Rachel's Children: Stories From a Contemporary Native American Woman by Beard Steve

Author:Beard, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759115507
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Published: 2013-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

COMMUNITY PROPERTY

Rachel was warming up a Tercel. She opened up her door. (“Windows freeze up here, it’s an awfully moist place.... Don’t force it, you can break the mechanism.” She and Tall Jack were the king and queen of careful, preventive equipment use. They squeezed machinery dry.)

“Do you want to come?”

I wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t volunteering information, so I hopped in on the passenger side. The door squeaked when I opened it.

“Remind me—silicone spray, when we get back.”

I hadn’t even remembered the shovel.

“What are we doing now?”

“I have to go check on Isabel.”

“She didn’t get off of the bus?”

“No. She’s running interference for Z. She wasn’t supposed to go back yet, but she doesn’t like it here with me, because I say no sometimes.”

“Why is she with you?”

“They ask me to sometimes. Just tell me flat out, they can’t handle her anymore. Things are going on that I don’t know about. Izzy tells me sometimes. She says it gets pretty violent. It’s not my place to say. But Izzy says that it gets pretty violent against Z. I don’t ask. The Divine Miz doesn’t tell me.

“I think, most of the time, they just buy her off, leave her with her computer, CD player—never say no. It takes a lot of work to say no to kids. At our house, it gets pretty ugly sometimes. I once grounded Stella for two whole months. She behaved well for years after that. Don’t remember what I grounded her for.

“Miz Z goes on all of our trips with us. They just pull her out and do the paperwork for homeschooling, and off to the bush she goes with us. And then, sometimes, in her real life, she’s off to Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, or someplace exciting. The girls are incredibly jealous. I won’t even take them to Disneyland.”

No, I didn’t imagine she would.

“I’d drive hundreds of miles to take them to pick wild blueberries though.”

I imagined she would.

“So, did I tell you about the snakes with antlers?”

“Yes, you did.”

“OK, so they had a big meeting.”

“And decided to break up the team.”

“Yes, they were just too efficient at hunting, Manaboozhou and First Dog. And they didn’t have it together to think about things like waste and overharvesting yet. They had to learn the hard way.

“So the Michikiniibigag lured Myiingunh out onto thin ice on the river. It was springtime, like now, sunny, like this.”

“How did they lure him?”

“I haven’t thought that part up yet.”

“You mean you’re making this up as you go along?”

“No! I told you, it’s not just my story. It’s everybody’s story. Sometimes, we start to tell stories, and then we find out that somebody else has another part to the story, either before or after the part that you’ve got. This is human history. It goes on forever. No one person can memorize the whole thing. So each of us gets a little piece of it, and, if we’re lucky, we get to hear three, four, six different sections, all tied together, in just one lifetime.

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