Bobby crouched with his tray, as if he were in the starting blocks preparing for the hundred-meter dash. I remember looking at his legs, tensed in anticipation, and marveling at his muscular calves. He was a skinny, malnourished kid, but even at his most hungry, he ran faster than everybody in the school. And, as he ran, Bobby would slap his ass and neigh like he was the jockey and the horse. I wonder now what kind of amazing athlete he might have been if coached and parented and fed properly.
I don’t remember much about the other O’Neal kids—one of the girls was shockingly beautiful even in her ragged clothes and kitchen-table haircut—but Bobby was treated like shit by us Indians. I suppose you’d like to believe that I, as a severely bullied kid who grew up into a reflexively compassionate adult, would have befriended Bobby. That was not the case. I wasn’t physically mean. I never slapped, punched, or kicked Bobby, and I don’t recall ever taunting him. But, after talking to him a few times during his first week at school, I learned to flee whenever he approached. I ostracized him as completely as everybody else did.
So, on that day when my mother packed canned goods into a box meant for the O’Neals, I didn’t join in while singing work-camp songs. Instead, I was angry. It’s not like our family enjoyed a surplus of nutrition.
“Why are you giving them the cling peaches?” I said. “Those are my favorites.” To reiterate, I adored the cling peaches.
In response, my mother quoted a Bible verse. I don’t remember which one. Throughout my childhood, we’d all endured our mother’s periodic Evangelical Christian fervors. She’d quoted hundreds of Bible verses at us, so they all blur together in my memory. If I had to guess at what she’d quoted while packing canned food for the O’Neals, I’d go with Matthew 7:12. And now, since I realize those canned goods had probably been given to us as charity, it seems that, on the reservation, the Golden Rule could be translated as “Hey, let’s pass this same unopened can of shitty-ass chipped beef around like it’s contagious.”
After my mother finished packing the food, she made me drive with her to the O’Neals’ house, a dilapidated shack that had been abandoned at least twenty years earlier. Half of the roof had collapsed, so the O’Neals had rigged and roped old plywood boards to act as some kind of semi-roof. It certainly wouldn’t be roof enough when the rain and snow arrived.
“What are they going to do for winter?” I asked my mother.
“The pastor will fix it,” she said.
Pastor Rod, the Assembly of God minister on the reservation, also had some serious carpentry skills. Talk about Jesus-like, right?
“Stay in the car,” my mother said.
She carried that box of canned goods to their front door and kick-knocked with her right foot. I was nervous. In those days, I was wary of white people. Hell, I’m still wary of white people. But I have physical strength and money now.
After a few moments, a white man opened the door, Bobby O’Neal’s father, I assume. I wish that I could describe him. But, in my memory of that day, I can see only a pale blur talking to my mother.
I do remember that he yelled and cursed at my mother. I do remember that he pushed the box of food that my mother was holding. He didn’t push violently, but it was enough to make her step back. Then he slammed the door shut and left my mother standing shocked and silent.
She took a deep breath, then walked back to our car. She set the box of canned goods in the backseat, sat behind the steering wheel, and stared into the distance.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“He doesn’t want charity,” she said.
We silently sat for another minute or two. I watched my mother making a decision. I wonder what Bible passages she was quoting to herself. Then she got out of the car, grabbed the food from the backseat, and walked toward the house again.
I was terrified. What would I do if the O’Neal man got even more angry? What if he become more violent? I opened my car door a few inches. On the reservation, I’d been conditioned to throw the first punch, regardless of the enemy’s size and strength. So I was ready to fight to protect my mother. I was, like all of the kids on the reservation, a child warrior.
Holding that box of food, my mother stood at the front door.
In the car, I was almost crying from fear.
My mother lifted her leg as if she were going to kick-knock again.
I opened the car door a little wider to give me more room to quickly exit the vehicle.
Then, without knocking or making a sound, my mother set down that box of food at the O’Neals’ front door and walked back to me.
We didn’t say a word as we drove away. But my mother must have been terrified, too, when she’d approached the O’Neal house for the second time—when she’d decided that she would risk the fact that the white man’s pride and shame might turn into absolute rage.
She tried to find some music on the radio, but reception was even more random in those days than it is now, so we rode in silence for a while.
Then my mother sang.
But she didn’t sing a Christian hymn.
No, she sang her favorite song of the moment, a country ballad by Jessi Colter: “I’m not Lisa My name is Julie Lisa left you years ago.”
My mother had a beautiful voice.
I loved it when she sang.
She kept singing all the way home.
And, yes, I am still pissed that she gave away the cling peaches.
70.
Ode in Reverse
This poem is for everyone in my life—
My sons, friends, mother, siblings, and my wife.
It’s a cuff to the head—a self-rebuff.
Dear ones, I have not loved you well enough.
71.
Construction
SHERMAN,” MY WIFE said after reading this memoir for the first time in its entirety. “Your book is constructed in fabric squares like one of your mom’s quilts.”
“I meant it that way,” I said, but that’s a half-truth.
I realized I had constructed a quilt of words only after I’d read my own damn book for the first time in its entirety.
And then I saw the patterns and repetition of patterns. I saw the stitches and knots. I saw that hands had worked in the same way that my mother’s hands had worked.
Fabric square ad infinitum.
My mother, the quilter, will always haunt me.
72.
Freedom
IN FEBRUARY 1979, I came home from the reservation school and told my mother and father that I needed to leave. I wanted to go to college and become a pediatrician. And that would never happen if I stayed in the reservation school system.
I’d been trying to escape the rez for years. After all, Indian reservations were created by white men to serve as rural concentration camps, and I think that’s still their primary purpose. So, of course, I ran away from home in third grade. I packed a small bag with comic books, peanut butter sandwiches, and my eyeglasses, and made it almost two miles down the road before my mother found me.
After that incident, she often said, “Junior, you were born with a suitcase in your hand.” That might have been a complimentary thing to say to a nomad. But my tribe hadn’t been nomadic in more than a century.
So when I came home that cold winter day in 1979 and asked my parents to let me leave the rez school, I wouldn’t have been shocked if they had denied me. I was only twelve years old and I was asking them to let me abandon the tribe and become an indigenous refugee in the little farm town of Reardan.