At that New Year’s Eve party, I raced up the stairs, whipped open the door, expecting to stab the men attacking my father, but was surprised to see he was playing a rough version of rugby, wrestling, boxing, and one-on-one Nerf basketball against an Indian friend—one of those guys nicknamed Bug or Mouse or Poochie. My father and his friend were drunkenly laughing and bleeding from various cuts and scrapes. They were unholy clowns. Dozens of partygoers were cheering and making bets. Nobody noticed me. I wasn’t scared as much as I was confused.
Then my father and his friend, locked in a violent embrace, wrestle-staggered toward me. I froze. And I would have likely been knocked over and maybe badly hurt, but some conscientious drunk pulled me out of the way. And I watched as my father and his friend pulled and pushed each other through the open basement door—the door I had left open—and tumbled down the thinly carpeted staircase.
Fearing they had killed themselves, I ran to the top of the staircase to see them, even more bloody and bruised, weakly laughing in a two-man pile on the basement floor. They were too drunk and injured to stand, so they soon fell asleep still wrapped in each other’s arms.
Meanwhile, my mother was playing poker against a group of other Native women.
“You’re cheating me,” my mother screamed at Birdie, a Spokane Indian woman who was not much bigger than me.
“No, Lillian,” Birdie said. “I don’t know how to play. I’m not cheating. Teach me how to play.”
My mother screamed again and punched Birdie in the mouth.
Birdie grabbed her face and wept.
My mother punched her in the forehead.
Then Birdie wailed like a rabbit being killed by a hawk. She was only bruised and bloody, but her pain still sounded like a death cry,
“Why did you hit me?” Birdie howled. “Why? Why? Why?”
I remember the blood ran between Birdie’s teeth like water flowing around river rocks.
“Lillian, why did you hit me?” Birdie wailed. “Lillian. Lillian.”
I was terrified and turned to run back downstairs. But somebody picked me up, carried me to the master bedroom, and threw me onto the bed, where a dozen other Indian kids were already wrapped around one another like a frightened litter of pups.
I found my little sisters in that dark scrum, and we held hands until we fell asleep.
At dawn, my mother woke my sisters and me. My big brother stood at her side. I don’t know where he had slept that night. In his room? At our cousins’ house? In a tree in the woods behind our house?
“Wake up, wake up,” my mother said. “We’re leaving and we’re never coming back.”
Exhausted, terrified, my siblings and I followed our mother outside to the car. We all piled into the backseat—without seat belts, kid seats, or any other kind of safety—as Mom started the engine and sped us away from our HUD house.
She cursed our father as she drove.
She also sang Christian hymns.
She sang ancient Spokane Indian songs that sounded like each note was filled with ten thousand years of grief.
Our mother drove us to Chewelah, Washington, the small white town north of the reservation where she was born. In her most desperate and lonesome moments, my mother often returned like a salmon to her place of birth, which had been a Spokane Indian gathering place in earlier centuries. Once in Chewelah, she pulled us out of the car and into a diner. We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger—the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.
Then my mother ordered us into a back booth and called for the waitress.
“Pancakes and bacon and orange juice,” my mother ordered. “For everybody.”
The white waitress looked at us four Indian kids still dressed in the clothes we’d slept in. And then she stared at me.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
I wiped my face and looked at the red glow on my fingers.
“His nose bleeds when he’s heated up,” my mother said.
It was true. But the waitress had her doubts.
“Did somebody hit you, baby?” the waitress asked me.
I thought about lying. I thought about blaming my mother. I thought about telling the waitress that my mother had slapped me. I thought about being rescued by white people.
But I was more afraid of any white people than I was of my Indian mother.
“My mom saved us,” I said. “She saved us from drunks.”
The waitress looked down at my bare and dirty feet. My mother had dragged her kids out of the house without putting socks and shoes on us. It was winter. But I don’t remember if my bare feet felt cold. They had to be cold. But I don’t trust this particular detail. I don’t believe we left the house with bare feet. There’s no way our mother made us walk with bare feet in the snow and ice. She would not have done that to us, right? I think my mind is adding a Dickensian detail to heighten the narrative punch. I hope our bare winter feet are only a metaphor or simile. I hope it means “Our cheap shoes weren’t much better than bare feet.”
“Did your daddy hit you?” the waitress asked me.
“No,” I said. “It was the other men who hurt us. Mommy saved us from the other men.”
The waitress knelt beside me.
“You can tell me the truth,” the waitress said. “Do you need help, little sweetie?”
“I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”
The waitress brought us our breakfast. Then she said that she’d pay for it when my mother said she didn’t have any money. And then, as we prepared to leave the diner, that kind waitress needed to help us even more.
“You take these kids somewhere safe,” the waitress told my mother. “Don’t go back to the place you ran from.”
I don’t remember my mother’s response to that waitress. I can only imagine my mother’s desperation and fear. She’d wanted to escape. She’d wanted to rescue her kids. But where could she go? Was there a place where she and her kids could be safe? Has there ever been a place in the United States where a poor Native woman and her kids could be truly safe? She had no money. She had no knowledge of family shelters. Did those even exist in the early 1970s? She must have debated her options. She knew that Indian children were often taken from their families for the flimsiest of reasons—as a late twentieth-century continuation of official government assimilation and termination efforts. Split up, separated, we kids would be sent to foster homes, where we’d be in potential danger. We might be sent to the last Indian boarding schools, where we would definitely be in danger. Our mother had already lost us once to Social Services. A second time might mean she’d lose us for good. She couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t trust any white officials. She had to go home.
So my mother drove us back to the reservation. Back to our HUD house. Almost all of the partygoers were gone. My father, scratched and bloody and bruised, was asleep alone in his bed. My mother and my siblings and I crawled into bed with him.
We slept all day and long into the night.
At some point, my mother woke alone and cleaned the house. Then she woke us, her children, and promised us that she would stop drinking booze that very second and would never drink again.
My mother was a liar. She broke many promises over the coming decades. But she kept that greatest of vows. She was sober for the rest of her life.
And that’s why I am still alive.
2.
Sacred Heart