When repeated enough times, the same story becomes a song.
“Okay,” she said. “So your dad’s cousins, Bill and Tinker and Johnny—they were brothers—and they always slept in the attic. It wasn’t insulated, but I don’t remember how they stayed warm. I guess we had a lot of blankets. I don’t think we had any sleeping bags. And even if we did, they would have been army surplus. And they would have smelled too moldy to use. And sometimes there were mice in them.
“You and Johnny had the same birthday. You shared a cake once. You weren’t happy about that at all. You cried and cried.
“Tinker fought in Vietnam. It took him a while to get okay with that.
“Eugene and Leonard and Sam were brothers, too, and your dad’s cousins, and they lived in the attic sometimes, until Sam went hitchhiking that one day and disappeared. Leonard moved to New Mexico and went to college for twenty years. Eugene still visited all the time, but I don’t think he ever slept in our house again. Not in that old house and not in the new one either. After Sam disappeared, Eugene never really lived anywhere again. And then he got murdered, remember? Shot in the parking lot of the liquor store. Imagine how Leonard feels with two brothers gone like that.
“Stubby—he was your father’s great-uncle—he slept on that twin bed in the hallway. He was small so he fit. You remember him? He always pinched your face and made you mad. One time, when you were three, you called him a Japanese sniper. You were just trying to get him back for pinching you, but Stubby really did look Japanese.
“Lizzie Bee—your father’s grandmother—she slept on an army cot in the kitchen. She had arthritis bad so she liked to sleep near that woodstove. We didn’t have enough wood to keep the fire going every night, but it would stay warm for a while. She used to give you dollar bills. And you saved them all in an old coffee tin. You hid that tin in the rocks behind the house. Somebody found it, though, and stole your money. It was probably one of the attic boys who stole it. But it could have been your dad, too. He was drinking a lot when we lived in that old house.
“Your big sister, Mary, when she wasn’t living with her father in Montana, or running around with some boy, she would sleep on the couch in the living room.
“Your little sisters, the twins, they shared a crib in the bedroom.
“Your dad and I slept in the bed.
“When Mary was home, you slept on the floor beside our bed. If she was gone, you slept on the couch. Sometimes, though, when you knew Mary was getting ready to leave again, you’d sleep on the floor by the couch. And then you’d cry for days after she was gone.
“Your big brother? He slept in the bedroom closet. He was too big for it. He had to sleep curled up like a dog. He always liked to sleep in places that squeezed him. I don’t know why.
“And, oh, you had those night terrors when you were little. You’d wake up screaming and shake the whole house.
“And, yeah, we didn’t have indoor plumbing until ’seventy-two.
“You remember the outhouse? It wasn’t too bad to use it in daytime or in good weather. But it was pretty rugged if it was winter and three in the morning.
“Do you remember how I caught you peeing out the window one night?
“Yeah, you said your dad had taught you how to pee that way so you didn’t have to go to the outhouse in the dark.
“And then, a few days later, I found a bunch of pee stains in the snow under the window and I asked you about it, and you blamed your sisters. That was so funny.
“You didn’t even know your sisters had different anatomy and couldn’t have balanced on the windowsill and peed that far.
“And then that old house burned down. Do you remember that?
“Yeah, I was sorry about leaving that old house. And I was happy when we moved into the new HUD house. But I loved that old house, too. Remember the pharmacist at the clinic—the white guy? French name, I think? Very handsome?
“He took a photo of the old house burning, but there was this optical illusion that made it look like the new house was burning, too?
“Yeah, two house fires at the same time. That was us.”
Ten days after our mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, we learned that she was also afflicted with small-cell lung cancer.
Terminal cancer, the doctor said. She had only weeks to live.
She had not smoked since she’d stopped drinking.
But our father had puffed on cigars for decades.
Can cigar smoke cause small-cell lung cancer?
Yes.
Can secondhand cigar smoke cause small-cell lung cancer?
Yes.
In 1987, while a senior in high school, my future college girlfriend, a white woman, measured radon levels in various reservation houses as part of a science project.
Our HUD house had moderately dangerous levels of radon, a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and radioactive noble gas.
Can radon cause small-cell lung cancer?
Yes.
My reservation is also home to two closed uranium mines and a closed uranium mill. One mine, the Sherwood, operated for only a few years and was shut down and cleaned with award-winning thoroughness. The other mine, Midnite, which operated from 1955 to 1981, was simply abandoned and never made safe on any level.
Can uranium cause cancer?
Yes, especially when inhaled as dust.
Gated, barbed-wired, the 350-acre Midnite Mine is now dotted with massive mounds of radioactive waste rock and ore—over thirty million tons in total—and uncounted barrels of various and mysterious chemicals. For years, huge trucks hauled uranium ore through Wellpinit, passing less than a mile from my childhood home, on their way to the uranium mill located on the east side of the reservation. I remember those trucks shedding small rocks and dust as they rumbled past us Indian kids walking, running, and riding our bicycles. Many driveways and roads on our reservation were paved with those waste rocks.
Located only six miles from my childhood HUD house, the mine also contains massive covered and uncovered pits, some more than five hundred feet deep, that are filled with impossibly green and blue wastewater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the flora, fauna, and groundwater near the Midnite Mine are unsafe to eat and drink.