The Lovebird (33 page)

She looked hot and out of breath—partly, I thought, because our subject so excited her. A few strands of her spun silver hair had escaped her bun and hung around her face in a girlish way, an Evelyn way.

“That’s why, honey, when I take roots, or berries, or any plants at all, I’m careful not to take too much. And I always thank her. Jim and Josie are the same when they hunt. We can’t just do whatever we want to her. This is what I want Cora to understand, and remember, and to share when she goes into that other world off the reservation.”

Granma drew her wrist across her damp forehead. “Think of this: if people had never started viewing animals as strangers instead of relatives, as below themselves on some”—she paused—“some imaginary ladder, then there would be no reason today for you and your friends to try to save them or fight for their rights. But people forgot that they and the animals—along with everything else—are so interconnected.”

“You mean,” I said, “like all of a piece? Like stars and tobacco, or the moon and plums?”

“Yes! All these lives—from the littlest plants to the biggest people—are knitted together. It’s just the same as what I do with my yarn, you see? I make a sweater for a baby. It has a body, it has arms, it has a hood, it has a collar, all these different parts, and I make it all with one long, long strand. Yes, I knit it up.

“And this world, Margie, is just like that.
She’s
the yarn. She
knits us up, connects us, holds us together. That’s why we’re never alone, never separate from each other, or from anything that lives.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes. “What sorts of things were you doing in your group, honey?” Granma asked.

“Well, some of it was kind of silly, to be honest …” I hesitated, thinking of how we’d released the birds from Azar’s, liberated lobsters from restaurant tanks, and dumped purple paint on fur coats. I knew how inconsequential those campaigns would seem to most people, yet my heart had been in all of them. I told Granma about some of our exploits.

“It really meant something to you, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It really did.”

“And I think you were right—are right—to feel the way you do about animals. You know,” Granma’s voice took on a tone of fascination, as if she were recounting a particularly provocative episode of her favorite soap, “a magpie once told my aunt her children were in danger. The kids had made their own raft, not a very good one, and were using it in the river, and the magpie called to my auntie and told her about it. Sure enough, when she went to them, the raft had tipped over, and the littlest ones were underneath. She arrived just in time because they couldn’t swim. And, do you know,” she continued in a low, confiding way, “the prairie dogs helped my grandmother after my mother got so sick with drinking and was lost to us all? Grandmother was sad, so sad. The prairie dogs came to her in a vision, and they gave her a message that healed her heartbreak and helped her to move forward. She never told me what they said, but the prairie dogs became her helpers after that.”

“I believe it,” I said. “I think animals have so much to share with us, but most of the time we’re too proud or preoccupied to listen.”

We reached a thicket of tangly trees adorned with hundreds
of scarlet jewels. “Here, oh my,” Granma murmured, “these look good, don’t they?

“But that old understanding,” she went on, “has really almost disappeared, replaced by a very different way of thinking. I first encountered it in the boarding school, this other way of looking at the world. You can’t imagine how foreign it was to me.” She shook her head. “When I was out in the city, working, it was just how everyone thought—that animals and the earth are ours to do with as we wish. I never could get used to it. And nowadays, honey,” she said, popping a chokecherry into her mouth, “even among most Indians, I’m kind of a freak.” She laughed. “There’s not enough connection with the animals or the plants around the rez today. My son and I, we’re not perfect, but we still try to keep some of the old traditions.”

Granma hooked her arm over a branch. “When we see animals as brothers and sisters, we can never abuse them. I’ll bet it was hard for you to see any kind of sadness or abuse. I can tell how much your sensitivity has been a burden to you. You just ache under the weight of it. But it doesn’t have to be that way forever, Margie. Sensitivity can be a gift, too. You just need to find the right way to live, the right way for yourself.”

“I have no idea what that is,” I said. “Or where.” I reached for a few cherries. They were firm and cool in my hand. “I want a feeling of home, but I don’t know how to get it.”

“Part of that is not having your mom. I don’t know where she is, and you don’t have to tell me, but I know she’s not around,” Granma said. “That’s from one motherless girl to another,” she added. “You might feel lost because you don’t have her—but that’s what I want you to know, honey. You have another mother always with you.” She tapped the ground with her puffy sneaker. “This beautiful woman. Go to her, go to her creations, for anything you need, if you are sick, or sad, or when you are happy.”

“But having a real human mother helps—” I felt the old
ladybug who, since her first appearance on a rose corsage, had been the frequent reminder of Rasha’s absence. She began to stir behind my eyes, and I tossed a few cherries into my mouth to distract myself. They were so sour they made the tears come faster, and I wondered how Granma could gobble so many of them in their raw, unsweetened state.

“It does help, sometimes, but how many people do you know who don’t have theirs, and they go on? I don’t have mine, Cora doesn’t have hers …”

I considered Annette Mellinkoff, whose mother had died of cancer, and Jack Dolce, whose mother had abandoned him to run away with the travel trailer salesman from Tucson, and Raven, whose mother had perished in the paragliding accident. There were millions of us.

“But Cora—at least she has that umbilical cord.” The amulet inspired enormous yearning in me. Its very existence had sucked the mystique out of every one of my under-the-bathroom-sink Rasha relics.

“We all have another umbilical cord,” Granma said, “one we can’t see, that links us to the mother of all mothers. It can’t be severed. And everything we do to her, we do to ourselves.” I squeezed a chokecherry until it turned pulpy in my fingertips. I knew Granma was right, and I no longer felt so unorthodox for seeing Mary as a symbol of the earth and all its features, the way I had since I was a girl gazing at the ceiling in church, or for leaving the oyster shells as offerings at Mary’s marble feet back in Little Italy while Jack Dolce stood and shook his head. And I realized what it was he had been missing. He already knew so much about living down close to the earth. But he didn’t know who or what she was. He didn’t know that she was beating in his own heart, that she animated him, that she was the roses in his cheeks, that she was the love—the feminine love—he longed for. I saw that once he understood, he could have her face filled in, and he, in all his bright-hearted brilliance, would be whole.

Granma glanced into her flour sack. We had filled it with a mass of red fruits. “
Look
at this!” she exclaimed. “Yum!”

Back at the house, I wrote him a letter with no return address. “You must fill in the face of your Mary,” I wrote. And I saw why Jack Dolce had so captivated me. We were twins of a sort, alike in that the very thing we had been craving was right beneath our feet—there, all along.

THAT EVENING, CORA WENT OUTSIDE
and practiced her shawl dancing in preparation for Crow Fair. There were lots of different kinds of dances, she had told me. “Fancy Shawl Dancers,” she’d explained, pushing her glasses back professorially, “must keep their feet and their shawls constantly in motion.” She had already shown me her shawl. It was bright pink, emblazoned with roses, and trimmed in long white fringe. “See, it billows out when I dance. I’m supposed to look like a butterfly! Escaping its cocoon!”

Josie had left behind a CD of the Hawk Heart Singers, a local drum group. Cora inserted the CD into her portable player, donned her headphones, and rehearsed on the grass.

She used the small knitted blanket from the back of Granma’s recliner as her practice shawl. An assemblage of multicolored squares, it looked like a whirling stained-glass window. While Granma, Jim, and I watched, Cora spun and fluttered and reminded us, yelling over the drumming in her ears, to imagine her in her regalia, in her “real” shawl, her flared skirt, her moccasins, and her leggins. “Remember!” she shouted. “I won’t be dressed like this! I’ll move differently in my moccasins!”

The sun began to sink and the Bighorns stood blue and benevolent against a pink sky. Grasshoppers had recently come to Crow Country, and dozens of them, delirious from heat and hunger, leapt up with each of her footfalls.

• • •

AFTER DINNER, CORA DISAPPEARED
behind the closed door of her bedroom to continue practicing. Granma wanted to take a long shower. “My hands are so stiff from all that picking today.” She held them up for us, and her fingers resembled the knotty branches of the chokecherry trees, the joints bulbous from years of knitting, picking, digging, and, in her secretary days, typing. “The hot water will help.”

“Come back when you’re done,” Jim said. “I’ll rub them for you.”

Jim and I were left alone in the kitchen, with only the grasshoppers outside to supplement our occasional words. We washed the dinner dishes, put them away. He had come home with a real adhesive bandage on his wound, which was almost healed, but after we washed the dishes he peeled it off. “I figure the fresh air will do it some good,” he said, and I blinked at the rawness of his revealed skin.

Then, sliding shut the silverware drawer, he said, “I brought you something.” He stepped into the living room and returned with a paper sack. I leaned against the sink. It wetted the back of my shirt, but I couldn’t seem to move. “It’s a thank-you,” he said, “for fixing my hand.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t do anything.”

“Yes. You did. You were very kind.”

The paper sack crackled with my anticipation. Jim unveiled a small orange, the first one I’d seen since leaving home.

“Oh, an orange—”

“—It’s just an orange.” Nerves pushed our words on top of each other. “Reminded me of you,” he said. “I imagine, being from Southern California, you must miss having lots of good oranges around all the time.” His usually sonorous voice was the softest and quietest I had ever heard it. “Here. Sit down.”

The grasshoppers whirred. Jim broke into the skin of the
fruit, and its sunlit scent filled the house. He scooted his chair close to mine and then, before I knew what was happening, he slipped a segment into the space between my lips. I closed my eyes in shyness and surprise. I let it rest for a moment on my tongue, and its sweetness suffused my mouth. When I chewed and swallowed, he fed me again.

The entire orange disappeared that way. Each time I felt a piece gently nudging my top lip, I opened for it. I kept my eyes closed and rested my face in my hand, no longer sure if I was at home, or on the prairie, or if Jim’s present had made them one and the same.

“It’s gone,” he said, and the shower shut off in the bathroom with a shudder that shook the house. I opened my eyes. Jim was smiling, looking out the window, and there wasn’t any line at all between his eyes.

11
BUFFALO
(Bison bison)

ON THE MORNING OF THE BUFFALO HUNT
, Josie came to the house with an elderly woman, one who really resembled Granma in spite of the fact that her hair was colored and tidily coiffed, she wore slacks and a polka-dotted blouse, and she had on bright lipstick, which contrasted with what appeared to be a slightly sickly cast to her otherwise comely skin. When she came through the screen door she paused and looked around as if appraising a favorite place she had not seen for a long time.

“Ruby!” Granma said. She embraced the woman tightly.

Ruby was Granma’s older sister. As Granma had explained to me, after their mother had been lost to them the two sisters had led very different lives, but had reconnected as grown women and become close. I could see it in the trusting way they leaned their soft bodies into each other.