But I mourned. I don’t know if I was mourning my mother
Or if I was mourning for myself or if I was mourning For my cousin’s mourning. Maybe I was mourning everything.
“Nothing makes me hungrier than sadness,” I said.
“I could eat a TV dinner made out of apple strudel,
Salisbury steak, carrots, and grief.” My cousin smiled.
We hugged and shared a half-lipped cousinly kiss,
Then ambled over to the waiting room, where My eternal cousin reached into her tote bag
And pulled out a bag of nacho cheese tortilla chips Like it was a relic worthy of worship—
Like we’d just returned from an ancient vault Where the dead worshipped only crunch and salt.
My cousin and I ate all those chips. We ate the walls And floors. We ate all of the coffins, jewelry, and shawls.
We ate all of the flowers. And we ate all of the air.
Then, for dessert, we ate all of the prayers.
16.
Everything Costs
SITTING IN THE funeral home, with my mother’s body lying in view in another room only twenty feet away, I paid for her coffin and burial and transportation with a credit card.
I had enough cash to pay for all the expenses, but I wanted to collect the Alaska Airlines miles.
The bureaucracy of death. The sacredness of death. The sacredness of bureaucracy. The beauty of frequent-flyer miles.
“Did you know my mother?” I asked the white undertaker.
And yes, of course, he did.
“I talked to Lillian at many wakes and funerals,” the undertaker said. “She was a funny person.”
I’d been to twenty or thirty funerals on my reservation, but I realized that the undertaker had probably been to a hundred or more—he’d buried so many of my fellow tribal members.
No matter how much you think you know about death, there is always somebody else who knows more.
As I signed the funeral home contracts, I thought about the last time I had talked to my mother—the last time I’d talked to her before she had become seriously, and then terminally, ill.
Before she’d gotten sick, I had not seen or e-mailed or texted or spoken to my mother for—I don’t know—three or five months. After all of that silence on my part, not exactly intentional but not at all surprising, she called and left a weeping message on my phone.
“Junior,” she said. “I know you blame me for everything, but please talk to me.”
A week later, I called.
“What’s happening on the rez?” I asked. I didn’t ask her about the weepy message she’d left. I didn’t want to encourage her dramatics. I knew her tears had been lures.
“Oh,” she said. “We had a funeral yesterday.”
“Who died?”
She said the name. I remembered him. An old Indian guy who used to work forestry. I knew him better thirty years ago. I knew his kids twenty years ago. Didn’t know his grandkids at all.
“How’d he die?” I asked.
“Heart attack.”
I remembered when my mother used to cook for almost every funeral and wake on the reservation. Some other folks took over that responsibility after my mother got too old.
“That other family cooks now, right?” I asked my mother. “Instead of you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’ll cook for my wake and funeral when I die.”
“That’ll be weird,” I said. “They hate me.”
“That’s okay. They love your brothers and sisters.”
I laughed.
“And besides,” she said. “They’ll feed you good anyway. You know that’s how it works.”
The unwritten rules of tribalism. The inherent responsibilities. The silent acceptance of duty. The endless social legacy of a people who’ve spent most of their existence living at a subsistence level.
Taking care of one is taking care of the many. And vice versa.
“Remember that time in high school,” I asked my mother, “when I slid on ice and drove into the ditch?”
“Which time?” my mother asked.
Another truth: If you live in a wintry climate and are too poor to afford good tires, then you will often hit the ditch, hopefully at low speeds.
“That time by the dump,” I said. “When I was daydreaming about winning the lottery and just spaced out.”
“Oh, right,” my mother said. “That’s when your cousin pulled you out. You were lucky he showed up.”
My cousin did rescue me and I was grateful to him. But he disliked me so much that he never said a word as he stopped his truck, grabbed a rope out of the back, tied one end to his rig and one end to mine, and pulled me out of the snow. And then he continued to ignore me as he untied the rope, got back in his truck, and drove away.
I am greatly amused by the white folks who believe that being Indian means you automatically fit like a puzzle piece into the jigsaw of your family and tribe. I’m even more amused by the Indians who believe that, too.
“Is there anything else you need?” I asked my mother on the phone.
I wanted to hang up. I couldn’t handle too much time talking to her. I needed to reclaim my separation from her.
“Can you send some money?” she said. “I spent my Social Security on the cable bill and the electricity.”
“I’ll send a check,” I said.
“Don’t forget,” she said,
“I won’t forget.”
“Yes, you will.”
I did forget for a week. Then my mother left another message on my phone.
“Junior,” she said. “We need firewood.”
Except the message was garbled, so I thought she said, “Junior, she breathes fire good.”
So imagine my disappointment when I discovered the truth.
“Oh, man,” I said to my wife. “I thought maybe some woman named She Breathes Fire Good had moved to the rez. That sounds like a Montana Indian name, right? Like maybe a new Crow Indian woman doctor started working at the clinic. Dr. She Breathes Fire Good. That name rocks. I’m gonna write a new short story about a Crow doctor named that. It’ll be awesome.”
I haven’t yet written that short story. I often have ideas for stories I know that I will never write.
But there is a good story in everything.
My mother died of lung cancer even though she had not smoked a cigarette in forty years.
So let me now imagine Dr. She Breathes Fire Good. Let me imagine she somehow diagnoses my mother when the cancer is only one split cell. Let me imagine that Dr. She Breathes Fire Good gave my mother another five years of life. Another ten. Another twenty.
Let me imagine my one-hundred-year-old mother leaving a message for the seventy-year-old me.
“Junior,” she says into the machine. “You better call me. I could die at any second.”
“Mom,” I say back. “I’m an old Indian man. Chances are good I will die before you do.”
But, of course, my mother died first. And my father is dead, too. And, based on health statistics and lifestyles, I would bet that I’m going to outlive my reservation-based siblings as well.
It’s a morbid thought.
But it’s not inaccurate.