Rez Life. David Treuer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ street a hundred yards down the road. During the 1930s and 1940s, it was illegal to serve liquor to Indians. So ­Harris Matthews sold whisky and beer to his in-laws out the back door and they drank back there but came in the front to dance. Harris was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole. Once he was fixing the roof of the Gitigan and someone walked by and asked, What are you building, Harris? A whorehouse? He replied, If I was building a whorehouse I’d have to put a roof over the whole fucking town.

      I got the news that my grandfather had shot himself on the morning of August 3. I was in Bena by early evening. I passed the “big house,” which is what everyone calls (without irony) the house my grandfather lived in. It isn’t actually big, just bigger than most of the other houses in Bena. His new Chevy Silverado was in the yard. I pulled to a stop at my grandmother’s trailer, just down the hill.

      Cars huddled around my grandmother’s trailer and I heard voices coming from the porch, the deck, and inside. It was packed. Some people were already drinking beer; most were not. My favorite uncle was staggering around the living room without his shirt on and gave me a hug. My grandmother sat on the couch with my mother. My grandmother was the one who had found him. Other relatives—my uncle Diddy and aunts JoAnne and Kay, and friends Rocky Tibbets and his brother Buddy—milled around on the deck. Buddy had the sideways look in his eyes that he seems to get when he’s been drinking all day. Some of my first cousins were already there—Nate, Josh, and Justin. Sam was driving in from South Dakota. Jesse was back in jail and wouldn’t make it. The trailer was warm and well lit, and I felt folded into the soupy, complicated, and comforting trouble of family almost immediately.

      The next day was beautiful. It was early August but it was sunny and crisp and clear. My cousin Sam had arrived in the night with his girlfriend and they were tangled up on the couch. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; this is obviously a family trait (one I don’t share). They woke up and we talked a bit and then they left for the café to get some breakfast. I talked my grieving mother into going down to the café, too. After breakfast we drove back up to my grandmother’s trailer and I asked her if there was anything I could do. There’s always something to do. That’s one nice thing about Indian funerals whether Catholic, traditional, or a mixture of both. There’s always something—­gathering sage, cooking, digging the grave, getting tar paper to cover the mound of dirt until a gravehouse can be built, building the rough box, carving and shaping the clan marker, getting drunk. I actually like digging the grave. It’s mindless and communal.

      My grandmother asked me to do two things. Would I be willing to write a eulogy to read at the service? And would I go up to the big house and take care of the bedroom? Clean it up. We want to make it look nice in there, she said. She was shaky. Her eyes watered constantly. We just want to make it look nice. And your uncles, well, you know; they just can’t go in there. She asked me to do this not because I had been close to my grandfather but because, compared with the rest of the family, I hadn’t been.

      It felt strange to be in the big house without my grandfather there. He had spent eighty of his eighty-three years in Bena. Sixty of those years had been spent in that house. Whenever I came over to visit him I’d find him sitting in his chair by the window, the police scanner on—with the scanner, he could often follow the progress the police were making tracking down our relatives. He’d smoke and drink coffee. If he was lucky he’d have peanut brittle or beans to eat.

      A stack of books and the Bible rested to the left of the chair on the small end table laden with all sorts of other things: two broken watches, glasses, a screwdriver, long and unreadable information about his medication. The chair was empty now. But his cigarettes and lighter were on the table, as though he were about to smoke. Someone had written “Dads” on a Post-it and stuck it on the pack. Without the possessive it made me think of fathers. Dads. Parents and mothers and cousins and brothers and sisters and all of us and how we could have ended up like this. I sat at the table across from the chair and smoked one of my own cigarettes. When I was finished I walked back to his bedroom.

      A narrow iron-frame bed. A dresser stuffed with socks, mostly the nonslip hospital kind, and T-shirts. A drawer full of medical supplies. A large oak table mounded with clothes and the weird effluvia that are a product of living in the same place for a long time; a broken printer, two dusty bedspreads, a boom box, and a portrait of my mother as a high school student, painted by his brother-in-law while he was in prison. A small safe served as his night table. When I opened it I found a few bundles of one-dollar bills, banded into stacks of 100, some rolls of quarters and silver dollars, and my cousin Vanessa’s cheap gold necklace. This was the necklace she had been wearing when she got into an argument at a party and drove across two yards, up a ditch, and onto the highway, where she was struck by a passing motor home.

      I looked down at my feet. A small throw rug was turned at a funny angle. What looked like grape juice had blotted through it in places. When I lifted it I found the blood.

      And then I got to work.

      I emptied the dresser, removed the drawers, and bagged the clothes on the oak table and the contents of the safe. I lifted the safe out of the room and lugged the mattress through the narrow door. I saw that, unbeknownst to anyone, my grandfather’s dog had been waging war against him by shitting under his bed. That dog’s turds, no bigger than those of a cat, were hard, preserved, nested in the humus of hair, dust, and dead skin that had collected there. I choked on the dust. The whole room smelled like my grandfather. Especially the blood—it didn’t smell like “death.” It smelled like him; sweet, smoky, thick.

      I took a break and wandered through the house until my older brother Anton arrived. I was glad he was there. He has the right personality for such jobs—calm, seemingly unperturbed.

      Anton and I lifted out the heavy furniture until all that was left was the small rectangle of a room and the smaller, more potent, more significant rectangle of the braided throw rug that covered what was left of my grandfather’s brain. We weren’t doing a great job and neither was the rug. It tugged at the feet, and carrying furniture while stepping over it was hard, and in short time the rug had been stepped on and flipped over and bunched up. Quite a lot of blood showed through. We tried not to notice.

      We moved the bed frame out to the garage. Since my grandfather, in addition to being a hard-ass, was somewhat sentimental, he held on to a lot of junk. For instance, he had saved all of his father’s logging equipment, and so one wall was covered with two-man Swede saws, crosscut saws, axes, peaveys, and the like. In the far corner hung a small hand drum. I remember hearing about this drum from my mother.

      When she was a young girl, growing up in Bena in the 1940s, everyone was Catholic, or at least acted Catholic. Her parents made all the children get dressed and go to church on Sundays even though they themselves did not attend. The Catholic church in Bena is a small, very modest building with the footprint of a very small house. The usher was a man named George Martin, an old, quiet man, who lived across from the church with his wife. My mother said that everyone was scared of George because he was rumored to be a medicine man. Whenever a dog went missing everyone would say, George must have got him. Watch your dogs or George will get them. Every Saturday night you could hear him singing medicine songs on a water drum. The drum, whose sound can carry for miles, sounded throughout the village. But then, on Sunday morning, George would be standing by the front door of the church in a brown suit, showing the good people of Bena to their pews and helping to pass the plate and tend the grounds. He never took Communion or knelt or joined in the prayers. Before he died he gave my grandfather—a man, it should be said, who had absolutely no interest in hand drums or traditional songs or anything of the sort—the hand drum that he had used when he played the moccasin game (a team gambling game involving singing and sleight of hand). George was the last grand medicine man from Bena.

      My brother couldn’t stay long. He has seven children ranging in age from six months to fifteen years. I told him I’d finish alone. I did.

      The СКАЧАТЬ