Dead Horses Talking

20 December 2005

"How do you figure your Indian,"asks my mother?
It was weeks prior that she asked me how I 'figured' I was a baby boomer. Defensive, I explained that as far as I understood it, if I was born between 1946 and 1964, I was in. I was born in 1963. "Well, I almost made it," she stated, pulling her teeth from the bite that pulled my shirt. Sadly, we weren't good at talking.
It was 1994. I had just moved to Mass. Shy a plot of land to squat on till I made new contacts, I pulled my Airstream behind my mother's rented apartment for a few months. It was a pretty field set up above the town of Housatonic, below Flag Rock.

After I swollowed from a mouth that had no spit, I gave my mother an answer to my native status. I was borrowing words from a childhood movie though. They were safe words. They were not mine. She could bite at them and not tough me. "It's like the old man said--It's a way of life, not a matter of blood." I agree with the old words. I wasn't going to tilt my cards. I could not win.

It wasn't until I was in the final stages of high school that I met my father for the first time. I left the home of my mother, step-father and several brothers four years prior because I could swollow the water no longer. Home wasn't a home. The air in a state of near war all of the time. Everything was filled with words, and looks, that once inhaled, became wormwood in my bones, in my heart. I escaped, never looking back. Sometime after I left there, their world broke into pieces, and then moved far away.

It was at my grandmother's house that the acorn met the tree. My grandmother was a funny looking creature. Her hair was as wild as winter grass when the snow leaves. Her teeth were old stones with names worn off, some broken and falling back to the earth. When I was little she scared me the few times I was allowed to visit, but I never said this. She was a heavy blanket that opened when I arrived, and allowed me to slip away when I left. Leaving her was always going outside on a cold day without a coat. My grandmother was heart over flesh. Every burr, and every basket that glanced against her legs, or arms left a mark--but I have never been graced by a soul as loving. Carol Jesse is the compass that I will forever move my finger over in the gail of life to see where the good needle pulls. I adored her, and to my utter amazement, she adored me. I was her young husband running through the field with a single shot rifle, distracted like a puppy by every leaf falling, and a full belly's weakness in the hunt. I was the hero in her novel. I was her son. When it was late in the evening, and sleep was walking around the base of the trees but not lying down, I would hold her hands as we talked in her four post bed made from stained two by fours. We took her paintings off the walls with our eyes, while I sat by her snuggled body like we were in the oldest fort in the world. She gave me one painting that I would walk in in the future in, but that is not this story.
With my father's guitar, I would make up songs so that she could cry to without moving her eyes. My grandmother saw her people in me. We would love each other in words until the old brown prune juice bottle filled with hot water wrapped in a towel by her feet became cold. Here I was taught love. Her smooth gentle fingers moved over mine so she would always know them.
My grandmother put my father in my hand like she was handing me the reins to a horse, then she stepped away...just a little. She was smiling. When I was three or four, my father hugged me good-bye just before my brother, mother, and myself drove away forever. He poured his hand into mine now, but I was no longer four. His fingers were draining from mine to the floor, but I did not look down. I knew then that there are some hungers you just learn to live with.

Having been shown pictures by my grandmother before I met my father, I saw that my mother was right. I was a baby left on the porch. The back porch. My father's nose was a curved stone blade. His face was that of a fisherman, complete with beard reaching for water. His fingers were long staggered bones that held cigarettes, and the necks of beer bottles more than people. I was nineteen. This is what I saw. When the photographs became a man moving in front of me, I noticed that he talked out of his nose more than I had ever heard anyone talk before. He was young enough, yet somehow he was held in a pose that struck me as frail. I did not care that he always leaned into his walk like he was going up a hill. It made no difference that he was always a cloud of smoke, with beer pouring into it. I had come to see how he made an Indian boy from a bottle, and feathers.
Above my fathers bed hung my grandfathers bow, and my grandfather's guns. I had already won awards for archery, and skinned my own deer without tainting the meat. I smiled. But these tools on the wall were weapons hung in the trees for the dead. My father touched them, moving them with his eyes. He did not take them down and show them the fields, or let them hear the birds, or feel his heartbeat sweat on the old greased wood. I had heard of blood skipping a generation so that children slept while their parents wailed. I was already intimate with the knowledge that some children looked for their relations under stones in creeks while their parents gave days for dollars, never hearing the wind in the woods, or songs born in their blood. I already knew of a mother not knowing her son. My father was as hard to read as snow sign by a warm waters edge. My father was walking with a heavy pack he never set down. It did not not bind up all he needed to live, with a cup swinging gently on the side-- it pulled him toward the grave. I kept my leather pouch under my shirt with my grandfather's gold tooth wrapped in a piece of my grandmothers old coat. I wished I showed him. Would he have cried?
All through these days my grandmother Carol Jesse watched me. She glowed. She was a good bed of coals waiting on morning wood. Her child came home, she would tell me quietly so the old boards of the house wouldn't hear and complain that she loved me too much.
Searching for my father was finding my people. It was not him though. He was the postmark, not the letter. He was the red string with a knot in his belly that lead to me. My grandmother and I held hands through my years as a paratrooper in the 82nd. There were too many good-byes with her face brought to flames in the window of the porch, as she watched me get small on the road with her fingers worring the buttons on the center of her blouse. We pained for one another while I was away as do the stones in the river pain when all the waters run into the earth. She was my Holy. She was my first life love. She hammered out the tight ribs around my heart for love to someday come into me.
My grandmother left this life with cold green grapes in her hand, as I moved toward leaving the army with fingers empty. For many years I was an ancient bowl with a hole punched in the middle. In the center of the bowl was a lone boy with a bow and arrow looking at all the faces that looked in. I was painted with brown blood. I went to the woods for years, and broke a good watch.
The last time I saw my father I brought my ivory handled .45 colt pistol so he cold move it in his hands, and feel where I'd taken it. It was a $20,000 piece of art. My father thought I should fold it up in a drawer. I shot it until the ivory turned brown smoke. I shot it until the blue became polished steel where my finger rested. I shot it until until I could not hear the quiet anymore, and all my world had perfect holes in it. Then like too many things that I love, I sold it on a whim for nearly nothing. I did that too often then.
We sat in the living room that day. The house was now his with my grandmother walking about the house in the things she created that tilted into the rooms on taunt wires, listening gently. My father told me about the native people of the horse that we came from out west where Canada sits cross legged on on America. He told about wolves we hunted for bounty, and why I couldn't sit still. This was the money I needed in my wallet that would feed me for the rest of my life. This was gold coins in a jar that once held nothing but goverment paper. His mouth moved over our Indian relations, and French Canadian blood with his finger in his hand so I could follow the map too. With my eyes I traced his finger to Montana, up and around where a bullet went into his palm years ago, below the fingers of Canada. He put his birthmark mark on me then.
He put this flesh over my bones after I thought I had moved from his table of him being family. This was my core. We sat so that our knees were horses with their heads leaning in together. He gave me reasons why I did not fit, conform, belong--settle into being a red heart in a world all new. I was old things gathered in bundles. Always would be. We talked a long time as lovers do when they first realize that they are not alone in the world. My knees were toward my father, but I was already six again--and not. Now I was six and I was smiling as all the neighborhood boys filled me with their arrows. I died perfectly, over and over until someone helped me up for dinner. I was stealing razorblades to shape sumac spears, and carving animals until all the wood was soaked rich with my childhood blood that made everything sticky. Still I worked on their eyes, and did not cry--or think to. I was running with my brother Steve to make rain dances in the empty lot of our trailer park. Under a blue sky we danced for hours. I danced because Steve told me to. I danced because I could, and I believed their was fringe in my blood. It rained for days. I wondered if we were supposed to dance to stop it. I wondered if somone angry was going to come for me. Then, in time, there were all of the books on survival I read, all of the knives I squirreled away, the slings, the arrows, the nights alone in the fields where the bravest children wouldn't sleep--now made sense. I was going home where I was wanted, where I was beautiful, where the river did not ask me how I figured I was a stone. It just listened to me sing with my little boy body half under water, as all the other stones sang around me..

On a cold kitchen in my bare feet, I was not going to give this away to a question that began with,"How do you figure..." I kept my pearls in my pouch.

That was the last time that I saw my father. Months later, I returned to see him. I was with a native girl I was crazy about. We danced into my grandmothers house(for it will always be her house), college was in our hair. It was fall. Love was playing in my ribs. We smiled like toothpaste commercials. As we mazed through the little house, I called out to my father. New faces came out from behind every door, but my grandmothers art still hung on many walls.
"Who are you,"asked a man that looked like he was trying to remember where he left his gun.
"Roger, He's my father. This is my girlfriend, and.... What's going on?" What could I say? Nothing made sense.
"Your father was invited back to court again by another woman that wanted more money for her kid. Your dad decided to pack it up, and head out." The man was dry as good tinder, and I wanted him to burn.
I asked for an address, number, whatever. It was explained coldly to me that my father left because he didn't want people bothering him... PEOPLE, meant me too. That was it. I was four years old on a dirt road watching a young gaulky man rise from knealing. The hug was over. My mother started the car.

"Mom. Tell me one good thing about my father. Over all of these years you have said nothing but hateful things about him. There must be something good?" Without a stretch of one arm in her mind to reach some high forgotten shelf, or some old box she kept filled with little things in a secret place she rarely goes, my mother looked at me, reaching for nothing. My mind figured she'd toss me the, "well, he gave me you," speach. I've heard other mothers say this in similiar settings with their hungry children as they got older.
"Nothing. There is absolutely nothing nice I can say about that man," she sent out through a thin line of lips tight over teeth.
I was sorry then, for her. For me. Two sons , and nothing. When a mother absolutely hates a son's father it drips into his blood that he is by extension hated. Always was, always will be. My father shattered my femur because I wouldn't stop crying when I was three and fell. He tried to shoot my cat with a pistol because it got on the table- again. Yet, he also sent the boiled egg out of my throat when I crossed the field blue to the point of dropping with my toy.
My father hated children. He hated his life. My father was a reservation Indian, with no reservation. I forgave my father as if he asked me twice. I mourned for my father...and stopped cutting my hair, and forgave.

Nothing?

I would have begged for both of my legs broken in trade for the words that my father gave to me on that last afternoon so many years ago. My father was just an empty bottle floating neck up just waiting on the slightest wave to nod under. My father spent his days around waiting on that wave. Maybe he is waiting still with the slow smoke from a cigarette coming up from his hand.

One day a broken man coming down to watch the water gave me legs, and then walked away.


































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