by Carole Maso
Wood ages quickly here, worn by wind and rain. He looks out over the reservation and then further off at all he has lost. He sees a row of wooden boxes bleached gray. These tiny houses are like the coffins of white men: there’s no air. He sends a petition to the Great Spirit. “We can’t breathe in here. We lie down in here and die.”
It is the end. He walks into the kitchen, turns on the faucet: sound of metal, sound of dark water. He opens the refrigerator, closes it. “The young ones tell me I’ve got to forget the way it was,” and a smirk comes to his face. “When we forget, then surely we die. Once there were buffalo and elk and clear water. Once we roamed freely on the land.
“Give me back,” he rasps, “what you have taken.”
He walks into the other room. He turns on the television.
Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble flip brontosaurus burgers on the grill in Bedrock in brilliant technicolor and plot how to sneak away to the Water Buffalo meeting without the girls finding out.
Lucy and Ethel have just begun work at a chocolate factory. They stand in front of the conveyor belt. The foreman tells them if one candy passes them and gets down to the packing room unwrapped, they’re finished.
A game-show host in heavy makeup smiles madly. “What is behind that curtain?” he asks a squealing audience.
“Come on down,” he calls out. “Mrs. Betty Loomis from Nashville, Tennessee, come on down! Let’s make a deal.”
Switch to a commercial: a woman in a nurse’s uniform breathes her mouthwash breath on a young doctor.
A man offers a woman a cup of coffee by a fire. Demurely she refuses. “It’s the caffeine,” she says, wrinkling her brow with puppy-dog sincerity. “But it’s decaf,” he says. “No, it can’t be. This rich?” she says in amazement, in adoration.
His voice quivers. “Give me back,” he says into the false smiles, “give me back,” he says into the antiseptic grins, into all the lies, “give me back what you have taken.”
Now as the orange and yellow and lime-green walls start to close in on him and he is beginning to have difficulty breathing, he closes his eyes and calls up the sacred land of the grandfathers. Slowly the walls recede and disappear.
Tears fall; tears have fallen for hundreds of years. The sun drops; the clouds turn pink and purple. Once he could call rain from the sky. “You must never forget,” he says.
He looks out the tiny window and sees his grandchildren reaching for the red medicine ball.
Lucy and Ricky, roses in their mouths, do the tango for the PTA at Little Ricky’s school.
In this fragile light which seems to change even as he observes it, the figures of the children dissolving, as he holds them, into a dusty background—in this light he calls up Butte Mountain where he can still go whenever he has to, in his mind. He reaches for it now.
“I dream of you,” he smiles,
“I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit,
Jackrabbit,
Quail.”
“We are killing people. There is no other way to see this,” Fletcher said in sorrow, standing paralyzed in his realization. “We fill the earth with the bones of those who beg simply to live out an average life: seventy years and the chance to work, but for many even that is not possible. This must change,” Fletcher burned, looking at Bill whose lungs had filled with asbestos.
Timmy Skofield was filled with questions.
Clifford kept saying, “I quit. I quit for good.” The deal he and Fletcher had made now seemed stupid. He had made the promise earlier that week that he would not quit at all for ten days and Fletcher in turn would take him out alone to any movie he wanted and afterwards for ice cream. It was the fifth day but now he kept saying, “I quit, I quit,” over and over. Fletcher was leaving. What Clifford had always known was still true: there was no one who would take him seriously, no one who could be trusted, relied upon, though life in the house with the other residents and Fletcher had seemed different somehow.
Amanda began neighing like a horse the way she always did when she was upset.
And in the bathroom Debbie unrolled roll after roll of toilet paper and stuffed it into the toilet.
The whole house was in chaos, my brother having to leave the job, unexpectedly, without notice.
The first postcard came from Maine. On it a fisherman stands on a wharf holding up two lobsters. The sky is a brilliant blue, like his eyes, which shine out from a haggard face.
“Eli Lilly,” Fletcher scrawls on the back, “manufacturers of the drug DES. Wrongfully marketed for use in preventing miscarriage. No preliminary lab tests done on pregnant mice. Consequences: all plaintiff’s reproductive organs and more than half her vagina removed. 1953 prenatal exposure to DES, which was ingested by the mother while pregnant with plaintiff, is proximate cause of cancer that developed seventeen years after her birth.”
Sarah Stafford, age twenty-two, having become accustomed to the movement of the boat, felt dizzy stepping onto the earth. It seemed to her years since she had left England; with the boat’s first motion forward, the land’s first tilt, she had left behind the idea of the world, and it had been oddly comforting to her. She had grown to love the oceans of blue and lavender and pewter.
Now, landing here, she could scarcely believe that this was the dream that had propelled the tiny ship forward: paradise. How the idea of paradise must have varied among the one hundred and fifty tossed through the water on the courageous Godspeed. Now they were here. So this was paradise: a land you could not stand on, a tangle of trees. All right, then, she thought. But it was not all right. It seemed far, far away from anything she had conjured. Her children clung to her skirt. Some of the men shouted. Others laughed with delight at their first sight of the New World. Some sighed as if with a lover. Her children began to cry. A dark shape rose in her.
My mother moves her feet across the polished floor—one, two, cha-cha-cha.
“Miami Beach,” Grandpa Sarkis sighs, wiping sweat from his forehead. “There are those pink birds that stand on one foot,” Lucy says, pointing to the picture on soiled newsprint. “Flamingos,” her mother says to her.
“And blue dolphins,” Christine whispers.
“I’ve heard that at the hotels in Miami Beach,” the father says, “men dressed in w hite bring cushions out for you so that you can sit by the pool. And just for signing a paper they will bring you banana and strawberry drinks with parasols in them.”
“Really? Parasols!” my mother says.
“Oh, yes,” her father nods solemnly. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
The next time I heard from my brother, he was in Fall River, Massachusetts, where he continued to name names. “Johns-Manville,” he wrote on the back of a postcard picturing the house of the famous ax-murderess, Lizzie Borden, “was fully aware of the hazards of asbestos in the 1930s but actively suppressed the information, making ‘a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others, to take no protective or remedial action.’”
This is the part of the story Grandpa hated to tell: It was a cold night. Ice was already thick on the creek called Wounded Knee. The crystalline trees seemed to bend further and further into the earth. It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
A white flag hoisted at the center of the Indian camp promised to the white man that there would be peace, harmony, safety. But the men with faces like snow moved into the camps anyway, hundreds of them, in great drifts like sorrow.
“Everywhere the Indians are dancing,” the men said, as they came nearer and nearer, mistaking the Ghost Dance for a rite of war, not noticing the white flag, not noticing that women, too, danced side by side with the men. “We begged for life, and the white man thought we wanted theirs,” Red Cloud cried.
The soldiers demanded the Indians’ guns, searched their tepees, spilled food from bowls, tore animal skins from sleeping children. Women screamed. Yellow Bird blew an eagle-bone whistle and told his people not to fear—they would be prote
cted by their Ghost Shirts.
The soldiers found about forty old guns, but not Black Fox’s, which he carried under his blanket. The women chanted and cried. And seeing this, all of this, Black Fox took out his gun and fired into the line of soldiers he hated.
Immediately the troops retaliated, shooting at point-blank range at the unarmed Indians. Some Indians had knives or war clubs and fought hand to hand for their lives. At this time another troop positioned up the hill joined in—firing nearly fifty rounds a minute into the women and children who had gathered together and were standing off to the side.
Yet another ring of soldiers killed those who tried to escape into the hills. From four sides the white men fired. Within minutes hundreds were dead. Women and children who attempted to escape by running up the dry ravine were followed and slaughtered. Their bodies afterward were found for more than two miles. A few survivors, mostly children, hidden in the brush, were told they had nothing to fear. Little boys who crept out were surrounded and butchered.
Later, a member of the burial party said that many of the women were found dead with their shawls pulled up over their heads, covering their faces in that last second as the soldiers raised their guns and took aim.
They were buried in a mass grave. Most were naked. Souvenir hunters had taken the bloody Ghost Shirts from their backs. Soon after the massacre was complete, a great blizzard swept over the Plains and covered the dead with snow. It was hard to get some of them into the grave, frozen as they were into the various grotesque postures of violent death.
It was New Year’s Day, I89I.
If you had listened carefully, you could have heard through the snow, some distante away, a chorus of auld langsyne.
“It was so thick on the engine-room floors that we used to walk through it like snow.”
Bill had been a welder at the shipyard. He sat with us now at dinner. He was gaunt and haggard and he gasped for breath. My father put food on his plate.
“Please eat,” Dad said in a whisper.
“They gave us asbestos clothes to wear for protection. In ‘7 2 they started paying us dirty money to work in certain areas.”
“I’ve got people dying here every two weeks,” the business agent for Local 24 said, Fletcher told us.
“Please try to eat something,” my father said.
He was dying from a disease called mesothelioma.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
Black tlk
“Johns-Manville,” he carved into a postcard, “made a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others.”
“A. H. Robins, manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device.”
“You sip these incredible drinks through a straw,” Grandpa Sarkis says, “and the men dressed in white dinner jackets pass out cards for bingo. You can play bingo all afternoon in the sun if you want—or put your chips on the Wheel of Fortune.”
“The white man shall never kill me. If they try to, it is they who will die. They will fall down as if they had no bones. They will suffocate in a great landslide. They will be burned by an enormous wall of fire. They could put bullets through me, they could chop me up into little pieces, they could burn me until I glittered in the palm of their hands, and still I would live.”
“We used to walk through it like snow. We walked through drifts of it to do our job. Later some of the children got it, too—from playing with our work boots or sitting on our laps.”
From Detroit he sent me a postcard of the Ford plant. Only my address appeared on the back.
The ceremony of burying the dead is ended with tears, wailing, howling, and macerations. They tear the hair, gash the skin.
“Greetings from the Land of Lincoln,” the front of the postcard reads in bright red letters, the famed log cabin in one corner, a dark silhouette in the other. “Dow Chemical,” my brother scrawls. “Much evidence that Dow knew as early as the mid sixties that exposure to dioxin (Agent Orange) might cause serious illness, even death, but withheld this knowledge and continued to sell to the Army and public.”
I have read a hundred times the messages he has scribbled on the backs of these cards. I have looked into the eyes of the fisherman for help, stared at the lobsters he holds to the sky like children. I have read and reread my brother’s long litany of betrayal and pain: DLS, asbestos, Agent Orange; Lilly, Johns-Manville, Dow Chemical. They lie like scars on my tongue. Then silence—nothing more—a horrible stillness.
There in the distance another Fletcher rises out of murky water. He crawls onto the shore clutching a bayonet. He claws his way into the thick bush where he lies shivering. It could be anywhere: Argentina or Chile, Vietnam or Cambodia. He sits up. It’s Fletcher all right. He is hunched over and counting something. Sweat collects on his forehead. He wipes it away with a filthy sleeve. Wasps gather around his head. He tries to bat them away, but they keep coming and coming like helicopters in the endless night. Waves of nausea overcome him. His boots are golden with vomit.
My brother looks so different forced into the brutal postures of war. I barely recognize him at all. He is covered with sores. His legs seem longer, larger somehow. “Best for running, Vanessa,” he whispers through the wide leaves. He tears a handful of leaves from a tree to wipe his mouth and brow. Patches of brow n and gray and green have grown on his arms. His skin looks tough like a lizard’s or snake’s. A second skull has grown around his head, hard as a helmet. His insect eyes bulge red.
He has become the kind of person who wants only to survive, only to stay alive. “Nothing else matters, Vanessa,” he shouts through the thick foliage. A monkey screams. More planes come. A tarantula is stunned motionless on a banana leaf. The air is filled with snakes. He begins to shake uncontrollably. He does not know where he is.
Trees burst into flames as he watches them. He hears drums, he thinks, in the distance, but perhaps it is his own heart he hears. He closes his eyes. His lids are thick. He covers his face. “You could not do it without the drugs,” he says. “No one could.” He thinks someone injects the high white clouds with poison. He tries breathing into his hands to keep out the fumes. The clouds mushroom and explode, red and black, igniting the sky. “The sky is burning, Vanessa,” he says. He laughs hysterically. His shoulders move up and down frantically as if he were shrugging over and over in fast motion. He is drenched in sweat. He turns suddenly. The brow n rice in barrels looks dangerous to him. The sandal of a child makes him weep with fear. Urine flows down his pants leg. “Vanessa,” he says, “help me. The sky is burning.”
“Fletcher, get up,” I try to say. “That lump, over there,” but I cannot get the words out fast enough, “is a grenade.” If a telegram comes I w ill not accept it. If a telegram comes I will tell them to send it elsewhere.
Preferring no thoughts to these, I close my eves, but the fear follows me.
“Fletcher,” my mother calls, wandering into the lining room of our enormous house in Connecticut one July afternoon years ago. She seats herself in the center of the floor. In the silence she feels the room betraying her.
“I think we’d better get rid of all this,” she says miserably and motions to the objects that surround her. It’s so crowded, and everything is always moving. She shows him the melting legs of the coffee table, the heavy curtains rustling in the windless air, the stereo that seems to slip from one radio station to the next without anyone touching it. The lamp and the piano chatter. There’s whispering among the Waterford. Fletcher’s eyes are wide. My mother’s perceptions are so real that my brother actually sees the furniture huddling in collusion. The pillows seem to be breathing, in the shrinking room, be
fore his eyes.
“And this rug, too,” she sighs, “and these vases—I never wanted them.” Now the room seems impossibly cluttered. Fletcher can’t believe we ever lived in it.
“And these paintings,” he shouts, looking at my mother, then back at the heavy brushstrokes.
“And this couch.”
“And the candles,” Fletcher says.
“And all these plants,” my mother says, gasping for air, and my brother, too, begins to cry.
The enemy is everywhere. It is the chaise longue, it is the love seat.
“Help me, someone,” I whisper, closing my eyes in an attempt to dissolve the images with darkness, with words. “Help.”
“Who are you?” I ask, squinting, my head tilted to the side. “Who are you really?”
“Why? What does it matter? How could it help?”
“Because I love you.”
“You love me? Love yourself first.”
“Please, Jack.”
“Don’t cry,” he says. “Keep going. There’s no turning back now.”
She reaches her arm into the present, into my apartment here in New York. “I always knew you were strong, Marta, but this—”
She hands me an apple.
“bat this,” she says. “Eat this.”
“Fool Dog. Three Fingers. Wolf Necklace. Dead Eyes,” my brother writes across the last postcard, which pictures Bear Butte in South Dakota.
“Eight miles from Fort Meade,” the postcard states in fine print, “is Bear Butte. It can be seen from a hundred miles away. The Teton used to camp on this flat-topped mountain to pray. Here they would wail for the dead of whom the stones are tokens.”
The day my mother turned eighteen and was awarded a full scholarship to Vassar College and my Aunt Lucy was more or less settled, having become engaged to the life-insurance salesman and on her way to a career in nursing, was the day that Grandpa Sarkis announced in the gray kitchen that he was going home.
