She generally used paper diapers with stick-‘em tabs at her home in the Cities, but since she’d been here my mother had shamed her into using washable cloth diapers and sharp pins. The baby wiggled and fought her hands.
“You hear?” King, already out of the car and nervously examining his tires, stuck his head back in the driver’s side window and barked at Lynette. “She was calling you. My father’s mother. She just told you to do something.”
Lynette’s face, stained and swollen, bloomed over the wheel.
She was a dirty blond, with little patches of hair that were bleached and torn. “Yes I heard,” she hissed through the safety pins in her teeth. “You tell him.”
jerking the baby up, ankles pinned in the forks of her fingers, she repositioned the triangle of cloth under his bottom.
“Grandma told you to tell him. ” King leaned farther in. He had his mother’s long slim legs, and I remembered all at once, seeing him bend all the way into the car, June bending that way too. Me behind her.
She had pushed a rowboat off the gravel beach of some lake we’d all gone to visit together. I had jumped into the rowboat with her. She had one son at the time and didn’t think that she would ever have another child.
So she spoiled me and told me everything, believing I did not understand. She told me things you’d only tell another woman, full grown, and I had adored her wildly for these adult confidences, for her wreaths of blue smoke, for the figure she cut. I had adored her into telling me everything she needed to tell, and it was true, I hadn’t understood the words at the time. But she hadn’t counted on my memory.
Those words stayed with me.
And even now, King was saying something to Lynette that had such an odd dreaming ring to it I almost heard it spoken out in June’s voice.
June had said,
“He used the flat of his hand. He hit me good.”
And now I heard her son say, flat of my hand … but good …”
Lynette rolled out the door, shedding cloth and pins, packing the bare-bottomed child on her hip, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.
Grandpa hadn’t noticed, whatever it was. He turned to the open door and stared at his house.
“This reminds me of something,” he said.
“Well, it should. It’s your house!” Mama barreled out the door, grabbed both of his hands, and pulled him out of the little backseat.
“You have your granddaughter here, Daddy!” Zelda shrieked carefully into Grandpa’s face. “Zelda’s daughter. She came all the way up here to visit from school.”
“Zelda … born September fourteenth, nineteen forty one …
“No, Daddy. This here is my daughter, Albertine. Your granddaughter. ” I took his hand.
Dates, numbers, figures stuck with Grandpa since he strayed, and not the tiring collection of his spawn, proliferating beyond those numbers into nowhere. He took my hand and went along, trusting me whoever I was.
Whenever he came out to the home place now, Grandpa had to get reacquainted with the yard of stunted oaks, marigold beds, the rusted car that had been his children’s playhouse and mine, the few hills of potatoes and stalks of rhubarb that Aurelia still grew. She worked nights, managing a bar called the So Long, and couldn’t keep the place as nicely as Grandpa always had.
Walking him slowly across the lawn, I sidestepped prickers. The hollyhocks were choked with pigweed, and the stones that lined the driveway, always painted white or blue, were flaking back to gray. So was the flat boulder under the clothesline-once my favorite cool place to sit doing nothing while the clothes dried, hiding me.
This land had been allotted to Grandpa’s mother, old Rushes Bear, who had married the original Kashpaw. When allotments were handed out all of her eighteen children except the youngest-twins, Nector and Eli-had been old enough to register for their own. But because there was no room for them in the North Dakota wheat lands most were deeded less-desirable parcels far off, in Montana, and had to move there or sell. The older children left, but the twin brothers still lived on opposite ends of Rushes Bear’s land.
She had let the government put Nector in school, but hidden Eli, the one she couldn’t part with, in the root cellar dug beneath herflOOL In that way she gained a son on either side of the line.
Nector came home from boarding school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later, hard to tell why or how, my Great-uncle Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
I wanted him to tell me about things that happened before my time, things I’d been too young to understand. The politics for instance.
What had gone on? He’d been an astute political dealer, people said, horse-trading with the government for bits and shreds. Somehow he’d gotten a school built, a factory too, and he’d kept the land from losing its special Indian status under that policy called termination. I wanted to know it all. I kept asking questions as we walked along, as if he’d take the hook by miracle and blurt the memory out right there.
“Remember how you testified.? What was it like … the old schools … Washington …
Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished.
The same color as water. Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me.
Grandma and, the others were always hushing up the wild things he said or talking loudly over them.
Maybe they were bored with his craziness, and then again maybe his mind blurted secrets from the past. If the last was true, sometimes I thought I understood.
Perhaps his loss of memory was a protection from the past, absolving him of whatever had happened. He had lived hard in his time. But he smiled into the air and lived calmly now, with’ It or desolation. When he thought of June, for instance, she was a young girl who fed him black plums. That was the way she would always be for him. His great-grandson, King junior, was happy because he hadn’t yet acquired a memory, while perhaps Grandpa’s happiness was in losing his.
We walked back down the driveway, along the flaking rocks. “He likes that busted lawn chair,” Grandma hollered now, leaning out the door.
“Set him there awhile.”
“Want me to get you a plate from the kitchen?” I asked Grandpa.
“Some bread and butter?”
But he was looking at the collapsed heap anxiously and did not answer.
I pulled the frayed, woven plastic and aluminum into the shape of a chair, he settled into it, and I left him counting something under his breath. Clouds. Trees. All the blades of grass.
I went inside. Grandma was unlocking her expensive canned ham. She patted it before putting it in the oven and closed the door carefully.
“She’s not used to buying this much meat, “Zelda said. “Remember we used to trade for it?”
“Or slaughter our own.” Aurelia blew a round gray cloud of Winston smoke across the table.
“Pew,” said Zelda. “Put the top on the butter.” She flapped her hand in front of her nose. “You know, Mama, I bet this makes you wish it was like it used to be. All us kids in the kitchen again. ” “Oh, I never had no trouble with kids,” Grandma wiped each finger on a dishrag. “Except for once in a while.”