Future Home of the Living God(70)

“Huh?”

“Mom?”

“Uh-huh?”

“What will hell be like?”

She’s silent, but she stirs around a little and soon I can tell, even in the dark, I don’t know how, that she has finally risen to consciousness and opened her eyes.

“Did you ask what will hell be like?”

“Yeah, what’s your version of hell?”

“I think, honey, well I sort of think it’s right now. I mean, things always could get worse, knock wood, if they should catch us, but Cedar”—her voice gets very gentle, as if she’s really shocked that I haven’t figured this out—“hell is what’s happening right now, here on earth.”

“I never thought of that, really.” I let the notion settle in. Then I wonder. “Politically or otherwise?”

“By otherwise, you mean everything going backward?”

“Turning around to the beginning. Maybe that’s not the same as going backward.”

“Well, it is for me.” And her voice is so sad, when she says this, beyond tears. Pure loss. The Catholic definition of hell is just that—pure loss. Loss of God. There’s fire too, but I think it is more the metaphysical torment of unknowing. The flames of eternal confusion. So perhaps according to this definition she really is in hell. I am stricken with this, and want more than anything to make my mom feel better. Nothing I can say will really cheer her up. I also realize that she most definitely did not get the gist of my confession, and I do not feel at all that I’ve lightened my shame and guilt. But I can tell her something else.

“Here’s something strange, Mom, please—just hear me out. I have this feeling, as I carry this baby into life, that things aren’t really going backward. Things aren’t really falling apart. All that is happening, even the purest chaos, physical and personal, even political, is basically all right. I know it seems na?ve. You might even say it’s hormones. But the feeling is so powerful that I have to tell you. I am happy. Awful things are happening all around us, true, and I have done the most terrible thing of all, but I am happy at the very pit of myself. I feel this stupid joy. A sense of existence. A pleasure in the senseless truth—we happen to be alive. We didn’t ask for it. We just are.”

She’s quiet, but it is a listening and considering silence.

“That’s all I’ve got to go on, right now, Mom,” I add. “So maybe if you’re thinking of a way to talk me out of it, you shouldn’t.”

“No,” she answers, “I wouldn’t do that.”

Later on, she says, “I really wish that I could feel it too.”

And I say to her, “Mom, when you see this baby, I think you will.”

“I hope so,” she says in a very small, doubtful voice, in the dark.



We don’t talk for a long time after that. But in my mind I answer her, swinging in the blackness, my heart pumping fast with a love that is burning richer and hotter with every fresh new cell of blood, every icy flash of neuron, a love of you, a love of everything. Fierce, merciless, sticking to the world like blazing tar, this love expands. And I’m thinking—of course you will be happy when you see my baby, yes, you will be overjoyed. He is the light of the world!





Part III



October 26

Full of dandelion greens and gas-station ramen, I lounge in a cushy fake-leather desk chair. An attention to my comfort is the only notice I am shown here—no hiding me, no concern about gravid female detention. Eddy sits at the head of the tribal council meeting table. He has won another election in which he did not mean to participate, but opportunities within the chaos were too good to pass up, he said. He is still working on his endless memoir, only there is, he says, a bit more redemption. The meeting table is expanded by the addition of several heavy-duty plastic banquet tables, because there is a crowd here. It is standing room only although we are not in the usual meeting room but on the community college basketball court. Behind him, a hand-drawn reservation real estate map is unrolled across the wall. The land parcels on the map are carefully platted out and colored—green, yellow, purple. Eddy explains that like almost every other reservation, ours was lost through incremental treaties and then sold off in large part when the Dawes Act of 1862 removed land from communal ownership. Some land was parceled out to the Ojibwe, the other land was “excess” and homesteaded out to white people. If the land included lakefront property, it was declared excess with an eye to the growing number of city people who wanted to escape to a cool rustic home during the heat of summer. On Eddy’s map the land owned by non-Indians is yellow. The green is State Forest. The purple is tribal. Most of the map is yellow, some green, a bit less purple. The room is full of tribal members, more are clustered in the doorway, and the halls are stuffed with people too. Nobody says a word. They are waiting for Eddy.

He stands up, and when he speaks his voice is light but resonant.

“Hello, my relatives,” he says. “Every week from now on, we meet, same time and same place. Over the next month you will see this map change. The green parcels can already be colored in—changed directly from green to purple. We have secured state land. The yellow is what we are working on now, and I think we are being reasonable. We’re not taking back the whole top half of the state, or Pembina, Ontario, Manitoba, or Michigan, all our ancient stomping grounds. We’re just taking back the land within the original boundaries of our original treaty. We were all set to conduct a compassionate removal of non-tribal people living on our land at present, but I am relieved to tell you that we haven’t needed to put removal into action. They’ve all removed themselves. The lake-home people have gone back to the Cities. Let us bow our heads and pray for their plight.”