—I already told you, asshole. You gotta forgive your mother.
55.
Sedated
AND THEN, ONE summer night, when I was seventeen, my mother asked me to go find my father. He’d left home a week earlier on a drinking binge. And he had diabetes. After seven days, we had to go looking for him. It was a family rule. We had arbitrarily decided that my father would only begin to seriously endanger his health after a week of booze and bad food. Plus, we’d get lonely for him. So I got into my car and drove from our home on the Spokane Indian Reservation to the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. My father, a supposedly full-blood Coeur d’Alene who had a suspiciously full mustache, had not lived on his reservation since he was a child, but that’s usually where he went to drink. He was always trying to fill some indigenous absence. There were five or six party houses where I would search for him. And then, once I found him, I would have to persuade him to come home. My mother used to exclusively perform this family chore. But once I earned my driver’s license, it was something I was often asked to do. My mother never commanded it, but she also knew I was unlikely to refuse the mission.
So, on that particular summer night, I discovered my father asleep in a chair in our cousin’s house in the little town of Worley, Idaho. He was barely conscious and smelled of beer, vomit, urine, and shit. I didn’t want him to stink up my upholstery, so I walked back out to my car, grabbed the old army surplus blanket out of the trunk, and covered the passenger seat. Then I walked back into the house and tried to fully rouse my father.
Most times, he’d argue with me. He was never a violent man, drunk or sober, but he often deployed a drunk’s persistent, if incoherent, logic that I’d have to overcome in order to get him home.
But that time, when I woke him, my father was so hungover and exhausted that he got into my car without protest. And then, as I rolled down the car windows because of my father’s stench, he tried to drunkenly explain our family history.
“That was the year your mother was addicted to Valium,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
My mother was a recovering alcoholic who’d sobered up when I was seven years old.
“Don’t you remember when she was chewing her lips and tongue all the time?” my father asked. “That was the Valium.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
But I think I didn’t want to remember it. My mother was often verbally cruel and emotionally unpredictable, but she was sober. I would only later learn that even a sober alcoholic can go on dry-drunk rages and sprees. But, in any case, I preferred my angry sober mother to my angry drunk mother. And I hated to think that my mother’s sobriety extended only to alcohol.
“You were little when it happened,” my father said.
“That was when she started sleeping on the couch all the time, right?” I asked.
“No, that was a different year.”
As we traveled through the pine forest, I desperately tried to remember my stoned mother. But I could not. I could not. And then I did.
“Oh, wait,” I said. “I remember when she thought she had MS and she was slurring her words.”
“That wasn’t MS,” my drunk father said. “That was Valium.”
“And didn’t she have a mini-stroke once?”
“Valium.”
“And didn’t she use to wear a blindfold because of migraine headaches?”
“Valium,” my father and I said together.
I drove us into Wellpinit, the center of our world.
“Where did she get the Valium?” I asked.
“I think that white doctor at the clinic was in love with her,” my father said.
“So instead of flowers,” I said, “he gave her drugs.”
“She was in real pain, though.”
“What kind of pain?” I asked
“The pain of being Indian,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
“That’s why I drink so much.”
“You drink so much because you’re a drunk.”
“No,” my father said. “I drink because I’m an Indian. I’m an Indian because I drink.”
I laughed at my father’s bullshit. When I was younger, during my father’s extended alcoholic absences, I would become inconsolable. But, in my teen years, I had come to accept that my father would never stop drinking and would always leave home on binges. In order to survive, I think I’d learned how to love him a little less. I don’t know what my mother did to survive his boozy sojourns but, hey, maybe Valium had been her temporary escape pod.
“How did Mom quit the Valium?” I asked.
“One day, she said she was done with it,” my father said. “And she was. Never took them again.”
“Maybe you should follow her example,” I said. I was never mean to my father when he was sober. But I’d often insult and challenge him when he was drunk. So maybe I never did learn how to love him less. I don’t know anything about my mother’s strategies for loving him. I do know this sad fact: My father was at his most emotionally engaged with the world when he was somewhere between pretty-damn drunk and all-the-way drunk.
“How am I supposed to follow your mother’s example?” my father asked, playing dumb.
“You’re going to have to sober up someday,” I said.
“That’s never going to happen,” he said.
He was telling the truth. My father died of alcoholism when he was sixty-four.
When I turn sixty-five, I’m going to throw the biggest birthday party of my life.
“Daddy, Daddy,” I’ll sing, “I lived longer than you.”
56.
At the Diabetic River
Salmon disappear.
My father goes blind.
He kneels on the bank
Close to the river
So I can wash his face
With the sacred water.
O the ghosts of salmon.
O the ghosts of my father’s eyes.
57.
Reunion
I release these salmon I release
I release my father and mother I release
I release these salmon Into their personal rivers
The river of bitterroot The river of broken bone
The river of stone The river of sweet smoke
The river of blood and salt The river of semen and sap
The river diverted The river damned
I release these salmon I release
I release these salmon I release
O salmon, I release you O salmon, I pray
O Father and Mother O Father and Mother
return to me
return to me
58.
The Spokane Indian Manual of Style
AFTER THE GRAND Coulee Dam murdered our wild salmon, we stopped being Spokane Indians and became a Paraphrase of Spokane Indians.
Our identity has been clarified for us.
We are the Unsalmon People.
We are Unsalmon.
We are Un.
59.
Testimony