Sarah Stafford, age twenty-two, having become accustomed to the movement of the boat, felt dizzy stepping onto the earth. It seemed to her years since she had left England; with the boat’s first motion forward, the land’s first tilt, she had left behind the idea of the world, and it had been oddly comforting to her. She had grown to love the oceans of blue and lavender and pewter.
Now, landing here, she could scarcely believe that this was the dream that had propelled the tiny ship forward: paradise. How the idea of paradise must have varied among the one hundred and fifty tossed through the water on the courageous
Godspeed
. Now they were here. So this was paradise: a land you could not stand on, a tangle of trees. All right, then, she thought. But it was not all right. It seemed far, far away from anything she had conjured. Her children clung to her skirt. Some of the men shouted. Others laughed with delight at their first sight of the New World. Some sighed as if with a lover. Her children began to cry. A dark shape rose in her.
My mother moves her feet across the polished floor—one, two, cha-cha-cha.
“Miami Beach,” Grandpa Sarkis sighs, wiping sweat from his forehead. “There are those pink birds that stand on one foot,” Lucy says, pointing to the picture on soiled newsprint. “Flamingos,” her mother says to her.
“And blue dolphins,” Christine whispers.
“I’ve heard that at the hotels in Miami Beach,” the father says, “men dressed in w hite bring cushions out for you so that you can sit by the pool. And just for signing a paper they will bring you banana and strawberry drinks with parasols in them.”
“Really? Parasols!” my mother says.
“Oh, yes,” her father nods solemnly. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
The next time I heard from my brother, he was in Fall River, Massachusetts, where he continued to name names. “Johns-Manville,” he wrote on the back of a postcard picturing the house of the famous ax-murderess, Lizzie Borden, “was fully aware of the hazards of asbestos in the 1930s but actively suppressed the information, making ‘a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others, to take no protective or remedial action.’”
This is the part of the story Grandpa hated to tell: It was a cold night. Ice was already thick on the creek called Wounded Knee. The crystalline trees seemed to bend further and further into the earth. It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
A white flag hoisted at the center of the Indian camp promised to the white man that there would be peace, harmony, safety. But the men with faces like snow moved into the camps anyway, hundreds of them, in great drifts like sorrow.
“Everywhere the Indians are dancing,” the men said, as they came nearer and nearer, mistaking the Ghost Dance for a rite of war, not noticing the white flag, not noticing that women, too, danced side by side with the men. “We begged for life, and the white man thought we wanted theirs,” Red Cloud cried.
The soldiers demanded the Indians’ guns, searched their tepees, spilled food from bowls, tore animal skins from sleeping children. Women screamed. Yellow Bird blew an eagle-bone whistle and told his people not to fear—they would be protected by their Ghost Shirts.
The soldiers found about forty old guns, but not Black Fox’s, which he carried under his blanket. The women chanted and cried. And seeing this, all of this, Black Fox took out his gun and fired into the line of soldiers he hated.
Immediately the troops retaliated, shooting at point-blank range at the unarmed Indians. Some Indians had knives or war clubs and fought hand to hand for their lives. At this time another troop positioned up the hill joined in—firing nearly fifty rounds a minute into the women and children who had gathered together and were standing off to the side.
Yet another ring of soldiers killed those who tried to escape into the hills. From four sides the white men fired. Within minutes hundreds were dead. Women and children who attempted to escape by running up the dry ravine were followed and slaughtered. Their bodies afterward were found for more than two miles. A few survivors, mostly children, hidden in the brush, were told they had nothing to fear. Little boys who crept out were surrounded and butchered.
Later, a member of the burial party said that many of the women were found dead with their shawls pulled up over their heads, covering their faces in that last second as the soldiers raised their guns and took aim.
They were buried in a mass grave. Most were naked. Souvenir hunters had taken the bloody Ghost Shirts from their backs. Soon after the massacre was complete, a great blizzard swept over the Plains and covered the dead with snow. It was hard to get some of them into the grave, frozen as they were into the various grotesque postures of violent death.
It was New Year’s Day, I89I.
If you had listened carefully, you could have heard through the snow, some distante away, a chorus of auld langsyne.
“It was so thick on the engine-room floors that we used to walk through it like snow.”
Bill had been a welder at the shipyard. He sat with us now at dinner. He was gaunt and haggard and he gasped for breath. My father put food on his plate.
“Please eat,” Dad said in a whisper.
“They gave us asbestos clothes to wear for protection. In ‘7 2 they started paying us dirty money to work in certain areas.”
“I’ve got people dying here every two weeks,” the business agent for Local 24 said, Fletcher told us.
“Please try to eat something,” my father said.
He was dying from a disease called mesothelioma.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
Black tlk
“Johns-Manville,” he carved into a postcard, “made a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others.”
“A. H. Robins, manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device.”
“You sip these incredible drinks through a straw,” Grandpa Sarkis says, “and the men dressed in white dinner jackets pass out cards for bingo. You can play bingo all afternoon in the sun if you want—or put your chips on the Wheel of Fortune.”
“The white man shall never kill me. If they try to, it is they who will die. They will fall down as if they had no bones. They will suffocate in a great landslide. They will be burned by an enormous wall of fire. They could put bullets through me, they could chop me up into little pieces, they could burn me until I glittered in the palm of their hands, and still I would live.”
“We used to walk through it like snow. We walked through drifts of it to do our job. Later some of the children got it, too—from playing with our work boots or sitting on our laps.”
From Detroit he sent me a postcard of the Ford plant. Only my address appeared on the back.
The ceremony of burying the dead is ended with tears, wailing, howling, and macerations. They tear the hair, gash the skin.
“Greetings from the Land of Lincoln,” the front of the postcard reads in bright red letters, the famed log cabin in one corner, a dark silhouette in the other. “Dow Chemical,” my brother scrawls. “Much evidence that Dow knew as early as the mid sixties that exposure to dioxin (Agent Orange) might cause serious illness, even death, but withheld this knowledge and continued to sell to the Army and public.”
I have read a hundred times the messages he has scribbled on the backs of these cards. I have looked into the eyes of the fisherman for help, stared at the lobsters he holds to the sky like children. I have read and reread my brother’s long litany of betrayal and pain: DLS, asbestos, Agent Orange; Lilly, Johns-Manville, Dow Chemical. They lie like scars on my tongue. Then silence—nothing more—a horrible stillness.
There in the distance another Fletcher rises out of murky water. He crawls onto the shore clutching a bayonet. He claws his way into the thick bush where he lies shivering. It could be anywhere: Argentina or Chile, Vietnam or Cambodia. He sits up. It’s Fletcher all right. He is hunched over and counting something. Sweat collects on his forehead. He wipes it away with a filthy sleeve. Wasps gather around his head. He tries to bat them away, but they keep coming and coming like helicopters in the endless night. Waves of nausea overcome him. His boots are golden with vomit.
My brother looks so different forced into the brutal postures of war. I barely recognize him at all. He is covered with sores. His legs seem longer, larger somehow. “Best for running, Vanessa,” he whispers through the wide leaves. He tears a handful of leaves from a tree to wipe his mouth and brow. Patches of brow n and gray and green have grown on his arms. His skin looks tough like a lizard’s or snake’s. A second skull has grown around his head, hard as a helmet. His insect eyes bulge red.
He has become the kind of person who wants only to survive, only to stay alive. “Nothing else matters, Vanessa,” he shouts through the thick foliage. A monkey screams. More planes come. A tarantula is stunned motionless on a banana leaf. The air is filled with snakes. He begins to shake uncontrollably. He does not know where he is.
Trees burst into flames as he watches them. He hears drums, he thinks, in the distance, but perhaps it is his own heart he hears. He closes his eyes. His lids are thick. He covers his face. “You could not do it without the drugs,” he says. “No one could.” He thinks someone injects the high white clouds with poison. He tries breathing into his hands to keep out the fumes. The clouds mushroom and explode, red and black, igniting the sky. “The sky is burning, Vanessa,” he says. He laughs hysterically. His shoulders move up and down frantically as if he were shrugging over and over in fast motion. He is drenched in sweat. He turns suddenly. The brow n rice in barrels looks dangerous to him. The sandal of a child makes him weep with fear. Urine flows down his pants leg. “Vanessa,” he says, “help me. The sky is burning.”
“Fletcher, get up,” I try to say. “That lump, over there,” but I cannot get the words out fast enough, “is a grenade.” If a telegram comes I w ill not accept it. If a telegram comes I will tell them to send it elsewhere.
Preferring no thoughts to these, I close my eves, but the fear follows me.
“Fletcher,” my mother calls, wandering into the lining room of our enormous house in Connecticut one July afternoon years ago. She seats herself in the center of the floor. In the silence she feels the room betraying her.
“I think we’d better get rid of all this,” she says miserably and motions to the objects that surround her. It’s so crowded, and everything is always moving. She shows him the melting legs of the coffee table, the heavy curtains rustling in the windless air, the stereo that seems to slip from one radio station to the next without anyone touching it. The lamp and the piano chatter. There’s whispering among the Waterford. Fletcher’s eyes are wide. My mother’s perceptions are so real that my brother actually sees the furniture huddling in collusion. The pillows seem to be breathing, in the shrinking room, before his eyes.
“And this rug, too,” she sighs, “and these vases—I never wanted them.” Now the room seems impossibly cluttered. Fletcher can’t believe we ever lived in it.
“And these paintings,” he shouts, looking at my mother, then back at the heavy brushstrokes.
“And this couch.”
“And the candles,” Fletcher says.
“And all these plants,” my mother says, gasping for air, and my brother, too, begins to cry.
The enemy is everywhere. It is the chaise longue, it is the love seat.
“Help me, someone,” I whisper, closing my eyes in an attempt to dissolve the images with darkness, with words. “Help.”
“Who are you?” I ask, squinting, my head tilted to the side. “Who are you really?”
“Why? What does it matter? How could it help?”
“Because I love you.”
“You love me? Love yourself first.”
“Please, Jack.”
“Don’t cry,” he says. “Keep going. There’s no turning back now.”
She reaches her arm into the present, into my apartment here in New York. “I always knew you were strong, Marta, but this—”
She hands me an apple.
“bat this,” she says. “Eat this.”
“Fool Dog. Three Fingers. Wolf Necklace. Dead Eyes,” my brother writes across the last postcard, which pictures Bear Butte in South Dakota.
“Eight miles from Fort Meade,” the postcard states in fine print, “is Bear Butte. It can be seen from a hundred miles away. The Teton used to camp on this flat-topped mountain to pray. Here they would wail for the dead of whom the stones are tokens.”
The day my mother turned eighteen and was awarded a full scholarship to Vassar College and my Aunt Lucy was more or less settled, having become engaged to the life-insurance salesman and on her way to a career in nursing, was the day that Grandpa Sarkis announced in the gray kitchen that he was going home.
The sisters looked at one another puzzled, pretending they did not know what he was talking about, although they both knew precisely what he meant.
“But you are home, Daddy,” Lucy said, patting him gently on the back and looking around the room with him.
Already he had changed his name back to the real one, the Armenian one, Wingarian—not Frank Wing, the name he used in the mill.
“I’m going home,” Sarkis Wingarian repeated.
But home, the girls knew, was something only in their father’s head. You could not even find it on the map. He was going back to the old country, now many countries strewn across the continent. He was going to a place where, he imagined, his own life and thoughts of his wife might be erased by some greater suffering.
“In this country there is only work. You work your whole life and for what?” he muttered. “For nothing.” He looked at the seat at the kitchen table where his wife used to sit when she was well enough.
My mother would never see her father again. Only once that I know of did she ask him to come back, and that was right after my birth. I cannot really imagine it—how she found him or what she said or what he said back.