Set Me Free (23 page)

I learned soon enough that it was useless. They didn’t care what had really happened. All they wanted was my brown face with
Harvard attached to it. They wanted me to jog the eleven miles down to the highway wearing a Harvard T-shirt and a pair of
shorts with Harvard tattooed across the ass, so all the white folks would see what a real Indian was made of as they came
barreling by the reservation. No one wanted me to tell them anything about what Harvard had meant, what I had seen there,
why I had come back. No one asked how on earth I could have gotten to a place in my life where I believed this home was the
only one I had.

B
ACK TO
M
ONDAY
. I finished reading my article. It described a wildly popular television show about six twentysomething New Yorkers. I took
my time refolding the newspaper when I was done. I had never seen this show. I had not been reading the article in the first
place. But there was a principle in the matter. I knew I was being watched.

Look, there was no political divide at the academy between Indian and non-Indian teachers. It was much more subtle than that.
Most of the teachers were Indian, but there were a few who weren’t, and that was no big deal. We hired whoever could do the
best job. That was always our policy. But there was also a way in which many of the Native teachers saw me as a gateway to
Elliot. If they were having an issue, they came to me first. We discussed it over dinner on the reservation, and the next
morning they went to Elliot. Elliot wanted it this way. He knew there were all sorts of things that wouldn’t get done if he
didn’t have someone interpreting the culture for him, and vice versa. Most of the time I was very happy to do it.

Still, it was hard to miss. We could all look around and notice that the preeminent institution educating our brown children
was entirely in the hands of a white man. Though Elliot Barrow was, by popular consent, considered to be just, kind, fair,
there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was also white. And he
thought
white. Maw-Maw would have had lots of opinions on this pretender in our midst.

Elliot’s office sat at the end of a long hallway in one of the “temporary” buildings that had been standing for nearly ten
years. There were four of these buildings in a line, facing west toward the basketball court and, beyond that, the mountains.
To the south was the Bugle House, where Amelia and Elliot lived, where math was taught, and where the children ate on winter
afternoons. Elliot had built the school like a mini-university, with distinct buildings for distinct centers of thought. This
wasn’t so unusual for the elementary school, which took up residence in two of the temporary buildings, with some spillover
into a couple of classrooms in the third. But the middle- and upper-schoolers were sent all over the place: math up on the
hill, science in a squat, fortified structure built almost entirely by Elliot and me that first summer, history sprinkled
in classrooms throughout, and English in the gym’s outlying rooms. “Ode to a Nightingale” and
The Odyssey
were first experienced by the children of Ponderosa Academy with an underlying percussive beat: basketballs taking the treble
line, sneakers squeaking a soprano counterpoint.

This was Elliot’s grand vision, the vision with which he’d come west. Sure, the buildings were shabbier than he’d originally
envisioned, but he loved the scurrying back and forth these children had to do. He loved the layers that had to be peeled
and unpeeled as the children entered and exited the sweltering swamp of winter heating. I thought it was ridiculous. Yes,
this was how Harvard was set up, and yes, I had survived it, but the academy was by no means Harvard. I didn’t think that
was what we were aiming for. It seemed Elliot had different ideas.

After dragging me to his office, he told me about the plan he was hatching with Benson Country Day. The facts of it, at least.
He framed it a tad differently than he had with Helen. He painted a rosy picture: what Benson Country Day could do for
us.
For
our
children. World-class arts and music education, an exchange program, a chance to be part of the global community. They had
computers. We had computers, but they had computer networks: Internet, intranets, e-mail accounts. Money money money.

At first I was too stunned to say much of anything. Sat there nodding like some kind of idiot. Stared over Elliot’s shoulder
at Mount Jefferson, tracing its familiar outline against the blue sky. He just kept talking and talking, and I knew him well
enough to understand that such an abundance of words was a sign of nervousness. Once I figured this out, I realized how to
begin.

I leaned forward in a donated chair. Folded my hands across my knees. “Do you know why,” I asked—very calmly, I might add—“not
one of my people knows the language our ancestors spoke for millennia? Do you know why we don’t even know what the language
the Neige Courante spoke sounds like? Do you know why we don’t even know what that language was
called?”

Elliot cleared his voice. I knew he knew why. But I wasn’t interested in his know-it-all-ness. Anyway, these were rhetorical
questions. I didn’t want to hear him telling me to proceed. I proceeded. “Do you know why the language of my people is dead?
Deader than Latin?
Do you know why we have to teach our children a language we made up only a hundred years ago? A language we made up for trading?
For trading with the exact people who took away our language?”

I stood up, thrust my hands into my pockets. Elliot didn’t try to say anything this time. “They sent my grandparents to boarding
school, Elliot. And do you know what they did in those boarding schools? They beat the language out of my grandparents. They
beat my six-year-old grandparents whenever they spoke the language of their ancestors. They taught these children English.
They taught them about the Christian God. They taught them about this Christian God’s particular favorite place to send heathens.
And then they sent these children back ‘home’ to a place we had never been before. They took us, who had rivers in our blood,
who were salmon people, and they put us in a place with no river. Then they killed our rivers: they killed the Columbia, they
killed the Rogue, and they are still killing our streams and our brooks. They built dams, drowned our waterfalls, and murdered
the salmon.” I was at
the door. I couldn’t be near him. “I will fight you so hard on this. You will not believe what has hit you.”

“Cal—”

“No,” I said, coming back, looming over him. “No. If you are walking away from this school, then just walk away. Don’t pussyfoot
around it. But if you are leaving, don’t you dare sell us up the river in the process. We take care of our own.”

Elliot shook his head as though he could not believe my gall. He shuffled the papers on his desk. “You are missing the point.”

“Is this why you brought in that Helen lady? So she could start to set your little plan into play? I knew she wasn’t just
some old lover.”

“I don’t want to insult you, Cal, but you are missing the point. Helen is here to help us. We are in this together.”

That made me laugh, a tight, mocking laugh, from another time in me. I hated that laugh. “And even if I am on your side,”
I asked, “even if I stop ‘missing the point,’ how do you expect all the people who’ve put so much time and energy into this
school to believe that you aren’t sending their children to a similar fate as that of their grandparents?”

“You’ll tell them.”

“I’ll what?”

“You’ll tell them,” he said.

Which was when I got out of there.

H
ELEN

Stolen, Oregon
Wednesday, October 9, 1996

Me again. Cal, that is. More to say, I’m afraid. Cutting into Helen’s version of events. Hear me out. You’ll understand soon
enough why I need to be the one to tell you that I was not “available” for a meeting until Wednesday. Read: I did not want
to see Helen at all, but she got to the school secretary, who also happens to be my second cousin Eunice, before I could fully
impart to Eunice that I
would not, under any circumstances, meet with That Woman. When Eunice informed me that she had penciled Helen in for Monday
afternoon, I knew right away that the best I could do was postpone. Eunice was easy to read, especially when she liked someone.
She and Helen had probably compared shampoo brands, or complained about lines in ladies’ rooms, or discussed one of those
universal topics that make women feel closer without having talked about anything particularly worthwhile. I knew, the moment
Eunice stared me down, that a meeting would be inevitable.

I thought the two-day postponement might prove an effective intimidation tactic; Helen seemed to thrive on it. She was beginning
to feel at home. Ferdinand was joyful, roaming the land, hunting, exhausting himself independently, and if Helen doubted for
a moment whether she had made the right choice in coming west, her beloved dog was a reminder that there were possibilities
in rural Oregon that even New York City couldn’t provide. Amelia and she were forging a kind of friendship. Elliot had quickly
turned stalwart. He was Protestant as ever, and Helen doubted they would again speak as warmly, as intimately, as they had
on that first Sunday. The fact that they’d had the conversation at all was enough for her. He had let her know he needed her.
It was good to be needed. She’d felt more needed in the past four days than she had in her last twelve years of life with
Duncan. Though she never would have breathed a word to Elliot, Helen was even beginning to like her little house on the prairie,
the quiet of it, the smallness of it, the way it wrapped around her like a shawl. Duncan was miles, decades, away.

Helen breezed into my office with a smile on her face. I had avoided her on campus, which was hard to do, because she and
her dog seemed to be everywhere. Even the Neige Courante women glared at me in the hallways. Gossip spreads fast here, and
those lady teachers had surely heard about my desertion of Helen over the weekend. Apparently, gender trumps race where sympathy
is concerned.

I opened my mouth to talk, but her words came first. “Look, Cal, I know you aren’t particularly thrilled about my being here.
I know Elliot spoke to you about his plans with Benson Country Day, and I want to make it perfectly clear that I have no opinion
about that at all, that I didn’t even know about it until I got out here. So I want to get that on the table. Whatever is
going on between you and Elliot is just that, between you and Elliot. I would like not to get involved. I would like for you
to think of me, if you can, as independent of all that. I would like for you to think of me as someone here on a project,
someone who has been hired to do a job. Someone who wants to do that job right.” She pressed her hands in her lap and smiled.
She hoped she had gotten her points across eloquently and kindly. She hoped she would not have to get clearer than that.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I just told you,” she said, her smile faltering. “I’m here to do a job.”

“And just what exactly is that job?”

“To direct a production of
The Tempest.
With the children.”

“Why?”

“Because Elliot asked me to. Really, I don’t see—”

“Surely you can see that if your reason for doing something is ‘Elliot asked me to,’ it is difficult for me to keep what’s
between Elliot and me separate from what is between the two of us. I would like to keep it separate, but I don’t know if that’s
possible.”

“You don’t?” She nodded at me, biting the inside of her lip. I thought she was backing down. I was wrong. “We have a misunderstanding,”
she said, “and the misunderstanding is this. You think that because I have slept with Elliot, because I have been his wife,
that somehow I am on ‘his side.’ Let me assure you that his side is not one I was on even twenty years ago. Contrary to appearances,
I am not the kind to take sides. I am my own woman, Cal. I am here to do a job. Elliot is an old friend, and he is the headmaster
of this school. He asked me to help him. But“—she laughed, surprising
me—“it is certainly not my intention to turn
The Tempest
into a piece of Elliot-slanted propaganda. I promise you that.”

Her laughter threw me off. It somehow made things more serious. I blundered on. “The kids are going to hate this. Trust me.
I’m the head of the English department. We read
Twelfth Night
in ninth grade,
Romeo and Juliet
in eleventh, and the seniors tackle
King Lear.
You’ve never tried to get teenagers to read Shakespeare, have you? This isn’t New York, Helen.” I dug in to the condescending
tone. “Acting isn’t ‘cool’ here. Basketball is cool. These kids…” I smiled at her dismissively.

“Amelia has already signed on,” she said. “I think that’s great. I think she’ll bring her friends.”

I knew right then that I’d be right. The brutal truth was that with the exception of Lydia (who wouldn’t be caught dead in
a Shakespeare play), my poor goddaughter, Amelia, was friendless. I would let Helen sink on her own terms. “You want to tackle
this, it’s your thing, okay? I don’t want to hear about it. And we don’t have a budget for any kind of production—”