The Lovebird (24 page)

“Ready for another day of root digging?” Granma asked. We had gone twice more since the first time. “I want to make sure Cora joins me at least once this year before the wild turnips are out of season, so she is definitely going to come. But if you’d rather stay home today, I understand. Jim will be here, working on the Pronghorn. That’s what he calls this car—after those antelope who can run so fast across the prairie.”

I looked at him ministering to the Cutlass. His hands had disappeared into her hood, and his shirt was sticky from sweat. I had not yet been alone with Jim. Jim and his invisible angel.

“No,” I said, “I’d like to come with you.”

“Good girl.” Granma reached out and squeezed my hand. “There’s lots to learn if you stick with me. Though Jim could tell you plenty, too.”

Cora pushed through the screen door and stood barefoot and bleary-eyed on the other side of Granma. She munched on an apple. “How were your dreams, Grandchild?” Granma asked.

“Good.” Always verbose with her grandmother, Cora continued, “I had a lot of dreams about seahorses. Did you know seahorses are raised by their fathers?”

“I did know that,” I said.

“It’s true.” Cora squinted straight ahead at her dad. She was not wearing her glasses, and she looked touchingly tiny and fragile without them, as if they served as some sort of sixties-style armor. “Seahorses. I had a lot of dreams about those. One of them was a baby. She flew out of the water. She had the sweetest breath.” She paused to crunch into her apple and went on. “I finally found that shoe of mine that Belly ran away with last week”—Belly, hearing her name, cocked her head—“in Dad’s room, under his bed. It is
utterly
destroyed. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want my leggins to look at Crow Fair this year …”

Jim approached, wiping his hands. He ruffled Cora’s bedhead. I watched his face while he listened to his girl describe her dream “leggins,” and looked for a sign of distraction in his eyes, and listened for a false note to slip into one of his encouraging “mmm-hmms,” and waited for a bit of boredom to sneak into the shape of his smile when he bobbed his head up and down, but all I sensed was interest—a degree of interest that would have made me suspicious, so strange would it have seemed had I ever perceived it in my own sad dad. Dad, as the green photo album had shown, could sometimes summon the strength to grasp at fragments of life as they passed and tuck them away for preservation, for resurrection in some distant future, but it wasn’t as easy for him to engage with such moments as they were happening.

At the end of Cora’s monologue, Jim asked her a couple of follow-up questions: “Did you give Belly your other shoe?” (“Not yet, but I may as well.”) “How much will the supplies for your new leggins cost, about?” (“I don’t know … not too much?”) Then he turned to Granma, who answered his query about her plans for the day half in English, half in Crow, so the only parts I understood were my own name and Cora’s, along with “walk” and “turnip.” She also said “stars,” and I wondered if she was telling him about some predawn celestial happening she had
observed when she ventured outside before sunup, as was—I had come to understand—her habit.

Then it was my turn. Jim tilted his face toward me. “Do you like going out and digging roots, Margie?” His eyes fell somewhere to the right of my body, and I wondered why he had even asked me the question if he was already so disinterested in the prospect of an answer.

“Oh, yes, very much,” I said. I absently drew an X in the dirt between us with my toe. “I feel like I can forget myself and my troubles when I’m doing it.” He just nodded and was silent, and soon I went back inside.

WE WALKED TOWARD A NEW ROOT-DIGGING PLACE
that Granma had in mind. “The world is greening up,” she said. She was right. The prairie was no longer a bland expanse of beige. It was alive with emerald grasses and all kinds of plants I had never seen.

She pointed to the soft, rounded mountains I had first noticed when Bumble and I drove across the reservation. They had an unostentatious beauty, as if they knew they were pretty enough without having to show off a lot of sharp crags or cloud-piercing peaks. There was something comforting in their easy slopes. “Those,” Granma said, “are our Bighorns. We Crows are so lucky to have those mountains here with us. Cora, why don’t you tell Margie about the Bighorns?”

“Mrrrr.” Cora gave a resistant little groan.

“Go on,” Granma persisted. “I want to hear you tell about them.” Granma seemed to be giving Cora a kind of test.

“Basawaxaawúua
—” Cora began to speak in a ringing, authoritative voice that vibrated with her bouncy steps.

“In English, Grandchild,” Granma said. “So Margie can understand.”

Cora started again. “The Bighorn Mountains”—she paused to
suck in a great gulp of air—“are sacred to the Crows, who are more accurately known as the
Apsáalooke
—that means ‘children of the large-beaked bird.’ Belly, c’mon!” Belly was interested in gobbling one of the prairie dogs who periscoped their heads out of innumerable holes in the ground, but she obediently trotted up behind Cora. “No Intestines,” Cora continued, “was the first leader of the Crows after we broke apart from our old friends, the Hidatsa. That was a long time ago.” Granma, closing her eyes, smiled to herself. “No Intestines was just a teenager then, but he knew we needed to find a new place to live, and he led us on a long journey in search of it. He knew when he saw tobacco seeds, that would be the sign that we had come to the right place. Good girl, Belly.” She reached down to stroke the top of Belly’s freckled head. “No Intestines was 117 years old by the time he found these Bighorn Mountains. He climbed the highest one, Extended Peak. When he was up there, he had a vision. He saw that the tobacco seeds he had been searching for were lying right at the base of that peak. He saw them shining like stars. He knew then that he had brought his people to the place where they belonged. That’s why the Crows are here today, and that’s why the Bighorn Mountains are the heart of our world.”

Granma looked as though she might explode with happiness. Cora, too, was deeply pleased. “That’s a fantastic story,” I said.

“But it really happened,” Cora said. She turned toward me and her eyes had a dreamy look behind her spectacles. “The tobacco seeds were shining like stars.” I could tell that was her favorite part. It reminded me of my orange blossoms, which had also always shone like stars for me—white scented stars at the heart of what had once been my world.

“And that’s why,” Granma said, “if you really want your prayer to be heard, it helps to burn some tobacco and let the smoke rise up to the stars. Tobacco and stars are very connected.”

“I don’t have any tobacco!” Cora said.

We came to a rocky spot similar to the one where Granma and I had dug. Cora had her own root-digging stick, which was much like Granma’s. She set about digging straight away, and we followed her lead.

I thought about the man named No Intestines. I imagined him on the mountaintop when he had his vision. His expression must have been one of absolute enchantment, and of relief, because the long journey was finally over. Maybe he had even wept and smiled at the same time. I could see his face. He had a vertical line between his ecstatic eyes—the mark of all the hardships he and his people had endured before finding the Bighorns. Yes, he had a vertical line between his eyes, just like Jim. And I realized I was imagining him
as
Jim, with Jim’s hands and Jim’s sideways gaze. Then I accidentally snapped off the entire bottom half of a root with my spade. “Ohhh,” I moaned.

“What is it, honey?” Granma plopped down on the dirt and rested with a freshly dug root in her lap. She stretched her legs out in front of her and winced. I heard her knees pop. Cora was digging in a distant patch, and I could barely hear her flutey voice trilling
“A-ho, a-ho.”
I sat close to Granma with the broken root in my hand.

“Granma.”

“Yes, Margie, what’s the matter? Getting tuckered out?”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just, something’s on my mind.”

“Yes, I can see that, honey. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I—it’s hard for me to say—I don’t know what to say, really. It’s just—” Granma laid her digging stick on the dirt. She looked as if she had all day and night to listen to me ramble, and that made me feel guilty for being so hesitant. “It’s just Jim,” I blurted. “I worry. I worry that I’m an intruder here in your home and that—that he doesn’t like me.” I glanced at
Cora, who was, thankfully, immersed in her work. I would have been embarrassed had she seen my tears.

Granma shook her head. “Margie! Honey, how could you say that now? We are all enjoying you so much here. Of course Jim likes you. It’s possible that, at first, he may have thought having you come here was another one of my funny ideas—it
was
my idea, did you know? I’m the matriarch after all, and what I say goes.” She winked. “So, Jim was probably surprised—why would we hide somebody in trouble with the law? But when I learned just
why
you were in trouble, I was intrigued. I wanted to meet the person who had those kinds of feelings about animals, even if her actions were a bit … unusual. It was the feelings behind the actions that captured my interest. But,” she patted my leg, “that’s all beside the point. I know Jim likes you. What’s not to like?”

“But,” I brushed my cheek with the back of my hand and caught a salty drop, “he never looks at me.”

“What do you mean, he never looks at you?” Granma’s eyebrows raised.

“I mean, never, ever. When we talk, he always looks a little away. Like he can’t
stand
me, or—”

Granma’s eyebrows returned to normal. She nodded and said, very slowly, “Ahhhh,” as if she comprehended everything already. I felt slightly relieved. So she had noticed it, too, I thought.

“Honey,” she said, “have you never been around any Indians before?”

“Well, no. I mean, Bumble is, I guess, a quarter Crow, because of his mother, but …” Again I thought of Jack Dolce, how the long arms of his lush houseplants climbed and stretched all over his sunlit flat, because if he had to bide in a wood and stucco dwelling he would at least bring the feeling of the outdoors inside, how little he cared for the things of the world, like clothes and cars and computers, and cherished the simplicity of his existence, how he adorned his wall with an image of Sitting Bull,
and how much he talked about the earth, sun, moon, and stars. Admittedly, I knew nothing at all about Indians apart from what I had seen in a few Hollywood movies that portrayed them as either feather-bedecked fiends or, conversely, mystical and gentle magicians who could turn the wind. But Jack Dolce seemed like the most Indian person I had ever known—before I’d come to Montana. I told Granma about him, leaving out the depressing detail of our friendship’s demise. “He is an endangered species of a man,” I said.

“Well, that guy sounds interesting, honey, but
we’re
not an endangered species. We’re now one of the fastest-growing minorities in the United States. And most Indians only live ‘simply,’ as you put it, because they’re too poor to do otherwise. Now,” she said, “here’s what you need to understand.” Granma took my hand. “Even though we live in the same country, there are lots of differences, cultural differences, between Indians and”—she paused again, as if hunting for the right word—“non-Indians. There are even lots of cultural differences from one tribe to another, but it’s like this: generally speaking, white people are big on eye contact. Indian people aren’t. You never heard that, did you, dear heart?” I shook my head. “Our grandparents felt it was rude, or invasive, or in some cases even aggressive, to look someone in the eye. So that’s why it seems we aren’t looking at you. And when I say
we
, I mean
we
—I’m sure Cora and I are no different from Jim. After all, I raised him, and he and I are raising her.” Granma was thoughtful. She stroked one five-fingered leaf of the prairie turnip in her lap as if it were an infant’s hand. “Why does it only bother you,” she said, “that Jim looks away when he speaks to you, but not that she and I do?” Her eyes twinkled with some subterraneous mischief, as if just beneath their glossy surfaces there grew sly little roots that grasped absolutely everything.

“I—don’t—didn’t—”

“You didn’t notice it in us? Only in him?” She looked as if she was trying hard not to smile. And then I had the urge to smile, too.

Cora approached with a fistful of the most slender, sleek young roots—the kind that Granma said tasted best. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Good job, Grandchild. These are my favorites. And now I see a patch over there,” she pointed to some faraway purple flowers, “waiting for you.”

“Oh, I get it. I’m not wanted. Humph.” Cora only pretended to be offended. She was playful, bright with the pleasure of root digging, and she sang to herself as she departed.

“Now,” Granma said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “I’m not going to claim to know why this habit of ours bothered you so much in my son and not in Cora or me. But you shouldn’t take it personally.”

“But Granma, Cora doesn’t like me either. I notice it differently with her. She—”

“Shh. Nonsense. Cora just has trouble trusting. Her mother let her down early on. Don’t worry. Just be yourself. Cora will be your friend soon enough. And I think it’s good for her to have you here, to have a young woman around. She’ll always be a
káalisbaapite
, a grandmother’s grandchild, but it’s good for her to know a younger woman’s ways.”

“It’s strange to hear you say that,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t think of myself as a woman.”

“What do you think of yourself as? A She-Bird, like your friend Bumble called you?” Granma’s smile was full now.

“I think of myself,” I answered, “as a girl.”

“You’re a girl as long as you allow life to happen to you. You become a woman when you start living according to your own instincts, your own intelligence, and your own desires. You’re a
woman when you take hold of yourself.” Granma scratched the dirt with her stick. “It won’t be much longer.”