Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana, October 2012.
It’s been a year since that early Thursday morning, when Vern and I drove down the Bitterroot Valley and I heard the stories of his life, when I watched the mountains slide gently by our car windows and met his version of Vic, our mom. He showed me the places he’d lived as a boy, and I stood on the land he’d walked. I thought of his life in the campgrounds, migrating from one place to another so many times that the chaos caught up to him. He left school to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood and babies of his own by the time he was sixteen.
That Thursday, a year ago, I was introduced to another reality of what it meant to have the life I lived. And I drove away with a new awareness for the price I paid, that we all paid, for the choices that were made for me. There is a significant difference between my arrival last year and my arrival this year. This year’s visit is a homecoming.
My schedule is busy: on Wednesday I’m giving a radio interview at two o’clock and then a lecture at five at the University of Montana; on Thursday I’m attending a meeting with the tribal council at eleven thirty; and on Friday I’m giving the opening lecture at the Presidential Lecture Series at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation at noon. These discussions will revolve around the research I did regarding American Indian transracial adoption. The weight of adoptees’ stories is heavy, reminding me of the responsibility I have to share them, with names changed, identities protected. What I am hoping is that my sharing them will change adoption policies and protocol. As I lie in bed, I feel a raw energy, an electricity that never leaves my body. My mind swirls, and the question what exactly am I trying to do here? comes around and around again, the eddy of emotion not letting it go. Am I lecturing? Am I helping? Am I asking for something in return that won’t, perhaps can’t, be granted?
I toss and I turn as I unknot the threads of why. Why am I so agitated with these upcoming lectures when I haven’t felt this way anywhere else? I sigh. Although I may not want to admit it, I know why. Unlike other lectures and presentations, where I present information to an interested audience, I am now in my homeland, where it all began. I could make a lot of people in these circles very uncomfortable with my experiences laid out, boned and filleted for all to see. This is what happens, the wind whispers, as if agreeing with me, when you let your children go. Soon the rain begins and the lightning throws shafts of light across the room, and I finally fall asleep, heavy with uneasiness.
The interview and the lecture go well. Healing words are spoken. Gifts are given in the spirit of a homecoming: a Pendleton blanket, an intricate traditionally beaded clamshell purse, a shawl, a beaded necklace, all given to symbolize a welcome home. All make me cry tears of gratitude and joy. However, as beautiful and as symbolic as they are, they do not assuage the ghosts that walk in the valley of my soul. And I don’t know if anything will.
Roads, some paved, most gravel, mark the Jocko Valley in one-mile grids. The Jocko is located on the southern end of the Flathead Reservation. It is nine in the morning, and heavy clouds lie close to the ground, pregnant with the threat of rain. Again. Once in a while the sun breaks through, but most of the time those golden rays of early morning light beam elsewhere, far away from me.
I am searching for the cemetery that sits next to a white wooden church located somewhere in this valley. It’s been three and a half years since I’d been there, so my memory of its location is vague, at best. But the valley is not so large that I won’t be able to spot it from a distance. Therefore, I drive slowly along the still-green fields punctuated by cliques of blazing yellow cottonwoods. The houses that lie scattered on the valley floor are a mixture. Some sit grandly on acreages that could be small farms, but aren’t used in that way, while others are hunched, their roofs buckled and tired. And then there are a lot of in-betweens.
My gaze is drawn across the valley, captured by a slash of white against the autumn palette. It is the church, the steeple a dead giveaway. I zigzag across the lowland, eventually turning left onto Agency Road, which then veers to the right, by a fence that marks a boundary more than it acts as a barrier, into the churchyard. The church itself doesn’t appear to be used anymore. There is no statement of denomination, even on the sign that once held removable letters announcing service times. I assume it’s Catholic; Vic was Catholic. I imagine she’d be buried in a Catholic cemetery. I pull alongside the church and cut the engine.
It is silent. A mid-October breeze seeps into my car and then into my bones, and I shiver from the chill. Although I am here to visit Vic’s grave, I’m not entirely sure why I’ve come. I tell myself it is a result of a detour I’ve taken as I drive from Missoula to Pablo, an interest, a curiosity, perhaps even a requirement. But all those reasons ring hollow.
I close my eyes and wrap my fingers around the door latch and breathe deep to alleviate the familiar jolt of adrenaline; I don’t want to do what I’ll do next. I pull the latch and get out of the car. Shutting the door creates a cacophony, and I scan the landscape, soon spotting the source: a flock of thirty chukar partridges, frantically beating their wings against the wood of wild shrubs as they seek a new haven. I smile wryly at my jumpiness. After a few moments, the silence resumes. I begin to walk, as gravel whispers beneath the soles of my shoes.
This cemetery is different from those I’m most familiar with, the ones that exist within the urban landscape of middle-class America. It is not filled with manicured lawns and engineered spaces that stretch out in rows of military exactness. Here, families, rather than individuals, are buried in clusters. Few graves are marked by traditional slabs of granite, concrete, or marble, on which names are delicately carved into the polished surfaces. There are no angels, no praying hands, no Celtic crosses, no historical photographs in oval frames. Instead, many of the markers are thin wooden crosses that, unlike stone, will melt into the soil in a decade or two. Its overall appearance is overgrown and cluttered, as runaway shrubs and graceful strands of long grass, now golden brown in their dormancy, fill the spaces in between. There is a tension here, between love and pain; therefore, much of this space is left untended. Some might misinterpret this as forgotten.
Vic’s grave is easy to spot because of the mound of black dirt that lies nearby, covering her grandson, Nathan, who was buried only a couple of weeks prior to my arrival. Nathan lies at the foot of his mother, Vic’s daughter, who is interred next to Vic’s niece, who rests next to Vic’s husband, who is buried next to Vic and is the only one who has a granite headstone, a gift from the Veterans Administration for his military service. The wooden crosses above lean delicately to one side or another, names painted black on their white enameled surfaces. These are my relatives. I can’t say as I ever really looked at them from this perspective before. I shiver and cross my arms in front of my chest in hopes that it will afford me some protection from the seeping chill, but it doesn’t. Instead, the cold mingles with a surge of loneliness, overwhelming my senses, allowing memories to escape.
March 2008: I remember James Allen, Ronni, and I walked along this road with a hundred other mourners to bury Vic. Ronni wore black pants; I, a navy-blue dress and heels; James Allen a suit. Vern, Vic’s youngest son, was dressed in a suit as well and moved easily in this space and among these people. His bearing was protective, of Vic, of his family, of the traditions required of this rite of passage. He’d arranged it all: the obituary, the vigil, the memorial, the burial. He’d given her the best service her tribal burial monies could buy, including the beautiful pine box that sat to the side of the freshly dug hole that would soon be her home.
I remember speaking to him briefly at the vigil, lending some words of comfort and knowing they offered little, if any, solace. What right did I have to comfort? Me, who hadn’t known Vic at all? I remember the guilt when the tears didn’t come. I remember Aunt Delphine touching my arm as she led me to the edge of the grave, where each of us, among the rest, threw a handful of dirt on Vic’s casket as we filed past. I didn’t know what to say, but felt words of some sort were required. I whispered, “Good journey,” through a very tight throat and only loud enough for Vic to hear.
Afterward I remember the way Vern sauntered over to me, hands in his pockets, and asked how I was. The information we exchanged was superficial, required. And then there was silence, the awkward silence of not knowing. Anything. About anyone. Ever. Vern broke the silence by pointing to a group of young people who stood across the circle from us. “See those kids over there? Those are my kids.”
“Which ones?” I asked.
He laughed, his brown eyes sparkling. “All of ’em.”
To Vern, family is everything.
So much lost. So little known.
Where do I fit in all this?
I stare at the grave, at the long grass surrounding it, at the irises that grace Vic’s feet, and I wonder what color they are. Suddenly I am wondering all kinds of things: her favorite color, the things that made her laugh, her hopes and her dreams. When she drove away, did she like to drive fast? Like me? After a couple of beers? Did she experience pain that never left her soul? Did she, like me in college, dull it with mind-numbing substances or mistake the closeness of another human being with love?
Did she ever wonder what happened to me?
Suddenly, I’m startled by this simple question. I had wondered for much of my life what happened to her, but had it been returned? My throat closes, and it hurts to swallow, and that’s when the tears finally come, at first gentle, but then full, blurring the world around me as they roll down my cheeks and disappear into the soil at my feet. And I can’t stop them. I begin to hurt inside, a deep wrenching pain that begins in my gut and surges upward and shakes my shoulders with huge wracking sobs, a heaving eruption of longing and the repression of longing. I gulp deep breaths of air, but the tears continue, a deluge in the drought of feeling, and I just let them come. I don’t have a choice. But I don’t just grieve for Vic, I grieve for the destruction of me, for the destruction of all of us.
I glance at my watch when I enter Pablo—11:15. I’m scheduled to meet with the tribal council at 11:30. During the drive my thoughts swirled like a snowstorm: how things were, how things are, how they might have been, even how they should have been. By the time I arrive my emotions have settled, and I can concentrate on the next thing I need to do: find a parking spot and see if my eyes are puffy. They are, but only a little. I press my cold fingers over my lids and hold them there, unsure of how much good I’m actually doing.
Two weeks ago I’d requested to be added to the council’s agenda, because I wanted the council to pass a resolution to hold a cultural event that acknowledged and welcomed home people separated from the tribes because of adoption or long-term foster placement. Now that I’m here, my stomach does a series of gymnastics, and I can’t seem to pull enough air into my lungs to calm my nerves. Vern has come, as has Ronni, with her granddaughter in tow. They are there for moral support. Evelyn, my source of support throughout my journey home, has once more been there for me by acting as my liaison, introducing me to the council. She arrives, dressed professionally, wearing creased slacks and a matching jacket. She sits down and places a gift into my hand, wrapping my fingers around it. It is a necklace, which I clasp tightly. She smiles and nods, and we wait to begin.
Soon the clerk takes me aside and tells me that council is running late; there were a lot of walk-ins. We’ll have to wait and see if the schedule can be rearranged. She adds that we have been allotted a half an hour. Soon we are instructed to go in, and we seat ourselves in the front row. Vern, seeking anonymity, sits in the back. I surreptitiously study the seven council members, who sit on the curved raised dais in front of me, and wonder how they’ll react to my statement. I prepare for the worst. The words I will say address my own personal experience of living with racism on the outside, as well as the racism experienced when I attempted to return home. Don’t leave us hanging in a brutal world, I want them to know. We want to come home. We need to come home. And there’s a whole new generation of foster kids being outplaced that will be where I was thirty years ago. Unlike mine, I want their homecoming to be successful. The barriers to acceptance need to come down; they affect all of us.
The council moves through the business requests quickly. The tribal police chief, who is ahead of us, wraps up, then returns to the back row and sits next to Vern instead of exiting through the main doors. “He wanted to stay and listen to you,” Vern will tell me later. “He was interested in what you had to say.” I appreciate the show of support from this person I do not know.
Evelyn and I slowly make our way to the table in front of the council. I avoid looking directly at the members before we start because I’m trying to find the balance for my asking and feeling guilty because of my asking. After Evelyn introduces me, telling the council why she believes this is an important request, I begin to speak. A council member interrupts me briefly, explaining how to operate the microphone. I turn it on, bend the mic toward me, and smile. Then I begin.
“My name is Susan Harness. My birth name is Vicki Charmain Rowan. I was removed by Montana State Social Services from my home in 1960.” I tell them about the ethnic slurs, the verbal and physical abuse. I tell them about the racism on the outside and the racism when I returned to the reservation. I talk about adoptees’ deeply embedded pain of nonbelonging and tell them that by passing such a resolution, they will begin to heal the destruction caused by assimilation policies that have assaulted us as Native people. I speak for ten minutes and feel the tension simmering in the room. I look up from my statement and see the council members leaning forward in their chairs as they listen to my words.
When I finish, there is silence.
The silence makes me nervous. What right do I, as an outsider, have to ask this of anyone or for anyone? Soon I hear murmurs of appreciation, and I immediately hear each of the seven members, in this very public forum, add their own private story, of being ostracized within the institution of a predominantly white school, of coming back to the reservation after being away for a period of time and experiencing a similar type of ostracism, of extended family being outplaced, of people returning home. I am humbled by their stories, fragile gifts of a shared past.
I hope they seriously consider my request.
The previous afternoon, at the invitation of Dr. Gyda Swaney, the director of the Indians into Psychology program at my alma mater, the University of Montana, I presented a lecture about my research and my findings. Prior to the lecture Dr. Swaney had arranged for me to tour the new American Indian Student Services building. No longer housed on the edge of campus, this architecturally symbolic building stood at its center, on the edge of the oval, just a few buildings away from the administration building.
The number twelve is a central theme to the building’s design, spaces that represent the twelve tribes living within Montana’s borders: Assiniboines, Blackfeet, Chippewas, Crees, Crows, Gros Ventres, Kootenais, Little Shells, Northern Cheyennes, Pend d’Oreilles, Salish, and Sioux. Inside, along the wall separating the interior circle from the hallway, are twelve doorways, each having the name of the tribe inscribed overhead and their traditional parfleche design inlayed in the flooring below. I saw the richness of the woods’ hues as symbolizing the richness of each tribe’s culture. How far removed this place is, both locationally and culturally, from the tiny turn-of-the-century house that used to be home to Native American Student Services. I am swelled with pride.
At a quarter to five I crossed the oval, locating the building where I was scheduled to lecture. Entering its hallways, I was slammed back to 1982, when I’d taken my first creative-writing course. The instructor was a well-known writer; he’d entered the classroom, clearly marked with a “No Smoking” sign, and after a few moments proceeded to grind his cigarette butt into the linoleum. Definitely a statement.
The room was located in the basement, and I was pleased to see Dr. Swaney as she approached me, wearing a beautiful smile that reached her dark eyes. After a quick hug, she said, “Before you begin, Joe Pablo, a Salish elder, will say a few words. I’ve asked him to talk because he will add important knowledge to the information you’ll present. Ready?”
I nodded and took a seat in the second row, on the end. Behind me sat an older American Indian man, an oxygen cord draped below his nose and over his ears, connecting him to a tank on a wheeled holder. Nearly black braids, thin plaits with wisps of silver, hung to his lap. He glanced at me briefly, nodding a greeting as he spoke to the woman beside him. Moments later, following Dr. Swaney’s introduction, he stood and walked to the podium. This was Joe Pablo, and his message was clear: American Indians in today’s America experienced not only a dilution of our culture but a dilution of ourselves, because of the historical policies that framed us while stealing our very strong cultural foundation of family. The result was this destitute place where fractured families were defined by dysfunction, through no fault of our own.
“People mistake tradition with culture,” Mr. Pablo stated, his voice soft but carrying great strength. “Tradition is what we do. Culture is who we are. Even though Ms. Harness wasn’t raised around us, she is very much a member of our culture, because we are a culture that has experienced assimilation with such negative consequences. So,” he said, turning toward me, acknowledging me with his smile, his nod, “you may not know our traditions, but you are most definitely of our Salish and Kootenai culture.”
My own presentation was an illustration of his words. All the assimilation policies that were put into place—removal, Indian education, relocation, termination, and child placement—created a space for us to argue among ourselves who is real and who is a “wannabe,” even though status had been granted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These policies meant to fracture us, turn us on ourselves and one another. Those of us at the margins were the vein of soft mineral that ran through rotten granite, crumbling us even further.
Several of us, including Joe, went out to dinner after the talk. At one point he turned toward me, with tears in his eyes. “Never stop telling people what has happened to us, what’s been done to us. They need to know. Please promise you won’t stop telling this story.”
I promised. Joe passed away a few months later. I lost yet another person who could have provided guidance had we known each other all those years ago.
It is now afternoon, as Vern and I drive the lower road of the Bison Range, which skirts about a third of the mountain. The upper road, the one I most like to travel, had closed a few weeks earlier due to snow. Both of us are disappointed. Vern likes the view from there. I like the feeling of being part of the reservation community in an invisible kind of way. As we drive the lower road I feel more visible but not necessarily more grounded.
“So what did you do this morning after breakfast?” Vern asks, as the brown rolling hills, dotted in rusts and golds, slip by our windows. I drive slowly because this one-lane gravel road is gently scooped with potholes. I look forward to this time with him, when our conversations are easier, my words less guarded. By knowing him, I’m coming to know me.
“Not much,” I reply. “Just drove up here from Missoula.” Then I pause. I don’t weigh my next words, but I know as soon as they are out of my mouth I have just landed in quicksand. “I stopped by Vic’s grave this morning.” I stare at the road in front of me as if I’m driving dangerously fast, not twenty miles an hour. Only then do I steal a look in Vern’s direction.
He steals it back. “Why?” Those brown eyes are unblinking. Piercing.
“Why, what?” My heart speeds up, and the evasive maneuvers begin.
“Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug my shoulders and look straight ahead. “I just did.”
Vern, the cop, pushes. “I think you know. Why did you stop?”
“I just wanted to.”
“But why?”
And this goes on.
“I just felt like it.”
“What made you stop?”
“I just did.”
“What were you looking for?”
“I don’t know.” Panic sets in because I’m being backed into a corner. I’ve just opened myself up to examination. C’mon, you can do better than that. Okay. I was establishing a territory: Vic was my mother too, not just Vern’s, and I sought to defend my right to her. However, the doubts, the continuing doubts of whether or not I even have a right to this territory are assaults in and of their own. But I have to defend it, because if I don’t and I lose it, I will have nothing left. Suddenly, I am playing a very foreign and dangerous game, with someone I can’t afford to lose. “Why doesn’t she have a headstone?” I ask, venturing in another direction. “Why is it just a simple white cross?”
“Why are you changing the subject?” He chuckles.
“I’m just wondering why she doesn’t have a headstone. Something more permanent.”
The chuckle is gone. Vern looks out the window. “Because I know that if I want anything done, it will fall on my shoulders. Headstones are expensive.” He looks at me. “Why do you think she needs a headstone?”
There are only two of us here in this space, and somehow I feel like I’m being flanked.
“I just do.”
“But why?”
“Because she should be remembered.”
“Why are you so bothered by it?”
“I just think it’s important.”
Silence descends, as I’ve run out of room. My back is to the wall. “I’ll go in halves with you,” I counter. I’m buying time.
“Really? Why? I mean, what do you care? She’s not there.”
My throat tightens. Because she is there. She will always be there. Because I don’t know where else I will put her. I don’t know where she fits. I don’t know where I fit. Silence fills the space between us, and I’m feeling vulnerable, exposed. I cross my right arm over my chest and massage my upper left shoulder. Tears threaten to spill, but I bite my lip and stare straight ahead and clench my jaw so the words don’t escape. I swallow them down. Once. Again. And then I shake my head; the rhythmic rubbing continues.
“You know,” Vern says after a few moments, his voice quiet, “it’s okay.”
But it’s not okay. This collision of worlds is not okay. I can’t say where Vic is or where she is not. I can’t say why it’s important that she have something more long-lasting. I can’t say why I care anything about the woman who let me go, who has lain in that space in the ground for three and a half years.
But I do care. I care so much it hurts. And having this conversation hurts. I feel as if I’m defending my ideas, beliefs, and attitudes of kinship that may not be defensible. But they’re mine. They’re all I have. “Because she should be remembered. Regardless of her choices.” My words are quiet, shaky, but they’re out. Massaging my shoulder is now a compulsive act; it takes attention away from the pain. The pain of existing in between: sister and not sister, daughter and not daughter, self and not self. This space of between, of being nothing and both, has created a dilemma in my consciousness. Whose rights win?
How much of a daughter do I have to be to feel justified in visiting her grave? In asking for a more solid headstone? In asking to be remembered within this family, this tribe? What right of claim do I have to anything? I can’t blame others for asking these same questions, when they rotate within me. This place of between is still so barren, and this barrenness is where I exist each and every time I return to this land. I look at Vern and force a small smile. “Have any of my questions ever made you feel uncomfortable?” I ask suddenly and return my gaze to the road.
Vern’s reply is simple, and I can see him shaking his head in my peripheral vision. “No. No, I’ve never felt uncomfortable with any of your questions.” I once more turn toward him and study his face. The half smile he gives in return indicates he already knows the answer to his next question. “Are my questions making you uncomfortable?” He laughs.
“Yeah.” I can’t help but chuckle at his laughter, but at the same time I continue the compulsive massage. I release a heavy sigh. “Yeah, they are.” The sigh has released a tension within me. I can finally say, “I guess I don’t want to answer because I don’t think any of my answers will make sense to you. I don’t know that they make sense to me. But I don’t know what else to say.” I shrug apologetically and turn away. And we drive and look at the deer, at the stream, at the antelope, at the various ambers and russets that cloak the ripples of ancient Lake Missoula, over which we drive.
We agree to go halves on a headstone.
We agree it will happen next summer.
But within my head the arguments and counterarguments still continue. Vic is part of me. With all her foibles, with all her mistakes, her harsh nature, her forgetfulness of her children, she is still part of me. She is who I wanted to know since I was sixteen; she is who I feared when I eventually met her. She holds my memories, of who I wanted her to be, of who I thought she was, maybe even who I think she wanted me to be. I feared being forgotten but then constantly prepared for that outcome.
“Did I ever tell you about the last time I visited Vic? The fourth time I went to see her?”
When I look at him, Vern stares straight ahead, but his face is taut. He shakes his head. “No. I didn’t realize there was a fourth time.”
“I’m not proud of it. I certainly didn’t show myself well. But it’s something that has bothered me for a long, long time.” I pause. This seems to be the trip of confession.
“What happened?”
That’s what I like about Vern—there’s no tone of judgment in his voice. But I don’t ever kid myself in thinking that it’s not there, somewhere.
I saw Vic five months before she died. I’d dropped by, and the teen-something girl who answered the door acted as if she knew me. “She’s asleep, but she’ll probably be awake in a little while. Come on in.”
Whenever I come back to the reservation, I find myself in a difficult position: I never fully know what my relationship is to other people I come into contact with. Are we blood-related? Related by marriage? Related at all? And like most American Indian families, it’s pretty convoluted. Brittany, the girl who answered the door, is Robin’s daughter. Robin is my half sister, Vern’s full sister, who died in a car accident three years before I met the family, the one whose son is now buried at her feet. Therefore, Brittany is my niece.
Brittany and I talked for perhaps an hour, where she spoke about her life, her ideas, the friends she’s lost through the various ways people die on the reservation: car accidents, drug overdoses, binge drinking, suicide. Within a period of five minutes she’d ticked off twenty people, touching the tips of her fingers as she recounted their brief stories. And I couldn’t help but think, This is just one kid on the reservation. Every kid has this story.
Afterward Brittany got up from the lounge chair, walked the hallway to the back of the house and disappeared into a side room. She spoke in quiet tones and then beckoned me back, saying, “She’s awake.” She turned her attention back to the person in the room. “Grandma, it’s Vicki Charmain.”
I stepped through the doorway and stopped.
I was so unprepared for the sight of the small, emaciated woman who sat on the edge of the bed, her hair dyed dark, her eyes blurred with medication. She looked at me and blinked but didn’t say anything. I was unprepared for the image of her skeletal legs and arms that extended out of her cotton pajamas, the bony structure of her face. Her face, its features, stark and angled, belonged to a woman I didn’t know, had not really ever known. She was dying, and I was unprepared to say good-bye. We hadn’t even been able to say much of a hello.
Tears. Fear. Shock. Guilt. All these ran together in a blur of emotions, like angry chalk colors left out in the rain. So I left. I made a lame, hasty excuse and disappeared down the hallway, where I used the wall as a touchstone in my escape from the tragedy defined by the woman in that room. When I finally reached the car, I turned the ignition and drove away, as tears coursed down my cheeks so fast my lap was soaked within moments. I didn’t tell anyone about that experience. I, the daughter and not daughter, never returned until the day before she was buried.
“Did you talk with her at the grave?” Vern asks at the edge of McDonald Lake.
“Yeah.” I am embarrassed.
“What’d you say?”
“I don’t know.” I’m tired. There’s been too much prodding around in such private corners, places I’ve protected for so long. Now with these past few days of conversation, presentation, emotional bartering, I feel like an emotion-hoarder who has been assaulted by the “clean police.”
“Dad used to talk to people in the cemetery all the time,” Vern added, his voice quiet as he slipped into memory. “I used to sit on his shoulders and listen to him.”
I let that hang in the air. When I look at him, I see the strong man who holds his own cards so close to his chest. In the times we’ve spent together, I’d seen two emotions: calm and restrained joviality. “Did you cry when Vic died?”
Vern shakes his head. No, he’d been prepared for that for a long time. He looks out across the lake. “I cried once when my dad was dying, and we were at the hospital. But I didn’t cry when I buried him.” Silence. “I cried when I had to pull the plug on Nathan, Robin’s son, though. That one was hard.”
The water of the lake is dark green and calm, its depth unfathomable, while its edges are fringed in the fiery passions of autumn.
I don’t know if I told Vern or not, but what I’d said to Vic at the grave was “I am so sorry. For all of it.”