Chapter 6
My head was surprisingly clear when I awoke. I showered, dressed, threw a change of clothes into a bag, and headed for the airport and the grueling all-day cattle drive that modern air travel has become.
I had debated whether to warn Mom of my impending arrival. I wanted to avoid a lengthy telephonic discussion about why I wasn’t at work, which is where we had left things the last time we talked. I never had gotten around to informing her of my engagement – which was now, of course, moot.
In the end, I texted her. “Surprise!” I wrote while waiting for my flight. “At DIA waiting for flight to IND – see you soon!”
“Great!” came the response, a few minutes later. Her un-typed “What happened?” hovered over me like a zeppelin, but it did not ultimately crash in flames – my mother typed nothing further, not even “What’s your ETA?” I sighed in relief, bought a breakfast burrito and a latte, and settled in to wait.
I expected to sleep on the flight, but I was wide awake – and kicking myself. Just what, exactly, did I hope to accomplish with this trip? Pumping Mom for information had sounded like such a good idea last night, when I was three sheets to the wind. Now I wasn’t sure. I was beginning to remember how hard it was to get anything out of Mom when she didn’t want to give it up. I began to wonder whether I should have just stayed home and searched the web for my answers.
Except that I didn’t have anywhere to start, other than that my Indian heritage, as Shannon called it, had to be on my father’s side. If I had any Indians on my mother’s side, my genealogist great-aunt would have mentioned it. No, my father had to be the missing link, if you will. And I knew absolutely nothing about him. My last name was Mom’s; my birth certificate said, “father unknown.” I had never seen a picture of him, never heard his name or anything about him – just that he died in Vietnam before I was born.
I frowned. I seemed to recall that the Vietnam War ended for the United States in 1973, but I was born in 1975. Assuming he’d been killed in combat, there was no way I could have been conceived before he died. Why had that never occurred to me before? Why had I just accepted everything Mom said as gospel?
Because she clams up when she’s pushed. So there’s never any point in pushing her.
Well, I had a newfound talent for pushing, and if Mom stymied me, I’d just have to use it on her. Although the mere thought of it made me want to squirm. I sighed and hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
My flight landed on time at Indianapolis International Airport. (I always wince at the name; my mother still calls it Weir-Cook Airport and criticizes the Indianapolis city fathers for putting on airs when they changed it in 1976. Mom can hold a grudge.) I picked up my rental car – a nondescript silver four-door sedan – and was on I-465 heading north within the hour.
Daylight was fading as I merged onto I-65 toward Lafayette. I’d forgotten how slowly the day fades when no mountains hide the sunset. Electric lights began to glimmer on across the flat landscape. There was only a dusting of snow on the ground – just enough to blur details. It felt like there was nothing to see for miles and miles, as if I were speeding into uncharted territory in this strange car, my only anchors to reality the gas stations and chain restaurants huddled around the highway’s exits.
Speeding into uncharted territory – not a bad metaphor for my life over the past few days.
I reached home just after full dark. Mom lived in West Lafayette, in a neighborhood called Wabash Shores despite the fact that the Wabash River is a few miles away. The house was on Indian Trail Drive – which was almost funny, given what I’d been going through lately – and backed to a ravine that had afforded me many solitary “wilderness” rambles as a teenager.
Many of Mom’s neighbors had decorated up a storm for Christmas: icicle lights hung from eaves, lit netting encased bushes, animatronic armature mimicked feeding deer. I even spotted a few windsock-type snowmen and Santas. But Mom hadn’t even put up a tree. The porch light was on, though, and it looked like a safe harbor in the storm my life had become. I parked the rental car in the driveway and went in.
Mom was watching some Christmas special on the TV in the family room. She rose from her favorite chair and gave me a big hug of welcome. “How was your flight? How was the traffic getting here – did you have any trouble? Where’s your suitcase?”
“Mom, stop,” I said, laughing. “The flight was fine, traffic was fine, and I didn’t bring a suitcase – I’m flying back home tomorrow.” At her crestfallen expression, I said, more gently, “We only get today and tomorrow off. I would have come earlier, but I was kind of tied up this weekend.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter,” she said, more cheerfully. “You’re here now. And supper’s ready.”
She had not changed in the months since I had last seen her. Perhaps she had more gray hairs, but everything else was the same – she was still an inch or two shorter than me, with brown eyes like mine, a little extra padding around the hips, and the same housecoat I remembered from childhood. She still smelled like lavender. And the house smelled the same, too – of pine cleaner and lemon-scented furniture polish, and of chicken-rice soup made from scratch.
We made small talk over soup and sandwiches – this cousin was pregnant, that uncle was ill. She had more inside information about my high school classmates than I could ever have learned in months of obsessive Facebook stalking. “Will’s back home again,” she said as we finished eating. Will and I had dated all through high school. “I guess Chicago didn’t work out for him.”
“Oh. Too bad, I guess.”
“Were you going to see him while you’re here?”
“I’ll hardly have time, Mom. I’m only on the ground for about twenty-four hours.” I moved my dishes to the sink and ran water over them to soak.
She handed me the dishtowel. “You dry.” Then she turned over the bowl I’d just begun soaking and filled the sink with dishwater. “How’s Brock?” she asked carefully, her back to me.
My eyes filled with tears, despite calling myself an idiot for it. “Well,” I said, “we were engaged for a couple of days there, and now we’re not.” She turned, face filled with sympathy, and hugged me for several minutes while I bawled again.
“Well, it’s for the best,” she said when I had calmed down a bit. “He always did strike me as being too full of himself.”
I nodded. I mean, he’d struck me that way, too; I’d just considered it part of his endearing charm, back when we were friends.
“So now what?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I wish I knew,” I said truthfully.
“You’ll figure it out,” Mom said, going back to the dishes. “You always have.”
I gave a bark of laughter and dried my eyes on my sleeve. At that moment, I wasn’t feeling particularly adept at figuring out anything.
Mom proposed going to midnight service, and I agreed, despite my minor case of jet lag. I figured it would save time in the morning to get church out of the way now.
I also felt that I needed a little time alone with my God. White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman had said some pretty horrible things about Jehovah. I wanted to take out her comments and examine them, to see whether I agreed with any of them. I was going to have to decide at some point whether the religion I’d been following my whole life was a scam.
As we got out of the car, I heard an owl hoot close by – not unheard of in this neighborhood, but unusual enough that I grimaced and thought, Another weird occurrence in this weird week. Then I looked at the church doors ahead of us, and wondered whether God would strike me down for having the temerity to enter his house of worship, now that I had been claimed by a Native American goddess. But there was no rumble of thunder as I crossed the threshold, no lightning strike upon my head. So either Jehovah isn’t watching or he doesn’t care, I couldn’t help but think, then kicked myself for being disloyal.
Mom and I took our usual seats near th
e middle of the church. I smiled at the familiar, comforting sight of the large cross hanging above the altar, decked for the season in evergreen boughs.
Midnight service at Christmas has always been my favorite. For one thing, it’s devoid of the Nativity pageant featuring the congregation’s adorable but confused children; having been one of those children in years past, I’m grateful to be spared the mortification-by-proxy.
But more than that, there’s a sense of vigil about the midnight service. The sanctuary lighting is dimmed as we arrive, waiting in the semidarkness for the Christ child to be born. Then at midnight, the lights come up and the choir breaks into “Joy to the World.” And the pastor always speaks to us of the joy and promise of the season – not just in material goods but in spiritual salvation as well, as we celebrate the birth of the child who would grow up to redeem us and restore us to a state of grace with God.
But this year, I was distracted by a memory of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman’s words: He sacrificed his own Son, and then twisted the story to make it appear as if it were an honor. What if humanity wasn’t flawed from the start, after all? What if God had lied to keep us from going back to worshipping the other gods that He said didn’t exist?
Certainly, I had rejected some tenets of Christianity long since. One of them was the idea that Eve had doomed humanity because she did what the serpent suggested. It made women out to be weak creatures who were easily led. I knew enough strong women – starting with my mother – that I had long considered that part of the story a remnant of an ancient misogynistic culture. But I had never followed the thought all the way through; now, I felt I had to. If Eve wasn’t a weakling and the serpent spoke the truth, then God had punished humanity simply for pushing the boundaries. Why would God do that? Why not a slap on the wrist instead?
If I took the agnostic way out – if I concluded that the Garden of Eden story was simply a mythological explanation for why we don’t live forever – then it was fairly easy to reconcile myself to the story and still believe in the existence of a just and loving God. But what if I stepped away from the Christian belief system entirely and looked at it from White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman’s point of view? I was dismayed to realize that Her claim made better sense than all the Christian explanations of the story I’d ever read.
“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace,” the pastor intoned – and now that bothered me, too. If the Sioux goddess was to be believed, Jehovah had no interest in peace. Or, really, in us. He was concerned about humanity only insofar as it gained Him worshippers. To that end, conflict was more desirable than peace.
The idea that God was only in it for Himself made me squirm in my pew. I found it very hard to believe that Jehovah didn’t care about humanity at all. But I felt I owed it to the goddess to plow ahead, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. I decided to approach it strictly as an exercise in logic, divorced as much as possible from any value judgments or knee-jerk arguments instilled in me by my upbringing.
I mumbled the words to “Angels We Have Heard on High” while following my train of thought to what seemed to me to be its logical conclusion.
If God was only in it for Himself, where did that leave us? I guessed it meant we had to live up to our own ideals, to the best of our ability. If there really were no Heaven and no Hell, then all we had was the here-and-now, today – and the only thing that mattered was to be true to ourselves.
A theologian, I reflected, would attempt to argue further about the source of our ideals. “If they weren’t instilled by God, then how did we get them? We were made in God’s image, after all,” he would say. I dismissed that line of reasoning as immaterial to the matter at hand. For my present purposes, it didn’t really matter whether we developed our own personal morality through nature or nurture, by hardwired installation at conception or by socialization. It mattered only that we had one at all, and that we felt it deeply enough to hold ourselves to it, whether God ordered us to or not.
And anyway, I thought with a twisted smile, if we were made in God’s image and if God were only in it for Himself, it explained a lot of selfish and greedy human behavior.
I was reminded, then, of my employer and the clients we took on. I thought about how we were led, willingly or unwillingly, down a path on which compromising one’s ideals was the first corruption. Even the purest of heart would end up tainted, if she worked long enough for a law firm that accepted such dirty clients as Leo Durant.
Just like that, I knew what I had to do.
As if on cue, the organist began playing the recessional. I cast one more look at the cross above the pulpit – less comforting to me now, if no less familiar – as I donned my coat and followed Mom out into the darkness of the new day.
Well, that was fruitful. I’m more conflicted than I was to start with. I was going to need more time, and probably more study, to resolve the confusion the goddess had sparked in me. I knew I was unlikely to get either one any time soon. But at least I’d come to a decision about something.
Before I took action, though, I needed to know whether White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman had told me any truths at all.
Back home, over hot chocolate and store-bought Christmas cookies, I broached the subject. “Mom, what really happened to my father?” I asked.
“He died in combat in Vietnam,” she said, as usual. But I heard a new wariness in her tone.
“Please,” I said. “The last U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam in ‘73. You would have had to have been pregnant with me for a couple of years.”
She opened her mouth, brows knitted, as if ready to argue with me.
I knew it. I had known it all along. I was going to have to push her.