I wanted to call up my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn’t tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and sons that I was okay. I told my mother and siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me.
“The Theology of Reptiles”
We found a snake, dead in midmolt.
“It’s almost like two snakes,” I said.
My brother grabbed it by the head
And said, “It just needs lightning bolts.”
Laughing, he jumped the creek and draped
The snake over an electric fence.
Was my brother being cruel? Yes,
But we were shocked when that damn snake
Spiraled off the wire and splayed,
Alive, on the grass, made a fist
Of itself, then, gorgeous and pissed,
Uncurled, stood on end, and swayed
For my brother, who, bemused and odd,
Had somehow become one snake’s god.
Catechism
Why did your big brother, during one hot summer, sleep in the hallway closet?
My mother, a Spokane Indian, kept bags of fabric scraps in that hallway closet. My brother arranged these scrap bags into shapes that approximated a mattress and pillows. My mother used these scraps to make quilts.
As an Indian, were you taught to worship the sun or the moon?
My mother was (and is) a Protestant of random varieties. My late father, a Coeur d’Alene, was a Catholic until the day that he decided to become an atheist. But it wasn’t until twelve years after he decided to become an atheist that he made this information public.
MY MOTHER: “Why did you wait so long to tell us?”
MY FATHER: “I didn’t want to make a quick decision.”
Do you think that religious ceremony is an effective treatment for grief?
My mother once made a quilt from dozens of pairs of second- and third- and fourth-hand blue jeans that she bought at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Value Village, and garage sales. My late sister studied my mother’s denim quilt and said, “That’s a lot of pants. There’s been a lot of ass in those pants. This is a blanket of asses.”
If your reservation is surrounded on all sides by two rivers and a creek, doesn’t that make it an island?
A Coeur d’Alene Indian holy man — on my father’s side — received this vision: Three crows, luminescent and black, except for collars of white feathers, perched in a pine tree above my ancestor’s camp and told him that three strangers would soon be arriving and their advice must be heeded or the Coeur d’Alene would vanish from the earth. The next day, the first Jesuits — three men in black robes with white collars — walked into a Coeur d’Alene Indian fishing camp.
Do you believe that God, in the form of his son, Jesus Christ, once walked the Earth?
Thus the Coeur d’Alene soon became, and remain, among the most Catholicized Indians in the country.
Has any member of the clergy ever given you a clear and concise explanation of this Holy Ghost business?
Therefore, nuns taught my father, as a child, to play classical piano.
Do you think that Beethoven was not actually deaf and was just having a laugh at his family’s expense?
By the time I was born, my father had long since stopped playing piano.
ME: “Dad, what did the nuns teach you to play?”
HIM: “I don’t want to talk about that shit.”
After you catch a sliver from a wooden crucifix, how soon afterward will you gain superpowers?
When he was drunk, my father would sit at the kitchen table and hum an indecipherable tune while playing an imaginary keyboard.
Did your mother ever make a quilt that featured a real piano keyboard?
I have mounted my father’s imaginary keyboard on my office wall.
ME: “And, here, on the wall, is my favorite work of art.”
GUEST: “I don’t see anything.”
ME: “It’s an installation piece created by my father.”
GUEST: “I still can’t see anything.”
ME: “Exactly.”
If you could only pick one word to describe your family, then what would that word be?
Honorificabilitudinitas.
Is that a real word?
Yes, Shakespeare used it. It means “The state of being able to achieve honors.”
So you’re stating your multisyllabic, overeducated, and pretentious belief that your family is and was in a state of being able to achieve honors?
Yep.
What kind of honors?
Whenever anybody in my family did something good, my mother would make an honor blanket. She used pieces of people’s clothes and stitched in little photographs and images or important dates and names. Very ornate.
So if your mother were going to honor your family’s religious history with an honor blanket, what shape would it take?
It wouldn’t be an honor blanket. It would be a quilt of guilt.
Do you actually believe in God?
My mother kept scraps of God in our hallway closet. My big brother arranged these scraps of God into shapes that approximated a mattress and pillows, and slept in that closet. My mother once used these scraps of God to make an epic quilt. My late sister studied this quilt and said, “That’s a lot of God. There’s been a lot of God in this God. This is a blanket of God.” However, my late father, when drunk, would sit at the kitchen table and sing to an indecipherable God while playing an imaginary keyboard.
But what do you think about God?
I’m at my kitchen window, and I’m watching three crows perched on the telephone wire. I think they’re talking trash about me.
Ode to Small-town Sweethearts
O, when you are driving through a blizzard
And your vision has been reduced—
Has been scissored—
Into two headlights and a noose,
How joyous to come upon the Wizard
Of Snowplows driving his glorious machine.
Now you will survive if you ride
In his slipstream.
He pushes back the fear and ice.
This is not a time for prayer, so you scream
With joy (Snowplow! Snowplow! Snowplow! Snowplow!)
As he leads you into the next
Snowed-in town.
You are not dead! You did not wreck!
And you know a family who live here — the Browns.
They run that little diner on Main Street.
It must be shut at this dark hour—
Quarter past three—
But the son, Mark, plays power
Forward for the high school, the Wolverines—
And once broke your nose with a stray elbow
While playing some tough-ass defense—
And you know him and call him friend.
So you park your car and trudge through the snow—
Cursing and/or blessing this fierce winter—
To find Mark and his dad awake
And cooking chicken-fried steaks
For a dozen other survivors and sinners.
“Dang,” Mark says. “Why are you out in this stuff?”
“For a girl,” you say. And Mark nods.
Mortals have always fought the gods
And braved epic storms for love and/or lust.
So don’t be afraid to speak honestly
About how you obeyed beauty’s call.