ON A WEDNESDAY in August 2016, Shelly Boyd texted me to ask if I might be part of a special tribute to her late husband, Jim Boyd, to be held at the Native American Music Awards in Buffalo, New York, that September.
Jim had died, at age sixty, of natural causes—of complications from preexisting health conditions—on June 21, 2016, two weeks short of a year after the death of my mother.
I called Shelly and said, “I want to do the tribute. I want to do this for Jim, but I have to take care of my brain. Let me talk to Diane.”
“Oh, Sherman,” Shelly said. “Your wife has veto power over everything, right? Especially when it comes to your health, right?”
Jim had ignored many warning signs in the days before his death. He’d run out of his high-blood-pressure medication and had delayed in getting it refilled. He was serving as the chairman of the Colville Tribal Business Council and was rushing from place to place, working too hard and not getting enough rest. He hadn’t played much music either after entering tribal politics. He’d often promised Shelly that he’d get to the doctor. That he would get more sleep. That he would play more music.
“Yes,” I said to Shelly on the phone. “I will talk to Diane. I will listen to her. I promise.”
Like many men—indigenous and not—I don’t always take good care of myself.
In December 2015, I’d had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor that had grown dangerously large and was intruding on vital areas of my brain. I’d first learned about the tumor in 2007 when I underwent an MRI scan while filming a documentary about my childhood hydrocephalus.
“It’s small,” my neurologist had said about the meningioma. “The size of a pea. Come back in a year and we’ll look at it again.”
And then I ignored that tumor for eight years. And would likely have continued to ignore it if not for the death, by brain cancer, of a good friend in November 2015. Shortly after his funeral, I went in for another MRI and learned that my tumor was significantly larger—about ten times larger.
Three days later, I underwent successful brain surgery. But after five months of steady recovery, and the resumption of my hectic literary job, I started to suffer simple partial brain seizures. My neurologist put me on antiseizure meds and told me to make my life simpler. So I canceled all of my business travel for the next eight months. I vowed to gift myself more silence and solitude. And to spend more time with my closest friends and family. During my twenty-four-year literary career, I’d earned nearly two million frequent-flyer miles and had performed at more than three hundred colleges. I needed to stop. I needed to heal. I needed to step away from the applause, applause, applause. At least, one step away, maybe two.
“I want to do the tribute to Jim,” I said again to Shelly on the phone. “I will call you tomorrow and let you know after I’ve talked to Diane.”
Shelly and Jim and I became friends in 1992 when I met them at the Columbia Folk Festival, being held at a rustic outdoor performance space north of Spokane that was, I think, also a pumpkin patch, Christmas-tree farm, and kitschy country art vendor. My first book had been published only a few months earlier, so I was new to the spectacular randomness and oddness of live performance.
Jim was a Colville Indian musician who’d played for years in local cover bands and a few nationally famous Native American rock bands, including XIT and WinterHawk. But he’d recently gone solo and was playing a personal blend of folk, country, and blues mixed with traditional Native vocables, drums, and cedar flute. Of course, the white organizers put Jim and me, the Indians, back to back on the bill. Jim played first, and I was amazed by his music, especially a song called “Filtered Ways,” which turned an Interior Salish stick-game song into a nostalgic rock ballad about lost youth. Then I stood and shouted my angry and nostalgic poems about my lost youth.
Afterward, I sat at a picnic table, feeling that post-performance emotional letdown (that I would later, thanks to Brene Brown, be able to more accurately describe as a “vulnerability hangover”), and smiled when Jim sat across from me.
“Your poems are cool,” Jim said.
“Your music is awesome,” I said.
Jim smiled. He was so instantly kind and shy. He was certainly one of the kindest and shyest people I have ever known. And, aside from my late father, Jim was probably the most gentle and shy Indian man in my life. In fact, as I type this, I think I was so immediately drawn to Jim because he reminded me of my father.
As Indian strangers will do upon meeting for the first time, Jim and I tried to figure out which Indians—cousins and friends—we had in common. Jim had traveled the world as an air force brat, but he’d also spent many years living in Inchelium, Washington, on the Colville Indian Reservation, a much larger rez, which sat across the Columbia River from my reservation. Jim was an urban Indian who’d gone rez, and I was a rez boy who’d gone urban. Different directions but still the same journey. We knew a lot of the same people, including my mother and big brother.
Then Jim and I talked about music and poetry.
That was the first time I’d ever had a long and detailed discussion about art—and the creation of art—with another Indian man.
Jim and I were also alcoholics who’d recently made the decision to get and stay sober.
So, yes, pretty quickly, I realized that I had a new brother.
“Did you ever think about putting your poems to music?” Jim asked.
“I used to write lyrics in high school,” I said. “But they were like REO Speedwagon love songs.”
“You should write some lyrics,” he said. “Indian lyrics like in your poems. And I’ll put them to music.”
That night, I went back to my cheap apartment in Spokane and wrote these lyrics:
Sometimes, Father, you and I,
are like a three-legged horse
who can’t get across the finish line
no matter how hard he tries and tries and tries.
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like a warrior
who can only paint half of his face
while the other half cries and cries and cries and cries.
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we need to go?
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we have to go?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like two old drunks
who spend their whole lives in the bars
swallowing down all those lies and lies and lies.
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like dirty ghosts
who wear the same sheets every day
as one more piece of us just dies and dies and dies.
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we need to go?
Now, can I ask you, Father,
If you know how much farther we have to go?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,