16

Vernon

Bitterroot Valley, Montana, October 2011.

We agreed on meeting at nine o’clock, but Vern, my brother, shows up forty-five minutes early. I can’t blame him, really; we haven’t seen each other in nearly two years. We hug, and his sturdy body is like a cedar; he is like a bear, and I feel safe as his arms pull me in, encircle me. When I stand back I immediately begin the search for similarity, familiarity. His hair is black, cropped close to his scalp, with only his temples shimmering in silver, as opposed to my hair, which is also short and black, but iced with wide swaths of pure white. His eyes are darker than mine, almost black, and his smile . . . I think we have the same smile, but perhaps mine’s a little less guarded. And our noses are almost the same. At ten years his senior, I imagine I’ve changed a lot, but he doesn’t look any different than when I first met him eighteen years ago, at a family gathering on the Jocko, when I first met Vic. When I first met all my family.

I have a photograph of him, cut out from the tribal newspaper and placed in our family album. Vern is standing with a group of police officers, dressed in the sharply creased, dark-blue uniform of Tribal Law and Order. It was taken when he graduated from the academy. I’ve never told him how proud I was to hear of his becoming an officer or that I’m still so proud of him.

9. Susan and Vern. Photo by Rick Harness. Courtesy of the author.

Three days ago I had called him at the spur of the moment to ask him for a favor. I was nervous. I hadn’t called him in years. After punching in his number, I held my breath and waited for an answer. Maybe he wouldn’t know me. Or worse, maybe he would and deny my request because I was going to ask too much, of him, of us. My heart stopped when he picked up on the third ring.

“Hey,” he said, his smooth voice taking me by surprise. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”

He had answered so quickly I didn’t have a chance to tell him who I was, to remind him of our relationship. I was afraid that without those reminders, he wouldn’t know me. The thing is, I feel the need to do this each and every time I talk with one of my relatives: explain to them our connection, my place in the lineage. I see myself as forgotten, but his greeting tells me I’m not. I smile.

“Where you been?” he asks. His voice is like a spring rain.

Our relationship, the one between my birth family and me, is, at best, unsettled. Since our reunion in 1993 my visits are sporadic, their response to them, guarded. I drop out of their lives for years at a time, and they never beckon me back. There are no invitations, no phone calls, no emails, no letters. There is no exchange of news of any kind. Communication is one way: me to them. I know the rules and I accept them. From this description reunion is misleading—perhaps remeeting or reconnecting is better. There has been no reunification of our family, and maybe there never will be, although I continue the efforts.

But I still feel uneasy around this reconstructed family. The edge I walk, being one of them and not being one of them, is fine and razor sharp. I never know if I’ll be welcomed, let alone accepted. We are separated by too many years, too much tragedy, too many tears, and too much difference. Plus, I tell myself, they all have one another; I am a satellite that has been knocked into a different orbit. In my mind they gather together like lambs in a huddle against the wolves. It takes work to insert myself into that huddle every time I return. They observe with practiced distrust my white mannerisms, my white speech, gathered from living for so long in the white boundaries. I could, they may presume, be a wolf in disguise. When I do return, however, they move apart, far enough to let me in. And when I leave, the circle closes tight behind me.

So when I called Vern three days ago, I was asking to be let in. “I have a favor to ask.” And that’s when my adrenaline started pumping; my fingertips felt on fire with the energy. I’m preparing myself for his rejection. That’s not a new reaction; people have said no to me a lot. Sometimes that no means “no admittance,” like the time I was sixteen and the saleswoman didn’t want to sell me a pair of jeans. Like the time, thirty years later, at an upscale store in Fort Collins, when a saleswoman followed me from room to room as I browsed the merchandise, always within six feet of me, always folding, fluffing, moving items from one space to another. Always there. She met my gaze only once but dogged me until I left. I never returned to that store.

It’s taken me over forty years to realize that I have been taught to believe I don’t carry enough value as a human being for someone to say yes. So I hold my breath and hope Vern sees beyond that nonvalue and says yes. That little voice, the one I hate, whispers, Why would he? We have nothing, no foundation. This relationship that I’m trying to build with Vern is far from solid. It is the thinnest layer of ice that hides vacuous depths below, shattering under too much weight.

But it didn’t shatter. Vern replied, interest tingeing his voice, “What do you need?”

I pulled air deep into my lungs and began my sales spiel. “The last time we spoke, a couple of years ago, you’d mentioned that your family lived in a campground for five years.” I paused. “That conversation has been playing in my mind ever since. I want to see where you lived. Will you take me there?” Again I held my breath, but not for long.

“Sure, I’ll do that.”

What if he bails? What if my request carries too much pressure? Too many memories? “Promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.” I heard the barely restrained smile.

“You won’t back out?”

“No, I won’t back out.”

“I’ll call you when I get into town.”

“Ready to go to Hamilton?” I ask, pulling on my raincoat.

“Let’s go.” His words are clipped, sounding more like he is from Minnesota than having been born and raised in the Rocky Mountain West. We walk toward my rented Ford Focus, and I scan the parking lot for the new truck he’d told me he purchased.

“I didn’t bring it,” he answers, reading my thoughts. “I don’t even know why I bought it. It’s a ridiculous size. It’s immense,” he says with a wry smile. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He points to the car he did bring—his son’s. “It’s a mess; it’s better if we take yours.” I grimace and wonder how he defines “mess,” as he gathers up the loose papers I’ve thrown across my passenger seat and tosses them to the back.

We pull out onto Reserve Street, and although the street has changed, my memories of Missoula haven’t. We drive by areas that had once been open fields, now filled in with big-box stores. We drive by Third Avenue; Rick had worked in an engineering office, where the street intersected with Higgins. We drive by Rosauers, the grocery store located just two blocks away from where we rented our first home together. We pass the golf course, where I remember walking with Rick on a beautiful June day when he said he wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was thirty. Don’t we all?

We turn right on Highway 93, where if we’d gone straight we would have eventually, through some twists and turns, landed near the home we first bought, on the hill. So many memories. I am soothed by the town’s familiarity. The rain pounds against my windshield, bringing yet another memory: why we left Missoula in 1987. In winter it was not uncommon to go six weeks without seeing the sun, except from our house on the hill, where we lived for three glorious years, or by driving out of the valley in any direction. Fort Collins, in contrast, experiences over three hundred sunny days a year. The rain feels oppressive.

As the windshield wipers slap the rain away, we talk about his job as a tribal cop. It’s clear he loves his job. I think he loves the adrenaline. I tell him about the legal case I found online, from 1999, where it says that he, Vern Fisher, “testified he was afraid Brown was going to shoot him.” Back then, he was just afraid.

Three years ago, Vern was shot. “Were you afraid then?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No, not really. I was on a case, though, where my boss was shot. Twice, in the chest. I laughed because I thought he was goofing around, that he’d stumbled. Then I saw him go backward and knew what had happened. Kept him down, called an ambulance. He was wearing a piece of sheet metal outside of his armored vest. That’s the only thing that saved him.”

Regardless of our relationship, I am intensely aware I have a cop in the car, so when a traffic light on the highway turns yellow, I slam on the brakes from sixty miles per hour, trying to come to a stop. Both of us brace ourselves against the sudden stop. But I realize with horror I can’t stop in time. I have to make a decision. I pause.

“I’d have gone,” he says easily.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

I hit the gas and slide through just as the light turns red. “I’m sorry if my driving makes you nervous,” I apologize.

He shrugs. “No, not really.”

We sit in silence for a few moments, and I recall a conversation I had with Uncle Albert recently and what I was supposed to tell Vern. “Uncle Albert says he hasn’t seen you in a while. He wonders why you haven’t been down to his house, since you live right up the hill.” Vern smiles but doesn’t reply. “He’s your uncle,” I remind him, as if my reminder carries any weight at all. I am an outsider. “You know, he and Delphine are not going to live forever. They’re your elders; go see them,” I chide.

He cups his chin as he looks out the window. “Yeah,” he says to the fogging glass, “We’re not a very close family.”

Colors of the autumn trees bleed outside the car windows, their hues heightened by the moisture. “What’s the hardest thing about being a cop?” I ask.

“Probably when the kids die.” As an afterthought, Vern adds, after looking at me, “Did I tell you I’m also the tribal coroner?” I shake my head. Vern is the first tribal coroner to be on the reservation. Those duties have typically been handled by the county.

“That must be tough.”

Vern shakes his head. “It’s not much different than being a cop,” he says in that matter-of-fact way I’m beginning to get used to. “People are usually dead when you see them, regardless.”

Dull gray clouds lay heavy on the Bitterroots, their edges brushing the knees of the mountains. As I watch the lace of golden-leaved cottonwoods race by my window, I’m aware that Ravalli National Wildlife Refuge—now called Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge—lies just on the other side of the Bitterroot River. That refuge was my family’s turning point, when Dad went from being a biologist to a refuge manager, from a casual drinker to an alcoholic. He liked working with animals, not people and budgets and bureaucracy. That’s what he told me when he finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous when I was sixteen. But we’d moved to the refuge when I was five and then moved to Washington when I was ten. But I don’t share the personal information; I don’t want to open our dysfunction for review.

Vern forces my attention from the refuge by pointing out my driver’s side window to a semicircular stand of cottonwoods. “That’s one of the campgrounds we stayed in,” he says. I look in the rearview mirror, and I debate whether I should stop and turn around. I want to stand in that space, to think about what it must have been like to be the child, Vern, even for a few minutes. His life is difficult to fathom. The very same year he lived in a campground, I was living the middle-class life in Billings, Montana.

“You know,” he says, breaking into my thoughts, “We didn’t stay in just one campground. We stayed in a lot of them. There’s no way we could visit all of them in one day.”

“Why did you stay in the campgrounds?” Are my questions painful? Intrusive? Evidently not, because Vern just keeps answering.

“That’s just what we did,” he says with a shrug. “I think Dad liked it; he liked camping. He didn’t like living in a home, a structure with walls. And as a kid? It was great. We could do whatever we wanted; go wherever we wanted to go. There were no boundaries, whatsoever.” He laughs. He then points across the car, to my left. I follow his finger to see the small, cabin-style bar. “I used to wait in front of that bar a lot. That one too.” He points to the one across the road, a little farther ahead.

I smile. “What, waiting for someone to buy you beer?”

“No. Waiting for my folks.”

I frown in vague understanding. “You were the designated driver?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I was just waiting for them to go home.”

“How old were you?” My mind races to conceptualize what this means.

“Grade school.”

I’d heard stories of kids driving their drunk parents somewhere. I didn’t actually know anyone who had done that. I look at Vern and consider the life he must have led. Vern shifts in his seat. “I got a ton of stories. Funny stories, but none of them don’t include alcohol.”

Our car jolts as the pavement ends, and we muddle through puddles that dot a construction zone lasting several miles. “This stretch of road here? One time Dad was driving, and Mom and all of us were in the car, and they were arguing really bad. Then, all of a sudden, Dad kinda slowed down, opened up the driver’s side door, and just bailed. Just left us going down the road without a driver. And we’re sailing along, and you know? Then Mom just slid over the bench seat, behind the wheel, and just kept driving.” His laugh is deep in his chest, and it rumbles like faraway thunder. “That happened more than once. Sometimes she’d turn around and pick him up. Sometimes she didn’t.”

He indicates for me to turn left down a narrow road. “And here? I walked this road a ton of times. Always in the dark. It was a long way home.” He pauses and looks out the window again, his voice quieter. “A long way.”

I’ve always been scared of the dark, my imagination conjuring fearful and violent images, both natural and supernatural. “Weren’t you ever scared?”

“Naw. Animals never scared me. People do. But everything just left me alone.” He points again. “Turn here. I’ll take you by where I lived.”

“It’s surprising you stayed such a good kid,” I say.

“Well, not always. I was pretty wild when I got into my teen years. One time I backed up to a bar and unloaded everything I could from it: beer, kegs, bottles, you name it. Everything went in the back of my pickup truck.”

“What did you do with all that stuff?”

“Sold it.” A wry smile crosses his features, and he looks at me for a reaction.

I imagine he’s a great cop; he’s been on the other side of the law.

Suddenly he smiles, his black eyes full of mischief. “You know how you want to write that book of what it was like to be adopted? I think I’m going to write a book about it was like not to be adopted.”

We laugh and the laugher fills that tiny car with warmth.

But Vern’s statement raises an interesting question that our society assumes about adoption—that to be rescued from a chaotic family and adopted is always better than not being rescued. And to hear his stories, it’s hard to argue with that. But I have my own stories to tell, but for now I hold them inside my mouth and remind myself that this journey we’re on, the one right now, is not about me. It’s about needing to hear what happened to my brother when I wasn’t part of his life.

So I follow the asphalt that winds along the outskirts of Hamilton as the road turns to a narrow two-lane. Houses, small and cottage-like, dot the landscape, their yards growing progressively larger until after a mile or so, when these yards slowly turn into small acreages. Willows grow everywhere; their rust-colored leaves hang limp in the rain.

“I used to walk down this road too, but it sure seemed a lot farther than it does now,” he laughs at his confusion while he watches the land slip by and the years catch up. “Okay, that’s one of the schools I attended.”

A small, one-story brick building comes into view. I’m sure when he was here in the 1970s, that building looked old. It now looks ancient.

“Here, turn left at this road. And slow down, we’re coming on it.” There’s a hint of excitement in his voice. “Turn left in here.”

I slow down and eye the painted Quonset hut and adjacent white clapboard house. I feel uncomfortable being here uninvited. But then I feel uninvited in a lot of places. It’s the hazards of being Indian. “You sure it’s okay?” I wince with my question; I am such a rule follower.

“Yeah, it’s a business.”

We park and get out of the car, standing in silence for a few moments while he scans the countryside, getting his bearings. Pretty soon he paints the scene with his fingers, pointing at the various sites. “When we lived here all of this was open. The guy who lived here, in that house, had a potato farm, and my dad was basically a laborer. He did work for the farmer, got the fields ready, planted, weeded, harvested. He fixed machinery and did a lot of welding. Originally, he was a welder. We lived over here,” he says, gesturing toward a grassy meadow straight ahead of us, “in a military tent, and we swam back in that canal.” He points toward a screen of willows. “You can’t see it now, but that’s where we swam.” He’s quiet as he looks past the grass, the trees, into another dimension. “I don’t mean to make it sound like growing up this way was all bad. It was great. Here, as a kid, I got to drive the tractor. A lot of times I’d work side by side with my dad. I enjoyed that.” He turns to me, a half smile on his face. “But that’s where we lived.”

“Did kids make fun of you in your schools?” I could only imagine the brutal taunting any of my classmates would have received if they lived this lifestyle.

“No, no one said anything. I had a lot of friends, did well in school. Best thing was probably the fact I had no TV, so I read all the time. But we were usually the only Indian kids in school. But a lot of times Mom would just up and leave, for weeks, months at a time.”

“Where did she go?”

He shrugs, “A lot of times she’d just go up and live with my grandparents, her folks. Other times no one knew where she was.”

“Who took care of you then?”

“Dad,” he answers simply.

“I don’t know how she kept you guys,” I say, shaking my head in complete confusion. “I have no idea how she didn’t lose you to the system. I heard she did heroin once.”

“She did. I watched. Rosa, our sister, said it was the one and only time Mom did it because I was crying so hard. But who knows?” Vern looks at me, studying my face, again with that unblinking gaze. I knit my brows and shake my head, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together.

“How did she not lose you to the system?” I ask again.

Vern returns his gaze to the field and settles his feet until they’re shoulder-width apart, sliding his hands into his fleece-vest pockets. He is silent for a long time, and when he answers it is with a quiet voice. “We moved a lot. I went to a lot of different schools. By the time I was in eighth grade, I’d changed schools thirty-five times. I’m sure any time someone started sniffing around, we up and moved camp.”

My smile is lopsided, but my voice holds no humor as I echo the logic. “She’d already lost three kids to social workers. She didn’t want to lose the rest of you, but she didn’t want to change either. She just tried to outrun it.” I shake my head, but I’m careful to be honest with myself. As much as I would like to judge her actions with sanctimonious anger, I can’t. I myself have gotten into a car and driven for hours, leaving my husband behind. I didn’t leave in anger, but just as a way of racing the claustrophobia of reality that seemed to chase me once in a while, settling around me, trapping me until I want to scream in protest. Yes, I admit I have done that pretty often. And those drives, when they happen, on dusty roads or endless asphalt, clear my head. I scan the horizon, watch fields of grain fly by my window, feel the endlessness of the high-prairie landscape in which I live. While the white line disappears hypnotically beneath my car, the chaos is calmed, focus restored.

My eldest son, in the midst of his teenage angst, gave me so much grief I thought ceaselessly about getting into the car and watching Fort Collins disappear in the rearview mirror, becoming a green dot on the high-plains landscape. Years later, when I confessed this to my husband, he looked at me and said, “You think I haven’t thought of that?”

It is on these drives that I churn events and conversations like butter, replaying them, reviewing them, revamping them. But sometimes I just drive. Sometimes I seek a sense of adventure that begins deep in my genes, to take a journey, to discover something. This usually happened every spring and fall, when the road trips were the longest, when I was the happiest, when I could do the hundreds of miles required to get whatever this was out of my system. I’ve been to Oregon (three times), Montana (numerous), Durango, Colorado (several), Missouri (three times), and the desert Southwest (often). Sometimes these forays occurred with the family, sometimes just with Rick, many times by myself.

The familiar requirement for self-assessment is apparent on this journey I am currently on: it is autumn and I am a thousand miles from my home. I could have flown but chose not to. I needed to think, reflect, to dream, to comb through the rubble of adoption and see, with new eyes, who I am in relation to my families and honestly assess how it has affected me throughout my life. I’m now finding out how this also affected my brother. Although I can draw a similarity between Vic and me in our escapes, there is an important difference: I never left my family when they needed me.

“Another thing Mom liked to do was ride the rail,” Vern says, bringing me back to this time, this space.

I smile. “Yeah, that’s what I heard. I heard Vic and Ronny went back to Minnesota once. They took me with them.” I look at his face. “Evidently, it didn’t go so well. I heard his family disinherited him because he was living with an Indian.” I don’t wait to see his reaction because anger still colors mine.

I start up the car and drive the back road to Corvallis, a tiny town tucked between Hamilton and Stevensville. “I think I went to that school,” Vern says, indicating a somewhat more modern structure than the last school, but his eyebrows are furrowed in thought and he tilts his head. “But it doesn’t look right. It’s like that one, but not that one. I think it was on the other side of the road. Yeah, there it is.” This school is as old as the first, but it is not abandoned; children are playing inside the chain-link fence, while above them, over the door, the letters of the school name are rusted and askew.

The road is narrow and curved; the drive is slow, calming. “So have you ever wanted to look up anything about your dad?” Vern asks, after a few moments’ pause. I’m uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation. I hadn’t planned on talking about my birth dad. I hadn’t planned on talking about me at all. But that’s not fair, I tell myself. He doesn’t know me as much as I don’t know him.

“No.”

“Are you curious?”

No, I think silently, I’m not.

Ronni, James Allen, and I are in the middle of the pack of nine children. We are full siblings to one another; we are half siblings to everyone else. The three of us share our father, Ronny Smith, a person of unknown Euro-American heritage who somehow made his way from western Minnesota to Montana, settling eventually with Vic on the Flathead Indian Reservation. It is no secret among all the kids that Ronny was Vic’s true and only love. For decades she spoke of him constantly, many times in booze-filled conversations with one of her daughters as they drove her around the countryside. But I wasn’t privy to those stories, those yearnings, those sonnets of longing. For me there are only scraps, bits and pieces of stories carefully wrapped around his memory like so many layers of papier-mâché. Uncle Albert was the only one who’d offered a memory, the beauty of Ronny’s voice when he sang. When he’d told me that, I remember feeling elated, like finding a long-lost puzzle piece under the couch. I’d always wondered where I got my love of music.

Neither of my adoptive parents sang or played any instruments. But they purchased a piano for me when I was six. I assured them I would practice every day if I took lessons. As I moved through school, I took up the violin and eventually taught myself the guitar in college. I sang in choirs since I was six, played in orchestras, and found bit parts in school musicals. I never tried out for the leads or even speaking parts. I knew myself well enough to know that my nerves would cause me to self-destruct.

As an adult, I took classical guitar lessons but quit because I began growing irritated when my kids, ages five and seven, interrupted me during my three- to four-hour practice sessions. I’d become compulsive, so I stopped, not just guitar but everything—singing, playing, learning. It was no longer fun. But at least now I know where the love of music began.

The only other hard evidence I have of him is his death certificate that says he drowned in Moses Lake, Washington. He was fishing, and I was five. I never knew him. And then this is where the rumors, the hearsay begins. Evidently, I’ve been told, Ronny hadn’t planned on having five kids at the age of twenty-five, so he gave Vic a choice: the kids or him. He’d left for Washington to give her time to think about it. Or according to another source, his ultimatum was either the booze goes or he does. When Vic didn’t immediately choose Ronny, he left to go to Washington, hoping to force her to stop drinking and join him, counting on her love for him to make that happen. It was, as one sibling said, an effort to pull our fractured little family together. I have no idea how it all played out. But he was missed, not only by Vic but by her youngest sister, Darlene. The family knows her as Doll. “I really liked him,” Aunt Doll once told me. “He was a really, really nice guy.”

What’s real; what’s not? I know nothing beyond what I’ve been told, that he loved to sing, he rode the rails, and his family disinherited him because they didn’t like the ethnicity of the woman with whom he’d had three children. And that last one, the racist ideology of his family, is to me the most threatening of all. So, no, I don’t want to know anything about them. I don’t want to meet them. I’ve known enough people like them to last me a lifetime; I don’t need to know any more. I tell myself the “not knowing” is fine, but it’s not. He disappeared, leaving no trace by which to know him, and the scraps I’ve been offered, the maybes of who he was, aren’t filling. I want, I need, so much more, but that will never happen. So what am I left with? Unrequited love? Unrequited anger? I don’t know.

“Why don’t you want to know more about your dad?” Vern asks, quietly.

My answer is a shield, a self-protective device that gives me permission to not know anything, to not be hurt by people who would cut a son out of their life, who would, perhaps, pass that hatred on to their children and their grandchildren. What I say is unfair, untrue, and terrible, but it stops the anger that rages in me about the entire situation. “As far as I’m concerned, he was nothing but a sperm donor.”

By now the rain is coming down in sheets. I pull into a parking lot adjacent to the Corvallis High School’s football field, which is enclosed within the running track. It just feels like it’s time to sit, that we are moving into serious conversations that pull at us like an eddy on the river. For a while we say nothing, as we stare at the dark-blue Bitterroot Mountains through the rain that runs in rivulets down the windshield.

“So when did you first know you were Flathead?” Vern asks, breaking the silence. It’s interesting that he refers to the reservation when asking about my tribe. Our tribe, I silently correct myself. I glance at him, but he maintains his forward gaze, and I feel like I’m in a confessional booth without a dividing panel.

“I’ve always known I was adopted. And I’ve known I was Salish since we lived in Stevensville. But Dad wouldn’t tell me anything else. He never wanted me to get in touch with you guys.”

“Why not?” Vern’s gaze shifts to me, then, but only for a moment. He’s back to looking out the window.

Suddenly, conversation becomes difficult, pocked with the promise of hurt feelings. “Because he said you guys would come and camp on my doorstep and ask me for money. That’s what he told me years later when I asked why he never gave me information. You know how Indians are,” I say, mimicking his words. I have to avoid his gaze; otherwise, he’ll see the stain of shame that sits on my cheeks.

“You’re kidding,” he says and stares at me, chuckling. I know he stares because I can feel his scrutiny like sandpaper on my skin.

“I’m not.” I exhale. I’m on the witness stand, and I hate it. I feel like I will be held accountable for my dad’s actions. I look down into my lap as I continue. “He told me all kinds of things about Indians that made me stay away. How you were all drunks, how you were into drugs, but more importantly how you would take advantage of me if I were to contact you.”

I steal a glance. Vern is shaking his head as he looks away, the humor gone from his voice. “Your dad sounds like a piece of work.” He gazes out the window. “What you’ve told me about your dad? I don’t think I would have liked him.”

“No,” I say softly, “I can’t imagine you would.” I turn away so he can’t see the tears that threaten to spill down my cheeks. Instead, I take a deep breath and change the subject. “You’d mentioned that you wished I had come back from wherever I was and take you away from all of this?”

“Yeah,” he smiles. His brown eyes are kind, captivating, but always studying my reaction. “That was a big fantasy of mine when I was a kid.”

I nod, silent. After a few moments, I clear my throat. “I tried to come back, Vern. I really did . . .” I stop and catch my breath, catch myself from falling entirely apart in front of this brother-stranger. I don’t want him to see my vulnerability. I want him to see me as strong, as in control.

My throat closes, and I stop speaking. Instead, I stare out the window and see how much it’s fogged up from our conversation, while the rain continues to fall. Clouds along the front edge of the Bitterroots part enough for me to see a fresh layer of snow. Silence fills the space between us. And suddenly this car is too small, too crowded. And words rush out, trying to find a safe exit, but there is none.

“I really tried,” I continue, forcing the words across my vocal chords that try to dam them, limiting their release. “I went to the state social services offices. I talked with two separate social workers, who never once told me there was anything I could sign, or check with, to help me get in contact with you guys. I had no idea you had signed the information-release forms when I turned eighteen. The social workers never mentioned anything! And I tried to get jobs up on the reservation. I spread the Plant name around everywhere I went, thinking somehow it would get back to you that I was looking, but nothing ever came back, even though I asked. I even wrote a letter to one of the tribal elders . . .” I stop then, because I can feel a sob rise up within me, and I choke it back down. But the tears that now threaten are tears of anger, not sadness, tears of bitterness, of loss. That elder, of all people, should have helped me come home. That was, a friend assured me, his role as an elder.

I told him of the letters I’d written all those years ago, the one to Vic and the one to Mr. Snipe.

“What did you say in your letter to Mom?” Vern asks, his voice quiet.

“I told her I was fine. Not to worry about me. That I’d had a good life.”

“You lied.” This is said without judgment.

“Kind of. But I didn’t want her thinking badly about herself. That wasn’t going to do anybody any good. But after I sent the letters, I waited. I waited for weeks, months, years. And nothing came back.” I pause. “Ever.” I shake my head and bite my lip in frustration, anger still edging my words. “That’s when I realized the elders, even if their job is to help, don’t have to do anything they don’t want to.”

When Roberta, Vern’s full sister, called me in 1993, I had asked her if Vic had ever received a letter from me. Roberta couldn’t recall Vic ever saying anything about hearing from me at all. When I met Vic the second time in 1994, I had asked her if she’d ever received the letter. “No,” she answered definitively. “I never received any letter from you.”

I have no idea what happened to those letters. Perhaps the elder had never opened them. Perhaps they ended up in his circular file. Perhaps, like so many other people, he didn’t want to get involved in a sticky family situation. Perhaps, I think tiredly, things would have been different so many years ago, if he had made a different decision.

“But everyone knows the Plants,” Vern reasons, his voice filled with confusion.

“I figured they were a pretty big family. I figured the reservation was small enough that if I threw their name around, someone would tell one of them that I was there. I don’t know what else I could have done.” How do you deal with someone who isn’t supposed to exist? A ghost in a memory? A marker of a lost self? A reminder of failure? I am all those things; I am nearly invisible.

“So many barriers didn’t allow me to come home,” I explain, fatigued. I sigh and continue. “I spoke to a social worker from here, from the Flathead, who asked why I wanted to meet my family. At the time, I was twenty-three years old. I told her, because I want to find the people who look like me. ‘That’s not a good enough reason,’ she said. Then basically she told me not to come back. ‘How do you think they’ll react when you walk back into their lives?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been dead to them for over twenty years. You’ll do nothing but remind them of the scars that are now starting to heal. How do you think that would make them feel?’”

I level Vern with a stare. “No one, not one person, ever asked if I was ever made to feel uncomfortable with my adoption, but I was not supposed to make anyone else feel uncomfortable with my presence? My questions?” Again that lump in my throat rose. “So I stopped. I stopped trying to find you guys. I stopped trying to be one of the tribe. I figured I didn’t want to hurt anyone because of my actions. I didn’t want to be hurt anymore. So I just stopped.”

Anger and frustration wrap around each other until they form a tight ball that lodges in my stomach. I am angry that so much has been kept from me: my family, knowledge of my birth father, knowledge of who I was in relation to this group that I somehow belonged to. And I am frustrated at the people who could have done something about it, who could have helped me return home all those years ago but chose not to. Too much time has allowed pain and resentment to grow, to fester.

“And the other social worker?” Vern prods.

“She left records for me to find,” I explain, and told him what the files had contained. “They said that Vic was given a court date. If she wanted to keep her children, she needed to come to the courthouse on such and such a date.” I look at Vern.

“She never showed up,” he finishes.

I shake my head. “A note said she was found in a bar down the street.”

“That true?”

I shrug. “But when I told Rosa about those files, she flipped out. ‘They’re lying,’ she yelled. ‘I remember when they came and took you from the house. We were all crying. They’re fucking lying!’” I stare out the window again. “Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. But that’s what the records stated.” I am numb. I am beyond crying, as I recount the dismemberment of our family, its carcass thrown aside. I am testifying.

“When did you find out about us?”

“When Roberta and Ronni called.”

“They didn’t mention us kids in the records?”

I frown, rummaging through my memory for what the yellow legal-length paper read, the one I’d scribbled my cryptic notations on. I threw it away once I met everyone, thinking I didn’t need it anymore. Bad call. Now I’m a hoarder when it comes to keeping records. “I think it was just Vic’s name, Gloria and Rosa, and us three kids. I know it listed a lot of her last names, but I can’t remember if you guys were mentioned or not.”

“But when Roberta called, that was the first you knew of us.” The cop, pressing for information.

I nod.

“Hm.”

Perhaps he’s wondering if they were as forgotten in the legal system as I was. We sit for what seems like a long time. What more can be said?

“Ready?” I ask.

“Sure, where are we going?”

“Stevensville.” I start the car and pull out once more on the two-lane back road into our pasts, this valley our connective tissue.

Stevensville is a small western Montana town in the heart of the Bitterroot Valley. When I lived there, between 1964 and 1969, it was a quiet collection of shops and businesses: an IGA, with a filling station next door; a bakery; and a clothing store, where even I could tell the mannequins were severely out-of-date. There was the bank, the realtor’s office, a law office, and other buildings, all connected to one another in the way buildings in small towns are. Beyond the town limits were the farm co-op and veterinarians and farther out small farms turned into larger ranches in the sagebrush-covered hills of the valley.

I gained my first steps in education in Stevensville. I went to kindergarten and grade school, then joined Brownies and Girl Scouts. I pulled musty books from dark-oak shelves in the immense library on the second floor of the grade school. I adored the first principal and was in awe of the second, Mr. Barlow, a Blackfeet man who went on to change Indian education policy in Washington DC.

There used to be a huge oil painting that hung over the main doors of the elementary school. It was a collage of people and events that defined the valley: a dark-haired man, a covered wagon, and the little cabin-styled Catholic church a few streets over, among other things I don’t recall. One day, as a first grader, I asked the silver-haired, blue-eyed principal who the man in the painting was.

“That’s Governor Isaac Stevens,” he’d answered. “That’s who this town is named after.”

Pride made him smile broadly and push his chest out. Wow, to live in a town that was named after someone with so much power!

Decades later I understood the irony. Governor Stevens, in 1855, negotiated the Treaty of Hellgate with the Salish, Pend d’Oreilles, and Kootenais. According to the treaty, the tribes ceded more than twenty million acres to the U.S. government, while retaining only one million three hundred acres, an area that would become the Flathead Indian Reservation. Important items in the treaty were that (1) the land was to be occupied by these three tribes, as well as “friendly” tribes that could be placed there at the will of the president of the United States; (2) no white man could reside on the reservation without permission of the tribes, as well as of the superintendent and the agent; (3) any roads could be placed on the reservation at will; (4) the tribes would retain their hunting and fishing rights; and (5) the tribes would be paid for the land at a sum of $126,000 over a twenty-six-year period. An Indian boarding school would be provided, which taught agriculture, industry, and the trades of blacksmithing, tinsmithing, carpentry, and wagon-wheel making. The government would also construct a sawmill, a flour mill, and a hospital. White employees would be kept in service for twenty years. Every tribal member would earn a salary of $500 each year for twenty years. The Dawes Act required that the reservation land could be surveyed and divided into lots at the discretion of the president of the United States.

To keep peace, tribal members would be required to “acknowledge their dependence upon the government of the United States, and promise to be friendly with all citizens thereof, and pledge themselves to commit no depredations upon the property of such citizens,” or consequences would follow. They would also agree that the use of “ardent spirits” would be excluded from their reservation, and they were to prevent their people from drinking the same.

This treaty brought the downfall of many Native people; the Dawes Act brought homesteaders by the wagonload. By 1904, when allotment was initiated, these same homesteaders, or their offspring, found themselves the owners of tracts that totaled nearly a half-million acres. Tribal members, not seeing the value of ownership, either sold their allotment or lost it because they couldn’t meet the federal land taxes. The purpose of boarding schools were not to teach leadership but to teach trade labor, thereby creating an economy constructed and maintained by outside interests. Although the government stressed independence, its treaties and ensuing policies actually forced dependence, which further served to break and dehumanize the human spirit, while at the same time bringing about the cultural and social destruction of a once self-sufficient and proud people. And those “ardent spirits” that were banned? They became the substance of choice to numb the pain from the loss of their culture, from the loss of themselves. Those ardent spirits also created the dysfunctional space within my family that allowed me to be removed.

But Vern and I don’t talk about these things; we’ve said all there is to say, for now. We are quiet on the ride back to town; as we eat our lunch at Double Front Chicken, near the old train depot; as we drive up and down the roads looking for the Snow Bowl ski area, only to find ourselves at dead ends in beautiful housing subdivisions. Perhaps we are quiet because we’ve run out of things to say. Or maybe we’ve said too much, opened up too much, required too much, wagered too much. And we’re tired, and we hurt.

I will continue to hurt because today wounds have been opened and scars have bled. But maybe the bloodletting is required. In the process I’ve learned I haven’t been forgotten. I’ve told someone else they’re important to my life, and I’ve become important in his. Perhaps this is where the true healing begins, when old stuff is dragged out of the closet and aired.