Needle & Thread
My brother wanted to bury
My mother with the necklace
Gifted to her by her late husband— Our late father—but my sister says,
“You want us to bury her
With all of her jewelry?
Like she’s Cleopatra?”
We gave away that necklace
To a granddaughter instead.
We gave away other necklaces And rings and beaded medallions To cousins and friends.
We gave it away
Because an Indian’s wealth
Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.
We gave away her clothes
To secondhand stores
And we give her deathbed
Back to the hospice.
But we keep her TV
Because that thing is HD
And epic and awesome.
But we don’t know what to do
With the mounds of loose fabric That my mother kept for quilting.
“There must be five hundred pounds Of blue jeans,” says my sister.
She says, “The only people who need That much denim are Mr. Levi
And Mr. Wrangler themselves.”
I tell my sister we should stitch
Random pieces together
And make five hundred scarecrows.
Then we’ll round up wild bison And tie those scarecrows
Onto the bisons’ backs
Like angry denim and calico warriors.
And then we’ll herd those scarecrowed bison Into big trucks, drive them into Spokane
Or even into Washington, D.C., and release them Into the streets and turn it all
Into a huge political installation art thing That we’ll call Honor Our Treaty Rights, You Criminal White Motherfuckers from Hell.
My sister laughs
And ponders that for a bit.
Then she says, “You’ve got a lot of crafty ambition For an Indian boy who can’t sew for shit.”
23.
How to Be an Atheist at a Spokane Indian Christian Funeral
We stay awake
For 29 hours—
We sisters
And brothers—
To guide our
Dead mother
As she transitions Into something else.
If we are not here,
Near her coffin,
She might rise
And wander from
Sweat lodge to trading post To post office to church In search of us,
And maybe miss the last bus To whatever happens Next. I don’t believe
In the afterlife
But I stay awake
To honor my siblings’ grief
And our mother’s theology.
I don’t believe in God But I pray anyway.
And when it is time To throw dirt
Onto my mother’s coffin,
I say good-bye
Only in my head.
I don’t believe
I will see her again, But I know I will see My siblings because
We are still alive.
So I try to remain Respectfully silent
Even when the Evangelical Indian preacher delivers A graveside tangent
About the Rapture And how true believers Will be lifted into Heaven
At 186,000 miles per minute, At 186,000 miles per minute, At 186,000 miles per minute.
“Oh, you dumb-ass Fundamentalist,” I think.
“The speed of light
Is 186,000 miles per second.”
And then I laugh and laugh Because I imagine
My mother in charge Of her own damn story As she slowly, slowly ascends
Into her Personal Glory.
“Dear God,” she texts.
“I’ll get there when I get there.
I know the path.
Just leave a key
Under the welcome mat.”
24.
Brother Man
I have seen my big brother cry Only twice in my life. The first, In 1977, when our mother gathered us In my brother’s basement bedroom
To tell us that Arthur Tulee— My brother’s best friend who’d, The previous year, moved
From our reservation to another—
Had drowned in the Yakima River.
Upon hearing the news,
My brother fell to the floor Like a skinny stick and wept so hard
That I feared he would aspirate His pain and dry-drown.
The second time I saw my brother cry Was at our mother’s funeral.
As we adult siblings stood together At my mother’s open coffin, With our arms wrapped around One another in a grief-scrum—
Collectively, we five siblings must weigh Sixteen hundred pounds. Shit, We’re a defensive line
Of hunger and insatiable sorrow.
At our mother’s coffin,
My brother shook so violently That I thought he might fall again, A much more dangerous thing now
That he was over fifty years old With gout, arthritis, and fragile hips.
But he leaned against the coffin, Supported by our mother one last time,
And kept his balance. But oh, He cried into his fists
And I cried, too, but more For my brother’s loss
Than for the loss of our mother.
Truth be told, I had only seen her Three or four times a year Over the last decade of her life,
And talked to her on the phone Maybe twice a month. I had become The farthest planet orbiting her But my brother had lived his entire life
Never more than ten minutes away From our mother’s star.
He loved her far more than I did So I knew his grief was larger
And more pure than mine.
I grieved that I hadn’t been loved enough By our cold mother
While my brother mourned her.
I am the brother with money and fame But he is the brother who possesses The most kindness and pain.
I wonder if I will ever see him weep again.
I wonder if I want to see My brother weep again,
I have never known how to comfort him.
I don’t even know how to take his joy,
As when, moments after we’d learned About Arthur Tulee’s death, We got a phone call from Arthur’s mother To tell us that it was a different
Arthur Tulee who had drowned.
My brother’s best friend was alive!
Oh, my brother rose to his feet And slammed himself against
His bedroom door. Laughing, He shadowboxed the air.
Laughing, he punched
As if he wanted to push
The house from its foundation.
Laughing, he thanked God
And he thanked our mother.
And then he stopped
Laughing, threw one last punch Against the air, wiped the tears From his face, and went searching And searching and searching for lunch.
25.
Silence
FROM WINTER 1987 until summer 1990, my mother and I didn’t say a word to each other, not through letters, not on the phone, not through intermediaries, and not in person. She and I didn’t speak to each other when we were in the same house. Not when we were in the same room. Not when we were in the same car.
I tried to break the silence in 1989 when my parents drove to Pullman, Washington, to give me cash to pay the rent for my college apartment.
My father chatted in the living room with Kari, my white girlfriend, while I walked outside to make peace with my mother, sitting in the car.
“You have to talk to her,” Kari had said a few moments before my parents arrived. “She’s your mother.”
That particular argument didn’t quite convince me. After all, Gertrude was Hamlet’s mother, and look how that ended up.
“My mom is crazy,” I said.