Heart Berries: A Memoir(20)

The doctor said she was confident that, given my circumstance, a late-term abortion would be considered necessary. I asked her for the price, and she directed me to the receptionist. It was roughly four hundred dollars, if, after consultation, it was approved.

I called you to ask for the money, and, instead, you pled for the baby’s life. I hung up. I was familiar with the baby’s life, but I couldn’t think of that. I made more calls to foundations for women, clinics, groups, and then called back the same doctor. I was willing to sell my car or anything to have sanity again.

“When does my baby have bones?” I asked.

“This is something we should talk about in the consultation,” the woman said.

I knew immediately that the Thunder Being inside of me had good bones. I thought of the bones from my lineage, which had been cemented inside the walls of residential buildings. I thought of my ancestors. I hung up and drove home.

In the next weeks, our baby in my womb reminded me of my brother Guyweeyo: willful and scared.

He kicked before the doctors predicted he would. He hiccupped each night at eleven.

I believed my mother spoke to our baby in my sleep. I think they devised a way to punish me for even thinking that a Thunder Being inside of me could be bad.

For a hundred days, I vomited. The projection of solids from my body felt like Baby Guy was crawling out of my throat. I heaved until my face became blotchy. We believed it was an allergic reaction, but our doctor said it was blood vessels bursting from the strain of puking so often and so hard. No pill worked against the nausea.

I realized, after looking at my silhouette, seeing our small person expanding my reflection, that pain didn’t burden me. Trying to forget damaged me the most.

Your eye has long since healed. I chose to be lethargic instead of angry in the last months of our pregnancy. Each night, I rested my head in your lap, and you placed your hand on my stomach. He kicked you, and I felt my mother raising her hands to me in the way Salish women do in ceremony, to say “thank you.”

When the day came, I wasn’t sure I was in pain enough, because the baby had conditioned me so well. We went into the hospital anyway, and Casey Guyweeyo was cut out from me, larger than he should have been. His skin is milk, and his body feels electric and unforgiving. He seems like the child my brothers, my sister, and I—could have been.





6


i know i’ll go


I preferred abandoned over forsaken—and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It’s something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can’t afford to think of lack—I’d rather be liberated by it.

Coffee cups run cold when I remember my father. Sometimes my hands shake.

My father died at the Thunderbird Hotel on Flood Hope Road. According to documents, he was beaten over a prostitute or a cigarette. I prefer to tell people it was over a cigarette. I considered an Indian death myself, while walking along the country roads of my reservation, before I really considered life. His death intruded, as I could not fathom being a good person when I came from such misery.

I found newspaper clips about my father. Ken and four men abducted a girl. There aren’t any details. There are documents about his murder and the transitional housing program he was in when he died. He was homeless, and social welfare gave him a hotel room, next to prostitutes and younger, more violent men. There was nothing easy about his memory or what he left behind.

He was an anomaly, a drunk savant. He took his colors, brushes, and stool when he left my mother. It was harvest, and the corn stalks were gold and waving. I was constantly waiting outside on the porch. I ate blueberries and spit out anything too ripe—a purple liquid. I remember staring at my spit on the porch, wondering about waste and if I was hungry.

His hair was black and coarse. He was wearing a baseball tee shirt and jeans covered in rust acrylic.

As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on a page, to impart the story of my drunken father. It was dangerous to be alone with him, as it was dangerous to forgive, as it was dangerous to say he was a monster. If he were a monster, that would make me part monster, part Indian. It is my politic to write the humanity in my characters, and subvert the stereotypes. Isn’t that my duty as an Indian writer? But what part of him was subversion?

Our basement smelled like river water and cedar bough. He carved and painted endlessly in the corners of the room. While I sat in his lap, he taught me our icons. Eagle was Mother, and bolts were Thunder Being, and his circles were the universes. It meant so much to draw a circle well. He practiced and let me watch. I remember when he left, my mother started to paint again. I remember that, while my father tried to draw a circle with his own eyes and hands, my mother used coffee cans. I resisted the iconography and found myself more interested in why Salish work wasn’t true to life.

My therapist asked me to speak to my father and mother in a session. I told my father that a bird is just a bird. A mother is a tangible thing. Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We’ve become too symbolic and never real enough.

My therapist asked me to speak to my mother and I couldn’t.

My father was soft looking sometimes. I liked to sleep in the crook of his neck. He smelled like Old Spice and bergamot. His hands shook when he was not drinking, at his worst. And when I held his hands he seemed thankful. He delighted in my imagination. The grass was always high in our lawn, and he often let me use the hose to fill buckets and wash tires—I pretended it was a snake.