Breaking Clean Read online

  Forest. Even then I was struck by the irony. We paid attention to names, and there wasn't a forest of note for a hundred miles. Our community was identified by several layers of place names that signified ownership. The Plains tribes who hunted that prairie had left hammers and arrowheads, tepee rings and medicine stones, but no names. Trappers and immigrant homesteaders had labeled the land as they pushed the Indians west, and by the time of my childhood, those earliest names belonged to the land alone. Carberrey, Whitcombe, Krumweide, Cruikshank—to say them aloud was to conjure a place long separated from a face or a family.

  The chunk of shortgrass prairie we called Regina had been named by French Canadians who drifted south out of Saskatchewan to trap beaver along the Missouri. The first home-steaders inherited a legacy of French place names that roll across the tongue like music, black-bottom draws and treacherous creeks and drainages identified by hisses and coos. The actual places seemed unrelated to the black letters and blue lines on the official Bureau of Land Management maps. We had little use for maps. Any rancher who wanted to see his land picked up a piece of it and rubbed it between his fingers. But the maps with their foreign spellings—Beauchamp and Fourchette—drew a solid line between insiders who knew the history of the land and outsiders who knew only maps and could not say the passwords. We all had our stories.

  "Had a guy up here yesterday, asks me directions to Regina," a neighbor might say. We'd all grin and lean forward. The name "Regina" applied to a large community of farms and ranches, but on the maps it appeared as a little gray circle, just like a town. "I tell him he's looking at it, but he ain't buying any of that. So we get to jawing and pretty soon he goes for his map, and there she is." He'd pause and lift his eyebrows and hands in one gesture of innocence. "So, hell, I give him directions."

  Strangers who were rude or adamant enough about the little gray circle on the map were sent there, to the Regina Post Office. The best part of the story was imagining the driver's face when he pulled into our mail carrier's barnyard. The official sign hung on the front of an old converted chicken house, where Joe and Ethel sorted the mail for Saturday delivery. The flag that waved over the Regina Post Office could have covered it like a pup tent.

  We measured the wealth of our knowledge against the ignorance of outsiders and judged ourselves superior. We pulled cars out of potholes, fed lost hunters at our kitchen tables, sold gas from the big drums we bought in bulk, and for the most part we did so graciously. We could afford to be kind. But social or political upheaval going on outside seldom intruded, and families who managed to tuck themselves into a fold of flatland and hang on seldom went looking for something else to worry about. Their priorities were immediate— wind and heat and hoppers in summer, wind and snow and blizzards in winter. Our isolation was real. The nearest town was Malta, an hour's drive north when the roads were good. To the south, the land plunged into rugged breaks and badlands, then dropped abruptly into a mile-wide stretch of water the maps called Fort Peck Lake. We still called it the Missouri River. In later summer a double row of dead cottonwoods reared out of the water where the original channel had been, and we could point to the site of submerged homesteads, name the families flooded out when the dam went up in the thirties. Halfway between the river and town, my parents bullied a hundred acres of winter wheat away from the big sagebrush and prickly pear cactus, and grazed cattle on the rest.

  Our fences marched straight down the section lines, regiments of cedar posts and barbed wire strung so tight it hummed in a strong wind. The corners were square and braced to meet the bordering fields of neighbors just like us. Our families had homesteaded, broken ground and survived into the third generation, and we shared a set of beliefs so basic that they were seldom spoken aloud. I remember them as commonsense adages: Hard work is the measure of a man. A barn will build a house, but a house won't build a barn. Good fences make good neighbors. That which belongs to everyone belongs to no one.

  "This is no country for fools," my grandpa said, and these truths were what separated fools from survivors. They were the only explanation I was ever given for the way we lived.

  To her credit, Mrs. Norby never gave up on Forest, although his lessons soon resembled a series of skirmishes. She always began cheerfully enough, settling us to work by ourselves, then calling him up to her big desk, where they would spend until recess working on the big alphabet cards. Our first-grade year, we all measured our progress and accomplishment by the lengthening row of cards, memorized and thumbtacked to the wall above the blackboard. We adored them. On each card the stout black lines of upper- and lowercase letters were incorporated into a picture and a story. The letter C, I remember, was a profile of a mouth lined with teeth; the sound of Mr. C coughing was the sound of the letter C. Lowercase/was the tail of a frightened cat. Mr. D was a soldier, and when he stood straight and beat his round drum, it went duh-duh-duh.

  The first time Forest spoke aloud, Mrs. Norby killed our reaction with one remarkably vicious look, perhaps afraid that we would frighten him back into silence. But Forest loved the stories, and his soft, surprisingly deep voice became background music for our own lessons. He learned the cards quickly, repeating the sounds, grandly embellishing the stories unless Mrs. Norby stopped him, and she must have expected him to take the next leap as effortlessly as we had. But he did not. He saw nothing in the shapes and sounds on the phonics cards that connected to the words written in a book. Mrs. Norby persisted like a trainer with a jump-shy colt, putting him through his paces, around the cards faster and faster, gaining momentum, and then the book would appear and Forest would brace his feet and skid to a stop.

  Against her decades of experience he had only endurance and a calm, sad stare that he seldom directed at the words she pointed out. After a few days he would have the words of Dick's or Jane's or Sally's exploits memorized and matched to the pictures on each page. Mrs. Norby would open to a page, he would look at it closely for a few seconds and then begin reciting the story that went with the pictures, sometimes adding bits from previous pages and, often as not, reading with his eyes focused on his fingers as they twiddled with a paper clip or a bit of paper. When her voice grew clipped and brittle, he waited her out. Forest did not think in ABCs. For him, the story was all.

  From my position as a third-row observer, I found Forest's academic difficulties neither surprising nor disappointing. Looking back, I can see it was his inability to read that kept him alive in my mind. From the first days I had attempted to find the mythical Red Man in Forest, and he had failed me on every front. We had studied Plains tribes in social studies. We had read the books, and when TV came to the county we were devoted to shows like Wagon Train and Rawhide. The Indians we admired had no use for reading; they wore buckskin leggings and medicine pouches on leather thongs around their necks. They had eagle feathers and long braids; they danced and hunted and collected scalps. Forest showed little promise of living up to this exciting potential.

  Gail and I were more given to fantasy than the boys were, but all of us spent part of our childhood summers playing Indian. We made bows and arrows from green willow and cotton string and bounded barefoot through the creek bottoms, communicating with gestures and grunts like Tonto did on The Lone Ranger. We had horses and could ride like cowboys, but my sister and I rebelled at the discipline of saddles and rules. We rode naked to the waist, hell-bent through the meadows, on a palomino mare and a black half-Shetland pony. We had no bridge between make-believe and the reality of children like Forest. We knew our land and its people, every pore and every pothole of a close, contained world. From that knowledge came identity and security. But we had only the vaguest sense of our place in the larger world. The Fort Belknap Reservation that lies twenty-five overland miles from my parents' ranch is no more real in my memory than New York City is. What I knew about this place I learned indirectly— jokes overheard, fragments of conversation, phrases that slipped into dialogue sideways, in reference to other whites. Shiftless as a reservation
buck. Stank like an Indian camp. Wild as, lazy as, dirty as —racial slurs we discounted as harmless because they were not directed toward Indians. They did not refer to anyone we knew. The Indian people we knew were ranchers, neighbors who lived like we did. The other kind were dark and dangerous and different. They got in bar fights and car wrecks; they hung around the Rez and took government handouts; they did not make good hired men. They were like the man behind the rodeo arena pouring his horse a big feed of commodity oatmeal, "U.S. Government" stamped right on the sack. There was, my father said through clenched teeth, no goddamned excuse for that, no goddamned excuse in the world.

  Forest and his grandparents were gone before Christmas. I never knew where they went or why they left. I suppose the extra desk got retired to the storeroom, but I don't remember that either. What I do remember from that time is that, with all the inborn arrogance of a white child raised in a white man's world, I thought well of myself for being kind to him. I had a sense that we would not have been punished for picking on Forest, just as I felt sure that he had been temporary all along, he and his grandparents, too. There were so many things I knew without knowing why, things I learned as a child listening with half an ear to all that was said, and most intently to all that was not said. I remember the silence most of all.

  The trip to Havre is in my honor, my first visit to the dentist. He pulls four baby teeth to make room for the new ones sprouting through my gums at odd angles, and there is blood. When we leave the dentist's office I make it to the parking lot, then vomit everything I have swallowed and feel better. Breakfast happened before dawn, before dressing in our nicest clothes, before our three-hour drive. My father hands me a clean handkerchief to hold against my mouth and drives through downtown Havre in search of an inexpensive cafe. Afraid that misery is catching, my brothers and sisters crowd against the far side of the backseat. Under the stained hankie my cheeks feel heavy and pliant, like wet clay. My father swears softly at the traffic, a white-knuckle driver unaccustomed to stoplights, and I close my eyes to shut it out.

  The cafe we pull up to is small but not crowded, and my stomach wakes to the perfume of hamburgers and french fries, a treat so rare that we could count their every appearance in our short lives, each event of "eating out." But when the food comes I am stunned to find a bowl of chicken soup set on the place mat in front of me, the kind my mother makes when she's too busy to cook. I stir noodles up from the bottom of the bowl and sulk, while the others take turns squeezing ketchup over hamburgers and fighting over split orders of fries. Even driven by hunger, I can't keep the soup from leaking through my numb lips, and when life becomes too unfair to stand, I slide to the floor under the table and begin to cry. My father drags me out by one arm and sends me to sit in the car until I can straighten up.

  Outside, I lean against the bumper in pure defiance of direct orders. But my attention wanders to the bench just outside the cafe door, where an Indian woman sits holding a baby. I'm drawn to babies, and this one is a black-eyed beauty, her fat belly peeking out of a crocheted sweater. She's just big enough to sit upright on the old woman's knee. The woman sees me edging closer and smiles. "You like babies?" she asks, and I nod, my tongue still too thick to trust with words.

  The woman is dressed in layers of color, wide skirts that brush the ground, a man's flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and a shawl that falls from her shoulders and drapes in folds around the baby. Thick gray braids coil at the nape of her neck. She bends her face near the baby's and clicks her tongue, tickling at the chubby brown chin, and the baby dissolves into giggles, her eyes fastened on the grandmother's face. The babies I have seen are next to bald, but this one has thick black hair standing up all over her head. I'm getting up the nerve to touch that hair when the cafe door opens and I leap back, scrambling toward our car, expecting my father. I turn, hand on the door handle, and an old man stands next to the woman and baby, regarding me with a puzzled look.

  The man hands the woman a wrapped hamburger and a paper cup of milk and walks back into the cafe. She lets the baby suck on the edge of the cup while she chews the sandwich, her lips disappearing with the motion of her jaw. She sets the cup aside, and I freeze against the car in wonder as she dips into her mouth with two fingers and pops a bit of chewed food into the baby's open mouth. The little girl works over the mashed hamburger and they rock gently on the bench, each gumming her own bite until it's swallowed. After a sip of milk, the baby leans forward comically, eyebrows arched, mouth and eyes round, ready for more. My own stomach shivers, squeamish, thrilled, but the process is done so gently that I can't be horrified. I watch the wonderful shuffle of food from mouth to fingers to baby, the easy sway between bites, until I'm full to bursting with news.

  Back inside the cafe, I ignore the cold soup and press against my mother's arm, conscious of slurring as I tell the story of what I've seen. Her forehead wrinkles and her voice comes out a whisper as she hushes me.

  "Did she talk to you?" Her voice is too flat and even, a trap I can't quite read. I nod, ready to work my lips and tongue around an explanation, but her hand snakes out and grabs my ear before I can speak, twisting it, her knuckles hard against my swollen cheek. Her eyes lock mine into full attention.

  "You were told to get in the car." She says nothing else, but continues to glare, giving my ear another jerk for emphasis. Something about the old woman has tricked me, but I don't know what. Stunned, I walk with underwater steps out the door, straight past the bench without looking, and to the car. I curl up in the backseat where I can't be seen from the outside.

  It's a long ride home that night, late and dark, and the car is a crush of packages and sleeping children. My mouth has been awake for hours, throbbing. In the front seat my mother tells my story of the Indian woman feeding the baby. My father says, "Jesus Christ." I hear it in their voices, and my belly fills with anger and shame. On the outside, nothing is what it seems and I long for my own bed, the quilt my mother sewed from woo] scraps and old coats, the comfort of a sure thing. My father drives automatically now, slowing for ruts and cattle guards, banking the gentle curves of the county road. Lonesome Coulee. Jackson's Corner. The Y. I press one cheek against the cool of the window and close my eyes, drifting with the motion of the car. Almost home. I can tell where we are by the feel.

  Fighting Fire

  When he finished his chores, Grandpa Blunt squatted down beside me in a corner of his old barn. I settled back on my heels so he could reach the new litter of kittens curled together in a nest of empty feed sacks. He stroked their overlapping necks with a pinky finger, then gently pulled the jigsaw of kittens apart. Turning to the manger window, he tipped each one upside down in the light and studied its underside, handing two to me to hold. The three females he set aside in an empty five-gallon bucket. They scrabbled in the bottom, and I reached in to nudge them together so they would comfort each other. "We don't need any more girl cats," he told me.

  "How can you tell it's girl cats?" I asked him. He looked startled for a second, then his eyes began to dance.

  "You look at the bottoms of their feet." When he grinned, his dentures clicked together. Still polite, I looked away from him, down at the kittens in the bucket.

  He repeated his punch line, bottoms of their feet, and chuckled to himself, storing it up for later. When he told it over the dinner table, eyebrows arched and knowing, most likely those words would be mine, and everyone would laugh.

  I knew how to sort boy kittens from girl kittens. I understood all the reasons for thinning out litters—too many cats around a place might starve, sleep with skunks and get rabies, start to eat eggs or even chickens. But no one would tell me why the limit was on girl cats. How could he tell when he had enough? Why were the girl cats the first ones to go?

  "Wouldn't it work," I asked him, "to get rid of all the boy cats?" Grandpa's back and neck had fused over the years into the shape of a lowercase^ so when he swung a wary eye in my direction, his whole body turned. We seemed to be edgin
g closer to the topic of how kittens came to be. I could have told him about that, too, but I knew better.

  "Well," he said, clambering to his feet and reaching for the pail, "a person could do that, I suppose."

  I knew this injustice wasn't limited to cats. Our ranching community applauded the birth of stud colts, bull calves and boy babies. We celebrated the manly man for doing the work of two men and the little woman for whipping up man-sized meals. And when television followed electricity to our community in the early sixties, the outside view it gave me confirmed my suspicions. I got from television names for what I already knew, an adult world divided neatly into Marshal Dillons and Miss Kittys. I reached for the role of the gunslinging marshal. If the twins and I played house after our baby days, we played wagon train, trekking cross-country to the stackyard and building a little soddy out of bales. We pretended to be mustangs, mountain lions and coyotes. When we played people, we played men at war: cowboys and Indians, cattle ranchers and sheepherders, sheriff and bad guys. We rescued womenfolk regularly, roles we saved for the battered baby dolls, but even a forked stick with a rag dress could wring its hands in a pinch. As we grew older and more daring, we tailored our play to the precise role of Phillips County Man. We played Fire.