Neither Wolf nor Dog (6 page)

Dan raised his hand slowly. It was a deliberate gesture, calling attention to his desire to speak. He chose his words carefully. “I've been listening here,” he said. “You're right, Grover. It's the white man's way to try and make everything neat. I guess I wanted a white man's book.”

Grover was gratified. His point had been taken. “You do it all like that thing Nerburn read,” he said, “and it's going to be like that New York woman's clothes — all ironed and neat.” Then, to me, he counseled, “You can't be afraid to get things dirty.”

Dan sat hunched over in thought. He bit on the edge of his cigarette and spit out several strands of auburn tobacco. “Yeah,” he said slowly. His thoughts were still forming. “I guess we should do it the Indian way.”

I didn't know what “the Indian way” was. It sounded ominously unformed, and I had invested a great many hours in the shoe box and its contents. I started to protest. Dan silenced me. He turned and began walking slowly up the steps. “Listen to Grover,” he said.

Grover picked up the cue.

“Forget the speeches,” he said. “You'll get speeches. The old man is always giving speeches. Has been ever since I've known him. Get the rest of it.” He stopped on the top step and spit once into the dust. “Think about Fatback.” He nodded his head toward the dog and grinned.

Fatback kicked twice in the throes of some dog dream, let out a blubbery wheeze, and settled contentedly into her hollow of dirt.

“That's how you should write it,” he said. “Just tell the story.”

I
t took me a while to get over my anger at Grover's airy dismissal of my literary method. I had worked too hard, too long, to take it in stride. Still, Dan, who had spent years collecting those shoe boxes full of thought fragments, seemed decidedly indifferent to our change in direction. I tried to tell myself that if Dan could absorb the idea of a whole new direction, I should be able to as well. I decided to ask him about it.

The opportunity came in an unexpected fashion. The next morning as I drove up the path to his house I noticed a thin haze of smoke lingering in the air. When I turned the corner
into his yard I saw him standing in front of his stoop tending a small fire with a stick. He was chanting under his breath and throwing something onto the small patch of flames. I drove in cautiously, afraid that I might be interrupting some private ritual. But he grinned and beckoned me over with a hurried gesture.

“Come on. Come on,” he said as I climbed out of the truck. A sweet fragrant odor came from the flames. “Here.” He reached into a small leather pouch he was holding and pulled out a pinch of something. “Put this on the fire.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“You're too late for the pipe. I did that alone.”

He sprinkled some more of the substance on the fire. The rich odor rose and filled the air.

“It's sweetgrass, Nerburn. You've heard of sweetgrass?”

“Yes,” I answered, though I was not acquainted with the intimacies of its usage.

“The Creator loves the smell of sweetgrass. If you smoke the pipe and pray and then put sweetgrass on the fire, he will listen to you.”

I wanted to be involved, but I felt uncomfortable entering into his spiritual reality.

“I'm doing this for you,” he said.

“For me?”

“Yeah. That you will write a good book.”

Things started connecting in my mind. “What are you burning?” I asked, unsure if I wanted the answer.

“All the stuff I wrote,” he said. Then he lifted a small chant into the air.

“You mean all the notes in the shoe boxes?”

“Yeah. I saved some of the good things from Ann Landers. But I burnt all my own stuff.”

I thought he might be joking with me to see my response.
But there was no twinkle, no nuanced pauses, in his manner. He was intent upon his mission. “Come on,” he said. “Here.” He sprinkled a little more sweetgrass on the fire and beckoned me to do the same. “You're going to need the help, Nerburn. Come on.”

I sprinkled the green leaves on the fire. The flames bit at them, then swallowed them into a haze of sweet smoke. Dan chanted a few more words. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Those pages had been my book and that book had somehow been my hope. I stared into the fire, numbed, like someone whose house had just burned down.

Dan was positively cheerful. “This is good,” he said. “Grover was right. This will be better.”

I didn't answer. What I saw in my mind's eye was the loss of several months worth of work. And worse, the whole burden of the project now fell on me. Dan's words no longer existed, except insofar as I could extract them from him and get them down in a meaningful fashion.

Dan must have been following my thinking on his own. “It's not the end of the world, Nerburn. You're a good writer.” He sprinkled more sweetgrass on the fire. The wind blew the smoke around my legs like a playful kitten. “Here. Put some more on. We need to make a strong prayer.”

Halfheartedly, I dropped more sweetgrass into the diminishing flames. Cheap metaphors of dying embers of hope filled my mind.

“You're thinking, not praying,” he said. He raised his voice in a lyrical, rhythmic chant. I stood silent, watching the crumpled edges of several stubborn pieces of paper as the flames crawled their way up and curled them into ash.

I waited what I hoped was an appropriate time before speaking. “So what do we do now?” I asked.

“Grover was right. It's all inside of me. We'll do it the
Indian way. I'll make talks and you watch and listen. Then you just write it down.”

“Oh.” It didn't seem that simple to me. But Dan was as lighthearted as a child. I had a sense of the burden those boxes must have been to him, filled with the best and deepest of his own thoughts, closeted away in a dark corner of his house from which they might never emerge except to be burned in an anonymous fire in the event that he died before finding a way to give them voice.

Now he had burned them himself. Now I was the box. Now he was going to fill it again.

“H
ere. Smoke with me,” Dan said. We were sitting on his front stoop listening to the larksong and the keening of the morning wind.

I had always been uncomfortable taking the pipe when it was offered to me by Indian people. It was not that I didn't want to smoke with them. I wanted to do so desperately. But it somehow did not seem to be my place. I was so attuned to the “wannabe” syndrome that I tried to stand back, putting myself last at the table, as it were, so I didn't seem to be feeding hungrily at the trough of Indian values because of the emptiness of my own inner life.

“Here,” he said again, holding the stem toward me. There
were just two of us. It was a private, intimate act; he did not have to offer it if he didn't want to. I took the pipe.

I smoked several puffs, cupping the smoke with my hand as he did, forcing it toward the ground, then the sky, then around my head. Then I handed it back.

He puffed several times more before it went out.

“You need to understand this, Nerburn,” he said. All levity was gone from his voice. “You're not a good liar.”

“No, never have been.”

“I know, because I see how bad you lie.”

I flushed a bit. I didn't think I had lied to him. And old people always scared me when they made observations like that. It was as if they had a second sight that allowed them to see more clearly.

“Have I lied?”

“Not in words. Only by silence.”

“By silence?”

“Yes. Silence is the lie of the good man, or the coward. It is seeing something you don't like and not speaking.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“You were mad the other day when I burned those words of mine. You were angry at Grover, too. You thought you had done good work. You didn't think Grover knew what he was talking about.”

“You're right,” I said. “I guess I'm easier to read than I thought.”

“You are. So don't lie to me again.”

His manner was authoritative and final. I felt like a small child being scolded. I waited for him to say more, but he had spoken his peace. I was left with the echo of his reproach floating like smoke around my head.

He occupied himself with emptying and disassembling the pipe according to some private rituals. It was as if he no longer
knew that I existed. I sat there next to him, half watching, as he wrapped it gently in a pouch of some soft animal hide.

When he was finished, he spoke again. His tone was formal. “We have smoked together. It is not a joke. You have made a promise to me not to lie with your words or your silences. It will not be easy for you, because you think you aren't a liar. You will have to watch closely. That's why we have tobacco. It makes us look hard for the truth.

“Remember when I told you to bring tobacco and to offer it to Grover? Did you see how he changed?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The tobacco was why. The tobacco is like our church. It goes up to God. When we offer it, we are telling our God that we are speaking the truth. When Grover took the tobacco from you, he was telling the Great Spirit that he would do the best he could.

“Wherever there's tobacco offered, everything is
wakan
— sacred, or filled with power. When you gave Grover the tobacco, he had to stop bullshitting. Now he's promised the Great Spirit that he will help. It doesn't have to do with you or me. It's a promise he made to the Creator.

“It isn't important that you didn't like what he said. I didn't like it either. He knew that. But he didn't care. He had made a promise to speak the truth.”

I felt sheepish and ashamed. The simple rectitude of Dan's words made my concerns about wasted work seem tawdry and fraught with self-interest. But Dan was no longer concerned with redirecting me. His thoughts had taken wing, and he was ruminating on larger issues.

“You know,” he said, “That's a lot of why we Indians got into trouble with the white man's ways early on. When we make a promise, it's a promise to the Great Spirit,
Wakan Tanka.
Nothing is going to change that promise. We made all these
promises with the white man, and we thought the white man was making promises to us. But he wasn't. He was making deals.

“We could never figure out how the white man could break every promise, especially when all the priests and holy men — those men we called the black robes — were involved. We can't break promises. We never could.”

He picked at a loose splinter on the side of his step.

“It's really kind of funny,” he continued. “We didn't always agree with the religion the white man brought. But there were things in it we could really understand. Like the Communion, how that made something sacred whenever it happened. That was just like our tobacco. And the way there were vows, like for marriage. We had vows, too. We had them for everything. A lot of them were private — we didn't need a priest to make them happen. But they were real. They were promises to the Creator to do something.

“So we thought we were seeing the same thing from the white man. Especially when he swore on the Bible or used the name of God to make a promise.

“But I guess it was a lot like their church. It was only important on some days. The rest of the time it didn't matter.”

Dan cradled the pipe bundle on his lap like a baby.

“Listen, Nerburn. I'm not trying to say bad things about you and your people. I'm just trying to tell you how it was for us. I hope you don't get mad.” He seemed to have completely forgotten his concern with my veracity.

“No, Dan,” I said. “I'm not mad. I'm just listening. You've got every right in the world to be mad.”

“You're a good boy,” he said. “That's the trouble. Our whole people were ruined by your whole people. But there are good people in the middle. There always have been. We used to help settlers. They would help us. We thought we could all live together. But we were so different.”