With deer legs, dropped from the womb, and sprinted
Out of the clinic and made it halfway home
Before the tribal cops pulled her over for speeding.
In kindergarten, she was faster than every adult.
I watched her, three feet tall, outrace my father up
A sand hill while dodging rattlesnakes at Blue Creek.
In sixth grade, racing in her first organized meet,
She looked back near the finish line
And was so far ahead that she burst into tears
Because she’d hurt her opponents’ feelings.
And then she never raced again.
In 2015, a few days after my mother’s death,
My quick cousin stood next to me as I stared
At my dead mother lying in her plain pine coffin
At the funeral home in Spokane.
The undertakers were white men
But they’d buried generation of local Indians
So they knew how to culturally comfort us,
And better, they knew how to leave us alone.
That was the private family-and-friends viewing,
So that meant thirty loud Indians had gathered
In the otherwise quiet funeral home.
“Lillian looks beautiful,” my cousin said.
And I had to agree. My mother wore her favorite
Turquoise business suit and a multicolored
Beaded medallion that could have eclipsed
The sun or moon. My cousin took my hand,
Bumped me with her hip, and said, “Hey,
You and I used to be the skinny and pretty cousins.
And now we’re old and fat and homely.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m still pretty from the neck up.”
My cousin laughed and said, “My soul’s spirit animal is
The butterfly, but my ass’s spirit animal is the buffalo.”
And I said, “I eat food like my father used to drink booze.
I binge and binge.” And my cousin said, “Oh, man! Me, too!”
And then my cousin began to weep. I didn’t cry with her.
But I mourned. I don’t know if I was mourning my mother
Or if I was mourning for myself or if I was mourning
For my cousin’s mourning. Maybe I was mourning everything.
“Nothing makes me hungrier than sadness,” I said.
“I could eat a TV dinner made out of apple strudel,
Salisbury steak, carrots, and grief.” My cousin smiled.
We hugged and shared a half-lipped cousinly kiss,
Then ambled over to the waiting room, where
My eternal cousin reached into her tote bag
And pulled out a bag of nacho cheese tortilla chips
Like it was a relic worthy of worship—
Like we’d just returned from an ancient vault
Where the dead worshipped only crunch and salt.
My cousin and I ate all those chips. We ate the walls
And floors. We ate all of the coffins, jewelry, and shawls.
We ate all of the flowers. And we ate all of the air.
Then, for dessert, we ate all of the prayers.
16.
Everything Costs
SITTING IN THE funeral home, with my mother’s body lying in view in another room only twenty feet away, I paid for her coffin and burial and transportation with a credit card.
I had enough cash to pay for all the expenses, but I wanted to collect the Alaska Airlines miles.
The bureaucracy of death. The sacredness of death. The sacredness of bureaucracy. The beauty of frequent-flyer miles.
“Did you know my mother?” I asked the white undertaker.
And yes, of course, he did.
“I talked to Lillian at many wakes and funerals,” the undertaker said. “She was a funny person.”
I’d been to twenty or thirty funerals on my reservation, but I realized that the undertaker had probably been to a hundred or more—he’d buried so many of my fellow tribal members.
No matter how much you think you know about death, there is always somebody else who knows more.
As I signed the funeral home contracts, I thought about the last time I had talked to my mother—the last time I’d talked to her before she had become seriously, and then terminally, ill.
Before she’d gotten sick, I had not seen or e-mailed or texted or spoken to my mother for—I don’t know—three or five months. After all of that silence on my part, not exactly intentional but not at all surprising, she called and left a weeping message on my phone.
“Junior,” she said. “I know you blame me for everything, but please talk to me.”
A week later, I called.
“What’s happening on the rez?” I asked. I didn’t ask her about the weepy message she’d left. I didn’t want to encourage her dramatics. I knew her tears had been lures.
“Oh,” she said. “We had a funeral yesterday.”
“Who died?”
She said the name. I remembered him. An old Indian guy who used to work forestry. I knew him better thirty years ago. I knew his kids twenty years ago. Didn’t know his grandkids at all.
“How’d he die?” I asked.
“Heart attack.”
I remembered when my mother used to cook for almost every funeral and wake on the reservation. Some other folks took over that responsibility after my mother got too old.
“That other family cooks now, right?” I asked my mother. “Instead of you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’ll cook for my wake and funeral when I die.”
“That’ll be weird,” I said. “They hate me.”
“That’s okay. They love your brothers and sisters.”
I laughed.
“And besides,” she said. “They’ll feed you good anyway. You know that’s how it works.”
The unwritten rules of tribalism. The inherent responsibilities. The silent acceptance of duty. The endless social legacy of a people who’ve spent most of their existence living at a subsistence level.
Taking care of one is taking care of the many. And vice versa.
“Remember that time in high school,” I asked my mother, “when I slid on ice and drove into the ditch?”
“Which time?” my mother asked.
Another truth: If you live in a wintry climate and are too poor to afford good tires, then you will often hit the ditch, hopefully at low speeds.
“That time by the dump,” I said. “When I was daydreaming about winning the lottery and just spaced out.”
“Oh, right,” my mother said. “That’s when your cousin pulled you out. You were lucky he showed up.”
My cousin did rescue me and I was grateful to him. But he disliked me so much that he never said a word as he stopped his truck, grabbed a rope out of the back, tied one end to his rig and one end to mine, and pulled me out of the snow. And then he continued to ignore me as he untied the rope, got back in his truck, and drove away.
I am greatly amused by the white folks who believe that being Indian means you automatically fit like a puzzle piece into the jigsaw of your family and tribe. I’m even more amused by the Indians who believe that, too.
“Is there anything else you need?” I asked my mother on the phone.
I wanted to hang up. I couldn’t handle too much time talking to her. I needed to reclaim my separation from her.
“Can you send some money?” she said. “I spent my Social Security on the cable bill and the electricity.”
“I’ll send a check,” I said.
“Don’t forget,” she said,
“I won’t forget.”
“Yes, you will.”
I did forget for a week. Then my mother left another message on my phone.
“Junior,” she said. “We need firewood.”
Except the message was garbled, so I thought she said, “Junior, she breathes fire good.”
So imagine my disappoi
ntment when I discovered the truth.
“Oh, man,” I said to my wife. “I thought maybe some woman named She Breathes Fire Good had moved to the rez. That sounds like a Montana Indian name, right? Like maybe a new Crow Indian woman doctor started working at the clinic. Dr. She Breathes Fire Good. That name rocks. I’m gonna write a new short story about a Crow doctor named that. It’ll be awesome.”
I haven’t yet written that short story. I often have ideas for stories I know that I will never write.
But there is a good story in everything.
My mother died of lung cancer even though she had not smoked a cigarette in forty years.
So let me now imagine Dr. She Breathes Fire Good. Let me imagine she somehow diagnoses my mother when the cancer is only one split cell. Let me imagine that Dr. She Breathes Fire Good gave my mother another five years of life. Another ten. Another twenty.
Let me imagine my one-hundred-year-old mother leaving a message for the seventy-year-old me.
“Junior,” she says into the machine. “You better call me. I could die at any second.”
“Mom,” I say back. “I’m an old Indian man. Chances are good I will die before you do.”
But, of course, my mother died first. And my father is dead, too. And, based on health statistics and lifestyles, I would bet that I’m going to outlive my reservation-based siblings as well.
It’s a morbid thought.
But it’s not inaccurate.
Dear brothers, dear sisters, if you die before me, then I will pay to put you in the ground. I will bury you near our parents.
And, once or twice a year, I will lug my old and battered self to your collective grave and apologize for winning the final spin of the Alexie Family Terminal Cancer Roulette Wheel.
17.
Reviewing
IN THE FUNERAL home, I told my sister that my mother looked better than she had in years—better than she had since our father had died, twelve years earlier.
“The undertaker did a great job with her makeup,” I said.
“He didn’t make her look pretty,” my sister said. “I did that.”
“Wow,” I said. “What did that feel like?”
“I felt like a little girl,” she said. “Like Mom was teaching me how to put on makeup again.”
“I don’t remember her teaching you that,” I said.
“Why would you remember that?” she asked.
“It just seems like a normal thing for a mother to teach a daughter,” I said. “And Mom rarely did normal things.”
“Well,” my sister said. “Mom taught us how to put on makeup by making us practice on Dad.”
“What?” I asked, and laughed. “You put makeup on Dad?”
“Yeah,” my sister said. “Lipstick, eye shadow, blush, and everything.”
“No way,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true.”
“Dad was okay with that?” I asked.
“He didn’t say anything,” my sister said. “But I think he wished he looked prettier in makeup.”
“What?” I said, and laughed even harder.
“Yeah,” my sister said. “This one time, he stared at his face in the mirror and said, ‘All that work and I still look like myself.’”
“That’s so funny,” I said. “Maybe Mom and Dad are doing each other’s makeup in Heaven.”
“That would be beautiful,” my sister said. “And silly.”
“If Heaven ain’t filled with gender-swapping Indians,” I said, “then I don’t want to go there.”
18.
Scatological
AFTER EVERYBODY ELSE left the funeral home—after our closest friends and family had said their private good-byes to my mother—I stayed behind to use the restroom.
As I squatted on the old toilet, I wept for the first time since my mother died. And then I shat. I wept and shat. And, yes, I am famously gifted as a weeper and a shitter.
My Alcoholics Anonymous friend—who remains nameless, of course, as do many other folks in this book—calls me Thunder Tears.
My siblings call me Dairy Queen because I have always filled up toilets like a human soft-serve ice cream machine.
Well, on that grief-stricken day, as my mother’s body lay only two walls away, I took the largest shit of my life. I expelled everything.
After I was done, I stood and looked at that shit cobra floating in the toilet, and I said aloud, “I’m gonna need Rikki-tikki-tavi to kill that thing.”
And then I noticed the handwritten sign on the wall above the toilet: Please be gentle with our toilet. The pipes are old. Be judicious in your use of toilet paper.
I was impressed with the undertaker’s vocabulary. But it was too late. I’d certainly been judicious with the toilet paper, but my shit was so large—so audacious—that I knew it would clog up that toilet and flood the bathroom.
Nobody wants to be the guy who clogs the toilet, let alone the commode only two rooms removed from his mother’s coffin.
I realized that I needed to break my own shit into pieces in order to make it easier to flush.
But I also knew that the toilet would still clog if I tried to flush all of the pieces at once.
So I wrapped my right hand in paper, reached into the toilet, and chopped my shit into four manageable fragments. Then, using my paper-wrapped right hand as a dam, I held three pieces out of the water as I flushed the toilet with my left hand.
And then I waited a few minutes for the old toilet to refill so I could flush the second piece of shit.
And then I waited for even more minutes so I could flush the third piece of shit.
And then, finally, after maybe five minutes, I was able to flush the last piece of shit.
And then I washed my hands with all the liquid soap in the world.
I walked out of the bathroom to see the undertaker waiting for me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I was embarrassed.
“Yes,” I said.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “You were in there a long time.”
He was genuinely concerned. I knew his empathy was real. I knew I could be honest with him.
I said, “I just took a grief poop like you wouldn’t believe. You ever seen a grief poop? Thing was big as a walrus.”
The undertaker touched my shoulder.
“Happens all the time,” he said.
He wished me well and said he would see me at the tribal longhouse the next day for my mother’s wake and funeral.
He walked me to the door.
He said another good-bye.
He wished me well again.
He patted me on the shoulder.
But he didn’t shake my hand.
19.
The Procession
THE UNDERTAKER DROVE my mother’s body to the reservation. But he didn’t use a hearse. No, he drove a black minivan converted into a more contemporary and fuel-efficient funeral carriage.
I guess death now has a smaller carbon footprint.
Behind the undertaker was the procession of seventeen cars filled with family and friends.
It took less than an hour to deliver my mother’s body back to our reservation.
I thought it would feel more epic.
But it only felt like a sad and brief commute.
20.
Nonfiction
WE BURIED LILLIAN Alexie on July 6, 2015.
We’d thought about burying her on the Fourth of July, but the funeral expenses would have doubled and tripled because of the holiday.
Yes, saying good-bye to a Native American woman would have cost us more on Independence Day.
21.
Blood
At my mother’s wake,
A mosquito alights
On my knuckle
And sucks and fattens
On my blood.
I ponder smashing
The damn thing
So I can pretend to read
<
br /> My fortune
In the broken
Insect pieces.
But instead, I allow
That mosquito to fly
Away, fat and drunk.
I don’t know if
I loved my mother.
I don’t know
If she loved me.
At my mother’s wake,
Another mosquito alights
On another knuckle
And sucks and fattens
On my blood.
When it reaches
Maximum density,
I smash
The damn thing
And read my fortune
In the broken
Insect pieces.
One wing says, “Yes,
You did love your mother.”
And another wing says,
“And, yes, yes, of course,
Your mother loved you.”
But the dismembered
Proboscis shouts,
“You don’t have to forgive
Her sins or your sins
But it’s probably best
If you give it a try,
You blood bag of a son.”
At my mother’s wake,
A third mosquito buzzes
My ear. And a fourth
And a fifth and a dozen more.
They’re singing
For my mother.
It is only the female mosquitoes
Who know how to speak,
Who know how to sing,
Who know how to grieve.