Jumping (33 page)

Dinner is finished and we have washed up. This is Granny's usual flat bread-making time. The kitchen table is clear for her to set up her makings and spread out. I'm sitting in the old rocker near the little pot-bellied stove in the corner of the tiny living room, legs crossed under me, my American history book open in my lap. As night comes on, a chill comes into the room with the dark, not leaving until the dark does. I'm glad for the warmth from the stove. I'm trying to catch up on my reading for my American history class, but my mind keeps going back to the clearing that morning. Babe and Miles's jump is as much with me as anything in the room.

“I saw them, too,” Granny says, as if I had said my thoughts out loud.

I close my book and look at her.

“I saw you, too,” she adds, stopping her bread making and looking directly at me.

“Why didn't you say something?”

“We were too filled with it, don't you think? I was. It wasn't the time to talk about it.”

“But it is now?” I ask, belligerently, annoyed at her for keeping yet another secret, knowing we are both deeply disturbed by what we've seen.

“Yes,” she says, going back to setting out her ingredients—flour, salt, baking powder.

“How did you know?” I ask, knowing I'd said nothing to her earlier to indicate I thought the jump was going to happen.

“I was out there the night before, talking with the Void. I knew I was to wait and watch and not interfere, just like that other time. It was birthing a new story, and I would be part of it. I understood it was transforming itself somehow, and I did what I know to do in such cases. I offered prayers.”

“It seems to me your prayers were answered, if more jumps indicate a change in things.”

“I hadn't seen anybody jump in a long time. It startled me to see it.” She sits in the nearest chair, resting her floured hands on the table. “I knew something was going to happen—there had been so many signs for a watcher to see, and I've been a watcher a long time. The crows were one. More people visiting the Void was another. I could see the animals sensed it, and it made them tense. Even the air held the ancient energy that first made this ground sacred. It made me remember the time of that other jump.” She stares into the space in front of her, barely breathing, her hands touching the cloth bag of flour in front of her.

I'm tired of the references to secrets, secrets that harbor my story, too. “I'm part of that change, Granny. I can feel it, too. It called me out there, too. I'm part of this, and now I need the rest of the story, and I know you have it.” The anger in my voice startles her.

She looks at me. I see fear and sadness shadow her face, giving it more sharp hollows, aging her. I stop, uncertain if I really want to know. I'm sure she'll tell me of my mother's jump, about which I know nothing, and now I'm scared. I don't know if I can carry more ghost memories. But there's no turning back. It's not just my mother. It's her daughter, too. How have I not remembered that?

Granny pushes the bag of flour away as if it now weighs more than she can lift. She dusts her hands on the towel on her shoulder and comes around the table to sit in the over-stuffed chair across from me—the only other piece of furniture in the living room. Her hands sit open in her lap, bereft of anything to hold.

“Yes, the elders have always known more than they ever say. I think they don't understand it all themselves, so how can they unravel its story? And maybe they're ashamed of it,” she says as she looks thoughtfully at the little fire.

“Ashamed?”

“Most of the Tribe has always considered the Void a place of ceremony, and we were comfortable doing that—vision quests, dream interpretation, naming ceremonies, that kind of thing—for as long as anyone could remember. We considered it a doorway to Great Mystery and made many offerings there. But I think the elders have secretly seen the Void as a place that accepts the Tribe's failures, because they see jumping as a failure—a failure to manage life. So they attach shame to the Void. And a jump happens in too public a way—a way that's harder to hide.”

She stops a moment. “I think we feel every failure as our own, too, and we're afraid they weaken us, weaken our ability to succeed at life.”

“But why did the Void allow suicide jumps?”

“They weren't suicide jumps, Carrie Jean. If they're allowed to jump, we just don't have the complete story. The Void doesn't make mistakes. The Tribe forgets this.”

This direct, intense attention from her humbles me. She was always so busy, focused on several tasks at once, herding my brother and me into helping her. Sitting quietly like this, she almost seems like another person.

“Of course, rumors sprang up around it—people had only an incomplete story. They thought it was a story about a woman who jumped, but that wasn't true. The woman had just disappeared. It was a child who jumped.”

“A child?” I croak, unable to catch a full breath.

She continues to look at me, unblinking. “It stunned everybody. No one knew what else to do but keep it secret, which was always the Tribe's way for most things. The child—a girl—belonged to the woman everyone thought had jumped.”

After a moment, she says, “Your mother.”

“Your daughter,” I whisper. “My sister jumped?”

Granny nods. “My granddaughter.” She pulls her eyes away from me and looks off again into the space in front of her.

“She was a fierce little thing. I thought she was an incarnation of my younger self. I was so proud of her. She was so smart. She comprehended things before I could put them together. I'd see the realization in her eyes and know she had already gone somewhere else, ahead of me.” She looks back at me. “A child jumped, but she did it for the adults.”

“Wait a minute. What happened? How did such a thing happen?”

“Let me get some water,” Granny says, rising stiffly from her chair, as if she's been sitting for hours. It's only been a few minutes.

“Let's make some tea.” I feel in need of some sustenance, something to warm the coldness that's now inside me. I'm weary from this day, but I rise, too, moving to the kitchen, glad for something to do. It's too much to sit with.

Granny lights the fire under the kettle on the stove. The kettle always has water in it—that's a habit from the old days, too, when you had to travel to the source to get it. I get the tin of loose tea leaves from the shelf above the sink. I bring it to the kitchen table where Granny has already set out two mugs and the old, chipped Fiestaware tea pot, which is a cheerful yellow. I use the tea ball to scoop tea from the tin, then close the ball and hook it onto the rim of the tea pot. We settle into chairs at the table to wait for the watched pot to boil. The bread makings are still there, unused, which never happens in this kitchen.

“I wish I still used tobacco,” Granny says, surprising me. I hadn't known she ever had. “Or drank alcohol,” she adds, looking at me with a smile. “Though I never really did.”

I find myself smiling back. Why should I be surprised to see that I still love her? Because, she and her secrets have tormented me and my brother for years, leaving us to live with gaps in knowing that made us unable to direct our own lives. Did it cost Jimmy Lynn his life? How much of the responsibility for that belongs to her? I'm unable to ask her that, still wondering how much it might have been my fault. How do any of us hold ourselves blameless?

The kettle whistles, and Granny gets it, turns off the fire, and brings it to the table to fill the pot. “We'll let it steep for a few minutes, to build its strength,” she says.

We wait, and as we do, she takes my hands in hers, studying them. This action is so uncommon that it speaks volumes to me—she still wishes she could spare me this telling of the truth, but she knows she can't. It's time—I'm old enough.

We will be equal now, two grown women, moving forward together, no longer separated by age. Girls don't become women when the Tribe celebrates their first menstrual cycle. They become women when life's events make them so.

“Rebecca,” she says, “that was her name. She was eight years old. You and Jimmy Lynn would have been three. She had a different father than you two did. His name was Robert. He was what we used to call a half-breed. One of his parents had been white, and he showed it.”

She looks at me. “That means he could often pass for white, which he did. He had come down from Canada, looking for work, he said. Probably looking for more than that. He parked cars at the country club. Sometimes he would drive for some of the members when they came out our way to hunt. They always needed a driver because they really came out to party, just like they do nowadays. And those men liked him. He seemed almost one of them—he had some education, manners, charm. They picked him often as a driver, and some of them came out our way for more than just hunting.” She stops and pours tea into both our mugs, looking up at me, and I nod to let her know, yes, I get what she's talking about.

“When he was with us, he seemed like one of us. He'd come out by himself and hang out at the Tribal store, meeting people, talking. He spoke native in a way that let you know he'd learned it at home. He was funny. We liked him.

“To this day, I don't know how or when he and your mother met. All I know is that he started pulling up outside the house in his old Buick, and she'd go out to meet him. She was still in high school, but I couldn't do anything with her, short of wrestling her to the ground, which I'd tried a time or two, I can tell you. But I knew it did no good. I will say that I think he was smitten with her, too.”

She looks directly at me again, reading me. “Yeah, it's an old story.” She shakes her head. “Why do you suppose it keeps happening?”

“It's new to the people it's happening to?” It's all I can think of to say. It's not hard to imagine it happening to me. Don't we want it to happen to us? To have a great, all-consuming love that nothing can stop? Isn't that true of all of us, no matter our origins? Isn't it true of Granny? I look at her and think maybe it is, or at least was, but that's not a story she tells, either.

Granny sips her tea and then says, as if she's heard my thoughts again, “I suppose you're right. I suppose that's how it looks to us when we're caught in it—something not to be denied, something that comes before anything else, something that takes the place of food and water and sleep. We just don't know that it won't stay that way.”

She gets up and goes to the breadbox by the stove. She pulls out her secret stash of Girl Scout cookies—her one real weakness. She buys boxes of them by the dozen when the selling season rolls around, and she freezes them for later, so that she'll never be without. The Samoas are her favorite, though they're not called that any more except by her, and she usually hates to share them. Now she puts a few on a plate and puts the plate in the center of the table, near both of us, so I know I'm allowed to have some.

“The rest of it is an old story, too. I bet you could guess it. Girl gets pregnant, boy gets scared and runs. Girl's heart is broken. Boy can't stay away.” She nibbles a cookie, though I don't think they're providing much comfort. “Natalie Wood and James Dean—that's who they reminded me of—always battling the grown-up world. Do you remember them?”

I nod, sipping my tea, remembering
Rebel Without a Cause
and all those old movies that would come on just after I got home from school. Maybe my mother used to watch them, too. “Maybe that's how we get brainwashed into trying to make their stories our stories, even if their stories are tragedies,” I say.

“This back-and-forth continues until Rebecca is born. Then they decide to settle down. He's working at the feed store, parking cars at night, so they can afford to rent a little two-room house over off Crawford,” she says, referring to a two-block street not far from here. “But I don't think settling down is in his nature, or at least it wasn't then. It's a fight he's having with himself, but she's the only visible opponent, so it's with her he fights. There's not much satisfaction in that, and it just drives him to drink.” She pauses to add more tea to her mug and then takes the tea ball from the pot and puts it in the sink. She comes back to sit in her chair, picks up her mug and stares into the space in front of her again.

I can't imagine what all these memories dredge up for her. That's another reason these stories don't get told.

“Time passes before the settling-down thing really disagrees with him. It's hard for him to come home every night to the same thing. No adventure. So he starts taking little trips, into the city, sometimes north, sometimes who knows where. What we do know is that he's home less and less, and when he is, they're fighting more and more. Finally he tells her he's taken a job up north. He'll try to make some money and then come back. Of course he'll be back, he says. Meanwhile, she and Rebecca move in with me.” She looks at me again. “I love having them here, but the spark has gone out of her.”

“She still loves him.”

“She still loves him,” Granny agrees.

“What happens next?” I ask, feeling as if the story is coming to a close.

“She hears from him less and less—an occasional late-night, drunken love call; occasional checks in the mail and sometimes they bounce. Soon it's been months, and life begins to move on without him. They had never married, so there is no pledge to hold them together. Rebecca is four, in pre-school, though I think she could have taught it, she was that bright. Your mom is waitressing. We've settled into our own routines and life is peaceful.

“Suddenly
your
dad, Benny, is now part of the picture. Brought in by a car—isn't that the way? Girls riding in cars. He gives her rides home from work, where he is a waiter, too. And he lives right here with the Tribe. He's one of us. I have hopes. I like him. They're good together. They come in after their shifts and take over my kitchen. They cook, they serve, they even clean up. And it's good. Little Rebecca laughs like I've never heard her laugh. She's enchanted with him and him with her. They've become a family.

“Soon, once again, your mom is pregnant—with you and your brother. Your mom and dad decide to marry, without telling us. They go to a justice of the peace in the city and come home married. Then they go to live with his parents, who have more room than I do, so I don't see them so much, though I hear things, because their business is more out in the community now. His parents drink and are on welfare, but their hearts seem to be in the right place, and they're peaceful drunks, gradually falling asleep as they drink, hurting no one, except maybe by neglect. They sponsor a traditional ceremony for your parents, and things are done right for the beginning of their lives together. You two are born and again ceremonies are held, to welcome you two and give you your first names and celebrate your first laughs. Rebecca seems right at home with it all, and you two worship her from the start. She has found her place in the world, which is the big sister in the middle of your world, seeing the two of you get raised right. Some time passes. And then what do you think happens?”