A Certain Kind of Hero (11 page)

He eyed her curiously.

She fidgeted, the backs of her thighs sticking uncomfortably to the metal chair. She smacked her knee, flattening a mosquito, and regretted her choice of walking shorts for this outing.

“Do you have a great-great-grandmother way back who was part Indian or something? Maybe your grandmother named you after her.” One corner of his mouth turned up just slightly. “Raina.”

“None that I know of,” she said airily, offering him her own smile and hoping to set an example. “I used to teach at the Pine Lake School, though. Back when I first met my husband. Does that…help?”

He slid a strip of bark between his fingers, considered her face and finally nodded once.

“Jared,” she supplied obligingly. “My husband. Did you know him?”

“Not really. I knew his dad, long time ago. I used to stay with my wife's people.” He tipped his chin in a vaguely westerly direction, pursing his lips as though his idle hands were too busy to make the gesture. “Over by where they got that new school now. She was from the Strikes Many clan. After she died, I came back here. But I lost track of those Defender kids. This one moved to the Cities. That one got to be chairman somehow.” He shrugged. “I lost track.”

“Do you have other children besides—” unsure of the reference, she gentled her voice to the point of near downiness “—besides Tomasina?”

“Two sons,” he reported. “Both went away, looking for jobs. One other daughter, married one of them Oglalas, moved to South Dakota. Peter's mother was the youngest.” She could tell he was testing her. When she didn't take exception to his choice of the word
mother,
he confided, “The wildest, looks like.”

“Do you have other grandchildren?”

“Five. Don't see any of them that much.” He couldn't quite hide the fact that he felt slighted. He shifted in his chair. “So you used to be a schoolteacher. And your husband was a big-shot lawyer?”

“I wouldn't say he was a big shot. He worked very hard.” Gently, as was her way, she added, “And he died very young.”

“A lot of Indians die too young.” His dry chuckle might have seemed inappropriate had Raina not experienced the cruel irony firsthand. “They don't want to listen to us
old
Indians. They don't ask us how we keep livin' so long, 'cause they got their own ideas. They want to go live like white men. They say it's more fun for them.”

Raina nodded. “Jared just worked too hard. Twelve, fifteen-hour days sometimes… His heart…”

“Was he too busy to make babies?”

“No.” Curiously, she did not find his question intrusive, nor did she mind answering it. “We did try. It just didn't work out for us until…until Jared found out about Peter.”

The old man grunted. “I told my girl it wasn't right, giving her baby away. She told me he was going to an Indian home, so I just let it go. She always had to do things her own way. Then she told me the name—that Defender that got to be a big-time lawyer down in Minneapolis. I knew he was probably giving her money, but I didn't say anything.”

“Well, we
offered,
but…” She didn't like the turn the conversation was taking. “Maybe some for expenses. I'm not sure. Jared handled all the details of the adoption, but it wasn't like…like we
bought
Peter or anything.” Whatever the arrangements had been, Raina felt that she owed Tomasina Skinner a debt of unending gratitude, regardless of whether her father approved.

She braced her hand on the edge of the table, leaned closer and entrusted him with the simple heart of her cause. “I've been Peter's mother since he was six days old, Mr. Skinner. I love him very much.”

He nodded and pointed toward the end of the table. “Hand me that pail of water there. This bark has to be soaked.”

She jumped at the chance to accommodate him and to talk about something else. “What are you making? Will this be—”

“Who wants coffee?” Gideon appeared at the door, steam rising from the melamine cups he carried, one in each hand.

Peter came next. With his free hand he held the door for
Gideon, who served Raina one of the cups and kept the other for himself. Peter's cup was for his grandfather.

“Don't hardly keep any pop around.” Arlen nodded his thanks, then sipped noisily, his grimace a sign that the coffee was especially hot. “Mmm, good and strong. Next time you come, I'll have some pop for you,
ninaoshishan.
What kind do you like?”

“Any kind.” A long, narrow, bark-covered bowl on the table caught Peter's attention. He touched one of the clothespins that held the lining in place. “What're you making?”

“Winnowing baskets,” Arlen said. “Good birch-bark baskets. That one's drying.”

“They're for ricing,” Gideon put in.

Arlen set his cup down. “You like wild rice?” he asked Peter as he gathered several pieces of bark for the pail Raina had set next to him.

“It's okay. We don't have it much.”

“I do make wild-rice stuffing sometimes,” Raina put in quickly.

“We're going to teach her how to bait her own hooks next. We'll get her trained.” Gideon slid Raina a teasing smile, then nodded toward Peter. “This guy's gonna make a hell of a good fisherman. He caught a nice walleye the other day.” He held up his hands to show Arlen, measuring generously. “That sucker was two pounds, easy.”

“Bigger than that,” Peter insisted, moving Gideon's left hand another inch. He grinned, ignoring the dubious look on Gideon's face. “More like that, yeah.”

“Born fisherman,” the boy's grandfather said.

As Arlen demonstrated the basket-making process, he described how the baskets would be used during the early autumn wild-rice harvest, when the Chippewa would exercise another of their treaty rights. It was an important source
of income for him and for many others. He lamented the competition from the cultivated varieties of wild rice, which was not rice at all, but truly a lake-grass grain, and he noted that the “farm stuff” was not to be mistaken for the real thing.

“Real wild rice is longer, lighter in color, tastes better, and it's gathered in baskets like these by real Indians in real canoes. Right, Arlen?” Gideon said.

“Big difference. Big, big difference.” He wagged a gnarled finger and gave Raina the hint of a smile. “You remember this when you make your stuffing next time.”

When it was almost time to go, Peter helped Raina clear away cups and led the way inside. “I'll show you how we made the coffee, right on the stove. I didn't know you could do that. I thought if you didn't use a coffeemaker, you had to use instant. Remember how Dad hated instant?”

Gideon watched them disappear into the house, then turned to Arlen, who offered him a cigarette. Gideon told himself he didn't want to be rude. Besides, he figured he owed himself one. Arlen leaned forward in his chair as Gideon struck a match on his thumbnail and offered him first touch of the flame.

“What do you think of your grandson?” Gideon squinted past the smoke as he renewed his acquaintance with the gritty pleasure of the first long, deep drag from a good cigarette. “He seems like a pretty well-adjusted kid, doesn't he?”

“Adjusted to what?” Arlen's smoke mingled in the air with Gideon's. “He has some things to learn yet.”

“Well, sure, he's not quite thirteen.”

“Things about who he is and where he comes from.”

“That's why they came up here, Arlen. Raina doesn't want to keep him away from us. She wants him to learn those things.”

The old man gave the woman's purpose some thought as he smoked a little more. Finally he shook his head. “It's no good, Indians moving to the city.”

Gideon studied his cigarette. He couldn't argue that point. It hadn't been that good for his brother, but it was all Jared had ever wanted. “The good life” meant different things to different people, and Native Americans were people, just like everyone else. They paid their money and took their chances, and they deserved the chance to choose.

“You've let well enough alone until now, Arlen. Why stir this up when the boy's almost grown?”

“Seeing him with her,” the old man recalled. “No offense to your sister-in-law, but when I seen him with her, I knew it wasn't right.”

Gideon understood how the old man must have felt, seeing the boy for the first time, and then having Marvin Strikes Many on hand with just the right goad. Something like,
Your grandson's being raised by a white woman, and Gideon Defender's the one to blame.

“Now that you've met her, what do you think?”

“I think she's still white.” Arlen appeared to be studying the toes of his moccasins. “Like I said, no offense, but I think you're forgetting, just because she's your sister-in-law.”

“She's a good mother. You can see that.”

“I can see that she cares for my grandson,” he allowed. “But a boy his age needs a man to help raise him. And a Chippewa boy needs—”

“My father was dead by the time I was his age, and Peter's—” Gideon closed his eyes briefly. The taste of cigarette smoke turned acrid in his mouth. “Peter's is, too.”

The door behind them opened, and Raina emerged, still praising Peter's first efforts at stove-top coffee making.

Arlen looked up as Peter stepped out behind her. “You
would like wild rice the way I make it,
ninaoshishan.
The rice I have gathered myself.”

Peter touched the unfinished edge of the basket on the table. “I wouldn't mind learning how to make these. They look pretty cool.”

“It looks something like that basket you made for me for Mother's Day when you were about seven years old,” Raina said proudly.

“That was just a grade-school project.” He shrugged off his achievement as a pale comparison. “The teacher did half of it, and she was following directions out of a book.”

“That's what schoolteachers do.” Raina offered a maternal pat on the shoulder. “They get ideas from books. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing wrong with learning the old ways, either,” Gideon said. “Put the old ways together with a few new ideas, you never know. You might end up with the best of both worlds.”

“Or you might lose out.” After directing it first at Peter, Arlen deftly transferred his admonishment toward Gideon. “You might lose everything, just like we've
been
doing for the last hundred years. We've been compromising.” The old man took a last puff on his cigarette, then spat the smoke in disgust as he pressed the butt into a jar lid on the table. He eyed Gideon dispassionately. “You're too young to be a tribal leader. That's why I never voted for you.”

Gideon shook his head, chuckling. “No beatin' around the bush, this guy.” He followed Arlen's example, putting out his cigarette in the jar lid. The end of a smoke signaled the end of a visit. “That's all right, Arlen. Man's gotta vote his conscience.”

“Maybe you ought to think about teaching up here again,”
Arlen told Raina. “Maybe your brother-in-law could get you a job.”

“I've always loved this place.” She turned to her son. Reading him came less easily these days, but it was a mother's habit, and one she wasn't ready to break. “I don't think Peter wants to change schools.”

Content to let the supposition stand, Peter tested the spring on one of the clothespins holding the bark to the basket frame, then eased it back into place.

“Next time you come back, we'll make a sweat,” Arlen told Peter. “We'll smoke the pipe together.”

Peter glanced at his mother, who was dead set against smoking, then his uncle, who had supposedly quit, and finally his grandfather, who had offered him the forbidden right there in front of their faces. He'd never had a grandfather before, but he'd heard there could be interesting benefits.

He smiled. “That'd be cool.”

“Good.” The old man rose from the chair slowly, easing his stiff joints into motion. “I will give you something, then. A gift from your grandfather.”

 

At Gideon's house that evening, Raina wasn't asked to stay for supper. She was simply included. But Peter had a place at Gideon's table and a towel in Gideon's bathroom. They showed Raina the room they had fixed up for Peter downstairs, next to the den, where the video games were now hooked up to the TV. Gideon had borrowed a rollaway from the lodge, and Peter had apparently acquired some fishing tackle. Raina didn't ask about it. Seeing it shelved in “Peter's room” near “Peter's bed” angered her a little, but it frightened her more.

Peter had a room elsewhere, she reminded herself. He
had
a bed—a bigger one than this, made up with the bedding she had chosen for it in the subtle colors he tended to choose for
his clothes. He liked blue denim and brown corduroy, not the gaudy plaid that covered the rollaway. It hadn't been more than two weeks since Raina had pulled a plaid shirt off a rack in a department store, and Peter had said, “No way. I'm not wearin'
that.
”

She was thinking of all those things as she helped Gideon put the last of the dishes away. She hadn't been much help, actually. Peter had taken out the trash, then bounded down the steps to use the TV in “his” den. Raina dried a few dishes and handed them to Gideon. She could have guessed where they might go, since the pine cupboards in the kitchen were few in number.

But whenever he had them open, she paid less attention to what was inside than to the unconscious ease with which Gideon took to such mundane chores. Gideon Defender putting his dishes away in his kitchen, filling the coffeepot with water, clamping an opener on a can and releasing the homey scent of fresh coffee. Remarkable, she thought as she watched the strong hand that was a natural at wood-chopping and paddle-wielding turn the crank on a kitchen device.