Part of me howled – your own mother! how could you! have you no decency left at all? – but my need for certainty overruled it. “Come on, Mom, tell me the truth,” I said, and pushed. Just a tiny bit.
She stiffened as if affronted. Then she sagged, all the fight drained out of her. Sighing, she rose from the table and went into her bedroom.
“Mom?” I called, going after her. I was worried that it hadn’t worked – that I’d damaged her somehow, that forcing her to break down her defenses had broken her. Or that the push had backfired, ruining our relationship irreparably. I was worried that she would shut the door in my face and refuse to come out ‘til I was gone, and then never call me again.
But she had simply gone to rummage in her closet. After a few minutes, during which I stood warily in the doorway, she pulled out a shoebox that was taped shut. Pushing past me, she went back to the kitchen, where she pulled a knife out of a drawer and began to slit the tape on the box.
“I wondered how long it was going to take for you to figure it out,” she said as she worked.
“You deliberately misled me,” I said.
She nodded, still struggling with the box.
“Why?” I wasn’t pushing now. There didn’t seem to be any need. Like a ball rolling downhill, my original nudge seemed to be gathering speed on its own.
Finally removing the lid, she pulled out some photos and tossed them across the table at me. Then she sat down and put her head in her hands.
I picked up the photos and studied them. The first was a studio portrait – possibly a high school graduation photo – of a young man with straight black hair, skin the color of Joseph’s, and a nose shaped exactly like mine, wide across the bridge and bulbous at the end. The second was a photo of the same young man in a powder-blue tux, standing next to a youthful version of my mother, who was clad in an evening gown. The third picture was of the same young man in a military uniform, standing in front of an unfamiliar house.
“Your father,” Mom said, not moving her head. “Andrew Michael Sauvage.”
“You dated in high school,” I said, “and then he joined the service.”
“He was drafted,” she said. “One of the last to go, and one of the last to come home.” She looked up at me. “Physically, he survived the war, but he was different when he came back. Angry. Bitter. Always on alert for danger that wasn’t there. He would react to things in real life as if he was back in Nam.”
“It’s called PTSD,” I said. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
“Yeah, well, in the ‘70s, they just called it ‘crazy,’” she said. She’d folded her hands on the tabletop and was kneading them back and forth. “He tried to get help from the VA, but in those days it wasn’t recognized as something that could be treated. The last straw for his family was when he stabbed his brother because he thought he was Viet Cong.”
I shuddered. “What happened? Did he go to jail?”
She shook her head. “The family refused to press charges. They sent him to his relatives in South Dakota instead, to try to magic it out of him.”
“South Dakota?” I said in surprise. One of my law school classmates had been from South Dakota, and she had once told us about the desperate poverty on the Sioux reservation near her home in Pierre. Wide-eyed, I asked, “His family lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation, didn’t they?”
As my mother nodded and slumped back in her chair, the last link dropped into place for me. White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman hadn’t lied to me. Not only was I an Indian – I was her kind of Indian.
Mom looked at me dead-on. “I swear to you, Naomi, I never knew until then that he was an Indian. He told me he was French Canadian. Turned out some trapper had married into the family back in the 1800s and given the family his last name.”
“Wait,” I said. “Start at the beginning, Mom. You met him in high school.”
She rolled her eyes and heaved a dramatic sigh, but she responded. I had to believe this was as cathartic for her as it was for me. “Andrew transferred into my school during sophomore year. He was exotic-looking; all the girls were after him. But he seemed to like me best.” She smiled a little, remembering. “We started going steady in the summer before our junior year. He gave me a promise ring for my eighteenth birthday. And then he got drafted and was gone.
“That’s when I got my associates in nursing and started working as an LPN. I dated a few other guys, but I never forgot Andrew. And then he came back, and we started dating again – but he was different, like I said.
“I had an apartment with two other women, and our boyfriends would sometimes spend the night.” She shrugged. “It was the ‘70s. Everybody did it.”
“I’m not judging you,” I said quietly.
“Good,” she said with a piercing look. Then she looked away again. “Anyway,” she resumed, “he started drinking a lot – to make the voices stop, he said. Then there was that incident with his brother, and he left.”
“Did you find out you were pregnant before he left, or after?” I asked.
“Just before,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t tell him about you, Naomi. I was afraid of him by then – afraid he would hurt me. Or you.” She reached into her housecoat pocket and extracted a tissue, then dabbed at her eyes.
“So you said you didn’t know who my father was.”
“It was either that, or admit to my parents that I’d been sleeping with an Indian,” she said. “It was bad enough that I was pregnant out-of-wedlock.”
I nodded with a half-laugh. “Grandpa would have flipped. He didn’t have much use for any ethnic group but whites.” Then I said, very gently, “Did you ever see him again?”
“No.” She’d given up on the sodden tissue; tears now trickled down her cheeks. “He never came back, and I never tried to contact him. He might well be dead by now.”
“You still love him, don’t you?” I said, as gently as I could. She nodded, and then buried her face in her hands again.
“I was so ashamed,” she sobbed.
I got up and put my arms around her.
After a few minutes, her shoulders stopped heaving. She said, her voice trembling, “You don’t hate me, then?”
“Oh, for the love of God,” I said. “No, I don’t hate you. You’re my mother. What’s done is done. Anyway, being Indian is cool nowadays – although I wish you’d picked a guy from a tribe with money.” We both laughed, although Mom’s laugh was shaky.
“I wish you’d told me sooner, though,” I went on. “I’ve gone through my whole life thinking the only relatives I had were yours. Now it turns out there’s a whole bunch of people I’m related to that I’ve never met.” A thought struck me. “Do my father’s parents still live here?”
She shook her head. “They moved back to South Dakota not long after Andrew went.”
My mind started clicking. “It shouldn’t be too hard to locate them. I’m sure the tribe keeps track of its members.”
“Oh, no, Naomi!” Mom cried. “You’re not going to try to find them, are you?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” I challenged her. “Look, I know you were embarrassed and ashamed at the time, but that was thirty-seven years ago. Thirty-seven years, Mom. Grandma and Grandpa are both gone, and their bigoted opinions died with them. Not only is it water under the bridge, but the bridge washed away long since.”
“Still and all,” she said. “Don’t contact them. Please, honey.”
I raised my chin. “I’m not going to make that promise. I can think of any number of legitimate reasons that I would need to break it. For instance, I might have to construct a family medical history.”
“I never thought of that,” she said quietly.
We were silent for a few moments, during which she dabbed at her eyes with her soaked tissue. Then I said, “So when the white buffalo calf bowed to me, it brought it all back, didn’t it?”
Her
head snapped up. “I thought you had forgotten all about that,” she said, staring hard at me.
“I had,” I said. “Something happened recently that reminded me of it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did those Indians contact you?”
Oho! Now we’re getting somewhere! I decided to play dumb and see where it took us. “What Indians? All I remember is the little buffalo lying down in the dirt, and the farmer making a big deal about it, and seeing my name in the paper, and you getting mad.”
“You bet I was mad,” she said. “That farmer was a shyster. He claimed to be an Indian himself, you know, but he was as white as new-fallen snow. And he had big plans for you after that field trip. He told me he wanted to put his farm on the map, and you were going to help him.” She looked disgusted. “He wanted to put you in a buckskin dress and have you do ads for his farm. I put the kibosh on that but quick.”
“He’s the one who told the paper, isn’t he?”
“He told everybody. I still can’t believe I turned down Jane Pauley.” She smiled, a little regretfully. “But I wasn’t about to turn you into a sideshow. And besides,” she said, “your Indian connection would have come out sooner or later.”
“Heritage,” I corrected. “My Indian heritage.”
She sighed. “I guess that’s right. Andrew would have been my Indian connection.” One side of her mouth quirked up.
I grinned at her, then tried to get her back on track. “So which Indians were you talking about a minute ago?”
“Oh, this old man and his teenage boy showed up at our door,” she said. “It was about a week after the field trip. Most all of the to-do had died down by then, and I thought I’d put the whole thing safely to rest. But then, here come these two Indians, knocking at our door.”
“What did they say?”
“The old man did all the talking. Said some Indian god had told him that you and his grandson were going to work together someday to save the world.” She laughed dismissively. “It sounded like a load of hooey to me, and I told him so. He insisted that he had to meet you, to see you with his own eyes. That’s when I got scared. I thought maybe they would try to kidnap you and take you back to their reservation and sacrifice you to their god or something.”
“Nobody does human sacrifice any more, Mom,” I said. “Nowadays, it only happens in movies about Satanists.”
“Well, I didn’t know for sure,” she defended herself. “Anyway, the point is, I was scared. So I told him that we were a good Christian family and he could just take his mumbo-jumbo and put it where the sun didn’t shine.”
“You didn’t!” I laughed in surprise.
“Well, not in exactly those words,” she admitted. “But I did threaten to call the cops if he didn’t leave.”
“Well, it must have worked, because they’re gone now,” I grinned.
“Put the fear of God in ‘em, I did,” she grinned back.
Mom’s story certainly jibed with Joseph’s version. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to call him and tell him everything. I yawned and stretched, making a big show of it. “Holy cow, it’s nearly two a.m. I’m going to turn in,” I said. I hugged my mother again, and kissed her cheek. “Merry Christmas, Mom. This is the best present I’ve received in a long time.”
She laughed ruefully. “Me too. I never realized how much effort I’d been putting into keeping up appearances all these years. I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. As if I can breathe again.”
“I’m glad,” I said as we walked down the hall, arm in arm. “Goodnight, Mom.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” she said. “Sweet dreams.”
“You too.”
A few minutes later, I pulled the covers over my head and called Joseph. His phone rang several times, then rolled over to voicemail. Disappointed, I left a message for him, saying that the goddess had been right about my heritage and that I’d come to some other important decisions as well. I told him I’d be back in Denver the following night, and hoped to catch up with him soon. I ended the message with, “Merry Christmas to you and your grandfather.” Then I pulled the covers off my head – it had gotten kind of stifling, trapped under the blankets – and drifted off to sleep.
The only thing I remembered of my dreams the next morning was the hooting of an owl.