Set Me Free (13 page)

That’s what Helen saw; that’s how she might have described things. What came out of her mouth were words like “wow,” like
“I can’t believe how gorgeous this is,” like “indescribable.”

“So just shut up,” I thought.

I could have taught her the names of things, but I took a perverse pleasure in watching a woman
of
words reduced to groping for simple clichés. She didn’t know how to talk about all this beauty, and she didn’t know how to
see it for what it was.

I could have told her the scientific version: how Route 26 from Portland passed by small basalt cinder cones that will erupt
no more. I could have made her understand that Mount Hood—that magnificent crown of the Cascade Range—is a big andésite volcano
made up of cooled lava flows, ash deposits, and what the mud has left behind. Driving over the mountain, you are making your
way past basalt outcroppings and white feldspar crystals.

I could have told Helen that her amazement over the smooth cut of rhyolitic ash rising from the earth was caused by the recognition
that what we see when we see geology is the inside of the earth dying to get out. She couldn’t assign words to all this beauty,
nor did she know how to see it for what it was. She didn’t understand that the lodgepole pines, the ponderosas, and, as we
descended, the juniper, all grow in response to the fundamental rules set down by rocks and soils and lava and ash. I could
have told Helen the names of the birds that were too fast for her to see: the sharp-shinned hawk, the pileated woodpecker,
the golden eagle. But I didn’t say a word.

I could feel Helen’s disappointment, her descent from the heights, as we descended from the heights into the scrub steppes.
The land flattened and the color dulled. The final suggestion of elevation was rimrock skirting the horizon; the solitary
green in sight was pale and dusty and resided in small herds of bunchgrass huddled against the sandy soil.

Yes, I could have told Helen many things about the place she’d come to, things that would comfort her, things that would offer
her
safety. But I wouldn’t. Perhaps that was because she was speaking a mile a minute and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise:

Wonders why he’s angry at her in the way that his own father was angry at every white. There’s no rhyme or reason to this
anger. It comes up swift, like heartburn. He watches the speedometer slide above eighty. Hopes she’s done talking.

That one kept her quiet for a while.

By the time we got past the mountain, Helen was bunched over Ferdinand, who was snoring his drug-induced snore and sleeping
hard. She leaned her head toward the window. She trusted my driving, even though I zipped around trucks and soared above the
speed limit. Perhaps she trusted me because I was Indian and this was my country. Perhaps when she saw the sign for the Warm
Springs Reservation, she felt a safety she had not known for a long while, even though I told her “Wrong reservation.” Maybe
there was something comforting about the idea of an Indian on Indian land, pulled together like magnets—she could let herself
rest.

She had no idea I was going to take her straight through Stolen, where the white folks lived, where the roads were impeccably,
smoothly paved. I wasn’t going to drive her the eleven pockmarked gravel miles up to where I called home, the Neige Courante
Reservation. She revealed her line of thought right then.

After that we stopped talking, but her fluttering questions seemed to linger in the truck with us, keeping me from saying
anything about the school and her place in it. I decided to let her crash and burn with the kids. They’d show her what a terrible
idea a Shakespeare play was; they’d be much more eloquent than I could ever be. I turned on the tribal station and listened
to Joe’s slow lilt as he counted down the Top 40: “Hey hey hey! What a great day to be indigenous!” We pulled through Stolen,
and I felt compelled to point it out—the gas station, grocery store, and Mexican restaurant go by in an instant—but when I
leaned toward her, I noticed that she was sleeping. I kept my mouth shut. The sound of her breathing was soft. I glanced at
her once, curled over her dog. It was hard to imagine this nervous little woman marrying Elliot. I guess when I was younger
and looked up to him, I always imagined the women he’d been with—not that he ever talked about them—as sexy and sophisticated.
They were New Yorkers, after all. He was the kind of man who could pull off a woman like that, a mythical urbanité. Now, finally
meeting one of his women, I felt a combination of disappointment and smugness. This was his ex-wife? I’d had women with ten
times more… well, however you want to say it. I’ll put it politely: I’d had women with ten times more charisma. Helen Bernstein
was a hibernating mammal. Let’s face it; her name was Helen. That’s a grandmother name. When I realized she looked like a
mouse, albeit a pretty little mouse, I smiled to myself.

The sky was beginning to change into night. Out the truck window, the setting sun outlined the mountains with brightness.
Behind them, the Pacific would be glimmering. But we did not steer toward the ocean. We turned left, off the highway, and
then
turned again until we met the end of the school driveway. I wondered if I would have to wake her, but at the crunch of the
gravel, she started and turned to me. Her smile was the kind babies make after a long, good sleep, when their heads are damp
with sweat and they have been dreaming. “Thank you,” she said.

I nodded. We were pulling up to the main house and I pointed. “Elliot will be in there.”

She nudged her dog into reluctant wakefulness. He stood up drowsily, stretched, yawned, shook. She was preoccupied with this
display, then gathered her things onto her lap. It wasn’t until then that she seemed to realize we were finally at our destination.
She looked out the window and glimpsed the school for the first time. It sprawled out before her, a combination of hand-hewn
outbuildings, prefab classrooms, pathways scuffed through sagebrush, parking lots made not by macadam but by cars. Seeing
it through her eyes, I saw, for the first time in a long time, that it looked like nothing. How easy it was to buy in to Elliot’s
vision if you never really saw the place, if, through some lens of optimism, you saw the place he imagined and the place he’d
actually built as one and the same. They were, in reality, two very different things. Apparently, he’d described to Helen
the place he imagined.

“Oh,” she said, surveying the land. Perhaps she was simply acknowledging what I had told her—that she was mere moments away
from her ex-husband. But there was something in her voice, a catch, like a cloud across a blue sky. She suddenly seemed as
threatening as I’d believed her to be. I heard myself defending my territory: “Elliot is very busy these days. Maybe it’s
none of my business, but he said you were coming to direct a Shakespeare program here? Not gonna happen. No money. No interest.
He might tell you otherwise, but there’s the board to consider, questions of money and time, curricula. So.”

Perhaps I should have been more merciful, if only so I could begin to complete the puzzle of Elliot myself. He was a man who
came from somewhere. She could tell me what that somewhere was.

Instead, when she got out of my car, I did not linger. Just helped her with the suitcases and the dog crate. Watched the dog
pulling at his collar, which Helen clutched tightly in her fingers, as if she could restrain a dog from entering paradise.
I backed up the truck, leaving her in a cloud of dust. When I hit the road, I sliced the wheel quickly and revved off into
the night. I continued toward the sunset and I didn’t look back.

H
ELEN

Stolen, Oregon
Saturday, October 5, 1996

The Native American left Helen and Ferdinand in the middle of a gravel road. The dog sniffed at Helen’s luggage and his crate,
then lifted his head and realized he was free. He was too strong for her as he pulled against his collar. She let him run
down into the field below the house. If she saw a car, she’d call him. He was good about coming when she called.

Helen’s wheeled suitcases didn’t work on the gravel. At first she’d tried to unload them from the truck herself, but the Native
American had insisted she let him do it, adding, “I’ve got to lift the crate down anyway,” with no attempt to mask the irritation
in his voice. She felt foolish. He had told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t welcome. And she couldn’t quite figure
out from whence his rancor came. There had been no indication it was coming, so now she cast back over the last three and
a half hours in his car: she had done something to upset him, or to offend him; she had asked too many questions; he hadn’t
wanted to pick her up in the first place. She hated herself when she was like this: helpless, overly apologetic. Nervous.

She could take care of herself. Granted, she could not lift her luggage, but she could drag it to the side of the road and
leave it there so it would not meet a terrible end. She was soon to learn that this “road” was in fact Elliot’s driveway,
and that weeks went by without it being touched by a vehicle, but she was still carrying
with her the mind of a New Yorker. She even worried that her luggage might be stolen; given that the town she was in was named
Stolen, I suppose the thought wasn’t entirely unfounded. She ran her fingers through her hair, adjusted the shoulder straps
of her canvas tote and her worn leather purse, and gazed at the lit house of Elliot Barrow. She tried to quell her growing
frustration at the men in her life. She tried to be sensible. Resourceful. She walked toward the tallest building in sight.

Helen didn’t know this, but Elliot Barrow’s home was called the Bugle House, and all four stories had been built, piece by
piece, starting in the 1920s, by an eager white rancher named Jim Bugle. Jim Bugle hadn’t been particularly good at handling
cows, but he had initially kept his money out of the stock market and invested wisely after the crash, so by 1942 he had enough
dough to build two more stories on top of his small two-story abode, then to expand outward, quadrupling his square footage.
The result was a sprawling hilltop building with a porch stretching three quarters of the way around, a myriad of rooms that
doubled back on themselves, creaking stairways that connected individual rooms to one another and skipped whole floors, and
windows and ceilings that were unusually high or absurdly low. Jim Bugle had relied on cheap Indian labor to get the job done,
and it was no great secret that the Neige Courante hired to work for him had had a good chuckle at making him a house in which
he would never be able to comfortably live. The cultured women he imported from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and
Seattle were at first impressed by the size and stature of the great white house with red trim as they made their way across
the prairie, dust shimmying up behind their chariots. But when these ladies got inside, to their great dismay, they discovered
that every room was either cramped or drafty, barren or stuffed with furniture (much of the extravagant furniture purchased
from mail-order catalogs was too big to get through any except the first few doorways), too full of sunlight or too dimly
lit. Added to that, despite the sweet smell of peppermint that wafted
up from the newly irrigated fields, there was not a damn thing in sight. No “people.” No “culture.” Nothing.