So I stand at three in the morning
In the tribal longhouse
And I hum and hum
And hum along
Because I’m only a man
Who doesn’t know
Any of the words or music
To this death song.
22.
Needle & Thread
My brother wanted to bury
My mother with the necklace
Gifted to her by her late husband—
Our late father—but my sister says,
“You want us to bury her
With all of her jewelry?
Like she’s Cleopatra?”
We gave away that necklace
To a granddaughter instead.
We gave away other necklaces
And rings and beaded medallions
To cousins and friends.
We gave it away
Because an Indian’s wealth
Is determined by what they lose
And not by what they save.
We gave away her clothes
To secondhand stores
And we give her deathbed
Back to the hospice.
But we keep her TV
Because that thing is HD
And epic and awesome.
But we don’t know what to do
With the mounds of loose fabric
That my mother kept for quilting.
“There must be five hundred pounds
Of blue jeans,” says my sister.
She says, “The only people who need
That much denim are Mr. Levi
And Mr. Wrangler themselves.”
I tell my sister we should stitch
Random pieces together
And make five hundred scarecrows.
Then we’ll round up wild bison
And tie those scarecrows
Onto the bisons’ backs
Like angry denim and calico warriors.
And then we’ll herd those scarecrowed bison
Into big trucks, drive them into Spokane
Or even into Washington, D.C., and release them
Into the streets and turn it all
Into a huge political installation art thing
That we’ll call Honor Our Treaty Rights,
You Criminal White Motherfuckers from Hell.
My sister laughs
And ponders that for a bit.
Then she says, “You’ve got a lot of crafty ambition
For an Indian boy who can’t sew for shit.”
23.
How to Be an Atheist at a Spokane Indian Christian Funeral
We stay awake
For 29 hours—
We sisters
And brothers—
To guide our
Dead mother
As she transitions
Into something else.
If we are not here,
Near her coffin,
She might rise
And wander from
Sweat lodge to trading post
To post office to church
In search of us,
And maybe miss the last bus
To whatever happens
Next. I don’t believe
In the afterlife
But I stay awake
To honor my siblings’ grief
And our mother’s theology.
I don’t believe in God
But I pray anyway.
And when it is time
To throw dirt
Onto my mother’s coffin,
I say good-bye
Only in my head.
I don’t believe
I will see her again,
But I know I will see
My siblings because
We are still alive.
So I try to remain
Respectfully silent
Even when the Evangelical
Indian preacher delivers
A graveside tangent
About the Rapture
And how true believers
Will be lifted into Heaven
At 186,000 miles per minute,
At 186,000 miles per minute,
At 186,000 miles per minute.
“Oh, you dumb-ass
Fundamentalist,” I think.
“The speed of light
Is 186,000 miles per second.”
And then I laugh and laugh
Because I imagine
My mother in charge
Of her own damn story
As she slowly, slowly ascends
Into her Personal Glory.
“Dear God,” she texts.
“I’ll get there when I get there.
I know the path.
Just leave a key
Under the welcome mat.”
24.
Brother Man
I have seen my big brother cry
Only twice in my life. The first,
In 1977, when our mother gathered us
In my brother’s basement bedroom
To tell us that Arthur Tulee—
My brother’s best friend who’d,
The previous year, moved
From our reservation to another—
Had drowned in the Yakima River.
Upon hearing the news,
My brother fell to the floor
Like a skinny stick and wept so hard
That I feared he would aspirate
His pain and dry-drown.
The second time I saw my brother cry
Was at our mother’s funeral.
As we adult siblings stood together
At my mother’s open coffin,
With our arms wrapped around
One another in a grief-scrum—
Collectively, we five siblings must weigh
Sixteen hundred pounds. Shit,
We’re a defensive line
Of hunger and insatiable sorrow.
At our mother’s coffin,
My brother shook so violently
That I thought he might fall again,
A much more dangerous thing now
That he was over fifty years old
With gout, arthritis, and fragile hips.
But he leaned against the coffin,
Supported by our mother one last time,
And kept his balance. But oh,
He cried into his fists
And I cried, too, but more
For my brother’s loss
Than for the loss of our mother.
Truth be told, I had only seen her
Three or four times a year
Over the last decade of her life,
And talked to her on the phone
Maybe twice a month. I had become
The farthest planet orbiting her
But my brother had lived his entire life
Never more than ten minutes away
From our mother’s star.
He loved her far more than I did
So I knew his grief was larger
And more pure than mine.
I grieved that I hadn’t been loved enough
By our cold mother
While my brother mourned her.
I am the brother with money and fame
But he is the brother who possesses
The most kindness and pain.
I wonder if I will ever see him weep again.
I wonder if I want to see
My brother weep again,
I have never known how to comfort him.
I don’t even know how to take his joy,
As when, moments after we’d learned
About Arthur Tulee’s death,
We got a phone call from Arthur’s mother
To tell us that it was a different
Arthur Tulee who had drowned.
My brother’s best friend was alive!
Oh, my brother rose to his feet
And slammed himself against
His bedroom door. Laughing,
/> He shadowboxed the air.
Laughing, he punched
As if he wanted to push
The house from its foundation.
Laughing, he thanked God
And he thanked our mother.
And then he stopped
Laughing, threw one last punch
Against the air, wiped the tears
From his face, and went searching
And searching and searching for lunch.
25.
Silence
FROM WINTER 1987 until summer 1990, my mother and I didn’t say a word to each other, not through letters, not on the phone, not through intermediaries, and not in person. She and I didn’t speak to each other when we were in the same house. Not when we were in the same room. Not when we were in the same car.
I tried to break the silence in 1989 when my parents drove to Pullman, Washington, to give me cash to pay the rent for my college apartment.
My father chatted in the living room with Kari, my white girlfriend, while I walked outside to make peace with my mother, sitting in the car.
“You have to talk to her,” Kari had said a few moments before my parents arrived. “She’s your mother.”
That particular argument didn’t quite convince me. After all, Gertrude was Hamlet’s mother, and look how that ended up.
“My mom is crazy,” I said.
“She reminds me of Zsa Zsa Gabor,” Kari said.
I remembered that Zsa Zsa was a Hungarian-born actress and socialite. I’d never seen any of her movies or TV shows, and I’d certainly never attended any of her society parties, but I still knew so many details about her life. As they say, she was famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa was charismatic in the banal and voracious way that reality stars like Kim Kardashian are charismatic now.
“Why does my mom remind you of Zsa Zsa?” I asked Kari.
“Because your mom gets all the attention like a beautiful actress,” she said. “And she has a fancy accent.”
“My mom is from the rez,” I said, and laughed. “Rez accents are the opposite of fancy.”
“You just say that because you don’t like the sound of your voice,” Kari said. “But rez accents make everything sound like music.”
I waved away the compliment.
“Should I marry a man who doesn’t talk to his mother?” Kari asked. “You think I want a mother-in-law who treats her son this way, too? Maybe you two should marry each other. Or marry yourselves. You’re like the same person anyway.”
Kari often said insightful and funny shit like that. She was an eccentric small-town empath. So, because I respected Kari and her opinions, and because I missed talking to my mother, I tried to end the silence, to make amends, to restart our relationship, to do something.
I was desperate.
As I walked toward my mother, sitting alone in the car, I knew she was aware of me. She knew I was walking toward her. She knew I was going to use my words. It was a strangely religious experience, like I was a pilgrim searching for wisdom from a monk who had not spoken in one hundred years.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
She didn’t respond. She was making a scarf or baby blanket or some rectangular object of beauty. All I could hear was the click-click of her knitting needles.
“Mom,” I said. “Talk to me.”
Knitting needles.
“Mom, please.”
Click-click.
Furious, I spun and rushed back to my apartment. I passed my father along the way.
“’Bye, Dad,” I said. We were poor Indians. It was always a struggle to find enough money to enjoy a decent life, let alone pay for college. I was grateful to him for paying that month’s rent, but I was too mad to properly show my appreciation.
I was an asshole.
Back in the apartment, I yelled at Kari.
“You told me to talk to her! You made me do it! And she just ignored me! It was embarrassing!”
Like I said, I was an asshole.
I screamed, ran at the living room wall, and slammed into it like I was trying to tackle the apartment building. Then I punched the wall once, twice, three times.
I left a shoulder-shaped dent in the cheap plasterboard. And three fist-shaped holes. I was lucky I only punched through the hollow plasterboard and didn’t break my hand on a wooden or metal wall stud.
Now, after years of good mental health care, I can look back and see that my rage—my assholery—was mostly the product of undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar emotional swings. But, in my youth, I only knew that I needed to physically, if irrationally, express my rage. I didn’t want to hit my mother or my father or Kari, or anybody else, so I punched objects. I punched metaphors. So, at that moment, I would have certainly kicked our metaphorical God in his even more metaphorical nuts if I’d been given the chance.
Kari, bored and scared by my self-righteous and self-pitying temper, gathered up her things and walked back to her apartment. We’d flirted in high school and had kissed a few times. And then we dated in college until a year after she graduated. She didn’t want to marry a writer, she said, especially one who was probably going to be famous. Yes, she believed in my artistry if not my marriageability. I used her manual typewriter to write my first two or three hundred poems and stories. You want to know the identity of my first muse and benefactor? She was a math- and science-minded white woman with an auto-mechanic father. Kari fed me when I had no money.
I loved her. She loved me.
But I don’t know how much joy she experienced while loving me. I don’t know much joy I was capable of feeling or providing.
So, after my mother ignored me again, and after I made holes in the walls, and after Kari walked home, I rounded up some poet friends—none of whom write anymore—and we pooled our meager resources and got drunk in the cocktail bar of a Chinese restaurant. We drunkenly vowed to start our own literary magazine, like all drunken student poets do, but we’d publish only “the good shit,” which meant that we’d print only our poems and any poems that sounded exactly like ours.
Then we argued about naming the magazine.
“Let’s call it The Silent Mother,” I said.
I remember that one of my friends—it was probably Old John—said The Silent Mother sounded more like a Bette Davis movie than a poetry magazine.
Zsa Zsa Gabor. Bette Davis. Lillian Alexie. It might sound ludicrous to think of my mother as being a part of that grandiose trinity. But she really did loom that large for me. And she loomed that large in our tribe. She was wildly intelligent, arrogant, opinionated, intimidating, and generous with her time and spirit. She was a contradictory person. She was, all by herself, an entire tribe of contradictions.
What do you call a gathering of women like Lillian? A contradiction of mothers.
At her funeral, half of the mourners talked about being kindly rescued by my mother. For many years, she was the drug and addiction treatment counselor for our tribe. She helped at least a dozen addicts get clean and stay clean. She helped many other addicts get clean once, twice, three, four times and more in that endless cycle of sobriety and relapse.
“She never gave up on me,” said one mourner. “She helped me get my kids back after I lost them to foster care. I raised my own kids because of Lillian.”
Three other mourners also praised my mother for helping them get back their kids.
My mother was a lifeguard on the shores of Lake Fucked.
But hey, my mother’s eldest daughter died in an alcoholic-fueled trailer fire. Two of her other children are active alcoholics. One is a recovering drug addict. And then there’s me, the dry-drunk poet with a Scrabble board full of mental illness acronyms. Only one of my mother’s children is a nondrinker and nonsmoker and nonpill swallower.
Her husband, our father, died of alcoholism.
My mother, the healer, could not heal the people closest to her. I don’t know if she tried to help us.
At my mother’s funeral
, many other mourners talked about being publicly rebuked and shamed by her.
“At the powwow,” a mourner said, “I sat in a folding chair and Lillian yelled at me and told me I should let an elder have that chair. Made me cry. I was just a kid. But she was right. Lillian was always right about stuff like that. I have never sat in a folding chair at any powwow ever again. I probably won’t sit in a folding chair even when I’m old.”
“I was at the post office,” said another mourner. “This was when I was a senior in high school and we lost that big game to Selkirk. Anyway, Lillian comes walking up to me and she yells at me for being a ball hog. For shooting too much. And I yell back, saying I pass the ball all the time, and then she yells at me about one play. At the end of the third quarter, on a fast break, I went up for a jump shot. And I was in midair when I saw Greg was open in the key. I knew I should pass to him, but I wanted to make a buzzer beater. I wanted to pass and I wanted to shoot. Anyway, I ended up shooting but was so distracted by everything that I threw up an air ball. I missed everything. And Lillian is yelling at me in the post office. She yells about that air ball. She tells me I shot an air ball because I felt guilty about not passing. She tells me Greg was open. She saw that Greg was open. And she was right. Man, Lillian knew basketball.”
Yes, my mother had vision. She had glare. So imagine how it felt to grow up under her surveillance.
At her wake and funeral, after hours of listening to other Indians talk about my mother’s life and death, I stood to deliver my eulogy. I’d wanted to say something epic and honest. But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.