Neither Wolf nor Dog (3 page)

She told me the name of a reservation. It was a long way from my home.

“What does he want?”

“Could you come and see him?”

The request took me aback. It was a strange request on any terms, coming as it did from someone I didn't even know. But the distance involved made it even stranger.

“I guess it's important for me to know if he's angry,” I said.

The woman betrayed no emotion. “He's not angry. He just saw those books and he wants to talk to you.”

I rubbed my eyes and thought of the travel. When I had left the oral history project I had made a silent promise that I would keep using such skills as I had for the good of the Indian people. I had never enjoyed a people so much and had never found such a joyful sense of humor and lack of pretension. But more than that, I had felt a sense of peace and simplicity among the
Indians that transcended the stereotypes of either drunkenness or wisdom. They were simply the most grounded people I had ever met, in both the good and bad senses of that word. They were different from white people, different from black people, different from the images that I had been taught, different from anything I had ever encountered. I felt happy among them, and I felt honored to be there.

Sometimes I would stand on the land in Red Lake and think to myself, “This land has never been owned by the United States. This land has never been touched by the movement of European civilization.” It was as if I were feeling a direct link to something elemental, something beneath the flow of history, and it was powerful beyond imagining. Though I was a white man, and all too aware of the effects of well-intentioned white people on the well-being of the Indian people, I wanted, from within my world, to help them retain the goodness in theirs.

Now, a voice had come to me from a place far away, asking me to come back to that world and hear what an old man had to say.

“I'll come,” I said, half hating myself for my hesitancy, half hating myself for agreeing at all. “It won't be right away, though.”

“He's pretty old,” she responded.

“Soon,” I said.

“Just ask at the store in town. He doesn't go anywhere much. He really wants to talk to you.” She gave me his name and hung up.

And so this book began.

I
t was several months before I could make the trip. I packed a few clothes in the truck and made my way across the bleak
landscape of America's northern tier. Scrub pines gave way to fields. Morning mist rose over rolling prairies. Small towns, signaled in the distance by towering grain elevators or church steeples, shot by on the side of the highway, unnoticed, unvisited, undisturbed.

The radio came in and out, offering moments of rock or classical music before disappearing into static. I switched from
FM
to
AM
. Farm reports, local ads for hardware stores, specials on rakes and fertilizer and feed.

I checked the map and marked my progress. The reservations were defined only by slightly off-color squares surrounded by dotted lines. I tried to imagine an America seen from within these tiny islands in a sea of invading cities and farms. I thought of how a mild sense of discomfort overcame me whenever I crossed one of these borders into a reservation, and how I felt vaguely alien, unwanted, even threatened. How must it be for the Indians themselves, traveling across great expanses of country, feeling that same threat and alienation until they could reach the protective confines of one of the tiny off-color squares that were so few and separated on the vast map of our country?

I arrived on the old man's reservation shortly after dark. The clerk at the local store was a heavyset Indian girl. She eyed me suspiciously when I gave her the name. Three young boys who were standing at the video rack stopped talking and watched me quietly.

“Over there,” she said, pointing toward the west. “He lives about three miles out. It's kind of hard to find.”

I assured her that I was good at directions.

She drew a tiny map on the back of a napkin. It was full of turns and cutbacks and natural landmarks like creekbeds and fallen trees. I thanked her, bought a pack of Prince Albert tobacco, and set out.

Her map was good, better than I had expected. I soon
found myself bouncing up a rutted path with weeds growing in its middle. The headlights formed a vague halo in the darkness. The eyes of small animals would gleam for a second on the side of the road, then disappear as shadowy forms made their way into the underbrush.

The road made a quick turn, then opened into a clearing. My headlights were shining directly onto a small clapboard house. Two cars sat outside. One was up on blocks. Three wooden steps made their way up to the front door. An old, low-bellied dog lay on the top stoop. When I opened the car door she came running toward me, barking and wagging her tail.

The front door opened and a figure emerged, silhouetted against the light inside the house.

“I'm Nerburn,” I said.

“Yeah. Come on in,” came the reply, as if he had been expecting me. The voice was old but warm. Suddenly I felt more at ease. There was that Indian sense of humor and grace — almost a twinkle — in its tone.

The dog continued barking. “Get away, Fatback,” the old man yelled. The dog fell silent and scrabbled her way under the car that was sitting on blocks. “Damn thing. Just showed up here one day. Now she thinks she owns the place.” The old man turned and walked back inside. He was slow and deliberate, hardly lifting his feet as he walked.

I made my way up the steps and into the door. The matter-of-fact way he accepted my arrival had me confused.

The house was full of man smell. Fried food. Stale cigarettes. Old coffee.

Dishes stood in the sink. One wall was covered with photographs — a 1940s-vintage sepiatone of a young man and woman standing in front of an old car; a department-store posing of a little girl in a taffeta party dress; a graduation photo
of a solemn young man in a mortarboard. An old
Life
magazine photograph of John F. Kennedy stood framed on an end table.

“Sit down,” the old man said. He beckoned to a yellow Formica table that stood in the middle of the kitchen. “Do you drink coffee?”

I told him I did. “Good,” he answered, and poured me a cup of thin brown liquid from a white enamel pot he kept on the stove. Then he padded over and slid into a seat across from me.

He must have been almost eighty. His face was seamed and rutted, and his long grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had on a plaid flannel shirt over a white T-shirt. His pants were held up by suspenders and he wore sheepskin-lined slippers. One eye was clouded over, but there was a twinkle in his look that matched the twinkle in his voice.

I reached into my pocket and handed him the Prince Albert. My days in Red Lake had taught me that the gift of tobacco was the gift of respect among Indian people.

The old man looked at it.

“Hmm,” he said. He reached across the table with a hand twisted by arthritis. He took the packet and shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “You wrote those ‘Red Road' books.”

“I helped the kids.”

He folded up the newspaper on the table.
To Walk the Red Road
lay underneath, as if it, too, had been awaiting my arrival. Small notations were written all over its cover.

“They're pretty good.”

“We tried our best.”

He spit once into a coffee can he kept by his chair.

“I don't like white people much,” he said. He was looking straight at me.

“That's understandable.”

“Did they?”

“Who?”

“The old folks at Red Lake.”

“Not all of them.”

He picked up a can of snuff from the table and slid some behind his lip.

“What about you?”

“You mean, did they like me?”

He didn't answer.

“I think so. Some didn't. They thought I was a pushy white guy. But what could I do?”

“You did okay.” He tapped the cover of
To Walk the Red Road.
“Now, let me ask you something else. Do you know why they let you?”

I smiled a bit and took a sip of my coffee. “I think so. I think it's because I like people and they could tell that. That I wasn't going to screw them. That the kids thought I was okay so they decided to trust me.”

“No, I don't think so,” he said. “There's something else. You don't try to be an Indian.”

I smiled at the compliment and let him continue. He was clearly a man who formed judgments quickly.

“White people that come around to work with Indians, most of them want to be Indians. They're always wearing Indian jewelry and talking about the Great Spirit and are all full of bullshit.”

“Yeah, I know the type,” I said.

He peered around the side of my head. “You got no pony-tail. That's good. You don't have any turquoise rings on, do you?” I held up my hands. They had no rings, no watch. “Good,” he said wryly.

He picked up his train of thought. “Or else they think we need some kind of white social worker telling us what to do. Some of them come here because they can't find a job anywhere
else and end up out on the reservation. We got them here, all of them.”

I nodded my head.

He leaned over as if to tell me a secret. “You aren't like that, are you?” he asked.

There was a kind of conspiratorial hush in his voice. I wasn't sure if it was a question or a joke.

“I try not to be. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't like Indian people.”

“That's okay. It's good that you like Indian people. I like them too. But how much do you like white people?”

The question seemed strange.

“I'm not much thrilled with the culture we've created.”

“Yeah, okay. But how about white people?”

I didn't know what he was driving at.

“I like white people just fine,” I said. “I mean, after all, I am one.”

“That's what I mean,” he chuckled. “That's good. That's good. If you hate your own people you can't be a very good person. You have to love your own people even if you hate what they do.” He gestured toward the mug on the table. “Here. Drink your coffee.”

I took a gulp to placate him. It tasted like something brewed from twigs and rubber tires. “No, I don't hate white people,” I said. “Sometimes I'm embarrassed by us. But white people are okay.”

He waved his gnarled hand for silence. He was done toying with me. He fixed me with a solid stare.

I was suddenly intensely aware of my whiteness and my relative youth. I wanted to know what this was all about, but I had learned through hard experience that Indians make their own choices and take their own time. The old man would come to the point when he wanted to.

He pointed to a picture on the wall. “That's my grandson,” he said. “When he graduated from Haskell.”

Haskell is an Indian junior college in Kansas. The people I knew who had gone there looked upon it with a great sense of pride.

“Did he like it?”

“He's dead now,” the old man answered. “Got killed.”

“He was a good-looking boy,” I offered, unsure of what else to say.

“Yes. He drank too much. Would have been about your age.” He fixed me again with that hard stare. “I want you to help me write a book.”

The abruptness of the request left me speechless.

“I'm seventy-eight,” he continued. “This is a hard life. I want to get all this down.”

“All what?” I asked.

“What I have in my mind.”

I thought he wanted me to write his memoirs. “You mean, like your memories?”

“No. What I have in my mind. I watch people. Indian people and white people. I see things. I want you to help me write it down right.”

He got up and went into his bedroom. When he came out he had a sheaf of loose-leaf papers in his hand.

“I've been writing some things down. My granddaughter said I should do something with them.”

I was shocked and excited and nervous. I didn't know whether I wanted to see the pages or not. The old man might be a crackpot full of wild religious theories. But there was always the chance that he was one of those rare chroniclers of life who had managed to catch the living, breathing sense of the times he had lived through.

He handed me the pile of papers. “Read them,” he said.

After two pages I knew that I was in the presence of someone extraordinary. The old man was neither the crackpot I had feared nor the chronicler I had hoped. He was a thinker, pure and simple, who had looked long and hard at the world around him.

His work wasn't polished. It wasn't even finished. Pages were filled with disconnected observations and long unpunctuated paragraphs. Thoughts were scrawled on hunks of napkins and the backs of envelopes.

But beneath the fragmentary disorder lay a level of insight that was as deep and as clear as a mountain lake.