The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  *

  My grandfather left a turquoise ring to my mother, one that he wore most of his life. He may have received it as a gift, but no story remains. The ring appeared in my mother’s handkerchief drawer after her death, along with other valuables. She had never shown it to anyone. In the dark recess of the drawer, it was out of her sight, like her father’s family. Yet it cast its spell.

  When I visited my brother a few years ago, casually he mentioned the old turquoise ring Grandfather wore, how odd it was in our small Kansas town. “I always assumed Grandfather wore it because he was Indian,” he said. Brother is older than I am and remembers more about Grandfather. “I never saw him when he wasn’t wearing it,” he said. “Whatever happened to it?”

  I told him it was not lost. Even before I realized it was Grandfather’s, I valued the ring as an heirloom and gave it to one of the grandsons. So, the ring continues its existence, still joined to the family.

  Turquoise was my mother’s favorite color to wear, and her dark hair and complexion showed well with its hue. As a child, she must have seen her father’s ring daily, and perhaps that was a small but steady influence on her taste. She often wore a fancy turquoise dress she made for herself. When I saw someone at a distance wearing that bright color, I knew it would be her.

  One of my mother’s favorite garments was a Guatemalan jacket with turquoise, red, and yellow animals woven into its black background. It always hung on a nearby chair, ready to go with her out the door. The turquoise animals in the design faded to a lovely aqua color through the years. I came to associate that color and those animals with her; the coat was almost another layer of her skin.

  In the grasslands we were surrounded by sky blue colors but no blues mixed with water—no teal or aqua or turquoise. Women wore pink or beige suits. Black was for mourning, white for brides. Turquoise was not in the McCall’s pattern books and seldom in the fabric stores. Never was turquoise in Poole’s Department Store dresses for grown women.

  My childhood was an era when, instead of gemstones, women wore rhinestones. Or they displayed new plastic creations, such as Bakelite, a synthetic resin harder than amber. Bakelite bangles create a muted clack, part of the fashion statement. No one wore turquoise rings when I was a child, and men seldom did.

  Once, when I was eighteen, I noticed a man wearing a turquoise ring, the Delaware man Don Ashapanek. I was working as a waitress in a soda fountain. When I served him, I noticed his turquoise ring was as large as my grandfather’s. I overcame shyness to ask about it. He told me it was a gift from his aunt. He was a doctoral student at Emporia State University. Years later he was my colleague at Haskell Indian Nations University, and he still wore that family turquoise ring.

  In the code of our small town, turquoise jewelry was “Indian,” from faraway southwestern deserts. On occasion a wealthy neighbor would travel on the Santa Fe train and return with silver bracelets set with colorized aqua stones as souvenirs. No one seemed to ever wear them. My other grandmother brought me silver bracelets, embellished with turquoise, that fit my small wrists. They were delicate and feminine. The color popped brightly within the gleaming metal. I loved them, tried them on, and wore the dainty wristlets in the house. Turquoise, for me, is the color of gifts.

  From recent books I learn the locations of turquoise mines in the Southwest. Each has its own colors, and some have lacy markings. My brother gave me a gift of a Lander Blue stone with a blue against black netting matrix. Leslie Marmon Silko writes about her personal attraction to the stone. All of its varieties obsess her, those that have been purchased as well as those she finds. Silko lives in the Tucson desert, where she walks daily and picks up nuggets from washouts. To her each is individual, with its own silent voice. I love her story about losing a favorite four-sided stone: “Even after I found three pieces of turquoise larger and as nicely polished as the small rectangular piece, still I searched the house for the lost piece. What is it about us human beings that we can’t let go of lost things?” For Silko that stone has a quality not measured by size or polish. That stone has become necessary to her, and she cannot let it go.

  My “lost thing” is my grandfather, and so I look for him in my mother’s drawers and in turquoise jewelry. I find pieces, like Silko finds fragments of a larger turquoise rock ledge, and each is part of a larger epic. I imagine a time when my grandfather’s life story was an intact seam of smooth, bright blues, like Silko’s turquoise ledge that crops to the surface at intervals. This lode connects underground to a solid, unbroken river.

  *

  After Mother’s Episcopalian funeral my husband conducted a Native American Church memorial for her in our backyard. He arranged the family around a fire ring in generational order. Friends circled family and tended the fire. In turn we each spoke about her life. Then my husband burned her master’s degree hood, which she had left folded in a closet, and her college diploma. The smoke rose straight into the winter clouds, toward the heavens of both traditions.

  Mother and I were not at peace with each other in this world, but now, when I look over the funeral pictures—church flowers; the cedar altar, eagle feathers, and Bible; the firewood brought by a friend; the circle of friends and family—I feel affection. She passed down wooden spoons, kettles, and white chinaware, part of my daily kitchen rituals. Her iris and day lilies bloom in my garden. One of the greatest surprises for me is how our relationship continues to evolve after her death.

  As the charred ring of the memorial fire pit fades into new grass, I recover from shock. With her last breath she exhaled bright red blood, a vivid sight. For months I relived that moment. I felt the helplessness of not saving her. Now that image loosens its hold.

  Recently I felt her ghost, or some similar presence, protect me. I was chopping onions with a cleaver, and it slipped. In an eerie moment I felt another person take the blade and put it in my other hand. I heard her voice, “Don’t hurt yourself,” as I must have heard it a thousand times when I was a baby.

  I learned to get along without much emotional support from my mother years ago, so I do not miss the relationship as much as some daughters might. As the first years of mourning end, the guilt ebbs. One exact moment it was completely gone. It was in the garden as I tended violets transplanted from her garden. As I wrenched crabgrass from between their rhizomes, I saw my hand become her hand. Then I began to have memories of her laughter, and then bits of family stories returned. Now a word like willow reminds me of her war against the weeping willow tree that tangled our sewer line. Hybridize evokes her years patiently tending new strains of iris. It suggests her interest in joining various lineages in her four children.

  Since her death I have found cousins and traded family stories that are eerily similar tales. We speculate about how claustrophobic small-town life puts pressure on people. Our parents worried about keeping up appearances so much that it stifled everyone. Official narratives of our families are like the crisp white sheets our mothers ironed weekly, without design or color. We cousins discuss how part of the midwestern ethos is based on fitting into community, at no small cost to individuals. We discuss the American Indian heritage in our family, how it was suppressed, and what that denial costs us to this day.

  Different European identities also were uncovered. I learned how “German” Grandfather Miller was actually Irish, from a farm family. That rural Irish background was not acceptable to my mother either. She spent her life trying to fit into some ideal.

  As pieces of my mother’s life become clearer, I accept her more, along with her anxieties. Even after her death, my mother inhabits my memory, where I revise our relationship. Each time I recall her, different details seem significant. Perhaps this account can reclaim the story of her parents, especially the life of her Delaware father. I celebrate her survival through difficult years. I have learned patience with her, as I hope my children will have patience with my failings.

  I find solace in the countryside that claimed her ashes. Another comfort
is the sun, the same one my grandfather faced every morning in his apartment. The grasslands world is intense, and human differences become small in this space. In our small funeral fire pit we symbolically released Mother to the winds and the earth. Over two seasons the burned scar remains, smaller each year as green growth reclaims it. From my house the Kansas River is within view, about a mile away. It flows east through 1800s Delaware lands to Kansas City, where my mother was born. A band of green-leaved trees outlines the river until winter, when turtles hibernate and reeds dissolve in soil.

  Part 3

  A Haunted Life

  Denise Dotson (b. 1949)

  In each room of our three-story house, I found a safe place. From that spot, usually on the floor, I listened. When I was a small child, the Bruner grandparents lived in the third-story apartment of our seemingly infinite house. That distance seemed very far away. On special occasions they came into our kitchen for meals. Then my grandfather sat quietly in a side chair, slowly chewing his meal with false teeth. He drank coffee and dipped bread in it, to soften the hard crusts. He had his honored place, but he seldom spoke. I could see something was wrong but not exactly what.

  On one occasion Grandfather and I were the topic of conversation, our resemblance to each other. We shared eyes that were as brown as the garden soil. He looked pleased, but we were both startled to be out of our usual roles. Words came at me quickly, too fast for response. We were grandfather and grandchild, minor players in our mixed-up, despairing, and occasionally joyful family.

  Grandfather and Grandmother had returned from California about the time of my birth. They avoided their hometown, just eighty miles away. There they would face public disgrace for Grandfather’s gambling indiscretions. At that time gambling was against the law in Kansas, and to many people it was sinful. Even worse, they were poor. Although I was a small child, I understood their postures of despair. My mother’s burden of unfilled aspirations made her cranky, and daily contact with her poor parents made her situation more pronounced. My father staggered under financial responsibility for four children and now, to some extent, his in-laws.

  My next older sibling, Jane, was three years older, very verbal, very pretty, and bright beyond her years. Today she is a brilliant writer. As a child, she was amazing. She entertained and distracted the family, full speed every day. With a quieter disposition I was a side attraction.

  I worried over all the words I did not understand as well as the grown-ups’ exclusionary experiences beyond the walls of the house. I seldom even went outdoors, and then only within our yard, so their descriptions were exotic, spoken in a foreign language of polysyllabic garble.

  Because of his railroad job, my father was absent most days. When he was home, he bellowed rants about the outrageous pro-business positions of the newspaper editor William Lindsay White, the privileged son of William Allen White, a nationally known journalist. As the town celebrity, White spent much of the year in New York, where he published novels, memoirs (Journey for Margaret), and articles for the New Yorker. My father loathed his elitism. After long hours of labor and poor sleep, Father was surly, but that did not give my mother pause as she countered his diatribes.

  I listened to everything: violent fights, orders for the milkman, rare and wonderful laughter, fabric store lists, warnings about weather—the 1951 Kansas City flood stands out, along with thunderstorms and blizzards.

  I learned each conversation created different facial expressions, pacing, timbres of voice, lengthening of vowels for emphasis. The slow Midwest dialect uses tonal cues to add nuances, so a simple phrase such as “I’m late” can be a complaint, an apology, an accusation, or a question. The slow pace of this dialect allows for a great range of emotion. I learned to hear all the overtones and undertones of vocalizations, but I did not learn how to talk easily. I made mistakes, and everyone corrected me in a chorus, which made me even more withdrawn. Then my mother labeled me “tongue-tied,” and the cure for that, she said, was cutting the tongue loose with a knife. I kept out of her reach as best as I could.

  So in the early 1950s my grandfather and I sat silently as others around us chattered. He was sixty years old when I was born. As a boy, he had lived on the Cottonwood River in Burns, the same prairie stream that ran through our town to join the Neosho River. In the sweep of geography and time it was not distant at all. His history overlapped mine, in the grassy center of the continent. And so, through him, I have direct ties to the Indian Wars.

  He was born just thirty-one years after a skirmish between Cheyennes and Kansas Indians in Council Grove, forty miles up the Neosho River. He was born twenty years after the Ponca man Standing Bear went to court in Omaha to assert his legal rights as a “person,” not wildlife. The Poncas’ route ran through Grandfather’s hometown on their forced march to Oklahoma and again on the 1879 flight away from the horrors of that impoundment. These events were just a few paces ahead of us on trails that were still visible. Wagon ruts of the Santa Fe Trail passed near our town. Wounded Knee, the last of the Plains Indian Wars events, was a year after Grandfather’s birth. He grew up in the penumbra of that violence against Native people.

  Those events never entered our family conversation, but they existed as a presence in the air we breathed in that kitchen. In the early 1950s I grew up among people of the nineteenth century, the western frontier days, and they shaped my reality. I met some of the last Indian fighters, who described a gritty time of hardships, mean drifters, and short life spans. Neighbors and relatives had lived through rustlers, brawlers, and horse thieves. I remember my oldest sister, Mary, coming home from a ride on the city bus, during which she had sat next to an old woman who had grown up in a sod house, like our great-grandparents. These experiences seemed just a few days old.

  When my grandfather did speak, everyone quieted down so his voice could be heard. The family showed its respect for him this way, and I watched this etiquette. Later I would learn that my father had more respect for him than his own father and how this affected all of us. One of the worst childhood sins was to interrupt. “Don’t be impudent!” my mother would command, along with “Don’t interrupt me while I’m talking!” We learned to never say “Shut up!” It was a breach of social rules to deny someone the right to speak and be heard.

  I have lived in many different houses since that first home, and Grandfather moved out of the three-story house early in my life, but the family never left that first kitchen table. Grandfather’s voice reverberates through time, even though his voice was soft. Even after I learned to talk, I kept his habit of silence.

  *

  My memories commingle with early images of the church across the street. It was a trim, pink-brick Congregational church with a steeple tower piercing the brilliant blue heavens. This pointy European architecture was alien to the landscape, a contrast even to rambling gingerbread houses nestled into sloping streets around it. The cotton candy pink of the bricks was odd. As a child, I considered its existence as evidence of foreign countries, like palm tree villages shown in Sunday school pictures.

  Despite its strange shape, the inside of the church was a homey place where we met friendly people. The minister of this independent congregation was a secular saint. When I was older, he would offer sympathy when family tensions erupted into battles. He never scolded the congregation about sinful ways, although once he noted more people worshipped at the nearby lake during summer Sundays than in the church. He was bemused, not angry. The two forms of celebration did not cancel each other out.

  My grandfather and my grandmother lived apart from the minister’s domain. They existed independently, suspended in our house’s top floor, beyond high ceilings and endless windows. Years later my next older sister wondered at their seeming “exile” in the house. Most often we never saw them. Their third-story apartment was, I thought, our steeple. There above the trees time moved at a different speed. They had become old in distant attics in the eternity before I was born. I understood them as supe
rnatural, like people in the Bible.

  In that house near the church, I slept where branches of elm trees swayed just outside the window. This was an intact canopy, before blight killed the elms. Those attic rooms continue to exist as backdrop for my dreams. They are infinite nesting boxes, where I wander for hours and never tire. Sometimes my parents, brother, or sisters are with me. The painted lumber is birch bark white and still smells of sunshine. Odd buildings jumble outside the windows, but inside we are all together. We are safe. Some nights my grandparents reappear like moonlight flowing through the window panes, and time ceases to exist.

  One night when I was not yet two years old, I had a flying dream, where I easily moved about the different floors of the house, soaring up and down the staircases. The next morning I ran to the head of the staircase leading the kitchen. I could smell buttered toast. I stood there transfixed, hungry, about to jump for a long moment. Something seemed different, though, something I could not name but something very real. Finally, I called for help to be carried down the stairs. I had come so close to leaping off. Instead, after long thought, I decided to believe in gravity.

  Another time I remember my grandfather’s profile reflecting in a window, a double image. He was looking at me closely because I am the only grandchild with his cleft chin. My mother said, “See how she inherited your mark.” His smile was twisted, composed partly of pain, which I sense but cannot identify as easily as gravity.

  Another memory from those days was when he taught me to drive, another kind of flight. I am a toddler, and he props me behind the wheel. At first I am terrified—I could hurt someone with this contraption. I squirm, but he encourages me. Then I put my hands on the wheel, turn it, and feel a surge of power. My powerful grandfather wants me to steer. I still have dreams about taking charge and driving buses. I never have dreams of being driven.