Dalva (5 page)

“I would do it with you because I love you, Duane.”

“I'd never fuck a white girl anyway. Not one who'd fuck those farmers.”

“I'm a little bit Indian and I didn't fuck those farmers.”

“There's no way you can prove it,” he yelled.

“Make love to me and then you can tell I'm a virgin.” I began to take off my clothes. “Come ahead you big-mouth coward.” He only glanced at me; then his face became knotty with rage. He ran out of the barn and I could hear the pickup starting.

When I rode home I couldn't stop crying. I wanted to die but couldn't decide how to go about it. I stopped along a big hole in the creek, now covered with ice, that we used for swimming in the summer. I thought of drowning myself but I didn't want to upset Naomi and Ruth. Also I was suddenly very tired, cold, and hungry. It was still sleeting and I hoped the ice would break the power line so we could light the oil lamps. After dinner we'd play cards on the dining-room table beneath portraits of Great-grandfather, Grandfather, and Father. I would think, Why did he leave us alone to go to Korea?

After dinner Grandpa pulled into the yard in his old sedan, which startled us because he always drove the pickup. Naomi and I had to go into town with him because Duane was in jail and they needed my part of the story. In the sheriff's office I said I had never had anything to do with the bruised and severely battered football players. Grandfather was enraged and the sheriff cowered before him. The parents of the football players were frightened, perhaps unfairly, because Grandfather is rich and we are the oldest family in the county. When they brought Duane out of the cell he was unmarked. The football players tried to sneer, but Duane looked through them as if they weren't there. The sheriff said that if anyone slandered me again there would be trouble. Grandpa said, “One more word and I'll run all of you filth straight back to Omaha.” The parents begged forgiveness but he ignored them. I could see he was enjoying his righteous indignation. Out in the parking lot of the county building I said thank you to Duane. He squeezed my arm and said “It's fine, partner.” I almost fell apart when he called me “partner.”

I was not bothered by the boys at school after that, though I was lonely and I was given the behind-the-back nickname of “Squaw.” I didn't mind the nickname; in fact, I was proud of it, because it meant in the minds of others that I belonged to Duane. When he found out, however, he laughed and said I could never be a squaw because there was so little Indian in
me as to be unnoticeable. This made me quarrelsorne and I said, Where did you get those hazel-green eyes if you're so pure? His anger seemed to make him want to tell me something, but he only said he was over half Sioux and in the eyes of the law that made him Sioux.

After that we didn't have anything to do with each other for a month. One summer evening when Grandpa was over for dinner he took me aside and told me it was a terrible mistake to fall in love with an Indian boy. I was embarrassed but had the presence to ask him why his own father had married a Sioux girl. “Who knows why anybody marries anybody.” His own wife, whom I never saw and who was long dead, had been a rich girl from Omaha who drank herself into an early grave. “What I'm saying is they aren't like us, and if you don't behave and stop chasing Duane I'll send him away.” It was the first time I stood up to him. “Does that mean you're not like us?” He hugged me and said, “You know and I know I'm not like anybody. You show the same signs.”

I felt it was all unnecessary since Duane showed not the slightest sign of being anything more than minimally my “partner.” I tried becoming less pushy and doe-eyed which did serve to make him friendlier. He took me to some Indian burial mounds in a dense thicket in the farthest corner of the property. I didn't tell him that my father had taken me there soon after I was given my first pony. Not far from the burial mounds Duane had erected a small tipi out of poles, canvas, and hides. He told me he slept there often and “communed” with dead warriors. I asked him where he got the word “commune” and he admitted he had taken to reading some of the books in Grandfather's library. It was the first cool evening in September and the air was clearer than it had been all summer, with a slight but steady breeze from the north. I mention the breeze because Duane asked me if I ever noticed that the wind in the thickets made a different sound depending on which direction the wind came from. The reason was that the trees rubbed against each other differently. I admitted I had never noticed this and he said, “Of course, you're not an Indian.” I was a bit downcast at the reminder so he gave my arm a squeeze, then gave me my first real hope by saying there might just be a ceremony to make me a bona-fide Sioux. He'd check if he ever
got back to Parmelee. I hated to leave but my mother insisted I be home before dark when I was with Duane. I went to my tethered horse and Duane said, “If I asked you to stay all night, would you?” I nodded that I would and he came up to me, his face so close that I thought we were going to have our first kiss. The last of the sun was over my shoulder and on his face, but he suddenly turned away.

That summer I became friends with a girl named Charlene who at seventeen was two years older than me. She lived in a small apartment in town above a café that her mother managed. Her father had died in World War II and this misfortune of war helped bring us together. I barely knew her at school where she had a bad reputation. It was rumored that when rich pheasant-hunters from the East appeared in late October and November Charlene made love with them for money. Charlene was very pretty but an outcast; she didn't belong to a church or any school groups. The only time she had spoken to me at school was when I was in the eighth grade—she told me to “be tough” when the older boys were bothering me. We didn't get to know each other until we began talking in the town library.

On Saturday afternoons, Naomi would drive to town to shop for groceries and do errands. Ruth would tag along with me to the saddle-and-harness shop, and then we'd have a soda and all meet at the library. We never saw Duane in town because he would do farm errands on weekdays, claiming it was too crowded on Saturday. The town was the county seat but barely had a population of a thousand. I had been reading
Of Human Bondage, Look Homeward, Angel,
also
Raintree County
by Ross Lockridge. They were wonderful books and I was puzzled when I read in the paper that Mr. Lockridge had committed suicide. Charlene saw me with the books and we began talking. She was in her waitress uniform and said she came in on Saturdays after work to get something to read in order to forget her awful life. We met and talked on a half-dozen Saturdays, and I asked her to come to dinner on Sunday because I knew the café would be closed. She said thank you but she wasn't our kind of people, but then Naomi showed up and talked her into it.

Charlene began spending every Sunday with us. Grandpa
liked her a great deal when I brought her over. It was her first time on a horse, which thrilled her. Duane made himself scarce—it was always difficult for him to deal with more than one person at once. Naomi gave Charlene lessons in sewing and made some clothes for her that couldn't be bought short of a long drive to Omaha. Naomi told me in private that she hoped Charlene wouldn't sell herself to pheasant-hunters again in the fall. She said more than one upstanding woman in the area had done so, so it wasn't an item on which a woman should be judged unfairly.

One night when she was staying over Charlene told me the rumors were true. She said she was saving up to leave town and go to college. I asked her what all the men did to her, but she said if I didn't know already she wasn't going to tell me. I said I did know but was interested in the details. She said she got to be very picky because they all wanted her, and one man from Detroit paid her a hundred dollars, which was what she made in the café in an entire month. The only embarrassing quality of her visits was the degree to which she was impressed by our house and Grandpa's. It was natural of her but it upset me. We had few visitors and I certainly knew that we were what was called “fortunate,” but one tended to take it all for granted. Furniture and paintings in both houses had been accumulated on travels beginning with Great-grandfather, but mostly by Grandfather around World War I in Paris and London, and later by his wife, and also by my parents. It was the time in life when you wanted to be like everyone else, even though you had begun to understand there was no
everyone else,
and there never had been.

My bad luck, innocently enough, started with religion. We had always gone to a small Wesleyan Methodist church a few miles down the road. Everyone did for miles around except the Scandinavians who had a similarly small church that was Lutheran. Once a year, in July, the churches held a joint barbecue and picnic. It was all quite friendly and social, our religion, and our preacher, though very old and quite ineffectual, was admired by all. On this particular Sunday we had to get to church
a little early because Ruth served as the pianist. Charlene was with us—she had never been to church until she began coming to our house for Saturday night and Sunday, and found it interesting though peculiar.

I remember it was the first Sunday after Labor Day and it was very hot after the brief cool spell when I was out at Duane's tipi. Our regular minister was away on vacation in Minneapolis, and his replacement was a young, handsome preacher from theological school who was a fireball and aimed, according to the mimeographed announcement, to be an evangelist. We were accustomed to restrained homilies on the tamer aspects of the New Testament, and the substitute preacher swept everyone in the congregation off their feet, except Naomi who was quietly tolerant. He thundered, roared, strutted up and down the aisle, physically grabbed us; in short, he gave us drama and we were unused to drama. The gist is that many of the inventors of the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb were Jews, or “children of Israel.” God had called upon his Chosen People to be his tool to invent the destruction of the world, which would call forth the Second Coming of Christ. All those who were truly saved would be drawn up in the Rapture before the Conflagration. Everyone else, no matter how sincere, would endure unbelievable torture with millions and billions of radiation-crazed zombies devouring each other's flesh, and the animal and sea world going berserk, and primitive tribes, including Indians, rising up to slaughter the whites. I remember thinking for a moment that Duane would save me. For the time being, the church moaned and wept. When the sermon neared its end and the wringing-wet preacher gave the invitation to come forward, there was a general rush to the front to give our lives to Jesus, including me, Ruth, Charlene, and more than two dozen others, including all the younger people.

In the confused but saner aftermath it was decided that we all should be baptized just in case hydrogen bombs were actually aimed at our part of the country. In the upper Midwest, no doubt due to the weather, many things are considered chores—including funerals, weddings, baptisms—that need to be accomplished with a certain dispatch. The plan was to meet at the swimming hole on our farm as soon as a picnic could be
gathered (food is never neglected) and the proper clothing found, which was anything close to white.

We reassembled by midafternoon and the ceremony went well except for the appearance of a water snake. The weather was so hot that the water felt especially cool and sweet. Naomi looked at Ruth, Charlene, and me in our wet white dresses and said it couldn't have done us any harm. While I was wiping my face with a towel I heard a bird whistle that I knew had to be Duane. The others went off to eat so I snuck through a grove of trees to where I saw Duane sitting on his buckskin.

“What were you goddamned monkeys doing in the river?” he asked.

“Well, we were getting baptized in case the war comes and the world ends.” I felt a little stupid and naked in my white wet dress. I tried to cover myself and gave up.

He told me to jump on the horse with him, which surprised me because I had never been asked to do so. He smelled of alcohol which also surprised me because he said alcohol was a poison that was killing the Sioux. At the tipi he put his hand on my bare bottom where my wet clothes hiked up as I slid off the horse. He offered me a bottle full of wild-plum wine from Lundquist. I drank quite deeply and he put his arms around me.

“I don't like the idea of you getting baptized. How can you be my girl if you're getting baptized and singing those songs?”

His lips were close to mine so I kissed them for the first time. I couldn't help myself. He peeled the dress up over my head and threw it in the grass. He stood back, looked at me, then let out a cry or yell. We went into his tent and made love and it was the strangest feeling of my life, as if I were walking up the sun-warmed boards of a cellar door and my feet couldn't keep my body balanced. I looked into his half-closed eyes but I knew he somehow couldn't see me, and there was a little humor in the awkward posture because my knees were bent and so far back. I didn't think I went in that far but he managed and I thought, whatever this is, I like it very much with my hands on his sweat slippery back slipping down to his bottom. When he was finishing he wrenched me around as if he were trying to drag and crush me into his body, and when he rolled off he was breathing like a horse after a hard run.
Then he fell asleep in the hot tent and far off I heard Naomi ringing the bell. I went out into the late afternoon and slipped into my damp dress. I ran all the way, except for stopping to take a quick swim. I wondered if I would look different to everyone. That was the last time I saw Duane for fifteen years.