by James Bird
“You don’t go to school, do you?” I ask.
“Not anymore.”
“Is it because you’re sick?” I ask.
“Do I look sick to you?” she says, and sets her paintbrush down.
“No. To me you look perfect.”
She smiles, crawls over to her wheelchair, and climbs into it. Her legs are working a bit less today. They kind of drag behind her. I want to ask her about it, but not yet.
“I was just about to feed my family. Would you like to help?” she asks.
Is she inviting me to dinner? This is a first. I might as well do it, since I’m pretty sure the next time I see my mom, she’ll inform me that I am grounded for the rest of my life. I wonder if she’ll use the word grounded literally. If that’s the case, there’s no way she’d let me be up in a tree, far off the ground. I better spend as much time with Orenda as I can.
“Hello?” she asks, which snaps me out of my thoughts.
“Fifty, total. Yes, I’d love to help you feed your family. What exactly does that mean?”
She rolls her wheelchair toward her open window.
“There’s a bag of fruit over there. Bring it here,” she says, and points toward the opposite side of the room.
I walk over and pick it up. It’s not too heavy, but there must be a dozen or so peaches in here. I hand it to her. From under her seat, she pulls out a large knife with a blade made of bone and the handle wrapped in dark brown leather.
“You carry a knife in your wheelchair?” I ask.
“I do. Are you afraid of knives?”
“Nope. I’m a rebel. Rebels aren’t afraid of many things.”
She laughs and slices one of the peaches in half. She hands me one from the bag.
“Pass me the knife,” I say.
“No. This one is for you to eat. You look hungry.”
“I am hungry. I skipped lunch again today. In fact, I skipped school.”
“Why’d you skip school?”
“Like I said, I’m a rebel.”
She takes one half of the peach she just cut and tosses it out the window. She bites into the other half. It’s juicy. I try not to stare at the peach juice running down the sides of her mouth.
“Well?” she says.
“Four,” I say, and bite into my peach.
It’s delicious. I think this is the best peach I have ever tasted.
“It’s pretty good,” I say, and wipe the dribbling juice off my chin.
“I know. I plucked them from the tree myself.”
“The rest are for all the butterflies outside?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, and proceeds to cut each peach in half and toss it out her window. “We love peaches.”
“Sixteen,” I say, and watch her toss peaches until the entire bag is empty.
I could do this all day. Who would have known that watching a girl throwing peaches out a window could be so fun? I look at her legs, which look perfect to me, but I wonder why they don’t work like mine. Was she in an accident?
She catches me staring and points the knife at me, which drips peach blood.
“Were you just checking out my legs?” she asks.
“Twenty-eight.”
“Don’t hide behind twenty-eight. Come clean, buster,” she says, raising the knife a bit higher.
“I was just wondering why your legs don’t work.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her that. I don’t want to sound creepy; plus, she is holding a knife.
“I came up with a name for you. It’s a noble name,” she says, completely changing the subject.
“What is it? I hope not Buster,” I ask.
She puts the knife away and sets both hands on her lap, milking my anticipation.
“Well?” I ask.
“The Count!” she says, and stretches her smile, almost from ear to ear.
I smile too. You’d think I’d hate being referred to by anything that has to do with numbers, but this name is clever. And she’s right, it sounds kind of noble and kind of like a vampire, which I do resemble, being so pale and always dressed in black.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
“No. I don’t like it,” I say, and her smile immediately vanishes. “I love it!”
And like a wave crashing against the rocks, her smile returns to the shore of her face.
“Oh, and guess what?” I say excitedly.
“What?”
“Today, for the first time I can remember, I answered my grandma without counting her letters,” I say.
Orenda claps excitedly. “How’d you do it?” she asks.
“Eleven. I don’t know, but it happened today. She was talking to the clouds and invited them into my head, and for a few moments, I guess my head was too … clouded to count. Isn’t that amazing?”
“It is. So the clouds did it?”
“Twenty. I think so, even though I know it sounds crazy.”
“It’s not crazy at all. The clouds are full of information,” she says.
“Forty-five. Really?”
“Of course. Let’s see what they are saying now,” she says, and leans her head out of the window, looking through the branches toward the sky.
She spots a herd of clouds drifting west.
“Thirty-five. What are they saying?”
She doesn’t answer right away. Maybe she’s talking to them? I walk over to her, and as I lean toward the window, I smell her. The scent of fresh peaches fills my nostrils. I close my eyes and inhale deeper. This is heaven. Heaven isn’t a place at all. We got it all wrong. Heaven is a peach. And angels bite into heaven and smell like Orenda.
I open my eyes and look out the window and up to the sky.
The clouds are no longer fluffy, fast, and white. They are now blotchy, slow, and dark.
“They say they are about to cry,” she says.
“Twenty-four. Clouds can cry?”
Oh. She means it’s about to rain. I immediately wonder if Seven is in the house. She hates the rain. Well, not the rain so much, but she hates being wet. Sometimes my dad would forget about her when I was at school on a rainy day, and I’d come home to a completely drenched dog waiting at the door. But to be fair, it hardly ever rains in Southern California, so I couldn’t be too upset with my dad when it happened. We all make mistakes. I know I do.
I look into my backyard. I see Seven waiting patiently at the door. The clouds must have spoken to her too.
“I should go,” I say, and head toward the opening in the floor.
“Until next time, Count!” she says, using a pronounced Romanian accent, sounding exactly how Dracula would.
“Eighteen. Do you need help down?”
She shakes her head no. “I’m staying up here tonight. I love the rain.”
“Thirty-four. Well, if I’m not grounded, I’ll come visit you tonight,” I say, and descend the rope.
As soon as my feet touch ground, I run through her yard, dodging the peaches, and make it to the fence before the rain begins to fall. But as I squeeze through, a loud roar of thunder barrels through the sky. I look up and see the sky turning. It looks and sounds like the muzzle of a giant hound foaming at the mouth. And as I step into my yard, it starts pouring.
I meet Seven at the glass door. I slide it open, and we step inside. Phew. That was close. But I’m not out of danger yet. The rain is an easy bullet to dodge. My mom, on the other hand …
As I step farther inside the house, she is standing there, with her hands on her hips, staring at me. And she doesn’t look happy.
“Am I grounded?” I ask.
“Start the fire,” she says.
I don’t know how to start fires. I know that’s pretty lame, but where I grew up, people never taught their kids how to start fires. We just turned on the heater or put on a sweater.
“I don’t know how,” I say.
“Figure it out,” she responds, and walks away.
This sucks. She is usually so full of joy. I ruined that. I disa
ppointed her. The least I can do is try to start the fire for her. How difficult could it be? Even cavemen figured it out.
I stand in front of the empty fireplace. Shouldn’t there be logs or something? I look around the room but don’t see a pile of chopped wood anywhere. Does she expect me to take an axe to a tree? Do we even own an axe?
Another growl from the hound thunders above. It sounds like the sky was just bitten in half. Even the windows shake a bit. Seven lies down by my feet. She must not know what is happening. I don’t think she’s ever experienced thunder. And my only memory of it is in those scary movies where a killer is on the loose and a bunch of friends happened to rent a cabin in the woods in the same area. Cue the thunder.
Seven must think there’s a war raging above our heads, being fought on the rooftops.
Thinking of fighting reminds me of where I saw a stack of firewood. In the garage near the punching bag. So I walk to the garage and turn on the light. There it is. I pick up as many logs as I can and return to the fireplace. I stack them and grab a newspaper from the coffee table.
After I roll it up and stuff it in between some of the logs, I light the newspaper with the candle that sits on the mantel. The sports section burns first. Eat that, Dad.
I must admit, although most of this stuff was laid out for me, I can’t help but feel very Native American about this whole thing. I mean, sure, anyone can start a fire, but this was my first time. And it’s on an Ojibwe reservation. And it was for my fire-skinned mother. I hope she’s at least a tiny bit impressed. Her city-raised son just made fire. That’s huge. Like a baby taking its first step. Whoa. I just compared myself to an infant. Maybe I’m not too impressive … yet.
But who knows, maybe I’ll get so good at this that people start referring to me as FireStarter, or the Boy Who Makes Fire, or something like that. Maybe bullies will be afraid of me if my name has Fire in it.
But I quickly remember that I already got a name at school. It’s Freak. It’s not very original and not too clever, but sadly, it fits me. No one but Orenda will know that I’m the Count.
As I think these thoughts, the flames begin to rise. Success! My mom comes in and sits in front of the fire. She doesn’t look impressed. She still just looks disappointed. Darn it.
“Hello, fire,” she says to the sprouting flames.
They don’t respond in words so much, but they do crack and pop. She pats the floor next to her. This is where she’ll either ground me, toss me into the fire, or forgive me. I sit beside her and await my fate.
Together, we stare into the flames and let the warmth grab hold of both of our bodies. I mimic everything she does. When she pulls back her hair, I pull back mine. When she puts her hands together, over her heart, I do the same. I even close my eyes when she closes hers. My dad would always deliver my punishment right away, usually a “go to your room.” Not a terrible punishment. My room was my temple.
“Is this something our people do?” I ask, and crack open one eye to see her.
And with her eyes closed, face toward the fire, she replies, “This is something all people do.”
“Are you angry with me?” I ask.
She opens her eyes to the fire.
“Why did you ditch school today?” she asks.
“They all made fun of me,” I say.
She takes a deep breath and lifts her hands toward the fire, nearly touching the tips of the flames. But she doesn’t say anything else. I guess she wants more details?
“No matter which school I go to, it’s always the same. The moment I start counting, I’m labeled a freak. I don’t belong anywhere, Mama. So I ran. I’m sorry,” I say.
She waves her hands toward the fire, and somehow, it responds to her by moving the tops of each flame in the direction that her hand goes. I shake my head to see if this is all in my imagination, but it isn’t. The flames follow her fingers back and forth, like they’re slow dancing to a song I cannot hear.
“How are you doing that?” I ask.
“I’m just moving my hands. The fire is doing what it wants,” she says.
“But the flames … they’re following you,” I say.
“Like how the clouds followed you and Grandma. You did your thing, and they did theirs. You didn’t try to control the clouds, did you?”
“No. We just let them follow us. That’s when I forgot to count her sentence. But I don’t know how I did it.”
“Maybe you didn’t do it. Maybe you just gave up control and let it happen,” she says, and rises to her feet.
“Fifty-six,” I reply, but she’s already gone.
Was that her punishment? A small talk about fire and clouds? I know there has to be some sort of lesson in there. I just need to decipher it. Okay. Think. I shouldn’t try to control everything. I should let clouds do what clouds do and let fire do what fire does. All I need to worry about is what I do. Right? How do I apply this to my life? I don’t try to control people’s words, do I? I mean, they talk, I listen, I see the letters in my head, they morph into numbers, I add up those numbers, I say the numbers, and then I reply.
Wow. I do a lot of things when someone speaks to me. I never really broke it down like that before. I guess knowing is half the battle, right? But the other half is the hard part. How do I make it stop? I still have no idea how to control my own brain.
Thunder cracks the sky and rattles the house again, which reminds me of Orenda. She’s out in her tree house, all alone. And technically, she’s closer to the thunder. I wonder if the rain and wind are shaking her tree house back and forth like a boat being battered at sea. Is she trapped? I can feel it pounding at our walls, but she’s just behind a few wooden boards and a bunch of leaves. I’d be terrified if I were her. But she seems fearless. Still, her legs … What if she needs my help? I need to know for sure.
I gather up enough courage and stand. My mom never actually said the words “You’re grounded,” so I wouldn’t necessarily be disobeying her if I were to go outside, climb a tree, and check on Orenda.
I turn around, only to find my mom staring directly at me with her eyes fixed on mine. I feel like a kid with his hand halfway into a cookie jar.
“Sit down,” she says.
“Seven,” I reply. “I was just going to see if Orenda is all right.”
She walks past me and kneels beside the fire. Again, it gravitates toward her.
“Fire, explain to Collin here his two options.” My mother is actually speaking to the flames.
I don’t count her letters because they weren’t directed toward me. A clever move on her part.
“What two options?” I ask her, and yeah, okay, I ask the fire, too.
“Tell him he can either be grounded the white way or be grounded the Ojibwe way.”
“Fire … what is she talking about?” I ask.
“Fire … tell him that the white way is you stay in your room for a week or two and do whatever you want, completely forgetting about why you’re even in there, learning basically nothing in the end.”
“And the Ojibwe way?” I ask. “Fire?”
“Tell him our people build a fire and sit with it. We reflect on our actions as the flames are given birth, live their life, serve their purpose, then slowly die. We think about why we did what we did and what we plan on doing differently the next time. We do this until the fire completely burns out. And as the last flame breathes in air, we are only then no longer punished.”
So … let me get this straight, I can be grounded for two weeks or be grounded for what, a couple hours? Ummm. Easy choice. Ojibwe all the way.
“Tell my mom that I choose the Ojibwe way.”
She gets up, kisses me on the cheek, and walks out of the room. I look down at the fire and think that I should have used fewer logs.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NATIVE WARRIOR IN TRAINING (37)
I fell asleep beside the fire last night, and when I woke up this morning, it was completely out. No flames, no logs, and no heat. There
was just black and white ash lying under the cold air. Good news is, I’m not grounded anymore, but bad news, I also didn’t get a chance to see Orenda last night. I wonder if she enjoyed the storm. I imagine she did. I bet she loved the sound of rain falling all around her. She probably had amazing dreams of riding lightning and swimming through the raining sea-sky.
I, on the other hand, don’t remember my dreams. I hardly ever do. I just remember Seven licking my face as I woke up. My mom said that if I agreed to go back to school today, then she’d consider allowing me to go to Orenda’s tree house after school. It’s a deal I can’t refuse. Stay in school, I see Orenda. Ditch school, I spend my days talking to fires.
* * *
School wasn’t as bad today, mainly because I spent most of the day in the office explaining why I ran out of class yesterday. The principal tried her best to not get annoyed with my numbers, but after a while, she gave up and just let me sit in her office and “think about my actions” … So I drew a picture of a fire and stared at it for three hours.
Technically I attended school today, but I didn’t have to suffer humiliation by going to any of my classes. Which is good, but it doesn’t save me from tomorrow. I got a firm warning to not ditch again. And the principal assured me that all my teachers were personally made aware of my condition. Apparently, not all teachers read their emails, which is how she first sent out the notification to her teaching staff. Now every teacher is to address each one of my classes aloud in front of everyone, so no one can plead ignorance when I blurt out numbers. I know she thinks that’s somehow going to help me, but I know better. It just paints a bigger target on my back.
The bus drops me off in front of the reservation sign. This is where I’d usually see Grandma. I was really looking forward to the opportunity to somehow speak without counting again. Also, I’d love me some of her wisdom right now. I need to stop being so terrified of school. And if anyone can help me with that, it’s my cloud-tongued grandma. But she’s not here, so I walk silently down the dirt road alone. I should take the forest route and seek an adventure, but if there’s no one to share it with, what’s the point?
