Set Me Free (27 page)

“We know all that. You think they would have looked at you? If I hadn’t gone to one of those boarding schools? If I didn’t
have my language beaten out of me? If your father didn’t pay good money? He pulled strings to get you into that Phillips Exeter.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Shame on you. Shame on you. Thinking you know. You don’t know. Your father saved you. He got you out of the reservation school.
He took you across the mountains. He sent you to a place where they could educate you right. The rest of us were here. We
know what it was like. Before Elliot came. Before Elliot came, only we cared about educating our children right. We did a
good job teaching them the Neige Courante Way. But we could not teach them the ways of the world. Don’t tell me an uneducated
Indian is better than an educated one. My grandchildren? They will never think they are less important than anyone else. Just
because they’re brown like me. Elliot has helped us on this path. He helps us make things right for our children. Now he thinks
this other school will help us more. When he thinks that, I am behind him. He has my blessing.”

The rest of the table mumbled agreement. I shook my head. They would never understand. They would never see that I had lived
it, this so-called globalization dream they all held for our children, the one filled with college-educated Neige Courante
who set out believing they could change the world. These elderly dreamers were so blind that they couldn’t see me, or that
I was the ultimate specimen of that dream’s failure.

Then Robert said one more thing that would burn in my ears for months and sting me into silence. “Figure out what you’re afraid
of, Calbert. Your fear keeps your heart from living with the Neige Courante. It even keeps you from living in the rest of
the world. You don’t have a home. You don’t know where you live. Stop blaming your poor father for that. Jasper Francoeur
may not have been the best father to you. Because he was a father to us all. You’re more like him than you think. Time you
stopped worrying about that. Started being proud of it. Started living like the rest of us.”

Once upon a time, the boy was still a boy. But each time the sun came up, the boy looked more and more like a man. This was
a fact not lost on the father. The father had been watching the boy and saw the way time was going.

Let it be explained here that the father was not often in the house where the boy now lived. This helped the father notice
the change in the boy. The father was often away on official business. He left the cooking and cleaning and raising to his
capable wife, who was kind enough to the boy, given the circumstances. The boy was nearly the same age as the second of the
wife’s three children, all girls. The middle daughter had such a beautiful face that there was nothing she could do to keep
men’s eyes off of her. When she got old enough to own her own body, this girl closely shaved her head, pierced every surface
imaginable, and got tattoos on her arms and back. It didn’t matter. Every man who saw her still wanted to make her his own.
But that is not what is relevant about the girl, although the boy would often look at her across the dinner table when she
was still a girl and wonder at the burden of such luminosity. What is relevant about the girl is that it was undeniable
—
given the two months that separated the boy’s age from the girl’s
—
that the father had cheated on his wife and that the boy was the product of this adultery.

The wife clothed the boy and fed him and made sure he got to school on time. Sometimes she forgot to pick him up, but he supposed
he couldn’t blame her. If he were her, he would have forgotten him too. For a time, the boy attended the most prestigious
school in the whole city, which was where the wife’s daughters also went to school. When people asked questions, the
boy was to tell them that he was a cousin. So he did. He did all the things that he was told.

Why did the boy do all the things that he was told? At first he did it for the memory of his grandmother. She had pulled strings
for him beyond the grave. He owed it to her to make the most of the life she’d haggled for him. But as time went on, he started
to forget her voice and face, and started to love the things around him. He started to obey because he loved these things
and did not want to risk losing them. The father’s home was a beautiful house made out of glass up in the hills above the
city. It was where the rich people lived. In the father’s home, they ate food the boy had never heard of. The father owned
thousands of books
—
he had whole rooms devoted to them
—
and let the boy borrow these books whenever he wanted. The father told the boy, in between his official business, that he
knew they could be the best of friends. He told the boy he had waited many years to have a son. And the boy knew, because
of what his mother had whispered in his infant ear, that there was a threat curled up somewhere in the language and the life,
but he wasn’t interested in discovering what that threat could do, so he chose to ignore it.

One morning the father told the son they would be taking a trip together. A fishing trip. It was a school day, and the boy
had looked forward to school. But he dutifully got into the father’s car and listened to the father’s music as they drove
out into the country. They drove fast. The car found a road that knifed beside the river that the boy’s and the father’s people
had been fishing for millennia. It was a wide blue river. It was fed by streams, by tributaries, by waterfalls. But the father
did not stop to look at the beautiful country. He did not stop until they got to the dam that had been built across the river
and had ended their people’s fishing for good.

“Celilo,” the father said, and pointed.

It was just water where the father pointed. But the boy knew what the father was talking about. There had been a waterfall
there, before the dam was built. At that waterfall, people had fished for thousands of years. One day, when the dam was built,
the waterfall was drowned under the river. To make cheap energy. Forget about the people who had been fishing there for thousands
of years.

“Yeah,” said the boy. “It’s too bad.”

The father grunted. “Do you know what I do? Every day?”

The boy didn’t know how to answer that. “You mean your job?”

“Yes. I mean my job.”

“You’re a lawyer.”

The father laughed, but the laugh wasn’t supposed to make the boy feel happy. “My job is to make sure this never happens again.”

“You want them to stop building dams?”

“My job is to get the salmon back for our people.”

“Okay,” said the boy. He didn’t know how the father was going to accomplish this. On the walls of the father’s office, there
were dozens of framed photographs of him shaking hands with luminaries; the boy liked this word. He liked looking at the pictures.

“There are three types of salmon on the endangered-species list. This river is swimming in chemicals now, so even if we catch
a salmon, it isn’t safe to eat it. By the time you’re my age, all my work may have been for nothing. But we have to try, don’t
we?”

The boy nodded. He wanted to return to school. The boy said, “I thought we were going fishing.”

“You thought wrong.”

“But you said
—
“

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Are We going home now?”

“First I’m going to show you where I met your mother.”

They drove into the town that was perched beside the river. The father stopped the car next to a place where women danced
nude. The building thrummed with the thump of heavy bass. There were neon outlines of women’s bodies on the front of the building.
The boy felt himself blush.

“Your mother was a dancer here,” the father said.

The boy was trying to imagine what kind of woman his mother must have been. He knew he was supposed to feel ashamed, but he
couldn’t think about her any different than he ever had. She had always felt like a ghost to him. Seeing where she’d done
her dancing didn’t change that.

The father had a smile worming at the edges of his mouth. “She was
something,” he said. “It’s time for you to choose. You can be nothing, like your mother. I don’t blame her for doing what
she did
—
she did the best she could. But the best she could be was a slut and a liar, because that’s all she was offered. I’m offering
you something more. I’m offering you the chance to be something. Do you have an interest in making something of yourself?”

No one had ever asked the boy a question like this. But he said what he was supposed to say. “Yes.”

“Then you must let go of the past. Forget about that picture you have of your mother. Forget your grandmother’s books. Forget
the stinking reservation. That was never our home. That’s not where we were meant to live. I’m telling you that your mother
was nothing because that’s what the world will tell you. The world wants you to think you are worth nothing, the same way
she thought she was nothing. The world wants you to stay on the reservation and drink and fuck. The world wants you to turn
your mind stupid, to forget that you’re smart.” The father wagged his finger. “But not me. I want you to be like me. I want
you to be a leader. I want our people to look up to you, to listen when you speak. I want you to be full of what made me.”

“And what is that?” the boy asked.

The father didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “I’m sending you east. To boarding school.”

The boy opened his mouth, but the father silenced him with one look. “It’s the best thing. To learn how the rest of the world
is before you come back. You’ll be prepared. You’ll show everyone who doubts you exactly what we’re made of. I only wish someone
had handed me the same opportunity. You’re a lucky boy. Someday you’ll understand.”

H
ELEN

Stolen, Oregon
Friday, October 25, 1996

Be not ajeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That if I then had wak’d after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.

S
o speaks Caliban, Prospero’s slave, in Act Three of
The Tempest.
Helen had never thought much about what this speech meant. She was a professional, so she
thought
she had. She’d considered the zigzagging tense of it: present to future to conditional to past. She’d mused on the rain metaphor
woven into the end of the speech, especially in contrast to the title of Shakespeare’s play; in Caliban’s version of a storm,
the clouds bring riches and hope, not rain. Helen had explored the open vowels of the words distributed throughout the monologue’s
first half: “noises,” “sounds,” “sweet airs,” “a thousand twangling instruments,” “hum,”
“voices.” All these sound words indicated that the island onstage should be peopled with aural stimulation, should be tropical
and wet, full of birdcalls, full of mystery. She had directed
The Tempest
three times in her career—once as an undergraduate, once at summer stock, once at the First Stage—and those productions had
reflected the times: at Columbia in the late 1960s, Prospero’s island had been peopled with flower children; at summer stock
in the early 1980s, the setting had been a metaphor for the post-industrial complex, set inside a corporation called the Island;
and four years ago, she had reversed the gender roles, as per Duncan’s suggestion, casting in the role of Prospero a two-hundred-pound
black actress and in the role of Caliban a hunched, elderly white woman.

Each time Helen directed
The Tempest,
this speech in the middle of Act Three provided a sweet nugget of beautiful rest, set amid the comic subplot of Caliban,
Stephano, and Trinculo’s drunken tromp around the isle. Each time Helen got to this speech, she would make her actors stop
and devour it, explore the clues it gave them about the island. They would discuss Caliban’s humanity. They would argue that
anyone who had put such language in the mouth of “the savage” was doing something subversive. They would say that Shakespeare
obviously believed Caliban was just as human as Prospero was, to put such fine words, such complex thought, such elegantly
rendered concepts, in his mouth and mind.

But she had never truly gotten it until now. She had never gotten it until the phone call she’d made to check in at the front
desk at the First Stage, until she heard that life was going on fine without her, that things were A-OK. She had supposed
these last three weeks, that this was what she wanted, but now, hearing that things were fine, she was not as satisfied as
she’d thought she’d be. It became apparent that Duncan was there, that he was asking poor young Nick at the front desk to
hand over the phone, and then before Helen knew it, she was speaking to her husband, and he was furious and loving at the
same time, if that made any
sense, and he was asking her when she was coming home, and why she hadn’t called him, and how this could happen between them,
and promising her mending and hope and future. His voice pulled so hard at her heart that she made herself hang up. She was
glad to have Amelia and Elliot’s apartment to herself so that she could gather herself, the self that had seemed so gathered
since she’d gotten here but which she now saw was frayed and frazzled, and then she called Michael Reid and told him what
had happened, and he asked her if anything had
happened
with Elliot and she told him no, it didn’t seem that was even on the table, and she didn’t even think she wanted it there.
She hadn’t realized this until she said it. Speaking to Michael Reid took Helen’s feelings from a vague, dark place and made
them true. She was greatly relieved when she heard herself explaining that something had shifted between her and Elliot, something
that made her believe she still loved him but not the way she thought she had all these years, and perhaps that wasn’t as
disappointing as she had assumed it would be. Michael Reid said to her, “Why are you still out there, then?” For that she
had no answers.