After the pauwau was the annual Bear River memorial, another affair I found dismal, because nobody really wants to stand in a chilly valley talking about how their family got massacred a couple generations ago. But that's exactly what we did. As a kid I never understood why it was important for us to visit Bear River every year. In a way I understood now. The past and the present were cause and effect. The world around us hardly sprang out of a vacuum, accidental and haphazard. It was shaped that way: by the hands of the people who touched it before us. And we were going to shape it for the people to come after us.
"My great-grandmother was called Pretty Eyes," Catherine Looks Over spoke above the throng. She addressed a crowd of six or seven hundred, standing beside an obelisk-shaped monument. Shoshone from Utah and Idaho and California and Wyoming had come together for the occasion. In fact, I spotted my grandmother sitting on a folding chair at the place where the hard river met the cold creek.
If you've ever heard those rural myths about ornery old houses that must be haunted, children crossing the road lest they get sucked into the evil radii of their crumbling front porches, I'm pretty certain my grandmother inspired at least half of them. For starters, the Fort Hall kids didn't call her Mrs. Gives Light at all, but Kee Kuhma Kantun; which in Shoshone more or less means Old Witch. I guess she looked something like a witch. Uncut, unbrushed gray hair fell flyaway around her shoulders and waist, tangled, streaked with strands of black. Her eyes were giant wilderness eyes; you didn't dare look too long or they sucked you in, boiled you alive, and fed you to her pet familiar. The dramatic slope of her nose was the nook of an ancient redwood, perfect for hiding tiny fauna and will-o'-the-wisps. All she was missing was a pointed, crooked hat.
"Mother, hello," Uncle Gabriel said.
Uncle Gabriel and Mary and Rosa and I approached Grandma Gives Light after the memorial speech. I hovered behind Mary. Grandma Gives Light didn't stand up. Her eyes went straight to Rosa and settled there blankly. Her ancient brown aura jumped to life around its edges, calculating, alert.
"This is not one of mine," Grandma Gives Light said. She only spoke Shoshone.
"No," Uncle Gabriel said cheerfully, "I'm afraid she's mine. Mother, this is Rosa. We're seeing one another."
It was so silent in that valley I heard the wind licking the water behind us. The longer Grandma went without speaking, the redder Rosa's brown face turned. It got so bad that Mary of all people kneaded her shoulders in comfort.
"Foolish, foolish children!" Grandma burst out suddenly. "Everything backwards! Marry first, date later!"
"You tell 'em, Grandma," Mary said.
Heads turned our way at the sound of Grandma's reedy shouts. Sky inched over to us in his fuzzy fleece jacket, looking alarmed. Grandma stopped yelling long enough to zero in on him. Her face went blank again.
"You're always telling the kids to bring friends, aren't you?" Uncle Gabriel said pleasantly. "This is Skylar. That won't be a problem, Mother, will it?"
"He looks white," Grandma said.
Sky didn't speak a whole lot of Shoshone, but the word for "white," Dosabite, was pretty distinct. He palmed the back of his neck with the cradle of his hand. He smiled sheepishly.
"No white man in my house," Grandma said.
"Grandma," I snarled, "stop being racist."
Grandma's eyes snapped onto me. I shrank back, feeling seven years old all over again. Me and my big mouth.
"You," Grandma said to me. "You have not visited me in two years!"
I tucked my head into my chest. I dug my heels against the cold, hard ground. Grandma looked at Sky again. Grandma looked at me with slow dawning.
"This boy is yours," Grandma said.
It wasn't a question.
"Alright!" Uncle Gabriel said, clapping his hands. "Let's head into town for lunch, and then the four of you can take the train to Fort Hall. Tell Caleb I said hi, won't you?"
The six of us visited a tiny town called Whitney, and we stopped in a cafe with brown walls and frosted windows. Uncle Gabriel, Rosa, and Mary sat down at a corner table. Sky and me sat across from them. Grandma Gives Light sat apart from us, refusing to order from the menu, but dipped her fingers into her pocket and pulled out a handful of peanuts. She crunched with her mouth open and left shells all over the floor. I ordered eggs for Sky and hash browns for me and made Sky try the hash browns anyway. He looked at me from underneath his eyebrows in such a way that I couldn't tell whether he was exasperated or endeared.
"Rafael! Rafael!"
Autumn Rose In Winter bounded over to our table. Her long, high ponytail bobbed behind her head. She threw her arms around my neck in an unexpected hug, winding me. Her fingernails gleamed shiny pink.
"What was that for?" I coughed.
Autumn Rose leapt back, giggling and flushed. Poor kid was always flushed. "I'm going to miss you is all!"
"It's only four days," I said, hesitant. Since when did people like me this much?
"Hey, Autumn Rose," Mary said in an oily voice. "Can I get a hug, too?"
Annie caught Mary's eye two tables over. Annie threw her a fierce warning look. Mary acquiesced.
After lunch Sky waved goodbye to his granny, who nodded curtly, like she had lockjaw. He was her baby, something told me, and parting with him was poison. Grandma Gives Light left the cafe without saying anything and it was all I could do to scurry after her, Sky's bag and my bag hanging off my shoulder. Despite her elderly bones, her portly shape, Grandma was much faster at walking than I was. So was everybody else. Come on, it takes effort to drag your body around when it's about the same size as a grizzly bear's.
Grandma and Sky and Mary and me boarded a little wooden train next to a grimy clam hatchery. Mary grabbed a seat at the front of the train so she could pester the conductor, a skinny guy with big teeth who probably wasn't paid enough for this shit. Grandma went with Mary. I sat at the far back of the car and listened to the engine humming through the wall behind me. Sky sat beside me on his knees, stashing our bags under our seats. He turned his head and put his hand on the cold glass window, like he was communing with winter or something. The train started moving, the city sliding away.
"Fort Hall's on the Snake River Plain," I said. "It's good medicine out there. Cold, but good."
Sky righted himself on the cushioned seat, swinging his legs over the side. It was weird that he was so much shorter than me, because his legs were longer. He beamed at me, making me feel shy. He put his head on my shoulder.
The train tracks sprawled across a bed of brown grass and runny brooks. The gray sky burst open with breathy mountains, silver and cloudy with sheets of quartz. A lazy snowdrift tumbled down beside our window, star patterns and spoke patterns sticking damply to the glass before the heat inside the car warmed them, the water sluicing in weak trickles. Sky watched the melting snow with amazement, because he was one of those rare people who was amazed by everything, even the stuff that other people found commonplace or obtrusive. One time we went to this tiny grocery store off the turnpike and he stopped what we were doing just to stare at the soup cans on the shelves. Five-minute cheddar and chives. People really thought of everything.
I spent the two-hour train ride drawing with pencil stubs in my pilot whale sketchbook. Sky leaned over my arm and tried to peek, but I swatted his face away. Dork. Sometimes I drew Sky with a tail like a mermaid's. Sometimes I put him in an otterskin sash, the kind that only Two-Spirit were allowed to wear in the old days, fished out of the bottoms of saltwater marshes. Even our ancestors had known that Sky was a siren. He nudged me and pointed out the window when the wooden train spiraled around the bottom of a mountainside, a taut bridge hanging high above us. He jostled my arm with excitement when the train chugged to a slow stop. We stood up along with a man in a business suit and two girls in plaid school uniforms. I grabbed our bags, and we made our way down the aisle and out the hissing doors.
Grandma and Mary stood together on the platform outside the train tracks. I took Sky's
hand and walked him over to them, wind slapping his curls, soft snow tickling our faces. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. Grandma led the way through the streets of Tyhee, a city so sparse it looked less like a city and more like a heliport. We had a way's to walk before we reached the Fort Hall outer boundaries.
"She pretends she doesn't speak English," I told Sky, staring at Grandma's lumpy back. "It's not personal. She's old enough to remember when it was still legal to hunt us."
Sky put his head back and smiled at me to show me he didn't mind. I swear to God, he had only to smile and he made me feel happy. We walked for twenty minutes or so, at which point we came up on the reservation border. A big red sign stood planted in a bed of white rocks. "Welcome to Fort Hall," the sign read. "NO TRESPASSING." Because that made sense.
"Sounds like they've gotten angrier since the last time I stayed here," Mary remarked.
I helped Sky up the incline. "When was the last time you stayed here?" I asked dubiously.
"Half a year ago," Mary said. "Alright there, Grandma?" she said in Shoshone.
"You are a disgrace," Grandma said.
"Cool beans," Mary said.
The Fort Hall Reservation was a real prairie, not at all like arid Nettlebush. Hardy blond grass grew between uniform white houses with thin brown roofs. The Bannock Mountain range stood green-gray and beautiful on the horizon, round peaks colliding, occluding the sky. Nothing had the right to usurp the sky, but I chanced a peek at him and he looked like he didn't mind. He craned his neck with awe, admiring the wet pearl clouds, the leafless sugar maple trees with homemade taps tacked into the trunks and cheery, scarlet birdhouses on the sleeping branches.
"Chief Pocatello lived on this reserve," I told Sky. I put my arm around his waist and pulled him back against me, my chin on his shoulder. "We could visit his house later if you wanna."
Sky ran his fingers along my wrists. Only reason it didn't tickle me was because it was cold as hell outside, and my skin had kinda gone numb. I harrumphed into his hair. Grandma whipped around, eyes bulging. She cursed me out in Shoshone and I sulked, letting go of Sky. You're not supposed to love people in public. On occasion I forgot about that. It wasn't fair, because how was I supposed to keep it inside? When I loved someone, it threatened to pour out of me. It had to come out, because there was so much of it, too much of it, and if I wasn't careful I'd probably burst open. Sometimes I thought that loving people was my only real talent. In the way of talents, it wasn't a bad one to have.
Grandma Gives Light's house was gray and dilapidated, the lumber porch sunken in, the banister covered in rotted brown moss. It was one of those saltbox varieties you only ever see on older reservations, one story in the front, two stories in the back. A sagging chicken coop stood behind a fenced in grain garden. Only the hardiest of winter grain had withstood the first snowfall, bleached yellow wheat and chilly camas without leaves. We went inside the house's entrance hall and I tripped over potted herbs. I coughed at the purple incense sticks burning on the shelves, the long braids of sweetgrass hanging from the ceiling. I shrank at the ceramic mask leering threateningly at me from the wall, ogreish and green-black, angry slits for eyes.
"Wonder if Caleb's here," Mary said.
He was. We went into the sun parlor at the back of the house, a round sheet of glass cut into the ceiling. I put my head back and watched the snow build up on the ceiling, veiling the white sun. A bright oil lamp in a jawbone dish glowed in one corner of the room, a real buffalo skin hanging decoratively on the wall. Our cousin Caleb rocked angrily in his rocking chair, chomping on a wad of chewing tobacco.
"Get out of my house," Grandma said.
"WHAT?" Caleb yelled. I flinched, because I'd forgotten he was practically deaf; although whether he yelled because he was deaf or whether he'd gone deaf from all the yelling was the question of the century.
Hi, Sky said with a bright grin. He took his bag off my shoulder, waving vigorously.
Caleb Kalispell was something like my first cousin once removed. He was turning forty-one this year, which made him older even than Uncle Gabriel, so I felt weird about addressing him like a peer. I'd tried to call him Uncle once, but he'd shouted me down, broken an ashtray, then wondered where his life had gone. He stared at me through one eye--the gray one, the other one electric blue. His cheek was patched over in wet and bloody bandages. Every time I saw him he looked beat up. If I hadn't known how lazy he was I would have sworn he frequented a gym.
"How's it hanging?" Mary asked wickedly, slugging Caleb's shoulder.
Caleb jumped in his seat. "JESUS!" was his response.
It hit me that sharing a blood relation with these people was actually, hideously depressing. My whole body sagged toward the hardwood floor. Sky put his hand on my arm and peered at me, concerned. Freaking hippie. I told Grandma I wanted to take Sky upstairs and pick out a room for him. She turned her big eyes my way, amber and blank.
"Should I plant blue corn this year?" she asked.
I didn't answer her, but my face went hot, my head tingly. I grabbed Sky's hand and tugged him out of the sun parlor. I felt his questioning eyes on me even while we climbed the crazy, spiraling staircase, the wooden steps under our feet as thin as toothpicks.
What happened? Sky asked when we reached the second floor. The corridor was narrow, five doors squashed into the walls without symmetry.
"Grandma and Grandpa slept in separate rooms," I started to explain. I grunted, heaving the bedroom doors open in exploration. "You can probably take Grandpa's room, not like he's using it much these days--"
Grandpa's bedroom was austere, the bed plain and white and the walls plain and gray. In a normal house a photograph or two might have decorated the hardy chest of drawers. Grandma Gives Light was oldschool Shoshone, the kind who believed that photographing yourself weakened your soul. A solitary window hung behind the box-spring, but it was a good one, the glass twin-layered and sturdy. Sky leaned on the window and watched the heavy scraps of snow tumbling down from his namesake, pooling on the first floor skylight. He watched the snowflakes as they powdered Snake River on the horizon, my favorite, uncut blue jewel. I liked that this was Sky's first time seeing snow. I liked that I got to see his reaction. He reminded me of a little kid in a toy emporium: He didn't know which direction to look in, or what to think of it, but he readily drank it in, his smile burgeoning. He smiled at me.
My heart swelled and my head spun. I reached for Sky's hips with hungry hands, my fingers cold. He grabbed the hem of my shirt, playful, and twisted it around his knuckles, like he didn't know what I wanted. Liar. I kissed his forehead, his warm skin soothing my cool lips. He smelled like snow and cedar and pine resin and Sky. To be Sky was to be everything, pine resin and more.
What was your grandma talking about downstairs? Sky asked, pinching my elbow.
I think I must have blushed. "I'll tell you some other time," I mumbled.
After Sky got set up in Grandpa's room I went out into the hall to pick one of my own. Caleb's room was off limits, which left Mom's old room and Uncle Gabriel's. I stared at the door at the end of the hall. I touched the rusted doorknob and knew it for my uncle's right away. I could still feel his emotions on the wood and brass, well-meaning but guarded, the quintessential Gabriel Gives Light. I pushed the door open and his room looked much the way it must have when he was a preteen, long before he and Mom had moved to Nettlebush. Giant, developing maps of America hung on one wall, because Uncle Gabriel really liked cartography for some crazy reason. The window looked out over a tin tool shed and a horse stable. Grandma only had the one horse now that Grandpa had passed away. I sat down on the bed and put my duffel bag beside the walnut wood table. "Gabriel Loves Samantha" was carved into the wooden bedpost. I smiled without meaning to, touching the grooves in the aged letters.
Above the bedroom door an unembellished, hanging mirror caught my eye. I flinched to look at it. I didn't like seeing my reflection, although I can't really explain that. Maybe I was a
vampire like Carmilla after all. My hair was frazzled with winter wind, the collar of my jacket crooked. My jaw looked meaner and more square than I remembered. The light hanging around my shoulders glowed weak and runny, a vacillating blue-gray. I thought blue-gray a ruminant color. It could be happy, or it could be sad. Mostly it needed to be both.
What did a mirror look like when it wasn't reflecting anything? What color was the glass if you weren't standing in front of it?
"Rafael!" Grandma Gives Light yelled. "Cut camas for dinner!"
I trudged down the staircase and out the front door. I zipped my jacket up, snow piling around my feet. A pack of rez dogs came bounding over to me, mutts with German Shepherds' torsos and pitbulls' stubby legs. I stopped walking and watched them warily, afraid that they would touch me, and then I wouldn't be human, and even a second without humanity was unbearable now that I finally had mine. Dogs know when you're not in the mood, though, and the rez dogs skirted around me and went loping to the next house over, some forty yards away. I climbed the fence to Grandma's grain garden and ripped camas bulbs apart with my hands. I dropped them in a wiry basket at my ankles. I took a stalk of wheat and snapped it in fours, and I carried it to the hen house and put it in the clay kiln for drying. Cherry Eggers and Plymouth Rocks clucked around the chilly dirt floor, bobbing their red and speckled heads.
When I ducked outside the hen house again I saw that the rez dogs had made their comeback. I frowned, because if they dug underneath the grain fence they'd probably eat the deathcamas by accident. Deathcamas was good for keeping pests away, but nobody wants a dead dog on their lawn. I drew nearer and watched the mutts wagging their tails, leaping in and out of the snow mounds. My glasses fogged up; I wiped them with my fist. Sky was kneeling in the snow, and rubbing his hands all over the littlest mutt's muzzle. He kissed the rez dog right on it nose.
"You dumbass," I said, grinning.
Sky grinned back at me, mischievous and innocent. Don't ask me how that worked. He picked up the camas bucket and straggled over to my side. We went inside the house, his nose and cheeks flushed pink. I kissed them to make it better. He held my shoulders in place when I made to move away and I humbly obliged, kissing the rest of him, his brows and his ears and the curls at his hairline. He showed me he was satisfied by grabbing my jacket sleeves, dragging me down, and sealing my lips with his. He'd kissed a freaking dog with that mouth and I didn't remotely care. No doubt that made me a loser of the very big variety.