She thought I wasn’t coming.
When my mom opened her front door, she took hold of my whole body and lifted me off the ground in a huge bear hug. Her grip had gotten stronger since I’d last seen her. Her hair was in a messy ponytail and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, but her face looked exactly as I remembered it: hard and aged, but kind.
“You missed the wake,” she said.
“I know, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t have the cash to return sooner, you know, shit, that old rez money don’t reach that far off the rez. But I’m here now, right? Solid as a rock.”
“We still have so much left to do. We have to help Mabel make the dainties for the service, I still have to pick up the flowers for Roger, and I still have no idea what the fuck I’m going to wear—”
I grabbed her and hugged her tightly again.
“I’ll help you with all of that,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Babe, heck, I just missed you.”
We held each other like that for a while, then she made us tea and ripped us a slab of bannock, which we sloppily slathered with butter and jam.
“I was in hell,” she said in between bites. “Straight up hell, Jon.” I wanted to say me too, tell her ain’t nothing straight about hell, but instead I sliced another piece of bannock in two. “He ain’t ever tell me it got that bad, fucking asshole,” she said. I used my fork to pull the tub of margarine towards me, slid my knife into it. “Who the hell does that? Who in their right mind peaces out leaving their nicîmos like that? Fucking dumb-ass, he’d go out with all those cousins of his, day in, day out; wake up, sip, get dressed, sip, go out, sip, come home, sleep—repeated that shit every day.” I didn’t say anything, just kept spreading the margarine hard across the two bannock halves, spilling crumbs everywhere. “I know I ain’t no saint, Jon, I know I been friends with that old bottle too damn long too—but, I only ever do it to whittle time, at least that’s what I told myself.” I spread the raspberry puree on the bannock next, that dark red jam oozing into the newly formed crevices. “And each time he’d come back I’d see how time etched into him, his muscles became sandbags. His calves were thin enough for me to wrap my fucking hand around. And his whole body went yellow as piss.” I took a bite from one half of the bannock and slid the other half across to her. “He looked like a goddamned skeleton, Jon, my old man was walking around dead as a doornail.” She shook her head, pushed the bannock aside.
“And he tells me, Karen, ain’t nothing no hospitals gonna do, fuck, I go there with strep throat and they ask me, ‘You drunk, boy?’ Ain’t nothing they gonna do, ain’t no one gonna give a liver to an NDN whose already punched out.” Momma’s curls fell across her face, hiding her, but her eyes peeked through, making her look feral, wounded, sad as a fox stuck in a hunter’s trap. “Said to me, ‘Karen, it’s my time—ain’t nothing wrong with that,’ and I said to him, ‘You don’t get to sit there and talk to me about wrongdoing, you, the one who let time fuck him up the ass royally—you don’t get to sit there and look at me with that pitiful face looking like you the only NDN who ever been hurt.’” My dear momma, I wanted to say, when did you become an owl caged in on all sides? “Ain’t fucking fair, Jon, ain’t fucking fair at all.”
Her body caved in on itself, but the veins in her arms rose up and showed the royal blue blood that beat and beat and beat inside her. “He never let me call no one, saying it ain’t my business, telling me this his fight, that he know a thing or two about scrapping with death.” I got up and wrapped my arms around her from behind. “And when he went I lost me, Jon, I lost me real good. Feels like I ain’t got nobody left—why everyone gotta leave me here to rot in this fucking hellhole, Jon?”
“You got me,” I said. “And I’m not ever leaving, Momma.” I rested my chin on her shoulder and we both stared into the distant corner of our kitchen. “Remember when you told me that neither of us weren’t ever supposed to survive birth?” I said. She nodded and grasped my arm. “You told me, ‘Jon, you, your Momma, we ain’t the lie down and die type, we’re survivors. That c-section or that pneumonia ain’t take me and it sure as hell couldn’t take you. The doctors said we had a week max and then come two, three, a month, a year, and then now, and you sure as hell better believe tomorrow.’ You remember that, Momma? You told me, ‘Never forget you born of Grandmother Earth, boy, you, the one who made me crave mud all the while I was pregnant with you.’ And I picture you sometimes, Momma, sitting out there in the bush, dress soiled, all that dirt painting your fingers black, and you there, hair in a glorious braid running down your back, digging your hands into that dark, brown flesh. Then you scoop out the guts of the earth and you swallow ceremoniously, that mud slopping down your mouth and chest. And you smiling, Momma, you happy as all hell there in the bush, with your belly full of kokum askiy. And I picture that earth wrapping itself around our umbilical cord, Kokum there kissing us in the bathwater of your womb.”
Momma laid her head on the table and broke down, dissolving into a yelping cry. I pressed myself against her and cried into her hair.
“I remember, m’boy,” she said. “I told you when you left that we hardened ourselves to the world back then, that old Grandmother Earth gifted us a shell by wrapping around the braid that maintains us. We both born from a wound.”
We held each other for what seemed a lifetime after that. We were so fucking helpless in our nostalgia, both so heavy with our sadness. When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.