Still we drove away and we later went to Bonimart. My pop bought me Zartan along with Stormshadow, which kept me busy for hours creating my own stories of death. And the events of the day were soon forgotten with short memory.
BEADING LESSON (2002)
Beth H. Piatote
Piatote is Nez Perce and a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale).
THE FIRST THING you do is, lay down all your hanks, like this, so the colors go from light to dark, like a rainbow. I’ll start you out with something real easy, like I do with those kids over at the school, over at Cay-Uma-Wa.
How about—you want to make some earrings for your mama? Yeah, I think she would like that.
Hey niece, you remind me of those kids. That’s good! That’s good to be thinking of your mama.
You go ahead and pick some colors you think she would like. Maybe three or four is all, and you need to pick some of these bugle beads.
Yeah, that’s good, except you got too many dark colors.
You like dark colors. Every time I see you you’re wearin’ something dark. Not me. I like to wear red and yellow, so people know I’m around and don’t try talkin’ about me behind my back, aay?
The thing is, you got to use some light colors, because you’re makin’ these for your mama, right, and she has dark hair, and you want ’em to stand out, and if they’re all dark colors you can’t see the pattern.
I got some thread for you, and this beeswax. You cut the thread about this long, a little longer than your arm, but you don’t want it too long or it will tangle up or get real weak. You run it through the beeswax, like this, until it’s just about straight. It makes it strong and that way it don’t tangle so much.
You keep all this in your box now. I got this for you to take home with you, back to college, so you can keep doin’ your beadwork.
How do you like it over there at the university? You know your cousin Rae is just about gettin’ her degree. She just has her practicum, then she’ll be done. I think her boyfriend don’t like her being in school though, and that’s slowing her down. It’s probably a good thing you don’t have a boyfriend right now. They can really make a lot of trouble for you, and slow you down on things you got to do.
Now you gotta watch this part. This is how you make the knot. You make a circle like this, then you wrap the thread around the needle three times, see? You see how my hands are? If you forget later you just remember how my hands are, just like this, and remember you have to make a circle, OK? Then you pull the needle through all the way to the end—good—and clip off the little tail.
I’ll show you these real easy earrings, the same thing I always start those men at the jail with. You know I go over there and give them beading lessons. You should see how artistic some of them are. They work real hard, and some of them are good at beadwork.
I guess they got a lot of time to do it, but it’s hard, it’s hard to do real good beadwork.
You got to go slow and pay attention.
I know this one man, William, he would be an artist if he wasn’t in jail. I’ll show you, he gave me a drawing he did of an eagle. It could be a photograph, except you can tell it’s just pencil. But it’s good, you would like it. There’s a couple of other Indian prisoners—I guess we’re supposed to call them inmates, but I always call them prisoners—and sometimes I make designs for them for their beadwork from what they draw. The thing is, they don’t get many colors to work with.
They like the beadwork, though. They always got something to give their girlfriends when they come visit, or their mothers and aunties.
You have to hide the knot in the bead, see, like this, and that’s why you got to be careful not to make the knot too big.
Maybe next time you come they will be having a powwow at the prison and you can meet my students over there and they can show you their beadwork. I think they always have a powwow around November, around Veterans Day. Your cousin Carlisle and his family come over from Montana last time, and the only thing is, you got to go real early because it takes a long time to get all your things through security. They have to check all your regalia and last time they almost wouldn’t let Carlisle take his staff in because they said it was too dangerous or something.
What’s that? Oh, that’s all right. Just make it the same way on the other one and everyone will think you did it that way on purpose.
Your mama is really going to like those earrings. I think sometimes she wishes she learnt to bead, but she didn’t want to when she was little. She was the youngest, so I think she was a little spoiled but don’t tell her I said that. She didn’t have to do things she didn’t want to, she didn’t even have to go to boarding school. I think she would have liked it. It wasn’t bad for me at that school. Those nuns were good to me; they doted on me. I was their pet. I think your mama missed out on something, not going to St. Andrew’s, because that’s when you get real close with other Indians.
I like that blue. I think I’m goin’ to make you a wing dress that color.
I think you’ll look good when you’re ready to dance. Once you get going on your beadwork I’ll get you started on your moccasins, and you know your cousin Woody is making you a belt and I know this lady who can make you a cornhusk bag. You’re goin’ to look just like your mama did when she was young, except I think she was younger than you the last time she put on beadwork.
I used to wonder if you would look like your dad, but now that you’re grown you sure took after her. I look at you and I think my sister, she must have some strong blood.
Hey, you’re doin’ real good there, niece. I think you got “the gift”—good eyesight! You know, you always got to be workin’ on something, because people are always needing things for weddin’s and memorials and going out the first time, got to get their outfits together. Most everything I make I give away, but people pay me to make special things. And they are always askin’ for my work at the gift shop. My beadwork has got me through some hard times, some years of livin’ skinny.
You got to watch out for some people, though. Most people aren’t like this; most people are real big-hearted. But some people, when they buy your beadwork, they think it should last forever. Somebody’s car breaks down, he knows he got to take it to the shop, pay someone to get it goin’ again. But not with beadwork— not with something an Indian made. No, they bring it back ten years later and they want you to fix it for free! They think because an Indian makes it, it’s got to last forever. Just think if the Indians did that with all the things the government made for us. Hey, you got to fix it for free!
You done with that already? Let me show you how you finish. You pull the thread through this line, see, then clip it, then the bead covers it up. That’s nice.
That’s good. I’m proud of you, niece.
I think your mama is really goin’ to like these earrings, and maybe she’ll come and ask you to teach her how you do it. You think she’ll ever want to learn beadwork? Maybe she’ll come and ask me, aay?
What do you think of that? You think your mama would ever want to learn something from her big sister? I got a lot of students. There’s a lady who just called me the other day, she works at the health clinic, and she’s older than you and she wants to learn how. I said sure I’ll teach her. I teach anyone who wants to learn. I just keep thinkin’ if I stay around long enough, everyone’s goin’ to come back and ask me, even your mama.
WAR DANCES (2009)
Sherman Alexie
Born in 1966, of Coeur d’Alene and Spokane heritage, Alexie has been publishing poems and fiction since 1993. He is the most colloquial of writers in this anthology, writing with a confessional voice that is often humorous. His books have won many awards; he adapted his early stories for the movie Smoke Signals (1998). The strange, great, and discursive “War Dances” is the title story of one of his recent collections of short
fiction.
1. My Kafka Baggage
A few years ago, after I returned from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a bottom corner. “Shit,” I thought. “We’re being invaded.” And so I threw the unpacked clothes, books, shoes, and toiletries back into the suitcase, carried it out onto the driveway, and dumped the contents onto the pavement, ready to stomp on any other cockroach stowaways. But there was only the one cockroach, stiff and dead. As he lay on the pavement, I leaned closer to him. His legs were curled under his body. His head was tilted at a sad angle. Sad? Yes, sad. For who is lonelier than the cockroach without his tribe? I laughed at myself. I was feeling empathy for a dead cockroach. I wondered about its story. How had it got into my bag? And where? At the hotel in Los Angeles? In an airport baggage system? It didn’t originate in our house. We’ve kept those tiny bastards away from our place for fifteen years. So what had happened to this little vermin? Did he smell something delicious in my bag—my musky deodorant or some crumb of chocolate Power Bar—and climb inside, only to be crushed by the shifts of fate and garment bags? As he died did he feel fear? Isolation? Existential dread?
2. Symptoms
Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucus flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, untied, and unmoored me. Simply stated, I could not fucking hear a thing from that side, so I had to turn my head to understand what my two sons, ages eight and ten, were saying.
“We’re hungry,” they said. “We keep telling you.”
They wanted to be fed. And I had not heard them.
“Mom would have fed us by now,” they said.
Their mother had left for Italy with her mother two days ago. My sons and I were going to enjoy a boys’ week, filled with unwashed socks, REI rock wall climbing, and ridiculous heaps of pasta.
“What are you going to cook?” my sons asked. “Why haven’t you cooked yet?”
I’d been lying on the couch reading a book while they played and I had not realized that I’d gone partially deaf. So I, for just a moment, could only weakly blame the silence—no, the contradictory roar that only I could hear.
Then I recalled the man who went to the emergency room because he’d woken having lost most, if not all, of his hearing. The doctor peered into one ear, saw an obstruction, reached in with small tweezers, and pulled out a cockroach, then reached into the other ear, and extracted a much larger cockroach. Did you know that ear wax is a delicacy for roaches?
I cooked dinner for my sons—overfed them out of guilt—and cleaned the hell out of our home. Then I walked into the bathroom and stood close to my mirror. I turned my head and body at weird angles, and tried to see deeply into my congested ear. I sang hymns and prayed that I’d see a small angel trapped in the canal. I would free the poor thing, and she’d unfurl and pat dry her tiny wings, then fly to my lips and give me a sweet kiss for sheltering her metamorphosis.
3. The Symptoms Worsen
When I woke at three a.m., completely unable to hear out of my clogged right ear and positive that a damn swarm of locusts was wedged inside, I left a message for my doctor, and told him that I would be sitting outside his office when he reported to work.
This would be the first time I had been inside a health-care facility since my father’s last surgery.
4. Blankets
After the surgeon cut off my father’s right foot—no, half of my father’s right foot—and three toes from the left, I sat with him in the recovery room. It was more like a recovery hallway. There was no privacy, not even a thin curtain. I guessed it made it easier for the nurses to monitor the postsurgical patients, but still, my father was exposed—his decades of poor health and worse decisions were illuminated—on white sheets in a white hallway under white lights.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question. Who could be okay after such a thing? Yesterday, my father had walked into the hospital. Okay, he’d shuffled while balanced on two canes, but that was still called walking. A few hours ago, my father still had both of his feet. Yes, his feet and toes had been black with rot and disease but they’d still been, technically speaking, feet and toes. And, most important, those feet and toes had belonged to my father. But now they were gone, sliced off. Where were they? What did they do with the right foot and the toes from the left foot? Did they throw them in the incinerator? Were their ashes floating over the city?
“Doctor, I’m cold,” my father said.
“Dad, it’s me,” I said.
“I know who are you. You’re my son.” But considering the blankness in my father’s eyes, I assumed he was just guessing at my identity.
“Dad, you’re in the hospital. You just had surgery.”
“I know where I am. I’m cold.”
“Do you want another blanket?” Another stupid question. Of course, he wanted another blanket. He probably wanted me to build a fucking campfire or drag in one of those giant propane heaters that NFL football teams used on the sidelines.
I walked down the hallway—the recovery hallway—to the nurses’ station. There were three women nurses, two white and one black. Being Native American-Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Indian, I hoped my darker pigment would give me an edge with the black nurse, so I addressed her directly.
“My father is cold,” I said. “Can I get another blanket?”
The black nurse glanced up from her paperwork and regarded me. Her expression was neither compassionate nor callous.
“How can I help you, sir?” she asked.
“I’d like another blanket for my father. He’s cold.”
“I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.”
She looked back down at her paperwork. She made a few notes. Not knowing what else to do, I stood there and waited.
“Sir,” the black nurse said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
She was irritated. I understood. After all, how many thousands of times had she been asked for an extra blanket? She was a nurse, an educated woman, not a damn housekeeper. And it was never really about an extra blanket, was it? No, when people asked for an extra blanket, they were asking for a time machine. And, yes, she knew she was a health care provider, and she knew she was supposed to be compassionate, but my father, an alcoholic, diabetic Indian with terminally damaged kidneys, had just endured an incredibly expensive surgery for what? So he could ride his motorized wheelchair to the bar and win bets by showing off his disfigured foot? I know she didn’t want to be cruel, but she believed there was a point when doctors should stop rescuing people from their own self-destructive impulses. And I couldn’t disagree with her but I could ask for the most basic of comforts, couldn’t I?
“My father,” I said. “An extra blanket, please.”
“Fine,” she said, then stood and walked back to a linen closet, grabbed a white blanket, and handed it to me. “If you need anything else—”
I didn’t wait around for the end of her sentence. With the blanket in hand, I walked back to my father. It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact, it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.
“Dad, I’m back.”
He looked so small and pale lying in that hospital bed. How had that change happened? For the first sixty-seven years of his life, my father had been a large and dark man. And now, he was just another pale and sick drone in a hallway of pale and sick drones. A hive, I thought, this place looks like a beehive with colony collapse disorder.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“I’m cold.”
“I have a blanket.”
As I draped it over my father and tucked it around his body, I felt the first sting of grief. I’d read the hospital literature about this moment. There would come a time when roles wo
uld reverse and the adult child would become the caretaker of the ill parent. The circle of life. Such poetic bullshit.
“I can’t get warm,” my father said. “I’m freezing.”
“I brought you a blanket, Dad, I put it on you.”
“Get me another one. Please. I’m so cold. I need another blanket.”
I knew that ten more of these cheap blankets wouldn’t be enough. My father needed a real blanket, a good blanket.
I walked out of the recovery hallway and made my way through various doorways and other hallways, peering into the rooms, looking at the patients and their families, looking for a particular kind of patient and family.
I walked through the ER, cancer, heart and vascular, neuroscience, orthopedic, women’s health, pediatrics, and surgical services. Nobody stopped me. My expression and posture was that of a man with a sick father and so I belonged.
And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guessed at the identity of other brown people.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” the other man said.
“You Indian?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What tribe?”
“Lummi.”
“I’m Spokane.”
“My first wife was Spokane. I hated her.”
“My first wife was Lummi. She hated me.”
We laughed at the new jokes that instantly sounded old.
“Why are you in here?” I asked.
“My sister is having a baby,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
“Ayyyyyy,” I said—another Indian idiom—and laughed.
“I don’t even want to be here,” the other Indian said. “But my dad started, like, this new Indian tradition. He says it’s a thousand years old. But that’s bullshit. He just made it up to impress himself. And the whole family just goes along, even when we know it’s bullshit. He’s in the delivery room waving eagle feathers around. Jesus.”
Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers Page 13
