her, returning with the familiar beige can of Coors in her tiny hands. Vic grabbed the flip top and pulled, opening the can with a fzzzzz and quaffing the drink with her head thrown back and her eyes closed. Obviously, this was the beverage of choice, judging by the eight or so cans that littered the space at her feet.
Vic pulled her thin coat closer to her chest as she hunched over, protecting herself against the cold that wasn’t intimidated by the nearby fire. She held the beer in one hand and took a final sip, dropping the can alongside the others when she was finished. She then shoved a hand into her pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes, which she tapped against her palm, a gesture that I, as a nonsmoker, still don’t understand. I just knew Mom also carried out this ritual each time she unwrapped a new pack. Extracting a slender white stick, Vic placed it between her lips and pulled a lit match to its edge, while she protected the feeble flame with a cupped hand. The end grew bright, as she inhaled, deep and slow, and her eyes squeezed shut against the smoke when she breathed out. It was evident she enjoyed this part of the ritual.
“Baby!”
While the toddler ran to the creek, Vic and I held each other’s gaze across the clearing for an awkward moment before I looked away. Somehow the group had become aware of this exchange, and the already-muted voices quieted even further, allowing only for the whisper of the trees, the quiet rush of the creek, and the call of the crows to be picked up by my ears. A sense of expectation hung in the air, as low and confining as the ceiling of clouds. I scanned the group, my heart beating frantically against my ribcage, and butterflies took flight in my stomach. Once more I was a small child, fearful of strangers, fearful of her. But my curiosity mixed with fear and caused me to wonder what each of us inherited and what have we passed on. As always, I looked for familiarities.
My aunt, Delphine Plant, Albert’s wife, leaned over to me. “You look just like Victoria.” She’d made the same comment about our similarities to Albert earlier that day, when I first met them. But when she said it to me, I couldn’t help but cringe as I looked intensely at the woman I “look just like.” I didn’t see the sameness Delphine described. Instead, I saw a face bloated with years of drinking and aged by difficult living. Her voice was harsh and guttural, and wrinkles carved deep into her skin. “I mean when she was younger,” my aunt clarified. Had my reaction been so visible? Embarrassed, I turned away. “She was beautiful when she was younger, when she was your age.”
Although she and I are both American Indian, our difference lay in the fact that while she lived among her own, sought solace among her family, and used them as home base from which she left and returned, I had been flung to the waiting arms of a world who found Indians repulsive, with our lazy, drunk, promiscuous ways. The wounds I was left with still bled under the right conditions. And my being in her presence put me in emotional limbo. I had longed for this moment, fantasized about it when I was six, dreamed about it when I was fifteen. But my soul filled with dread as the reality check of who I really am seeped into the cracks of my fragmented identity.
As I glanced around this small group of people, their brown eyes briefly met my own and they looked away, leaving me to my own decision. How could I have ever thought this was a good idea? How could I talk to this woman who’d given birth to me but allowed social workers to take me and ignored a court date to keep me?
I watched Baby bring another can of beer and hand it over delicately, with love. Vic took it without any thought of the child. That beer can, like the previous ones, soon ended up at her feet. I took a deep breath; it was now or never. Leaving the safety of my husband, my family, and my aunt Delphine, I took my first tentative step toward her, and I felt the silence, palpable against my skin, my soul, as everyone in the group witnessed my journey, which lasted a lifetime but took only about fifty feet to complete.
“I’m Vicki Charmain,” I told her quietly, as I knelt in front of her. “I’ve come home.”
Vic refuses to look at me; her head is bent, so I am left to observe the haphazard part in her salt-and-pepper hair. My peripheral vision captures the shaking of her shoulders, and she bends even more forward, into herself, burying her face in her chest. Her voice is weak, supported only by the tears that I hear but cannot see.
“I dreaded this day,” she finally says through soft sobs caught in her throat, strangling her words to bare whispers. “I thought you’d come up here and be mean. I thought you’d call me all kinds of bad names. I thought you’d be really angry and talk harsh.” My own throat closes, and I can’t speak. Her fear explains the number of beer cans that surround us, vestiges of distress. We are cloaked in silence, except for Mother Nature, who keeps talking, her breeze caressing the treetops, her water whisking over the glacial boulders that line the early lengths of the Jocko River as it flows from the Mission Mountains. After several long moments Vic looks at me, as if I am a spirit from a long ago past. I see fear in her eyes, tension on her face. Trails of tears follow the marked arroyos of age. There is silence, and I witness her face crumple with shame.
I push my own hurt aside, as I feel the familiar obligation to lessen hers. I place my hands on her arms, and even through her jacket I can feel their thinness. Soft as the pine needles beneath our feet, I say, “I can’t do that. I don’t know the life you’ve led. My mom raised me not to pass judgment. I cannot judge you.”
5. My first meeting with my family. From left to right: Ronni Marie, Vic, and Vern. Photo by Rick Harness. Courtesy of the author.
She cries openly then. I know we share the same pain, she and I. It’s just called different names. Hers is a shame of relinquishment; mine is the hurt of abandonment. Both are two sides of the same adoption coin.
Flathead Indian Reservation, Ronan, Montana, August 1994.
I haven’t seen Vic since last summer, and Ronni, not interested in visiting family, has dropped me off at the home of Vic and her husband, Ray, who live in tribal housing, in a small neighborhood tucked away off the main highway. Her home is like all the other tribally administered HUD homes in this development, a small one-storied structure cloaked in heavily weathered gray siding and surrounded by a fenceless lot, devoid of vegetation, save the hardy, slow-growing grass that erupts in the midst of the connected lawns. This grass could be mistaken for xeriscaping, but it’s the result of people being too poor, or too disinterested, to plant, water, and maintain the lush lawns seen elsewhere in the United States.
The sidewalk from the street to the house is buckled, grouted with weeds that refuse to die. The door stands open, and I know I am supposed to just walk in without knocking (to knock is such a “white” thing to do), but I am uncomfortable with this cultural requirement. But if I’m to be really honest, there is nothing comfortable about this entire visit. I enter into the main living space and note that the linoleum is dirty and worn. Replacement is out of the question—too expensive. Beneath the picture window sits a brownish couch, whose springs have seen better days, evidenced by the sagging cushions that require anyone who sits there to defy gravity. Across from the couch are torn overstuffed chairs and an ottoman, and beside these stand a small table, where an ashtray spills over with cigarette butts that have been smoked all the way to the filter. Stale odors of cigarettes and bacon and eggs hang heavy in the air, and my stomach churns at this clash of sensory overload. Well, that and anxiety.
The walls are filmed by cigarette smoke; one wall holds a Catholic cross and clusters of photos in dime-store frames, where faces of smiling adults and happy children stare hopefully through the glass. There is one of a beautiful young woman surrounded by toddlers. There is a young man in military uniform, a proud, stoic warrior. I have no idea how he is related. There is the wedding photo of Vic and Ray, looking forward to a happy future. My eye, however, is caught by the photo of a young woman, whose long, dark hair, curved with gentle curls, is pulled back from her face, in a style of the 1940s. She is devastatingly beautiful. She is Vic at fourteen.
As I look from one photo to another, I try to find the resemblances between and among people. Some are clearly related, some are not. Who is the soldier? Who is the young woman surrounded by children? With an ache I am aware how visibly absent I am in these photos of family, and as a result I experience the familiar stab that comes from existing “outside.” These captured moments commemorating achievements, events, and crazy-quilt pieces of everyday life sit in stark contrast to the heavy oppression within the room, this house, this development.
When I join Vic and Ray on the back patio, I am pointed toward an empty chair. Words are a hoarded commodity, made clear by the fact that no one is speaking any. Ray doesn’t stand up or offer to shake hands; he just nods his head in my direction without looking at me. This is okay. I have no interest in meeting him—he isn’t blood. And for me, right now, blood is all that matters.
I know from the family scuttlebutt that he’d refused to come to the gathering the previous summer, the one I’d attended, saying, “If she wants to meet me, she can damn well come to my home. I’m not going up there.” I’m not exactly sure why he was so angry. Perhaps it was because I was the long-lost daughter that he and his family were forced to hear about, and I had returned. Or perhaps it was more visceral: I was the visible byproduct of a love that his wife had shared with someone before him, a love she continued to revisit in stories and laments, especially after a long evening of drinking. A mythical love.
We sit on their back patio on white, molded plastic chairs and look out on a view that most Americans would pay a lot of money to see every single day of their lives: the bald-pated Mission Mountains rising majestically from the valley floor forming the eastern boundary of the reservation. In front of us, a gaggle of children, wearing dirty, ill-fitting clothes, play a raucous game of tag, screams of laughter escaping through white teeth, begging us to watch their every move. They are unfazed when we don’t. These are Vic’s grandchildren, the genetic remains of Robin, her second to the youngest daughter, killed a few years previous in a car accident, one of many, on Highway 93. A common motto that graces bumper stickers in the area is “Pray for me, I drive 93”—funny except that it’s true. Vic is now raising Robin’s kids.
I watch Vic as she watches her young charges. She looks different than she did the last time I saw her. Her face has slimmed down, and there is almost a regality in her posture. Gone is the hunching woman with beer cans at her feet. She turns toward me and measures my mettle with a steel gaze of her black eyes. We are definitely on her territory. She pulls the cigarette that is held delicately between her index and middle fingers to her lips and inhales deeply, her chin thrust forward, her eyes half-closed against the acrid blue smoke curling around her head in the breezeless air.
I remember sitting there for a long time that afternoon while the sun moved slowly overhead. What I don’t remember are the conversations we try to have; I remember only that they are stilted and halting. I remember my stomach hurting and a headache playing around my temples. I remember thinking, Blood might be thicker than water, but it’s thinner than time. How could we possibly bridge almost three decades, where I am but a fragmented memory, and she has been effectively erased, by my parents, by the system? I am painfully aware that for much of that afternoon she and I exist in minimal sentences and monosyllabic answers; her husband doesn’t exist at all.
I try to find a gentle way to leave this physical discomfort when Vic’s attention is pulled away by a child, perhaps a gesture, perhaps a scream. She growls orders, her voice raspy from too many cigarettes. The children stop their roughhousing for a few moments, and their black eyes jump between her and Ray, measuring her seriousness against his reaction. The moment passes with no action on anyone’s part, and they return to their game, ignoring her continued brief rants. This, I can tell, is a long-practiced routine. I’m sure they’d pay attention if she’d come off the patio, but she doesn’t. I doubt she comes off the patio for much of anything. She certainly hadn’t come for me when I needed her, and that event was a lot bigger than a toddler asking for attention. I suspect she’s not a patio-leaving kind of gal.
“You wanna beer?” Ray asks to no one in particular. Vic nods and he disappears, returning with two opened cans of Budweiser. He hands one to her and wraps the other in his fist and downs it in a few gulps. I glance at my watch; it’s two in the afternoon.
After a few moments and a few sips, Vic asks, “You read much?” She’d lit another cigarette immediately after stubbing the previous one out.
“Yeah, I like reading.”
“What kinds of books do you like?” Her gesture of the upthrust chin as she asks this is so Indian. I’ve seen it in fictional characters, those stereotypes of the American West, the Jim Chees, the Joe Leaphorns. But this is for real. This is also a loaded question. I know she didn’t go beyond eighth grade; I know she doesn’t work outside the home. I know the literacy rate on the reservation is abominable. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of books might be of interest to her. What kind of books would she have in common with me, a college graduate?
“I dunno,” I say, playing it safe, vague. “I like murder mysteries, some romances.”
I watch for signs of approval. She exhales and wrinkles her upper lip. “I could never get into those types of books. You like Gone with the Wind?”
“I loved Gone with the Wind!”
A few more questions later we realize we both like John Steinbeck, James Michener, and the new one from Jean Auel. That afternoon I realize the love of reading is genetic, and I am humbly reminded that being uneducated is different from being stupid. This woman who resides in this impoverished, forgotten corner of the world known as the reservation is by no means stupid.
Flathead Indian Reservation, Ronan, Montana, August 2005.
I follow my sister Ronni, who this time has agreed to come with me to visit Vic, into the familiar gray house, the same one I’d visited years before. A bed occupies the far corner of the living room, where the dining table once stood, and on it lies a thin figure, curled, her shoulders convulsing while muffled sobs emanate from beneath the bedsheets.
“Vic, are you crying?” Ronni asks, as she steps forward. I’m shocked at the skeletal version of the woman I haven’t seen in ten years.
“Oh, just feeling sorry for myself,” Vic says with a rasping laugh, wiping tears from her face, which is even more carved with wrinkles from all her weight loss. She’d quit drinking two years before when she was hospitalized with a diabetic attack that threatened to move her into Catholic heaven sooner than she’d anticipated. It was during that hospitalization that she’d confided to Ronni, saying she wished she’d chosen her children over alcohol. That was as close to an apology as anyone was going to get.
“Who is behind you? Is that Vicki Charmain?”
I have to admit, hearing that name causes my throat to close, each and every time. When I was a kid, I used to think that Vicki Charmain was the baby that died, and I had somehow replaced it. I suppose in a way it’s true, on some level: a child within a family is removed from view, which can be translated as dead, and is resurrected in someone else’s family, well beyond the vision of the mother who’d given birth.
“Vicki Charmain! Come on over here.”
I walk over and wrap my arms around her small, bony frame and look into her obsidian eyes. Their brightness says she is truly happy to see me. She is now seventy-one years old, still sporting harshly dyed jet-black hair spiked in the style of the eighties. This is her statement of unconventionality, the inability to color within the lines, which also explains my removal. Her unconventionality caused her and Ronny Smith, my father, to have me, a six-month-old, ride the rails with them to Minnesota. Her unconventionality led her to disappear for weeks, sometimes months at a time, leaving her children with various family members until she resurfaced, with no explanation of where she’d been or why she disappeared. Her unconventionality led her to shoot heroin in front of her five-year-old son, Vern.
But I recognize that she is the way she is and seventy-one years hasn’t changed any of it. So I sit on the bed next to her, and both of us pretend ten years haven’t gone by since I’ve seen her. We pretend her drinking hasn’t caused the chasm in the family that is still an open wound, and we pretend that her kidneys aren’t failing to the point that requires her to go to dialysis three times a week, as she wastes away before everyone’s eyes. That’s okay though—I’m really good at pretending; I’ve had a lot of practice. I’ve pretended for nearly four decades that I truly feel comfortable living in a country filled with people who often despise people like her and me, Indians. We are enemies of the state because we fought for our homeland, and we are constantly reminded how little we matter. According to various U.S. Census and CDC demographics, we are 2 percent of the population, our poverty rate is 26 percent, 83 percent of roads on the reservations are in unacceptable condition, we die at significantly higher rates than other Americans, our youth have higher suicide rates than other American youth, and we have an average of a 50 percent high school–dropout rate. Unfortunately, I think we have begun to believe we are as insignificant as our statistics portray.
“So how you been?” she asks.
Where do I start? Probably by explaining why it’s been ten years since I’ve been back.
In 1995, two years after reuniting, Ronni and I became estranged, as did Roberta and I. But I don’t know why. Really, the “why” is unimportant. What is important is there was nothing of substance to hold us together. We had no history, no shared memories, nothing other than a piece of paper that said we shared the same mother. And I didn’t know anyone else in the family enough to feel comfortable just going to visit. I am not a person who pushes myself into a group and dares anyone to say I don’t have a right to be there.
Therefore, ten years vanished. And how badly I want to say how much I miss her, how much I will miss the chance to discover our differences or, more disconcerting perhaps, our similarities. I want her to know that I need her in my life to prove that I am “real,” a real daughter, a real sister, a real aunt, and a real niece. I’m not just a pencil marking on the genealogical tree that can be erased at whim when some family member determines I’m not real enough. I want to say these things, but don’t. These words hurt, physically, as they sit bunched in my throat and, emotionally, as they sit bunched in my consciousness.
“Oh, you know, raising those two boys and making quilts.”
Smoke encircles us with confining familiarity. “How’s that oldest boy of yours? What’s his name again?”
“Chris?”
“He the one that got me my beer from the river the first time you came up?”
I give a wry smile and nod. Chris became her minion of choice that summer at the gathering in the clearing. He replaced Baby, who sulked as she watched her grandmother create another “favorite,” hard news for a three-year-old. Vic liked the brightness of Chris’s eyes and the mischievousness of his smile.
She turns over on her side, facing us, her hand propping up her head, her face morphing into a familiar smile, the one that sits on my son’s face most of the time. “That little shit. I couldn’t believe it when I asked him to get me a beer from the river, and he’d run it back to me, shaking it the whole way! Each time I opened one, beer flew out of the flip top. I must have had three beers that he did that to.” She laughs at the memory, her small shoulders shaking. She pauses and fixes me with a smile. “How old was he then?”
“Six.”
“That little shit,” she repeats, smiling. This term holds both endearment and high respect. She inhales, lays her head back on her pillow, and closes her eyes, the cigarette lying limp in her hands, the smoke drifting lazily from her mouth and nostrils toward the screen that covers the nearby window, its ripped fabric doing little to keep the flies out. They move easily through this nonboundary, being swatted by Vic only if she takes a mind to, which she rarely does.
“You see Robin’s kids out there?” she asks, her voice suddenly tired. “I don’t know who’s going to take care of them kids when I’m gone.” A tear slides from beneath a closed lid.
Out of nowhere Vic announces defiantly, “I hate black people.” She stubs out another cigarette, adding it to the already overflowing pile in the ashtray and pulls another one from the pack. She watches my face, which I’m sure betrays a look of horror, and laughs at this reaction. “Don’t think I don’t hate white people too. I hate them probably more than black people. Coming up here, living on our land, telling us what we can and can’t do. Making us feel bad about ourselves. That’s what white people do.” She pauses and looks out the window. “I don’t much like Mexicans either.”
I don’t understand her issues about ethnicity. According to my adoption records, my biological father, long dead from a drowning accident, was white and one of Robin’s partners had been from Mexico, a fact I’d learned on my last visit here. I don’t know if that’s how Vic really feels and she simply doesn’t care who hears her opinions and states them proudly, or perhaps, as her youngest son claims, she’s testing my reaction. All I know are these are the words she says. And while her chin is stubbornly set, and her eyes squint like flint against humanity, I cringe. These words are mirrors to the ones hurled at me as I was growing up, in anger, in laughter, in teasing, and in taunt: “I hate Indians.” Although I can see where the unveiled anger comes from, and I can see where people get chips on their shoulder, I also see why I can’t let myself go that direction: I have a white husband and two-eighth–blood boys that I would kill for, or die for, or just be for.
Flathead Indian Reservation, Arlee Cemetery, Montana, March 13, 2008.
A bitter cold wind blows across the wide valley, the kind that tugs at clothing, flapping loose corners like sheets on the clothesline. This kind of wind sandblasts our skin with pebbly-hard snow pellets, forcing our eyes to become slits against its onslaught. I watch the man in the Pendleton vest read from a Bible, his words flying away on a fickle gust, and I move closer to my sister, seeking shelter, if only for a few moments. I glance around the brown-faced group and note that there are about eighty of us huddled together in this rural cemetery, which holds the remains of ancestors buried over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Unlike other tribes, we weren’t moved here by the U.S. government; we ceded a large portion of our land and lived on the remaining 1,317,000 acres.
Ronni, James Allen, Aunt Delphine, and I face the empty hole. Two pine planks and a couple of iron bars keep the casket from falling in. It is a pine box with bare-bones decoration, the least expensive one the mortuary had to offer, the most expensive the tribal funeral fund could afford. We stand shoulder to shoulder, bent against the cold like bison. I know only five people, three of whom are standing beside me. I am the only one in a navy dress and heels. I am once more painfully aware of my outside status.
“When you go up to the funeral,” another Native adoptee told me when I mentioned the passing of my birth mom, “it’s customary for children to sit in the front row. You sit there, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. You’re as much her child as any of them.”
I tried that out earlier this morning, at the wake. Ronni, James Allen, and I took our seats in the front row, next to Vern, Vic’s youngest son, who’d sat at the wake for three days. The rest of the siblings, who had inhabited the front row moments ago, moved to the row behind us. This active shifting of place and location made it apparent we did not share the same status of “family.” After a few awkward moments the three of us got up and returned to our seats back in the fifth row, next to Albert and Delphine, and watched the rest of the funeral from this sheltered vantage point.
Afterward funeral attendees filed around the chairs like the video game Centipede, shaking hands with each of the family members. An aunt approached me, shook my hand, and hugged me, pulling me close. She whispered in my ear, “You should be up in the front row with the rest of the kids.”
I whispered back, “I know, it’s just really uncomfortable.” She stood back and appraised me with a sad smile, nodded, and moved on.
We were the orphans of highest magnitude.
But now, as I stand, huddled against the wind with a group of nearly perfect strangers, I wish I could say I had cried when I found out about Victoria’s death, but I didn’t. I couldn’t summon up tears for this small woman who had given birth to me, allowed me to be handed off to the woman who raised me, and who wouldn’t see me again until 1993, when I was thirty-four years old. My dry eyes focus on Delphine, who pulls gently on my sleeve and says quietly, “Let’s go throw dirt on the casket.”
I don’t want to throw dirt on the casket. In fact, I really don’t even want to be here.
But I am.